Operation Epic Fury eliminated 90 percent of Iran’s weapons factories, 80 percent of its air defense systems, 90 percent of its naval fleet, and nearly 80 percent of its nuclear infrastructure, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine told reporters a day after President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire.
The U.S. military hit more than 13,000 targets inside Iran during 38 days of combat, Caine said alongside Hegseth during a Wednesday morning press conference at the Pentagon. The United States destroyed more than 1,500 Iranian air defense targets, 2,000 command and control nodes, 450 ballistic missile storage facilities, and some 800 one-way attack drone storage centers, including “every factory” that produced the notorious Shahed attack drone.
“All of these systems are gone,” Caine said. “It is, and we know this, incredibly frustrating right now to be a lower-level Iranian commander trying to fight your fight.”
Operation Epic Fury included more than 50,000 U.S. troops stateside and in theater. The United States flew more than 10,000 missions in total, including 62 bomber runs. Eighteen of those sorties “flew round trip from the United States to deliver bombs on military targets,” Caine said. The United States, along with its Gulf region partners, successfully intercepted 1,700 Iranian ballistic missiles and one-way attack drones.
“Along the way,” Caine said, “we consumed more than 6 million meals, and by my estimate, more than 950,000 gallons of coffee, 2 million energy drinks, and a lot of nicotine, but I am not saying that we have a problem.”
The United States completed combat operations using “less than 10 percent of America’s total combat power,” Hegseth said, adding that the U.S. military “untied just a fraction of our strength, and Iran suffered a devastating military defeat.”
In just over a month, “America’s military achieved every single objective on plan, on schedule, exactly as laid out from day one,” Hegseth said. “We own their skies, their missile program is functionally destroyed, launchers, production facilities and existing stockpiles depleted and decimated and almost completely ineffective.”
The Islamic Republic’s defeat, Hegseth told reporters, “is America’s retribution for every American lost to Iranian terror, especially those brave troops killed by Iranian-made roadside bombs in Iraq.”
In the hours before President Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire, the United States completed more than 800 strikes alone, “completely destroying Iran’s defense industrial base,” he told reporters.
The secretary of war said that, as diplomatic talks between the United States and Iranian leaders play out over the next two weeks, the U.S. military will remain in the region to ensure Tehran makes good on its promise to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“We’ll be hanging around,” Hegseth said. “We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to make sure Iran complies with this ceasefire, and then ultimately comes to the table and makes a deal.”
Hegseth added that the “agreement means that they will never, ever possess a nuclear weapon.”
The U.S. intelligence community has eyes on Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium “24/7,” he said. Hegseth stated that Tehran will “give it to us voluntarily” or Trump will decide “we have to do something else ourselves.”
Trump said in a Truth Social post earlier Wednesday that the United States “will work closely with Iran” to “dig up and remove all of the deeply buried (B-2 Bombers) Nuclear ‘Dust,'” a reference to the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
“It is now, and has been, under very exacting Satellite Surveillance (Space Force!). Nothing has been touched from the date of attack,” Trump wrote, adding that Iran will receive some amount of sanctions relief now that it has agreed to “many of the 15 points” included in the president’s peace proposal.
The Pentagon is also monitoring the Islamic Republic’s compliance with the ceasefire after it spent most of Tuesday evening shooting missiles at Israel and other Arab countries in the region. The United Arab Emirates downed 17 ballistic missiles and 35 drones overnight, while Kuwait intercepted 28 drones.
Hegseth warned that Iran “would be wise to find a way to get the carrier pigeon to their troops out in remote locations to know not to shoot, not to shoot any longer one-way attacks or missiles.”
In the coming days, Trump posted Wednesday morning, the United States will help spur the flow of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.
“Big money will be made,” he wrote. “Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just ‘hangin’ around’ in order to make sure that everything goes well. I feel confident that it will. Just like we are experiencing in the U.S., this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!”
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