America Must Abandon Incremental War To Defeat The IRGC

Over the past century, no nation has matched the United States’ ability to wage war at scale. When America commits to overwhelming, sustained pressure, the results are decisive. When instead we choose calibrated strikes followed by pauses and negotiations, we guarantee another generation of shadow war, proxy attacks, shipping disruptions, and recurring crises.

That is where we stand with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps today.

Even with the new administration’s excellent refocus on rebuilding military capability, the United States is still fighting the IRGC in a restrained, incremental fashion. We sink a ship. We destroy a headquarters or logistics node. We degrade another piece of their infrastructure. Then we pause, waiting to see whether the IRGC decides to be reasonable. This approach assumes our adversary values the same things we do: minimizing casualties, preserving economic capacity, and avoiding risks to the regime’s survival. We hold the wrong assumption. The IRGC leadership does not value any of that.

What drives the Revolutionary Guard’s senior leadership? Three things above all.

First, status. In their world, a superior’s removal often opens the door to promotion rather than crisis. The network simply promotes the next loyalist.

Second, control of assets. The IRGC does not regard Iran’s banks, ports, shipping companies, factories, and construction firms as neutral state property. These are their economic fiefdoms, controlled through family members and front companies. Estimates attribute between 20 and 40% of economic activity in key sectors to IRGC-linked entities. The broader Iranian economy can suffer; their personal wealth and patronage networks do not have to.

Third, clan networks. Forged during the Iran-Iraq War and reinforced over decades, these tight patronage systems matter more to the IRGC’s senior leadership than religious or nationalist ideology. Its decisions serve first to protect and enrich the clans.

An organization built on these incentives will not respond to limited strikes followed by pauses. It absorbs the losses, promotes the next man, shifts revenue streams, and keeps testing red lines. Despite losing key leaders, suffering major damage to its nuclear and military infrastructure, and enduring severe economic contraction during the 2025–2026 conflict, the IRGC has continued provoking confrontations in the Strait of Hormuz and against Gulf states. They are degraded, but they still expect to emerge with their power and wealth intact.

The only strategy capable of producing capitulation must destroy the only three things the IRGC values – simultaneously and without self-imposed pauses.

This requires expanding pressure beyond military targets. Businesses that profit from IRGC smuggling, oil sales, and reconstruction must pay a sustained price. While major powers such as China require careful handling, secondary sanctions, maritime interdiction with Gulf allies, and aggressive financial enforcement should make any business with the IRGC commercially toxic worldwide.

It also requires sustained psychological operations. Name IRGC leaders individually and repeatedly, documenting their corruption, stolen wealth, and the privileges they preserve for themselves. Broadcast that message to the Iranian people who are enduring inflation and shortages. Broadcast it internationally so businesses understand the cost of associating with the IRGC. Direct it inward as well, making clear to every commander that anonymity is over and personal accountability has arrived. The message should be simple: the United States and its partners have repeatedly offered paths to peace, while the IRGC has repeatedly sacrificed the Iranian people to preserve its own power and wealth. Convince the rank and file that they are being sacrificed while their commanders protect their own clans and fortunes. The United States was once very good at this.

It also requires recognizing the reality of clan networks. The only reliable way to break these structures is to dismantle the networks themselves – not just their visible leaders, but the family members, business fronts, and patronage ties that allow them to regenerate. Half-measures that leave the clan architecture intact simply guarantee the next generation of commanders. The message must be unmistakable: the network itself will not survive. That’s what they understand.

The United States has demonstrated overwhelming force before, most notably in World War II and, on a more limited scale, during the 1991 Gulf War. By contrast, Korea, Vietnam, and GWOT settled into constrained campaigns that traded decisive outcomes for incremental, rules-based pressure. The current doctrine of incremental strikes followed by assessment and negotiation plays to the IRGC’s strengths. They treat limited losses as the cost of doing business.

The necessary model is the General “Iron Ass” LeMay method: apply overwhelming, sustained pressure across every domain until each IRGC leader concludes that continued resistance threatens everything he values. The objective is not a series of pinpricks followed by pauses, but overwhelming pressure that makes the protection of status, assets, and clan networks impossible.

Kish (not Kharg) Island offers one example of the kind of target that could deliver a clear object lesson. It has little conventional military value, yet it serves as a conspicuous luxury destination for Iran’s wealthy elite – the very people who have benefited the most from the IRGC’s economic empire. A concentrated campaign against such a visible symbol of regime privilege would be limited enough to execute decisively, prominent enough for the world to notice, and symbolic enough to demonstrate that the era of IRGC impunity has ended.

The choice is straightforward. Continue the restrained, incremental approach and accept another generation of IRGC provocations, economic harm to America’s allies, and the risk of endless conflict. Or shift to overwhelming, sustained pressure that threatens the three things the Revolutionary Guard values most – status, assets, and clan survival – until capitulation or internal fracture becomes the only rational outcome.

America has the power and the partners to choose the shorter, harder, and ultimately more effective path. The only question is whether it will.

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Tim Wood is a retired Navy SEAL who served for 22 years during the Global War on Terror, with deployments across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Since leaving military service, he has focused on military readiness, developing AI-enabled readiness management platforms and distributed manufacturing systems that improve force preparedness while reducing administrative burden. His current research examines how military organizations generate and sustain combat capability, with a particular focus on generative capacity and adaptation velocity.