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US-Israeli war on Iran, day 11: Trump, Hegseth send conflicting messages to the world about the end of war on Iran. In a press conference after markets closed Monday, President Donald Trump told reporters at times contradictory information about the future of his joint war with Israel against Iran that has rattled the global economy and sent oil prices soaring. 

Latest: “Today will be yet again our most intense day of strikes inside Iran,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday at the Pentagon. 

“We've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough,” Trump said to Republican lawmakers Monday in Florida. “We're achieving major strides toward completing our military objective,” he told reporters later in the day. “And some people could say they're pretty well complete. We've wiped every single force in Iran out, very completely.” 

Shortly before those remarks and while the markets were still open, Trump told CBS News, “I think the war is very complete, pretty much…If you look, they have nothing left. There's nothing left in a military sense.” U.S. stock indexes climbed sharply after his remarks, and the price of oil eventually fell to around $92 per barrel by Tuesday morning after reaching a high of $119 on Monday.

Rewind: On Sunday evening, Hegseth said, “This is only just the beginning,” in an interview with “60 Minutes” of CBS News. “But this is not a remaking of the Iranian society from an American perspective,” Hegseth said. In Iraq and Afghanistan,” “a lot of foolish approaches were used. This is war. This is conflict. This is bringing your enemy to their knees. Now, whether they will have a ceremony in—in—in Tehran Square and—and—and surrender, that's up to them.” 

Hegesth’s Defense Department sent a similar message to the world on Monday afternoon, declaring on Twitter, “We have Only Just Begun to Fight.”

Trump was asked about the two different answers Monday evening. “You said the war is ‘very complete.’ But your defense secretary says ‘this is just the beginning.’ So which is it?” 

Trump replied: “You could say both. The beginning. It's the beginning of building a new country,” he said, and noted, “As we speak, they're being hit.” He then noted three developments administration officials have begun emphasizing this week amid allegations of strategic incoherence. “When you think about it, it's incredible. We wiped out a big navy, very powerful navy,” Trump said Monday. “The Air Force is gone, everything's gone. The missiles are down to a trickle. The drones are down to probably 25 percent and they'll soon be down to nothing. We'll have the—where they manufacture the drones are under fire.”

After a week in which White House officials gave at least 10 different reasons for going to war against Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, like Trump, listed three objectives on Monday as well. “The goals of this mission are clear,” he said, “and it’s important to continue to remind the American people of why it is that the greatest military in the history of the world is engaged in this operation: It is to destroy the ability of this regime to launch missiles, both by destroying their missiles and their launchers; destroy the factories that make these missiles; and destroy their navy.”

On Tuesday morning, Hegseth added his own, slightly different take: the U.S. is fighting to destroy Iranian missile capabilities, destroy the Iranian navy and “permanently deny Iran nuclear weapons forever,” he said at a Pentagon press conference. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more from that, here. 

Tehran’s response to the conflicting U.S. messaging: “Iran will determine when the war ends,” a spokesman for the Revolutionary Guards said Monday. Another Iranian general claimed, “We are prepared for ten years of war with the United States. At least ten years.” And the country’s deputy foreign minister alleged, “Iran has upper hand in war [and] will decide when it ends.” 

Related reading: “Iran Isn’t Winning This War,” But it might if the U.S. stops the bombing due to higher oil prices, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board argued in a commentary Monday. 

Update: The first two days of the Pentagon’s Iran strikes cost $5.6 billion in munitions, the Washington Post reported Monday, citing three U.S. officials. “The estimate, shared with Congress on Monday, raises new questions about the Trump administration’s broad dismissal of lawmakers’ concerns that the Iran operation is quickly eroding the U.S. military’s readiness,” Noah Robertson writes. 

Two more media outlets report video evidence strongly suggests the U.S. military attacked an elementary school on the war’s first day, killing more than 150 people, including children: The New York Times and the Associated Press joined earlier reporting from Bellingcat and Reuters, which arrived at a similar likelihood after consulting video forensics and—in the case of Reuters—preliminary results of an internal Defense Department investigation of the incident. The school was located beside an Iranian military base in southern Iran, and that base was one of the earliest targets in the war beginning Saturday, Feb. 28. 

• Here is what is reportedly the last photo of Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, a third-grade student killed in the airstrike.
• “UN experts strongly condemn deadly missile strike on girls’ school in Iran, call for independent investigation,” the United Nations announced Friday; 
• “US/Israel: Investigate Iran School Attack as a War Crime,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement Saturday; 
• See also: “The Pentagon Cut Its Civilian Safeguards Before the Iran War,” via Missy Ryan, writing Monday for The Atlantic. 

Trump was asked about the school attack Monday, and even though the U.S. military is the only one in the conflict deploying Tomahawk missiles, the president seemed to suggest Iran may have used the missile observed moments before impact. “Whether it's Iran or somebody else, the fact that a tomahawk, a tomahawk is very generic. It's sold to other countries. But that's being investigated right now,” Trump said. AP called his allegation of Iran’s use of Tomahawks “erroneous.” 

“We take things very, very seriously and investigate them thoroughly,” Defense Secretary Hegseth told reporters Tuesday when asked about the school strike. 

Survey says: Most Americans still oppose the Iran war. “Even the highest level of public support for this conflict falls far lower than that at the start of most other conflicts, including World War II, the Korean War and the Iraq War,” the New York Times reported Tuesday. The gist: “So far, polls have found that most Americans oppose the Iran attacks. Support ranges from 27 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll to 50 percent in a Fox News poll. The wide variation suggests that public opinion is still taking shape as more Americans learn details of the attacks and the aftermath.”

Investor reax: “The risk of a 1970s scenario is rising,” one portfolio manager told Reuters Monday in an economic report on the risks of stagflation similar to the energy crisis that affected the U.S. and allies after Israel’s 1973 Yom Kippur war. 

Latest: Saudi Arabia's Aramco warned of “catastrophic consequences” if oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is paused much longer. “While ​we have faced disruptions in the past, this one by far is the biggest crisis the region's oil and gas industry has faced,” CEO Amin Nasser said in an earnings call Tuesday, according to Reuters.

Analysis: Hormuz is unusually hard to defend, Axios reported Monday. “The Strait, which carries roughly 25% of the world's seaborne oil supply, is approximately 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point, but the designated shipping lanes are far smaller—concentrating traffic into predictable corridors for Iran to monitor and target adversaries.” 

Commentary: “Take the win. Stop the war,” argues Will Walldorf, Wake Forest University professor and senior fellow at Defense Priorities, writing Monday in Defense One. “The American experience in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan have shown that taking out leaders is the easy part; it’s what follows that turns into a disaster,” he says. 

Additional reading: 

• “Markets bet that Trump will end Iran war soon despite threats from both sides,” Reuters reported Tuesday morning for its top story
• “Sinking Iran’s Frigate IRIS Dena and the Law of Naval Warfare,” which is a legal consideration of the March 4 Navy submarine attack on an Iranian ship, via Just Security writing Sunday; 
• “Trump’s Iran options include special operations raid on nuclear sites,” Semafor reported Tuesday; 
• “Drones hit the UAE as the country reports 2 new deaths,” AP reported Tuesday; 
• “Gas price spikes are slamming Senate battleground states,” Axios reported Tuesday;  
• “Trump Advisers Urge Him to Find Iran Exit Ramp,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday; 
• And “Trump’s War in Iran, and Rising Gas Prices, Collide With Midterm Agenda,” the Times reported Monday. 

Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1987, Iran attacked three Kuwaiti ships as part of the Tanker War.

Around the Defense Department

Hegseth presses Defense civilians to deploy for immigration enforcement. The U.S. military is reupping its request for civilian employees to deploy to the southwest border to assist with immigration enforcement operations, with supervisors now facing a stronger push to solicit their staff to sign up for the details, Eric Katz of Government Executive reported Monday. The memo is dated Feb. 19, more than a week before the U.S. and Israel began the war in Iran, though it was delivered to employees on Monday. 

Hegseth encouraged “all who are interested” to volunteer for the detail, calling the work “vital to the national security of the United States.” According to an Army official, “With the potential for increased numbers of migrants in the interior of the United States territory and across the southwest border, [the Department of Homeland Security] needs volunteers to assist in its commitment to ensuring a safe and orderly immigration system.” Katz notes, “It was not immediately clear why the number of migrants entering the country could potentially increase—the Trump administration has consistently boasted that it has slashed the number of individuals illegally entering the country to record-low levels.”

“We all think it’s absurd,” one civilian said. The timing of the new push seemed to be a “bad look,” the person added, given the war the U.S. is currently waging against Iran. Continue reading, here. 

The U.S. military says it killed six more people in its 45th known strike targeting alleged drug traffickers off the coasts of Latin America. The latest strike occurred Sunday as the vessel transited “known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific,” officials at Southern Command said in a statement Sunday. 

Notable: Critics have likened the strikes to a campaign of extrajudicial killings, and the administration has yet to share evidence supporting its claims that those aboard the boats were in fact trafficking drugs when they were killed. The New York Times maintains a tracker from the ongoing strikes, here. 

Anthropic sues DOD, Hegseth, other federal agencies. The AI company that was recently declared a “national security risk”—even as its tools were reportedly being used to plan strikes on Iran—filed suit on Monday with the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. The lawsuit “asserts that the government's actions after this disagreement—primarily the designation of the company as a supply-chain risk and alleged violations of its right to due process through a lack of ‘core requirements’ such as ‘adequate notice and a meaningful hearing’—constitute illegal retaliation,” reports Nextgov’s Alexandra Kelley. Read on, here.

New science on heat is changing the future of soldiering. “The U.S. military has been studying the effects of heat on troops for almost a century, dating to the 1927 establishment of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory at the military's request. Still, soldiers’ and commanders’ approach to core physical tasks—think timed runs, strenuous outdoor activity, or environmental exposure—lags the growing body of science about heat risks, sometimes by years or decades. That may finally be changing under new initiatives to expand research into human performance,” reports Defense One’s Patrick Tucker, here.