When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine stood side by side at their March 4 briefing on the Iran war, they each offered what they called the mission’s clear, decisive objectives. They listed three apiece. They were not the same three.
“Obliterate Iran’s missiles and drones and facilities that produce them, annihilate its navy and critical security infrastructure, and sever their pathway to nuclear weapons,” Hegseth said during the briefing. “Iran will never possess a nuclear bomb. Not on our watch, not ever.”
Minutes later, Caine provided a different trio of objectives.
“First, we are targeting and eliminating Iran’s ballistic missile systems to prevent them from threatening the U.S. forces, partners and interests in the region,” he said. “Second, we are destroying the Iranian navy. … Third, we’re ensuring Iran cannot rapidly rebuild or reconstitute its combat capability or combat power.” It contained no mention of nuclear weapons.
That exchange has come to epitomize what has become a recurring feature of the conflict: Almost three weeks into the war, political and military officials have yet to coalesce around a single, coherent account of what military success looks like, what achieving it would require or how the war ends.
The clearest fault line runs through the question of Iran’s nuclear program.
President Donald Trump has said he had discussions with NATO allies this week about how it is “very important that we take out the nuclear threat from Iran.” Hegseth has consistently called permanently denying Iran a nuclear weapon one of the mission’s core objectives.
But the military’s operational commanders have conspicuously declined to echo that framing.
In a March 11 recorded video, U.S. Central Command’s commander, Adm. Brad Cooper, ticked through three “very clear military objectives”: hitting Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, targeting its navy and striking its defense industrial base. Nuclear facilities were not mentioned. On March 10, a week after the March 4 press conference, Caine elaborated on the mission’s third goal, adding language about preventing Iran from projecting “power outside their borders” and “servicing production facilities, research and development sites and infrastructure.” He still did not use the word “nuclear.”
Even as the administration has faced criticism over its messaging about what would constitute mission accomplished, Hegseth reiterated the president’s “unchanged, on target and on plan” objectives during the latest Pentagon briefing Thursday morning.
“Destroy missiles launchers and Iran’s defense industrial base so they cannot rebuild, destroy their navy, and Iran never gets a nuclear weapon,” Hegseth said.
Caine followed, again sidestepping the nuclear issue. “CENTCOM remains on plan to achieve our military objectives and remain unrelenting in our pursuit of Iranian missile capabilities, UAV capabilities and their navy, and as the Secretary said, their industrial base,” he said.
A U.S. official dismissed the idea that there is daylight between the overall strategic and tactical objectives.
“The military objectives are as stated; the president and secretary have been clear, and the joint force works toward their defined military objectives,” the U.S. official told MS NOW.
The administration has offered varying answers about how many objectives the war actually has. Hegseth has named three. Caine and Cooper have named a different three. A White House official, asked by MS NOW to clarify, listed five: to destroy the threats posed by Iran’s ballistic missiles, its missile industry, its navy, its armed proxies and the regime’s ability to possess a nuclear weapon.
“Iran was hoping to converge its ballistic missile capacity, missile industry, navy and proxies to shield its ability to produce a nuclear weapon,” the official said, essentially arguing that achieving the first four objectives would result in eliminating its nuclear program by leaving it unprotected.
Despite Hegseth calling his three objectives of eliminating the missiles, navy and nuclear program “clear, decisive, achievable,” it’s unlikely that military action without American troop deployments could achieve the last goal — if at all.
“We’ve said from the beginning, deny Iran nuclear weapons as a core mission,” Hegseth said when asked how the mission ends without physically taking control of the enriched uranium. “We retain options across the spectrum to ensure that they never do.”
Asked how the U.S. ensures its objective of denying Iran a nuclear weapon, Caine declined to comment “on what we may or may not be thinking about, any options that the joint force could be tasked to do in the future, whether it’s on the nuke matter or anything else.”
Officials have cited Trump’s determination that Iran’s nuclear program posed an “imminent threat” to the U.S. as a fundamental reason for needing to attack the Islamic Republic. Yet in the several fact sheets CENTCOM has published since the start of the war, not once has a nuclear-related site been specifically listed as a “type of target.”
“Iran is just a military operation,” Trump said when asked on Tuesday about his foreign policy priorities.
But without a long-term diplomatic strategy, any military successes will be overshadowed by failure to secure a regime in Iran willing to forgo its nuclear ambitions and surrender its existing material, says retired CENTCOM deputy commander Adm. Robert Harward. Notably, in his first public remarks after the attack on Iran, Hegseth declared, “This is not a so-called regime change war.”
“If it’s not a regime change, then we’ve just exacerbated the problem,” Harward told MS NOW. “We’ve got a short-term military success that’s going to be a longer-term political problem.” Harward said ensuring Iran never has a nuclear weapon is a “whole-of-government objective” that requires military victory in eradicating the country’s missile and drone program and threat to sea navigation to set the conditions for a new government. “This is a political solution, because you can only achieve so much through military force,” Harward said. Neither Trump nor his lieutenants have ruled out the prospect of U.S. forces on the ground in Iran. Asked on Tuesday if he was afraid of the Iranian regime warning that deploying U.S. troops would turn into another Vietnam, the president was unfazed. “I’m really not afraid of anything,” Trump said. Harward said that while there are other ways to enact regime change with U.S. government support that do not translate to troop deployments, a limited approach to meet a defined objective, such as sending troops to Kharg Island to signal “to the Iranian people it’s time for the leadership to go,” could work. “If that’s to get that tipping point where the army, the navy flips and they think the U.S. is there to ensure they’re not murdered by the IRGC, then that can be a sound strategy,” he said, referring to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters this week that the conflict in Iran is “the most incompetent, incoherent war America has fought in the last 100 years,” adding, “there is no viable war plan.” Murphy said Trump “changes his mind every single day about what he thinks this war should be about,” citing the president’s claim that one of the war’s aims was to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. “He should talk to his military leadership, because they do not believe that one of the goals is to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” Murphy said. “They are not targeting Iran’s nuclear program. They have made that clear to us in private briefings.” And it’s not just military officials dodging the nuclear threat — intelligence leaders CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress this week articulating the same three objectives outlined by Caine and Cooper. During the Senate Intelligence Committee’s worldwide-threats hearing on Wednesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe disputed criticism from Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., that there are not clearly defined goals, again echoing what Caine and Hegseth said — while still ignoring the nuclear aspect. “The complete lack of clarity should matter to everybody,” Bennet said, “President Trump most of all. He is the person that got elected on the criticism that we had fought two wars in the Middle East that had lasted for 20 years, and now we’re hearing the testimony is to get their ballistic missiles, to not even get to the nuclear stuff. We’re going to have to be in a perpetual war with Iran, and I don’t think that’s where the American people are on this.” This is a preview of MS NOW’s Project 47 Newsletter. As President Trump continues implementing his ambitious agenda, get expert analysis on the administration’s latest actions and how others are pushing back sent straight to your inbox every Tuesday. Sign up now.
Julia Jester covers politics for MS NOW and is based in Washington, D.C. Recommended
