The United States will have full and undisputed control of Iranian airspace within days, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth declared on Wednesday, saying that Iran “cannot survive” American military power and that its capabilities are “evaporating by the hour.”
The joint US-Israeli operation to attack Iran, which began on Saturday, had already provided “twice the shock-and-awe airpower of Iraq in 2003” and “seven times the intensity of Israel’s previous operations against Iran during the 12-day war,” Hegseth said at a news conference alongside Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“We’re just getting started,” Hegseth said. “We are accelerating, not decelerating.” He said the Iranian regime “is finished and they know it, or at least they will soon know it.”
Caine added that Iran’s ballistic missile capability had been reduced by 86% since the initial day of hostilities, its navy largely destroyed and its senior leaders killed or in hiding. He said the progress had allowed the United States to establish air superiority along Iran’s southern coast, and that forces would now “begin to expand inland, striking progressively deeper into Iranian territory.”
Caine read the names of four of the six American soldiers killed in a drone strike on a base in Kuwait: Capt. Cody Khork, 35; Sergeant Nicole Amor, 39 years old; Sergeant Declan Coady, 20; and Sergeant Noah Tietjens, 42. Two names remain pending notification of next of kin. In Israel, 11 people have reportedly been killed and hundreds injured.
More than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran so far, according to human rights observers, including 180 children, most of them schoolchildren aged seven to 12, who died when their school was bombed. Hegseth was evasive when asked about the school bombing, telling reporters: “All I can say is that we are investigating.” He offered no information on whose munition was responsible, adding that US forces “never attack civilian targets,” even though The Guardian reported that the missile directly hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school.
Hegseth spent more time describing the assassination of the alleged leader of a plot to assassinate Donald Trump.
“The leader of the unit that attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed,” he said. In 2024, federal prosecutors in the Biden administration charged 51-year-old Iranian national Farhad Shakeri and two New York men with running a murder-for-hire operation on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Caine said the United States had so far attacked more than 2,000 Iranian targets and destroyed more than 20 warships. He explained that the operation is moving from expensive standoff munitions (cruise missiles and precision weapons fired from beyond the range of Iranian air defenses) to cheaper GPS and laser-guided gravity bombs dropped directly on Iran. Hegseth claimed that the United States had an “almost unlimited stockpile” of these weapons.
Hegseth also confirmed that a US submarine had sunk an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean on Tuesday, the first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War II. “He thought it was safe in international waters,” he said. “Instead, she was sunk by a torpedo, a silent death.”
In Iran’s ground command, both officials painted a picture of an adversary in disarray. “Iran’s top leaders are dead,” Hegseth said. “The so-called governing council that could have chosen a successor: dead, missing or huddled in bunkers too terrified to even occupy the same room.”
Caine said Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait are actively intercepting Iranian missiles and drones with their own air defense systems, after Iran has fired more than 500 ballistic missiles and 2,000 one-way attack drones since hostilities began.
Asked about the broader geopolitical consequences suggested by Russia and China’s calls for an immediate ceasefire, Hegseth said: “I don’t have a message for them. They’re not really a factor here.” He also dismissed a question about U.S. ground troops, calling it “a question for policymakers.”
As he did yesterday, Hegseth declined to give any timeline for the end of the operation. “We could say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight, it could be three. In the end, we set the pace and pace.”
