Iranian officials have repeatedly warned that Tehran could mount a ground offensive in the region targeting U.S. bases if American troops move to seize Iranian islands or territory. One former foreign minister has even proposed launching such an offensive to capture U.S. soldiers and bring them back to Iran. However, Iran analysts are highly skeptical that Tehran will prove capable of launching any such large-scale ground offensives any time soon.

Iranian MPs have singled out Kuwait and the island kingdom of Bahrain as possible targets for ground attacks. “If the United States puts boots on the ground in Iran, we may also launch ground attacks on Kuwait and Bahrain,” declared Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani, a member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Committee, in mid-July.

Former Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, also a parliament member, went even further. “I have been advocating for a ground war for a long time,” he said. “We should seize one of the U.S. bases in the region, capture its forces, and bring them back to our country.”

Iran has already subjected Bahrain and Kuwait to repeated drone and missile attacks in recent weeks, with these states, alongside Jordan and Iraqi Kurdistan, taking heavy fire. The Wall Street Journal reported that both states executed covert airstrikes against Iran in early July using intelligence provided by the United Arab Emirates in direct retaliation for these attacks.

Arash Azizi, a lecturer at Yale University and author of ‘The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran’s Global Ambitions’ as well as an upcoming book on the history of Iran-Israel relations, believes such talk about seizing Kuwaiti or Bahraini territory or U.S. bases in these countries is “baseless.”

“Not only will it struggle militarily to stage such operations, but its doctrine for years has been based on irregular warfare and covert operations, not outright ground military offensives,” Azizi told me.

Kuwait’s strategic Bubiyan island is one speculated target of any hypothetical ground attack. The U.S. military base at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait is a mere 62 miles from Iran. Bahrain hosts a major U.S. naval base, the Naval Support Activity Bahrain, that’s located approximately 128 miles away from Iranian territory.

Farzin Nadimi, a defense and security analyst and Senior Fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, also noted that seizing and holding any U.S. base or mounting any conventional seizure of Kuwait’s Bubiyan island or Bahrain would prove “extremely difficult under current conditions.” Additionally, while Iranian officials talk about a ground offensive, Bubiyan and Bahrain are islands, which would necessitate amphibious operations or sizable airlifts.

“Iran’s conventional ground-force projection capabilities across the Persian Gulf are limited, and the region currently features a heavy concentration of U.S. and coalition air power, ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), naval forces, and rapid-reaction capabilities,” Nadimi told me.

Iran also has limited amphibious and sealift capabilities, and months of U.S. and Israeli strikes have degraded its C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance), air defenses, and logistics. Any concentrated buildup of troops or vehicles would find itself under real-time surveillance and vulnerable to air and naval attacks.

“Also, Bubiyan Island is close to Iranian waters but heavily monitored,” Nadimi said. “Bahrain is an island nation hosting major U.S. naval infrastructure (including 5th Fleet elements), making any approach highly visible and contested.”

“Even though the majority of Bahrainis are Shia and some of them might theoretically collaborate with Iranian infiltrators, Saudi Arabia is likely to quickly intervene with full force in defense of the island,” he added.

“Therefore, Mottaki’s public suggestion appears more rhetorical and domestic-political than operationally realistic.”

Ironically, Mottaki’s suggestion echoed one made by Iran’s former rival Saddam Hussein after he fatefully invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990.

Much like Iran wasn’t intimidated by the pre-war U.S. buildup earlier this year ahead of the war, Iraq’s dictator wasn’t intimidated by America’s Operation Desert Shield buildup ahead of the 1991 Persian Gulf War that utterly devastated Iraq’s military. During that period, he told his intelligence chief, Wafiq al-Samarrai, of his plan to defeat an American offensive. Iraq could overcome America’s overwhelming firepower, Hussein reasoned, by somehow capturing thousands of U.S. troops, tying them to Iraqi tanks, and then advancing into eastern Saudi Arabia. Hussein was certain that the U.S. wouldn’t fire at his army’s helpless American human shields.

Of course, none of that ever happened. It was demoralized Iraqi troops that surrendered to the U.S.-coalition en masse during that war and a small number of downed American fighter pilots who Baghdad captured. Iraq made a brief offensive into Saudi Arabia, seizing the border town of Khafji before losing it again in a three-day battle with the coalition’s counteroffensive.

It’s worth remembering that during Desert Shield, the United States deployed more than 500,000 troops in Saudi Arabia to prevent any subsequent Iraqi offensive against that kingdom. Today, it has roughly 50,000 troops throughout the region, which have faced repeated attacks from Iranian drones and ballistic missiles.

Presently, analysts do not see Iran launching a Khafji-style offensive against its immediate neighbors or against American bases. Nadimi reasons that a “more plausible end of the spectrum” might resemble a reported fishing-boat infiltration by a small team of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps paramilitaries against Bubiyan in May. Six IRGC personnel attempted to reach the island covertly. Four were detained.

“That episode looks like a special-forces or intelligence-linked probe rather than the opening of a conventional offensive,” Nadimi said. “So if the conflict intensifies further, the most likely Iranian ground-related actions would remain in the asymmetric and special-operations domain rather than conventional offensives.”

One possibility the Iran military expert flagged is a combined operation by the IRGC’s extraterritorial Quds Forces and the Iran-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces infiltrating and briefly seizing Kuwaiti border posts on the Kuwaiti side of the Iraqi-Kuwaiti land border, which is over 150 miles long. Drones launched from Iraq have targeted Kuwait’s northern border posts in recent months.

Azizi estimates that another scenario which could change Iranian calculations would be an American ground invasion of its southern coast. That might move Tehran to take “unprecedented steps.” But even there, it would still struggle if it opted for a ground offensive.

“Although Iran is now much more militarily advanced than it was during the 1980s, it still has bitter memories of six years of unsuccessful attempts at capturing Basra,” he said in reference to the bloody and depleting Iran-Iraq War.

In the end, nothing like Mottaki’s or the other hawkish Iranian MPs' suggestions is likely to happen.

“Beyond rhetoric, limited, high-risk special-forces style or propaganda-oriented attempts are conceivable,” Nadimi said.

“Large-scale seizures or conventional incursions are not.”