Bloodbath

My friend Terrence Goggin, who writes the excellent Substack newsletter “West Point History Professor” — and yes, he did teach me history at the Academy back in the stone age — published an excellent column today on the possibility of Trump using ground troops to open the Strait of Hormuz by taking the Iranian city of Bandar Abbas, which sits right on the Strait and has an airport with an 11,000 foot runway. You can read his column here.

Basically, he describes what he calls a “wargame scenario” whereby the U.S. would use Marines headed to the region on the USS Tripoli and another Marine Expeditionary task force to take the Bandar Abbas airport and take control of the high ground overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, so Iran could no longer shoot anti-ship missiles and launch drones at oil tankers moving through the Strait. Goggin goes into a lot of detail, describing the 7,000-foot-high mountain range that overlooks the Bandar Abbas airport, specifying that Iranian defenses, including Iran’s army, would have to be defeated in these mountains in order to seize the airport and help control the Strait.

The Trump administration has also been talking about deploying soldiers from the 82^nd Airborne Division’s Immediate Response Force to the region. Reports today say that 750 soldiers have been alerted to deploy with thousands more standing by. There are about 4,500 to 5,000 Marines on the two Expeditionary Task Forces on their way to the Gulf.

Goggin’s column has an artist’s depiction map of what an assault would look like, and a map showing the mountain ranges (plural) that line the southern coast of Iran facing the Gulf. It’s such an interesting take on what kind of plans the Pentagon must be making about now, I decided I would spend some time this afternoon looking at Bandar Abbas on Google Earth maps and see more detail of what U.S. military forces might face if they should try such foolishness.

The first thing that struck me was Bandar Abbas itself. It’s a city of more than 500,000 residents. There are seven universities located there, along with at least two hospitals, including a children’s hospital. Here is what the skyline of the city looked like in 2007. You can be sure it has grown during the last 19 years:

Here is a screenshot from Google Earth showing just some of the mountain ranges immediately overlooking Bandar Abbas:

If you zoom in on the image, you’ll see the names of several dozen villages scattered throughout those mountains. I looked up a few of them. They have populations of 100 to 300. Sometimes the populations are given as “43 families,” which is actually an excellent way to present what U.S. military forces would be facing if Trump tells Hegseth’s Pentagon to make the grave, grave error of committing ground troops into the mountainous region overlooking Bandar Abbas in the hope they would be able to take control of what the military calls “the high ground.” As Goggin points out, the high ground in the case of this area of Iran is mountain ranges of 5,000 to 7,000 feet, all of which overlook the Strait of Hormuz and Bandar Abbas.

Goggin says the naval commander might use B-52 and B-1 bombers to drop glide bombs on gun, missile, and drone emplacements. After that, helicopter gunships would hit the area, taking care of Revolutionary Guard Corps troops still alive after the heavy bombing. Then Marines and soldiers from the 82^nd Airborne would move in on helicopters, with “targeted ground strikes” from fighter jets hitting Iran’s coastal denial forces.

Looking at the map shown above, and Google Earth satellite images of the mountain ranges north of Bandar Abbas, what I saw was hundreds of miles of more mountains, and hundreds and hundreds of villages in the valleys of the mountains. Every village can be assumed to have hundreds of residents who are, shall we say, unfriendly to American forces.

There is an enormous island, Qeshm Island, right in the Strait of Hormuz just off the coast of Bandar Abbas. It’s 85 miles long and 40 miles wide. The island, too, has an airport with a long runway. And it has a population of 150,000 Iranians who will be, shall we say, unfriendly to the idea of Americans coming to their home turf and taking it over and telling them what to do. If we’re going to control the Strait of Hormuz, we’ll have to control that island, too.

To the south of Bandar Abbas are more mountain ranges and dozens and dozens of villages overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, way too many for me to count. We know that Iran has many thousands of Shahed armed drones. I looked up their drones. They have five versions of the Shahed drone. They also have one called the Kaman 22, a “widebody” drone capable of carrying 300 pounds of explosives. Iran has 36 different varieties of drones. They have so many thousands of drones that for the last two or three years, they have been exporting them to Russia.

Here is a photo of a storage facility at a Shahed factory somewhere in Iran:

The U.S. has been trying to target Iranian missile and drone factories, but like Ukraine, most of their weapons factories are hidden underground. It is unknown how many U.S. or Israeli strikes have destroyed Iran’s drone factories, but if I were to guess, they haven’t gotten all of them, and the finished drones themselves have been moved out of the factories and concealed all over Iran.

The Shahed 131, shown above, is only 8 feet long with a 7-foot wingspan and weighs, with its warhead, about 300 pounds, is small enough to be concealed in the living room of a house. Launchers can be hidden in other living rooms. In one of the many, many villages along the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian men could remove a launcher from a house, go around to other houses, pick up a half dozen Shahed drones, and light their rocket boosters and send them on their way to attack targets across the Gulf, targets like ships in the Strait of Hormuz, or targets like U.S. Marines whom the Pentagon and Trump have been maybe insane enough to have walking around on Iranian soil in Bandar Abbas or on Qeshm Island.

After studying Google Earth maps and Iranian drones, I decided to see what Donald Trump said today as he walked out to his Marine helicopter on his way to play golf in Palm Beach, Florida. Here is what he told the press: “I don’t want to do a cease-fire. You know, you don’t do a cease-fire when you’re literally obliterating the other side.” Earlier, on Truth Social – because that’s where you run a war, you understand, on a social media site – Trump said, “I think we’ve won.” He’s still concerned about the Strait of Hormuz, of course, oil having ended the day at $112 a barrel, but he’s not worried. “The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it — The United States does not! If asked, we will help these Countries in their Hormuz efforts, but it shouldn’t be necessary once Iran’s threat is eradicated.” Because of course all those allies of ours are just chomping at the bit to commit their navies and armies to take over and control the Strait of Hormuz, now that we and Israel have bombed the shit out of Iran and gotten them all pissed off at us and Israel and the countries in the Gulf and everybody else but Russia.

Just between you and me, the United States has used oil for decades that has been shipped through the Strait of Hormuz from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Iraq and other Gulf nations.

Donald Trump his Secretary of the Push-Up Hegseth have it all figured out. He’s not worried about the 125,000 crack troops of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the 300,000 soldiers in Iran’s regular army. Have you read anything or seen anything on the teevee about all our missiles and bombs knocking out Revolutionary Guards or Iran’s regular army forces? I haven’t. An outfit called Human Rights Activists in Iran says that about 1,300 civilians have been killed so far in the war, and about 1,100 military personnel have been killed. They caution that the figure for military deaths is probably low, because such figures are classified. But let’s say it’s ten times higher. That’s still only about 11,000 deaths in the Iranian military out of a total of probably 500,000, when you include Iran’s air force and other services.

So, what are we to think with Trump deciding one day we’ve won the war and the same day saying we have more bombing to do, while he’s got Hegseth ordering the 82^nd Airborne over there and sending fleets of navy ships full of Marines to the Gulf?

And what about all those mountains and villages where Iranian regular army forces could hide, not to mention irregulars that I’m sure some day we’ll be referring to as “insurgents?” What about all those drones, thousands and thousands of them, that are scattered all over the tens of thousands of square miles of Iran?

Let’s be brief: If Trump orders American soldiers into Iran, it will be a bloodbath.