Donald Trump is thinking about sending an extra 10,000 soldiers to the Middle East, to join around 3,000 paratroopers and 5,000 U.S. Marines in carrying out ground attacks on Iran.
This is laughable. To succeed, Trump would have to deploy every single member of the U.S. armed forces to Iran – upwards of 1.3 million.
At the height of U.S.-led operations in Iraq, during the 2007-2008 “surge” ordered by George Bush Jr, around 185,000 American and allied troops were sent to quell an insurgency that had grown since its dictator had been toppled four years earlier by an allied invasion.
Add that number to the 450,000-550,000 Iraqi government forces working with the allies.
And then remember that the so-called Islamic State, formed by thugs from al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, took much of the north of the country in 2014, set up a “state,” and sponsored global terror for years. So three-quarters of a million soldiers were not enough to sort out Iraq.
The U.S. is looking at sending an extra 20,000 or so of its finest to add to the 50,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and women already deployed in multiple U.S. bases around the Gulf. The latter are busy bombing Iraq and fighting off Tehran’s missile and drone counterattacks.
The number of U.S. troops currently tasked with, or being considered for, carrying out military operations against a nation of 90 million people, which is about the size of Western Europe, is less than were sent to fight in Helmand, southern Afghanistan, at the peak of that conflict.
Helmand had the most intense allied concentration of forces anywhere in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011.
About 25,000 U.S. Marines surged into the province when the British-led operation there, which expanded from about 3,000 troops in 2006 to around 10,000, was unable to secure the region.
Those 35,000, including the U.S. Marines, British troops, and soldiers from many other nations who contributed to operations there, were unable to secure a region 28 times smaller than Iran.
The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), based around the USS Tripoli, and the 11th MEU, based around the USS Boxer, are America’s well-trained amphibious attack dogs. Each MEU has about 2,500 personnel.
Their unit structuring could, arguably, be used for a blueprint to turn the shrivelled British armed forces back into an effective single force and a vertically integrated all-arms machine.
The Tripoli and the Boxer are mini aircraft carriers carrying Marine fast jets, Marine Osprey vertical take-off planes, Marine helicopter gunships and transport helicopters, and Marine artillery.
With no interservice rivalry, and non-stop training as a unit, MEUs would be ideal to send to capture targets like Kharg Island, the heart of Iran’s oil export system, which Trump has threatened.
They might also be used to try to drive land-based threats from Iran, currently ranged against ships that are trying to get through the 21-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz. In both cases, they might even succeed. Until, that is, first-person drones perfected by Russia in Ukraine, and no doubt supplied by Vladimir Putin to Iran, come swarming in and transmit live, real-time footage of U.S. soldiers and their last moments of horror, freeze-framed by Iranian propagandists.
These are the kind of scenes that Trump promised Americans would never again have to witness in unnecessary wars of choice, especially not in the Middle East.
Kharg Island is more than 300 miles north of the Strait of Hormuz. It’s a valuable economic target, but would leave U.S. forces badly exposed to Iranian air attacks. And any coastal operations will, inevitably, take such troops deeper into Iran, where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps looks forward to applying the tactics and techniques it exported to Iraq and trained Hezbollah to use in Lebanon, on soldiers wearing the uniform of the “Great Satan.”
Lieutenant General Sir Nick Borton, a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who was also Director of Overseas Operations in the UK Ministry of Defence, estimates that the U.S. and any allies who joined it in an Iranian ground attack would need “many hundreds of thousands.”
Some former Nato generals have said that the U.S. would need to send “over a million, well over a million” troops to succeed in a ground war in the country.
“Ukraine is less than half the size and population of Iran. Russia invaded with 250,000, failed, and now has 800,000 there and still not winning. So one can conclude that a successful operation on a large scale in Iran would need a lot more than that. Of course, there could be a tactical operation to seize Kharg Island, or part of the coastline would require less – but for how long?” he told The Independent.
He warned that, without clarity of purpose, an operation would be “doomed.” For now, there is no clear purpose behind the war against Iran being enacted by the U.S. (though Israel is focused on regime change).
On top of that, Iran has about 600,000 men in its ground forces, including the IRGC, the regular army, and the Basij militia. All of them are spoiling to get the U.S. sucked into an “Iraq 2.0” – the “nightmare” scenario.
So, for the Trump administration to send U.S. troops to the Iranian conflict may be an exciting activity for people in the Oval Office. But it is pointless, and risks delivering to the Iranians more Americans to kill.
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