Hegseth’s comments at a Wednesday morning Pentagon press conference echoed a line of reasoning offered earlier this week by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose rationales have shifted, expanded, and come in for criticism by U.S. officials, regional experts, and lawmakers with access to classified information.

“The evidence in front of us since the 12-day war [of June 2025] was that Iran had no intention of actually negotiating a nuclear deal,” Hegseth said, though he did not clarify why there was a concern about Iran’s nuclear program after the administration had repeatedly touted its “obliteration” as recently as Trump’s State of the Union address in February. 

The U.S. military has been targeting Iran’s short-range ballistic missile capabilities and its navy “to prevent them from threatening the U.S. forces, partners and interests in the region,” Hegseth said.

“They've been killing Americans for 47 years, thousands of missiles pointed at us. They have ongoing nuclear ambitions, and they're at the weakest they've ever been,” he said. “What makes the most sense was to do this to ensure that the narrow objectives we have, of ensuring they never have a nuclear weapon, have a maximum effect.”

During his remarks, Hegseth acknowledged the six U.S. service members who have been killed during the operation so far, saying, “we will avenge them, no doubt,” before moving on to a metaphor about Iran as a football team with no plays left to call.

Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, took on the task of reading the names of the four dead Army Reserve soldiers who have been identified so far. The Pentagon has not released an update of total injuries thus far. 

“To our wounded warriors and their loved ones, we will never forget your sacrifice,” Caine said. “Our nation stands with you, and we are eternally grateful for your courage, your resiliency, your devotion to this mission and to our nation.”

Since Saturday, Iran’s use of ballistic missiles has dropped 86 percent, Caine said, with a 23-percent decrease in the past day. Their one-way attack drone strikes are down 73 percent since the weekend, he added. 

The drop in activity has allowed the U.S. to secure the air space along Iran’s coast, allowing strikes to “expand inland,” he said.

“I know there have been a lot of questions about munitions. We have sufficient precision munitions for the task at hand, both on the offense and defense,” Caine said. “But I want to tell you, teammates, as a matter of practice, I don't want to be talking about quantities, and I know there's been a great debate about that. I appreciate the interest, but just know that we consider that an operational security matter.”

The U.S. has hit more than 2,000 targets, he said, and destroyed more than 20 Iranian vessels, including one sunk by a U.S. submarine, the first strike of its kind since 1945.

“Iran, on the other hand, has been indiscriminate and more imprecise in their attacks,” Caine said. “They fired more than 500 ballistic missiles and more than 2,000 drones, striking innocent civilian targets throughout the region.”

Asked whether there was any initial assessment as to who bombed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school on Saturday, killing 160 students, Hegseth would only say that the incident is under investigation.

A year ago, Hegseth moved to dismantle a civilian protection office within the Defense Department that was aimed at reducing collateral deaths during combat operations. 

“Our fighters have maximum authorities, granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it,” the secretary said in his prepared remarks. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly how it should be.”

While internet traffic in Iran itself has dropped precipitously since the U.S. and Israel began their bombing campaign over the weekend, observers with the nonprofit Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center warned that groups aligned with the Iranian regime in other countries may strike vulnerable targets, including government websites, financial services and the energy sectors.

Randy Rose, MS-ISAC’s vice president for security operations and intelligence, said this could at first take the form of “low-level cyber activity” like denial-of-service attacks, website defacement and malicious code injections. And TJ Sayers, MS-ISAC’s senior director of threat intelligence, said those efforts are all part of those hackers’ plans in the event that the regime fell.

“What we are seeing, and this is largely happening from outside of Iran, is hacktivist organizations are basically mobilizing to try to start targeting domestic U.S. and allied networks,” Sayers said during a webinar hosted by MS-ISAC and the Center for Internet Security. “This is largely based upon prior guidance that they've received from Iran, that if a red line was crossed, like the killing of the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei], that they should carry out operations like this, and in some cases, they're even operating autonomously.”

Rose said any cyberattacks would come as part of an “invisible war” waged over the “cyber domain” for the past decade. And there have already been some apparent Iran-linked skirmishes in cyberspace, as a U.S. port was targeted with a DDoS attack by the DieNet group, while the Fatimiyoun Cyber Team, known as FaD Team, claimed to have injected code and released personally identifiable information from a township in the U.S.

Sayers warned governments to stay vigilant, as it appears, based on their observations, that hacking groups are starting to cooperate, rather than work autonomously.

“The hacktivist groups are largely operating independently, but we are starting to see some coalescence of these hacktivist groups to form somewhat of a collective, which would give them a little bit more robust targeting capabilities and kind of help unify their targeting efforts,” he said.

Another worry for U.S. state and local governments could be the potential targeting of physical infrastructure many rely on, including data centers. Two Amazon Web Services data centers were reportedly hit by Iranian drone strikes in the United Arab Emirates, leading to disruptions in various digital and financial services in the region. Those attacks and others in the Middle East led Recorded Future’s Insikt Group to conclude in a blog post that if hostilities in Iran escalate further, “the likelihood of state-sponsored destructive cyber operations against critical infrastructure increases significantly.”

“The targeting profile for the near term includes Israeli media outlets, telecom providers, and SMBs, with US and Gulf organizations in the escalation path,” the blog post continued. Recorded Future also warned that critical infrastructure could be under more threat if hacktivists “shift” their target to it.

And some state and local governments may face supply chain issues in the coming weeks, especially if their technology is Israeli-made, Sayers said. Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz could spark higher energy prices and result in delays of equipment arriving, he added.

One other aspect for governments to monitor is Iran’s efforts to spread disinformation and social media manipulation to try to undermine public opinion on the conflict. And with new technologies available to hackers, including artificial intelligence, Rose warned that those efforts could take on a new dimension.

“Historically, Iran has been a capable [information operations] actor,” he said. “[Right] now, as they're absorbing kinetic losses from conventional warfare, they are pivoting their resources. We're not seeing a ton of information operations right now, but we anticipate those narratives targeting Western public support for the conflict, amplification of imagery, particularly AI-generated deepfake imagery and attempts to fracture the US-Israel coalition, are likely to spike in the coming weeks.”