Hegseth warns ‘this is only the beginning’ of war with Iran and there will be more US casualties
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said “this is only just the beginning” of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and warned that more American casualties can be expected.
Hegseth was speaking to CBS News’s 60 Minutes after Mojtaba Khamenei was named as Iran’s new supreme leader following the death of his father in the initial wave of airstrikes, global oil prices surged past $100 per barrel, and a seventh U.S. servicemember was killed after President Donald Trump had attended the dignified transfer of the first six soldiers killed at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
Asked by host Major Elliott Garrett on the likely duration of the war, Hegseth said: “Oh, we’re very much on track, on plan. We’re not flying a mission accomplished banner – like George W Bush on an aircraft carrier. We’re not doing that and we haven’t done that.
“But we can be clear with the American people that this is not a fair fight. And that’s on purpose. Our capabilities are overwhelming compared to what Iran’s are.”
On the prospect of more U.S. troops losing their lives in the hostilities, Hegseth said: “The president’s been right to say there will be casualties. Things like this don’t happen without casualties. There will be more casualties.
“And no one is – I mean, especially our generation knows what it’s like to see Americans come home in caskets… But that doesn’t weaken us one bit. It stiffens our spine and our resolve to say this is a fight we will finish.”
Pressed again on the war’s likely duration, the secretary acknowledged it was a fair question but told Garrett: “People ask boots on the ground, no boots on the ground, four weeks, two weeks, six weeks?
“President Trump knows, I know, you don’t tell the enemy, you don’t tell the press, you don’t tell anybody what your limits would be on an operation. We’re willing to go as far as we need to in order to be successful.”
Asked what Trump’s demand for unconditional surrender from Tehran means in practise, Hegseth answered: “It means we’re fighting to win. It means we set the terms.
“We’ll know when they’re not capable of fighting. There’ll be a point where they’ll have no choice but to do that. Whether they know it or not, they will be combat-ineffective. They will surrender. This is war. This is conflict. This is bringing your enemy to their knees.”
Elsewhere, Hegseth insisted the U.S. was “always controlling the throttle” and not being directed by Israel – while acknowledging their partnership in the endeavour – and said it was “silly and academic” to characterize the engagement as an “opportunity” to overthrow Iran’s theocratic regime, rather a response to a direct threat posed.
He said that Trump was “well aware of who’s talking to who” and that the likes of Russia providing intelligence to Iran would be “confronted strongly” and that the U.S. was “investigating” who was responsible for an airstrike on a girls’ school that killed scores of pupils on Day One of the aggressions.
Hegseth also insisted the objective was “not a regime change war in a conventional George W Bush context,” saying the U.S. had learned the lesson of its folly in Afghanistan when the attempt to turn “a society that was basically Biblical times with AK-47s and cellphones” into a “Jeffersonian democracy” had comprehensively failed.
“We tried that,” the secretary said. “The American people have rejected that. President Trump called those wars dumb.
