Afrasianet - Hours before the Israeli-Iranian war, senior commanders of Iran's military gathered in a safe building in a Tehran suburb. The meeting was supposed to be routine to assess signs of escalation, but what attendees didn't know was that the building was under surveillance and about to be targeted.
In the predawn hours, precision missiles hit the place housing the chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri , his aides, and a number of operational commanders, turning the command room into a silent crater. This coincided with an assassination campaign against IRGC commander Hossein Salami and a number of security officials and nuclear scientists.
In one moment, Iran lost its leadership nerve, the channels of coordination between the army and the IRGC units were disrupted, and the response system was preoccupied with confirming news of the survival or death of the commanders instead of planning any effective action.
The strategic theorist Colin Gray wrote in one of his most famous reflections that "the central command that is hit in the first strike is not a victim of the missile, but a victim of organizational vanity," referring to the mistake of countries that put all the keys to their decision in one room, and then assume that war will give them time to rearrange.
On the tenth day, it was the turn of the nuclear facilities that Tehran had bet on to stabilize the balance of deterrence. Three sensitive sites deep inside Iran, including the Natanz, Arak and Fordow reactors, were hit by direct U.S. strikes.
The attack was not secret or entrusted to allies, but rather came with a formal announcement from President Trump, marking a new chapter in the war, as the United States moved from political and intelligence support to outright military action. Just as an Israeli operation to paralyze the leadership in Tehran at the dawn of the war, an American operation was carried out to eliminate the nuclear project and prevent it from surviving.
What happened was not so much a victory for Israel as an exposure to the nature of modern warfare, a delicate blow that toppled the leadership and targeted strategic locations. The heaviest lesson concerns not only Tehran, but any country that might find itself in a similar confrontation.
In Damascus, where a new leadership headed by Ahmad al-Sharaa is responsible for re-establishing the Syrian state from the rubble of war, the Iranian-Israeli confrontation is a mirror that must be carefully considered: the new Syria cannot derive its security from emulating defeated models, nor basing its defenses on illusions of showmanship.
The war has revealed that institutional cohesion and intellectual and strategic readiness are more important than the abundance of missiles or threatening rhetoric. It also revealed that diplomatic speeches, negotiations, and UN sessions may not mean a strategic approach adopted by the West to containment, but rather a tactical phase waiting for the right conditions for launching surprise attacks.
It is true that there are lessons in this war for many countries, but Syria stands out as a young example that was exposed in its early days to Israeli attacks that sought to draw new rules and lines of engagement that Israel would not tolerate the emergence of any indication that it might see as a threat, even in the future, to its security.
Opening blow brings down command
One of the most striking lessons of the Iran-Israel confrontation was that of the early hours of the shock: Israel not only targeted air defense systems, but focused on "brains," not "muscles."
The opening strikes included command and control headquarters, military commanders' homes, and IRGC operational communication centers, causing a deep blow to the command system and disrupting Iran's defense plans.
This type of pre-emptive strikes not only aims to reduce the military effectiveness of the adversary, but also creates a psychological and organizational gap that strikes deep in the political-military structure, with the aim of making Tehran need a period to restore its institutional balance, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei tried to fill the vacuum as much as possible on the same day by appointing replacement leaders, but some of them were targeted again in less than four days.
For a new Syria that has neither the civilian nor the military defensive structure after decades of President Bashar al-Assad's rule, this experience is a clear warning to the new Syrian leadership: centralized leadership, though tempting in terms of control, puts the state paralyzed if the head is hit.
Leadership based on a flexible type of network leadership, which distributes leadership functions to relatively independent units, is able to continue operating in the event of a collapse of the centre. This does not mean breaking up the decision, but ensuring its continuity under pressure.
Distribution, camouflage and rotation
The Israeli strikes were not limited to commanders, but extended to missile launch bases, drone facilities, and major logistical warehouses, a structure that Iran has built over the years in well-known and established bases.
Iran's calculations were based on deterrence through mobilization and threats, but the Israeli calculations were quite different: a single strike focused on sensitive points was enough to neutralize a significant danger.
This experience has shown the fragility of defense when capabilities are concentrated in symbolic or strategic locations, without taking into account the surprise strike scenario. What was struck were not only military sites, but strategic perceptions of deterrence, based on the accumulation of tools in specific places.
For Syria, it is not necessary to have huge military tools, but to have the ability to deploy them in such a way that striking them all at once is impossible. Distribution, camouflage, rotation, and mobile deployment are important vocabulary to pay attention to in the Syrian military dictionary, rather than static positioning that entices the enemy and destroys defense from first strikes.
The rise of cyber and information warfare
The strikes Iran received were not confined to the hard side of the war, but were accompanied by a wave of cyber attacks, targeting communication systems and some media platforms, which increased the uncertainty of the situation among the Iranian public, and even among field commanders.
Modern warfare is no longer just a clash between missile launchers, but a struggle for information, a scramble between networks, where cyber and intelligence warfare advances to be as important as the battlefield.
In this context, it is important that the countries of the region and Syria understand the future not to neglect building cybersecurity capabilities, countering disinformation, fortifying command and control networks, and even thinking about dual structures that can absorb the shock and then continue to operate.
One of the important issues that must be taken into account is the importance of the high security sensitivity of large segments of security and defense workers and sensitive sectors in the state, as the main work of the Israeli intelligence services is not in times of war, but in times of "calm", which allows them to form a vast database, at the level of individuals and establishments, that is easy to employ later when they decide to attack.
In Gaza, too, there have been press reports that the occupation army not only targeted security and military leaders, but also influential people in the civilian sectors, with the aim of dismantling the social fabric by striking community leaders and influential voices.
Therefore, the momentum of victory with the fall of the Assad regime must not forget the dangers facing it, and that the stage of mobilization, preparation, and secrecy in preparation and construction are all factors that should be continued at varying levels, to face the future dangers lurking next to the Syrian geography.
In addition, investing in artificial intelligence, early warning systems, and data analytics tools are important issues that must be included in the priorities of defense doctrine, as war begins when an adversary loses his ability to see, not just move.
High uptime
One of the most obvious ironies of the Iran-Israel confrontation was Israel's complete control of the initiative. While it took Tehran several hours to formulate a disciplined response, Tel Aviv had ended its first wave. Israel has made the first strike a doctrine in its own right, weaving its superiority of timeliness, precision and surprise.
Herein lies the paradox: the weakest state demographically and geographically excelled because it initiated, planned, collected information, and implemented at the crucial moment, while the state with geographical extensions, agents and capabilities remained trapped in the response speech at the right time, a timing that may never come in the desired and deterrent form.
If the new Syrian state wants to survive in a highly volatile environment, with Israel's eye watching closely, it must adopt a new pattern of security thinking: anticipation, not response.
Anticipation does not mean requiring offensive initiative, but rather high readiness, the ability to warn early, and to determine the enemy's intentions at the critical moment. A country that waits for the first strike to act on the ground has handed over a large part of its sovereignty to the adversary, as happened with Egypt and Syria in 1967.
Centralization of power is a strategic killing
In analyzing the structure of failure in the Iran-Israel confrontation, we find a repetition of an earlier Iraqi image, but this time differently. When the United States struck Iraq in 2003, Iraq's military and political leadership quickly collapsed, because Saddam Hussein had established a state with an overly centralized, inflexible, and self-loyalty-based leadership structure rather than institutional competence, limiting the ability to objectively assess risks and marginalizing professional competencies.
When we re-read the Iranian lesson on the centrality of leadership that Tel Aviv tried to paralyze with the first strike, we find a direct echo of Colin Gray's warnings in his book Another Bloody Century: The War of the Future: "In modern warfare, no leader can monopolize understanding or control.
In this sense, post-collapse Syria is required to build a leadership style that is not centered on the individual leader or the single decision-making center, but rather on a distributed leadership system, which includes field commanders trained in initiative, and empowered with flexible executive authority, enabling them to make critical decisions at critical moments without waiting for central directives that may be disrupted or targeted.
A country that puts its full weight in one position quickly loses its viability if the head is injured.
Thus, the distribution of leadership functions and the establishment of "rear command" structures in different areas capable of absorbing the shock and resuming performance is no longer an organizational luxury or an administrative option, but rather the cornerstone of ensuring the continuity of the state under pressure, especially in a strategic environment in which wars are conducted with pre-emptive strikes targeting the leadership structure first.
The Need for an Effective Intelligence Service
One of the most prominent manifestations of Iran's failure in this war is the failure of the intelligence system to anticipate the nature of the first Israeli strike, identify its targets, and deal with its next waves. Iranian intelligence was preoccupied with foreign and propaganda operations, without having a real strategic analysis system that enables the decision-maker to assess the situation based on objective indicators, and it appeared that Iranian intelligence is full of tools, but it lacks vision.
Colin Gray argues that intelligence is not just a supporting tool in war, but one of the cornerstones of the strategy itself. In his book Modern Strategy, he clearly writes that a good strategy requires accurate knowledge of your enemy, just as clarity in your goals and realism in your tools.
When intelligence fails, the entire system of estimation fails, and decisions of war or peace collapse. Gray stresses that the difference between surprise and exposure is measured by the state's ability to transform information into knowledge, and knowledge into effective decisions that are translated in time.
Based on this perception, the new Syrian state needs not only monitoring devices, but an intelligence system capable of collecting and analyzing information from the field to the center, linking security assessment to political decision-making, and feeding the strategy with the changing dynamics in the regional environment.
As Gray warns, war is not just a struggle of means, but a test of consciousness, and those who do not see what is happening cannot face it.
The necessity of the comprehensive project
Colin Gray stresses that strategy is not pure science, but a practice of a political, ethical, and historical nature. He stresses that a state's ability to fight or avoid war is not only related to its physical capabilities, but to its ability to understand war as an extension of politics, and to think strategically as an overarching function of the state that is not confined to generals.
Thus, Gray argues that "victory results not only on the battlefield, but in the way the war is conducted from the political decision-making room."
This was evident in the difference between Israel and Iran during the first days of the war, as Tel Aviv manages the battle within a grand strategy, and adjusts its responses according to clear goals. As for Iran, it entered the war with a revolutionary discourse, but it did not have a clear architecture to manage the war, so its responses were late, but it was able to absorb the effects of the first strike, and then reoriented its military apparatus towards a deliberate approach.
In light of this, the new Syrian state needs not only to restructure its security and military apparatus organizationally, but also to reposition these institutions within a broader political-national project in which civilian authority is integrated with the defense structure, and strategy is exercised as a senior government function, rather than a technical competence confined to army barracks.
As Gray warns, a state cannot succeed in war if it does not first understand its nature and link its tools to its political function, within a realistic conception of its position in the regional and international system.
Conclusion: Syria after the war
The new Syria, led by Ahmad al-Shara', has an opportunity to rebuild the state through a deep understanding of the nature of the threat and establish a modern national security architecture that builds on the experiences of neighboring countries without replicating them.
The most striking lesson from the Iran-Israel war is that deterrence is not made by weapons alone, but by coherence of decision, distribution of leadership, and flexibility of institutions. If Israel has excelled in knowledge, initiative and high technology, let the new Syria be a state that does not follow events, but rather initiates, adapts its tools, and builds an army that is not surprised, and leaders that do not paralyze.
Syria may not be able to match Israel in technology, international influence, or air dominance, but it can excel at something else: in establishing a clever defense doctrine, coherent institutions, and a flexible survival strategy based not on emotion or centeredness on the symbolic leader, but on an accumulated understanding of the region's experiences, and on a conscious will to build a state that learns from other people's wars before it is tested in its next war.