Why Taking Iran's Kharg Island Could Be an American Trap

Iran’s Kharg Island is the ultimate bargaining chip. Sitting twenty-five kilometers off the Iranian coast, the island is known for its historical monastery and temples, its archaeological finds, and an oil refinery that just happens to handle up to ninety percent of all Iranian oil exports. For Iran, its allies, and especially its adversaries, the value of Kharg Island is obvious. Control the island, and you can throttle Iran’s oil-dependent economy.

Capture it intact, and another nation could make Iran do almost anything to get it back. Destroy it outright, and Iran would transform from a powerful rogue nation into an economic afterthought—and that is if we are being generous.

As the United States and Israel wage war against Iran, it is no surprise that Kharg Island has become an object of fixation for US President Donald Trump, a world leader with the military power to seize the island and bring Iran to its knees. Right now, thousands of US Marines and Army paratroopers are inbound to the Middle East, and there is a strong possibility that Kharg Island is their ultimate target.

But as Washington directs its hungry gaze toward the crown jewel of the Iranian economy, America and its allies would do well to remember that it is a lot harder to take Kharg Island in real life than it was in a video game. If the United States intends to seize the island using only the forces traveling to the Middle East today, then there is a real chance that Kharg could become the place where America endures its worst military defeat in generations.

The Target

Before we can understand what it means to attack Kharg Island, we have to understand the island itself. Despite the world’s intense focus on the Strait of Hormuz, Kharg sits in the northern Persian Gulf, much closer to the Gulf’s Iraqi shoreline than to the Indian Ocean. It lies a mere twenty-five kilometers from the nearest point on the Iranian coast, and around sixty kilometers from Bushehr—the site of Iran’s sole nuclear power plant and its most important commercial port. Just 180 kilometers from Bushehr is Shiraz, a major city of about 1.6 million people, home to a major refinery and the economic center on which southern Iran depends.

In practical terms, the export facilities on Kharg are the most important site in one of Iran’s most important regions, which makes the region especially important to the Iranian military. This is an area with well-developed civilian infrastructure, a large presence from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and, most likely, the hidden weapons stockpiles to match.

Kharg is a low-lying coral outcrop, with an elevation of just seventy meters at its highest point. With a land area of roughly twenty square kilometers, it is basically flat, basically triangular, and surrounded by deep waters to enable the transit of oil tankers. The island has no substantial vegetation or other terrain obstacles, except for some relative high ground near its southern edge. Its coastline is mostly sandy and gradually sloped—an ideal candidate, on paper, for an amphibious landing.

While Kharg sits near several offshore oil fields, it is not the site of any onshore oil production.

Instead, the island hosts the major oil terminal, a sprawling facility that takes up most of the available land area. That is largely a function of topography. The waters off most of the Iranian coast are shallow and rocky, so from Iran’s vantage point it was easier to route the vast majority of oil exports to Kharg than to construct new deep-water ports on the mainland. To give a sense of scale, the island hosts Kharg City, a restricted-access area home to roughly 8,200 long-term or semipermanent residents.

The island receives oil transfers from the mainland through a network of submarine pipelines, and is also fed by pipelines running directly to Kharg from a trio of offshore oil fields, bypassing the Iranian coast entirely. Once crude reaches the island, storage can accommodate up to twenty-eight million barrels at a time. That crude is refined on-site before being moved to the export terminal, where Iran can host and load ten petroleum supertankers at once. Operating at full capacity, Kharg can export up to 1.6 million barrels of oil each day.

The people who run Kharg understand that Iran sits at the heart of a major regional conflict, so the island is not what it was before the war. Across late 2025 and early 2026, Iran offloaded oil from Kharg much faster than the terminal accepted new shipments, with a very high proportion of that oil heading toward China. As of now, exports have slowed dramatically.

The island hosted a substantial military presence before the war, but those forces took a beating from the United States Air Force on the thirteenth of March. On that day, US Central Command claimed it had targeted over ninety Iranian military sites across the island, though both Iran and the US say the oil infrastructure was spared.

The US said it destroyed, in its words, “naval mine storage facilities, missile storage bunkers, and multiple other military sites.” President Trump claimed the forces based on the island were “totally obliterated.” As of this writing, the extent of any surviving military infrastructure on Kharg is unknown—assuming any infrastructure has survived at all.

Why Washington Wants It

There is one final question to ask about the island, though by now the answer may be obvious: why would the United States want to capture it? In a word, leverage. By seizing Kharg, the US could use it as a bargaining chip to hold the Iranian economy hostage. It could control the docking and loading of oil tankers, shut down the refinery, obstruct or cut off access to pipelines, and even threaten to destroy the facility completely.

According to recent reports by Axios, citing multiple well-placed US officials, the island is among the prime candidates for what American planners are calling a “final blow” to end the conflict. The US is purportedly weighing other options too—attacks against other islands near the Strait of Hormuz, or a blockade or seizure of Iranian ships leaving the strait—but the capture of Kharg would deliver unparalleled leverage for Washington. According to those Axios sources, Washington’s intent is to launch an operation so decisive that Iran would have no choice but to negotiate. If the United States believes such an operation is feasible, then Kharg Island is the obvious first choice.

The problem is the gap between belief and reality. There is a well-worn expression about operations like these, attributed to the nineteenth-century Prussian general Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder: no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Much like the conflicts of Moltke’s time, modern wars tend to get very messy, very quickly—especially when a powerful attacking force walks into a complex, risky ground operation believing it has already secured the upper hand.

Iran’s Real Strategy: Cost Imposition

Before getting into the details of an Iranian defense, one thing has to be clear. For America to turn Kharg into a strategic bargaining chip, it has to do more than capture the island. If the US did attempt to seize Kharg, Iran would probably try to defend it—but the bulk of Iran’s approach would not involve stopping America from taking the territory. Iran’s defense of the island will only truly begin once the island has already been seized.

Tehran will be guided by the same logic it has relied upon throughout this conflict: that it can force the US to disengage by imposing costs. Iran does not care about winning head-to-head battles, and in fact would rather avoid them entirely, because it believes its adversaries—especially the United States—are far less willing to accept losses or damage than Iran itself.

That said, there will be an initial island defense. Iranian attacks on an assault fleet would start at relatively long range, where Iran can deploy anti-ship cruise missiles, aerial kamikaze drones, and even more dangerous sea drones to hit ships approaching by sea. The extent of Iran’s surviving stockpiles is unknown, but judging by its continued ability to strike targets across the Middle East at long range, Tehran clearly has not run out of these weapons. Iran will also employ static defenses—specifically sea mines—that it can lay on just hours’ notice before an American landing force arrives.

The forces that any nation would need to amass on the water for an operation like this are very substantial, and Iran will see them coming before they arrive, especially with the benefit of intelligence supplied by Russia, as European leaders are now routinely alleging. American forces arriving by air, like paratroopers or close air support, are another story. Iran lacks the ability to meaningfully contest control of the skies. Low-flying aircraft will face greater risk from shoulder-fired missiles and other weaponry, but the US can partially offset that risk through airstrikes before a landing force arrives.

Iran’s concentration of ground forces on Kharg is currently unknown in the wake of America’s earlier strikes. Most likely, any heavy equipment stationed there is no longer in fighting shape, and the specific US claim of over ninety destroyed targets suggests it may have hit decentralized, hidden supply caches across the island. Some of those caches will have survived, meaning soldiers and paramilitaries may still manage an organized resistance to a US landing. According to a recent CNN report, Iran is also working to beef up its defenses—laying anti-armor and anti-personnel mines, including along the shoreline, while reinforcing what appears to be a layered air defense system.

The Trap Springs After the Landing

Any amphibious or parachute landing will be preceded by intense aerial bombardment. The trouble with bombardment is that aircraft inevitably miss things, and surveillance fails to spot defenses or stockpiles that have been well hidden. There is no telling what the US will destroy and what it will miss, but some of those mines and air defenses will survive. That raises the possibility they could claim American lives or down vulnerable, non-stealthy, low-flying aircraft.

Even so, Kharg will not be an easy place for Iranian forces to hold once US ground troops have a foothold. Iran’s troops will either be left exposed, forced to use refinery infrastructure as cover, or pushed into the island town where most residents live.

It is after the United States takes control, and radios victory back to Washington, that the real trouble would begin. There is a chance Tehran does what the United States seems to expect: recognize America’s control of the island and immediately call for negotiations. But Iran’s actions to this point reveal a very different way of operating. Tehran’s objective is not victory in any conventional sense.

It is willing to accept the deaths of its political and military leaders, the destruction of its cities, and mass casualties among its soldiers, paramilitaries, and civilian supporters. Iran’s focus is on regime survival—not the survival of the people who make up the regime, but the survival of the regime itself.

That is a problem for the United States, because although Washington would take Kharg for economic leverage, that is a long-term play. If the US held the island for months or even years, Iran would face complete economic ruin unless it capitulated. But it will take time for Iran’s situation to become untenable—whether because the money runs out in Tehran, or because Tehran’s international partners decide they can no longer bear the collateral damage.

By taking Kharg, the US would give Iran a critical window to operate, lasting at least a few weeks while Iran’s economic apocalypse develops. Throughout this conflict, Iran’s strategic read of the United States has been consistent: Tehran believes the American public is not willing to accept the loss of American troops, nor long-term or severe economic pain, just to see the Islamic Republic overthrown. That read seems to have been borne out in US opinion polling, on Wall Street, and even in the growing political divide within Trump’s own Republican Party.

Whatever the administration may want, the American public, the markets, and a large share of Trump’s own voting base simply do not value this war very much. For Iran, the war is everything.

Iran’s Arsenal Against a Stranded Garrison

If Iran has a few weeks to work, with thousands of American troops stuck on Kharg, it may choose to target those troops directly and impose as many losses as possible. At Tehran’s disposal are the Iranian ground forces: roughly 350,000 soldiers in the Iranian Army, about 150,000 across the ground forces of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and several hundred thousand more paramilitary fighters of the Basij Resistance Force. These troops have been mostly left out of the current conflict—unless they are being bombed from above or launching missiles and drones—and after so long on the sidelines, they are beyond ready to fight.

It would be difficult for those forces to reach Kharg en masse and conduct a counter-landing, given how much of Iran’s navy has been destroyed or put out of commission. But Iranian forces are creative and highly motivated to accept risk to their own lives in order to deliver damage. Everything from ordinary speedboats to fishing vessels to tugboats could be commandeered for improvised, small-unit beach raids to harass US forces. Those attacks would amount to suicide missions—but again, Iran’s focus is not on avoiding the loss of its own troops, but on imposing losses on its adversaries.

Much more dangerous is Iran’s artillery. None of those pieces have the range to hit Iran’s Middle Eastern adversaries, but many can use rocket-assisted projectiles to strike Kharg from the coast. Iran may also field shorter-range aerial drones, similar to those used in Russia and Ukraine, even using fiber-optic cables to defeat jamming.

Of course, if Iranian forces move their long-range artillery or unconventional landing boats into range of Kharg, America can see them and will try its very best to destroy them. Even so, those weapons pose a real threat to US forces once they have landed—and they become even more relevant in a later phase of this discussion.

Then there are the munitions Iran can send from further out: one-way attack drones and the cruise and ballistic missiles it can launch from anywhere in its territory. It is unclear how much of this weaponry Iran has left, but it is clear it has enough to threaten targets much farther away than Kharg. Iran also holds substantial stockpiles of shorter-range missiles and drones—weapons that cannot reach Israel, the Gulf states, or US bases in the region. We cannot speak to US or Israeli targeting policy, but an educated guess is that both nations have focused on longer-range munitions and launchers that pose a more immediate threat.

If US forces are positioned on Kharg, however, those shorter-range munitions become a major concern. Short range helps Iran in more ways than one. When targets are that close, it might take only a couple of minutes for a weapon to be pulled from storage, prepared, and fired, with only a couple of minutes more before even the slowest drone reaches its target.

For the US and Israel during this conflict, distance has mostly equated to safety—and even at distance, the task has hardly been easy. Last week, the New York Times reported that several US military bases had already been severely damaged by Iranian drones and missiles, rendering some of them, especially in Kuwait, uninhabitable. Move US troops as close to Iran as Kharg Island, where those troops, vehicles, ships, and aircraft would have only a limited ability to escape or protect themselves, and they are sitting ducks.

The Outer Walls: Hormuz and the Mainland

Iran can harass the United States as it tries to take Kharg, and it can bombard, raid, and otherwise attack US troops once they are on the island. But these two rings of defense are the ones America encounters only after its forces get close. There is another ring Washington would have to account for: the Strait of Hormuz, the other outlying islands across Iran, and the Iranian mainland itself.

We know what the United States would use in an attack. The US is deploying airborne assault units, special operators, and daredevil helicopter pilots. But the bulk of its attacking force is expected to comprise two Marine Expeditionary Units, each sailing into the region aboard amphibious assault ships.

When they arrive, those Marines will most likely be tasked with a beach landing—it is what they are trained for, what their ships are designed for, and a task their fleet seems ready to accomplish. But to get those amphibious forces to Kharg, you first have to get them through the Strait of Hormuz, which under current circumstances means fighting your way through it. If you cannot, those Marine units do not reach Kharg, and the US is stuck with whatever forces it can drop—highly vulnerable and probably outnumbered—from a fleet of tactical airlifters Iran can target relatively easily, or worse, low-flying helicopters.

A purely airborne operation, with troop numbers so limited that every problem we are about to discuss becomes unsolvable, would be a disaster.

Taking the Strait of Hormuz is a very difficult task in its own right—so difficult that, as of now, the US has not attempted it. Instead, Washington has been berating members of NATO because they will not do it. The strait is only about fifty kilometers wide at its narrowest point, well within range of all those weapons fired from the Iranian mainland.

Iran is known to have laid sea mines in the area and would very likely lay more if it appeared the US was about to try for the waterway. Iran possesses over a thousand small fast-attack craft to harass ships trying to enter, mostly concentrated near the strait, though it is unclear how many remain operable. To handle all those problems at once, the US would need more naval vessels than it currently has in the Gulf of Oman, including dedicated minesweepers that are mostly unavailable or have been sent elsewhere.

And to truly control the strait, it would have to capture at least some of the nearby Iranian mainland coastline, demanding a fair share of America’s ground forces.

This is where those many hundreds of thousands of Iranian ground forces become extremely relevant. They cannot reach Kharg once it is taken—unless they are brave or foolish enough to attempt a beach landing from a fishing boat—but they can concentrate their power across coastal areas of the mainland. And if the US must dedicate its naval power to securing the strait long enough to invade Kharg, it can forget about escorting trade ships out of the Persian Gulf.

According to expert estimates via the Wall Street Journal, those crossings are so risky that the US and its allies could have to dedicate a warship, or maybe two, for every tanker guided through. To move ten tankers in a convoy, the US would need a dozen warships—naval power that simply is not available in the region right now.

The Math of Holding It All

Suppose the US does make that decision: it opens the Strait of Hormuz and secures the Iranian coastline long enough for the amphibious assault groups to slip through. And suppose it manages to hold the strait, since capturing it and then letting it go again makes little strategic sense. Then those ships still need to get past Iran’s other outlying islands in the Persian Gulf and avoid whatever munitions might be hidden there.

Then, if the US wants to land troops on Kharg and keep them safe from all the artillery shells, rockets, missiles, drones, and raiders described earlier, it can do that—but the only way to protect Kharg from shorter-range munitions is by capturing even more coastline. That raises the problem of Iranian ground forces once again, this time in an economically critical, infrastructurally developed area where Iranian troops will be present in large numbers, able to navigate the landscape and maneuver quickly. And regardless of what the United States ultimately captures, it has to sustain its operations everywhere it decides to hold territory.

That is a tactical mandate, but also an optics problem. If the US concedes territory after taking it, or avoids territorial fights with Iranian troops, it confirms Iran’s belief about America’s aversion to casualties and losses. Every risk the US chooses not to take against this particular enemy will be read in Tehran as a sign that America really is unwilling to accept the costs of war that Iran can impose.

The Attacking Force

At this point some readers may wonder why we are underrating the American military so badly. American forces are extremely competent. American air power is the best in the world, American naval power is unmatched, and anyone willing to go toe-to-toe with the Marines in an amphibious environment clearly does not know who the Marines are.

But the limiting factor for the United States is not competence; it is the number of troops available to accomplish such a complex and risky operation. When it comes to military occupations, size matters, and the US ground forces currently en route just are not numerous enough. There are enough troops inbound to seize Kharg if the island existed in a neat little vacuum with nothing to fear from the outside world. But that is not the case, and forcing through the Strait of Hormuz without capturing it—just to take Kharg and ignore the threats across the surrounding region—would be incredibly risky.

The bulk of the inbound US force is split between two US Navy Amphibious Ready Groups and the Marine Expeditionary Units aboard each. Those two groups carry at least three thousand Marines in total, and possibly closer to five thousand, along with the many thousands of Navy sailors needed to operate the ships. The first Marine Expeditionary Unit will have already arrived in the region by the time this is published—and if you are reading this at all, it is because those forces have not yet attacked. The second group is expected around April eighth, at which point the US will have to either tell them to sit tight or start clearing the way into the Persian Gulf.

Also en route is the 82nd Airborne Division, around 1,500 paratroopers trained rigorously for short-notice deployments to seize contested areas behind enemy lines. The current members of the 82nd have never parachuted into a conflict under real-life conditions; the unit last executed a combat jump during the 1989 invasion of Panama. They are very well-practiced, but they are light units, and so are the inbound Marines, meaning they do not travel with tanks or large numbers of infantry fighting vehicles.

According to some sources, the US is looking to deploy additional special operations units—Army Rangers, Naval Special Warfare teams, and even Delta Force, the uber-elite raiders who most recently snatched Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro from his fortified bedroom. The US may also deploy its Night Stalkers, specialized helicopter pilots who excel at extremely risky insertion and extraction operations.

In total, being really optimistic about troop numbers, that is only about eight thousand ground troops, drawn from several branches and specializations. Each of those units is very expensive and highly trained, representing immense investments of time and resources. And while eight thousand troops is nothing to take lightly, it is not enough to hold Kharg Island plus the nearby Iranian coastline plus whatever else must be captured to control the Strait of Hormuz. Eight thousand is more than enough to capture the island itself—but by capturing the island and nothing else, the US would be sending eight thousand highly valuable warfighters to squat on a vulnerable, exposed landmass.

No Cavalry Coming

Nor will any of America’s allies come to help. The nations of NATO have made it abundantly clear that they do not intend to put their own troops in harm’s way for this war, and the same can be said for the nations of the Indo-Pacific. If the US could seize the Strait of Hormuz and hold it long enough for a NATO naval coalition to take over during a lull in hostilities, then maybe those relief forces would let US troops move elsewhere—but now we are talking about a timeline of weeks, if not months.

Nor does Israel have forces to spare. The nation is trying to invade and occupy southern Lebanon while continuing to occupy most of Gaza, while keeping order in the West Bank, while sustaining its air campaign against Iran, while defending the rest of Israeli-controlled territory against any other threats. The Gulf states might be a bit more willing, but, to put it gently, they cannot keep up in a high-paced, multidimensional operation like this. They will also be busy dealing with the inevitable, massive retaliation Iran would direct at their energy infrastructure, population centers, and maybe even their desalination plants, if Kharg is captured.

Even occupying Kharg itself would not be as easy as it sounds. Thousands of people still live there, and while some are combatants, most are not. If the US seizes the island, it also has to control a civilian population, requiring intensive, round-the-clock guard and monitoring duties from the very troops needed to hold the landmass.

The US would also risk Iranian fighters slipping into whatever internment camps it created, demanding even more troops for security screenings, rapid-response capabilities, and possibly replacements for losses from ambushes and lone gunmen. That is yet another drain on the total pool of available troops—eight thousand on the ground, if we are being very generous.

Most recently, as of this writing, the Wall Street Journal reports that Washington may send an additional ten thousand ground troops to the Middle East to assist in a Kharg seizure or a similar operation, supplied with heavy armored vehicles. That report was unconfirmed when this was written; if those troops are inbound by the time you read this, you will be able to find the record easily through any number of news outlets. Ten thousand extra troops would go a long way toward addressing the problems laid out here, but two concerns remain.

First, even an additional ten thousand may not be enough, given how much territory the US would need to take to make all of this work. Second, with a force that size and the limits of available air and sea transport, it would take several weeks at a minimum to prepare those troops, move them to the region, and deploy them into combat. It can be done, and ten thousand extra troops would help—but how much they would help is hard to say.

The Risks of Overconfidence

The quandary the United States risks stumbling into should now be clear. What is less clear is whether the US—and particularly the more gung-ho members of its political leadership—truly understands what it is signing up for. With this White House, there is always a layer of machismo and tough talk over every conversation, but even accounting for that, US leadership has consistently underestimated Iran since before the conflict began.

Worse, it does not seem to be learning from those mistakes. Yes, Trump tried to shift into negotiations very quickly after Iran threatened to destroy the Gulf states’ desalination plants, but otherwise the administration appears caught up in the idea that it has already achieved victory.

In fairness, if this conflict had a scoreboard, the US and Israel’s score would be vastly higher than Iran’s. But this is a war, not a game, and for Iran, victory means survival. The scoreboard does not matter as long as the Islamic Republic still stands—and even if Kharg is captured, the Islamic Republic can survive for several more months at a minimum.

Taken at its word, the administration seems to be looking for its so-called “final blow” to force Iran to the table on terms favorable to Washington. The US is under pressure from Israel to continue the conflict as long as possible, and under pressure from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates to degrade Iran’s capabilities so thoroughly that it could never threaten the region this way again. Despite what an overwhelming majority of US polls might say, despite the clear anxieties in US markets, Trump and his inner circle seem to believe those problems will vanish if they can demonstrate enough strength and exert enough force to make Iran capitulate. Their logic rests on a deep belief in American military might and a fundamental assumption that enough tactical victories will make a strategic victory inevitable.

But no matter what Trump and his allies believe, an invasion of Kharg Island is dictated by three core realities. First: capturing Kharg is not the same as securing Kharg as meaningful leverage over Tehran. To turn the island into leverage, the US must capture and hold other territory to keep it safe, then maintain control of all of it for as long as Iran tries to hold out.

Second: the United States simply does not have the required force concentration, either in or on its way to the Middle East, to be confident it can capture and hold all the necessary targets at once. Third: Iran is betting that America cannot tolerate the deaths of large numbers of American troops in a war the majority of Americans do not support and do not believe to be necessary.

As of this writing, the thirteen US service members acknowledged as killed in Iran are already a major problem for the American public. Trying to capture Kharg plus multiple stretches of Iranian coastline, with eight thousand troops or even eighteen thousand, raises the risk that many more could be killed. If Tehran is correct in its assessment, the US cannot tolerate high troop losses without this war becoming politically untenable.

Make no mistake: as soon as Iran has footage of American Marines and paratroopers dying grisly deaths on Iranian soil, that footage will be published as often and as widely as possible, to drive the costs of war home for the American people. For Iran, those troops are not the real target; the political blowback against US leadership is what Tehran is really after.

Iran can accept high troop losses—it has no choice but to accept them—and if a US invasion of Kharg is as poorly thought out and executed as it appears it would be, then the United States is walking into a trap where Iran can bleed it dry and force Washington to capitulate. It is a grim assessment, and a hard one for some American readers to hear. But war has changed too much, and Iran is too good at this particular style of warfare, for an invasion of Kharg Island to go the way Donald Trump thinks it will.