The Pentagon Has Made It Clear That The Iran War Is Here To Stay

As the Iran War continues to claim the lives of thousands throughout the Middle East, recent statements from the Pentagon and movements of U.S. naval assets are making analysts concerned that the conflict is not going to end soon.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the U.S. military could maintain its blockade “indefinitely” by rotating ships in and out of the war in a statement to reporters on Thursday. Hegseth’s statement pointed to the U.S. military’s recent decision to rotate the USS George Washington into the Iran War, indicating that the Trump administration may not have planned for a conflict of this duration, analysts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The George Washington will be relieving the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been deployed since Nov. 21, 2025, or over 269 days, according to Forbes. The deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln is the longest in U.S. Navy history.

One expert even warned that the extended continuation of the Iran War could lead to the use of nuclear weapons.

“There’s a very real possibility because people are talking about this in Washington, about tactical nuclear weapons,” the Director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center, Dan Grazier, told the DCNF. “Both sides of the aisle are talking about variable-yield nuclear weapons, and sometimes they were talking about limited nuclear war options and that kind of stuff … the longer this goes on, the greater the danger that something like that could actually happen.”

“Hegseth said the Navy can maintain the blockade ‘indefinitely’ by rotating ships in and out. This is a true statement that is clearly a message to the Iranians that a waiting game will not work,” Heritage Foundation visiting fellow and former Pentagon official Steven Bucci told the DCNF. “Preparing for a longer conflict does not mean it will play out that way. Preparing is DOW’s way of doing business.”

The rotation of the USS George Washington shows the U.S. is “deadly serious about ending the Iranian game,” Bucci added.

The Navy is already grappling with persistent maintenance and readiness strains; 63% of ship executive officers said in a survey that personnel shortages made it moderately to extremely difficult to complete repairs while at sea, according to a March Government Accountability Office report.

“I think that the U.S. administration significantly underestimated the Iranians’ resolve in terms of this war,” geopolitical strategist and CEO of RAKSHA Intelligence Futures Aarathi Krishnan told the DCNF. “I think we are absolutely at an impasse at the moment where both sides are not blinking. And to do so would be, at least for the U.S. administration, potentially admitting that they were not as successful as they initially claimed they were.”

“War is the realm of unintended consequences, and it’s impossible to know how something like this is going to unfold, which is why I’ve been telling everybody shouting from the rooftops that the United States administration should basically accept any terms possible and stop the fighting,” Grazier told the DCNF. “We can declare victory, or you know success or whatever, however we want. But the longer this goes on, the greater the danger that this whole conflict is going to veer [in a] direction that none of us really want to see.”

The Pentagon declined to comment, citing operational security concerns. U.S. Central Command referred to previous press releases.

More than 8,000 people have been killed across the Middle East since the Iran war began Feb. 28. Notably, the numbers on these casualties are nearly a month old, and the true numbers are likely even higher at this point.

Iran has sustained 3,636 casualties since the war began, Reuters reported, citing U.S.-based Iranian human rights organization HRANA. Lebanon has suffered 4,335 deaths and over 12,277 wounded, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.

Meanwhile, 18 U.S. military service members have died in the war and over 600 have been wounded, Reuters reported, citing anonymous U.S. officials. At least 72 Israeli citizens and residents have been killed since the Iran war began, according to a compilation of Israeli military and civilian casualty reports.

“I don’t suggest for a second that this is the right course of action, but the next escalation in a conflict like this would be the insertion of ground troops, and I don’t want to see that,” Grazier told the DCNF. “Iran is one of the worst places imaginable for us to have a fight on the ground, and I just don’t think there’s any appetite within, among the American people for another ground conflict in that part of the world.”

“Military strength might not be as strong a lever anymore, because the ability to rotate, the ability to ensure our people are in good shape to go to war, that’s already being compromised quite significantly,” Krishnan told the DCNF.

Multiple polls of U.S. adults show that support for the Iran War is not widespread.

Roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults said the Iran war was not worth fighting, while only about 20% supported continuing U.S. military action, according to an Associated Press-NORC poll of 1,165 adults conducted July 23-27 with a 3.7-point margin of error.

Just 35% of Americans approved of the Iran war, according to an Aug. 6 Reuters/Ipsos poll of 4,505 U.S. adults conducted online with a 2-point margin of error.

This sentiment was shared earlier in the war, with 60% of Americans saying U.S. military action against Iran was not worth it and just 34% saying it was worth the cost, according to a Quinnipiac University poll of 963 registered voters conducted July 23-27 with a 4.1-point margin of error.

“What I think is interesting about this whole situation is it has shifted the balance of power globally,” Krishnan told the DCNF. “So there’s a couple of examples there. So the fact that Pakistan is the mediator, which is not a role Pakistan has played before in dealings in that region, and they have been steadfast in that mediator role. They have been able to defuse the situation where it needed to be defused. They are continuing conversations, I believe, with the Iranian regime, and it demonstrates an increased role of Asian countries in the region.”

The Iran War is also weakening the U.S. military by depleting munition stockpiles.

The U.S. may have burned through nearly 67% of its prewar PAC-3 Patriot missile interceptor stockpiles, retaining as few as 759 out of the initial 2,330, according to a Friday report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

The U.S. Air Force has been able to wage an extensive air campaign against Iran, but it has paid for those losses with many drones and aircraft.

So far, the U.S. Air Force has lost one F-15E Strike Eagle and one A-10 Thunderbolt II to enemy air defense since the war began on Feb. 28. The U.S. military has also lost roughly a quarter of its MQ-9 Reaper drone fleet, the Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing U.S. officials.

However, these are not the only aircraft lost during the Iran War; they are only the aircraft that have been shot down by Iranian air defense. The U.S. Air Force also lost three F-15E Strike Eagles in a Kuwaiti friendly fire incident, one AH-64 Apache attack helicopter in a mid-air collision, and an Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker in another collision.

“I’ve been studying military history a couple of decades now, and there’s a couple big conclusions that you can draw from an extended study of warfare,” Grazier told the DCNF. “The biggest lesson is that war is just really stupid, and the winner of a war is rarely either one of the participants.”