America’s Lost Warfighting Doctrine

By Emma Isabella Sage & Charles Bauman

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

When the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran in February, they showcased the most expensive military force ever assembled. The cost of America’s opening salvoes alone may have exceeded Iran’s total defense expenditure in 2025. With its obvious firepower superiority and the swift decapitation of Iran’s leadership, the campaign was—as the White House continues to insist—a success by conventional measures of military performance.

 

It was also precisely the inverse of how the American military was supposed to be fighting by 2026.

 

For nearly a decade, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office has been developing the concept of mosaic warfare, a doctrine intended to replace the U.S. military’s reliance on a few expensive, highly complex platforms with vast networks of cheap, interchangeable systems coordinated in real time by artificial intelligence. The Pentagon published the concept openly, and there were few real detractors—the only question was how quickly and extensively to implement it.

 

Yet in February, when America went to war, it reached for the same tools as before. The mosaic doctrine was nowhere to be found—except, perhaps, in the adversary’s warfighting strategy.

 

Iran has spent the last two decades building something much closer to mosaic warfare. Meanwhile, America’s long-standing failure to translate strategic concepts into operational doctrine, weapons procurement, and policymaker decisions may both doom and outlive this conflict.

 

The rise and plateau of mosaic warfare.

 

The phrase “mosaic warfare” was coined in 2017 by Tom Burns, then-director of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, and his deputy Dan Patt. They were attempting to design the ideal solution to a well-known problem in defense planning: American reliance on what the Pentagon calls “exquisite” platforms. These systems (like the F-35 fighter jet, the Ford-class aircraft carrier, and the B-21 stealth bomber) are extraordinarily capable, ruinously expensive, and impossible to produce at scale. Those lost in combat cannot be meaningfully replaced within the timeframe of the conflict.

 

The mosaic concept is the inverse. Burns and Patt argued that the future of warfare looks less like a chess set of irreplaceable pieces and more like a tile mosaic with hundreds of cheap, interchangeable components that could be rearranged in real time to suit mission requirements. For instance, where an F-35 attempts to fuse sensing, command, and weapons systems into a single, multimillion-dollar airframe, the mosaic doctrine would see those functions scattered across many lower-cost components manufactured at scale, knitted together by AI.

 

Burns and Patt foresaw a shift from “kill chains” to “kill webs”: a battlefield in which thousands of low-cost components could be combined and recombined in ways no adversary could fully degrade, making complexity a competitive advantage. The individual pieces were designed to be expendable, removing individual points of failure and rendering the network as a whole virtually impossible to defeat. Commanders would be empowered to assemble and substitute custom force packages from a long list of manned and unmanned options. DARPA argued that operationalization could begin immediately by linking existing systems in new ways.

 

Nearly a decade on, almost no progress has been made.

 

The Iranian approach.

 

Iran was already working on a defensive corollary of mosaic warfare before DARPA’s strategy ever appeared in print. In 2005, the then-commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced what Tehran calls defā'-e mozā'iki—mosaic defense. The strategy emerged from careful study of American campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, where decapitation strikes against centralized regimes had collapsed enemy command structures within days. Tehran drew the obvious lesson: Any state hoping to survive a confrontation with the United States needed to render decapitation strategically meaningless.

 

The Iranian solution, implemented in 2008, restructured the IRGC into 31 semi-autonomous provincial commands, each with its own headquarters, intelligence apparatus, weapons stockpile, and predelegated authority to act if Tehran were attacked. The system included a so-called “fourth successor” protocol—a series of preselected replacements for every senior position—designed to ensure no loss of leadership could halt operations. Its choice of weaponry is similarly decentralized, relying heavily on small, cheap and fast options, such as the “mosquito fleet” currently holding up traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

 

When the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior IRGC commanders in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury, mosaic defense worked exactly as designed. Soon after the fighting began, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed that provincial commands had begun operating under standing instructions.

 

Iran’s wartime strategy attempts to leverage the cost differential between the weapons of each side. Cheap drone and short-range missile barrages were launched to deplete THAAD and Patriot interceptors that cost millions of dollars apiece. Iran is successfully imposing precisely the same economic burden that mosaic warfare was designed to, and crowing about it in its own information operations and those of its allies.

 

The knowledge transmission problem.

 

How is it that the U.S. came to fight a war using exactly the platforms mosaic warfare was meant to replace, against an adversary whose doctrine was designed to not only counter but exploit this approach?

 

The fact is that DARPA’s doctrine never made it from Arlington to the battlefield. The agency appears to have done its job—to develop innovative concepts and hand them off—but the process broke down during the implementation phase. Mosaic warfare is an unusually good test of the American military innovation pipeline because of the well-documented and publicly known nature of the concept’s development and execution, and the stark opportunity to see it pitted against the execution of an adversary’s defensive variation of the doctrine.

 

The exquisite platforms may have performed as advertised, but the policymakers didn’t, hampered as they have been by intransigence and inertia. In the complex military planning and procurement ecosystem, it’s impossible to identify a single point of failure, but it is undeniable that a failure has occurred.

 

Perhaps the most inexcusable aspect of the situation is the yes-man culture that has been created around the commander in chief, leading Trump’s briefings to be anchored by daily two-minute strike montages of Iranian targets being destroyed. While this is as close to a confirmation-bias loop as one could ask for, and actively suppresses strategic reassessment, it is not the only way that strategic logic appears compromised. The focus on decapitation made the government appear blind to the Iranian regime’s long-standing efforts to fortify itself against such attacks. The Pentagon said it had achieved a 90 percent reduction in centralized Iranian missile fire within 10 days of the conflict’s start, but Iran kept fighting anyway, because its doctrine assumed centralized command would be lost.

 

The question of what victory looks like under this paradigm of diffuse warfare becomes more pressing by the day. The words of Henry Kissinger in the aftermath of the Vietnam War ring ever louder:

 

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.

 

The Iran conflict may not be properly classified as a guerrilla war, but it is most certainly an asymmetrical one. It appears that the lessons learned in America’s long series of asymmetrical conflicts have not yet rendered a useful, tangible battlefield approach. The unsettling implication is that the same dynamic may continue to be exploited in any future conflict—including one against an adversary as capable and well-armed as China. The plan for such a war should be undergoing battle-testing in Iran right now, but it remains trapped in a set of policy papers.