- 10 months ago
At a Pentagon press briefing, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine broke down the strikes on Iran.
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00:00Good morning. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, and good morning, and all of you. Thank you for being here.
00:05As a follow-up to my comments on Sunday's press conference, I wanted to give you a few updates
00:10this morning on something I'm honored to do as a chairman, and that's a chance to get to talk
00:16about some of our service members and the incredible things that they do on behalf of our nation. And
00:22I apologize ahead of time for the length and the detail. Today, I'm going to brief you on a couple
00:27things. First, I'm going to talk about our air defenders at Al Udeid in Qatar and their actions
00:32on Monday. Then I'm going to walk you through a little bit about the academics that went into the
00:37attack against Fordow, the massive ordnance penetrator weapon, and we're going to show a video that
00:44highlights the effects that that weapon has. Of course, nobody was down inside the target, so we
00:49don't have video from the target. First, on Monday, as the president has stated, on Monday morning, we
00:56began to receive indications and warnings that Iran intended to attack U.S. bases in the region.
01:04That morning, building on the work that CENTCOM commander Eric Carilla had done, and on the
01:10orders of the president, at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and around the region, we assumed a minimum
01:16force posture. Most folks had moved off the base to extend the security perimeter out away from what
01:24we assessed might be a target zone, except for a very few Army soldiers at Al Udeid. At that point,
01:34only two Patriot batteries remained on base, roughly 44 American soldiers responsible for defending the
01:43entire base, to include CENTCOM's forward headquarters in the Middle East, an entire air base, and all the
01:50U.S. forces there. The oldest soldier was a 28-year-old captain. The youngest was a 21-year-old private who'd
02:00been in the military for less than two years. So let's put ourselves out there for a second. Imagine
02:06you're that young first lieutenant. You're 25 or 26 years old, and you've been assigned as the tactical
02:14director inside the command and control element. You, at that age, are the sole person responsible to
02:22defend this base. Listening next to you is your early warning operator whose job is to notify you of
02:30imminent attack. There's five people inside a vehicle and five people outside of a vehicle, around
02:37these, a total of, as I said, 44. By the way, you've sat in the Middle East for years, deployed over and
02:46over again, extended multiple times, always being prepared, but unsure of when that particular day
02:54will come that you must execute your mission and not fail at doing it. In this case, these Patriot crews
03:01were deployed from Korea and Japan as part of our U.S. forces there to ensure that we had the most
03:08capable missiles in the CENTCOM area of responsibility. As the day continues, you start to hear more and
03:16more chatter in the information space about an pending attack. And as the sun starts to set in the west,
03:25you get orders from your higher headquarters to make sure that your missile batteries are pointed to
03:30the north. There are just a few other teammates. It's hot. You're getting nervous and you expect an
03:37attack. Outside of those Patriot vehicles, your hot crew, which is one NCO and four additional soldiers,
03:46turns a key and relinquishes control of those missiles to that young lieutenant inside the vehicle
03:52and you wait. You know that you're going to have approximately two minutes, 120 seconds to either
04:00succeed or fail. And then at approximately 12 30 p.m. on Monday, that's 7 30 p.m. in Qatar, as the sun
04:11sets in the west, Iran attacks. As the targets were detected, round after round of Patriot missiles are
04:21ejected from their canisters by an initial launch charge. Then the main solid rocket motor ignites.
04:28You can feel this in your body if you've ever been around a Patriot taking a shot and round after round
04:34goes out and guides against those missiles coming inbound. We believe that this is the largest single
04:41Patriot engagement in U.S. military history. And we were joined in this engagement by the Qatari Patriot
04:49crews. I'm not going to tell you how many rounds were shot, but it was a bunch because of classified
04:56purposes. And we're aware that something there's reports of something getting through. What we do
05:01know is there was a lot of metal flying around between attacking missiles being hit by Patriots,
05:08boosters from attacking missiles being hit by Patriots, the Patriots themselves flying around and the
05:15debris from those Patriots hitting the ground. There was a lot of metal flying around. And yet our U.S.
05:21air defenders had only seconds to make complex decisions with strategic impact. These awesome
05:28humans, along with their Qatari brothers and sisters in arms, stood between a salvo of Iranian missiles and
05:36the safety of value deed. They are the unsung heroes of the 21st century United States Army. And I know a lot
05:44of you have seen the videos online and the excitement as those Patriots departed their launchers and went up
05:50and guided. This really demonstrates the combat capability and capacity of our Army air defenders.
05:58Simply stated, they absolutely crushed it. If you'd flip this over, thanks. Let me next move to a walkthrough
06:09of the GBU-57 massive ordnance penetrator weapon and share a little bit about the planners who did this
06:19and their work on the weapon. First, let me set the stage for you. There's an organization in the U.S.
06:27called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, DITRA. DITRA does a lot of things for our nation,
06:34but DITRA is the world's leading expert on deeply buried underground targets. In 2009, a Defense Threat
06:44Reduction Agency officer was brought into a vault at an undisclosed location and briefed on something
06:51going on in Iran. For security purposes, I'm not going to share his name. He was shown some photos
06:58and some highly classified intelligence of what looked like a major construction project in the
07:03mountains of Iran. He was tasked to study this facility, work with the intelligence community to
07:09understand it, and he was soon joined by an additional teammate. For more than 15 years,
07:15this officer and his teammate lived and breathed this single target, Fordow, a critical element of
07:22Iran's covert nuclear weapons program. He studied the geology. He watched the Iranians dig it out. He
07:30watched the construction, the weather, the discard material, the geology, the construction materials,
07:36where the materials came from. He looked at the vent shaft, the exhaust shaft, the electrical systems,
07:42the environmental control systems, every nook, every crater, every piece of equipment going in
07:48and every piece of equipment going out. They literally dreamed about this target at night when
07:54they slept. They thought about it driving back and forth to work and they knew from the very first days
08:02what this was for. You do not build a multi-layered underground bunker complex with centrifuges
08:09and other equipment in a mountain for any peaceful purpose. They weren't able to discuss this with
08:16their family, their wives, their kids, their friends, but they just kept grinding it out. And along the way,
08:22they realized we did not have a weapon that could adequately strike and kill this target. So they began
08:29a journey to work with industry and other tacticians to develop the GBU 57. They tested it over and over again,
08:38tried different options, tried more after that. They accomplished hundreds of test shots and dropped many
08:45full-scale weapons against extremely realistic targets for a single purpose. Kill this target at the time
08:55and place and place of our nation's choosing. And then on a day in June of 2025, more than 15 years after they
09:04started their life's work, the phone rang and the President of the United States ordered the B2 force that you've
09:10supported to go strike and kill this target. Yesterday, I had the incredible honor and privilege of spending time with
09:17these two Defense Threat Reduction Agency officers who've given so much. One of them said, quote,
09:24I can't even get my head around this. My heart is so filled with the pride of being a part of this team.
09:32I am so honored to be a part of this. To you both, thank you and thank you to your families.
09:39Operation Midnight Hammer was the culmination of those 15 years of incredible work. The air crews,
09:44the tanker crews, the weapons crews that built the weapons, the load crews that loaded it. Before I
09:50run through this video today, I want to talk a little bit about Weaponeering and what goes into an
09:56attack. Weaponeering is the science of evaluating a target. I mentioned all of those factors before
10:03that these two DITRA officers had thought about. Ultimately, Weaponeering is determining the right
10:09weapon and fuse combination to achieve the desired effects and maximum destruction against a target.
10:17In the case of Fordow, the DITRA team understood with a high degree of confidence the elements of the
10:24target required to kill its functions, and the weapons were designed, planned, and delivered to ensure
10:32that they achieved the effects in the mission space. By the way, in the beginning of its development,
10:40we had so many PhDs working on the MOP program doing modeling and simulation that we were quietly
10:48and in a secret way the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America.
10:55So let me talk about the graphic a little bit. The GBU-57, which all of you I know know is a 30,000
11:05pound weapon dropped only by the B-2. It's comprised of steel, explosive, and a fuse programmed bespokely
11:16each weapon to achieve a particular effect inside the target. Each weapon had a unique desired impact
11:24angle, arrival, final heading, and a fuse setting. The fuse is effectively what tells the bomb when to
11:33function. A longer delay in a fuse, the deeper the weapon will penetrate and drive into the target.
11:41So on Fordow, in June of 2008, you can see these three holes. Depicted here is the main exhaust shaft
11:51with two additional ventilation shafts on either side. The United States decided to strike these two
11:57ventilation shafts seen here on the main graphic as the primary point of entry into the mission space.
12:05In the days preceding the attack against Fordow, the Iranians attempted to cover the shafts with
12:12concrete to try to prevent an attack. I won't share the specific dimensions of the concrete cap,
12:20but you should know that we know what the dimensions of those concrete caps were. The planners had to
12:27account for this. They accounted for everything. The cap was forcibly removed by the first weapon,
12:35and the main shaft was uncovered. Weapons two, three, four, five were tasked to enter the main shaft,
12:45move down into the complex at greater than 1,000 feet per second, and explode in the mission space.
12:53Weapon number six was designed on each side, so there were six on each side. Weapons number six
13:00was designed as a flex weapon to allow us to cover if one of the preceding jets
13:06jets or one of the preceding weapons did not work. The video I'm about to show you is a culmination of
13:15over 15 years of development and testing. As I said, hundreds of test shots on various models.
13:22This is one weapon, so if you take a view of this as five additionals, you'll get a sense of what this
13:31looks like. Hopefully you can see it and there's not too much reflection. Tom runs our videos out there.
13:39We'll run it at full speed so you can see it and then go back through it. Go ahead, Tom.
14:01Keep it going for a minute. You'll see inside the mission space.
14:18Unlike a normal surface bomb, you won't see an impact crater because they're designed to deeply
14:34bury and then function. I know there's been a lot of questions about that. All six weapons at each
14:41vent at Fordow went exactly where they were intended to go. A bomb has three effects
14:48that causes damage blast fragmentation and overpressure. In this case, the primary kill
14:55mechanism in the mission space was a mix of overpressure and blast ripping through the open
15:01tunnels and destroying critical hardware. The majority of the damage we assess based on our extensive
15:08modeling was a blast layer combined with the impulse extending from the shock. Imagine what this looks
15:16like six times over. A point that I want to make here. The joint force does not do BDA. By design,
15:25we don't grade our own homework. The intelligence community does. But here's what we know following
15:30the attacks and the strikes on Fordow. First, that the weapons were built, tested, and loaded properly.
15:38Two, the weapons were released on speed and on parameters. Three, the weapons all guided to their
15:46intended targets and to their intended aim points. Four, the weapons functioned as designed, meaning
15:53they exploded. We know this through other means, intelligence means that we have that were visibly,
16:00uh, uh, uh, we were visibly able to see them. And we know that the trailing jets saw the first weapons
16:07function and the pilots stated, quote, this was the brightest explosion that I've ever seen. It
16:14literally looked like daylight. Let me now turn to the bomber crews themselves, give you a few details
16:20about them. The crews that attacked Fordow were from the active duty air force and the Missouri air
16:26national guard. The crews ranked from captain to colonel and most were graduates of the air force
16:33weapons school headquartered at Nellis air force base in Nevada. I will state for the record that
16:39there is no beach volleyball or football at the air force weapons school. Uh, they were male and female
16:47aviators on this mission and a crew member told me when I talked to them on video the other day that
16:53this felt like the super bowl, the thousands of scientists, airmen and maintainers all coming
16:58together. One last story about people. When the crews went to work on Friday, they kissed their loved
17:05ones goodbye, not knowing when or if they'd be home late on Saturday night, their families became aware
17:14of what was happening. And on Sunday, when those jets returned from Whiteman, their families were there
17:21flags flying and tears flowing. I have chills literally talking about this. The jets rejoined
17:28into a formation of four airplanes followed by a formation of three and came up overhead. Whiteman
17:35proudly in the traffic pattern, pitching out to land right over the base and landing to the incredible
17:42cheers of their families who sacrifice and serve right alongside their family members. Like I said,
17:49there were a lot of flags and a lot of tears. One commander told me this is a moment in the lives
17:56of our families that they will never forget. That my friends is what America's joint force does. We
18:02think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we test, we evaluate every single day. And when the call comes to
18:10deliver, we do so. I could not be more proud standing up here today of our joint force. I'm filled with
18:17gratitude that I get to tell their story. And as we stand here right now, our forces remain on a high
18:24state of readiness in the region prepared to defend themselves. And one last thing, our adversaries
18:33around the world should know that there are other DITRA team members out there studying targets for the
18:41same amount of time. And we'll continue to do so. Thank you very much. I apologize for the length. I look forward to
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