Being originally from Iran, my friends, colleagues and neighbors constantly ask me what I think will happen next in the current conflict. They usually expect a political or emotional answer. Instead, I always give them a professional one.

My background is in cybersecurity and incident response. I make a living with frameworks that are heavily influenced by U.S. Department of Defense doctrine. When I look at the current U.S.–Israel confrontation with the regime in Islamic Republic of Iran, I don’t see chaos. I see a familiar process.

Why I Explain This Like a Cyber Incident

In cybersecurity, when a system is compromised, we follow a lifecycle:

Detection → Containment → Eradication → Recovery

The DoD operates the same way. Different domain, same mindset. The biggest mistake in public debate is treating containment as an end state. It never is.

Containment is what you do when you already know the system is hostile, but you’re limiting damage while deciding whether it can ever be trusted again.

Containment Has Already Happened (With Real Results)

The United States and its allies have enforced economic sanctions that crippled Iran’s economy, functioning much like resource starvation and network isolation in cyber response. Among others, some of the efforts have included:

• Removal from global banking systems
• Severe restrictions on oil exports
• Progressive financial isolation
• Recognizing the IRGC as a terrorist organization

The outcome is quite visible:

• Crashing of the Iranian currency
• Collapse of purchasing power
• An economy that can no longer sustain normal state functions
• Millions in sustained demonstrations driven by hunger, currency collapse and economic suffocation

In cyber terms: the system is still running, but barely.

In addition to economic isolation, military containment (precision strikes) mirrors disabling compromised components without touching the core.

• Israeli strikes on IRGC and proxy infrastructure in Syria
• Sustained pressure and precision strikes on Hezbollah capabilities in Lebanon
• U.S. strikes on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen
• Systematic degradation of logistics, command nodes, and weapons pipelines
• Severe degradation and disruption of nuclear facilities in Islamic Republic

Once again, the result is very impressive. In fact, one could say, this is the definition of a successful containment:

• Proxy forces are severely degraded
• Indirect deterrence has lost credibility
• Power projection through intermediaries is no longer reliable

However, strategic restraint should not be misunderstood as part of containment. In cybersecurity, teams sometimes keep a compromised system online to prevent uncontrolled failure while pressure is applied. By carefully applying limited responses, they will avoid full-scale regional war. In other words, short, constrained conflicts are designed to stabilize, not to resolve. This has been a deliberate strategy. And so far, it has worked effectively.

The Question That Ends Containment

Every incident response reaches the same moment when we ask ourselves: Can this system be trusted again?

If the architecture is designed for:

• Persistence
• Regeneration of threats
• Instability as a survival mechanism

Then the answer is no. As all these are true with the Islamic Republic, the regime’s structure and existence has depended on proxy warfare, permanent escalation, and crisis recycling since inception. That is not a misconfiguration - it is a deliberate system design.

All of us in IT and cybersecurity know very well that you cannot patch a hostile architecture.

Why Eradication Is the Next Phase

In cybersecurity and DoD doctrine, when containment has achieved maximum degradation, we reach diminishing returns. It is formally concluded that a known risk will remain in place. At that point, leadership must choose between containing forever and accepting recurring crises OR removing the threat and restoring a stable environment. There is no third option.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

So, when people ask me what comes next in Iran, I always answer as a security professional. The system has been isolated. Its threat surface has been degraded. But the underlying hostile architecture remains intact.

In other words, Containment is finished. The remaining risk is known. The system is unrecoverable.

In every discipline governed by serious risk management, be it cybersecurity, military doctrine, disaster recovery, or medicine, prolonged containment without resolution leads to recurring crises. At this point, eradication seems logical. Not because it is desirable. But because it is the only option left.