The war with Iran could be on the brink of further escalation.
President Donald Trump privately expressed interest in sending U.S. troops into Iran, according to several current and former officials who spoke to NBC News.
The idea came up in conversations with aides and Republican officials, where the president is said to have discussed what a post-war Iran might look like and floated the possibility of deploying a small contingent of U.S. forces for strategic missions rather than a full-scale ground invasion.
Either possibility would go against Trump’s repeated promises to keep the United States out of any new foreign wars.
Some analysts say a limited deployment could involve missions targeting facilities that cannot easily be destroyed through airstrikes.
“You could envision them doing some sort of special operations insertions if there were targets that they absolutely needed to take out or reduce but didn’t lend themselves to bombardment,” Joel Rayburn, a former Trump administration official and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told NBC News.
Officials told NBC News that Trump has not made a final decision on whether to deploy troops to Iran, but the private discussions suggest he may be more open to putting U.S. ‘boots on the ground’ than he has publicly acknowledged.
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” Trump told the New York Post in an interview this week, though he stopped short of ruling it out altogether.
“I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Iranian officials have said they are prepared for the possibility of a U.S. ground invasion.
“We are waiting for them,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told NBC News.
“We are confident that we can confront them, and that would be a big disaster for them.”
The conflict began early Saturday morning, with U.S. and Israeli air strikes on Iranian targets.
Six U.S. service members have so far been killed and 18 wounded in Iranian counterattacks since the fighting began, according to the Pentagon.
Araghchi said Iran has prepared for the possibility that the conflict could escalate further.
“We have prepared ourselves to confront with any scenario,” he said.
During a visit to U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, on Thursday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said there is “no shortage of American will” to sustain Operation Epic Fury.
“We’ve got no shortage of munitions; our stockpiles of defensive and offensive weapons allow us to sustain this campaign as long as we need to,” Hegseth said.
“Our will is ironclad, which means our timeline is ours and ours alone to control.”
Hegseth’s remarks underscore how open-ended the conflict may become, particularly as Trump continues to keep the possibility of ground troops in play.
For now, the war has largely been fought from the air, with U.S. and Israeli strikes targeting Iranian military infrastructure. But Trump’s private discussions about deploying American forces suggest the next phase of the conflict could look very different.
