Is a Ground War With Iran Imminent, or Inevitable?

The answer is an unqualified 'No.'

13th Marine Expeditionary Unit

If you watch or read the media, you would think that a “ground invasion” of Iran is “imminent” — either to land on Kharg Island, a five-mile speck that processes 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, or to take some coastal strip adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz.

It is not imminent and not even inevitable.

Military sources tell me that for weeks, the Pentagon has exaggerated the readiness and potency of the Marines, setting in motion a media frenzy that is part stupidity, part disinformation to spook Tehran, and part manipulation to please Donald Trump.

“We got two Marine expeditionary units sailing to this island [Kharg],” Sen. Lindsey Graham told Fox News Sunday. “We did Iwo Jima. We can do this.”

Sounds scary, right? Here’s the reality.

On March 13, headlines blared that the “three-ship” USS Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group, carrying the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, was ordered from Japan to the Middle East. Over the next week, news outlets across the globe literally tracked the supposed 2,200 Marines making their way moving west through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean.

In actuality, one of the three ships, the USS San Diego, never left Japan and is still there. And the other two ships, carrying just 1,500 fighters, are sitting at Diego Garcia, roughly 4,260 kilometers from Iran’s coastline.

And that second Marine Expeditionary Unit? Contrary to some reporting that said that the USS Boxer Group left Hawaii on March 19, it departed San Diego. It will have to cover approximately 22,200 kilometers to reach the region and wouldn’t be able to arrive until mid-April at the earliest. Navy sources in San Diego say it is still unclear to the unit itself whether it is headed for the Gulf or just moving to the Pacific to cover the departing Tripoli group.

Not exactly imminent!

And yet here’s NPR, implying an ominous military buildup:

“Between 2,000 and 3,000 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division have received written orders to deploy to the Middle East … The deployment, combined with two Marine Expeditionary Units already moving toward the Persian Gulf, could bring 6,000 to 8,000 U.S. ground troops into close proximity to Iran.”

CBS went even further, linking the 82nd Airborne explicitly to the “Iran war.”

CBS headline

The 82nd is just a light infantry battalion. The idea that we’re going to parachute the 82nd for a ground invasion is absurd. We didn’t even do that at the height of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when a good part of the entire U.S. Army was poised to strike Saddam. (And the 82nd made a near-identical movement in January 2020 after the assassination of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.)

The 82nd has a quick reaction brigade to serve exactly as a “ready unit” to quickly deploy anywhere in the world, but CENTCOM sources tell me that with the majority of the brigade is in training in Louisiana and the battalion ‘on its way’ is going to perform a force protection role in the interim, waiting for you know who to decide to do something stupid.

Then there’s the “increase” in U.S. forces constantly being referred to, as if ground troops are building up in the Gulf or more and more aircraft are constantly flowing. But the truth is that almost all of what has augmented the forward deployed forces are maintenance, ordnance, and logistics to sustain a bombing campaign that started as a quick strike and is now extended to a weeks-long campaign for who knows how long.

That augmentation, if you believe the news media, includes a “Third Aircraft Carrier” on its way. “Third US aircraft carrier heads to region as Trump signals long war with Iran and demand for surrender,” YNet news reports.

There is a third carrier that is potentially ready, the USS George H.W. Bush, which could go to the Gulf, especially to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln, which is well overdue for rotation, but it is sitting in Virginia, with a liberal leave policy over Easter Week.

And even a second carrier? The USS Gerald Ford — the carrier that’s been bombing Iran from the Mediterranean Sea, has been in port at Souda Bay on Crete in Greece this week, not for combat operations but because it suffered a significant non-combat fire that originated in the ship’s laundry spaces. The blaze rendered more than 100 berthing spaces unusable and displaced several hundred sailors. The Ford isn’t projecting power toward Iran; it’s getting its laundry room repaired.

If you squint, an invasion seems inevitable. But look closer at the actual state of each force being cited, and a very different picture emerges. How is it possible, for instance, that every news organization from the New York Times on down, can report three ships leaving Japan with the Tripoli group when there were only two? Secrecy. Sloppiness. Sops.

With Trump in charge, one never knows. But even if there were a ground operation against Kharg Island, it would most likely involve Army Rangers and special operations forces, Green Berets and Navy SEALs — not some conventional ground assault à la Normandy. The idea of the U.S. Marines storming the beaches while the 82nd Airborne drops on parachutes from above is a cable news fever dream.

This frenzy echoes the panic after Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro was arrested in January, when breathless coverage of military movements convinced many that a conventional U.S. intervention was hours away. It wasn’t.

The panic has even reached active-duty service members, several of whom have contacted me worried they were heading into ground combat.

It also reminds me of another media freakout Iran’s mining of the strait of Hormuz, giving the impression that Tehran had mined the entire passage. It later became clear that Iran either hadn’t mined anything at all or had only planted a few as a signal.

Which is what all of this is about, signaling to Iran. From the beginning of the bombing, signaling that the U.S. is serious this time, that the enemy will be given no quarter, etc. Then came the Marine and then the 82nd Airborne, and a third aircraft carrier, and threats of hell and damnation coming from the mouths of Trump and Hegseth.

It’s the White House’s prerogative to scare the shit out of the Iranian government. But does the media need to do that to the public?

— Edited by William M. Arkin