Iran still poses a “considerable” tactical threat to US forces in the Middle East despite strikes on its nuclear and military sites by Israel and the US, a top admiral told Congress on Tuesday.
“At the tactical level, I think they’ve been degraded,” Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander of US Central Command, said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
“I think the degree to which that degradation has taken place, particularly in the last 12 days, is best discussed in a classified forum,” he added.
But he said that Iran possesses “considerable tactical capability,” one element of which was visible in the missile attack on the US military base of Al Udeid on Monday.
Iran attacked the base, located in Qatar and the US’s largest in the region, with missiles that were foiled by Qatari air defenses and caused no deaths or injuries.
The attack came a day after the US launched a major strike on Iranian facilities linked to its nuclear program, using GBU-57 bunker-buster bombs for the first time in combat.
In a press briefing Sunday, Gen. Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said US forces fired around 75 precision-guided weapons in total during the operation, which targeted facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.
President Donald Trump said the strikes had destroyed the nuclear facilities. The White House pushed back on reports on Tuesday that the sites were only damaged.
A tentative ceasefire between Israel and Iran is currently in place, but there are concerns that it may not last, and that Iran could resort to other tactics to fight back.
Iran retains a large ballistic missile stockpile, and Cooper said that while its proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza have been reduced in strength, its network of regional militias remains a threat.
“The thing I think we need to do right now and that we are doing, with clarity, is making sure our men and women are safe in the Middle East,” he said.
The US has around 40,000 military and civilian personnel in the region, and bolstered its military presence there with the deployment of the USS Nimitz.
Cooper added that: “We’ve got to be in a three-point stance, ready to go every single day.”