Gen. Dan Caine, after describing U.S. strikes on Iran, had a message to adversaries: U.S. intelligence members are studying targets in their countries.
Following the U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine put U.S. adversaries on notice.
Caine, at a press conference at the Pentagon on June 26 alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, touted the work of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in studying the Fordow nuclear facility in Iran—which was one of the nuclear sites struck by the United States on June 21—and said that adversaries should know that the agency is studying them as well, suggesting that they could be next to be targeted by the United States.
“Our adversaries around the world should know that there are other DTRA team members out there studying targets for the same amount of time, and we’ll continue to do so,” he said.
“DTRA does a lot of things for our nation, but DTRA is the world’s leading expert on deeply buried, underground targets.”
Fordow is an underground facility in a mountain range.
Caine recalled that in 2009, a DTRA officer “was brought into a vault at an undisclosed location and briefed on something going on in Iran” and “shown some photos and some highly classified intelligence of what looked like a major construction project in the mountains of Iran.”
The officer and a colleague closely studied the Fordow facility’s developments, such as its geology and construction.
The officer and colleague also studied the facility’s shafts, systems, “every nook, every crater, every piece of equipment going in, and every piece of equipment going out,” he said.
Caine said that monitoring Fordow was their life’s work.
“They literally dreamed about this target at night when they slept,” he said. “They thought about it driving back and forth to work, and they knew from the very first days what this was for.”
He added, “They weren’t able to discuss this with their family, their wives, their kids, their friends, but they just kept grinding it out, and along the way, they realized we did not have a weapon that could adequately strike and kill this target.”
This led to the development of the bunker-busting bombs that were dropped by the B-2 planes.
“After that, they accomplished hundreds of test shots and dropped many full-scale weapons against extremely realistic targets for a single purpose: kill this target at the time and place of our nation’s choosing,” Caine said.
Ultimately, Caine said, the strikes were the “culmination” of the work of the DTRA employees.
