President Donald Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth have given various timelines for the war against Iran, raising questions about how long they actually expect the campaign to go on.
On Monday, the president downplayed the conflict, calling it an “excursion” that U.S. forces “are very close to finishing,” while in an interview that aired a day earlier, Hegseth warned, “This is only just the beginning.”
Trump, during his press conference on Monday in Florida, was asked about the apparent contradiction, and he responded, “Well, I think you could say both, the beginning. It’s the beginning of building a new country, but they certainly — they have no navy. They have no air force. They have no anti-aircraft equipment. It’s all been blown up. They have no radar. They have no telecommunications, and they have no leadership. It’s all gone.”
WHO HAS BEEN KILLED SO FAR DURING US-ISRAEL MISSION IN IRAN?
The war has gone on for roughly 10 days since Israel and the United States launched their opening attacks. In that time, the U.S. military has carried out thousands of air strikes against Iran’s military targets, including missile stockpiles, launchers, and production facilities, as well as targeting their naval assets.
“Where we are is a very strong place, giving the president of the United States maximum options,” the secretary told reporters on Tuesday. “And from the beginning, from this point, we haven’t seen how long it will take, our will is endless. Ultimately, the president gets to determine the end state of those objectives, right? But what he said continually, I want the American people to understand is this is not endless.”
Hegseth, who is a veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, has sought to differentiate those campaigns from the current one by focusing on the narrow mission this time around that does not involve “mission creep” or nation-building.
At the outset of the war, Trump said it could take four to five weeks, while Hegseth said U.S. forces would continue to target Iran’s military capabilities until they achieved their objectives, whether it took more or less time than the president’s time frame.
Both Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Tuesday that Iran’s attacks against U.S. assets in other countries are trending downward as the conflict continues.
“Our strikes mean we’ve made significant progress in reducing the number of missile and drone attacks out of Iran,” Caine said, though Hegseth acknowledged that if “the enemy can simply wait and then project power, that’s problematic.”
US WAR IN IRAN IS ‘FULL STEAM AHEAD’ WITH CONTINUED BOMBINGS
Iran, for its part, has remained defiant amid the war.
The country’s Assembly of Experts, its deliberative body responsible for selecting the nation’s supreme leader, announced this week that the assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will be succeeded by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei.
