The Pentagon has reportedly revived an extraordinary option for President Donald Trump: Send thousands of American troops deep into Iran to seize enriched uranium from damaged and buried nuclear facilities, according to a new report.
It is being described as a raid. It would be nothing of the sort.
This would be a temporary invasion of hostile territory, launched without real surprise, against an enemy that has spent months expecting us, at sites whose defenses and contents remain uncertain. American troops might seize the objective only to become trapped in a mission with no reliable timetable and no clean exit.
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The historical parallel is Operation Eagle Claw, the failed 1980 attempt to rescue American hostages in Tehran. President Jimmy Carter had exhausted diplomacy and sanctions after a hostage crisis that had humiliated the United States for six months, as mounting political pressure pushed him toward a complex rescue operation.
It ended at Desert One, where mechanical failures and a collision between a helicopter and a transport aircraft killed eight American servicemen before the rescue force ever reached Tehran.
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Today’s military is far more capable, with mature special operations commands and decades of combat experience. But technology does not repeal geography, logistics or enemy action, and a president’s need for a decisive result does not make a fragile plan sound.
Trump has shown the Carter analogy concerns him. When asked in June about a uranium-seizure mission, he said he considered it early and rejected it. “I didn’t want to be Jimmy Carter,” he said.
The reported mission would dwarf Eagle Claw in complexity. Carter’s force knew roughly where the hostages were. In Iran today, we may not know precisely where the enriched uranium sits, whether it has been divided among sites, or whether Iran has already moved it. Some officials believe international inspectors have not verified its location in nearly nine months.
The Pentagon plan reportedly contemplates securing Iran’s Fordow and Isfahan facilities, along with the deeply buried Pickaxe Mountain complex near Natanz, where Iran is believed to have moved centrifuges.
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Thousands of troops could be required, including Army Rangers, special operations forces and combat engineers. One version reportedly calls for flying in excavation equipment and building a runway to fly out roughly 450 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, some enriched to 60 percent.
Pickaxe Mountain alone shows the scale of the problem. Analysts believe it sits more than 300 feet underground, deeper than the Fordow plant the U.S. struck last year. Open-source evidence does not place uranium there at all; the mountain may hold centrifuges instead, and American forces could fight their way inside only to discover the objective had already disappeared.
Iran knows the likely targets and has spent months preparing entrances, roads and defenses. At Isfahan, tunnel entrances believed to hold much of Iran’s enriched uranium reportedly remain backfilled with dirt, reinforced with mines and roadblocks to complicate any ground approach. As one former National Security Council official noted, the sites are fixed and both sides know which facilities American forces would likely approach.
American aircraft might suppress Iran’s air defenses and deliver an assault force. That is only the first step. Troops would then have to control roads, tunnel portals and an airfield for heavy cargo aircraft, while engineers bring in heavy equipment and other troops secure a wide perimeter. Inside, they could confront collapsed concrete, mines, poor ventilation and armed defenders in confined passages. Every hour favors Iran.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would likely respond on multiple fronts: striking American bases, disrupting shipping through Hormuz and activating proxies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Tehran would not need to defeat American forces outright, only deny them the objective by collapsing tunnels, contaminating the site or trapping personnel inside.
The longer our forces remain, the more dangerous the mission becomes. What began as a raid becomes a defended American lodgment hundreds of miles inside Iran. The moment American engineers begin building an airstrip on Iranian soil, the raid becomes an invasion.
That raises the question Washington should ask before sending a single soldier underground: Why not deny access to the facilities rather than occupy them?
If the uranium is trapped inside damaged tunnels, the wiser course may be to collapse every known entrance and access route, then maintain surveillance and strike any effort to reopen the site. Iran might carve a concealed entrance or move the material first — but seal, monitor and re-strike may be far more sustainable than sending thousands of Americans into an underground maze.
The goal should be making reopening slow, visible, costly and vulnerable to another strike, not pretending the mountain can never reopen.
Washington should keep demanding International Atomic Energy Agency access and verified accounting of the material as the price of any further relief, paired with sanctions, interdiction and verified international custody of the stockpile.
Trump is not Carter, and this is not 1980. But both presidents confronted an adversary that refused to yield and mounting pressure to deliver one dramatic operation that could break the stalemate. I will not call Trump desperate; that claims knowledge of his state of mind outsiders lack. But the administration plainly faces pressure to convert tactical success into a visible strategic victory, and seizing Iran’s uranium for display in American custody would offer precisely that image. Wars punish leaders who confuse a powerful image with a durable outcome.
Wars are not won by counting targets destroyed, but by producing a durable political outcome. American forces have punished Iran and badly damaged its military, but an open-ended ground commitment could still turn success into failure.
Before proceeding, the administration owes the country answers: Do we know where the uranium is? Can we reach it? How many troops are needed to hold the perimeter? What happens when Iran counterattacks? And before placing thousands of Americans on Iranian soil, has Washington secured the legal authority and public support for a ground war?
Most importantly, how do we get our troops home?
Desert One failed before the rescue force reached Tehran. A uranium-seizure mission could reach the mountain, breach the tunnels and still fail because getting in is not the same as getting out. The real test is not whether America can reach the objective. It is whether the objective justifies the cost when a less dangerous strategy may achieve the same strategic result.
