U.S. war actions against Iran are “accelerating” as U.S. and Israeli forces battle for control of Iranian airspace and push inland to seek and destroy Iran’s missile capabilities, a senior U.S. official said on Wednesday.
“Four days later, our fight has only just begun,” U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said.
“The gas pedal is about to be stepped up,” said Gen. Dan Kaine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
However, Hegseth said Iran’s reported missile attack on NATO member Turkey – which was intercepted by NATO defense systems – was not expected to immediately expand the theater of operations by triggering NATO provisions requiring the participation of other members.
In an unapologetic tone, Hegseth said Iran’s surviving leadership “didn’t know what to call it” after exhausting the initial retaliatory strategy it had developed before the U.S. attack, while the United States was firing on all fronts and winning – including a U.S. submarine that recently torpedoed an Iranian warship in international waters, which Hegseth said was the first such sinking since World War II.
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“We’re just getting started. We’re accelerating, not slowing down,” he said. “We can easily sustain this fight for as long as we need to.”
Kaine struck a much more cautious tone at the Pentagon news conference, talking about the “sacrifice” of the six U.S. service members killed in the conflict so far and the “clear military objectives” of the operation, which include destroying “Iran’s ability to project power beyond its borders today and in the future.”
He said the United States had made “steady progress” toward those goals in recent hours. He said Iran’s “number of ballistic missile launches” had dropped by 86% from the first day of fighting, and by 23% “in the past 24 hours alone.” He said their “number of one-way attack drone shots” were down 73% from “the first few days” of the war.
This allows the United States to “establish localized air superiority along the southern flank of Iran’s coast and penetrate its defenses with overwhelming precision and firepower,” Kaine said. “We will now begin to expand inland, gradually deeper into Iranian territory, creating more freedom of maneuver for U.S. forces.”
An Iranian ballistic missile reportedly landed in the village of Dimhiyye al-Kabira in Syria’s Hasakah Qamishli district near the Turkish border on Wednesday. No casualties were reported in the area where the missile landed. (Sevket Akca/Anadolu, Getty Images)
Hegseth and Kane spoke against the backdrop of escalating devastation in the Persian Gulf, with Hegseth acknowledging Iran as a “terrible” enemy, Iran continuing to launch a wave of retaliatory attacks, and Israel penetrating deep into Lebanon against Iran-aligned Hezbollah militants there.
Their message of U.S. control of the region belies chaos in many parts of the region — alarms were sounded in Bahrain, U.S. and other foreign citizens scrambled to flee the region, global air traffic was thrown into chaos and tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for global energy flows, dropped by about 90%, according to the Associated Press.
Turkey’s Defense Ministry announced on Wednesday that a NATO air defense system shot down a ballistic missile launched into Turkish airspace from Iran, raising more questions about the rapidly expanding war footprint given that Turkey is a member of NATO and protected by the treaty’s Article 5, which states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all.
Heggs said the United States was aware of the attack but he did not believe it would trigger Article 5 or force all of NATO into a conflict that has drawn countries across the Gulf as Iran targets U.S. allies and military installations.
Heggs abandoned any pretense of limited or measured U.S. force and instead described its actions as an all-out attack on a “radical Islamic adversary of Iran,” arguing that both Democrats and the U.S. media were grossly distorting the facts to make President Trump look bad.
He said the U.S. media focused too much on losses, such as the deaths of U.S. military personnel, and not enough on the progress the U.S. had made in destroying Iran’s military capabilities in a matter of days.
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“They’re screwed, and they know it — or at least they’ll know it soon,” he said of Iran. “And we’ve only just begun our ability to hunt down, disrupt, neutralize, destroy and defeat their capabilities, in just four days.”
He said the United States and Israel would “completely control Iran’s airspace – uncontested airspace” within “a week,” which means “we will fly around the clock to find, repair and complete the Iranian military’s missile and defense industrial base, find and repair their leaders and military leaders.”
“Death and destruction fell from the sky all day long,” he said. “We will keep fighting.”
It’s unclear exactly what Hegseth meant, given the Trump administration’s continued messaging that the war with Iran will not become another “endless” U.S. engagement in the Middle East.
The rules of engagement used by the United States are “bold, precise, and designed to unleash, not constrain, U.S. power,” Heggs said. “It was never a fair fight and it’s not a fair fight now. We were punching and kicking them while they were down, and that’s how it was supposed to be.”
The disruption to tanker shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and its potential impact on global and U.S. natural gas prices is clearly a concern for Trump. On Tuesday, he posted on his Truth social platform that the United States would provide wartime insurance for “all maritime trade” in the Gulf waterway (other insurance companies began withdrawing coverage) and that the U.S. Navy would begin escorting tankers if necessary.
“No matter what, the United States will ensure the free flow of energy to the world,” he wrote.
The news immediately raised concerns among some of Trump’s political opponents, who questioned the cost of ensuring U.S. energy shipments around the world, including from competitors such as China, one of the region’s largest buyers of crude oil.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, wrote on
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
