Key Points and Summary – At a Pentagon briefing on Thursday, June 26th, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine forcefully defended the success of “Operation Midnight Hammer,” the US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.
-While President Trump has claimed “total obliteration,” his top military officials were more measured, deferring final battle damage assessments to the intelligence community while detailing the operational success of the mission.
-Hegseth also clashed with reporters over a leaked preliminary intelligence report that suggested a more limited impact.
-Gen. Caine revealed that Iran had attempted to seal the Fordow facility’s tunnels with concrete before the strike, a move that US planners anticipated and overcame.
Iran Attack: What We Learned From the Pentagon’s Briefing Today
In a Thursday morning briefing accompanied by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth slammed the U.S. media for its response to recent American airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
During the news conference, held at the Pentagon, the United States’ top defense officials also revealed details about Operation Midnight Hammer and the military personnel responsible for its success.
Hegseth and Caine used the opportunity not only to double down on the White House’s insistence that the strikes “obliterated” Iran’s top three nuclear sites, but to provide additional details about the damage done. Caine confirmed that the strikes went completely as planned, describing how fourteen 30,000 pound bombs “functioned as designed, meaning they exploded.”
Caine revealed that the United States and Israel were able to see the bombs as they dropped, and by using intelligence, were able to visually verify the damage that was done.
“We know this through other means intelligence means that we have that were visibly, we were visibly able to see them,” Caine said. “And we know that the trailing jets saw the first weapons function.”
Caine also provided interesting insights into Iran’s response to the strikes, as well as action taken in the days leading up to President Trump’s decision to deploy B-2 stealth bombers to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment and nuclear sites.
The U.S. defense official claimed that in the days leading up to the attack, Iran attempted to protect its facilities by covering the main shafts with concrete.
“The planners had to account for this, they accounted for everything,” Caine said.
And while Iran’s attempt to cover the shafts was successful, Caine said, the first bomb dropped removed the caps completely, allowing subsequent strikes to inflict substantial damage on the facilities underneath. The main shaft, Caine said, was completely uncovered by the first bomb dropped.
Perhaps most notably, however, Hegseth appeared to confirm something journalists have been pushing the White House to clarify for days: that Iran’s enriched uranium was not removed from the site ahead of the attack.
The clarification comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed he was in receipt of “interesting intel” on the location of the enriched uranium, without expanding on what he knew. His comments also came
In a Truth Social Post, President Donald Trump described how U.S. officials saw “cars and small trucks” at the site, which belonged to construction workers who were attempting to block entryways to the Fordow uranium enrichment facility.
“Nothing was taken out of facility,” Trump said. “Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move.”
The briefing also confirmed the timeline of events leading up to the destruction of the facilities. According to the US Department of Defense, seven B-2 bombers left Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri on Saturday, June 21, at 12:01am Eastern Time.
By 5pm, the B-2s joined other U.S. fighter jets, and missiles were fired from the Arabian Sea.
An hour later, the American fighter planes entered Iranian airspace. Between 6:40 and 7pm, the three targets were hit, with American fighter pilots turning their planes around and returning to base at approximately 7:30pm.
About the Author:
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society. His latest book is The Truth Teller: RFK Jr. and the Case for a Post-Partisan Presidency.
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