On June 13, 2025, Israel launched a precision air campaign against selected Iranian military and nuclear facilities, killing senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) along with several nuclear scientists, triggering a wider Iran-Israel conflict that unfolded over the following 12 days.
On June 17, 2025, ‘Predatory Sparrow’, an Israeli-linked cyber group, conducted a destructive cyber operation against Bank Sepah, crippling core banking systems and rendering the institution largely inoperative for roughly 10 days, from June 17 to June 27.
Headquartered in Tehran, Bank Sepah is one of Iran’s oldest state-owned banks and has long-standing institutional linkages with the IRGC. The bank is a key financial conduit for the IRGC, disbursing an estimated $40 million per month in salaries and benefits to approximately 190,000 IRGC personnel.
Israeli intelligence doctrine, including assessments attributed to Mossad, treats regular salary disbursement as a core pillar of IRGC loyalty to the regime. Disrupting payroll flows is therefore viewed as a pressure tool: prolonged non-payment is expected to strain morale, weaken unit cohesion, and lead segments of the IRGC rank-and-file to question their loyalty to the regime. Such loyalty is regarded as critical to regime survival, regardless of the scale or intensity of public protests.
Red alert: In every state’s power structure, street mobilisation matters, but the loyalty of armed institutions matters decisively more. The Iranian regime nonetheless survived. From a Mossad planning perspective, this suggests the disruption window was too short to breach the IRGC’s loyalty threshold. A ten-day interruption in salary disbursement proved insufficient to induce defection or cause organisational fracture.
Israel tried and failed. Israel tested the system and mapped the threshold. This is how modern wars are increasingly fought — not through mass mobilisation or territorial conquest, but through precision strikes on command, finance, and institutional loyalty.
Air power targets leadership and capability; cyber operations target cash flows and cohesion. The battlefield is no longer only geographic — it is organisational. Victory is sought not by breaking cities, but by testing the durability of the adversary’s command-and-control system over time.
