President Trump said in an interview with The New York Post on Monday that he won’t rule out sending troops into Iran as the war the US and Israel launched against the Islamic Republic on Saturday morning continues to rage.
“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,” Trump told the paper. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.'”
Earlier in the day, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth held a press briefing with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, where he also refused to rule out sending troops into Iran and went on a tangent about how the US military doesn’t need to brief the American people on its plans.
When asked if there were currently US “boots on the ground” in Iran, Hegseth said, “No, but we’re not going to go into the exercise of what we will or will not do. I think it’s one of those fallacies for a long time that this department or presidents or others should tell the American people this — and our and our enemies, by the way — here’s exactly what we’ll do.”
Hegseth also contradicted Trump’s earlier remarks by saying it was not a “regime change war,” but he added that the “regime sure did change,” though the Iranian government remains intact despite the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which hasn’t slowed the Iranian military’s response.
While insisting the US wouldn’t get into an open-ended conflict or “quagmire” in Iran, Hegseth did not directly answer when asked what the administration’s “exit strategy ” is, as neither he nor Trump has clearly defined the goal. “As far as time frame, I would never hang a time frame from our perspective. The commander-in-chief sets the tempo and terms of this fight,” he said.
Trump previously estimated that the war could last four to five weeks, but said on Monday that the US has the capability to go “far longer” than that.
Caine said during the briefing with Hegseth that the US was deploying more troops and fighter jets into the region. “This work is just beginning and will continue,” he said.
