Members of Congress are increasingly concerned that Donald Trump could order ground operations in Iran despite claiming the war is near “complete”, with the President said to have advanced plans for audacious, high-risk deployments to secure strategic sites or nuclear fuel.
Democrat senator Richard Blumenthal warned after a briefing from top Trump officials on Tuesday that war plans were “on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran”. The Republican senator Thom Tillis said that with the introduction of ground forces, the war “starts looking like a longer-term conflict”.
Trump has never ruled out deploying ground forces, telling reporters he does not have “yips” about the prospect, despite railing against involvement in foreign wars during his presidential campaign and struggling with a lack of support for war among his supporters or the US public. The President said on Saturday he would only send in soldiers for a “very good reason”.
US officials told Axios that plans for “small special ops raids” were under discussion to secure strategic sites or Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium that has been missing since Trump ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in “Operation Midnight Hammer” last June. US network NBC reported that Trump has shown “serious interest” in ground operations.
While the US has recently executed a successful lightning incursion into hostile territory in Venezuela to extract President Nicolás Maduro, and Israel has reportedly conducted raids behind enemy lines in Iran, military specialists say Trump would face serious challenges in his most likely targets.
US Special Forces could soon be deployed to Iran (Photo: Luke Sharrett/Getty Images)Send in troops to the Strait of Hormuz
Trump has warned Iran to allow commercial shipping to resume through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic chokepoint off its southern coast after Tehran launched attacks on vessels, driving up global oil prices.
Trump’s commitment to provide navy escorts for tankers has yet to materialise, but the President could execute a more ambitious plan to control the route through ground forces, suggests Mick Mulroy, who served as a senior defence department official during Trump’s first term.
“You would need to land marines on both sides of the Strait to fully control it,” he said, suggesting this would require the deployment of “thousands” of soldiers, which would require a surge of troop numbers to do it.
“The US already has a plan to do that if ordered,” Mulroy added. Another former defence official told The i Paper that such a deployment was one of several scenarios that had been extensively war-gamed for a conflict with Iran that has long been anticipated. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment.
US strikes on an Iranian naval vessel in the Hormuz Strait (Photo: US Central Command/Reuters)Professor Alessio Patalano, a naval warfare specialist at the War Studies Department of King’s College London, suggests the US military could seek to break the impasse with targeted operations against Iran’s offensive capabilities around the coastline.
“Iran continues to possess small coastal submarines, mobile surface and subsurface drones, as well as mobile missile launchers,” he said. “These have to be added to the risk of mining, which has been systematically used by Iran over the years.”
“The elimination of these threats will demand inshore operations, targeted insertion of forces to disable or destroy them, in addition to escorting of shipping. All of the above carry risks, but the US and major European actors would be in a position to conduct them.”
The US must be prepared to act quickly, anticipating that Iran will regroup from any blows it receives, Patalano believes.
“As Iranian capabilities are reduced, risks also might come under greater control,” he said. “But in war at sea there are risks of operating in narrow spaces [such as the Strait], especially in light of more recent drone capabilities.”
Seizing Iran’s oil island
Kharg Island is the most vital node of the Iranian oil industry with 90 per cent of fuel flowing throwing its terminals (Photo: European Spacency/AFP/Getty)Trump’s team have also reportedly discussed plans to take Kharg Island, which hosts Iran’s main oil export terminal, with an estimated 90 per cent of the fuel that provides the regime’s most critical source of revenue passing through it, with China the leading buyer.
Former Pentagon official Michael Rubin wrote in January that capturing the island would effectively bankrupt the regime, claiming “should [Trump] take Kharg…he can ensure the regime can never again pay the salaries of its bureaucrats and soldiers.”
Jarrod Agen, executive director of Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, appeared to hint at the plan in statements to Fox last week.
“What we want to do is to get such massive oil reserves in Iran out of the hands of terrorists,” he said. “We’re going to get all of the oil out of the hands of terrorists.”
Kharg would be an easier target than controlling land around Hormuz, said Mark Cancian, a former US Marine colonel and now a defence analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Because it’s an island it would be easier to protect,” he said. “It would be difficult for Iran to reinforce due to our air superiority. And if we took it, we would control all their oil exports. We might not have to take the rest of the country.
But Cancian added that this would require thousands of new troops in the region and “entail a large ground operation with casualties.” That could play into Iranian hands, he suggests, as losses would make it politically difficult for Trump to sustain the war.
Another factor that could deter a US operation in Kharg Island is the fear that paralysing Iran’s oil trade could set off another shock in an already volatile market, with some analysts suggesting it could drive the price of a barrel up to $150 (£111.60).
Targeting Isfahan nuclear complex
Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said this week that the UN watchdog believed that half of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium remained buried at the nuclear complex in Isfahan, one of the targets of Trump’s B-2 bomber raid last summer.
Trump has not ruled out a mission to recover the radioactive material, close to weapons-grade, that is stored in separated capsules. “At some point maybe we will,” he said last week.
Satellite images show damaged buildings following airstrikes on the Isfahan nuclear complex on Sunday (Photo: Vantor/AP)Iran’s nuclear programme – and Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that Tehran was “weeks” from an atomic bomb – has been a key factor the President has cited as a justification for military action.
Mulroy said the US military had special forces prepared for such a mission, but crucial uncertainties remained.
“That would be a very complex and risky operation,” he said. “We have highly trained units like JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] that can do this. It would require complete air dominance, airborne forces to cordon off the area and multiple squadrons of special operators to execute.”
“One question would be, what level of damage did the installation endure with our previous bombing.”
Ken Katzman, a former CIA analyst and Iran specialist now at the Soufan Center think-tank, said an operation at Isfahan would be ambitious and high risk.
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“There would have to be a seizure of that entire area, with a substantial US unit, possibly needing to get air defence into it, and setting up a perimeter that would allow experts to get into the site and try to find this stuff,” he said.
“It’s not like they know exactly where this is. [The nuclear material] is presumed to be buried under debris, which means you need earth-moving equipment. You maybe even need co-operation of Iranians site workers there.
“All of that is going to take days, or maybe more. You have to move a lot of earth to find it. This is not something that a few helicopters full of commandos can do in an afternoon.”
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