How Trump’s Complex Operation To Extract Iran’s Enriched Uranium Could Unfold

President Trump is mulling a deployment of U.S. troops on the ground in Iran to remove the country’s highly enriched uranium, a complex and dangerous operation that could take days to complete.

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Retired Vice Adm. Robert Harward, who served as the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command (Centcom), said the U.S. could use the Joint Special Operations Command forces, including Army Rangers, which have recently been deployed to the Middle East; rely on the 101st Airborne, an elite light infantry division known for its air assault operations; or utilize the combination of both since they have “worked together before, and that probably brings your biggest scale to it.”

Marine Expeditionary Units (MEU), two of which have been ordered to the Centcom region in recent weeks, are designed for amphibious operations, and they could also partake in the operation. However, they have not “trained as specifically as those forces [have], and they’re not airborne qualified, so you’d have to seize some territory to get them in somewhere,” Harward said in an interview with The Hill.

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“It could be as short as a day, but I would assume, with the tunnels and all the things and what they’ve done to prepare for it, it would probably take longer,” Harward, the executive vice president for international business and strategy at Shield AI, said.

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Harward, the former Centcom commander, argued the high stakes of the mission and the fact the Iranian military knows the U.S. is coming make for unfavorable conditions to execute the it now. 

“Focus on the other things. First, if you stop the missiles and you can open up the Strait of Hormuz, you can take the time to do whatever you want, and as the Israelis are adamantly pursuing, they’re going after regime change,” he told The Hill. “Well, if you get off those conditions, why take the risk? At that point, you could go get the uranium with no risk.”

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