The American troops approach Kharg Island, flying low on tilt-rotor aircraft and helicopters. Upon landing, they fan out over the vital oil export hub, all under Iranian fire.
The troops stick close to the island’s oil infrastructure for cover, confronting the Iranian regime with an extraordinary dilemma: destroy the oil facilities to get at them? Or hold back, allowing Washington to take control of the country’s economic backbone?
Such a scenario could play out in the coming weeks as the US weighs whether to take Kharg Island, where 90 per cent of the Islamic republic’s oil is loaded on to tankers.
President Donald Trump said this week that he hoped to strike a deal with Iran to end the hostilities. But, with thousands of US marines en route and paratroopers set to deploy to the region, seizing Kharg Island is an option under consideration by Washington to gain leverage over the Iranian regime if the war escalates.
Such a move would give the US control over virtually all of Iran’s oil exports, allowing Washington to choke off revenue without destroying the facility and potentially triggering chaos in global oil markets.
It would also give the US a bargaining chip in any effort to force Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with other options including capturing strategic islands in the strait in order to exert control over the waterway.
Either way, putting boots on the ground in Iran would be an enormous escalation that would expose American forces to casualties and could drag them into an open-ended conflict.
“Introducing ground troops is clearly a riskier operation to our own forces,” said Karen Gibson, former director of intelligence for US Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East. Though the US is capable of taking the island militarily, she said, the challenge is “not just seizing the island . . . it’s holding it under continued pressure”.
Much of the combat power now striking mainland Iran could be directed instead to supporting the operation as protecting those troops becomes the US military’s top priority, she added.
Seth Krummrich, former chief of staff of US Special Operations Central, the command responsible for Middle East special operations, said the goal in an operation to take Kharg would be “to shock and seize terrain, and [do it] as fast as possible”.
“Speed matters because you don’t want to be in the exposed areas. You’re going to want to hug that oil infrastructure,” he said.
Advocates for tougher US military action in Iran have called on Trump to take Kharg, with Republican senator Lindsey Graham suggesting the regime would “die on a vine” without its oil exports.
As it weighs options, the Pentagon is set to deploy thousands of troops from the 82nd Airborne, the army’s elite paratrooper division. They are designed to deploy within 18 hours.
It is also sending two Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) to the region, each with about 2,200 marines. One, the 31st MEU, is en route from Japan aboard the USS Tripoli, an amphibious assault ship optimised for air operations, and is expected in the region at the end of this week.
The defence department has also ordered the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group — three ships led by the USS Boxer, which is carrying the 11th MEU from California — to go to the region. It will take three to four weeks to arrive.
Each MEU has an infantry battalion, air combat troops and a combat logistics battalion. Both the USS Tripoli and USS Boxer are carrying V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. The USS Boxer also has stealth F-35 fighter jets and landing craft to launch from its well deck that could carry troops and equipment to shore.
One MEU would be enough to take and hold the island, according to former US military officials. “This is a classic Marine operation,” said Gibson. “This is the reason the Marines exist.”
“But they’d be doing it under pressure and under fire,” she added.
US troop casualties would be all but certain. Kharg, an eight-square-mile island located 15 miles from Iran’s mainland coast, is well within range of Tehran’s remaining missiles, drones and artillery.
Retired admiral James Stavridis said US troops could “hold it indefinitely so long as air and sea superiority remained in the hands of the occupying force”.
“This is not like the second world war on the islands of Okinawa or Iwo Jima in terms of size and scale of the defending force,” Stavridis said.
Amphibious assaults, through which troops launch ground operations from naval vessels using air or landing craft, have long been embedded in the institutional DNA of the US Marine Corps. This doctrine was forged in some of the most costly and pivotal battles of the 20th century, from Iwo Jima in the second world war to Inchon during the Korean war.
The US has not done a large-scale amphibious landing under bombardment since the battle for Okinawa in the second world war. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, US troops used amphibious operations to take oil terminals in the Al Faw peninsula but met only light resistance.
US forces have already attacked the military installations on Kharg Island, hitting more than 90 targets, including naval mine storage facilities and missile storage bunkers. Those initial strikes could already be the first phase of the operation to take it: preparing the battlefield.
Kalev Sepp, a US special forces veteran and former defence official, said he anticipated an operation to seize Kharg would involve a very “brief and fierce” attack with precision munitions against remaining defences on the island and the near mainland. This would be followed by an air assault to insert troops by helicopter or aircraft.
Using the 82nd Airborne, Army Rangers and Air Force special operations would also be options because “you could put them right on the target to seize terrain [and] hold it” ahead of the marines’ arrival, Krummrich said. They could also join the operation after marines take the island.
There are two ways marines could land: by sea or by air. USS Tripoli would be the most likely platform for an air assault, in which troops would load up in V-22 aircraft and land on the island.
By boat, marines and equipment would head ashore on landing aircraft. Equipment could include armoured vehicles, artillery, HIMAR rocket launchers and air defences.
“They’ll build a beachhead and they will then move across the island,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and Pentagon official.
But getting ships close to Kharg Island would be challenging, requiring going up the “shooting gallery” that is the Strait of Hormuz, he added. Given the chance that Iran has already mined the strait, entering the Gulf could also require first undertaking a time-consuming mine sweeping operation — potentially under Iranian fire.
An alternative would be for the ships to remain outside the Gulf and land forces by air only. The 31st MEU has practised assaults in which its infantry battalion landing team flies as far as 1,600km from ship to shore — roughly the range they may need to travel.
But helicopters and aircraft would probably face vulnerability to ground fire and the loitering munitions increasingly used by Iranian forces.
Jonathan Hackett, a Marine Corps veteran, argued that US forces could instead seek to deploy from a staging area on land.
This would require basing, access and overflight rights from the nearby Gulf states or Jordan, which would put those countries further in Iran’s crosshairs. The operation would also require resupply and logistics capabilities to be deployed within easy range of Iran’s missiles, guns and drones.
“This would present not only a challenge to those contingency logistics and sustainment requirements — things like fuel, medical and quick reaction-force transport — but also the diplomatic challenges of negotiating basing, access and overflight,” said Hackett.
An alternative to taking Kharg would be to capture strategic islands in the strait itself as part of an effort to control the waterway. Larek, Qeshm and Hormuz would be more accessible from outside the Gulf and give the US a foothold in the strait, but well within range of artillery and drones.
Aside from Iran’s capacity to mount military resistance, however, the risks of fallout in oil markets could undermine the mission from the first hours.
Any operation to seize Kharg Island would be “economic warfare”, said Krummrich, now a vice-president at security firm Global Guardian. You are “fighting in a completely different and more complex space”, he added. It would be harder to justify to the American people with the midterm elections looming in November.
Cancian said that seizing Kharg would give the US a lot of “bargaining leverage”.
But it is unclear that Tehran would negotiate, rather than escalate. Some speculate Iran might even try a scorched-earth policy of destroying its own oil infrastructure rather than giving it up to an adversary.
That means that, even if an operation to seize the island were to go flawlessly, it may change little for the US position in the Iran war. “The big question,” Nick Reynolds, of the Royal United Services Institute in London, said, “is what then?”
Visualisations by Alan Smith and Aditi Bhandari