The U.S. war effort against Iran was \u201caccelerating\u201d as American and Israeli forces fought for control of Iranian airspace and pressed farther inland to seek and destroy Iranian missile capabilities, top U.S. officials said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cFour days in, we have only just begun to fight,\u201d said U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe throttle is coming up,\u201d said Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.<\/p>\n
However, a reported Iranian missile strike at NATO member Turkey \u2014 intercepted by NATO defense systems \u2014 was not expected to immediately broaden the war theater by triggering a NATO clause requiring other member nations to get involved, Hegseth said.<\/p>\n
Hegseth, striking an unapologetic tone, said Iran\u2019s surviving leadership \u201cdon\u2019t know what plays to call\u201d after exhausting initial retaliatory strategies devised prior to the U.S. assault, while the U.S. is firing on all fronts and stacking up wins \u2014 including an American submarine recently sinking an Iranian warship<\/a> with a torpedo in international waters, which Hegseth called the first such sinking since World War II.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are just getting started. We are accelerating, not decelerating,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can sustain this fight easily for as long as we need to.\u201d<\/p>\n Caine, striking a far more measured tone at the Pentagon briefing<\/a>, spoke of the \u201csacrifice\u201d of the six U.S. service members who have been killed in the conflict to date and the \u201cclear military objectives\u201d of the operation, which include dismantling \u201cIran\u2019s ability to project power outside of its borders, both today and into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n And he said the U.S. has made \u201csteady progress\u201d toward those goals in recent hours. He said Iran\u2019s \u201cballistic missile shots\u201d were down 86% from the first day of fighting, and down 23% \u201cjust in the last 24 hours.\u201d He said their \u201cone-way attack drone shots\u201d are down 73% from the \u201copening days\u201d of the war.<\/p>\n That has allowed the U.S. to establish \u201clocalized air superiority across the southern flank of the Iranian coast and penetrate their defenses with overwhelming precision and firepower,\u201d Caine said. \u201cWe will now begin to expand inland, striking progressively deeper into Iranian territory and creating additional freedom of maneuver for U.S. forces.\u201d<\/p>\n Hegseth and Caine spoke against a backdrop of escalating destruction across the Persian Gulf region<\/a>, as Iran \u2014 which Hegseth acknowledged is a \u201cformidable\u201d enemy \u2014 continued to unleash a wave of retaliatory strikes and Israel pushed into Lebanon and against Iran-allied Hezbollah fighters there.<\/p>\n Their message of U.S. control in the region belied chaos in many parts of it \u2014 as sirens blared in Bahrain, U.S. and other foreign citizens scrambled to flee the area, global air traffic was in disarray and tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for the flow of global energy, was down by about 90%, according to the Associated Press.<\/p>\n Turkey\u2019s defense ministry announced Wednesday that NATO air defenses had shot down a ballistic missile fired toward Turkish airspace from Iran, which raised additional questions about a rapidly expanding footprint of the war given that Turkey is a NATO member and protected by a treaty clause \u2014 Article 5 \u2014 stating that an attack on one member is an attack on all.<\/p>\n Hegseth said the U.S. was aware of the strike, but that he did not believe it would trigger Article 5 or force all of NATO into the conflict \u2014 which has already drawn in nations throughout the Gulf region as Iran has targeted U.S. allies and military facilities.<\/p>\n Hegseth jettisoned any pretense of constraint or measured force by the U.S., instead casting its operations as an all-out assault on \u201cradical Islamist Iranian adversaries\u201d that he suggested both Democrats and the U.S. media were badly misrepresenting to make President Trump look bad.<\/p>\n He suggested the U.S. media was overly focused on losses, such as the deaths of U.S. military personnel, and not nearly focused enough on the progress the U.S. has made toward destroying Iran\u2019s military capabilities in a matter of days.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are toast, and they know it \u2014 or at least soon enough they will know it,\u201d he said of Iran. \u201cAnd we\u2019ve only just begun to hunt, dismantle, demoralize, destroy and defeat their capabilities, just four days in.\u201d<\/p>\n He said that the U.S. and Israel in \u201cunder a week\u201d will \u201chave complete control of Iranian skies \u2014 uncontested air space,\u201d which he said will mean that \u201cwe will fly all day, all night, day and night, finding, fixing and finishing the missiles and defense industrial base of the Iranian military, finding and fixing their leaders and their military leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDeath and destruction from the sky, all day long,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re playing for keeps.\u201d<\/p>\n It was unclear what exactly Hegseth meant by that, given the Trump administration\u2019s constant messaging that the war on Iran will not be another \u201cendless\u201d engagement for the U.S. in the Middle East. <\/p>\n The U.S. was using rules of engagement that are \u201cbold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it,\u201d Hegseth said. \u201cThis was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they\u2019re down, which is exactly how it should be.\u201d<\/p>\n Disruptions to tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and their potential effect on global and U.S. gas prices, were clearly on Trump\u2019s mind. On Tuesday, he posted to his Truth Social platform that the U.S. would be providing wartime insurance for \u201cALL Maritime Trade\u201d through Gulf shipping lanes \u2014 as other insurers began canceling coverage<\/a> \u2014 and that the U.S. Navy would begin escorting tankers if necessary.<\/p>\n \u201cNo matter what, the United States will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n The message drew immediate concern from some of Trump\u2019s political opponents, who questioned the cost to the U.S. of securing energy shipments for the entire world, including rivals such as China, one of the largest purchasers of crude oil from the region.<\/p>\n \u201cVery few, if any, of these tankers are coming to the United States,\u201d Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) wrote on X. \u201cThis certainly looks like the United States will be subsidizing and protecting oil shipments to China.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The U.S. war effort against Iran was \u201caccelerating\u201d as American and Israeli forces fought for control of Iranian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3292,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2501,2504,395,648,1368,34,2503,1486,722,680,2502,1176,2500,683,36],"class_list":{"0":"post-3291","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-iran","8":"tag-caine","9":"tag-control","10":"tag-day","11":"tag-defense","12":"tag-hegseth","13":"tag-iran","14":"tag-message","15":"tag-nato","16":"tag-president-trump","17":"tag-strike","18":"tag-tanker-traffic","19":"tag-turkey","20":"tag-u-s-secretary","21":"tag-u-s","22":"tag-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116171779226059556","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}