The Trump administration launched Operation Epic Fury on Saturday, March 1, with a stated timeline of four to five weeks.
Central Command has since requested that the Pentagon deploy additional military intelligence officers to its Tampa, Florida headquarters to support operations against Iran for a minimum of 100 days, reports Politico, with planning extending potentially through September.
The expansion in planning scope marks a significant development from the conflict’s opening parameters.
President Trump addressed the extended timeline on Monday, defending the operation’s progress and leaving the door open to a longer campaign.
“We have the strongest and most powerful, by far, military in the world,” Trump said, “and we will easily prevail. We’re already substantially ahead of our time projections.”
Trump added, “We projected four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that. We’ll do it.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, speaking Wednesday, signaled that the pace and scale of operations would increase rather than slow.
“As President Trump said, more and larger waves are coming,” Hegseth stated. “We are just getting started. We are accelerating, not decelerating.”
Hegseth continued, “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.”
The administration has outlined four primary objectives for the conflict: the destruction of Iran’s missile capabilities, the elimination of Iran’s naval forces, preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and ending Iranian funding of terrorist organizations beyond its borders.
Six members of the United States Armed Forces have died since the operation began.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio faced reporters over the weekend and was pressed on whether the strike was triggered by an imminent threat.
“There absolutely was an imminent threat,” Rubio said.
“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.”
Rubio explained the strategic calculation behind acting first, citing Department of War assessments that a reactive posture would have resulted in greater American casualties.
“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,” Rubio said.
“We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage.”
When pressed by a reporter on whether Israeli military intentions forced the United States to act, Rubio rejected a narrow framing of the decision.
“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,” Rubio said.
Rubio cited Iran’s missile and drone buildup as the core long-term justification, warning that inaction would have closed the window for any future military option.
“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,” Rubio said.
He added, “Look at the damage they’re doing now, and this is a weakened Iran, imagine a year from now, so that had to happen.”
Rubio acknowledged awareness of Israeli intentions while maintaining the operation’s necessity was independent of any allied action: “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.”
Resist the Mainstream reported earlier this week that Vice President JD Vance clarified that Operation Epic Fury will not be a multi-year conflict with “no clear end in sight.”
WATCH:
