ROBERT MAGINNIS: The Pentagon's plan to seize Iran's uranium isn't a raid. It's an invasion
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Video US eyes plan to obtain Iran’s nuclear material from Pickaxe Mountain site, report says The White House is reportedly considering a complex plan to obtain enriched uranium from Iran's underground nuclear sites, specifically Pickaxe Mountain. This comes amidst satellite imagery showing continued construction and concerns about Iran's new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who is reportedly open to pursuing an advanced nuclear weapon. Former CIA Station Chief Dan Hoffman discusses the intelligence and military options available.
The Pentagon has reportedly revived an extraordinary option for President Donald Trump: Send thousands of American troops deep into Iran to seize enriched uranium from damaged and buried nuclear facilities, according to a new report .
It is being described as a raid. It would be nothing of the sort.
This would be a temporary invasion of hostile territory, launched without real surprise, against an enemy that has spent months expecting us, at sites whose defenses and contents remain uncertain. American troops might seize the objective only to become trapped in a mission with no reliable timetable and no clean exit.
Satellite image shows an overview of the Pickaxe Mountain tunnel complex in Natanz. (Vantor/Handout via Reuters)
The historical parallel is Operation Eagle Claw , the failed 1980 attempt to rescue American hostages in Tehran. President Jimmy Carter had exhausted diplomacy and sanctions after a hostage crisis that had humiliated the United States for six months, as mounting political pressure pushed him toward a complex rescue operation.
It ended at Desert One, where mechanical failures and a collision between a helicopter and a transport aircraft killed eight American servicemen before the rescue force ever reached Tehran.
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Today's military is far more capable, with mature special operations commands and decades of combat experience. But technology does not repeal geography, logistics or enemy action, and a president's need for a decisive result does not make a fragile plan sound.
Trump has shown the Carter analogy concerns him. When asked in June about a uranium-seizure mission, he said he considered it early and rejected it. "I didn't want to be Jimmy Carter," he said.
President Donald Trump said he did not "want to be Jimmy Carter," when speaking on military operations in Iran. (Getty Images)
The reported mission would dwarf Eagle Claw in complexity. Carter's force knew roughly where the hostages were. In Iran today, we may not know precisely where the enriched uranium sits, whether it has been divided among sites, or whether Iran has already moved it. Some officials believe international inspectors have not verified its location in nearly nine months .
The Pentagon plan reportedly contemplates securing Iran's Fordow and Isfahan facilities, along with the deeply buried Pickaxe Mountain complex near Natanz, where Iran is believed to have moved centrifuges .
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Thousands of troops could be required, including Army Rangers , special operations forces and combat engineers. One version reportedly calls for flying in excavation equipment and building a runway to fly out roughly 450 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, some enriched to 60 percent.
Pickaxe Mountain alone shows the scale of the problem. Analysts believe it sits more than 300 feet underground , deeper than the Fordow plant the U.S. struck last year. Open-source evidence does not place uranium there at all; the mountain may hold centrifuges instead, and American forces could fight their way inside only to discover the objective had already disappeared.
Based on the latest targets, Iran has been signaling that it is prepared to damage water, energy and transport infrastructure elsewhere in the region, a senior U.N. official explained. (European Union/Copernicus Sentinel-2/Handout via Reuters)
Iran knows the likely targets and has spent months preparing entrances, roads and defenses. At Isfahan, tunnel entrances believed to hold much of Iran's enriched uranium reportedly remain backfilled with dirt, reinforced with mines and roadblocks to complicate any ground approach. As one former National Security Council official noted , the sites are fixed and both sides know which facilities American forces would likely approach.
American aircraft might suppress Iran's air defenses and deliver an assault force. That is only the first step. Troops would then have to control roads, tunnel portals and an airfield for heavy cargo aircraft, while engineers bring in heavy equipment and other troops secure a wide perimeter. Inside, they could confront collapsed concrete, mines, poor ventilation and armed defenders in confined passages. Every hour favors Iran.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would likely respond on multiple fronts: striking American bases, disrupting shipping through Hormuz and activating proxies in Iraq , Syria and Yemen. Tehran would not need to defeat American forces outright, only deny them the objective by collapsing tunnels, contaminating the site or trapping personnel inside.
The longer our forces remain, the more dangerous the mission becomes. What began as a raid becomes a defended American lodgment hundreds of miles inside Iran. The moment American engineers begin building an airstrip on Iranian soil, the raid becomes an invasion.
A container ship, right, and a cargo vessel are seen in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas, Iran, June 17, 2026. (Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA via AP)
That raises the question Washington should ask before sending a single soldier underground: Why not deny access to the facilities rather than occupy them?
If the uranium is trapped inside damaged tunnels, the wiser course may be to collapse every known entrance and access route, then maintain surveillance and strike…
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