What Are Iran’s Centers of Gravity and How Are They Being Attacked?

War is not a targeting exercise. It never has been. It is a contest of systems and, more importantly, a contest of wills.

Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th century military theorist taught in war colleges around the world, understood this long before precision strike, satellites, or real-time intelligence feeds. He described the center of gravity as “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.” That definition still holds. The center of gravity is not simply what is important. It is what allows everything else to function. When you get it wrong, you can destroy a lot and still lose. When you get it right, the rest begins to come apart faster than the enemy can fix it.

Once the enemy’s center of gravity is identified, Clausewitz advised that this source of power should be struck with concentration. He emphasized focusing strength against the decisive point, not spreading effort across every available target. Speed, mass, and concentration matter. But they only matter if applied against the thing that actually holds the system together.

Modern U.S. joint doctrine takes that idea and makes it more usable for planners. It forces a level of discipline that is often missing in public commentary. First, identify the center of gravity. Then ask what it must be able to do. Those are its critical capabilities. Then ask what it needs in order to do those things. Those are its critical requirements. From there, the analysis gets practical. Which of those requirements are exposed, fragile, or difficult to replace? Those are the vulnerabilities worth attacking.

That framework is essential for understanding Operation Epic Fury. As stated by U.S. officials, the objectives are to destroy Iran’s missile arsenal and its ability to rebuild it, ensure Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon, eliminate its ability to use naval forces and mines to threaten the Strait of Hormuz, and reduce, if not end, its ability to arm and direct proxy forces across the region.

If you approach those objectives by listing targets, you miss the point almost immediately. Missiles, ships, centrifuges, militias. That is just a catalog. It tells you what exists, not how it works.

The more useful question is simpler and harder at the same time. What allows Iran to do all of those things at once, and to keep doing them after being hit?
It is not the missile force alone. You can destroy launchers and still face the same problem months later if production remains intact. It is not the nuclear facilities in isolation. Those can be rebuilt if the underlying system survives. The same is true for naval forces or proxy networks.

Iran’s center of gravity in this war is the regime’s integrated ability to generate and sustain coercive power. Not a single program, but the system that connects them. The leadership, the security apparatus, the industrial base, the revenue streams, the command networks. All of it working together to turn resources into military capability and military capability into leverage.

That is what gives the regime freedom of action. That is what allows it to absorb losses without collapsing. And that is why everything the United States says it wants to stop ultimately runs through that system.

Once you look at it that way, the rest of the analysis becomes more grounded.

Start with missiles. The issue is not simply the number of launchers or the size of the current stockpile. It is whether Iran can continue to produce, disperse, and employ them in a sustained way. That is why strikes on factories and production infrastructure carry more weight than images of destroyed launchers.

You are not just reducing today’s capability. You are trying to prevent tomorrow’s.

The nuclear problem is even more telling. Iran is not starting from zero. It has accumulated roughly 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent. That is a significant threshold. It shortens timelines and reduces the warning window. So the challenge is not just dismantling facilities. It is disrupting the entire pathway, including the expertise, the command structure, the procurement networks, and the ability to restart under pressure. If that system remains intact, physical damage alone will not be decisive.

Maritime coercion follows the same logic. Iran does not need a traditional navy to create strategic effects. It needs to be able to disrupt shipping long enough to introduce risk into global markets. Mines, anti-ship missiles, small boats, coastal systems, and targeting networks all contribute to that. But none of that works without the ability to find and track targets. Sensors, especially radar and ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) networks, are what make the system function. Remove one piece and the threat may persist. Degrade the sensing and targeting network, and the entire coercive effect begins to break down.

Proxy warfare is similar. Iran’s influence in the region does not come from conventional deployments across the region. It comes from its ability to support others who can act in its interest. Funding, weapons transfers, training, communications. Those links matter more than any individual group.

And then there is the piece that ties all of it together. The regime has to maintain control internally while all of this is happening. It has to keep its security forces loyal, paid, and willing to act. It has to preserve enough confidence within its own system that it can endure the pressure. If that starts to crack, the external capabilities become much harder to sustain.

Those are the capabilities. They do not exist on their own. They depend on a set of requirements that are far less visible but far more important.

Missiles require production lines, components, storage, transport, and command networks. Nuclear capability requires facilities, scientists, materials, and time. Maritime coercion requires more than platforms. It depends on sensors, especially radar and ISR networks that can detect and track shipping, as well as logistics, ports, trained crews, and coordination. Proxy warfare depends on money, routes, and communication. None of this functions without revenue, especially hard currency. None of it functions without command cohesion.

Revenue deserves particular attention because it sits at the intersection of capability and constraint. It is clearly a critical requirement. None of Iran’s military capabilities function without sustained access to hard currency. Oil exports, especially through concentrated infrastructure like Kharg Island, finance missile production, naval operations, proxy networks, and the internal security forces that maintain regime control. That makes it a logical target in a center of gravity approach, not only for destruction, but for coercion. The ability to threaten, disrupt, or selectively degrade these revenue streams introduces pressure on the regime’s decision making calculus. It signals that the resources required to sustain military capability, maintain internal control, and continue the fight are no longer secure.

At the same time, it is not a target that can be approached without consequence. Striking revenue at scale risks second and third order effects that extend far beyond the regime. Global energy markets would react, but not simply because Iranian barrels disappear from the system. Most of Iran’s oil already flows to China outside formal markets. The impact comes from what happens next. China would move to replace that supply on the open market, tightening global supply, while markets would price the risk of broader disruption, especially to the Strait of Hormuz.

Inside Iran, economic collapse could generate instability that is difficult to predict or control. For these reasons, the United States has historically been cautious about directly targeting oil export infrastructure, even while signaling that it remains an option. That tension does not make revenue less important. It reinforces its status as a critical requirement. The fact that it is both central to the regime’s survival and constrained as a target is exactly what makes it strategically decisive. In that sense, revenue is not just something to be destroyed. It is something to be held at risk.

And that is where the vulnerabilities begin to emerge.

Iran’s system is more constrained than it appears. It relies on key nodes that are harder to replace than the platforms they support. Industrial sites, research facilities, and integration points are not easily moved or rebuilt quickly. Command networks, once disrupted, take time to restore. Revenue streams, particularly those tied to concentrated export infrastructure, are not easily substituted.

The same is true at sea. The ability to threaten shipping depends on more than numbers. It depends on sensors, especially radar and ISR networks, as well as specialized capabilities, trained personnel, and coordination. Those are finite and, once degraded, difficult to restore quickly.

The nuclear program has its own form of vulnerability. It is not just about facilities. It is about whether the system can recover after being struck, and whether it can do so without immediate detection and further attack. If that confidence erodes, the program becomes far less viable even if pieces of it remain.

The proxy network depends on continuity. Break the flow of money, weapons, and direction, and it begins to fragment. Not immediately, but over time.
When you step back and look at the campaign through this lens, a pattern becomes clear.

The United States and Israel are not simply working through a list of targets in an effort to destroy Iran’s military piece by piece. They are applying pressure across multiple parts of the same system at once. Production, command, naval capability, sensing networks, infrastructure, and support networks are all being hit in ways that reinforce each other.

That is what a center of gravity approach looks like in practice. Not a single decisive strike, but a series of actions that collectively make it harder for the system to function, adapt, and recover.

Clausewitz’s warning about dispersion still applies. Effort should be concentrated. But concentration does not always mean a single point. It can mean sustained pressure against the elements that give the enemy its strength.

There is also a dimension of modern war that Clausewitz could not have fully imagined. The ability to strike not just the system, but the individuals who animate it, at scale and with precision. Today, the United States and Israel are not only degrading infrastructure and capabilities. They are systematically targeting the leadership that commands them. Political leaders, military commanders, and those responsible for missile forces, naval operations, nuclear development, and proxy networks. This is not incidental. It follows the same logic. If the center of gravity is the regime’s integrated ability to generate and sustain coercive power, then removing the leadership that directs and coordinates that system directly attacks its function and its will. It introduces paralysis, disrupts continuity, and signals that no part of the system is protected.

And even then, the outcome is not automatic. War is a contest of will. Striking a center of gravity is not about destruction alone. It is about compelling the enemy to do your will through the use, or threat of use, of force, including military action, sanctions, and the removal of critical capabilities the regime sees as vital to its survival.

If the campaign is successful, Iran’s critical capabilities are degraded or destroyed, and there is a real possibility the effects of the war will be visible in decisions, not just damage. That could include Iran handing over its nuclear material, accepting intrusive inspections, ending the program in a way that cannot be easily reversed, halting missile development at scale, reducing or ending support to proxy forces, and abandoning the use of the Strait of Hormuz as a tool of coercion.

Those outcomes are the measure. Anything short of that may represent significant damage. It may even look decisive in the short term. But Clausewitz would caution against confusing damage with success.

John Spencer is the Executive Director of the Urban Warfare Institute.
He is the author of 20 Times I Almost Died: Life Lessons from the Edge of Survival and coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare.
Learn more at www.johnspenceronline.com
Substack: https://substack.com/@spencerguard