VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Vice President JD Vance told U.S. service members Wednesday that Iran is now further from building a nuclear weapon than at any point in the last two to three decades — a direct result, he said, of the missions Trump gave them and the way they executed those missions during Operation Epic Fury.
Vance visited Naval Air Station Oceana to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, honoring troops who had recently returned from an 11-month deployment supporting Operation Epic Fury against Iran. The vice president’s speech was at once a tribute to the men and women in the audience and a detailed accounting of what, in his telling, they had actually accomplished — beginning with Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“If you look at what our own intelligence says about their nuclear program, they are further away from developing a nuclear bomb than they have ever been since basically the last 20 or 30 years,” Vance said from the stage. “And that is because of you and because of your hard work.”
Three Missions, Three Victories
Vance walked the crowd through what he described as the three specific and clearly defined objectives Trump gave American forces — a deliberate contrast to what he characterized as the vague and open-ended deployments of the Iraq era, when he served as a Marine from 2003 to 2007.
The first objective was the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capability. Vance reported that mission complete with stark language. “Their navy is at the bottom of the ocean and they have no ability to project power like they did even 12 months ago,” he told the troops.
The second objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program — the mission that Vance spent the most time discussing, citing the U.S. intelligence community’s own assessments to make his case. Vance said Iran is now “further away from developing a nuclear bomb than they have ever been since basically the last 20 or 30 years,” stopping short of Trump’s own claim that Iran’s nuclear program has been “totally obliterated.”
The third objective was the dismantling of Iran’s defense industrial base — ensuring that even if Tehran someday decided to attempt a military or nuclear reconstitution, it would lack the infrastructure to do so with any speed. Vance told the troops they had accomplished that as well.
Operation Epic Fury: What Was Accomplished
The scope of the campaign Vance was describing was, by any measure, historic. Operation Epic Fury launched on February 28, 2026, as a coordinated multi-domain precision strike campaign targeting Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure, designed to dismantle Tehran’s ballistic missile architecture while disrupting sensitive nuclear development layers that could support a weapons capability.
In the operation’s first ten days alone, U.S. forces struck over 5,000 targets and damaged or destroyed 50 Iranian vessels. By late March, U.S. Central Command reported striking over 10,000 targets in Iran, including missile and drone sites, Iranian naval assets, Iran’s military industrial base, and command and control centers associated with the Iranian military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The operation’s opening salvo assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a strike that fundamentally altered the Iranian regime’s leadership structure and its capacity to direct military operations. Vance acknowledged that the war’s conclusion came through a memorandum of understanding signed June 17 at Versailles — but his message to the troops was that they earned every inch of leverage Trump now holds.
Intelligence at the Center
What distinguished Vance’s remarks from typical political speech was his explicit invocation of classified assessments to back his claims. Standing before an audience that included many of the airmen who conducted the strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Vance said he speaks from access to the intelligence — not from political talking points.
“Trust me, I know because I look at the intelligence estimates,” he said, before stating that U.S. intelligence now confirms Iran is further from nuclear capability than at any time in a generation.
Congressional Research Service reporting from late March 2026 noted that U.S. officials said strikes had resulted in significant damage to Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure, though independent assessments from the period noted ongoing uncertainties about the full extent of damage to deeply buried facilities.
Vance did not hedge. In his telling, the intelligence picture is clear, and the troops in front of him deserve to hear it. He framed the nuclear setback not as a bureaucratic outcome but as a personal achievement of every service member who flew a sortie, maintained an aircraft, or supported the mission from the ground.
Drawing the Contrast With Iraq
Vance returned repeatedly throughout his address to the lessons of his own military service — and the mistakes, as he sees them, that political leaders made during that period. His argument was pointed: the men and women who fought in the early 2000s were not failed by their own abilities but by leaders who deployed them without clear goals.
“We had a lot of people who were asking our military to do the impossible, but they weren’t giving them clearly defined missions and clearly defined objectives,” he said of the 2003 to 2007 period.
The implication was unmistakable. The strikes on Iran’s nuclear program were not a repeat of that era — they were its corrective. Where past administrations sent troops into ambiguity, Trump sent them with specific, achievable objectives. And where past operations left the nuclear question unresolved, Operation Epic Fury, in Vance’s accounting, has pushed Iran’s nuclear timeline back by decades.
“And finally, what the president asks you to accomplish is to destroy the defense industrial base of that country so that if they ever decided to rebuild their military or if they ever decided to rebuild that nuclear program, they would be hard pressed to do it,” Vance said. “And you did that exactly as well.”
As the crowd in Virginia Beach erupted in applause, Vance made the closing argument simple. The intelligence says Iran’s nuclear threat has been rolled back a generation. The men and women in that hangar are the reason why.