Iran’s retaliation strategy shows command and control still

Iran has made its playbook clear: it retaliates by targeting similar categories of sites in Israel and the Gulf to those attacked on its own soil, and with thousands of such targets already hit, the list is long.

The targets Israel and the United States have struck include nuclear facilities, energy infrastructure and civilian sites used by the Iranian regime, such as industrial factories and universities. While Tehran initially threatened mainly to respond in kind to whatever was struck on its soil, it is now aiming beyond that.

As early as March 10, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf made clear that the Islamic Republic would apply an “eye for an eye” policy, and he repeated that message a week later. “The attempt to attack infrastructure is suicide. The ‘eye for an eye’ equation is still in effect.”

Later, Majid Mousavi, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps aerospace force, warned that if the strikes continued, “this time it will no longer be an eye for an eye, but a head for an eye — and you (U.S. forces) will leave the Gulf.”

Over time, however, the Iranian threats expanded beyond that. Responding to strikes in Iran on March 27, Mousavi said: “This time the equation will no longer be eye for eye. You wait. Employees of industrial companies linked to the Americans and the Zionist regime should immediately leave their workplace so that their lives will not be in danger.”

Danny Citrinowicz, a research fellow in the Iran Program at the Institute for National Security Studies and the former head of the Iran branch in IDF Military Intelligence’s research division, said the Iranian equation “illustrates that the command and control in Iran is robust, because at the end of the day, there are strategic decisions and actions on the ground. The fire isn’t random.”

“This is a significant development. The ‘eye for an eye’ is escalating and, from Iran’s point of view, ‘everything you do to me, I will do to you and more.’ They are not matching; they are escalating. The Iranians are trying to create new rules of engagement. They understand that in order to stop attacks on them, they need to inflict much more pain,” he said.

According to Citrinowicz, the next stage will likely be attacks on academic institutions, following strikes carried out against such institutions in Iran. In recent days, the Revolutionary Guards have already threatened that Israeli and American universities would be legitimate targets.