President Donald Trump on Sunday said Operation Epic Fury would continue against Iran “until all of our objectives are achieved,” estimating it could last “four weeks or less,” while acknowledging the possibility of additional American casualties.
While the operation won't be as quick as the one in which U.s. forces captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, it also won't be what the left media is insisting is another "endless" war, Trump's team said.
The U.S. military remains “laser-focused” on key objectives: dismantling Iran’s missile production, crippling its naval forces, and destroying security infrastructure linked to its nuclear program, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said at a Pentagon press conference on Monday.
“We set the terms of this war from start to finish. Our ambitions are not utopian. They are realistic, scoped to our interests and the defense of our people and our allies,” Hegseth said.
“This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both — our generation knows better, and so does this President. He called the last 20 years of nation-building wars dumb, and he’s right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission: Destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy, no nukes.”
The Pentagon has confirmed four U.S. service members have been killed, three in Kuwait over the weekend and one in a strike on a tactical command center. A separate “friendly fire incident” in Kuwait resulted in three U.S. F-15 fighter jets being shot down, though all crew members survived.
Trump said Monday that he is not ruling out sending U.S. ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary.”
In an interview with the New York Post, Trump said: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it. I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’ ”
Trump said the operation was moving faster than expected and had already achieved key objectives.
“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” Trump told the Post. “We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership — 49 killed — and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day.”
The president said he made the final decision to strike following what he described as unsuccessful diplomatic efforts in Geneva last week.
“We had very serious negotiations, and they were there, and then they pulled back,” Trump said, referring to Iranian representatives. He indicated that U.S. intelligence concluded Teheran was resuming nuclear work at undisclosed sites.
“They wanted to make a nuclear weapon, so we destroyed them completely, but we found they were in a totally different site — totally different — because the sites that we took out were permanent,” Trump told The Post. “They tried to use them, but they were totally, as I said correctly before, obliterated, right?
"So then we found them working on a totally different area, a totally different site, in order to make a nuclear weapon through enrichment — so it was just time.”
“I said, ‘Let’s go.’ ”
🚨 SCOTT JENNINGS DROPS TRUTH: "Missiles. Nuclear ambitions. Terrorism. It stops now because TRUMP had the guts to do it."
"Trump isn’t starting a war - he’s ending a regime at war with the US & Western Civilization for 47 years. May God rest the souls of the Americans who gave… pic.twitter.com/GVfl2yQIzN — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 2, 2026
