“We’re still sending terrorists where they belong to hell and tankers to the bottom of the ocean where they belong.” With that line, delivered at a solemn ceremony meant to honor the 184 people killed at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth turned the 25th anniversary of the attacks into a status report on the six-month-old American war against Iran.
Hegseth’s remarks came during Friday’s memorial ceremony in the Pentagon’s center courtyard, an event that drew President Donald Trump, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and dozens of senior military officials, some of whom were on duty at the building when it was struck a quarter-century earlier. The ceremony has traditionally centered on remembrance, but Hegseth used a substantial portion of his address to draw a direct line between the September 11th attacks and the ongoing conflict with Tehran.
“There are still enemies who hate us every day,” Hegseth said. “Enemies plot to curb our power and kill our citizens, including from Islamic terrorists abroad and at home. But we are ever vigilant, especially this place, especially these people. Over the past six months, we have laid waste to the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism. Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century. That cheered on 9/11. A regime that has sponsored terrorist attacks against Americans for decades, killing thousands, including our comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they did not factor in this president. United States has killed their leaders, destroyed their air force, and their navy rests at the bottom of the sea. Their defenses are gone. We’re still sending terrorists where they belong to hell and tankers to the bottom of the ocean where they belong. And we’re ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. The economic pressure tightens every day. We control the strait. We will finish this fight.”
The war Hegseth referenced, Operation Epic Fury, began on February 28, 2026, when U.S. forces launched a campaign the Department of War has described as intended to strike targets that dismantle the Iranian regime’s security apparatus, prioritizing locations that pose an imminent threat. The State Department has said the operation’s objectives were to destroy Iranian offensive missiles and missile production, destroy Iran’s navy and other security infrastructure, and ultimately ensure Iran will never possess nuclear weapons, framing the campaign as an exercise of collective self-defense alongside Israel.
Hegseth’s claim that Iran’s navy “rests at the bottom of the sea” tracks with figures the administration has since publicized. A White House release marking an April ceasefire stated that 150 Iranian warships across 16 vessel classes had been destroyed, every Iranian submarine had been sunk, and 97% of Iran’s naval mine inventory had been eliminated, effectively ending Tehran’s ability to arm its regional proxies by sea. The same release said Iran’s command-and-control structure had been shattered by more than 2,000 strikes, resulting in what the administration described as leadership losses and mass desertions.
Those naval losses accumulated rapidly in the war’s opening days. By early March 2026, roughly a week into the campaign, Hegseth and U.S. Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper said American forces had already sunk or disabled more than 30 Iranian vessels and cut the regime’s missile launches by roughly 90%. Cooper told reporters at the time that while President Trump had publicly cited a figure of 24 destroyed ships, the actual total had already climbed past 30, with strikes continuing against a drone-carrier vessel Cooper compared in size to a World War II-era aircraft carrier.
The Pentagon’s own fact sheet on the first ten days of the operation listed more than 5,000 targets struck across Iran and roughly 50 Iranian vessels damaged or destroyed, using an arsenal that included B-2 stealth bombers, F-22 and F-35 fighters, and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers operating alongside guided-missile destroyers. That early bombardment set the stage for the broader campaign of attrition Hegseth referenced Friday when he said the U.S. had “laid waste” to Iran’s military over six months.
The war’s momentum led to a ceasefire and renewed diplomatic talks in Pakistan by early April 2026, at which point Hegseth had already claimed Iran’s navy and air force were destroyed and the regime substantially weakened. That diplomatic track culminated months later in the Islamabad memorandum of understanding, though fighting and strikes have continued intermittently since, with Friday’s remarks describing the conflict as still ongoing nearly seven months after it began.
Hegseth’s reference to controlling “the strait” points to the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes and which Iran attempted to close at points during the war, triggering a global economic shock and spikes in gas prices that have become a persistent talking point in American domestic politics. Trump has separately said he would not allow “a terrorist regime to hold the world hostage” by threatening the strait’s oil traffic, tying military operations in the region directly to economic stakes at home.
The war has not been without American losses, a fact that has occasionally put Hegseth at odds with the press covering the conflict. During a March 2026 briefing following an Iranian strike that killed six U.S. Army reservists at an operations center in Kuwait, Hegseth suggested that media coverage of American casualties was intended to make the president look bad, remarks that drew criticism from journalists including CNN’s Jake Tapper, who called the framing “ahistorical” given that covering fallen service members has long been treated as a tribute rather than a political attack.
Despite the administration’s repeated claims of decisive success against Iran, independent assessments have been more measured. Reporting on Friday’s ceremony noted that despite Trump’s and Hegseth’s insistence that the U.S. is winning the war, none of the goals the administration originally set out to achieve had been fully reached as of the 9/11 anniversary, even as officials continued to describe Iran’s military capacity as devastated and its economic position as steadily deteriorating under continued pressure.
Hegseth’s decision to lay out the state of the Iran war in such explicit terms during a ceremony intended to honor the dead of September 11, 2001, reflects a consistent strategy by his and Trump’s administration to frame the six-month conflict as a direct continuation of the war on terror launched a quarter-century ago. Both men used their remarks at the ceremony to present the Iran war as a continuance of the broader Global War on Terrorism, arguing that the enemies being fought today are of the same character as those responsible for the original attacks.
Whether or not the war meets its stated objectives of eliminating Iran’s nuclear ambitions and permanently neutralizing its military, Hegseth’s remarks Friday made clear the administration intends to keep describing it in the starkest possible terms — as a campaign that has already sent Iranian ships to “the bottom of the ocean” and one that, in his telling, is not yet finished.