Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson told CNN after the Wednesday morning Pentagon press conference, "somebody's smokin' something."
During his briefing, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was asked how Iran had nuclear weapons when the administration said last year that they obliterated the weapons in the "12-Day War."
Hegseth told reporters that President Donald Trump believed Iran "had no intention of making a deal." He claimed that Iran didn't have nuclear weapons; rather, they "had the intentions" of getting such weapons. This conflicts with Trump's ongoing claims that Iran was at work on nuclear weapons again.
"They can’t do the nuclear… They’ve got to stop with the nuclear," Trump said in January at the World Economic Forum.
“After Midnight Hammer, they were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, and in particular nuclear weapons, yet they continue. They’re starting it all over… One thing is certain: I will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon," Trump said during his State of the Union address, mere days before the strikes.
CNN's Natasha Bertrand reported that Trump administration officials acknowledged during a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that they have major concerns about Iran's drone program because they haven't been able to intercept all of them, as evidenced by the six dead American soldiers in Kuwait.
During the briefing on Wednesday, both Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine agreed that the drones do pose a bigger problem than they anticipated.
The other problem, according to several reports, is that the U.S. is running out of weaponry because the administration has burned through the stockpile so quickly.
It was reported on Tuesday by several outlets that the military lacks the supplies to continue at the current level.
“It’s not panic yet, but the sooner they get here, the better,” a regional source told CNN.
Even the pro-Trump "America First Post" reported that Trump burned through five years of Tomahawk inventory in just three days.
Speaking to CNN after the press conference. Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson pointed to Gen. Caine's comments that they were switching from "stand-off munitions" to "stand-in munitions."
"What he's saying is that we're running out of precision-guided munitions," the retired general said. "That's what he's saying. That we're going to take advantage of our air superiority, our ability to loiter over targets and use other type munitions. In fact, the Secretary of Defense even talked about using dumb bombs, gravity-based bombs, and not laser-guided bombs."
He was asked if Hegseth's claim that the U.S. can outlast Iran was accurate.
"That's not how I see it at all. I mean, you know, it's going to take an awful lot to dig these people out. I mean, what we saw today was essentially the same briefing that was given in 2003 by Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers," said Anderson.
He recalled that when they announced the attack on Iraq, there was also no clear definition of the objectives.
"But what we saw was the Secretary of Defense was a tough, macho guy talking about killing and shamelessly sucking up to the POTUS, but he really wasn't giving any specifics on what the long-term objectives are," Anderson continued. "And I would say that we're going to be in the same situation we were in Iraq. We're going to be able to knock out their defensive capabilities, their offensive capabilities, establish air superiority, but they're going to go underground. These are tough, resilient people. They're going to be able to outlast us."
He cautioned that if anyone thinks the U.S. can "bomb them into submission from the air, somebody's smoking something."
