Boots on the ground

There's growing discussion of some sort of US troop deployment against Iran, but little appreciation of the scale it would need.

Modern language around military action is full of euphemisms, like the notorious collateral damage for unintended civilian casualties. Of course deliberately killing civilians or destroying civilian infrastructure has its own euphemism, countervalue targeting. But one of the most pernicious one has been a journalistic idiom, boots on the ground. It has become pervasive in a modern era of airstrike and drone warfare – the dividing line between a fake war and a real one, so to speak. But it softens the implications of a full-on military assault, and the means it requires.

As the US-Israeli war with Iran drags on inconclusively, discussion about an actual ground invasion, boots on the ground, has picked up. Some troops have been deployed to the region, including the elite 82^nd airborne division. But the nature of these deployments and the scale of what would be required are out of step with each other. The 82^nd airborne’s deployment to the Middle East numbers around 3000 soldiers. The US’s total presence in the Middle East is in the tens of thousands – around or over 50,000, give or take.

Any effective military action against Iran would probably require much more than that. It’s very difficult to estimate exactly what would be necessary. But in ballpark terms, this number of troops probably wouldn’t be able to do much more than occupy a few key points on Iran’s coastline. The problem with that, however, is that it wouldn’t stop Iran’s regime from being able to launch drone and missile attacks on the strait of Hormuz from further inland. It would thus require a much larger force than what the US currently has in the region.

This is also assuming that you could actually deploy all of these soldiers to an invasion force. The personnel in Middle East fill any number of different roles within the military, often related to maintaining bases themselves. The US would not be able to redeploy them that easily. The US could always bring more troops to the region relatively quickly, but it would have to do so on a much bigger scale than now.

A maximalist goal of invading or occupying Iran would be an entirely different story altogether. There are various estimates from military strategists and historians of how many troops you need per 1000 inhabitants to actually manage a successful counterinsurgency. These estimates range from about 13 per 1000 to 20 or 25. Even at the very low end, in a country of around 92m people that would mean deploying almost 1.2m soldiers. Even occupying coastal provinces, if that’s even possible by itself, would mean occupying an area with around 10-12m people, give or take. That could mean an occupation force in the hundreds of thousands, at a minimum.

Of course, a ground operation might not try to actually occupy the coast. But it would still need to clear a vast area that reaches further inland into Iran to actually neutralise the threat to Hormuz shipping. This would not be a small undertaking at all, and even then its chances of success would be far from guaranteed.