Trump’s Operation Epic Fury could last ‘at least 100 days’ or into September: report

Politico reports that US Central Command has asked the Pentagon "to send more military intelligence officers to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days but likely through September."

"We have the strongest and most powerful, by far, military in the world," President Trump said on Monday, "and we will easily prevail. We're already substantially ahead of our time projections. But whatever the time is, it's okay. Whatever it takes, we will always and we have from the beginning. We projected four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that. We'll do it."

On Wednesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said, "as President Trump said, more and larger waves are coming. We are just getting started. We are accelerating, not decelerating. Iran's capabilities are evaporating by the hour, while American strength grows fiercer, smarter, and utterly dominant. More bombers and more fighters are arriving just today."

These comments indicate that a broader timeline could be what should be expected from this conflict. The stated goals of the Trump administration are to destroy Iran's missile capabilities, annihilate their navy, ensure Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon, and prevent Iran from funding terror outside their own borders.

Just how the US got into this conflict has been a question many have been asking. The US has lost six members of the Armed Forces so far. Secretary of State Rubio was asked over the weekend by reporters if the incursion into Iran was due to an "imminent threat."

He said: "There absolutely was an imminent threat. And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us. And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded, because the Department of War assessed that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first, after they were attacked by someone else, [if] Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths. We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage."

When a reporter asked, "Was the US forced to strike because of an impending Israeli action?" Rubio said: "Two things I would say: number one is no matter what, ultimately this operation needed to happen, that's the question of 'why now,' but this operation needed to happen. Because Iran, in about a year, or a year and a half, would cross the line of immunity, meaning that they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it because they could hold the whole world hostage.

"Look at the damage they're doing now, and this is a weakened Iran, imagine a year from now, so that had to happen. Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions and understood what that would mean for us and we had to be prepared to act as a result of it, but this had to happen no matter what."

Trump said on Monday that he would not rule out boots on the ground in Iran and in an interview with NBC News, Iran's Foreign Minister said that they were waiting for US ground troops to enter Iran. He said, "we are waiting for them. Because we are confident that we can confront them, and that would be a big disaster for them."