Opinion

Iran proves that it might change its military leaders, but it’s not changing strategy

New IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi is a particular danger to both the US and Israel

By Erfan Fard Fox News

Published August 20, 2026 9:00am EDT

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Military appointments in authoritarian states, particularly during wartime, reveal priorities, threat perceptions, institutional loyalties and leadership fears. The new military and security hierarchy under Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei should therefore be read as more than the reconstruction of a command structure damaged by war.

It is an order of battle with two purposes: confronting the United States and Israel abroad and preserving the Islamic Republic against instability at home. Those elevated are not a postwar generation seeking accommodation with Iran’s adversaries, but veterans of the revolutionary-security establishment, formed through war, intelligence operations, ideological conflict, asymmetric warfare and domestic coercion.

Claims that leadership decapitation has produced meaningful regime change in Tehran should be treated with caution. Commanders have died, offices changed hands and a new supreme leader replaced the old one, but regime change is not the replacement of individuals. It requires transformation of the institutions, ideology, strategic objectives and political relationships defining a governing order.

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By those measures, the Islamic Republic has not disappeared. Tehran is reaching backward to men whose careers were forged in institutions that spent decades confronting Washington and Jerusalem while protecting the regime at home.

Ahmad Vahidi, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, Esmail Qaani, and Iraj Masjedi, Deputy Coordinator of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, participate in a ceremony to mark the memory of former IRGC commander, Hossein Salami, who is killed in Israeli attacks, at a mosque in an IRGC organizational house complex in Tehran, Iran, July 25, 2025. (Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/Nur Photo via Getty Images)

Ali Abdollahi, the new chief of the General Staff, belongs to the revolutionary-security........

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