CENTCOM

The Pentagon has reportedly drawn up plans to send American troops into Iran, possibly to Kharg Island or far deeper into the country to seize enriched uranium. These moves would represent a huge escalation for Operation Epic Fury. Former CENTCOM commander Joseph Votel offers us exclusive insights into the challenges and dangers of having U.S. boots on the ground in the Islamic Republic, and what it would take to seize Kharg Island or attempt to snatch Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium that could be very challenging to access.

In the second part of our conversation, the first centering on the current situation around the Strait of Hormuz, the retired general, now a Distinguished Military Fellow at the Middle East Institute, also addressed concerns over America’s magazine depth of interceptors and other high-end weapons, what China may be learning from the operation, and how long Epic Fury could last, among other topics.

The interview took place before news broke that a second Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) – with at least 2,200 Marines – was being deployed to the Middle East. As we previously reported, Trump ordered another one to the region in the last week.

Some of the questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

Q: Does a seizure of Kharg Island, or an insertion of SOF to recover enriched uranium from Pickaxe Mountain or elsewhere in Iran, seem feasible? What would either of those operations take, in terms of troops and assets?

A: 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. 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.

Going after the fissile material I think is a bigger operation. Again, I think we have the capabilities to do this. Within our Special Operations community, we have people that are trained to do this and have the right relationships and connections and other things to allow us to get in and do that. So you’d have to be able to project that force onto the ground. This would be going to a place like Natanz or Isfahan – probably one of those locations. Those are well inland – several hundred miles into Iran, a country of the same size as the state of Alaska. So it’s big and it’s diverse. It’s largely in an open plain, so you don’t have a lot of natural terrain protection there. That would have to be taken into consideration.

In addition to the kind of operators you put on the ground, you’d also have to bring in a security force, but probably a sizable security force – a brigade size or 1,000 to 3,000 or 4,000 troops to just secure while they did that work. You’d have to do that. You’d have to make sure you dedicated air power. You’d have to put CAPs [combat air patrols] up over, you’d have to have ISR [information, surveillance and reconnaissance] in place.

Again, you’d have the challenge of people on the ground, so you’d have to logistically sustain them and then be prepared to protect that tail. And then you have to have all of the lift, whether it’s rotary wing or fixed wing, to get them in and get them all back out. And then you have the added challenge of handling nuclear material. So about 450-some kilograms. That’s roughly 1,000 pounds of 60% highly enriched uranium. And that’s a lethal material. So ideally, that would be packaged already, but we’d have to make sure we packaged that and moved it and had someplace to actually take it back to. 

So, yeah, could we do a military operation? Sure. I think it would kind of look like I described there. It would be a big operation, and it wouldn’t be something that would be done in a single period of darkness. It probably takes some time. You’d have to have some special capabilities to go in and excavate these things and identify them.

There’s no real open-source discussion of what the conditions are at these things, you’d have to be prepared for the worst, and the worst would be having to dig down and find it. I’m hoping that our intelligence community understands this a little bit more, and I suspect that is the case. But this is a pretty big, pretty significant operation.

An alternative to this would be waiting until there is a cessation of hostilities and then trying to go in in a more semi-permissive environment with elements of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who really have responsibility for this. They would bring expertise in to do this. We – or some other military force – would probably assist with some of that. But that may be another option as well. I’m sure they’re looking at all these.

Q: This is not a job for a Tier One unit like SEAL Team Six or Delta, to go in and grab it, right? There’s a lot of discussion about that.

A: Yeah. First of all, you’re not just going to go in and grab 1,000 pounds of nuclear material and then ferret it right out. That’s not the case. Those unique capabilities reside within the Special Operations community. I won’t identify organizations, but they reside within the tip top of our special operations capability. They’re trained and maintained and normally exercise and rehearse on a regular basis. So, yeah, we have the ability to do that. But it’s unlikely – in my view, my estimate, with what I know – that you just send a few folks in there, grab the stuff and get it out. I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s going to take more. You might be able to do that in a permissive environment, but I don’t think you want to take the risk associated with that in the environment that we’re seeing right now, or perhaps even in a semi-permissive environment.

Q: Was there proper planning to ensure enough missile and drone interceptors were in place prior to the start of Epic Fury?

A: I have no reason to believe that it wasn’t. Is there pressure on our magazine depth? There sure is. We’ve talked about that for a while. CENTCOM planned – which has been developed and modified over the last 20, 25 years – to do this. Every commander had their fingers involved in it. I do not know the current plan. I’m sure that [CENTCOM commander] Adm. [Brad] Cooper has done that. It was a significant discussion, not only about the targets, but certainly about what was required to execute that and also to protect themselves. So my assessment is, yes, I think we have. And I don’t think we’ve seen an instance where we’ve not been able to defend ourselves because we didn’t have any missiles. 

There’s no doubt we’ve expended a lot, and that’s put a lot of pressure on the magazines, but the Department of Defense and CENTCOM and Joint Staff, I think, have been able to make sure that they’ve been able to move enough materials into place so we can sustain this operation, now well into its third week.

Q: How concerned are you about America’s magazine depth of these defensive weapons?

A: We should be concerned. I think the challenge may not necessarily be in CENTCOM. The challenge may be in other areas like the Pacific, Korea, you know, Europe, you know this. This could be impacting our ability to send things to the Ukrainians, or through our NATO partners, the Ukrainians. So I think that’s where the concerns are. And by the way, you know, all of our Gulf Arab partners and many of our partners around the world use THAAD [Terminal High Altitude Area Defense] and use Patriot missile systems, and so they require resupply as well, and stocks available to them. 

I think we have long had an issue with making sure we had sufficient magazine depth. We went through this several years ago when North Korea was flexing its muscles and firing missiles towards Guam and over Japan. We had a serious discussion about this. We saw this with the response to Ukraine as well with artillery rounds. The Army’s ramped up production, three or four fold over the last couple of years. But it’s taken a little bit of time. That’s good. But we need to do that with all these other munitions. So a portion of our resources needs to be dedicated to making sure we have sufficient munitions in place for our contingencies and for our partners who have bought our systems they are relying on.

Q: What’s your assessment of Iran’s magazine depth of missiles, operable launchers and drones? How long can they keep presenting a threat?

A: There’s been pretty serious damage done to their missile system and I say the system, because it’s not just the missiles. It’s the launchers, it’s the command and control sites, manufacturing sites, it’s the storage sites. I think we’ve done a lot of damage to that. And you’ve probably heard some of the numbers that have come out of CENTCOM – in the 70, 80% range of destruction. I think we’ve done a lot with the drones as well. I think the concern is the last 15 or 20%.

Don’t pay attention to the numbers. The fact of the matter is, they’re going to have a remnant portion of capabilities, and that’s a portion we’re focused on right now. Iran’s strategy has been to broaden the conflict by hitting a lot of different places, 12 or 13 different countries, and then to extend it by continuing to present this threat to us over a long period of time. They don’t have to shoot large volleys of missiles and drones. They just have to get some across. They just have to launch some every day. And that’s going to keep our focus, and it’s going to keep us occupied doing that. So that’s their strategy on this. 

They’ve taken a significant hit in some of their capabilities, and I imagine some of the magazines, but there’s some left. I think at the start of the war, their missile strength was somewhere in the 2,000 to 3,000 range. Some of the numbers I’ve seen show there are probably over 1,000 that have been launched now, and so that leaves a considerable number. They don’t have the ability to launch these. And now that we have air superiority over those locations, we can go anywhere we want. We see something, we can take it out right away. So the missiles are very, very vulnerable, but the drones are much easier [for Iran to protect]. They don’t require all that much, and they probably got larger stores that it’s important to appreciate. They were manufacturing these things for Russia, so they probably have fairly sizable stores of drones left.

Q: How closely is China watching this? And what are they learning from it?

A: Well, I think they’re paying very close attention to this. They’re learning how we respond to counter fire. They’re very closely following our air tactics and how we are working with the Israelis on that. They’re looking at the targets we are going after, and trying to understand the scheme of fires associated with all of this. 

They will be watching very closely how we deal with the Strait of Hormuz. We’ve got the straits down there – the Strait of Taiwan and all these other ones in Asia – they’ll be paying very, very close attention to this. They’ll be watching what our readiness rates are throughout all of this, and our ability to marshal forces and how quickly we can do this. So I think they’re absorbing a lot about how we are operating. 

But they’re also seeing the use of drones. They’re probably trying to pay attention to how artificial intelligence may be being effectively used. And I would imagine that it is by the US and helping us parse a whole bunch of information and select targets and perform other functions. So, they’re paying a lot of attention. I think they’re also paying attention to what this is doing to our readiness in other areas, frankly. We continue to move resources out of the Asia Pacific, and they certainly are taking note of that.

Q: Do you think China will move on Taiwan given all that?

A: I don’t know. I’m not an expert in that particular area. But what I do know is they’ve had some ambitions of trying to be ready for that in the next year or so. I also know that there’s been a wholesale sacking of their military leadership by President Xi. So he’s putting new people into place, that has an impact. It certainly has an impact on the ability to command and control a major operation to [invade] Taiwan. I don’t think we’re going to see this in the near-term. I don’t know that that’s necessarily the lesson Xi’s taken away from us. I don’t know if they’re actually prepared to do that. But they’re certainly paying attention to how we are doing things here and how that could be used in their types of operations.

Q: So far, the Houthis have been on the sidelines. Why do you think that is and at what point will they get involved?

A: The Houthis – one of the extensions of the Iranian network – have always been much more independent than Hamas or certainly Hezbollah or the Shia militia groups we normally see in Iraq and Syria that are loyal to the Iranian regime. [The Houthis] are much more independent in terms of this. They actually have a governing function, full-on governing function, and so they are trying to make decisions for themselves. 

I have heard a couple of discussions on this one. One viewpoint would be that the Iranians have told them to hold on: ‘We want to extend again. We want to extend this conflict out. We want to buy some time. We’re going to be patient,’ and then we may look to do that. 

Another theory might be that they’re just keeping their powder dry right now and waiting for an opportunity to launch into this. I think there’s probably a variety of reasons why they aren’t doing it. They have an agreement in place with us. They took a pretty serious beat down during our counter-Houthi operations some months ago. So that had an impact on them. They’re probably not anxious to revisit that immediately, because it was pretty devastating for them. So I imagine they’re just being patient.

Q: How likely is regime change in Iran and will it make a difference?

A: I don’t view it as particularly likely at this point. There may be some further power shifts there. I think the military component – the IRGC component of the regime, those senior leaders – are having much more influence, and that’s influencing these very angry responses we’re seeing from the Iranians on this, lashing out at the Gulf Arab countries. So I think that the military is definitely ascending in this.

But yet, they have preserved the theocratic side of government by putting a new Ayatollah in place, admittedly, one that’s not well known, that appears to be pretty weak [Mojtaba Khamenei, chosen to replace his father, Ali Khamenei who was killed on the first day of the war]. He actually seems to be very aligned with the hard liners on the military side. There’s not much on him. He doesn’t have a huge amount of religious credibility or anything. So, he could be a figurehead, could be expendable for them, frankly, but their regime is very deep. It has great influence, and it’s pretty much wired everything in Iran, so they can remain in power. And so I suspect that they probably will. Whether a more pragmatic leader arises. I don’t know. I don’t know who that might be.

Q: What’s your biggest worry about how this all winds up?

A: That the regime remains in power. They’re going to continue to try to extend and keep this going for a long period of time, and we are going to have to undertake very expensive and deliberate activities to bring this under control. I mean, we’re already three weeks into what has been touted as a four or five week campaign. That’s pretty reasonable based on my experience and knowledge of what CENTCOM is trying to do, and what that plan basically looks like. It makes a lot of sense to me. 

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. 

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 that. I can see us for a couple of months here.

Q: What kind of strain does it put on the U.S. in terms of readiness, in terms of the troops and equipment?

A: Well, most of these naval vessels were not necessarily anticipated or forecasted to be in the Middle East right now. For the most part, they have diverted from other things that they were doing, particularly the carriers. That defers maintenance. It defers normal training cycles, and other readiness cycles that are built into this. 

Those ships are fantastic, but they have to go into very deliberate maintenance periods and capital ship maintenance has been an area of some concern for us for a while, because we have so many things going on and because we don’t have the infrastructure that we require to take care of these things. So I think there could be some readiness issues with our maritime vessels. It certainly puts a lot of stress on things like THAADs and Patriots, and again, we have a finite number of those. They’re not in Korea, they’re not other places, they’re not in Europe, they’re here. So that’s going to have an impact, and those organizations are going to have to be reset at some particular point on this.

This is putting more and more stress on our air fleet, our tankers, the C-17 movers, and, of course, all the wear and tear on all of our fighters. I think to our readiness, all of those things have to be taken care of at some particular point. And that’s going to have an impact as we try to rebuild readiness and respond to other contingencies around the world. And in addition to returning to our great power competition. So I think there’s definitely going to be some impacts in this.

Q: How much of a difference to Epic Fury does it make that the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford has to leave the theater to undergo fire damage repairs in Souda Bay, Crete? That leaves just the USS Abraham Lincoln as the lone carrier during a major contingency operation.

A: We’ve got a lot of aircraft. We’ve got ground-based aircraft. My understanding is we may be moving another carrier in to replace that one. I don’t recall exactly which one it is, but I think I’ve read at least one or two sources that said it would happen. It takes 80 or 90 airplanes, theoretically, out of the cycle. Now those aircraft can be cross-decked, they can be moved to land. And we may be doing that. I don’t really know. But it takes away a big platform. We lose some flexibility here, and those aircraft carriers are basically floating air bases out in the middle of the ocean, and give us the ability to launch and recover things and project power where we need to. It takes away from some major command and control capability. So, yeah, it creates a void. It’s not impossible to backfill. I suspect we probably will be able to do that, but there’s definitely a diminishment there, and hopefully we’re replacing one with one here.

Q: Anything I didn’t ask that you want to talk about?

A: No, it was pretty comprehensive.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

Few people know the Middle East as well as Joseph Votel. From March 2016 to March 2019, the retired Army general served as the commander of U.S. Central Command, overseeing American military operations in the region. A big part of that job was planning for contingencies like what would become Operation Epic Fury, and especially how they would affect the massively strategic waterway that joins the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman — the tumultuous Strait of Hormuz. This waterway, in which about 20% of the world’s oil passes, is currently shutdown by Iran.

In the first part of our wide-ranging exclusive interview with Votel, we focus on what is happening in the Strait. The author transited the Strait with Votel, now a Distinguished Military Fellow at the Middle East Institute, in 2016 and got a first-hand look as Iranian ships shadowed the USS New Orleans.

Some of the questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

Q: How surprised were you that the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz, attacked shipping and Arab nations?

A: I’m not particularly surprised. I expected that they would attack some of the Gulf partners, but I did not think they would go after civilian targets. I thought they would go after military installations, particularly our military installations in most countries, but going after things like hotels and civilian airports, things like that, I think was, was not expected. I was a little surprised that they would do that. I think we certainly expected them to respond to it and of course, trying to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, I think was very expected.

Q: Did you expect that?

A: Oh yeah.

Q: Why?

A: Because it’s their principal advantage. They control that terrain. They have the advantage over the Strait of Hormuz. They know it’s a critical choke point. They know it’s a pain point for many, and they knew it would cause the discussion that it’s causing right now.

Q: How much pain do you think the Arab allies can sustain during this fight?

A: Well, I think they’re actually proving pretty resilient right now and they’re doing a good job defending themselves. Some of [the missiles and drones] are getting through, but it hasn’t been catastrophic in terms of that. Obviously, some damage… That’s not good. But they’re doing a pretty good job of defending themselves. 

And I think as you have seen from some of the open source reporting today, some of the Arab countries are beginning to run out of patience here, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, of course, and we may see them lash back out. But they are also watching very carefully what the United States is doing, along with the Israelis, and they see that we are striking back very, very hard at the Iranians. So I think that that helps them to be a little bit more patient. We haven’t stepped away from this. We’re still very, very engaged, and I think that allows them to be a little bit more patient as we work through this.

Q: How feasible or not is a mission to escort ships in the Strait and de-mine it? What are the challenges and dangers of that?

A: Well, first of all, it’s very feasible. The United States Navy has a history of doing this kind of stuff, and they have, for the most part, all the resources that are required for this. 

I think the most important thing to appreciate before we really kind of get into the Strait of Hormuz here, is to appreciate what’s preparatory to doing all that. We really have to kind of finish this campaign that’s already been started. That is focused on reducing the Iranian capabilities to a very significant degree. And that’s what’s happening right now.

I think we need to appreciate that CENTCOM is executing a war plan here that’s going to take some weeks to destroy the military capability, and then they will be in a position – they’ll set the condition, so to speak – so they can actually go and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and then direct and escort tankers through there. 

For the most part, we have all the resources that we need for that. As I mentioned, it might be helpful to get some additional resources from our international partners. And I’m not sure that’s going to happen based on some of the politics around all that and how we engaged and not engaged them in the lead up to this. But the United States Navy and Marine Corps and other joint services are, I think, are fully prepared to do that.

Q: Have the engagements we’ve had with foreign nations been helpful or hurtful or the ability to draw in assistance for any escort effort?

A: Well, we’ve had a pretty adversarial discussion going on, particularly with our European allies for at least the last 12 to 14 months with them. We haven’t really sent a positive signal. And the whole thing about Greenland and getting everybody fired up over that, and pushing that kind of thing, I think really gave some pause to them. 

And of course, you know, there’s continuous rhetoric coming from across the administration towards this, and in the lead up to this, we apparently didn’t do any kind of consultation with any of our partners that we expected would be impacted by this, or whose resources we thought we would need.

Now, coming back after things have been joined and they haven’t been consulted, I think makes it really, really hard for us to get them involved. And I think it makes it hard for those international partners to sign on with this readily, very, very readily, without a lot of debate and understanding what they’re getting into. So we really didn’t set the conditions very well for if we thought we needed international support on this. 

And we usually do. I mean, that’s a normal thing that we do. We generally always try to fight as a coalition, because it gives us credibility. It gives us additional resources. And it kind of helps share the burden a little bit, and it makes everybody feel like they’re part of the solution to this. But in this case – with the exception of Israel – we pretty much chose to go it alone.

Q: We talked about the importance of keeping the Strait open while we were transiting it when you commanded CENTCOM. What’s your worst case scenario for the Strait now, given the current situation?

A: I think the worst case now would be if we’ve found positive evidence of the Strait being mined… That would really extend out the time [for opening the Strait]. We probably have to assume that there are mines in there right now. But a serious mining effort by Iran could really complicate and slow things down. 

Mine clearing is very deliberate. It’s very slow. It’s very frustrating. It’s that way if you’re doing it on land, and it’s that certainly if you’re doing it at sea. So to me, I think that kind of represents the most challenging thing that we would have to deal with. I mean, we can get [combat air patrols] Air CAPs up over this. We seem to be doing a good job going after missiles and drones and shore-based systems. We’ve destroyed a lot of the Iranian Navy and the IRGC Navy, and we can continue to ping on [Fast Attack Craft] FACs and [Fast Inshore Attack Craft ] FIACS – things like that that they might send in there. 

But the mines, I think, are a really, really hard issue. And when we think about one of these big tankers, so they are just really vulnerable, they’re thin-hulled, getting into this very narrow traffic scheme that’s there – two miles wide, right in the middle of the Strait and then hitting a mine and being disabled on the spot. Not only will we have a mine problem, we have a disabled ship problem and an ecological disaster, and a whole bunch of other things there. So in my view, I think the worst case situation kind of looks like a deliberate mining effort by the Iranians.

Q: Can the Gulf allies protect the Strait on their own? Some have expressed fear that the U.S. could end Epic Fury before the Strait is secured.

A: I don’t know. I don’t think so. They are a little dated in some of their capabilities. There hasn’t been a huge investment in the resources that would be necessary for keeping the Strait open in an armed conflict scenario. You need destroyers. You need a bunch of them. You need to be able to maintain several air CAPS up over it. You need to have extensive ISR. You need to have boarding parties. You need to have all the other stuff, like mine sweepers.

And I don’t know that they have that. They may have all the pieces and parts of it across some of the Gulf countries, although I doubt they have the number of frigates that would be needed. But then bringing that together, they don’t necessarily have a great history of coming together for these kinds of things and combining these capabilities under a unified command other than the United States. I think it would be a challenge for the Gulf partners to be able to do that.

In our next segment, Votel talks about the highly strategic Kharg Island and how recovering uranium in Iran would be a more massive effort than most people think, among other topics.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com