Not All Missions with Ground Troops Are the Same

There’s increasing buzz out of the Trump administration about possible deployments of ground troops in or around Iran. Several different missions have been floated: seizing Kharg Island, the key Iranian oil facility in the Strait of Hormuz; landing soldiers on the Iranian coastline to end threats to shipping in the strait; and even what sounds like a cinematic heist of Iranian uranium. Some or all of this may be misinformation aimed at the enemy, at restful allies, at the voters (to make what follows seem less extreme by comparison), or even misleading leaks by various factions within the administration — trial balloons by people who want such operations to take place, or hostile leaks by people who don’t. So, take it all with more than a pinch of salt. But then, not knowing what comes next is one of the built-in downsides of a war that has never been debated in Congress or fully explained by the administration.

I’m not in a position to judge either the potential military value of any of these operations or the potential costs. Those costs could be quite serious even when we have overwhelming air, sea, and ground-fire supremacy, and we should never whitewash them in these debates. When you put soldiers on the ground, at least for anything longer than our one-night raid into Venezuela, people get killed, maimed, and injured. There may be serious reasons to do so, but you must think through what you’d get from it compared with the alternatives.

In assessing the costs and benefits, we should bear in mind that not all forms of ground combat are created equal. Much of the popular backlash against deploying American soldiers and marines overseas has come from a specific experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam: the use of our troops to protect allied civilians, governments, and societies. Whether or not this is fairly characterized as “nation-building” in all cases, in practice it means that our people are exposed to insurgencies, ambushes, asymmetric warfare, and IEDs and other booby traps, and are generally compelled to let the enemy take the initiative, use human shields, and then melt into the population while our troops make themselves targets. Now, conducting this kind of warfare is sometimes necessary, and our military has developed a lot of tactical knowledge in how to handle it. But the mission is still an immensely slow and frustrating one, with no visible victories or timeline. The American people hated it. The troops, for the most part, hated it too — even those who believed in the mission. No sane person wants to replay that experience in Iran, a country twice the size in population of Iraq or Afghanistan.

But not every mission is that kind of warfare. Our military plays to its strengths when it is targeting conventional enemy armed forces, driving them out of territory, holding positions against conventional attacks, or doing quick snatch-and-grab strikes. Nearly every time we’ve engaged in this type of warfare over the past four decades, it’s been both successful and popular with the electorate — even in the early months of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. Consider Kharg Island: less than eight square miles, with a population of about 8,000 people, the bulk of them oil workers. I don’t know what level of resistance Iran could plan to mount if the United States decided to take the island, but it would need to be principally a conventional one, in which the U.S. Marines excel. The population is small enough that it could presumably be temporarily detained or controlled without sweeping win-hearts-and-minds patrols. Once taken, it would be suicidal for the Iranians to try to retake it with no working navy. Taking and holding strongpoints on the coastline would involve some similar calculations, but less favorable ones for us.

This is not an argument in favor of ground operations. Frankly, I’ve been in favor of this war only to the extent that it seeks to finally resolve the problem of the Iranian jihadist regime by bringing about its end; I don’t believe in war for the temporary function of disarmament. It is, however, a case where we should think about potential ground warfare without reflexively assuming that it ends in a lengthy counterinsurgency campaign. The British learned their lesson in 1856 when they went to war with Iran (then Persia) over control of Herat in Afghanistan. The First Anglo-Afghan War in 1838–42 was a catastrophe; at one point, the British sent a 17,000-man army in and only one man came back alive, a Scottish doctor who was spared just so he could tell the tale of how badly the British force had been defeated in their retreat from Kabul. Deep inland campaigns in the mountains were not the strength of the British military. At the same time, in going to war against the shah just months after ending the Crimean War against Russia, the British ruled out regime change in Persia; they wanted the shah to remain a counterweight to the tsars. So, rather than fight in Herat where the cause of the war was, or in Tehran where the enemy was, the British chose a campaign on the southern shores of Persia — the same coastline we’re debating today — so that their army was never far from the superior Royal Navy. By fighting a war on their own terms that played to their own strengths, they brought the shah to the bargaining table.

If we’re going to fight, we should remember that lesson.