Revolutionary Guard expands Red Sea attacks, ramps missile output
Iranian hardliners concluded the memorandum was likely just an attempt by the U.S. and Israel to take pressure off the global economy and buy time for a bigger attack down the road, the officials said. Instead of putting faith in talks, they took the past two months to prepare for a bigger fight: giving the Revolutionary Guard more control of the country’s regular army, appointing hardened veterans of the war with Iraq and past internal crackdowns to key posts, expanding domestic counterintelligence operations and ramping up production of missiles and drones.
President Trump signed the memorandum of understanding with Iran on June 17 at the French palace of Versailles. The deal promised sanctions waivers to let Iran sell its oil, access to billions of dollars in frozen cash and the prospect of a $300 billion fund to rebuild the country. Iran’s main obligation was to open the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic and then negotiate in good faith on its nuclear program. Iran started shooting at ships the U.S. was guiding through the strait three weeks later, in early July, catching the U.S. by surprise.
The leadership pursued a two-track policy, the officials said. While Iranian diplomats pursued a peace deal with the U.S., Iranian leader Mojtaba Khamenei was taking steps to prepare the security apparatus for an expanded confrontation that may be initiated by Tehran itself. The Revolutionary Guard used the calm created by the memorandum to lay the groundwork with allied militias around the region, sending advisers to Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon to discuss the plans.
Arab intelligence officials have picked up evidence — including communications between Iran and militia allies in countries such as Yemen and Iraq — of a strategic shift inside the country’s hard-line leadership to get their forces ready to widen the war and raise the costs for the U.S., officials familiar with the findings said. Intercepted communications showed the Revolutionary Guard sending commanders to areas controlled by Yemen’s Houthis to plan a stepped-up confrontation with Saudi Arabia in coordination with Iraqi militias that also are backed by Iran.
The Guard supervised deployments of missiles, naval weapons and drone launchers to positions overlooking the Red Sea. It also provided the Houthis with intelligence, target lists including Saudi ports and energy facilities, and advice on sheltering from Saudi retaliation, the officials said.
Fighting escalated through late July. The Houthis struck Yemeni government forces backed by Saudi Arabia and declared the Bab al-Mandeb Strait — which links the Red Sea to world markets — closed to Saudi Arabia, then fired on Saudi ships, complicating the kingdom’s efforts to export its oil and raising supply risks for global markets. Around the same time, Saudi Arabia said Iran-backed militias in Iraq had launched drone attacks on its oil facilities.
Iran also escalated attacks on American troops. Tehran surprised the U.S. by firing five ballistic missiles at Jordan during a lull in the conflict, two weeks after another Iranian strike in Jordan killed three U.S. servicemembers. Iranian missiles evaded U.S. defenses and hit targets in Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain, alarming officials in the Gulf as the fighting spilled into August and Iran struck six United Arab Emirates ships over the past two weeks as they tried to transit the Strait of Hormuz.
Revolutionary Guard spokesman Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi said in an interview with the Guard-affiliated Tasnim news agency in July: “We took full advantage of the ceasefire period. We enhanced our capabilities, accelerated our missile production rate and improved missile accuracy.”
Supreme Leader Khamenei lined up seven key security leaders to run revamped military and repression institutions in a reorganization unveiled a week ago. Mohsen Rezaei, who led the Revolutionary Guard during the war with Iraq in the 1980s, was named secretary of Iran’s top decision-making body, the Supreme National Security Council, where he will be Khamenei’s representative. In the past week, the council squelched progress on a deal to gradually open Hormuz.
To step up internal security, Khamenei returned veteran Hossein Taeb, a close associate who led a deadly crackdown on protests in 2009, to the helm of the Basij, tasking him with pivoting the volunteer force into a “popular intelligence network.” Khamenei also consolidated Revolutionary Guard influence over the regular army by unifying control of the two military arms under Brig. Gen. Ali Abdollahi, a veteran Revolutionary Guard senior commander. Ahmad Vahidi — who has been unofficially on the job since March — was formally given the position of Revolutionary Guard Commander in Chief, with the decree appointing him tasking him with “powerful offensive operations against the enemy.” The next day, Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi, an adviser to Vahidi, said the paramilitary force must be prepared to take operations into enemy territory.
The appointments came with aggressive goals that included tightening the military chain of command, turning an ideological militia into a neighborhood intelligence agency and emphasizing an offensive approach.
The overriding goal of the preparations, according to the officials, is to inflict enough pain to ensure the kind of attacks Iran endured during the 12-day war last year and the continuing conflict aren’t repeated. “There is also a widespread view in Iran that the main war has not yet begun,” said Mohammad Hassan Sangtarash, a Tehran-based defense analyst close to the Iranian government. “What we have seen so far is increasingly interpreted through the lens of ‘salami-slicing’ tactics—limited, incremental escalation designed to weaken capabilities before a larger confrontation.”
“For the regime, the baseline is war,” said Alan Eyre, a former senior U.S. diplomat and nuclear negotiator with Iran. “Iran will remain on a wartime footing, preparing for a subsequent attack.”
The preparations point to an enormous gulf between how Washington and Tehran perceive this stage of the war, a divergence that has driven a hard-line negotiating stance and reluctance to close deals by Iran’s leaders. Trump has called them crazy and accused them of lying. “The very dangerous people from Iran, they’re sick,” Trump said. “There’s something wrong with them.”
“Vahidi’s elevation is consistent with a leadership preparing the security establishment for a period of sustained confrontation rather than a return to normal peacetime politics,” said Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iran’s security services at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
The Revolutionary Guard — an armed force nearly 200,000 strong — has devised new plans for further escalation including pre-emptive strikes, according to Iranian officials and public statements. Among the options: sabotaging internet cables in the Persian Gulf, creating political unrest in countries with Shia communities such as Kuwait and Bahrain, and potentially ground operations in Kuwait. Kuwait takes those risks seriously; in early May, the tiny Gulf sheikhdom said its security forces had intercepted six Revolutionary Guard troops that used a rented fishing boat to land on a Kuwaiti island separated from Iran by only a thin strip of Iraqi territory.
The Guard also threatened Gulf states that it would destroy their energy facilities if the U.S. hit similar sites in Iran, going as far as sending detailed lists of individual targets to its Arab counterparts, the officials said. It has successfully targeted U.S. bases and retains enough firepower to threaten ships and Gulf energy infrastructure, Arab officials said. Iran is rebuilding its infrastructure and restoring access to missile bases much more quickly than expected, a concern to Israeli officials familiar with the progress.
Iran’s military and economic base have been battered by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes, and more pragmatic members of the leadership, including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, have repeatedly warned that Iran needs to negotiate a deal to end the war that brings sanctions relief — or face the collapse of its economy. People close to Iran’s top negotiators have warned that peace talks could be just an interlude before more conflict.
Mediators in the talks said Iranian diplomats agreed early in the month on a deal with Oman to set up and oversee routes through Hormuz that would lead to the gradual reopening of the strait. Those efforts were blocked by the Revolutionary Guard, which went back to attacking ships. With negotiations blocked and Iran not backing away from escalating the fight, Trump has stepped back to see if the economic pressure from sanctions and the Navy’s blockade will soften Iran’s position, U.S. officials said.
Mehdi Mohammadi, a strategic adviser to chief Iranian negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, described the current stalemate Tuesday as “the calm before the storm.” In an earlier social-media post, Mohammadi said the drivers of continued conflict include a “generational project for blood vengeance” for the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba’s father, in the opening strikes of the war. “The Iranian nation still has much unfinished business with Trump,” said Mohammadi, who is also a member of Iran’s negotiating team. “Iran is prepared for the great confrontation.”