Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declined to rule out deploying American ground forces in Iran during his first public comments on the joint American and Israeli military operation.
Appearing at the Pentagon on Monday with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine, the nation’s top military officials made the case that the strikes launched over the weekend have no timetable for wrapping up, and are meant to destroy Iran’s conventional and nuclear weapons programs.
Asked specifically about putting American troops on the ground, Hegseth said that while there are none there now, “we’re not going to go into the exercise of what we will or will not do.”
The open timetable — along with the possibility of deploying ground forces — stands in contrast to President Donald Trump’s campaign promises that he would avoid any new wars of choice. In his election night victory speech in November 2024, Trump capped his campaign by telling his supporters: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
The president, along with his Cabinet, have also lambasted the “forever wars” of previous administrations, which in the case of Afghanistan continued during Trump’s first term.
The Trump administration has offered shifting estimates for how long the current attacks on Iranian leadership and military infrastructure might last, and Iran’s missile and drone attacks on U.S. and allied bases and civilian infrastructure are showing no signs of letting up.
Caine and Hegseth on Monday both sketched out a broad explanation for why the administration felt the war was necessary even as U.S. and Iranian negotiators were meeting in Geneva. The strikes, which have hit over 1,000 targets inside Iran so far and are still underway, were launched to “prevent Iran from ability to project power outside its borders,” Caine said.
Hegseth offered a similar take, saying that “Iran was building powerful missiles and drones to create a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions… Iran had a conventional gun to our head.”
The strikes are meant to “ensure that they can’t use that conventional umbrella to continue [their] pursuit of nuclear ambitions,” Hegseth added.
Since Saturday, four U.S. troops were killed in a missile attack on their base in Kuwait, and Kuwaiti air defenses mistakenly shot down three American F-15E fighter planes. All six crewmembers survived the shootdowns.