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Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.
This morning, we’re talking about the war in Iran and getting the latest. This is what Donald Trump posted this morning. This is all quote:
“The United States of America is in serious discussions with a new and more reasonable regime to end our military operations in Iran. Great progress has been made, but if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately, quote, open for business, we will conclude our lovely, quote, stay in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plant, oil wells, and Kharg Island, and possibly all desalination plants, which we have purposefully not yet, quote, touched. This will be in retribution for our many soldiers and others that Iran has butchered and killed over the old regime’s forty-seven-year reign of terror. Thank you for attention to this matter. President Donald J. Trump.”
What do we make of this?
Here to discuss, we have Mona Yacoubian, director and senior adviser of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Welcome.
Mona Yacoubian: Thank you.
Alexis Madrigal: We also have Lieutenant Colonel Jahara Matisek, who’s a command pilot and a research fellow at the Naval War College. Welcome, Lieutenant Colonel.
Lt. Col. Jahara Matisek: Great to be on a show I used to listen to when I was a kid.
Alexis Madrigal: Bay Area kid.
Lt. Col. Jahara Matisek: Daly City, San Bruno.
Alexis Madrigal: Oh, nice.
Mona, let’s start with just over the weekend. It feels like every time I read a different article, the president or Pete Hegseth has said something else to somebody about what’s happening in the war. How are you reading this kind of armada of statements?
Mona Yacoubian: It’s a very confusing picture, to say the least. As you rightly note, even within the same Truth Social post by the president this morning, we have very serious threats being laid down, but also some idea that negotiations are proceeding and a deal should happen. And again, I think this confusion speaks to a broader confusion that has dogged this war from day one, which is—
Alexis Madrigal: What are we doing? Yeah. Which is, what are we actually doing here, right?
Mona Yacoubian: Exactly — a lack of clarity on the objectives. And what that then unravels is a whole series of concerns and issues: the duration of the conflict, the endgame, how do we judge success, how do we know when we’re done — all of those questions. And the fact that we’re now entering the second month of the conflict and we still have this level of confusion, while the situation on the ground continues to grow more and more serious by the day, with global implications, I think is deeply, deeply concerning.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah.
Jahara, one of the reasons we wanted to have you on is that I and our team here, when we’re reading about various troop deployments — okay, 82nd Airborne, a couple thousand people in; okay, we’ve got these Marines going in; we’ve got 40,000 people normally stationed there — I don’t really have in my head what those troops mean in terms of the possibilities for war. And I also don’t know what the limitations of those kinds of forces are. Can you walk through who’s in that theater, if I’m even using that word correctly?
Lt. Col. Jahara Matisek: Yeah, you are. And obviously, we have to tell the viewers the views are my own, not those of the U.S. military or government as well — just the usual disclaimer.
So there are currently about 50,000 forces in the region. Think of them as primarily combat enablers. Or, in the case of pilots, yes, they’re doing combat, but again, a lot of it has been standoff strikes, aerial refueling, and other intelligence and reconnaissance missions.
Alexis Madrigal: Logistics and stuff like that too.
Lt. Col. Jahara Matisek: Exactly, yeah. So actual warfighters — the people who would actually take land and hold it — you’ve got the 82nd Airborne. That’s about 2,000 infantry. Remember, they’re light infantry, so they’re not coming in with a bunch of tanks and armor. That’s a light, rapid-assault force.
And the same thing with the 3,500 Marines who are on a ship getting pretty close to entering the Persian Gulf right now. Again, those are rapid, light-assault forces designed for quick operations. They’re basically designed to fight for three days at most while you wait for the heavy infantry to come in with the tanks, armor, and standard infantry to actually hold territory, because they bring all the logistics and supply.
So when you think of it in those terms, you kind of have the three-day assault forces. And then, of course, you have probably at least 1,000 special operations forces. Those are the ones that really only want to go in for a few hours, do what they have to do, and then leave. They are not equipped to hold any ground for a long period of time.
So when you look at that kind of picture, any sort of threat to Tehran and the regime is really episodically short term. If we’re talking about really threatening Iran in a bigger strategic way, it kind of takes us back to the 2003 Iraq War. You’re going to need half a million troops in the region if you wanted to seriously take, hold, and actually threaten the regime.
Alexis Madrigal: I mean, this is fascinating, right? This is exactly the kind of stuff that I was interested in. Because when I hear thousands of troops, I think, hey, that sounds like a lot.
And then I think, when the Israelis went into Gaza, right, they brought, what, 300,000 troops? Something like that? To hold a place that’s the size of Alameda County, not something two and a half times the size of Texas with 90 million people.
So what I’m hearing you say is that the kind of forces we have there are more the kind of forces that would be running a single operation over less than a week. So what are the sorts of things they could do, then?
Lt. Col. Jahara Matisek: It may be very small, short, episodic types of assaults. I think the president has talked about taking Kharg Island.
Well, okay, cool. You can take the island and maybe hold it for three days while facing intense airstrikes from Shahed drones from Iran and Iranian ballistic missiles, because the Iranians are still averaging about 34 missile attacks a day and about 95 drone attacks a day in the region.
So if you wanted to put U.S. forces into Kharg Island or any other parts along the coast in Iran, cool — you can probably hold it for three days. But you’re going to face a lot of intense pressure, and you’re going to have to expend a lot of air defenses just trying to protect whatever little enclave you decide to grab.
And then the question becomes: if you want to hold it, now you need tens of thousands of follow-on forces — the basic infantry and the whole logistical tail that comes with trying to hold and maintain ground, while also keeping your adversary at bay and defending your forces.
Again, if you’ve been watching the last four weeks of the war, the Iranians are doing this sort of grind of attrition against the entire region. And things are slowly getting through at a higher rate each day because the U.S. and the coalition are running out of air defense capabilities to shoot these things down. And then you’re losing a lot of the sensors and radars that help you be more effective in doing so.
So it’s turning into a very difficult situation, I think, for the entire coalition. And in the case of Iran, they’ve proven to be highly resilient. It’s almost as if they watched us fight in their neighborhood for the last 20 or 30 years.
Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about the war in Iran, the latest developments, and what our troop movements suggest.
We’re joined by Lieutenant Colonel Jahara Matisek, who is a command pilot and research fellow at the Naval War College. We also have Mona Yacoubian, who’s director and senior adviser of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
You may recognize her name — she’s been on the program recently to talk about what’s happening in Iran.
We would love to hear from you. As you’re hearing the president and the administration making different statements about what’s happening in Iran and in the war, what are your questions? What do you want to hear from our experts on the region and military strategy?
You can give us a call: 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786.
Of course, you know the email: forum@kqed.org.
And you can find us on Bluesky, on Instagram, and on Discord. We’re KQED Forum.
I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.
