Friday, March 13, 2026
Hegseth’s Boasts of ‘Maximum’ Engagement Authorities Face Scrutiny After School Is Hit
Hegseth’s Boasts of ‘Maximum’ Engagement Authorities Face Scrutiny After School Is Hit
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s disdain for restrictive rules of engagement, aimed at minimizing civilian casualties, is under scrutiny following a U.S. missile strike that destroyed an Iranian elementary school, killing 175 civilians. The strike, intended for a nearby military base, relied on outdated intelligence, raising questions about the Pentagon’s targeting standards and the potential impact of Hegseth’s rhetoric on military culture. Critics argue that minimizing civilian harm is not only a moral imperative but also crucial for strategic success and maintaining international support.
The defense secretary has disparaged restrictive rules for opening fire that are aimed at reducing the risk of mistakes and civilian casualties.
Charlie Savage has written about national security and legal policy for more than two decades. He reported from Washington.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made contempt for what he calls “stupid rules of engagement” — limits meant to reduce risks to civilians — central to his political identity, and has boasted that he unleashed the military to use “maximum authorities on the battlefield” in the Iran war.
“Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly,” Mr. Hegseth said at a briefing four days after the war started. “Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it.”
This and similar statements are now the backdrop to a body of evidence that the destruction of an Iranian elementary school during the opening hours of the war was likely caused by an American missile strike. The preliminary finding of an ongoing military investigation has determined that the United States was responsible, The New York Times has reported.
The destruction of the school, which coincided with an attack on an adjacent Iranian naval base, killed about 175 civilians, most of them children, according to Iranian officials.
Long before this war, Mr. Hegseth’s opposition to stricter versions of limits on what U.S. forces need to see and know about a potential target before they may open fire drew criticism. Retired commanders argue that the point of such constraints is not just law, morality and honor, but strategic self-interest. Mistakes that kill civilians stoke anti-Americanism — alienating allies, creating new enemies and making wars harder to win.
“You don’t want to turn the entire population against the United States,” said Mark Hertling, a retired three-star Army general. “If you are bombing indiscriminately — like may have happened on several occasions, to include the girls’ school — that would negate any opportunity to have a positive regime change.”
Pressed about the incident as the details have gradually come to light, Mr. Hegseth has repeatedly responded by saying the matter is under investigation and stressing that the United States does not target civilians.
“We’re certainly investigating,” Mr. Hegseth said on Saturday, for example, standing behind President Trump on Air Force One. “But the only — the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
But the issue is not targeting civilians — such as a situation in which an armed force deliberately attacks a civilian building knowing full well what it is, because it wants and intends to kill civilians.
If the United States attacked the building under the mistaken belief that it was a military facility, the issue is instead how strict or lax the rules of engagement in Mr. Hegseth’s Pentagon were for identifying and verifying the nature of a potential target.
What standards of certainty were imposed on planners for the strikes for vetting and validating potential targets? Does Mr. Hegseth’s repeated statement that he gave the military “maximum authority on the battlefield,” compared with the practice in past wars, mean the standards were formally lowered? Whatever the rules were on paper, did such comments contribute to a culture of moving faster and with less care — of “no hesitation,” in his words — among the planners, resulting in negligence or recklessness?
The school was next door to an Iranian military base full of buildings that were destroyed by precision missile strikes. The school building was once part of that base, before it was fenced off between 2013 and 2016 and converted to civilian use. Officials familiar with the preliminary findings of the official investigation said the strike relied on outdated intelligence and questions remained about why it had not been double checked.
The Pentagon press office declined to comment, saying only that “the incident is under investigation.” It also declined to say who is conducting the investigation.
Usually, the Navy would perform an after-action review of strikes involving Tomahawks fired from a naval vessel, which would ultimately go to Mr. Hegseth for review and approval.
In theory, the Pentagon’s inspector general could conduct a more independent inquiry. But Mr. Trump last year fired the experienced watchdog there, and recently installed as a replacement a former political appointee from his first administration with no prior experience doing inspector general work, Platte B. Moring III.
Last month, Mr. Moring froze a staff proposal to evaluate targeting practices and procedures in the military attacks on boats the administration says are suspected of smuggling drugs, saying he wanted to consult department leadership. He also told staff that it sounded like such a project could be highly political, according to a person briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
His office noted it has not publicly announced any projects related to the Iran war operation and declined to comment on the status of the boat strike matter.
Challenging guardrails
“War is hell,” as Mr. Hegseth frequently points out. But traditionally, American military leadership has expressed concern about the risk of civilian casualties. Especially during the counterinsurgency efforts of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, when U.S. and allied commanders realized that winning local cooperation was key, they imposed rules of engagement that the military considered to be more restrictive than the minimum guardrails required by the laws of war.
The Pentagon’s own law-of-war manual states that the military, in planning and conducting attacks, must “in good faith based on the information available at the time, take feasible precautions to verify that the person or object is a military objective.” It also notes that “policymakers may choose to apply heightened standards of identification, greater than those required by the law of war, to reduce the risk of incidental harm in conducting an attack.”
Mr. Hegseth thinks differently. He has tried to reshape Pentagon culture, reveling in lethality with “no apologies, no hesitation.” He has portrayed this approach as a “warrior ethos,” one that is tough and manly.
He came up as an Army infantry officer and, as he wrote in his 2024 memoir “The War on Warriors,” loathed strict rules of engagement imposed to minimize risk to civilians, seeing heightened standards for when his platoon could open fire as putting soldiers at greater risk on the battlefield. He blamed judge advocate general lawyers, or JAGs, for such rules — even though it is commanders, not lawyers, who issue them.
Mr. Hegseth later continued that line of thinking as a Fox News contributor and host and as an advocate for U.S. service members charged with war crimes. In his 2024 book, he questioned the need to obey the Geneva Conventions and derisively referred to military lawyers as “jagoffs.”
After Mr. Trump appointed him to lead the Defense Department, Mr. Hegseth fired the top JAGs for the military services and shuttered Pentagon offices that focused on preventing and responding to civilian harm during U.S. combat operations.
For the first few days of the war in Iran, when details about the school strike were murky, Mr. Hegseth boasted at briefings about how he had dialed the rules of engagement down to a minimum.
Unlike traditional American allies “who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force,” he said on March 2, the United States was using force on its own terms “with maximum authorities — no stupid rules of engagement.”
It was two days later that he described his rules of engagement as unleashing, not shackling, American power, saying the pilots and operators conducting airstrikes were “controlling the skies, picking targets — death and destruction from the sky all day long.”
On March 5, he said that “the dumb, politically correct wars of the past were the opposite of what we’re doing here” because they were fought “with restrictive, minimalist rules of engagement,” but in this one, engagement authorities were “maxed out.”
But as more facts have emerged about the school, Mr. Hegseth has softened his tone. At a press briefing on Tuesday, while he still described the mission as “maximum authority,” he did not specifically mention more permissive rules of engagement. Instead, he emphasized and praised precautions to protect civilians.
“Seeing it from the inside every single day, including this, no nation takes more precautions to ensure there’s never targeting of civilians than the United States of America,” he said, adding: “No nation in the history of warfare has ever attempted in every way possible to avoid civilian casualties. And frankly, that’s a point that just isn’t appreciated enough.”
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.“
Weakened by War, Iran Hits Back by Strangling a Vital Waterway
Weakened by War, Iran Hits Back by Strangling a Vital Waterway
“Iran is retaliating against the US and Israel by threatening shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for global oil exports. This has led to surging oil prices and slowed global trade, complicating US calculations about ending the war. The US is preparing to provide naval escorts and plan anti-mine operations, but analysts warn that a lasting solution requires diplomatic efforts.
The threats to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz are complicating President Trump’s calculations about how and when to end the war.
Nearly two weeks after the United States and Israel attacked Iran with an extraordinary display of firepower, Iran has found a way to inflict pain back on its enemies by strangling one of the world’s most vital waterways.
By threatening shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, attacking tankers in an Iraqi port and beginning to lay mines in the strait, Iran has sent oil prices surging and slowed global trade. It has also made clear that it is intent on using what advantages it has to sap the will of the United States to sustain the war.
The Iranian tactics have forced the United States to prepare to provide naval escorts for shipping traffic through the strait and to plan for anti-mine operations even as American forces target what is left of the Iranian navy, including Iranian mine-laying vessels.
On Thursday, Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader of Iran, sent the regime’s clearest signal yet that it would continue to endanger commercial shipping in the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil was passing before the war began.
“Certainly, the lever of closing the Strait of Hormuz must continue to be used,” Mr. Khamenei said in his first statement since being chosen to succeed his father, who was killed in an airstrike at the start of the war.
Iran, analysts say, is demonstrating that even in a weakened state, it can inflict significant economic and military damage on the United States. That further complicates President Trump’s calculations about how and when to end the war and how to deal with a post-conflict Iran.
“This war isn’t only about what happens in the current cycle,” said Caitlin Talmadge, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has long studied security issues in the Persian Gulf. “It is about re-establishing Iranian deterrence for the next war.”
Asymmetric Warfare
Geography makes the Strait of Hormuz well suited for Iran’s asymmetric warfare — its effort to impose costs on a more powerful foe. The main route for exports from the Persian Gulf, the strait is roughly 20 miles wide at its narrowest point and skirts Iran’s southern border. That allows Iran to combine tactics to stop traffic in the strait, using small boats and submarines, unmanned watercraft, an array of naval mines and the ability to fire from land.
American military planners have prepared for decades for the possibility that Iran could try to close the strait. The Houthis, a Yemeni group backed by Iran, used missiles and drones to disrupt maritime commerce in the Red Sea after the start of Israel’s war in Gaza. The costly U.S. military campaign last year to try to stop those attacks was a harbinger of the challenge in relying on air and naval power to secure waterways in the Middle East.
“The Strait of Hormuz is a difficult, almost impossible, problem to solve through military means alone,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, who served as a senior air strategist in the Middle East in the 2000s.
At the time, General Hinote was asked to study military approaches to Iranian aggression, including a scenario in which Iran attacked shipping in the strait. His team concluded that while the United States could use advanced sensors and precision strikes to mitigate Iranian attacks, they could not stop them completely. The shipping lanes are too narrow, and the vessels are too vulnerable to a mix of rockets, missiles and swarms of small craft.
The only way militarily to guarantee the waterway is open — to move from mitigation to control — would be to take and hold the Iranian territory bordering the strait, he said.
“It would require large numbers of ground forces to seize the coast,” General Hinote said. “Short of that, the only lasting solution to the strait is a diplomatic one.”
Mr. Trump said last week that the Navy could escort tankers through the strait. But Chris Wright, the energy secretary, told CNBC on Thursday that the Navy was not yet ready to carry out such an operation.
“It’ll happen relatively soon, but it can’t happen now,” Mr. Wright said. “We’re simply not ready.” He added that “all of our military assets right now are focused on destroying” Iran’s military resources and its ability to manufacture them in the future.
Before any escort operation, the United States would need at least several more days of an air campaign against Iran’s military assets threatening the strait, including minelayers, the regular Iranian navy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s fast boats, short-range missiles and mobile missiles and launchers, a senior U.S. military official said.
And even after that, the official warned, it is likely to be challenging to coax shipping companies to resume their operations if Iranians still threaten to shoot at commercial ships.
Markets in Turmoil
Iran’s strategy shows signs of careful planning.
For years, the common wisdom among military analysts was that Iran would not close the strait because it needed it open to export its own oil. But shipping analysts say that in recent days, Iran has been loading oil and exporting it through the strait. Since March 1, at least 10 tankers and gas carriers have left Iran and gone through the strait, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a shipping analysis firm. All of them were loaded, said Tomer Raanan, a maritime risk analyst at Lloyd’s List.
“Iran is still getting its oil and gas out to market through Hormuz,” he said.
More than 80 percent of oil and gas exports through the strait go to Asia, threatening severe supply shocks for many countries there. But Iran’s most important customer, China, protected itself before the conflict by increasing its oil stockpile. China imported 15.8 percent more oil in January and February than in the same period last year, according to customs data the country released on Tuesday.
China’s strategic stockpile contains roughly 1.2 billion barrels, or about 115 days of its seaborne crude imports, according to Kpler, a global ship tracking firm.
The United States and Israel, meanwhile, are dominating Iran’s airspace. It is possible that their attacks pressure Iran to stop its threats on shipping and seek a truce. Mr. Trump has predicted that oil prices “will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over,” and argued that higher energy prices are “a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace.”
Oil futures on Thursday settled above $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022. That was up from about $70 before the start of the war, and Mr. Wright, in a television interview, did not rule out the possibility of $200 oil.
Mining the Strait
Iran’s decision to start mining the strait injects yet another risk. The United States Central Command said Thursday that the number of mine-laying vessels it had attacked was up to 30. But on Thursday, Iran began using smaller boats — of which the I.R.G.C. has hundreds, if not thousands — for its mining operation, according to a U.S. official briefed on the intelligence.
It could be hugely expensive, and dangerous, for the U.S. Navy to have to conduct what would most likely be a weekslong mine-clearing operation in the Strait of Hormuz, according to military officials. They said that clearing the strait could also put American sailors directly in harm’s way. And the military would need to make difficult choices about sending warships into the strait that are now being used to support the offensive mission against Iran.
The Strait of Hormuz has been a flashpoint before, including in 1988 during Iran’s war with Iraq, when Iran planted mines in the strait. The Reagan administration offered protection to Kuwaiti tankers by registering them in the United States, providing the legal justification to protect them with military assets like Navy warships.
But analysts say that conditions in the current war are different. Ship operators appear more cautious these days, said Rosemary Kelanic, a director at Defense Priorities, a research organization that favors restraint in foreign policy. “I do get the sense that norms have changed just in terms of what companies are willing to do, what they’re willing to risk,” she said.
And others who have studied the attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf during the 1980s say Iran is far more dangerous now than it was then. “You cannot extrapolate from that war to this war,” said Martin Navias, the co-author of “Tanker Wars: The Assault on Merchant Shipping During the Iran-Iraq Crisis.”
For American foreign policy, one of the biggest casualties of the Strait of Hormuz crisis could be the strength of the alliance with Gulf Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The geopolitical aftershocks could prompt Gulf countries to seek to rebuild ties with Iran even if it remains adversarial to the United States.
“The big conclusion from some of our Gulf allies, once they’re out of this, is that they need a more permanent arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. The countries would seek to reduce their dependence in the strait on security provided by the United States, he predicted, “a country that has so much military power but sometimes doesn’t have the strategic focus and reliability that they wish.”
Helene Cooper, John Ismay, Eric Schmitt and Megan Mineiro contributed reporting.
Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.
Peter Eavis reports on the business of moving stuff around the world.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military for The Times.“1st
Thursday, March 12, 2026
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Mojtaba Khamenei was hurt in strike that killed his father, Iran’s Cyprus ambassador confirms
Mojtaba Khamenei was hurt in strike that killed his father, Iran’s Cyprus ambassador confirms
“Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was injured in the February 28th attack that killed his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and six other family members. The attack targeted the presidential complex in Tehran during US-led airstrikes. Mojtaba Khamenei is reportedly recovering in the hospital and has not appeared in public since the attack.
Alireza Salarian says Iran’s new supreme leader was lucky to survive strike that killed six of his family members
Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was injured in the 28 February attack that killed six of his family members, including his father, Tehran’s ambassador to Cyprus has confirmed.
In an interview conducted at his embassy compound in Nicosia, Alireza Salarian elaborated on the circumstances in which Khamenei, 56, was injured, saying he was lucky to survive the strike, which levelled the late ayatollah’s residence.
“He was also there and he was injured in that bombardment but I haven’t seen that reflected in the foreign news,” he told the Guardian. “I have heard that he was injured in his legs and hand and arm … I think he is in the hospital because he is injured.”
Explaining why the cleric had not appeared in public or made any statements since he succeeded his father on Sunday, he added: “I don’t think he is comfortable [in any condition] to give a speech.”
The attack occurred on the opening day of US-led airstrikes against Iran, when the sprawling presidential complex in the heart of Tehran was targeted. It was the 10th day of the holy month of Ramadan, said the ambassador, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was at his residence with several members of his family, including Mojtaba’s wife, Zahra, and his teenage son, Mohammad Bagher, who were also killed in the attack.
Iranian media reports suggested that Ali Khamenei’s wife, Mansour, died three days after the aerial strike.
“The [late] supreme leader was killed with his wife, with his daughter, with his son-in-law and with his daughter’s 14-month-old baby,” said Salarian, who was in Iran when the US-led offensive began. “They were inside their house near the presidential office. Top commanders were also killed as they were also invited. The supreme leader had four sons and two daughters and actually he lived in the same place where he worked.”
On Wednesday Yousef Pezeshkian, a top government adviser and the son of Iran’s president, had said Mojtaba Khamenei was wounded but stopped short of explaining how. In a post on his Telegram channel, he wrote: “I heard news that Mr Mojtaba Khamenei had been injured. I have asked some friends who had connections. They told me that, thank God, he is safe and sound.” An Iranian official on Wednesday told Reuters that Khamenei was “lightly injured” but still continuing to operate.
Earlier this week Iranian state TV described the regime’s new leader as a “wounded veteran of the Ramadan war” but did not specify his injuries.
The US president, Donald Trump, called Mojtaba Khamenei’s election by an 88-member committee of clerics “an unacceptable choice”, adding: “He is not going to last long.”
Israel has warned it will not hesitate to assassinate the Shia cleric, thought to be as hardline as his father, who had held the post for 37 years after the Islamic revolution.
Salarian told the Guardian the late ayatollah “had not wanted his son” to replace him. “High-ranking clergymen did ask him but the late supreme leader said ‘no’ because he didn’t want a dynastic system. He was elected. [After the attack] top-ranking clergymen said: ‘This is your job; you have to obey.’”
Western intelligence services believe the new leader is being deliberately kept out of the public eye for fear of an assassination attempt. “I don’t know if he [the new leader] is worried or not, but we know that the US, and especially Israel, will target him,” the ambassador said.“
How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War
How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War
“President Trump and his advisers underestimated Iran’s aggressive response to the U.S.-Israeli attack, leading to a significant disruption in global oil markets. Despite warnings from some advisers, Trump prioritized the mission to dismantle the Iranian regime over potential economic consequences. The administration’s lack of a clear strategy for the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping lane, has exacerbated the crisis, causing oil prices to spike and prompting concerns about the war’s long-term impact.
In the lead-up to the U.S.-Israeli attack, President Trump downplayed the risks to the energy markets as a short-term concern that should not overshadow the mission to decapitate the Iranian regime.
On Feb. 18, as President Trump weighed whether to launch military attacks on Iran, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, told an interviewer he was not concerned that the looming war might disrupt oil supplies in the Middle East and wreak havoc in energy markets.
Even during the Israeli and U.S. strikes against Iran last June, Mr. Wright said, there had been little disruption in the markets. “Oil prices blipped up and then went back down,” he said. Some of Mr. Trump’s other advisers shared similar views in private, dismissing warnings that — the second time around — Iran might wage economic warfare by closing shipping lanes carrying roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.
The extent of that miscalculation was laid bare in recent days, as Iran threatened to fire at commercial oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which all ships must pass on their way out of the Persian Gulf. In response to the Iranian threats, commercial shipping has come to a standstill in the Gulf, oil prices have spiked, and the Trump administration has scrambled to find ways to tamp down an economic crisis that has triggered higher gasoline prices for Americans.
The episode is emblematic of how much Mr. Trump and his advisers misjudged how Iran would respond to a conflict that the government in Tehran sees as an existential threat. Iran has responded far more aggressively than it did during last June’s 12-day war, firing barrages of missiles and drones at U.S. military bases, cities in Arab nations across the Middle East, and on Israeli population centers.
U.S. officials have had to adjust plans on the fly, from hastily ordering the evacuation of embassies to developing policy proposals to reduce gas prices.
After Trump administration officials gave a closed-door briefing to lawmakers on Tuesday, Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said on social media that the administration had no plan for the Strait of Hormuz and did “not know how to get it safely back open.”
Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war. But they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.
Mr. Trump has laid out maximalist goals like insisting that Iran name a leader who will submit to him, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have described narrower and more tactical objectives that could provide an off-ramp in the near term.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the administration “had a strong game plan” before the war broke out, and vowed that oil prices would drop after it ended.
“The purposeful disruption in the oil market by the Iranian regime is short term, and necessary for the long-term gain of wiping out these terrorists and the threat they pose to America and the world,” she said in a statement.
This article is based on interviews with a dozen U.S. officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations.
‘Show Some Guts’
Mr. Hegseth acknowledged on Tuesday that Iran’s ferocious response against its neighbors caught the Pentagon somewhat off guard. But he insisted that Iran’s actions were backfiring.
“I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility,” Mr. Hegseth said at a Pentagon news conference. “I think it was a demonstration of the desperation of the regime.”
Mr. Trump has displayed growing frustration over how the war is disrupting the oil supply, telling Fox News that oil tanker crews should “show some guts” and sail through the Strait of Hormuz.
Some military advisers did warn before the war that Iran could launch an aggressive campaign in response, and would view the U.S.-Israeli attack as a threat to its existence. But other advisers remained confident that killing Iran’s senior leadership would lead to more pragmatic leaders taking over who might bring an end to the war.
When Mr. Trump was briefed about risks that oil prices could rise in the event of war, he acknowledged the possibility but downplayed it as a short-term concern that should not overshadow the mission to decapitate the Iranian regime. He directed Mr. Wright and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to work on developing options for a potential spike in prices.
But the president did not speak publicly about these options — including political risk insurance backed by the U.S. government, and the potential of U.S. Navy escorts — until more than 48 hours after the conflict started. The escorts have not yet taken place.
Mr. Wright, the energy secretary, caused a market commotion Tuesday when he posted on social media that the Navy had successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. His post drove up stocks and reassured oil markets. Then, when he deleted the post after administration officials said no escorts had taken place, markets were once again thrust into turmoil.
Efforts to resume shipments have been complicated by intelligence that Iran was preparing to lay mines in the strait, one U.S. official said. The Iranian operation was only in its earliest stages, but the preparatory efforts spooked the Trump administration. The U.S. military said on Tuesday evening that its forces had attacked 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near the strait.
As the conflict has roiled global markets, Republicans in Washington have grown concerned about rising oil prices damaging their efforts to sell an economic agenda to voters ahead of the midterm elections.
Mr. Trump, both publicly and privately, has been arguing that Venezuelan oil could help solve any shocks coming from the Iran war. The administration announced on Tuesday a new refinery in Texas that officials said could help increase oil supply, ensuring that Iran does not cause any long-term damage to oil markets.
A Potential Off-Ramp
The confidence that White House officials had that the shipping lanes could stay open is surprising given that Mr. Trump authorized a military campaign last year against the Houthis, a Yemeni group backed by Iran, that had used missile and drone attacks to bring maritime commerce in the Red Sea to a halt.
In a social media post last March announcing he had authorized military strikes against the Houthis, Mr. Trump said that the attacks had cost the global economy billions of dollars, and that “no terrorist force will stop American commercial and naval vessels from freely sailing the Waterways of the World.”
But since the start of the war in Iran, Mr. Trump has not offered a consistent message. In private, his aides have said they feel frustration over his lack of discipline in communicating the objectives of the military campaign to the public.
Mr. Trump has said both that the war could go on for more than a month and that it was “very complete, pretty much.” He also said the United States would “go forward more determined than ever.”
Mr. Rubio and Mr. Hegseth, however, appear to have coordinated their messaging for now on three discrete goals that they began laying out in public remarks on Monday and Tuesday.
“The goals of this mission are clear,” Mr. Rubio said at a State Department event on Monday before Mr. Trump held his own news conference. “It is to destroy the ability of this regime to launch missiles, both by destroying their missiles and their launchers; destroy the factories that make these missiles; and destroy their navy.”
The State Department even laid out the three goals in bullet-point fashion, and highlighted a video clip of Mr. Rubio stating them on an official social media account.
The presentation by Mr. Rubio, who is also the White House national security adviser, appeared to be setting the stage for the president to bring an end to the war sooner rather than later. In his news conference, Mr. Trump boasted of how the U.S. military had already destroyed Iran’s ballistic missile capability and its navy. But he also warned of even more aggressive action if Iranian leaders tried to cut off the world’s energy supply.
Matthew Pottinger, who was a deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration, said in an interview that Mr. Trump had indicated he could decide to pursue ambitious war goals that would take weeks at least.
“In his press conference, I could hear him circling back to a rationale for fighting a bit longer given that the regime is still signaling it won’t be deterred and is still trying to control the Strait of Hormuz,” said Mr. Pottinger, now the chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group that advocates a close U.S. partnership with Israel and confrontation with Iran.
“He doesn’t want to have to fight a ‘sequel’ war,” Mr. Pottinger added.
The search for pathways out of the war has gained urgency since the weekend, as global oil prices surge and as the United States burns through costly munitions. Pentagon officials said in recent closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill that the military used up $5.6 billion of munitions in the first two days of the war alone, according to three congressional officials. That is a far larger amount and munitions burn rate than had been publicly disclosed. The Washington Post reported on the figure on Monday.
Iranian officials have remained defiant, saying they will use their leverage over the world’s oil supply to force the United States and Israel to blink.
“Strait of Hormuz will either be a Strait of peace and prosperity for all,” Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security official, said in a social media post on Tuesday. “Or it will be a Strait of defeat and suffering for warmongers.”
Reporting was contributed by Julian E. Barnes, Michael Crowley, Eric Schmittand Catie Edmondson.
Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.“
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