Hegseth goes on attack in Pentagon press briefing on Iran strikes
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday called a rare Pentagon press conference to defend the U.S. strikes on Iran and lambast the media's coverage of the effectiveness of the operation.
Hegseth criticized 'fawning coverage' of early intelligence findings of the impact of Saturday's bombing of three Iranian nuclear facilities – which suggested the strikes did not fully take out Tehran's nuclear program and only set it back by a few months.
'Whether it's fake news CNN, MSNBC or The New York Times, there's been fawning coverage of a preliminary assessment,' Hegseth said during a Pentagon press conference. 'It was preliminary – a day and a half after the actual strike – when it admits itself in writing that it requires weeks to accumulate the necessary data to make such an assessment.'
'There's low confidence in this particular report,' he added.
The Trump administration has pushed back hard at a Defense Intelligence Agency summary that has seemed to refute President Trump's repeated insistence that Iran's nuclear program has been 'obliterated' and set back by years.
Trump on Wednesday disputed the report's findings, calling them incomplete and saying officials were merely guessing.
The DIA findings, initially reported by The New York Times and CNN on Tuesday, found the bombing failed to collapse the deep underground buildings of the Fordow Fuel Enrichment plant and the Natanz Enrichment Complex and likely did not destroy much of Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium, as it was moved before the bombing.
The 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs dropped on Fordow and Natanz — as well as armaments that struck at Iran's Isfahan nuclear site – did significantly damage aboveground structures but left the sites' centrifuges still 'intact,' according to the assessment.
But Hegseth on Thursday framed the reporting as an attack on the American warfighter and Trump, insisting the president 'created the conditions to end the war, decimating – choose your word – obliterating, destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities.'
He also claimed the DIA report was revealed as 'someone had an agenda to try to muddy the waters and make it look like this historic strike wasn't successful.'
'I hope, with all the ink spilled, all of your outlets find the time to properly recognize this historic change in continental security that other presidents tried to do, other presidents talked about,' Hegseth said. 'President Trump accomplished it. It's a huge deal.'
The Pentagon chief leaned heavily on recent statements released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe in seeking to dismiss the DIA assessment.
Ratcliffe a day prior on Wednesday stated that Iran's nuclear program 'has been severely damaged' and specific facilities 'were destroyed,' while Gabbard referred to 'new intelligence' that confirmed Trump's assertion that 'Iran's nuclear facilities have been destroyed.'
Hegseth also refuted claims that enriched uranium was moved from the Iranian facilities prior to the strike.
'I'm not aware of any intelligence that I've reviewed that says things were not where they were supposed to be – moved or otherwise,' Hegseth said when asked about the enriched uranium stockpiles.
Trump has also pushed back hard at the idea the strikes did not destroy the uranium stockpile, insisting on Truth Social on Thursday – directly after Hegseth wrapped up the press conference – that 'Nothing was taken out of facility. Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move.'
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, who appeared alongside Hegseth, said Sunday that initial battle damage assessments indicated the sites 'sustained extremely severe damage and destruction,' but that a full assessment would take time.
Asked about the previous comments and whether he would also describe the sites as 'obliterated,' Caine said the Joint Chiefs 'don't do' battle damage assessments or 'grade its own homework,' referring questions to the intelligence community.
'The IC should be able to help you answer that question,' Caine said. 'They look at a variety, as the secretary has alluded to, they look at a variety of things. I don't do that. They do all, all different sources of intel, which I'd refer you to them to get clarity.'
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The history of moms at work Stay-at-home motherhood is sometimes portrayed as a natural or original state of humanity, something women began to deviate from around, say, the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. In fact, mothers have moved in and out of various kinds of work over the course of American history. 'People treat the 1950s as the conventional ideal,' said Matt Darling, a senior research associate at the policy research firm MEF Associates who has written on mothers in the labor force. But if you go back to the 1800s, most white women and their husbands worked together on farms. 'The household was an economic unit,' Darling said. As the American economy transitioned from agricultural to industrial, Darling has written, more men went to work in factories and more women focused on child care and other work in the home. 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It sounds counterintuitive, but Darling has laid out the case, citing the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin. Essentially, wages began to rise in the years after WWII, especially in fields like office work that were more open to women than factory labor had been. Rising wages gave moms an increasing incentive to work — if they stayed home, they'd be leaving more and more money on the table. (Some research also posits that women are more likely to work outside the home when their potential earnings outstrip the cost of child care.) As Darling put it to me, 'it might not be worth it for me to take a job when it's $10 an hour, but it might be worth it to me when it's $15.' If more women started working in part because of rising wages, then boosting wages even more might incentivize even more women to work. Instead, the only way to get more women to stay home, some say, would be to pay them to do just that. What's the going rate for giving up your career? It's not unheard of: According to the Times, Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) has introduced a bill that would pay stay-at-home parents for providing child care, an approach that's been proposed by some liberals as well. The bill would allow subsidies that currently go to child care providers through the federal Child Care & Development Block Grant to go to family members instead. The idea of compensating family members for providing care isn't new, or unique to Republicans — a number of states, including New Jersey, offer payment for what's known as family, friend, and neighbor care. But subsidy rates tend to be very low, and some family members who receive them say they're not even enough to cover the cost of what children need (like diapers and food), let alone enough to provide someone with a living wage. If you really wanted lots and lots of American moms to leave paid work for stay-at-home care, you'd have to pay them more — a lot more. That's because you're not just replacing their income (which, in 45 percent of cases, pays the majority of bills in the household); you're also working against 75 years of American culture. A hundred years ago, many American women would have been very happy to take money to stay home, said Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at King's College London who writes about gender roles across societies. Their society already idealized (white) stay-at-home motherhood and they gained prestige and status from their role as moms. Today, however, 'women see success and status in having a career.' That success has been very real, and goes beyond pure economics. When American women entered the workplace, they achieved greater independence and the ability to leave bad marriages. Many found new social relationships and new sources of meaning and fulfillment. Women gained more power in society, more seats in Congress and on corporate boards, and more rights (though none of this came without struggle or backlash). In a 2023 McKinsey report on women in the workplace, 80 percent of women said they wanted to be promoted, the same share as men. A full 96 percent said their career was important to them. To get women to drop out of the workforce, then, the government would need to give them enough money to overcome the powerful incentives, both financial and social, that drive them to work. 'Maybe if someone offered me a million, I'd stop doing my Substack,' Evans joked. When I asked Goldin, who won the Nobel in 2023 for her work on women's employment, whether policies like baby bonuses or larger child tax credits would convince moms to stay home, she replied, 'Are we giving them a million dollars?' What if even $1 million isn't enough? Obviously neither Evans nor Goldin has studied whether giving moms a check for $1 million would convince them to stay home with their kids. Even in today's inflationary times, that number is basically a shorthand for a lot of money. The point is, if you want mothers to give up all the benefits they get from working, you're going to have to make it really financially attractive. And that's expensive. If there are about 25 million working moms in the US, giving each one a million dollars would cost the US about $25 trillion, an amount that dwarfs even the $2.8 trillion Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' is projected to cost the country over the next 10 years. Costs grow even more if the $1 million is an annual payout rather than a one-time sum. Paying only moms in the labor force without offering the same sum to moms already caring for kids at home also seems unfair — including the around 9 million stay-at-home moms in the US would boost the total even further. 'There's really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy' And that's all before we factor men into the equation. A two-parent home with a stay-at-home mom requires another person to be the sole breadwinner — according to a lot of socially conservative thinkers, that person should be a man, ideally a husband. But that puts a lot of pressure on young men, many of whom aren't even sure they want to get married, let alone bear the sole financial responsibility for a family, Evans pointed out. 'It's not just about giving women a million,' she said. How much would you have to pay men to go back to a 1950s nuclear family model, in which the entire burden of providing for a family rested on their shoulders? Getting a large number of moms to quit their jobs would also have indirect costs. The 25 million mothers working today are treating patients, teaching kids, selling products, and contributing to the country's GDP in innumerable ways. 'There's really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy,' Holder said. Trump and members of his administration have at times hinted that shrinking the American economy is acceptable if it allows the country to return to its manufacturing past. But tariffs purportedly designed to bring manufacturing jobs back home (and, some hope, bring men back to their former position of dominance in families and society) have been so unpopular that the administration has had to walk many of them back. It's hard to imagine that tanking the economy to get moms back in the home would fare much better. There are also surprisingly popular cultural forces — think tradwife influencers — encouraging women to prioritize stay-at-home motherhood, but it's a campaign that's unlikely to succeed at scale, due to cultural fragmentation and the hyperpersonalization of social media. 'It's much, much harder for, say, government to change people's values' than it might have been in the past, Evans said, 'because we're not all watching the same shows.' There are, of course, other options for supporting American families. If policymakers wanted to help moms with the costs and challenges of raising kids, they could institute national paid leave programs, Holder said. They could also make child care more accessible and affordable. In surveys, a significant minority of moms say the best setup for them would actually be to work part-time. If we wanted to make part-time work easier for parents, we could tackle unpredictable part-time schedules that make it hard for workers, especially at the lower end of the wage spectrum, to balance work and child care, Darling said. All this would probably cost less than $25 trillion. But if what Republicans want is to get moms back in the home, they're going to have to pay up. I will take my million in cash.
