Experts have sounded the alarm over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s starry-eyed messaging to President Donald Trump about the war against Iran.
The U.S. and Israel began launching strikes against Iran more than five weeks ago. U.S. Central Command has said its forces struck more than 13,000 Iranian targets so far, and Trump has been intensifying his threats against the country, warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”
There are concerns inside the Trump administration that Hegseth is being unrealistic about the true state of the war, and he could be misleading the president because of his faulty assessment, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
“Pete is not speaking truth to the president,” a Trump official told The Washington Post.
The official warned that because of Hegseth’s messaging, Trump “is out there repeating misleading information.”
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell denounced The Washington Post’s reporting, telling The Independent it was “pushing a fake story of failure” and urged the publication to “stop trafficking lies and propaganda.”
During a March 13 press briefing, Hegseth told reporters, “Iran has no air defenses. Iran has no air force. Iran has no Navy.
“Their missiles, their missile launchers and drones being destroyed or shot out of the sky. Their missile volume is down 90 percent. Their one-way attack drones yesterday, down 95 percent.”
Trump painted a similar picture during his national address last week, telling Americans, “Tonight, Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins…Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed.”
But Iran still managed to shoot down an American F-15E fighter jet Friday, prompting a desperate search for an airman who went missing behind enemy lines. On Sunday, Trump announced on Truth Social the airman was found safe, although injured, in “one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History.” Another airman was in the downed jet, but was rescued quickly.
The fighter jet’s downing is what happens “when you have air superiority but don’t have air supremacy,” Kelly Grieco, a military analyst at the Washington think tank, the Stimson Center, told The Washington Post.
A CNN report published last week also called the Trump administration’s assessments of Iran’s missile-launching capabilities into question.
The report, which cited sources familiar with recent U.S. intelligence assessments, said about half of Iran’s missile launchers and thousands of its drones still existed. Although it’s not clear how many launchers Iran can still access.
Trump officials told The Washington Post that Hegseth’s claim on March 31 that the latest number of missiles and drones fired by Iran fell to the lowest level in any 24-hour period since the start of the war was false.
The officials told the publication lower 24-hour periods of missile and drone launches occurred earlier in the month. Their assessment was backed up by data published by Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank in D.C., The Washington Post noted.
Some U.S. officials questioned Hegseth's use of launch volume to measure the American military’s success in the war.
“If you judge Iran’s strength or weakness based on their launch numbers, that is a dumb metric. What is their objective? Are they achieving that? That’s what matters,” one of the officials said.
Last week, Time reported that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had expressed concerns that aides were giving Trump “a rose-colored view” of the Iran war.
But the Pentagon insists it is “crippling” the Iranian regime.
“Since Operation Epic Fury began, Secretary Hegseth has provided the Commander-in-Chief with decisive military options to achieve our clear, scoped objectives: destroy Iran’s missile arsenal, annihilate their Navy, destroy their terrorist proxies, and ensure Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon.
“The United States military has delivered a crippling series of blows to the Iranian regime, and we are ahead of schedule in accomplishing our mission,” spokesman Parnell told The Independent.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement to The Independent, “As Secretary Hegseth said, as the United States Military continues to meet or exceed all of our benchmarks under Operation Epic Fury, we still expect the Iranians to shoot back.”
Trump “always had the full picture of the conflict. Nothing has surprised him or our military planners, who were prepared for any possible contingency.”
All eyes will be on the U.S. military Tuesday night as Trump has threatened to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure if Tehran doesn’t make a deal to open up the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has effectively closed the waterway, which carries about a fifth of the world’s oil, amid the war.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday morning, hours before the 8 p.m. ET deadline he gave Tehran.
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