President Donald Trump has reportedly expressed serious interest in deploying a limited force of U.S. troops on the ground to fight Iran.
The detachment would not be a full ground invasion force, but rather a small contingent of troops, officials familiar with the discussions told NBC News.
The president reportedly floated the idea while talking about his larger vision of stopping Iran from enriching uranium that could be used in a nuclear weapon and ensuring Iranian cooperation with U.S. oil producers, the sources said.
The White House denounced the reporting.
“This story is based on assumptions from anonymous sources who are not part of the President’s national security team and are clearly not read into these discussions,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to the outlet.
“President Trump always, wisely keeps all options open, but anyone trying to insinuate he is in favor of one option or another proves they have no real seat at the table.”
The president has said he’s keeping his options open in regards to putting U.S. boots on the ground.
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump told The New York Post this week. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.'”
His military leaders have described a U.S. campaign so dominant that such a step hasn’t been necessary.
“We've taken control of Iran's airspace and waterways without boots on the ground,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Wednesday during a press conference. “We control their fate.”
Observers are keenly watching whether this stance will change.
The Army reportedly abruptly canceled a major training exercise for members of an elite paratrooper unit in recent days, sparking speculation that the Defense Department could be preparing to send U.S. troops to Iran.
The Army 82nd Airborne Division Immediate Response Force reportedly has not been given deployment orders.
Those familiar with the unit told The Washington Post they are on alert as the conflict escalates.
“We’re all preparing for something — just in case,” an official familiar with the situation told the outlet.
Iranian leaders have said they are confident they can repel a U.S. ground invasion if it comes.
On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was asked on NBC News if he feared U.S. boots on the ground.
"No, we are waiting for them," he said, adding, "Because we are confident that we can confront them, and that would be a big disaster for them."
The prospect of U.S. troops invading Iran is politically fraught, given the president’s own non-interventionist campaign promises and Americans’ larger wariness for conflict after two lengthy Middle Eastern wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent decades.
Six U.S. service members have already died in the Iran conflict, after an unmanned aerial vehicle attacked a U.S. installation in Kuwait.
“I honestly can’t believe we’re doing this again,” conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly wrote on X in response to the report Trump was considering ground troops.
Even some of the loudest backers of the Iran fight have insisted against sending U.S. troops there.
"There will be no American boots on the ground,” Sen. Lindsey Graham told Meet The Press on Sunday, shortly after the conflict began.
He distinguished the fight from past conflicts such as WWII and the War on Terror that saw large U.S. ground forces invade.
“This is not Iraq,” he said. “This is not Germany. This is not Japan.”
The war itself has proved unusually divisive on the right, which often marches in lockstep behind the president’s position.
Shortly after fighting broke out, podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon warned that an extended conflict would “bleed support” for Republicans and dangerously leave other key U.S. interests including Taiwan on the back burner.
Tucker Carlson has called the U.S. strikes “disgusting and evil” and said on his podcast that the war does not serve U.S. interests.
“This is Israel’s war,” he said Monday. “This is not the United States’ war. This war’s not being waged on behalf of American national security objectives — to make the United States safer or richer. This war isn’t even about weapons of mass destruction, nukes.”
Carlson’s criticisms drew a heated rebuke from Trump, who said the broadcaster was “not MAGA” anymore.
“MAGA is making our country great again,” Trump told ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl. “MAGA is America First, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.”
The divisions have played out on Capitol Hill too.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, already a thorn in the side of the White House for his campaign to force the release of the Epstein files, has been sharply critical of GOP House leadership for its insistence the U.S. is not at war with Iran, but rather carrying out a limited combat operation.
Massie, in a post on X on Thursday, called such thinking “Orwellian levels of double speak.”
Massie, along with Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, sponsored an unsuccessful War Powers Act resolution to rein in the Iran conflict.
The resolution was rejected this week, along with a similar one in the Senate.
Not everyone on the right is skeptical of the continued Iran campaign.
A Thursday editorial from the Wall Street Journal urged the public to give the president more time before leveling criticisms.
“[N]ow that the war is underway, and our troops are in harm’s way, our perhaps old-fashioned view is that we ought to hope for American success, both military and strategic,” the board wrote. “The world will be safer if there is a better regime in Tehran that isn’t bent on the mission of ‘death to America.’ And maybe, before anticipating or cheering failure, we could wait and see how it goes.”
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