This research aimed to redefine media literacy as a policy instrument functioning simultaneously as a cognitive defense shield and a component of national power in the era of influence warfare. The research studied the case of the 12-day imposed war of 2025 (the joint U.S.–Israeli attack on Iran) as its empirical focus. The research conducted by qualitative interpretive way. It draws on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis, grounded in Husserlian interpretive phenomenology, Hegelian dialectics of consciousness, and the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry. Data were collected from three primary sources during the war period: 260 high-engagement posts on Platform X, 85 domestic and international news reports, and 40 documents. Sampling followed a purposive, criterion-based strategy and continued until theoretical saturation. Brandwatch was used for social-media monitoring, and multi-source triangulation was applied for verification. Findings indicate that the influence operation manifested across three layers: a cognitive layer (emotional engineering and judgment shaping), a narrative layer (the competition between the “Iranian collapse” narrative and the “smart defense” narrative), and a content layer (coordinated repetition of four dominant themes: crisis of trust, managerial ineffectiveness, questions of legitimacy, and social instability). Despite this, Iran’s current media-literacy policies remain confined to educational–consumerist approaches and lack strategic orientation. The study proposes that media literacy be elevated from an instructional skillset to a strategic literacy for cognitive defense. It recommends implementing a two-level model of “critical awareness ↔ institutional action,” including the formulation of a national doctrine, revision of school curricula, establishment of an academic field in “Media and Perception,” introduction of a national cognitive-resilience index, and the development of community-based media-literacy networks. These measures would collectively strengthen Iran’s societal deterrence capabilities in future influence conflicts.