Friday, March 20, 2026

“And Every Day You Take Another Bite…”

No Daddy to bail him out, so he’s just going to wait for it to go away. What are the odds he has a plan?
EVERYONE REPEAT AFTER ME

You CANNOT get to Kharg Island with Marines until you successfully transit the Strait of Hormuz ... which the IRGC will make a living hell with sea mines, suicide boat drones, missiles and aerial drones

Once past the SOH its a 20-24 hour dash (380nm) to Kharg along a coast that may be firing off antiship missiles, ballistic hypersonic missiles, cruise missiles small boats and suicide drones of all sorts, aerial, surface and subsurface.

Then they can just blow up the islands refineries when you arrive so you have to live in a town of 8,000 who hate you in a cloud of poisonous smoke/gas
So, what’s going on now? Or ... not. This sounds like Trump paid attention to the Europeans who said “Not until the fighting’s over.”  But what if we do go after Kharg Island?
Both of those things are feasible. Let me just start with Kharg Island. We can put troops on there. We can air mobile them in. We could land them by boat. I guess the comment I have about Kharg is, I’m not sure what the significance is of putting troops there. It’s only about 20 miles off the coast of Iran. So you’re definitely under the threat of their weapon systems. You’d be very, very vulnerable there. And I don’t know that it would give us any particular tactical advantage that we don’t already have or couldn’t get someplace else at an offset location where we have established bases and other things like that. So I’m not sure what the tactical advantage of it is.

I get that it has an informational and kind of messaging advantage against the Iranians that we are on their territory. And it may send a message to the broader energy community that we are safeguarding these vital Iranian infrastructures. That might give them some confidence [but] kind of an odd thing to do. But I just don’t really see the big advantage of going to Kharg. But we could certainly do it if we had to.

We would be vulnerable.
Aye, there's the rub.
When you start putting troops on the ground – I know there’s some mishmash and words on that – but that’s troops on the ground right there. It also implies that you are going to have to take care of them, you’re going to have to resupply them, you’re going to medevac them, you have to do all the things that keep them in place for whatever period of time. And that requires that you have a logistical tail, and at some point that tail has to be protected as well. So these are not insignificant considerations and they’re often bigger operations.

I would imagine on a little island like Kharg, you would need a battalion sized force of Marines or soldiers could probably do that. So you’re probably looking at 800 to 1,000 troops, kind of size, maybe a little bit smaller, probably not much larger than that.
Nothing simple, right? I don’t think it would be without dangers, either. Iran has struck one of our jets, enough to force it to land. Providing support to troops won’t be easy. And just straightening out Hormuz will take more than “NOT OUR PROBLEM!”
And then we have to undertake a very deliberate effort to open the Strait. And then we’ll have to stay committed to helping move ships through there, for some period of time, and Iran will continue to have the ability to interdict that.
Think about it: why wouldn't they? Hope is not a plan.
My concern is that when we move to a new normal that hasn’t necessarily changed the dynamic all that much, we will have to stay committed to this for some time forward. I don’t know that that was necessarily what we had envisioned at the start of this, or had envisioned for the force long term.

Q: How long do you think this will go on, given what you’re seeing now?

A: I think we’ve got weeks more of operations.

Q: A month? More than that?

A: More than a month, I think probably double digit weeks and single digit months when you throw in a Strait of Hormuz operation, stuff like. I can see us for a couple of months here.
So, through spring maybe into summer, at least? With the possibility of casualties?

The tougher this war gets, the less popular it gets. Trump knows that. But does he understand the logistics of withdrawal? 

The withdrawal from Afghanistan which Biden carried out on Trump’s “plan,” does not inspire confidence.
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