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Source: https://jcfa.org/how-targeted-killings-set-the-stage-for-the-iranian-regimes-collapse/
How Targeted Killings Set the Stage for the Iranian Regime's Collapse
(Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Aviram Bellaishe - Every state depends on a leadership layer that holds institutional knowledge, experience, and decision-making authority. In the opening strikes of Israel's Iran operation, Iran's entire senior command layer was eliminated. When that entire layer is removed at once, the system goes into shock. Systems adapt. They promote replacements, reorganize, and continue functioning, often less effectively, but functioning nonetheless. Then their replacements are targeted too. The goal is not just the man, but the office. A new leadership that inherits intact capabilities can still fight. So, alongside the targeted killings, missile systems are destroyed, air defenses dismantled, and infrastructure struck. Any replacement leadership that emerges does so with fewer tools and diminished reach. All this does not topple a regime. They generate pressure, fear, and attrition. But they do not produce collapse. Regimes do not fall because of external pressure alone. They fall when their internal mechanisms of coercion stop working for them. Domestic protests, however large, cannot bring down a regime that is willing to massacre its own people. The only path to regime collapse runs through defection, and the most consequential defection would come from Iran's conventional military - the Artesh - which is a separate body from the ideological Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij. For the Artesh to move, it first needs to see the IRGC fracture. A conventional military watching a unified, dominant Revolutionary Guard will not move. But a conventional military watching an organization that appears fractured, internally suspicious, and visibly weakened begins to calculate differently. An officer does not abandon a system simply because he is afraid. He abandons it when he believes there is a future on the other side. That means guaranteed immunity, protection for his family, and preservation of his interests. In Romania in 1989, Ceausescu's regime did not fall because of street protests alone. It fell the moment the army stopped obeying and crossed to the side of the protesters. The decisive moment will come only if an armed force, above all the Artesh, concludes that it has a real alternative and that choosing it is worth the risk. The writer, vice president of the Jerusalem Center, served in senior government positions for 27 years.