US. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a stinging rebuke of Iran’s military leadership on Thursday, declaring that the most undesirable position in the world today is that of a senior commander within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, describing every such post as nothing more than a temporary assignment in a rapidly collapsing chain of command.
Speaking at a Pentagon press conference alongside Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, Hegseth used the blunt remark to underscore what he described as the devastating and accelerating degradation of Iran’s military apparatus since the launch of Operation Epic Fury nineteen days prior.
The Secretary painted a picture of systematic destruction, noting that the United States military had struck over 7,000 targets across Iran and its military infrastructure. He was emphatic that this represented not incremental pressure but overwhelming force applied with surgical precision — a campaign that grows in intensity with each passing day.
Hegseth confirmed that Iran’s air defenses had been effectively flattened, and that the factories and production lines feeding the country’s missile and drone programs were being overwhelmingly destroyed. He noted that ballistic missile attacks against American forces had dropped by ninety percent since the opening of the conflict, with one-way attack drone strikes declining by an equivalent margin.
The Secretary was careful to acknowledge that Iran retained some residual capability, noting that the Iranians would continue to fire — but that they would fire considerably more if they still possessed the means to do so. That distinction, he argued, illustrated the scale of what had been achieved.
Borrowing a phrase attributed to World War II Admiral Ernest King, Hegseth told the assembled press that the United States had decided to share the ocean with Iran — giving them, as he put it, the bottom half. He confirmed that more than 120 Iranian naval vessels had been damaged or sunk, with battle damage assessments still pending on additional ships. Iran’s submarine fleet, which once numbered eleven vessels, had been eliminated entirely, and its military ports rendered operationally crippled.
General Caine reinforced the operational picture, confirming that CENTCOM remained fully on plan and unrelenting in its pursuit of Iranian missile capabilities, UAV infrastructure, naval assets, and the country’s defense industrial base. He noted that strike operations were penetrating deeper into Iranian territory each day, with the most recent packages representing the largest yet assembled.
Hegseth closed by reminding both the press and the American public of what was at stake, describing Iran’s core industries not as agriculture or tourism but as state-sponsored terrorism, proxy militias, underground networks, and a violent messianic ideology pursuing an apocalyptic endgame. A regime of that character, he argued, seeking nuclear weapons, posed a direct threat not merely to the region but to the United States and to civilization itself….See More
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