Defence secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered on Thursday the Trump administration’s most detailed descriptions yet of the planning and execution of US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
But Hegseth and General Caine offered no new assessments of the state of Iran’s nuclear programme or the damage to the sites.
Both men referred those questions to the nation’s spy agencies.
Neither man repeated President Donald Trump’s assertion that the strikes had “obliterated” the Iranian facilities, even as they pushed back against a preliminary classified Defence Intelligence Agency report that said the bombings set back the country’s nuclear programme by only a few months.
“You want to call it destroyed, you want to call it defeated, you want to call it obliterated — choose your word. This was an historically successful attack,” Hegseth said in an often combative session with the media.
Hegseth began what was only his second ever news conference at the Pentagon by saying that the news media, in his view, had not been kind to Trump.
“Searching for scandals, you miss historic moments like recruiting at the Pentagon, historic levels in the Army, the Air Force and the Navy.”
Hegseth has fashioned himself as an amplifier of Trump, as part of his role as defence secretary.
General Caine played videos of the bombing attack on the nuclear sites and described how they were carried out.
He steered clear of Hegseth’s political points, and instead focused on the personnel who developed the 13,607-kg bombs that the B-2’s dropped, the bomber crew members who flew the 37-hour-round-trip mission, and the troops who defended a major American base from Iranian retaliation.
General Caine said only two Patriot missile defence batteries remained at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar when Iran retaliated for American strikes with a missile barrage on Monday.
The oldest American soldier on the base was a 28-year-old captain, he said, and the youngest was 21. He painted a portrait of tension on the base, in an almost lyrical way.
“At 7:30 pm in Qatar, as the sun sets in the west, Iran attacks,” he said.
Asked later if he had been pressured to provide a rosy assessment of the mission, General Caine, an F-16 pilot, said: “No, I have not, and no, I would not.” Caine described the 15 years of study by two Defence Threat Reduction Agency officers to create a bomb that could penetrate the Fordo nuclear facility being built deep underground by Iran.
Over time, he said, the department had many people with Ph.D.s working on the programme, “doing modelling and simulation that we were quietly and in a secret way the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America”.
The pilots of the bombers involved in the weekend strikes described the flash after the bomb drop as “the brightest explosion they had ever seen”, Caine said.
Jennifer Griffin of Fox News asked Hegseth about the movement of enriched uranium from the Fordo site. Hegseth did not answer the question and instead attacked Griffin, one of the most experienced and respected Pentagon reporters.
New York Times News Service