Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s chest-thumping claims about Iran’s losses don’t appear to line up with intelligence assessments.
Iran still has thousands of ballistic missiles that could be pulled out of hiding or dug up from underground storage sites, officials familiar with U.S. intelligence assessments revealed to The Wall Street Journal.
The report undercuts the self-proclaimed secretary of war’s claims that Iran’s missile program has been obliterated.
“Their missile program is functionally destroyed, launchers, production facilities, and existing stockpiles depleted and decimated and almost completely ineffective,” Hegseth, 45, told reporters on Wednesday as he asserted that “Iran’s air force has been wiped out.”
U.S. intelligence reports paint a more worrying picture, sources told the Journal.
Though American officials have said that more than half of Iran’s missile launchers have been destroyed, damaged, or trapped underground in the conflict, many of them can still be repaired or pulled out of underground complexes, the outlet reported.
U.S. and Israeli officials also said that while Iran’s missile inventory has been roughly halved, it retains thousands of medium- and short-range ballistic missiles that could be taken out of hiding or dug up from underground sites. Iran still has more than 1,000 of the estimated 2,500 medium-range missiles that it had at the start of the war, Israeli officials told the Journal.
On Wednesday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine reiterated that President Donald Trump’s war with Iran was aimed at accomplishing three objectives: “destroy Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capabilities, destroy the Iranian Navy, and destroy their defense industrial base to ensure that Iran cannot reconstitute the ability to project power outside their borders.”
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told the Journal that those objectives have been met.
“This profound military success has allowed Vice President Vance, Special Envoy Witkoff, and Jared Kushner to negotiate with maximum leverage in order to end these threats to American troops and our homeland for good,” she said, referring to the peace talks between U.S. and Iranian officials in Pakistan.
The Pentagon declined to comment.
Hegseth has repeatedly declared victory against Iran, insisting on Wednesday that the U.S. has “completely” destroyed Iran’s defense industrial base.
“Their command and control is so decimated they can’t really talk and coordinate,” he said. “So, they still may shoot here and there, but that would be very, very unwise.”
