A devastating air campaign is pounding the Iranian military and leaving it nearly incapable of mounting any resistance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on Wednesday.
“They are toast, and they know it, or at least soon enough, they will know it,” Mr. Hegseth said of the Iranian government and military.
Mr. Hegseth appeared alongside Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who offered a more modest assessment of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran that began on Saturday.
“It’s still very early,” General Caine said. “But the balance is shifting. We’ve always got to remember that these operations are complex, dangerous and far from over.”
So far the U.S. military has hit more than 2,000 targets, a barrage that appears to have severely degraded Iran’s ability to fight back by firing missiles at Israel, U.S. bases or other American allies in the region. The number of ballistic missiles fired by Iran is down 86 percent from the first day of fighting, General Caine said.
The Iranian military’s ability to fire one-way attack drones, among its most potent weapons, also appears constrained. Such launches are down 73 percent from the opening days of the conflict, General Caine said.
The destruction of Iran’s air defense should allow the Pentagon to bolster its attack by shifting away from standoff missiles, which are expensive and in relatively short supply, and using cheaper and more plentiful precision-guided gravity bombs.
“The throttle is coming up,” General Caine said.
Mr. Hegseth and General Caine declined to address responsibility for a strike on an Iranian girls’ school on Saturday, which killed at least 175 people, many of them students. “All I can say is that we’re investigating, and that we, of course, never target civilian targets,” Mr. Hegseth said, adding that an investigation into the strike was continuing.
Many of the victims were attending class at the Shajarah Tayyebeh school, in the southern town of Minab, according to local health officials and Iranian state media. Several videos and images verified by The New York Times showed that at least half of the two-story building was destroyed in the explosion.
Mr. Hegseth also played a video of a U.S. attack submarine sinking an Iranian vessel in the Indian Ocean with a torpedo, the first such sinking of an enemy ship by U.S. forces since World War II. In total, the United States has destroyed 20 Iranian ships.
“We’ve taken control of Iran’s airspace and waterways without boots on the ground,” Mr. Hegseth said. “We control their fate.”
It remains murky, though, exactly how much longer the bombing will continue or how the war will end. General Caine said the U.S. military’s objectives were clear: “Dismantle Iran’s ability to project power outside of its borders, both today and in the future.”
Less clear is what it will take to make that goal a reality. President Trump has suggested that the goal of the operation is to replace the current Iranian government with one that is more moderate or, at a minimum, more willing to accede to his demands regarding nuclear enrichment, its missile capabilities and its funding of proxies in places like Lebanon and Yemen.
Mr. Hegseth suggested that these largely political outcomes could be achieved by an unrelenting barrage from the air. “We are fighting to win,” he said.
Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military for The Times.
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