An interceptor missile fired by Israel strikes an incoming Iranian ballistic missile as seen through tree branches looking straight up, over Moshav Beit Zayit, just outside Jerusalem, on the fifth day of the USA-Israel war on Iran on Wednesday. Photo by Jim Hollander/UPI | License Photo
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine announced that the U.S. military has greater control over Iranian airspace and will launch a major bombing campaign in a press conference Wednesday.
“More and larger waves are coming. We are just getting started. We are accelerating, not decelerating,” Hegseth said. “Iran’s capabilities are evaporating by the hour, while American strength grows fiercer, smarter and utterly dominant.”
“More bombers, fighters are arriving just today. And now with complete control of the skies, we will be using 500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound GPS-and-laser-guided precision gravity bombs, which we have a nearly unlimited stockpile,” he added.
Caine clarified that the strikes so far have lowered Iran’s defenses enough to clear skies for bombing, and that the military would start using GPS-aided free-fall weapons and Hellfire missiles.
“This will allow the joint force to deliver significantly increased precision effects on the target. The throttle is coming up, as the secretary said, as opposed to ramping down,” he said. “This will allow us to maintain consistent pressure on the adversary over the coming days, disrupt their launch timelines and impose costs every day around the clock.”
Hegseth confirmed that a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian warship named after Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani was killed in a drone strike in 2020 that Trump ordered.
Caine said it was the first time since 1945 that a U.S. Navy submarine “sunk an enemy combatant ship using a single Mark 48 torpedo to achieve immediate effect, sending the warship to the bottom of the sea.”
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday that the original plan to attack Iran was scheduled for the middle of the year, but “due to developments and circumstances,” it was moved up, ABC News reported.
Those circumstances were “mainly what happened inside Iran, and the position of the President of the United States, and the whole possibility of creating a combined operation here, then the need arose to bring everything forward to February,” Katz told intelligence soldiers.
Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, issued a warning to the United States and Israel in a post on X, saying that killing Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “will exact a heavy price from you.”
“Mr. Trump, with Netanyahu’s clownish antics, dragged the American people into an unfair war with Iran,” Larijani said on X. “Now let him do the math: with over 500 American troops killed (in these past few days), is it still ‘America First,’ or ‘Israel First’? The saga continues.”
“The martyrdom of Imam Khamenei will exact a heavy price from you. God willing,” he added.
The U.S. has lost six American soldiers so far, the U.S. Central Command has said.
The Iranian Red Crescent Society told Iran’s SNN news agency Wednesday that at least 940 people have been killed in Iran.
Hegseth said at the press conference Wednesday that recent negotiations with Iran didn’t work because Iran had no intention of finding a way forward without a nuclear bomb.
“The evidence in front of us since the 12-day war was that Iran had no intention of actually negotiating a nuclear deal that truly meant they did not have a pathway to the nuclear bomb,” Hegseth said.
He said that negotiators, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, “poured into that negotiation, giving them every single possible opportunity to release that ambition, and they didn’t. And the intelligence that we saw [showed] they didn’t intend to do it in good faith — that they had the intentions eventually to get to a place where they could have a conventional shield to block their nuclear capabilities.”
Iran continues to launch attacks on U.S. ground assets in the region, including killing six American troops in Kuwait and targeting U.S. embassies.
Caine said Iran had fired more than 500 ballistic missiles and more than 2,000 drones at Israel and Gulf states with U.S. bases.
This week in Washington
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is sworn-in during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on Minnesota’s welfare fraud scandal at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. The hearing marks Walz first official appear in the federal probe examining the alleged misuse of federal funds intended for Minnesota social services and Medicaid programs. Photo by Annabelle Gordon/UPI | License Photo
