The Crumbling Iron Horde and the Future of Warlords

The Iron Horde's leadership is devastated in 6.0. When we enter Tanaan Jungle, we meet five of its leaders - Kilrogg Deadeye, Kargath Bladefist, Ner'zhul, Blackhand, and of course Grommash "Grom" Hellscream. There are other warlords among the Iron Horde - the Iron Wolf leads the Thunderlord Clan, Zaela leads the Dragonmaw on Azeroth (and is, other than Garrosh, the only one from our universe,) and Azuka Bladefurry, who takes over from her father to lead the Burning Blade Clan.

However, look at those names: how many are alive by the end of 6.0?

The Iron Wolf dies at the hands of the Horde hero, Ganar and Durotan in Frostfire Ridge. Garrosh (spoilers...) is no more after his final duel with Thrall in Nagrand. Ner'zhul and Zaela are both killed in their respective dungeons. Kargath dies in Highmaul, and Blackhand will be the final boss of Blackrock Foundry.

So that's six dead Warlords, leaving just Kilrogg, Azuka, and Grommash himself in 6.1 and beyond.

The Iron Horde waged a brutal blitzkrieg, but they were unable to establish a real foothold in Azeroth, and even setting aside video game logic that would guarantee they couldn't win in the long run, just from a strategic standpoint, the turning point in the war was really the destruction of the Dark Portal. Every encounter with them since then has seen the Iron Horde defeated and losing important leaders.

But I don't think this is a flaw in the storytelling. I think that it's setting us up for the real threat of the expansion, which is, if not the Burning Legion itself, then the Shadow Council and the Sargerai.

The big difference between this Horde and the Old Horde is that Gul'dan is not pulling the strings. Now yes, this means that the leadership of the Iron Horde is unlikely to go off and abandon it when they find out about some demonic artifact that could be useful, but it also means that they don't have the level of control and allies that the Old Horde had. We can assume that in our timeline, the Horde, the Shadow Council, and probably even the Sargerai (I assume they existed in our timeline given Socrethar's existence in Outland,) were all working in concert. In this timeline, at best we could imagine the Sargerai and Shadow Council working together (though given Socrethar's Eredar-supremecist leanings, they could be just both branching off of the Legion but not working together.)

We managed to kick Teron'gor out of Auchindoun, but it's most likely he's still alive, and he did manage to gain a great deal of power from the souls there. In all honesty, while we've been able to defeat the Iron Horde several times, we haven't really managed to slow down Gul'dan.

With the Iron Horde beginning to rip apart at the seams, we should probably begin to turn our attention to the larger threat.