US President Donald Trump told US broadcaster Fox News in an interview on Tuesday that he would consider a ground campaign in Iran “if I thought it was appropriate,” adding, “Sometimes you need a ground campaign. But we have other people who will do the ground campaign for us.”
The comment, made as US forces carried out their fourth consecutive day of airstrikes on Iranian targets, was casual in delivery but staggering in implication, representing the most explicit public acknowledgement yet that a ground war in Iran is at least conceptually on the table.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was blunt in his response.
“We are waiting for them,” he told NBC network, separately, adding, “We are confident that we can confront them, and that would be a big disaster for them. We have prepared ourselves to confront any scenario.”
Between Trump’s bravado and Araghchi’s defiance lies one of the most sobering military geography problems the US has faced since Vietnam: a country nearly four times the size of Iraq, with a standing military of more than 600,000 personnel, missile batteries blanketing its mountain ranges, and terrain that makes Afghanistan look navigable.
What a US ground campaign in Iran would actually look like, and why military strategists almost unanimously view it as potentially catastrophic, demands a detailed accounting.
US Sailors conduct nighttime operations aboard USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) while sailing the Arabian Sea. Source: CENTCOM
‘Hit Everything But the Oil’: Trump’s Strategic Obsession With Kharg Island
Trump has been specific about at least one target that has dominated his thinking throughout the conflict. “We already hit Kharg Island, as you know, twice, even three times,” he told Fox. “I said, ‘Hit everything but the oil. Just leave that little area from 25 yards out. Don’t touch the oil.’ Because I don’t want that, in terms of the world economy.”
Located roughly 25 kilometres off Iran’s Gulf coast, Kharg Island handles approximately 90 per cent of Iran’s crude exports and serves as the primary outlet for its oil revenues.
Military analysts have described seizing or permanently disabling Kharg as the most logical objective of any US ground operation focused on strangling Iran’s economy, but the island’s defences, combined with the naval environment surrounding it, make a traditional amphibious assault extraordinarily difficult and costly.
Trump separately declined to specify whether the US would try to take Kharg Island, saying doing so “would be foolish,” an acknowledgement that even his own instinct toward escalation has limits when confronted with the island’s layered anti-ship missile batteries and Revolutionary Guard naval assets in the Persian Gulf.
The Geography Problem: A Country Built to Resist Invasion
Iran’s physical geography is the single most important factor shaping any serious military assessment of a ground campaign, and it tilts heavily toward the defender. The country covers approximately 1.65 million square kilometres, nearly four times the size of Iraq, and its interior is defined by two enormous mountain ranges: the Alborz range running along the northern border with the Caspian Sea, and the Zagros range sweeping in a vast arc from the northwest to the southeast, effectively bisecting the country between its western lowlands and its central plateau.
Any ground force seeking to move from the Persian Gulf coast or the Iraqi border toward Tehran must either traverse the Zagros, a series of parallel ridgelines rising to over 4,000 meters, or attempt to navigate the central plateau, which offers little cover, extreme temperature swings and distances that would require massive logistical chains stretching hundreds of kilometres through hostile territory.
Military historians point to the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988 as the most instructive modern precedent.
Iraq, with a battle-hardened military of similar size to the force the US might assemble, launched a full-scale ground invasion of Iran’s oil-rich southwestern Khuzestan province in September 1980 and was met with tenacious Iranian resistance that, after eight years of fighting, resulted in roughly half a million deaths on each side with no territorial gain.
Iran successfully mobilised its population in a mass defensive effort that ground the Iraqi advance to a halt within months, establishing a static front that neither side could break for nearly a decade.
Soar Atlas’ new high-res imagery with a clearer view of the IRGC Naval Base in Jask. Source: Soar Atlas via X
Iran’s Military: Size, Dispersion and the IRGC’s Guerrilla Doctrine
Iran’s armed forces present a multi-layered problem for any ground campaign planner. The regular Iranian Army numbers around 350,000 personnel, equipped with ageing but locally upgraded armour and artillery. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fields an additional 125,000 to 150,000 troops, supplemented by the Basij paramilitary force, which can mobilise an estimated 90,000 to 300,000 irregular fighters at relatively short notice. Together, these forces represent a potential defensive mass of well over 600,000 armed personnel, vastly more than the Iraqi forces the US defeated in three weeks in 2003.
The IRGC’s doctrine, refined over decades and accelerated dramatically since 2003, is explicitly built around the expectation of a US or Israeli ground campaign.
The corps has dispersed its command infrastructure, weapons depots and missile batteries into mountain tunnels, hardened underground facilities and civilian urban areas throughout the country, deliberately complicating targeting and forcing any ground force to fight through populated centres where civilian casualties would be enormous. Iran has specifically developed its network of underground missile facilities, with some tunnels reportedly extending several hundred meters below the surface, to survive even direct hits from the heaviest conventional bunker-busting munitions in the US arsenal.
Iran Army and IRGC spokespersons at a meeting reiterated full and unwavering support for the IRGC, rejecting foreign attempts to label the revolutionary institution as “terrorist.” Source: IRGC via X
The Urban Warfare Nightmare: Tehran at 16 Million
Any ground campaign seeking to force regime change, which US President Trump has suggested as a desired end state, saying he wants new Iranian leadership he approves of, would ultimately require either the encirclement or the assault of Tehran, a metropolitan area of approximately 16 million people. It is one of the largest cities in Western Asia, ringed by foothills and built across a complex of intersecting valleys and ridges that break up clear lines of advance and create natural defensive positions at virtually every major approach.
Military urbanists who have studied the problem point to the Battle of Mosul in 2016 and 2017, in which a coalition-backed force of roughly 100,000 Iraqi troops and Kurdish fighters took nine months to retake a city of around one million people from a far less sophisticated opponent, as the closest available template.
US Navy SEALs and Iraqi Army T-72 during the battle of Mosul. Source: War Flash via X
Extrapolating to Tehran’s population and the IRGC’s defensive sophistication, analysts have estimated a battle for the Iranian capital could last years rather than months, at a cost in casualties that no modern democratic government has shown a political willingness to sustain.
‘Other People’ and the Proxy Fantasy
US President Trump’s repeated suggestion that “other people” could conduct the ground campaign on America’s behalf has attracted considerable scepticism from defence analysts, who note that no regional ally has either the military capability or the political will to conduct a large-scale ground war in Iran.
Israel, the US’s most capable regional partner, has a military optimised for rapid offensive operations and air superiority but lacks the ground force mass to sustain a long campaign in Iran’s interior, and its logistical lines to Iranian territory would require crossing multiple hostile states.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE have invested heavily in modern military hardware but have struggled operationally even in Yemen against Houthi forces whose military capacity is a fraction of the IRGC’s. Jordan and Bahrain, both of which host significant US military infrastructure that has come under Iranian attack in recent days, are not candidates for a land invasion of a country that shares no border with either of them.
The most plausible reading of Trump’s “other people” formulation, analysts say, is a reference to Iranian opposition groups, exile forces or potentially Arab Gulf state proxies, none of which currently possess the organisation, cohesion or military capacity to take and hold Iranian territory against the IRGC’s dedicated resistance.
What the White House Actually Seems to Want
Sources familiar with Trump’s private discussions told NBC that his interest in ground troops has not centered on a large-scale invasion but rather on a small contingent of US troops used for specific strategic purposes, most notably securing Iran’s nuclear material and establishing conditions for a new Iranian government that the US and Iran could cooperate with on oil production, similar to the administration’s relationship with Venezuela’s post-Maduro government.
That more limited vision of “boots on the ground,” a special operations or Marine contingent seizing a nuclear facility or holding a strategically critical island, is operationally and politically very different from a full-scale land war.
But it carries its own severe risks: Iran has promised to treat any US ground presence on Iranian soil as a trigger for full national mobilisation, and the IRGC has spent decades preparing specifically for the scenario of holding a critical asset against a small, elite US force that lacks the mass to hold ground against a popular uprising.
US F-16 fighter jets fly over the Middle East during a patrol. Source: CENTCOM via X
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said ground troops are “an option that remains on the table” but are “not part of the plan for this operation at this time,” a formulation that leaves the question deliberately open while trying to contain its immediate political fallout.
For now, the answer to whether US boots will follow US bombs onto Iranian soil remains suspended between US President Trump’s appetite for maximum pressure, the Pentagon’s awareness of what a ground campaign would actually cost, and Tehran’s blunt promise that it is waiting, and ready.
