(The Center Square) – Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine touted the United States’ supposed victory against Iranian nuclear sites in a news conference Thursday.
Hegseth and Caine celebrated the victory but referred assessments of the damage to Iran’s nuclear site for the intelligence community, including the CIA.
“What the United States military did was historic,” Hegseth said.
Caine said the strike against Iran with “bunker buster” bombs included 15 years of intelligence assessments on Fordow, Iran’s nuclear site, and many tests of the bomb. He said the United States developed the bombs with Iran’s nuclear facilities in mind.
“Operation Midnight Hammer was the culmination of those 15 years of incredible work, the air crews, the tanker crews, the weapons crews that built the weapons, the load crews that loaded it,” Caine said.
Caine said the military targeted two ventilation shafts in Iran’s Fordow nuclear site. He said Iranians tried to cover the ventilation shafts with concrete caps.
“The cap was forcibly removed by the first weapon, and the main shaft was uncovered,” Caine said.
Caine said the following five bombs were meant to go through the opened shaft and explode the main complex at 1,000 feet per second.
“The weapons functioned as designed, meaning they exploded,” Caine said.
Caine warned adversary nations that the United States is working on the same kinds of operations against targets in other countries.
“Our adversaries around the world should know that there are other [Defense Threat Reduction Agency members] out there studying targets for the same amount of time, and will continue to do so,” Caine said.
While Caine and Hegseth celebrated the operation, they declined to offer specifics on the damage assessment, referring it to CIA reports.
“The Joint Force does not do [Battle Damage Assessments],” Caine said. “By design, we don’t grade our own homework, the intelligence community does.”
Hegseth and Caine declined to comment on reports that uranium was moved from Iran’s nuclear site before the United States attacked.
“There’s nothing that I’ve seen that suggests we didn’t hit exactly what we wanted to hit in those locations,” Hegseth said.
He said leaked intelligence that the operation only set Iran’s nuclear program back by two months was motivated by “political purposes.”
“Someone had an agenda to try to muddy the waters and make it look like this strike wasn’t successful,” Hegseth said.