Pete Hegseth says Iranian regime is ‘toast’ as US expands military offensive

The US will have complete, uncontested control of Iranian airspace within days, the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, declared Wednesday, saying Iran “cannot outlast” American military power and that its capabilities were “evaporating by the hour”.The joint US-Israeli operation to attack Iran, which began on Saturday, had already delivered “twice the air power of shock and awe of Iraq in 2003” and “seven times the intensity of Israel’s previous operations against Iran during the 12-day war”, Hegseth claimed at a press conference alongside Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.“We are just getting started,” Hegseth said. “We are accelerating, not decelerating.” He said the Iranian regime “are toast, and they know it, or at least soon enough, they will know it.”Caine added that Iran’s ballistic missile capability had been reduced by 86% since the opening day of hostilities, its navy largely destroyed and its senior leadership killed or in hiding. He said the progress had allowed the US 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 US soldiers killed in a drone strike on a base in Kuwait: Captain Cody Khork, 35; Sergeant Nicole Amor, 39; Sergeant Declan Coady, 20; and Sergeant Noah Tietjens, 42. Two names remain pending next-of-kin notification. In Israel, 11 have reportedly been killed, with hundreds injured.So far more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran, according to human rights monitors, including 180 children, most of them schoolgirls aged seven to 12 years old who were killed when their school was bombed. Hegseth was evasive when asked about the bombing of the school, telling reporters: “All I can say is that we’re investigating.” He offered no information about whose munition was responsible, adding that US forces “never target civilian targets”, despite the Guardian reporting that the missile directly hit Shajareh Tayyebeh school.Hegseth spent more time describing the killing of the supposed leader of a plot to assassinate Donald Trump.“The leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed,” he said. In 2024, federal prosecutors under 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 that the US had so far struck more than 2,000 Iranian targets and destroyed more than 20 naval vessels. He explained that the operation is transitioning from expensive standoff munitions – cruise missiles and precision weapons fired from beyond the range of Iranian air defences – to cheaper GPS and laser-guided gravity bombs dropped directly over Iran. Hegseth claimed the US held a “nearly 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 vessel by torpedo since the second world war. “It thought it was safe in international waters,” he said. “Instead it was sunk by a torpedo, a quiet death.”On Iran’s ground command, both officials painted a picture of an adversary in disarray. “Iran’s senior leaders are dead,” Hegseth said. “The so-called governing council that might have selected a successor – dead, missing, or cowering in bunkers too terrified to even occupy the same room.”Caine said Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait are all actively intercepting Iranian missiles and drones with their own air defence systems, after Iran had fired more than 500 ballistic missiles and 2,000 one-way attack drones since hostilities began.Asked about the wider geopolitical fallout 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 brushed aside a question about US ground troops, calling it “a question for policymakers”.As he did yesterday, Hegseth declined to give any timeline for the operation’s end. “We could say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight, it could be three. Ultimately, we set the pace and the tempo.”