\u201cI don\u2019t care about polling,\u201d he\u00a0said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground. Like every president says, \u2018There will be no boots on the ground.\u2019 I don\u2019t say it,\u201d the president said. \u201cI say \u2018probably don\u2019t need them,\u2019 \u2018if they were necessary.’\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Post<\/em> reported that recent polling shows a lack of American support for the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think that the polling is very good, but I don\u2019t 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,\u201d the president said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLook, whether polling is low or not, I think the polling is probably fine. But it\u2019s not a question of polling,\u201d he added. \u201cYou cannot let Iran, who\u2019s a nation that has been run by crazy people, have a nuclear weapon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking at the Pentagon alongside Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hegseth said that it was \u201cfoolishness\u201d to lay out a timeline or make statements about \u201cboots on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019re not going to go into the exercise of what we will or will not do,\u201d Hegseth said. \u201cWe\u2019re not dumb about it. You don\u2019t have to roll 200,000 people in there and stay for 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pressed by a reporter on Trump telling the Daily Mail<\/em> that the war could \u201ctake four weeks, or less,\u201d Hegseth said that was a \u201cgotcha-type question.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPresident Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take,\u201d Hegseth said. \u201cFour weeks, two weeks, six weeks. It could move up, it could move back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegseth confirmed that four U.S. servicemen have been killed in Operation Epic Fury so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cnot from hostile enemy fire\u201d and are under investigation. U.S. Central Command\u00a0described\u00a0the downed planes as the result of an \u201capparent friendly fire incident\u201d on Sunday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An Israeli official\u00a0told\u00a0JNS 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking at the White House on Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump said that the objectives of the operation were clear\u2014destroying Iranian missile capabilities, \u201cannihilating\u201d the regime\u2019s navy, preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons and halting its efforts to arm terror organizations, according to the poll report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump said that the United States projected four to five weeks for the operation but that it had the \u201ccapability\u201d to go longer, per the pool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegseth told reporters on Monday that this was not a \u201cregime change war\u201d but referred to the Iranian government as \u201cthe former regime\u201d following decapitation strikes in the first hours of the war that killed Iran\u2019s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The defense secretary said that the military operation was focused on destroying Iran\u2019s offensive capabilities and preventing the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear weapon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIran has an ability to project power against us and our allies in ways that we can\u2019t tolerate,\u201d Hegseth said, citing Iran\u2019s ballistic missiles, drones and navy. \u201cRadical Islamists can\u2019t have a nuclear bomb that they wield against the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe set the terms of this war from start to finish,\u201d he said. \u201cOur ambitions are not utopian. They are realistic, scoped to our interests and the defense of our people and our allies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat\u2019s a discrete sense of what\u2019s being addressed here: to ensure that they can\u2019t use that conventional umbrella to continue a pursuit of nuclear ambitions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to talk specifics, because that would tip the enemy off,\u201d Caine said. \u201cWe have more tactical aviation flowing into theater, just based on the time it took to get it out there. I think we\u2019re just about where we want to be in terms of total combat capacity and total combat power.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u201cif they were necessary.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t care about polling,\u201d he\u00a0said. \u201cI don\u2019t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground. Like every president says, \u2018There will be no boots on the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[178,179],"coauthors":[381],"class_list":{"0":"post-10594","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-2","8":"tag-iran","9":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10594"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10596,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10594\/revisions\/10596"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10594"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=10594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Hegseth](\"https:\/\/me.jnsi.org\/uploads\/2026\/03\/55124738001_deced48aa8_o-scaled.jpg\")
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