Since the war against Iran began on Feb. 28, the U.S. military has provided updates on how many targets have been struck, how many Iranian ships have been sunk, and how many combat sorties have been flown.
But no one in the U.S. government seems to be able to say how the war ends and what comes next.
We’ve been here before. U.S. troops routed the Taliban in 2001, but that wasn’t enough. They stayed for 20 years in a failed attempt to turn Afghanistan into a democracy, even though top U.S. officials knew the mission was hopeless. The U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 destroyed Saddam Hussein’s regime in weeks, but that wasn’t enough either. American forces spent the next eight years battling insurgents and later returned to fight the Islamic State group, or ISIS. Twenty-three years after the mission in Iraq was supposedly accomplished, U.S. troops are still there.
The current situation brings to mind a quote from the start of the Iraq War, “Tell me how this ends,” which was posed by Army Gen. David Petraeus, who would later oversee a portion of the Afghanistan War, where the answer eluded military leaders and presidents alike until a hasty withdrawal in 2021.
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When President Donald Trump announced the start of Operation Epic Fury, the official title for the current campaign against the Iranian regime, he said the U.S. military’s overarching goal was to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from Iran.” He vowed to “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.” He also said the U.S. military would “annihilate” Iran’s Navy, ensure that Iran’s proxy forces can no longer threaten the Middle East or the world, and prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Trump also indicated that the United States sought to overthrow Iran’s ruling regime, telling Iranians “the hour of your freedom is at hand,” adding: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”
More than a month into the conflict, Trump said on Wednesday that “regime change has occurred” since Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei was killed on Feb. 28. He also said Iran’s air force and navy are “gone;” its missiles are “just about used up or beaten;” its factories that build weapons “are being blown to pieces,” adding that “very few of them left;” and its nuclear sites have been “hit so hard that it would take months to get near the nuclear dust.”
Then came the caveat. Trump said that although the U.S. military would accomplish its goals “very shortly,” there would be no discharge in the war.
“We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” Trump said in a speech from the White House. “We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.”
That begs a serious question: If the “tremendous progress” that Trump cited on Wednesday is not enough to declare victory, what more does the U.S. military need to achieve to bring about an acceptable end state for the war?
From his speech on Wednesday, it was unclear whether Trump’s comments about hitting Iran “extremely hard” in the coming weeks could refer to soldiers and Marines seizing Iranian territory, such as Kharg Island. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently told reporters that neither he nor Trump will rule out committing ground troops to the operation.
Hegseth also repeatedly condemned comparing operations against Iran to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
“This is not 2003,” Hegseth said at a March 10 Pentagon news briefing. “This is not endless nation building under those types of quagmires we saw under [Presidents] Bush or Obama. It’s not even close. 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. Those days are dead.”
A White House official told Task & Purpose on Thursday that the U.S. military is meeting or surpassing the goals that Trump set at the war’s outset, and the military campaign would end as soon as those objectives are met.
Based on how things are going, it’s unclear how long that might take. Iran’s theocratic regime remains in power. Its new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is his predecessor’s son, and he reportedly has close ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has trained and equipped proxy forces blamed for attacks against U.S. troops. Reuters also reported in late March that U.S. officials could confirm that about a third of Iran’s missiles had been destroyed. Meanwhile, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthi rebels in Yemen — both Iranian proxies — have attacked Israel in response to the Iran war. And Iran has largely blocked the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil flows.
Trump has made conflicting statements on the latter issue. He shared on social media on Wednesday that the United States would continue “blasting Iran into oblivion” until it reopened the Strait of Hormuz, but he later said during his White House speech that the Strait of Hormuz would “open up naturally” after the end of the war, and he encouraged other countries to protect the flow of oil through the waterway.
The elusive endgame in Iran may feel familiar to Global War on Terrorism veterans, who listened for years as top U.S. officials claimed that the war in Afghanistan had reached a turning point and that U.S. and Iraqi leaders had set a “time horizon” for withdrawing from Iraq.
In the end, the Trump administration may try to declare victory and walk away from the Iran war, as it did in 2025 when it ended the U.S. military’s campaign against the Houthis. But a war is not truly over if the enemy is still willing and able to fight — it doesn’t matter how many times U.S. leaders claim it has turned a corner.
