The war in Iran has dragged on for more than a month, with no clear resolution in sight as additional U.S. troops are headed to the region.
Thousands of soldiers from the U.S. Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division have started arriving in the Middle East, Reuters reported on Monday, as U.S. President Donald Trump weighs his next steps in the war against Iran.
The paratroopers, based out of Fort Bragg, N.C., add to the thousands of additional sailors, Marines and Special Operations forces sent to the region. Over the weekend, about 2,500 Marines arrived in the Middle East.
This comes as the Wall Street Journal is reporting Trump is mulling an additional 10,000 troops in the region and the Washington Post said the Pentagon is preparing for “weeks of ground operations in Iran.”
However, some experts are warning that a sustained ground invasion of Iran would be a tall order, even for the U.S. military.
“For context, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 saw around 150,000 coalition forces during the initial invasion. The United States does not have that in theatre at the moment,” said Alexander Salt, senior researcher and managing editor at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute based in Ottawa.
While the success of the U.S. military operation in Venezuela may have emboldened Trump, the difference between Iran and Venezuela’s military capabilities is like “night and day,” Salt added.
“The Iranian military is certainly more capable of striking back at U.S. forces than the Venezuelans ever were,” he added.
For one, Iran has one of the largest militaries in the world.
According to some estimates, Iran had 570,000 active-duty troops as of 2023 and 350,000 reserve troops, bringing the total to just under a million pairs of boots. This is in additional to paramilitary forces.
“It’s quite a large military apparatus and it’s still intact. There is a chain of command,” said Kevin Budning, director of scientific research at the CDA Institute.
“The Iranian strategy is very clearly to keep taking punishment for as long as they can and wait for the Americans to move on,” Salt said.
In addition to around a million troops, Iran has a range of military assets, including both short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.
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“The Iranians would have the capacity to inflict casualties, and that is something that in the United States they haven’t really experienced in high numbers in the recent conflict,” Salt said.
Iran has already deployed its resources to successfully blockade the Strait of Hormuz, choking off one-third of the world’s oil supply.
This is also the type of conflict Iran has spent decades preparing for, Salt said.
“They have certainly prepared for that potential in the years leading up to the current moment by the acquisition of different types of military technology (including) drones, missiles of various ranges, and naval assets, including potentially anti-ship mines,” Salt said.
While a full-scale invasion might be harder to execute, Budning said U.S. troop movement might indicate the U.S. is looking to conduct smaller scale operations in the region, such as raids.
One such objective for the U.S. could be taking control of Kharg Island, a strategic location in the Strait of Hormuz
Trump said in a social media post Monday that the United States was in talks with a “more reasonable regime” to end the war in Iran, but he also issued a new warning over the Strait of Hormuz.
“Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island,” Trump wrote.
The island is crucial, not just for Iran’s war effort but its entire economy, Budning said.
“Kharg Island is the economic hub of Iran. Ninety per cent of Iran’s oil exports are (sent through) there,” Budning said, adding that Iran would do all that it can to prevent a U.S. takeover of the island.
“It will most likely require boots on the ground to do that. It would require a significant all-service operation or pan-domain operation — air, land and sea,” he said.
Iran could see an attack on Kharg Island as an escalation, prompting them to step up its attacks on Gulf oil and gas infrastructure and emboldening Yemen’s Houthi rebels to block the Red Sea, another crucial shipping route, Budning said.
“The United States and Israel have largely run out of hard military targets to attack. It’s been several weeks, thousands of targets. Iran is holding strong with the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz,” he added.
Taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities will be hard, too, new analysis published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Monday, despite the “tactical prowess” of the U.S. and Israeli forces.
“Despite clear tactical prowess, as demonstrated by the Israeli 2024 raid on a missile-production facility at Masyaf in Syria, and U.S. special forces’ capture of Nicolás Maduro in Caracas in January 2026, placing boots on the ground to seize or neutralize the HEU, in hostile territory with unclear intelligence, is fraught with risk,” the report said.
The U.S. is running out of military options to resolve the conflict quickly, Budning said.
“The question is not whether the United States and Israel can win a war against Iran. It’s whether they could do so quickly and efficiently and at an acceptable cost,” he added.
With the U.S. midterms approaching and domestic appetite for the war shrinking, Trump is likely to seek an off ramp fairly soon, Salt said.
The troop deployment in the region could be a “coercive diplomatic signal” from Trump to the Iranian regime, Salt said, to bring them to the table and negotiate the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
“It’s… saying, look, if you don’t do what we want, we will potentially escalate to ground forces,” Salt said.
“I would not be surprised if he (Trump) simply declares victory, just makes the statement regardless of what the situation on the ground is and just ends the conflict,” he said.
–with files from Reuters