In event of an Iran-Israel showdown, what would US military do?

How would the US military respond if Iran attacked US interests – in retaliation for, say, an Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities? What would a US counterattack look like?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington Monday to meet with President Obama – which comes in the midst of increasingly vocal warnings from Pentagon officials urging caution on any military action in the region – has brought these questions into sharp focus this week.

These questions, too, were at the heart of one of the largest US military war-game exercises in a decade, meant to mirror the conditions that US troops would face if Iran were to, say, shut down shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

The war game, dubbed “Bold Alligator,” included some 16,000 US Navy seamen and Marines, as well as a a contingent of US allies from Europe and Australia, and took place near Norfolk, Va., last month. 

Yet Iran conducts its own war-game exercises, too, designed to practice how best to make US military operations in the region difficult, defense analysts note.

The Pentagon’s exercise, for its part, was designed to explore what might happen when US troops face threats in a populated, “built-up” area like the Persian Gulf, according to senior US military officials. 

The exercises were “certainly informed by recent history,” says Adm. John Harvey, head of the US Navy’s Fleet Forces Command.

Operating in seaway as narrow as the Strait of Hormuz – one of the most important in the world for US commercial interests – becomes “very difficult when you talk about irregular threats,” says Lt. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, commander of US Marine Corps Forces Command. Those threats include the widespread mining of the Strait, as well as small boats that could swarm US vessels.

The war games also explored the threat that Iran could pose with its shore-based cruise missiles, to which US ships might be exposed “under certain circumstances,” according to Harvey.

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