The U.S. military operation against Iran, codenamed Epic Fury, will not be over “in a single night,” U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said at a press conference at the Pentagon on Monday.
The officials declined to specify a timeline for the large-scale joint bombing campaign with Israel. The briefing marked the first public update by senior members of Donald Trump’s administration on the course of the fighting and the first time they answered questions from journalists since the clashes began on Saturday.
“To be clear… this is not a one-off operation designed for a single night,” Caine stressed. Carrying out the military objectives assigned to U.S. Central Command and allied forces, he said, would take time and, in some cases, involve “difficult and exhausting work.” He added that the United States expects further casualties and will, as always, seek to minimize them, recalling the deaths of four American service members.
On the eve of the briefing, President Donald Trump suggested in an interview that the war could last around four weeks. Hegseth declined to comment on that estimate, saying he “never ties an operation to a specific timeline.” “President Trump has full latitude to talk about how long this may take—four weeks, two weeks, six weeks. Timelines can shift both forward and backward,” he said.
In his opening remarks, however, Hegseth sought to draw a clear line between the current campaign and past U.S. interventions in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan, stressing that this was not an “endless war.”