Story by Andrew Bernard/jns.org
U.S. President Donald Trump told the New York Post that he would not rule out sending American troops into Iran “if they were necessary.”
“I don’t care about polling,” he said.
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground. Like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” the president said. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ ‘if they were necessary.’”
The Post reported that recent polling shows a lack of American support for the war.
“I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling. I have to do the right thing. I have to do the right thing. This should have been done a long time ago,” the president said.
“Look, whether polling is low or not, I think the polling is probably fine. But it’s not a question of polling,” he added. “You cannot let Iran, who’s a nation that has been run by crazy people, have a nuclear weapon.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on Monday that he would not place any time limit on U.S. military operations against Iran and refused to rule out ground operations.
Speaking at the Pentagon alongside Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hegseth said that it was “foolishness” to lay out a timeline or make statements about “boots on the ground.”
“We’re not going to go into the exercise of what we will or will not do,” Hegseth said. “We’re not dumb about it. You don’t have to roll 200,000 people in there and stay for 20 years.”
Pressed by a reporter on Trump telling the Daily Mail that the war could “take four weeks, or less,” Hegseth said that was a “gotcha-type question.”
“President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take,” Hegseth said. “Four weeks, two weeks, six weeks. It could move up, it could move back.”
Hegseth confirmed that four U.S. servicemen have been killed in Operation Epic Fury so far.
Caine added that three U.S. F-15s had been downed in the past 24 hours with no crew fatalities. He said the crashes were “not from hostile enemy fire” and are under investigation. U.S. Central Command described the downed planes as the result of an “apparent friendly fire incident” on Sunday.
An Israeli official told JNS on Monday that the objective of the military operations against Iran is regime change, but U.S. officials have not laid out a clear end state for what they hope to accomplish against Iran.
Speaking at the White House on Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump said that the objectives of the operation were clear—destroying Iranian missile capabilities, “annihilating” the regime’s navy, preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons and halting its efforts to arm terror organizations, according to the poll report.
Trump said that the United States projected four to five weeks for the operation but that it had the “capability” to go longer, per the pool.
Hegseth told reporters on Monday that this was not a “regime change war” but referred to the Iranian government as “the former regime” following decapitation strikes in the first hours of the war that killed Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian leaders.
The defense secretary said that the military operation was focused on destroying Iran’s offensive capabilities and preventing the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
“Iran has an ability to project power against us and our allies in ways that we can’t tolerate,” Hegseth said, citing Iran’s ballistic missiles, drones and navy. “Radical Islamists can’t have a nuclear bomb that they wield against the world.”
“We set the terms of this war from start to finish,” he said. “Our ambitions are not utopian. They are realistic, scoped to our interests and the defense of our people and our allies.”
“That’s a discrete sense of what’s being addressed here: to ensure that they can’t use that conventional umbrella to continue a pursuit of nuclear ambitions,” he said.
Caine described details of how U.S. forces had surged into the Middle East over the past month and said that additional troops were en route to the region.
“I don’t want to talk specifics, because that would tip the enemy off,” Caine said. “We have more tactical aviation flowing into theater, just based on the time it took to get it out there. I think we’re just about where we want to be in terms of total combat capacity and total combat power.”
