Politics

Iran's new war cabinet is really an old one

The appointments show how Tehran is drawing lessons from successive wars and preparing for a prolonged period of insecurity

Al Majalla

Alex Vatanka

last update on 15 Aug 2026

Within 48 hours this week, Iran filled six of the most important posts in its battered military and security establishment. Ali Abdollahi became chief of the Armed Forces General Staff, Kioumars Heydari his deputy; Ahmad Vahidi, who had effectively led the Revolutionary Guards since the war began in February, was formally confirmed as commander, with Mostafa Izadi named his deputy; Ali Azmaei, who had already been running the Guards' navy since early July, was folded into the same round of decrees; and Hussein Taeb returned to lead the Basij paramilitary force, 17 years after he last ran it. A day earlier, Mohsen Rezaei, the Guards' longest-serving former commander (1981–1997), had returned to the centre of decision-making as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC).

All the decrees were issued in the name of Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father as supreme leader in March, after Ali Khamenei was killed in the war's opening strikes on 28 February. Months into his tenure, Mojtaba remains an unusually elusive leader. State media report meetings and decrees in his name, but the lack of independently verifiable public appearances makes it hard to assess Iran's direction through his personal views.

However, the appointments offer firmer ground. Read together with the biographies and mandates behind them, they show how Tehran is drawing lessons from successive wars and preparing for a prolonged period of insecurity, without proving it has abandoned negotiation.

An old guard

The most striking feature of the new lineup is how old it is. Rather than promote a new generation, the political system reached deep into the surviving bench of the Islamic Republic's veterans. Rezaei commanded the Guards through most of the Iran-Iraq War. Vahidi was an early Qods Force commander and later defence and interior minister. Abdollahi has moved through IRGC ground and air commands, provincial governorships in Semnan and Gilan, a security post at the Interior Ministry, and Khatam al-Anbiya's joint command. Taeb spent 13 years running IRGC intelligence after entering the security establishment in the revolution's early years. This is not rejuvenation. One can say it is emergency reconstruction through institutional memory.

That choice is understandable.

The Islamic Republic has lost an extraordinary number of senior officials in less than a year: the 12-day war of 2025 killed Hossein Salami, Mohammad Bagheri and other top IRGC commanders; the war that began in February 2026 removed another layer, including Ali Khamenei himself. The current appointments are less about replacing individuals than rebuilding command structures while the country remains under military and economic pressure.

Abdollahi's assignment is the clearest example. He has been tasked with completing the integration of the General Staff, the armed forces' planning and coordinating body, with Khatam al-Anbiya, its wartime operational headquarters, a merger Iranian commentary has called one of the most consequential changes to the command structure since the Iran-Iraq War. Abdollahi ran Khatam al-Anbiya before this appointment, so he knows both halves of what he is being asked to fuse. The lesson Tehran appears to have drawn is not just about weapons or manpower but about speed: a command system repeatedly subjected to decapitation strikes has to keep functioning when senior officers disappear.

REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis — IRGC Commander-in-Chief Ahmad Vahidi attends a public farewell ceremony in Tehran, Iran, on 5 July 2026, for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on 28 February in a US- Israeli airstrike.

Vahidi's mandate points to a related lesson. He has been instructed to pursue "maximum deterrence" while preparing the IRGC for "powerful offensive operations," and to strengthen command skills, modern capabilities and ideological cohesion throughout the force, not simply replenishing the Guards after their losses but making them more willing to take the initiative.

His own career, spanning the Qods Force, the defence and interior ministries, and the state's response to the 2022 protests as interior minister, suits a security environment where the line between external and internal threats has blurred. Azmaei's position atop the Guards' navy follows the same logic: with the Strait of Hormuz now both battlefield and bargaining chip, naval readiness sits at the intersection of Iran's military strategy, economic survival and diplomacy.

A pragmatist among hardliners

Rezaei's return suggests Tehran believes its problems extend beyond military command. His predecessor at the Security Council, Mohammad-Bagher Zolghadr, lasted only months; Pezeshkian publicly acknowledged "differences" the government was trying to resolve before Zolghadr's exit.

There is a clear institutional choice to rebuild the old system around the weaknesses the wars exposed, with the job handed to the most experienced survivors.

Rezaei is harder to categorise than the reshuffle's tone might suggest. He is committed to the Islamic Republic's survival but has also shown real tactical flexibility in the past—for example, criticising some of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's policies and once entertaining nuclear arrangements well beyond what hardliners would accept, even as his own rhetoric on Hormuz has hardened considerably during this war.

What he brings to the SNSC is standing across the establishment's different wings, at a moment when the government, the foreign ministry and the security services haven't always spoken with one voice. It is also worth noting that Rezaei is wanted by Interpol over Argentina's 1994 AMIA bombing—a detail that will colour how his appointment is read well beyond Iran.

That matters because the reshuffle should not be read as Tehran simply choosing war over diplomacy. Reporting on the earlier ceasefire deliberations suggested an overwhelming majority of the SNSC, including senior military figures, backed an agreement with Washington; the real argument is over what negotiations should achieve and how much military pressure should accompany them. Pezeshkian and parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf have treated force and diplomacy as complementary: pressure creates leverage, negotiation converts it into gains. Rezaei may be better placed than his predecessor to hold that logic together.

REUTERS/Mohammed Salem — Adviser to Iran's supreme leader Mohsen Rezaei attends a public farewell ceremony in Tehran, Iran, on 5 July 2026, for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on 28 February in a US- Israeli airstrike.

Watching the neighbourhoods

Taeb's return shows the lessons of the war extending inward. He ran the Guards' intelligence organisation for thirteen years after the disputed 2009 election, building it into one of Iran's most powerful internal security bodies, one that pursued activists, journalists and dual nationals, including the Washington Post's Jason Rezaian, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Nizar Zakka and Siamak and Baqer Namazi, before leaving in 2022 amid unexplained questions about Israeli penetration and a string of assassinations and sabotage operations.

Mohammad Kazemi succeeded him; Taeb spent the intervening four years as a senior adviser to the Guards' commander-in-chief rather than leaving the system. His return is not a reversal of that 2022 removal; he has not gone back to counterintelligence, but to the Basij, the organisation he last commanded in 2009 before Khamenei moved him to build up Guards intelligence, where his experience is evidently now valued differently. His ties to Mojtaba Khamenei run deeper than any title: the two served together in the Habib Battalion during the Iran-Iraq War. His new mandate instructs him to build the Basij's "popular intelligence network," expand its presence in neighbourhoods, universities and workplaces, and deepen its "resistance" culture.

The opposition reading is that this prepares the state to suppress the next uprising, and Taeb's record does not rule that out. But the mandate fits a broader pattern: regime commentary increasingly treats foreign attack, domestic unrest, infiltration and sabotage as a single threat environment, hardened by years in which Israeli intelligence has repeatedly reached deep inside Iran. One idea is perhaps that the Basij reaches into places the formal intelligence services cannot. Strengthening its informal network gives the security state more eyes and ears exactly when it fears both external penetration and internal instability.

That does not mean every hardline instinct is being indulged. The cleric Mohammad-Bagher Kharrazi, a relative of the Khamenei family by marriage, claimed this month that Pezeshkian had threatened to resign twenty-eight times and that Mojtaba Khamenei had warned him the next resignation would be accepted; the Supreme Leader's office denied the claim as "entirely false."

Kharrazi was separately summoned before the Special Clerical Court after calling for the Islamic Republic to be replaced with a harder-line "Islamic government" and outlining plans to mobilise a 250,000-strong network to surround government buildings. Both episodes drew criticism even from hardline quarters, one sign the establishment is trying to restrain radical actors who threaten wartime cohesion even as it strengthens its coercive machinery elsewhere.

Taken together, the appointments do not amount to an ideological turn at the top, nor do they say much about Mojtaba Khamenei's own project, given how little of him is independently visible. What they offer instead is a personnel map of what the Islamic Republic believes it needs: tighter coordination at the SNSC, a faster military chain of command, a Guards force capable of offense as well as deterrence, greater naval readiness around Hormuz, and a Basij with deeper intelligence reach into Iranian society, staffed by people who can start that work immediately, which is why so many of them never really left.

The direction this produces is harder to read as either war or peace. Iran is preparing for another round of confrontation even as indirect talks with Washington continue, strengthening coercion at home even as its own officials keep arguing for negotiation abroad. Whatever role Mojtaba Khamenei is personally playing behind the decrees issued in his name, the institutional choice is visible enough: rebuilding the old system around the weaknesses the wars exposed, and handing that job to the most experienced survivors still standing.

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