The Pentagon disputed reporting on Thursday that the Trump administration had given more optimistic outlooks on the damage the military did to Iran’s military capabilities, such as what happened following Operation Midnight Hammer last June.
Since President Donald Trump’s April 7 ceasefire announcement, Iran has already been able to restart some of its drone production and has also begun replacing missile sites, launchers, and production capacity for key weapons systems destroyed during the war and has been doing so faster than U.S. estimates expected, according to a report from CNN.
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While acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez accused the outlet of “acting as public relations agents for the Iranian regime in order to paint Operation Epic Fury as anything other than a historic accomplishment,” in a statement to the Washington Examiner, he did not address specific details that the department disputes.
Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell also did not directly dispute the reporting.
“America’s military is the most powerful in the world and has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President’s choosing,” he told the Washington Examiner. “We have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests.”
U.S. Central Command declined to comment.
A little more than a week after the ceasefire commenced, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, himself, said on April 16 that Iran is “digging out [its] remaining launchers and missiles.”
Pentagon political appointees, including Hegseth himself, have frequently criticized the press for its coverage of the department, notably the war in Iran this year, but also with last year’s Operation Midnight Hammer, when the United States bombed three of Iran’s nuclear facilities during the Israel-Iran 12-day war.
“I stand here today speaking to you, the American people, not through filters, not through reporters, not through cable news spin,” Hegseth said during a briefing on March 19. “A dishonest and anti-Trump press will stop at nothing, we know this at this point, to downplay progress, amplify every cost and call into question every step. Sadly, [Trump derangement syndrome] is in their DNA. They want President Trump to fail, but you, the American people, know better.”
During other briefings about Operation Epic Fury, he compared the media to the Pharisees, “the so-called and self-appointed elites of their time,” and he alleged in another briefing the media tries to make the deaths of U.S. service members “front-page news” to “make the president look bad.”
Rosemary Kelanic, an expert with Defense Priorities, told the Washington Examiner, “It was predictable ahead of time that Iran would be able to rebuild capabilities, and it was predictable ahead of time that we wouldn’t be able to get them all. Iran is just a huge country geographically and in population wise, and they can rebuild, and they will, because the capabilities that the U.S. is targeting are cheap capabilities.”
A similar cycle occurred last year with Operation Midnight Hammer. Hegseth and Trump quickly declared in its aftermath that Iran’s nuclear facilities were “totally obliterated.”
Shortly after, CNN reported that the strikes were less effective than that, citing a preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which the administration also vehemently disputed.
“This is a preliminary, low confidence assessment – not a final conclusion – and will continue to be refined as additional intelligence becomes available,” a senior DIA official told the Washington Examiner at the time. “We have still not been able to review the actual physical sites themselves, which will give us the best indication.”
Hegseth said in July of last year that the department was working with the FBI to investigate who leaked the assessment. Parnell also said at the time, “We have degraded their program by one to two years at least.”
Even after several weeks of an intense U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign from Feb. 28 through April 7 of this year, Iran retains some military capabilities, Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of CENTCOM, told lawmakers last week.
“They are a very large country, and they retain some military capability,” Cooper said, also noting that when it comes to the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for oil and gas transports that have global economic reverberations, “Their voice is very loud, and those threats are clearly heard by the merchant industry and the insurance industry.”
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Cooper said in his written testimony that the U.S. conducted more than 13,500 strikes, destroying more than 85% of Iran’s ballistic missile drone, and naval defense industrial base and more than 90% of Iran’s naval mines, and U.S. forces destroyed 82% of Iran’s air defense missile systems along with the radar and command architecture that tied together Iran’s fixed-wing airfields, hangars, fuel storage, and munitions stockpiles.
“I think we are seeing a resilience on the part of the Iranians,” Mona Yacoubian, a Middle East expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner. “I think that perhaps they anticipated some of these circumstances and were prepared for them. So, for example, that there would be strikes taken on their, in particular on their ballistic missile launchers, the missiles themselves, etc. and the fuel, all of that, all the different components of their ballistic missile and drone system.”
Despite the degradation, Iran has, since the ceasefire, begun to attack U.S. Navy and commercial vessels nearby. They have also sporadically carried out attacks in Gulf countries that they attacked during the war. Iran’s threats to attack vessels in the Strait of Hormuz have halted shipping through the vital waterway, giving Iran leverage in the ongoing but stalled talks.
