Name: Today will be ‘most intense’ day of US attacks on Iran, says US defence secretary | BBC News
Uploaded: 2026-03-10T23:02:03.000Z
Duration: 8 min 49 s
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US Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth said that today will see the heaviest strikes on Iran since the beginning of the war.

Adverbs of degree

He said Iran had fired its lowest number of missiles during the past 24 hours and that US attacks would continue until it was totally defeated.

As someone who led troops, led soldiers in the streets of Baghdad and Samarra, Iraq, and

who trained counterinsurgents in Kabul, Afghanistan, and

who still carries the weight of brothers lost to Iranian terrorist proxies, many backed by the same Iranian regime we're confronting now.

This fight, Operation Epic Fury, it hits home.

For 47 years, these barbaric savages in the Iranian regime have murdered our brothers in arms.

My guys, your guys, our guys, through their terrorist proxies and cowardly attacks.

Now they race toward a nuclear bomb to hold the world hostage.

The Iranians have targeted and killed thousands of my American brothers that race to a nuclear bomb.

The mullahs are desperate and scrambling like the terrorist cowards they are.

They fire missiles from schools and hospitals deliberately, deliberately targeting innocents because they know their military is being systematically degraded and annihilated.

in some cases, former allies in the Gulf, they've abandoned them and their proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and

Either broken, ineffective or on the sidelines, Iran stands alone and they are badly losing.

We are winning with an overwhelming and unrelenting focus on our objectives, which are the same as the day I gave my first briefing here on Operation Epic Fury.

They're straightforward, and we are executing them with ruthless precision.

One, destroy their missile stockpiles, their missile launchers and their defense industrial base missiles and their ability to make them two, destroyers, their navy, and

three, permanently deny Iran nuclear weapons forever.

It's a laser focused, maximum authority mission delivered with overwhelming and unrelenting precision.

We're crushing the enemy in an overwhelming display of technical skill and military force.

We will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated.

We do so on our timeline and at our choosing.

For example, today will be yet again our most intense day of strikes inside Iran.

The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.

Intelligence more refined and better than ever.

On the other hand, the last 24 hours have seen Iran fire the lowest number of missiles they've been capable of firing yet.

Just a bifurcation, just the trend lines that we talked about on our first briefing, you see, this is not 2003.

This is not endless nation building under those types of quagmires we saw under Bush, under or Obama.

Our generation of soldier will not let that happen again and nor will this President who very clearly ran against those kinds of never ending, nebulously scoped missions.

Instead we're winning decisively with brutal efficiency, total air dominance and an unbreakable will to accomplish the President's objectives.

On our timeline, we stay locked on the target because here at the Department of War that's our job.

Now the Chairman and I, having just returned from Dover last night, our troops and their families and the enormous sacrifice that they make is certainly heavy on my mind.

Well, Patrick Burey, defence expert at the University of Bath, says the war objectives that we just heard being set out there by the US to towards Iran are realistic.

I think the good news is from what we're receiving from different Ministry of Defenses in the region, so Israel, all the GCC countries that have been targeted and then the updates provided by General Kaine, they kind of tally, you know, in terms of what we're looking at.

And if we're just looking at the ballistic missile launches and the drone launches and say for the first day of the campaign there was about 3, 350 or so ballistic missile launches and 300 drone launches, then the next day it was about 180 missile launches and about 500 drone launches.

But since then they've been going down at an attrition rate of about 50% until it's got down to the low teens.

And so this is exactly tallying with what General Kane is telling us now.

Of course some people are saying, well they're keeping some in reserve.

But given if you're a commander inside Iran and the risks that involves of trying to hide and keep a sort of second reserve salvo, for example, but

So I think and again what General Kaine said is there now.

Now it sounds like that is local air superiority means over a period of time and over a certain area you can have air superiority.

Now it sounds like they're moving towards air supremacy.

They can operate with impunity in the air and then once you can do that, of course your intelligence and surveillance and your targeting gets much better as you fill it with drones, etc.

So your granularity and you actually start to see more targets at the lower level, especially in terms of drone launches, which are harder to detect and the supply chains and all behind that.

So I think in general it's tallying with what we're seeing.

The battle damage assessments, of course, are all classified, etc.

It's interesting to see a lot of the companies which actually provide the open source satellite imagery are now not providing it for numerous different reasons, we think, but

also because the US had been targeted quite efficiently in some areas as well, by the Iranian drones in particular.

So, Patrick, when Pete Hegseth comes up with his objectives and number one is destroy the ballistic and drone technology.

Number three is destroyed the defense industrial base in Iran.

The longer they have persistent air cover, the better picture they get.

And this is, you know, we're probably entering the end of phase one now and more into phase two, where they'll flood the bubbles, as it were, and

try to get the bubbles, as it were, as they put over with all the assets which, which give them the, the intelligence and surveillance and the radar and then the strike packages and then your, you know, the AI systems which that is complementing the targeting behind that, getting those bubbles to join up.

And I think they'll have given the political pressure and the economic pressure rising on the one hand, you know, we saw over the weekend especially and Trump moving to allay some of those fears last night.

They'll probably go, well, what is an acceptable level of degradation?

You've got to remember here, Lucy, there's some for them now, you know, they're expending their munitions.

They've taken a big political risk domestically, especially President Trump.

There's American casualties and it's had, it's already had its impact on the region and on the world economy.

And I think Hegseth is talking about this, we will not be dissuaded from our objectives as we have, you know, they're clear objectives now which there's defining in military terms.

Until we assess they have been completed to a level which is worth the sun costs, as it were.