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RAND, 2017: A Corps in Oman and a "Lodgment Around the Strait"
In February 2017, the RAND Corporation, a research organization funded largely by the US government, published a study paid for by the US Army. One of its imagined wars is set in 2025 against a nuclear-armed Iran. In that scenario the United States stages an Army corps headquarters, several divisions, and a Marine expeditionary force in Oman, across the water from Iran, so that leaders have "the option to seize a lodgment around the strait and to give leadership the option to undertake a full-scale invasion." Nine years later, the options the Pentagon reportedly drew up for Iran began with exactly that: seizing islands and coast around the Strait of Hormuz.
Evidence rating: CONFIRMED for the quoted text and the Army sponsorship (report PDF; catalog page). STRONG that the 2026 options follow the same first step, based on the Axios options list as retold by The Independent.
The document
"Smarter Power, Stronger Partners, Volume II: Trends in Force Projection Against Potential Adversaries," edited by Duncan Long, Terrence K. Kelly, and David C. Gompert, with contributors Scott Boston, Michael S. Chase, and Jeffrey Engstrom. RAND's catalog page says the research was sponsored by the US Army's Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-8, and carried out in the RAND Arroyo Center, the Army's own federally funded research center. The volume builds nine war scenarios involving China, Russia, or Iran to test whether the United States could still get combat power where it needs to go.
The ground force in the Iran scenario
In the 2025 branch where Iran has a small number of deliverable nuclear weapons, the scenario gathers air and naval forces in friendly Gulf states over about a month, notes that Israel would have to be talked out of a first nuclear strike, and then moves the ground force:
"Second, the United States brings forward III Corps headquarters, three division headquarters, four BCTs, and a marine expeditionary force to Oman, with two more division headquarters, and six more BCTs in transit and more being readied in CONUS—these forces are intended to give the option to seize a lodgment around the strait and to give leadership the option to undertake a full-scale invasion."
In plain terms:
- III Corps is an Army headquarters built to command several divisions.
- A BCT (brigade combat team) is the Army's standard ground package of several thousand soldiers.
- A Marine expeditionary force is the largest Marine formation, tens of thousands strong.
- CONUS means the continental United States.
- A lodgment is a foothold: a piece of shore seized so more troops and supplies can land.
In a second 2025 story, with no Iranian bomb, the authors wrote that US ground forces are not sized for a conflict followed by an extended occupation, and that one escalation option would be sending ground forces to secure footholds and hunt missiles.
The 2026 options
In March 2026, Axios reported, as The Independent retold it, four options for a "massive final blow": "invade or blockade Kharg Island; invade the island of Larak, which helps Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz; seize the island of Abu Musa and two Iranian-controlled smaller islands which are also located near the strait; or block and seize ships exporting Iranian oil" (The Independent, 26 Mar 2026). Those islands and that coast are the lodgment around the strait.
In June 2026, reporter Ken Klippenstein reported a leaked Army order sending soldiers of the 82nd Airborne to Israel, tied, in a summary of his report, to "joint contingency planning" "for seizing Iranian-controlled Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf and carving out coastal territory inside Iran" (X news summary, 8 Jun 2026). See Kharg Island and the uranium raid.
The difference in size
RAND staged a corps, multiple divisions, and a Marine expeditionary force as the minimum for holding a foothold with the option of invading. The 2026 force sent for the same purpose was about 5,000 Marines and a brigade of the 82nd Airborne, with "up to 10,000 additional ground troops" considered (Wall Street Journal, as relayed by Sputnik on X, 27 Mar 2026). Either the plan changed, or the first units would be the start of something much larger. The Army's own contractor wrote the larger version down in 2017. The article page: a203.
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Last Updated: 2026-09-26