Since a ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. was announced, leaders in President Donald Trump’s administration have been quick to say Iran’s military and arms capacity has been largely wiped out during weeks of fighting. But U.S. and allied officials have also acknowledged that Tehran retains some capabilities, whether to strike back or to defend itself, and those admissions appear in their own figures and caveats as well as in outside monitoring.
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Dan Caine said Wednesday at the Pentagon that the military has hit more than 13,000 targets in Iran. Speaking to reporters after the administration’s public assessment that Iran’s forces had been heavily degraded, Caine laid out a breakdown that gave high percentages for attacks or destruction across air defenses, navy and weapons-related sites while still leaving room for what officials described as remaining portions of Iran’s capability.
Caine said many of Iran’s air defenses have been destroyed, citing more than 1,500 air defense targets, more than 450 ballistic-missile storage facilities and 800 one-way attack drone storage facilities. He told reporters that “All of these systems are gone,” framing the U.S. effort as having significantly reduced Iran’s ability to protect its airspace. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier said that “Iran no longer has an air defense” and that “we own their skies,” but Hegseth later conceded that Iran “can still shoot — we know that,” and elaborated that Iran may have “a system here or there” but lacks an air-defense “system that’s capable of defending their skies.”
Neither Caine nor Hegseth specified what the remaining portion of Iran’s air defenses looks like or which parts of the country can still carry out sporadic fire, according to the AP report. Caine also did not provide new details about what weapon Iran used to shoot down a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle last week, an event the report described as the first American military jet shot down during the war and as evidence of continued Iranian ability to hit back.
The U.S. officials’ figures on Iran’s sea power followed a similar pattern of very high degradation claims alongside acknowledgments of what remains. Caine said the military sunk much of Iran’s fleet and that 150 Iranian ships “are at the bottom of the ocean.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went further, telling reporters that the Iranian navy was “completely annihilated,” while Caine said only half the Revolutionary Guard’s small attack boats — described by the report as the vessels the government used to swarm and harass warships and merchants in the Strait of Hormuz — have been sunk.
Caine also said that after more than 700 strikes, the military believed it had destroyed more than 95% of Iran’s naval mines. Because the U.S. had not said how large Iran’s mine stockpile was before the war, it was described as unknown how many mines make up the remaining 5%, with semiofficial Iranian news agencies publishing a chart suggesting the Revolutionary Guard put sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz during the war. Independent analysts told the AP that they had seen no change in merchant traffic through the strait since the tenuous ceasefire began.
On Iran’s weapons production base, Caine told reporters that the military “destroyed Iran’s defense industrial base,” pointing to claims that the U.S. and allies attacked approximately 90% of Iran’s weapons factories. He also said that nearly 80% of Iran’s nuclear industrial base was hit, describing it as further degrading Iran’s attempts to attain a nuclear weapon. The report notes that Caine said the U.S. and allies struck parts of Iran’s ability to produce certain components, such as solid rocket motors, but he stopped short of saying Iran could not eventually rebuild or obtain weapons in other ways, or that the attacked factories had been fully destroyed or made unusable.
The report places those U.S. and allied claims against the idea that some Iranian strike capability continued during the ceasefire window. Independent data from Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a U.S.-based group that tracks conflicts, showed Iranian strikes persisted at a relatively steady and uninterrupted pace from Feb. 28 through Wednesday, according to the AP account.
Israel also offered its own effectiveness figures for air defenses. The Israeli military pointed to how many drones or missiles it said it has stopped from landing, saying it had an interception rate of more than 90% through its aerial defense systems. The report says Israel has developed a system intended to detect incoming fire and deploy only when a projectile is headed toward a population center or sensitive military or civilian infrastructure, and that Israeli leaders said the system is not 100% guaranteed but has helped prevent serious damage and casualties.
The AP report frames the competing sets of claims and caveats as part of the context for negotiations, with Iran, Israel and the United States heading into talks this weekend in Pakistan, and with independent analysts describing stability in Strait of Hormuz shipping during the ceasefire.