In President Trump’s view, generals are chest-thumping, tough-talking cheerleaders for the military and the operations he, as commander in chief, orders them to carry out.
It’s a view that often puts the senior military officers who serve under him in an impossible position. On Thursday morning, it fell to Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to meet Mr. Trump’s expectations without politicizing the institution he serves.
He did it by painting an earnest, at times florid, picture of the men and women involved in the attack this weekend on Iran’s nuclear site at Fordo, and largely sidestepping the question of how successful the strike had been.
General Caine’s first big test began with a preliminary report from the Defense Intelligence Agency this week suggesting that the attack at the site and two others in Iran had set back the country’s nuclear program by only a few months, according to officials familiar with the findings.
News about that report infuriated Mr. Trump, who described the strikes in social media posts as “legendary” and insisted that Iran’s nuclear sites had been “obliterated.”
At the Pentagon on Thursday, Mr. Hegseth spent 10 minutes excoriating reporters as unpatriotic and “irresponsible.”
“This was a historically successful attack,” he insisted. “We should celebrate it as Americans.”
Then it was General Caine’s turn.
“I apologize ahead of time for the length and the detail,” he began.
Instead of talking about damage assessment, he praised a dogged pair of Defense Threat Reduction Agency analysts who for 15 years had scrutinized “every nook, every crater” of the Fordo site.
“They literally dreamed about this target at night when they slept,” he said.
He celebrated the young members of the Army’s Patriot missile crews who had defended an American air base in Qatar from an Iranian missile barrage earlier this week. In the process, he waxed poetic about the heat in the desert, the sun setting as the Iranian attack commenced and the 120 seconds that the lieutenant overseeing the mission had to “either succeed or fail.”
General Caine was speaking to the American people, but also to an audience of one in the White House. Perhaps sensing the president’s affection for superlatives, he described the air defense mission in Qatar in which no one was injured as “the largest single Patriot engagement in U.S. military history.”
One thing that General Caine did not do was comment when questioned by reporters about the extent of the damage at the Fordo site or defend Mr. Trump’s insistence that the strike had obliterated the Iranian nuclear program.
“We don’t do B.D.A.,” he said curtly using the military acronym for battle damage assessment. “I’ll refer that to the intelligence community.”
There’s a moment when Mr. Trump sours on almost all of his generals. Usually it comes when they fail to meet his expectations on a public stage. Trump’s first defense secretary, retired Gen. James Mattis, earned the nickname “Mad Dog” for his hard-edge aphorisms leading Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As defense secretary, Mr. Mattis was reluctant to play the role of Mr. Trump’s guard dog and take his side publicly in political battles. By 2019, Mr. Trump was describing him as “the world’s most overrated general.”
Mr. Trump soured on retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former Joint Chiefs chairman, after he accompanied Mr. Trump as he walked across Lafayette Square near the White House for a photo op celebrating the aggressive clearing of a peaceful demonstration against police violence in 2020. General Milley was widely criticized for allowing Mr. Trump to drag him into politics.
“I should not have been there,” General Milley said. Mr. Trump never forgave him for apologizing.
Mr. Trump has celebrated General Caine as an aggressive commander who, he said, told him during a visit to the Middle East that Islamic State fighters who had taken over portions of Iraq and Syria could be wiped out in just one week. Other officers, Mr. Trump said, told him the mission would take two years.
Mr. Trump also said General Caine donned a Make America Great Hat during the briefing, which the general has denied. At his confirmation hearing. General Caine vowed to steer clear of politics and cited the example of former Gen. George Marshall, who did not vote.
As a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute, General Caine said he could see a statue of General Marshall from his barracks’ window. “If I failed to provide my candid advice to the secretary, the N.S.C., or the president, I think General Marshall would climb out of his grave and hunt me down,” he testified, using an acronym to refer to the National Security Council.
This week, General Caine learned that providing candid military advice, avoiding politics and staying in Mr. Trump’s good graces can be a perilous task.
“Bomb damage assessment is not usually political,” said Nora Bensahel, a defense policy expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “It’s usually done to understand the damage that’s been done and decide whether it’s necessary to restrike.”
But Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth had made it political by insisting that the news media and Mr. Trump’s political opponents were using the initial Defense Intelligence Agency assessment to damage the president and disparage the military, Ms. Bensahel said.
In that case, it made sense for Mr. Caine to steer clear of the issue.
The general closed his remarks on Sunday’s strikes by describing the scene as the B-2 pilots returned to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri after their 37-hour mission.
“Their families were there, flags flying and tears flowing,” General Caine said. “I have chills literally talking about this.”
The general’s performance in the Pentagon briefing seemed to please the commander in chief.
“One of the greatest, most professional and most ‘confirming’ News Conferences I have ever seen!” Mr. Trump called it in a social media post.
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