TEHRAN, Aug. 22 -- The Islamic Republic's army has a spokesman who gives interviews to the state news agency about once a week, and on Saturday Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia used one of them to say something about the shape of the war. Iran's military doctrine, he told IRNA, used to be defensive. It is not any more.

His words were that the doctrine had been defensive in the past but that gradually, during these two wars, it had moved from a defensive posture towards an offensive one. The two wars are the twelve days of June 2025 and the forty that began on 28 February this year and ended with the Pakistan-brokered ceasefire of 8 April, a ceasefire since extended indefinitely and broken by both sides often enough that nobody uses t...