Strategic alignment: explaining Iran’s integration of offensive cyber operations into its military strategy under supreme leader Ali Khamenei

This article discusses Iran's increasingly assertive use of offensive cyber operations (OCOs) and their integration into its military strategy under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's leadership. It argues that the rise of Iranian OCOs is best understood through strategic alignment: the convergence between inherent features of cyber operations and the logics of asymmetry, ambiguity, escalation control and strategic depth that characterised Iranian strategic thinking. To assess this explanation, the article reviews the literature on Iranian OCOs, discusses the core logics underpinning Iran's strategy, and builds strategic alignment’s plausibility upon both theoretical insights from the cyber literature and empirical evidence: the 2020 operations against Israel's water infrastructure and the 2022 attacks on Albania's government websites. A separate section examines the June 2025 war between Iran and Israel, highlighting the limits of integrating OCOs into fast-paced wartime operations. The article concludes that both theory and practice corroborate strategic alignment as a plausible explanation for Iran's growing reliance on OCOs.