Iran Conflict Spotlights Need to Map Global Proxy Connections and Relationships -- i2 Group’s Cormac Meiners - March 27, 2026
The current conflict with Iran has been building, relationship by relationship, across four decades and multiple continents, placing new urgency on tracking the diffuse and often hidden connections between Iranian proxy networks and drug cartels in Latin America, whose interactions carry increasingly unpredictable and far-reaching consequences.
So says Cormac Meiners, a retired Green Beret and i2 Group's federal lead for the Department of War and the intelligence community (IC), whose firm has spent more than 30 years developing software to map exactly these kinds of complex, shifting networks. Meiners made that assessment in an exclusive interview with BizTechReports recorded shortly after Operation Epic Fury began. His argument has only grown more urgent in the days since, as a complex array of variables is converging to create a kaleidoscope of factors for intelligence analysts to consider, including, but not limited, to the fact that:
Cormac Meiners, a retired Green Beret and i2 Group's federal lead for the Department of War and the intelligence community (IC
Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has dropped to a trickle, with hundreds of oil tankers trapped in the region. Oil prices have surged, prompting the International Energy Agency to authorize a record release of 400 million barrels of crude in response.
Hezbollah has re-entered the war from Lebanon.
Iraqi militias are striking U.S. targets in Baghdad.
Law enforcement agencies across the United States are investigating a series of domestic incidents as potential acts of terrorism linked to the conflict.
What is unfolding, Meiners argued, is precisely the scenario that an inadequate understanding of Iran's global proxy architecture makes so difficult to manage. The relationships Tehran has cultivated over four decades, across the Middle East, Latin America, and within the United States, are not passive. They are reorganizing under pressure, and tracking that reorganization requires both a new generation of data fusion and artificial intelligence tools as well as a willingness to mine decades of accumulated intelligence history.
A Proxy Architecture Forty Years in the Making
To understand what Iran can do right now,it is essential to understand the institutional architecture through which it operates. Meiners argues that this dimension of the problem statement can be easily misunderstood.
"Everyone talks about the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, but a lot of folks didn't realize Iran has a regular army," he said. "While the IRGC is also an army, it's a political army that's beholden directly to the Ayatollah." Alongside the IRGC sits the Basij militia, a religiously motivated paramilitary beholden not to the Iranian state but to the regime itself. Meiners compared the dual structure to that of Nazi Germany, where an ideologically driven SS answered directly to Hitler rather than to the regular Wehrmacht.
Within the IRGC sits the Quds Force, whose global mission Meiners described in terms that underscore how long Iran has been at this work.
"This is an arm of the IRGC that is actually quite similar to our Green Berets as far as what they do. They go around the world arming, equipping, and training militia groups for combat in various regions, such as Iraq or Lebanon."
That mission has been ongoing for decades, and the relationships it has built form the connective tissue of a network now actively fighting from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen. This is why, despite the significant disruption of Iran’s leadership structure, it is important to understand the underlying players and their relationships. It is the key to Iran’s resilience.
Indeed, the Atlantic Council cautioned that degrading the authorizing center of a network does not dissolve it. Hezbollah retains an estimated 25,000 missiles, 1,000 drones, and thousands of fighters. Iraqi militias continue attacking U.S. targets. The Houthis remain operational. Decapitation creates disruption. It does not eliminate four decades of relationship-building overnight.
The Domestic Dimension -- How Proxy Players Reorganized Inside the United States
The reach of these elements extends all the way to the United States. Iranian backed players have spent decades quietly building a financial and logistical infrastructure inside the country, and that network has arguably received less analytical attention than its military operations abroad. That oversight now carries serious consequences.
"They have cells that mainly operate in order to gather resources and money for the IRGC," he said. "They operate smuggling rings, they do fraud, they do money laundering." It is not primarily a violent network. It is a financial and logistical one, designed to fund operations while maintaining the capacity to activate for other purposes when circumstances warrant.
The historical record of that activity is concrete. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a Hezbollah-linked network in North Carolina purchased untaxed cigarettes and transported them to Michigan, exploiting state tax differentials to generate substantial revenue for the IRGC. The scheme was a window into a broader pattern that has been documented across multiple states and has funded terrorist activities for years.
"That network in this hemisphere is actually quite robust," Meiners said.
Since the start of Operation Epic Fury, that network has moved from a background concern to an active area of focus. U.S. law enforcement is investigating a series of domestic incidents as potential acts of terrorism. An attack at a synagogue in a Detroit suburb has been labeled an act of targeted violence. Two other incidents, including an attempted attack on protesters outside the New York City mayor's mansion and an attack that killed a student at Old Dominion University in Virginia, are under FBI investigation as acts of terrorism.
Where Cartel Capabilities and Proxy Networks Converge
The convergence of Iranian proxies with the increasingly sophisticated capabilities of major drug cartels is another area that requires increased attention and link analysis.
"Cartels have nascent nation-state capabilities," Meiners said. "They have drones, they have cyber, they have surface-to-air missiles potentially, and advanced weaponry. And this is a fact now, right there, just to the south of our border."
The relationships between these criminal enterprises and Iranian proxies have also been developing for decades. Hezbollah maintains smuggling relationships with cartel networks that have moved personnel and materiel across the U.S. border for years. Those same networks now sit adjacent to weapons systems that could be transferred with relatively little friction.
"It probably wouldn't take much to get some one-way attack drones into the hands of these Hezbollah folks and unleash them," Meiners said.
Indeed, independent national security analysts assessing the domestic threat since the start of the conflict have identified three primary attack vectors through which Iran could act inside the United States, including:
Direct operations by IRGC or intelligence operatives;
Attacks planned by Iran but executed by proxy groups; and
The use of criminal organizations to conduct operations while preserving Iranian deniability.
The Institutional Memory Opportunity -- History as an Operational Asset
Confronting a network that has been building for forty years requires analytical resources that match its depth. One of the most significant and currently underutilized assets available to U.S. intelligence is the body of analysis produced during the global war on terror. There are thousands of detailed link charts mapping Shia militia networks in Iraq, documenting individual actors, their organizational roles, their methods, and their relationships. Meiners argued that those records are far from obsolete.
"I'd be willing to bet a lot of them are still in the fight, or at least have connections to folks who are still in the fight," he said.
Data Flows, Silos, and the Interoperability Challenge
The challenge of mapping a global proxy network is compounded by the fragmented state of the data needed to do it. Law enforcement agencies tracking cartel criminal activity and counterterrorism commands monitoring Iranian proxy networks have historically operated in separate analytical lanes. The actor who appears in a Drug Enforcement Administration file as a cartel logistics coordinator may be the same person who appears in a Defense Intelligence Agency file as a Hezbollah facilitator. Without systems and protocols that bridge those environments, that connection risks going unseen.
"Our solution is used globally throughout law enforcement and partner nations, as well as currently in the Department of War in many locations," he said. "We're working to make sure that data is compatible by integrating data to fuse links and properties coming in from battlefield sensors or different forms of intelligence. By being able to really fuse these different threads of intelligence, we can create context that is useful in real time."
While the technical infrastructure exists, the harder problem, he acknowledged, is organizational in nature. Classification structures, agency cultures, and legacy data architectures all create friction that technology alone cannot resolve.
The current conflict has accelerated efforts to address these challenges in ways that years of peacetime planning have not. Joint interagency task forces that existed before the war began are now working at full capacity to connect the criminal justice and counterterrorism data streams that Meiners described as dangerously siloed.
Artificial Intelligence Is Compressing the Analytical Cycle
Artificial intelligence is also reshaping what is analytically possible in this environment.
"We are closing the gap from ‘flash-to-bang.’ The targeting cycle is a lot faster now that we have AI incorporated," he said. "It is helping analysts to better and more accurately pick targets and be recursive and iterate as quickly as possible."
“But that is the conventional targeting piece” he added. “If the asymmetric nature of this conflict continues to spread- a detailed understanding of human networks will be key to not just fighting the IRGC and their proxies overseas- but potentially in the homeland. And that is where precise visual analytics in the hands of skilled and experienced analysts comes in- and that is our wheelhouse at i2 Group.”
RAND analysts assessing the conflict noted that Iran's forward defense doctrine, which relies on proxy depth absorbing threats before they reach Persian soil, is reaching its limits as the financial architecture sustaining the network becomes harder to reconstitute under sustained bombardment.
But a degraded network is not the same as a mapped network. As long as significant nodes remain active in Lebanon, Iraq, Latin America, and the United States, the analytical work of understanding how those nodes are reconnecting under pressure remains an urgent priority.
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