Kharg Island Terminal
"Trump Can Start It But He Can’t Finish It.
Now He Wants to Island-Hop"
by Larry C. Johnson
"The cupboard is bare: Start with the thing nobody in the White House wants to talk about: missile-defense interceptors. According to public estimates from September that Miller cites, the United States has spent between one-half and two-thirds of its inventory of certain interceptor types since June 2025. Rebuilding those stocks will take at least five years, even with production ramped up. You cannot order a factory to work faster. It needs parts, qualified suppliers, trained workers and testing, and it is competing with demands from the Pacific and from allies who would also like to be defended.
And no, the Pentagon cannot fix this by firing more Tomahawks. Offensive missiles and bombs do a different job from the interceptors that protect ships, bases and cities. You can have a warehouse full of bombs and still be unable to stop the missiles coming back at you. Israel, meanwhile, depends on Washington to resupply its own defenses, which means Israel’s endurance problem is really an American endurance problem with a different flag on it.
The bill comes after the headlines: Miller’s central insight is that retaliation, not the opening strike, sets the limits of this war. Any president can order the first wave. The question is whether he will keep paying after Iran answers: protecting sailors and bases, replenishing defenses, repairing damage, keeping sea lanes open and explaining to voters why gasoline and diesel just went up again. On that score, I share Miller’s blunt judgment. Donald Trump and the Israeli leadership do not have the stomach to carry this fight through to an Iranian surrender.
The economic bill is already staggering. Miller puts the global shortfall in diesel and jet fuel at a minimum of 3 million barrels a day. That is 90 million barrels a month and about 1.1 billion barrels a year. At $150 a barrel, replacing it would cost $13.5 billion a month. His reconstruction estimates for the Gulf’s damaged energy system run from $550 billion to $2.3 trillion, over seven to ten years. Another campaign does not reduce any of those numbers. It adds to them.
And blowing things up does not produce surrender. A destroyed facility is not a permanent loss of capability. A dead leader does not produce a compliant successor. Nuclear restrictions require inspectors, access and verification, none of which can be delivered by a B-2. That is why Miller expects the same cycle we have seen all year: threats, strikes, retaliation, and then a frantic search for an exit that can be called a victory.
Enter the islands: Which brings us to the island plan. Here is how I understand it came together. The week of October 19, Trump was presented with a menu of options for a renewed war on Iran. The plans were not drawn up by the Joint Staff’s J5, the Pentagon’s chief planning directorate, but by the J5 at Central Command, the headquarters that will actually fight the war. Trump, my source says, chose the option of seizing one or more islands. Murphy’s “insane” comment, after his briefing, fits that choice. Murphy has not publicly named the targets. Analysts discussing his briefing have mentioned Kharg, Iran’s main oil export terminal, and Qeshm, the large island that sits across the Strait of Hormuz.
And then, on October 29, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, the Joint Staff’s J5. The Pentagon says he was removed for leaking classified information and failing polygraph tests. Two other Pentagon sources told CBS those accusations are false. What I am told, and what other analysts have heard from their own sources, is that Sylvia opposed the island plan. If that is right, the administration just fired the general whose job was to tell it which plans were bad, a week before it intends to carry out one of them. That is not leadership. That is shooting the smoke detector. I understand the appeal for Trump. An island is a tangible thing. You can plant a flag on it, take a picture and call it a win. That’s the theory. Now let me walk you through the practice.
Getting there: The traditional way to take an island is an amphibious landing: ships, landing craft, Marines wading ashore. That is almost certainly off the table. Any American amphibious ship that sails into the Persian Gulf puts itself inside range of Iranian anti-ship missiles, drones, mines and fast attack boats. Kharg sits about 16 miles off Iran’s coast. Larak, near Qeshm, sits just a few miles off it. Sending a big-deck amphibious ship into that space is an invitation for the first American capital ship to be lost to enemy fire since the Second World War. Even Proceedings, the Naval Institute’s own journal, ran an analysis in April warning that the Navy might not be able to get close enough to launch amphibious vehicles at all.
That leaves the air. Either you drop paratroopers or you land C-130 transports on the island and offload troops. Here is the arithmetic problem. A C-130 carries fewer than 100 combat-loaded troops, and typically somewhere between 64 and 92 paratroopers, depending on the model. To put 1,000 soldiers or Marines on the ground, you need at least a dozen sorties, and far more once you add vehicles, ammunition, water, medical teams and air defense. Every one of those aircraft is a large, slow, unarmored target flying into airspace where Iran has had years to position short-range air defenses and shoulder-fired missiles. One aircraft shot down on approach and you have lost a company.
The first wave also has to secure the runway before anyone else can land, and we know who gets that job. Airfield seizure is the signature mission of the 75th Ranger Regiment. It is what the Rangers did at Point Salines in Grenada in 1983, at Rio Hato in Panama in 1989 and at Objective Rhino in Afghanistan in 2001. Ranger battalions are reportedly already in the theater, and they would almost certainly be handed the mission of jumping in and seizing the strip so the C-130s can follow. These are the finest light infantry in the world. They are also light infantry: lightly armed, carrying what they can jump with, and dependent on everything that comes in behind them. In Grenada and Panama, the defenders could not shell the airfield from the mainland a few miles away. Here, Iran can. Iran also knows the Rangers’ playbook as well as anyone who has read the history, which means it knows exactly which runway to watch. Sending the Rangers to seize an airfield within sight of the Iranian coast is asking America’s best to hold the door open in a room that is already on fire.
Staying there: The landing is not even the hard part. The hard part is the day after. Once American troops are on the island, they are sitting a few miles from the Iranian coast with no hardened fortifications, inside range of Iranian artillery, rockets, ballistic missiles and swarms of drones. Iran will not need to retake the island. It will simply shell it, around the clock, for as long as the Americans choose to stay. And the Americans will be defending themselves with the same depleted interceptor stocks Miller describes, against targets that are cheap for Iran to build and expensive for us to stop.
Then there is resupply. A Marine Expeditionary Unit carries enough to sustain itself for roughly 15 days. After that, every bullet, every gallon of fuel, every bottle of water and every replacement part has to arrive by air or by sea, through the same gauntlet that made the landing so dangerous. Casualties have to go out the same way. That means an endless air bridge of vulnerable transports, or ships parked inside the Gulf, or both. The island becomes a hostage, and the American public watches the casualty count rise every evening on the news.
And what would it achieve? Seizing a couple of small islands near the Strait does not neutralize Iran’s long southern coastline, which is where the missiles and drones that threaten shipping are actually launched. Taking Kharg would cut into Iran’s oil exports, but Iran has other terminals, and the most likely response would be more strikes on the Gulf states’ oil and water infrastructure, the infrastructure that is already being held together with tape. We would be trading a symbolic flag-raising for a permanent target.
No wonder the general said no: This is the kind of plan that looks wonderful on a whiteboard in Tampa and terrible on the ground in the Gulf. It assumes Iran will not shoot down transports, will not shell an exposed garrison, will not attack resupply and will not widen the war. Every one of those assumptions has been proven wrong this year.
So here we are. The interceptors are half gone. The diesel is gone. The Gulf’s energy system needs a decade of repairs. The general who reportedly warned against this plan has been fired. And the President is preparing to send American troops to sit on an island off Iran’s coast, a few miles from the enemy’s artillery, waiting for C-130s that may not arrive. If you wanted to design a war that the United States can start but cannot finish, you could hardly do better. Somewhere in Tehran, they are probably hoping we go through with it."
