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As U.S. President Donald Trump considers ordering ground troops into Iran, military experts say capturing any of the most likely targets would pose a significant challenge.
The Pentagon has been backing up Trump’s threats to expand Operation Epic Fury into a ground war by bolstering the roughly 40,000 U.S. troops normally based in the Middle East.
Some 3,500 marines and sailors have arrived in the region aboard the USS Tripoli, an amphibious assault ship, U.S. Central Command confirmed on the weekend.
Another 2,500 marines are on their way to the Middle East from their base in California, while the Pentagon has ordered the deployment of around 2,000 paratroopers from Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is looking at sending as many as 10,000 more ground troops to the region to give Trump further military options, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.
While the president and his officials say no decisions have been made about putting U.S. troops on Iranian soil, the deployments are clearly designed to send a message to the Iranian regime.
U.S. President Donald Trump is mulling ordering ground troops into Iran. Capturing any of the most likely targets would pose a significant challenge, experts say.
The overall purpose of putting troops on the ground would be to wrest control of the Strait of Hormuz away from Tehran. The strait is effectively blocked to all but a handful of Iranian-approved ships, making it the regime’s most powerful leverage in the conflict.
Here are the main scenarios that could unfold with U.S. ground forces.
Kharg Island
Located near the northern end of the Persian Gulf, some 500 kilometres from the Strait of Hormuz, Kharg Island is the departure port for roughly 90 per cent of Iran’s crude oil exports.
Trump has repeatedly cited it as a possible target. In a social media post on Monday, he threatened “blowing up and completely obliterating” the island — along with Iran’s power plants and oil wells on the mainland — unless Tehran agrees “shortly” to a deal to open the strait.
“Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options,” Trump told the Financial Times on Sunday.
The island is tiny, measuring just eight kilometres long by five kilometres wide, much of it covered with oil transport and storage facilities.
But it is fortified with Iranian military positions, which have already been the target of U.S. airstrikes.
Sajjan Gohel, international security director for the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London-based think-tank, says sending ground forces to the island would raise the stakes for the U.S.
“There will be fatalities in any kind of ground operation, I don’t think there can be any doubt about it,” Gohel told CBC News Network on Monday.
An analysis published last week by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think-tank describes a mission to seize the island as “a high-risk operation involving large numbers of U.S. forces that could lead to significant casualties.”
If U.S. troops manage to take control of Kharg Island, experts say holding it would remain a challenge, as it is well within the range of Iranian artillery on the mainland and vulnerable to missile and drone attacks.
Strait of Hormuz islands or coastline
Roughly 20 per cent of global supplies of crude oil and liquified natural gas passed through the narrow Strait of Hormuz before the war began. While Iran has continued to send its own ships through, the virtual closure has driven up energy prices worldwide.
There are seven key islands scattered along the strait with military assets and garrisons that are central to Iran’s control of the shipping lanes. Their locations, particularly the three westernmost islands, mean Iranian forces can easiy use them to target any large tankers or military vessels attempting to pass through the strait.
The relatively small size of the islands makes it conceivable for a large U.S. force to take over any of them, according to military strategists.
But such a mission is unlikely to achieve Trump’s objective of ending the Iranian blockade, according to Jason H. Campbell, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a think-tank in Washington.
A takeover “would be an operational nuisance for the regime but would have limited impact on their stranglehold on the strait or desire to continue to inflict punishment on the U.S., Israel, and other regional partners,” Campbell wrote in an analysis published Monday.
Campbell says the same constraints would apply to any U.S. attempt to take strategic targets on the Iranian mainland along the Strait of Hormuz coastline.
“The amount of ground they could hold would be very limited, and the shipping lanes would still be well within range of most if not all Iranian threats,” he said.
Nuclear material
A further option for Trump would be sending special forces deep into Iranian territory to try to seize its stockpile of enriched uranium. Preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is one of Trump’s stated reasons for launching the war.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, some 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium is believed to be split between Isfahan and Natanz, two nuclear sites that the U.S. bombed in June of 2025.
Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., says it would be a tough operation to seize the material from these sites.
“It is pretty well defended and it’s large and bulky, so you’re not going to just go in and pick it up,” Lewis told the Guardian earlier this month.
The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran that could involve raids by a mixture of special operations forces and conventional infantry troops, the Washington Post reported on the weekend.
Iran’s parliament speaker warned his country’s forces are ‘waiting’ for American soldiers as another 3,500 U.S. troops arrived in the Middle East Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Iran would ‘rain fire’ on any U.S. troops attempting to enter Iranian territory. The threats come as Pakistan pushes for U.S.-Iran peace talks.
No ground troops
It’s also possible that Trump is bluffing by sending so many extra U.S. forces into the region, with the aim of persuading the Islamic regime to back down before having to put a single American marine or soldier into the country.
Matthew Kroenig, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, says he is surprised that Trump appears to be on the verge of sending in ground forces.
“It is still my prediction that, consistent with Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ doctrine, the U.S. president will ultimately declare victory and end the conflict soon rather than allow himself to get into an extended military quagmire,” Kroenig wrote on Friday.
Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington-based foundation that focuses on U.S. military and foreign policy, says she doubts Trump’s threat of ground forces is just a bargaining tactic.
“It seems likely to me that this is a genuine escalation or at least that he’s seriously considering escalating,” Kelanic told New York magazine on Monday.
She said the 10,000 additional U.S. troops being considered for the region “is not enough to invade large areas of Iran, but it’s enough to get into some serious trouble.”