Almost a month of US and Israeli bombing of Iran has been a stunning demonstration of what air power can achieve – and what it cannot. The Iranian mullahs have prepared for this kind of asymmetric warfare for decades. They are not giving in. In fact, hardliners in the regime have only been strengthened.
Nor have the Iranian people risen up as Donald Trump hoped they would. Now he faces a painful choice: declare victory, an obvious lie and a humiliation, or start a ground war.
Credible reports say that around 5,000 Marines are on their way, along with elements of the 82nd Airborne. This is nowhere near enough for a march on Tehran. That would take hundreds of thousands of troops. It may be enough to start securing the Strait of Hormuz, or for a bridgehead on the coast.
But this is the “mission-creep” that terrified Trump’s predecessors and led to the Powell Doctrine, set out by the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State Colin Powell: define what victory looks like, use overwhelming force to achieve it and have a clear exit strategy.
The Trump Doctrine is the opposite: order bombing on impulse, change your war aims day-to-day and have no idea how to get out of the mess you’ve made.
A UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter during military exercises at the Tolemaida Air Base in Colombia, where paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division joined Colombian counterparts to conduct exercises (Photo: Ivan Valencia/Bloomberg via Getty Images)This is what happens when you skip the hard thinking about exactly what victory looks like and how to achieve it. America’s 47th president is blundering into a ground war without a plan. It is exactly what Powell – seared by his experience as an army captain in Vietnam – warned against.
The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington has the names of the US dead chiselled into polished black granite, each panel – each list of the dead – getting longer as you walk down a ramp, a deepening wedge showing in three dimensions how America was sucked into Vietnam. Trump has said that, unlike other presidents, he doesn’t have “the yips” about deploying ground troops. Yet he didn’t go to Vietnam because of “bone spurs” in his feet.
What happens next will be determined by Trump’s personality more than anything else. He is the US commander-in-chief after all.
As America’s enemies, especially Russia and China, have noticed, Trump often blusters only to back down. He has a strong incentive to do this now because the economic damage done by the war is hitting his supporters hard. It may even break the Maga coalition, which elected him to keep America out of foreign wars, not start them.
On the other hand, the worst insult in Trump’s limited lexicon is “loser”. When he tells stories about his past, he loves to say that former rivals and enemies “choked”, fumbling a big decision through nerves. Trump desperately needs something he can call a win.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, which lists the US casualties from that conflict (Photo: Mehmet Eser / Middle East Images via AFP)The plan – perhaps formed only this week – may therefore be this: first the Marines and the 82nd Airborne take control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent or more of the world’s oil usually flows. Then they seize Kharg Island, more than 400km northwest, responsible for 90 per cent of Iranian oil exports.
That would be a big chip to hold in any negotiations. Axios quoted one Trump administration official as saying: “We… would get them by the balls.” This is an unconscious echo of Vietnam. “Get them by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow” was how soldiers described the official Vietnam policy of “winning hearts and minds”.
Senator Lindsey Graham – the war’s leading Republican cheerleader – wrote on X: “He who controls Kharg Island, controls the destiny of this war.” But holding the island would require constant air and naval support against continuous Iranian harassment.
The island might also have to be reinforced with more ground troops. There might have to be US raids further into Iran to destroy artillery positions and bases from which Iranian attacks could be launched.
At the same time, to secure the Strait of Hormuz, the marines would have to carry out raids along Iran’s coast to destroy missile batteries, mine stockpiles and attack boats at anchor. This is how the war deepens, like the wedge at the Vietnam Memorial.
Despite Graham’s confidence, as US Army officers like to say: “The enemy gets a vote too.”
Iran’s military has been damaged by the recent US-Israeli air strikes but still has formidable weapons (Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)On Monday, an Iranian Major General, Ali Abdollahi, announced that the country’s armed forces would now switch from defensive to offensive operations. That may have been rhetoric, but Iranian strikes have intensified. They have fired ballistic missiles at the US base on Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands, there have been fresh attacks on Tel Aviv and one barrage of missiles fell near the Israeli nuclear plant at Dimona.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Defence Council has reportedly warned that any attack on its southern coast and islands would trigger mining of “all Gulf routes” with “various types of sea mines, including floating mines”. Iran is said to still possess thousands of such mines. All this adds up to a concerted message from Iran to Trump about the risks of any ground operation he may order.
The Iranian regime shows every sign of eagerly awaiting a ground war. Fighting house-to-house neutralises some of America’s technological advantages. That would be a war of one infantry soldier against another. A US invasion would also be the beginning of a war of roadside bombs and suicide bombers. The Iranian regime sent thousands of children to die by marching across minefields in the war with Iraq. They won’t hesitate to use children against American forces now.
The Marines and the 82nd Airborne may be weeks away from being able to Iaunch an offensive to seize Kharg Island. Any military build-up takes time. The ground war will not be a rapid solution to Trump’s failure to topple the regime. As with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there has been no knockout blow, no overnight collapse.
Unless Trump backs down – a humiliation that may be too much for him to bear – the next steps have a terrible inevitability. He’s almost certainly not planning or even discussing a full-scale invasion. Much more likely, the next step will be the use of ground troops for limited objectives – but the history of Vietnam shows that you enter a quagmire one step at a time.
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