‘Pete is not speaking truth to the president’: Experts sound alarm over Hegseth’s war messaging to Trump
Experts have sounded the alarm over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s starry-eyed messaging to President Donald Trump about the war against Iran.
The U.S. and Israel began launching strikes against Iran more than five weeks ago. U.S. Central Command has said its forces struck more than 13,000 Iranian targets so far, and Trump has been intensifying his threats against the country, warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”
There are concerns inside the Trump administration that Hegseth is being unrealistic about the true state of the war, and he could be misleading the president because of his faulty assessment, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
“Pete is not speaking truth to the president,” a Trump official told The Washington Post.
The official warned that because of Hegseth’s messaging, Trump “is out there repeating misleading information.”
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell denounced The Washington Post’s reporting, telling The Independent it was “pushing a fake story of failure” and urged the publication to “stop trafficking lies and propaganda.”
During a March 13 press briefing, Hegseth told reporters, “Iran has no air defenses. Iran has no air force. Iran has no Navy.
“Their missiles, their missile launchers and drones being destroyed or shot out of the sky. Their missile volume is down 90 percent. Their one-way attack drones yesterday, down 95 percent.”
Trump painted a similar picture during his national address last week, telling Americans, “Tonight, Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins…Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed.”
But Iran still managed to shoot down an American F-15E fighter jet Friday, prompting a desperate search for an airman who went missing behind enemy lines. On Sunday, Trump announced on Truth Social the airman was found safe, although injured, in “one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History.” Another airman was in the downed jet, but was rescued quickly.
The fighter jet’s downing is what happens “when you have air superiority but don’t have air supremacy,” Kelly Grieco, a military analyst at the Washington think tank, the Stimson Center, told The Washington Post.
A CNN report published last week also called the Trump administration’s assessments of Iran’s missile-launching capabilities into question.
The report, which cited sources familiar with recent U.S. intelligence assessments, said about half of Iran’s missile launchers and thousands of its drones still existed. Although it’s not clear how many launchers Iran can still access.
Trump officials told The Washington Post that Hegseth’s claim on March 31 that the latest number of missiles and drones fired by Iran fell to the lowest level in any 24-hour period since the start of the war was false.
