WASHINGTON—President Trump is leaning toward expanding U.S. military operations in Iran after days of briefings from top aides, U.S. officials said. Options include stepping up airstrikes, sending ground forces to seize Iranian islands near the Strait of Hormuz and bombing a fortified site that could be used for covert nuclear work.
Trump hosted a Situation Room meeting Tuesday evening to discuss the potential seizure of Kharg Island and other territory along the Strait of Hormuz using U.S. troops, as well as the potential bombing of a tunnel complex at Pickaxe Mountain, a nuclear-linked site the U.S. has yet to target. Expanding airstrikes against more targets in Iran, including energy sites, also remains a possibility.
The discussion was one of multiple formal and informal conversations Trump has held in recent days with senior officials including Vice President JD Vance , Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth , Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Gen. Dan Caine , the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the officials said.
The U.S. military said it launched two waves of airstrikes against Iran on Wednesday, targeting Iran’s ability to threaten vessels transiting the strait. “We’ll find out whether or not we settle with them, or we just finish it off,” Trump said at an industry event shortly after the second wave of attacks began.
The president hasn’t made a final decision on next steps in the war , officials said, and he insists privately and publicly that he would prefer resolving his dispute with Iran diplomatically. But Iran hasn’t capitulated to Trump’s demands that it surrender its nuclear stockpile after weeks of military strikes and an interim deal that would have allowed Tehran to make billions of dollars selling oil on the open market. The diplomatic gridlock has prompted Trump to ask aides for new, escalatory options that could force Iran to surrender, or at least promise to stop attacking commercial vessels in the strait.
Some U.S. officials said Trump is reluctant to commit ground forces. He has repeatedly walked back his biggest public threats, including taking Kharg Island and Iran’s oil industry. But if Trump were to approve of the plans, it would usher in the most dangerous phase of the nearly five-month war and drag the U.S. deeper into a growing Middle East conflict, one that would likely lead to higher gas prices and complicate Republicans’ plans for the midterms.
Trump has made candid statements about the war in recent days, confirming that he is considering new military options. While officials say he is leaning toward expanded operations, he could change his mind. And his open discussion of options also could be used to try to scare Iran back to the negotiating table.
“We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt this week. On Tuesday, shortly before the Situation Room meeting, Trump told Fox News that seizing Kharg Island was unlikely but not ruled out. “If we degrade them far enough and deep enough back, I would do that,” he added.
Axios reported earlier on the Situation Room discussions.
The strikes Wednesday marked the fifth-straight day of attacks on Iran, following the collapse of an interim peace agreement that had lifted the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports and paused sanctions on Tehran’s oil sales. But Trump declared the ceasefire over after Iran attacked ships in the strait, reimposing the blockade and authorizing fresh strikes .
In an interview that aired Wednesday, Vance told podcaster Joe Rogan the strikes were aimed at forcing Iran back to the negotiating table.
“We’re not just going to bomb and bomb and bomb. We’re going to try to use our military force as one of the many tools that we have to solve the problem,” Vance said.
A green light on either a Pickaxe Mountain or Kharg Island operation would be Trump’s riskiest bet of the conflict.
Pickaxe is a heavily fortified underground site consisting of tunnels built into granite some 300- to 475-feet beneath the surface of a mountain peak—far deeper than Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow, which the U.S. and Israel bombed last summer. The site is believed to be incomplete.
The depth of the Pickaxe tunnels means they might not be vulnerable to direct hits from the U.S. military’s bunker-buster bombs. Whereas U.S. attacks on Fordow in 2025 targeted ventilation shafts that went straight down to the halls of the site, publicly available satellite imagery hasn’t exposed the definite locations of any ventilation sites at Pickaxe.
That doesn’t mean Pickaxe has no vulnerabilities. Construction at the site means it depends upon power supplies, equipment deliveries and construction personnel that could be sabotaged.
“If they make any move” toward turning Pickaxe into a functioning nuclear site, “we immediately go and do whatever we have to do, but they haven’t,” Trump said Tuesday on Fox News. “Nobody knows if they even are doing anything at Pickaxe, it’s just something that comes up.” Trump added that U.S. bunker-buster bombs “can go deep.”
Attempting to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil-export hub, would harm the country’s oil industry but it also would put American forces directly in harm’s way. Troops would be easy targets for Iranian missiles and drones, U.S. officials and analysts say.
Retired Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie said the U.S. should still consider a Kharg Island operation. “That’s something we should think about doing because possession of Iranian soil would be a significant factor in future negotiations with Iran,” he said Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
Trump is also discussing ideas to occupy other islands along the Strait to assist with shipping and to destroy heavily militarized territory, with analysts pointing to Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb as the likeliest targets. U.S. troops would also be vulnerable in those locations, according to the officials and analysts.
