No boots, no nukes in Iran: Hegseth​

Washington: U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Monday said Operation Epic Fury will not be a short campaign, ruled out American ground troops for now, and reiterated that Iran will not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, outlining what he described as a limited but decisive military objective.​

Responding to a question at a Pentagon news conference about American forces on the ground, Hegseth said: “No, but we’re not going to go into the exercise of what we will or will not do.”​

He also laid out the objective: “destroy Iranian offensive missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their Navy and other security infrastructure, and they will never have nuclear weapons.”​

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General Dan Caine added: “To be clear, as the Secretary said, this is not a single overnight operation.”​

Caine cautioned that the campaign would take time. “The military objectives that CENTCOM and the Joint Force have been tasked with will take some time to achieve and in some cases will be difficult and gritty work,” he said. “We expect to take additional losses, and as always, we will work to minimize U.S. losses. But as the Secretary said, this is major combat operations.”​

Hegseth declined to provide a timeline. “As far as time frame, I would never hang a time frame from our perspective,” he said. “The commander-in-chief sets the op tempo in terms of this fight.”​

He rejected suggestions that Washington should publicly define the limits of the operation. “Why in the world would we tell you, the enemy, anybody, what we will or will not do in pursuit of an objective,” he said. “We fight to win.”​

The Secretary framed the mission as necessary to counter what he described as Iran’s expanding military capabilities. “Iran has an ability to project power against us and our allies in ways that we can’t tolerate,” he said, citing ballistic missiles, drones, and naval forces.​

He drew a direct line to nuclear concerns. “You can’t have a nuclear bomb. Radical Islamists can’t have a nuclear bomb that they wield against the world,” Hegseth said. He added that prior diplomatic efforts had failed. “He gave them every single opportunity. Then we precisely took it away.”​

While distancing the campaign from past U.S. wars in the region, Hegseth said, “This is not Iraq. This is not endless.” He added, “You don’t have to roll 200,000 people in there and stay for 20 years.”​

Caine said battle damage assessments are underway even as strikes continue. “He’s doing offense and assessment simultaneously,” he said, referring to the theater commander. “It’ll take some time for us to conduct a battle damage assessment.”​

Officials said the objectives remain focused on degrading Iran’s ability to project force and preventing what Hegseth described as a “conventional umbrella to blackmail nuclear ambitions.”

IANS