General Dan Caine

Second Press Briefing on Operation Midnight Hammer

delivered 26 June 2025, The Pentagon

Good morning. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, and good morning. And all of you, thank you for -- thank you for being here. As a follow up to my comments on Sunday's press conference, I wanted to give you a few updates this morning on something I'm honored to do as the chairman, and that's a chance to get to talk about some of our service members and the incredible things that they do on behalf of our nation. And I apologize ahead of time for the length and the -- and the detail.

Today I'm going to brief you on a couple of things. First, I'm going to talk about our air defenders at Al Udeid in Qatar and their actions on Monday. Then I'm going to walk you through a little bit about the academics that went into the attack against Fordo, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator weapon, and we're going to show a video that -- that highlights the effects that that weapon has. Of course, nobody was down inside the target, so we don't have video from the target.

First on Monday; As the President has stated, on Monday morning we began to receive indications and warnings that Iran intended to attack US bases in the region. That morning, building on the work that CENTCOM Commander Eric Kurilla had done and on the orders of the President, Al Udeid -- at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and around the region we assumed a minimum force posture.

Most folks had moved off the base to extend the security perimeter out away from what we assessed might be a target zone, except for a very few Army soldiers at Al Udeid. At that point, only two Patriot batteries remained on base, roughly 44 American soldiers responsible for defending the entire base, to include CENTCOM's forward headquarters in the Middle East, an entire air base and all the US forces there.

The oldest soldier was a 28 year old captain. The youngest was a 21-year-old private who'd been in the military for less than two years. So, let's put ourselves out there for a second. Imagine you're that young first lieutenant. You're 25 or 26 years old, and you've been assigned as the tactical director inside the command and control element. You, at that age, are the sole person responsible to defend this base.

Listening next to you is your early warning operator, whose job is to notify you of imminent attack. There's five people inside a vehicle and five people outside of a vehicle around these -- a total of, as I said, 44.

By the way, you've sat in the Middle East for years, deployed over and over again, extended multiple times, always being prepared but unsure of when that particular day will come that you must execute your mission and not fail at doing it.

In this case, these Patriot crews were deployed from Korea and Japan as part of our US forces there to ensure that we had the most capable missiles in the CENTCOM area of responsibility. As the day continues, you start to hear more and more chatter in the information space about an impending attack. And as the sun starts to set in the west, you get orders from your higher headquarters to make sure that your missile batteries are pointed to the north.

There are just a few other teammates. It's hot. You're getting nervous, and you expect an attack. Outside of those Patriot vehicles, your hot crew, which is one NCO and four additional soldiers, turns the key and relinquishes control of those missiles to that young lieutenant inside the vehicle, and you wait.

You know that you're going to have approximately two minutes, 120 seconds, to either succeed or fail. And then at approximately 12:30 PM on Monday, that's 7:30 PM in Qatar as the sun sets in the west, Iran attacks. As the targets were detected, round after round of Patriot missiles are ejected from their canisters by an initial launch charge. Then the main solid rocket motor ignites, you can feel this in your body if you've ever been around a Patriot taking a shot, and round after round goes out and guides against those missiles coming inbound.

We believe that this is the largest single Patriot engagement in US military history. And we were joined -- we were joined in this engagement by the Qatari Patriot crews. I'm not going to tell you how many rounds were shot, but it was a bunch, because of classified purposes.

And we're aware that something -- there's reports of something getting through. What we do know is there was a lot of metal flying around. Between attacking missiles being hit by Patriots, boosters from attacking missiles being hit by Patriots, the Patriots themselves flying around and the debris from those Patriots hitting the ground, there was a lot of metal flying around, and yet our US air defenders had only seconds to make complex decisions with strategic impact.

These awesome humans, along with their Qatari brothers and sisters in arms, stood between a salvo of Iranian missiles and the safety of Al Udeid. They are the unsung heroes of the 21st century United States Army. And I know a lot of you have seen the videos online and the excitement as those Patriots departed their launchers and went up and guided. This really demonstrates the combat capability and capacity of our Army air defenders. Simply stated, they absolutely crushed it.

If you'd flip this over -- thanks. Let me -- let me next move to a walkthrough of the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator weapon and share a little bit about the planners who did this and their work on the weapon. First, let me set the stage for you. There's an organization in the US called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, DTRA. DTRA does a lot of things for our nation, but DTRA is the world's leading expert on deeply buried underground targets.

In 2009, a Defense Threat Reduction Agency officer was brought into a vault at an undisclosed location and briefed on something going on in Iran. For security purposes, I'm not going to share his name. He was shown some photos and some highly classified intelligence of what looked like a major construction project in the mountains of Iran.

He was tasked to study this facility, work with the intelligence community to understand it, and he was soon joined by an additional teammate. For more than 15 years, this officer and his teammate lived and breathed this single target, Fordo, a critical element of Iran's covert nuclear weapons program.

He studied the geology. He watched the Iranians dig it out. He watched the construction, the weather, the discard material, the geology, the construction materials, where the materials came from. He looked at the vent shaft, the exhaust shaft, the electrical systems, the environmental control systems, every nook, every crater, every piece of equipment going in and every piece of equipment going out.

They literally dreamed about this target at night when they slept. They thought about it driving back and forth to work. And they knew from the very first days what this was for. You do not build a multi-layered underground bunker complex with centrifuges and other equipment in a mountain for any peaceful purpose.

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, so they began a journey to work with industry and other tacticians to develop the GBU-57. They tested it over and over again, tried different options, tried more 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. And then, on a day in June of 2025, more than 15 years after they started their life's work, the phone rang and the President of the United States ordered the B-2 force that you've supported to go strike and kill this target.

Yesterday, I had the incredible honor and privilege of spending time with these two Defense Threat Reduction Agency officers who've given so much. One of them said, "I can't even get my head around this. My heart is so filled with the pride of being a part of this team. I am so honored to be a part of this." To you both, thank you and thank you to your families.

Operation Midnight Hammer was the culmination of those 15 years of incredible work, the air crews, the tanker crews, the weapons crews that built the weapons, the load crews that loaded it.

Before I run through this video today, I want to talk a little bit about weaponeering and what goes into an attack. Weaponeering is the science of evaluating a target. I mentioned all of those factors before that these two DTRA officers had thought about. Ultimately, weaponeering is determining the right weapon and fuse combination to achieve the desired effects and maximum destruction against a target.

In the case of Fordo, the DTRA team understood with a high degree of confidence the elements of the target required to kill its functions, and the weapons were designed, planned and delivered to ensure that they achieve the effects in the mission space. By the way, in the beginning of its development, we had so many PhDs working on the MOP program doing modeling and simulation that we were, quietly and in a secret way, the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America.

Click for direct access enlargement

So, let me talk about -- let me talk about the graphic a little bit and the GBU-57, which all of you, I know, know is a 30 -- 30,000 pound weapon dropped only by the B-2. It's comprised of steel, explosive and a fuse programed bespokely each weapon to achieve a particular effect inside the target. Each weapon had a unique desired impact angle, arrival, final heading and a fuse setting. The fuse is effectively what tells the bomb when to function. A longer delay in a fuse, the deeper the weapon will penetrate and drive into the target.

So, on Fordo, in June of 2008, you can see these three holes. Depicted here is the main exhaust shaft with two additional ventilation shafts on either side. The United States decided to strike these two ventilation shafts seen here on the main graphic as the primary point of entry into the mission space. In the days preceding the attack against Fordo, the Iranians attempted to cover the shafts with concrete to try to prevent an attack.

I won't share the specific dimensions of the concrete cap, but you should know that we know what the dimensions of those concrete caps were. The planners had to account for this. They accounted for everything. The cap was forcibly removed by the first weapon and the main shaft was uncovered. Weapons two, three, four, five were tasked to enter the main shaft, move down into the complex at greater than 1,000 feet per second and explode in the mission space.

Weapon number six was designed on each side -- so, there were six on each side. Weapons number six was designed as a flex weapon to allow us to cover if one of the proceeding jets or one of the preceding weapons did not work. The video I'm about to show you is the culmination of over 15 years of development and testing.

As I said, hundreds of test shots on various models. This is one weapon. So, if you take a view of this as five additionals, you'll get a sense of what this looks like. Hopefully you can see it and there's not too much reflection. Tom runs our videos out there. We'll run it at -- at full speed so you can see it and then go back through it. Go ahead, Tom.

Keep it going for a minute. You'll see inside the -- inside the mission space. Unlike a normal surface bomb, you won't see an impact crater because they're designed to deeply bury and then function. I know there's been a lot of questions about that. All six weapons at each vent at Fordo went exactly where they were intended to go.

A bomb has three affects that causes damage, blast, fragmentation and overpressure. In this case, the primary kill mechanism in the mission space was a mix of overpressure and blast ripping through the open tunnels and destroying critical hardware. The majority of the damage we assess based on our extensive modeling was a blast layer combined with the impulse extending from the shock. Imagine what this looks like six times over.

A point that I want to make here, the joint force does not do BDA. By design, we don't grade our own homework. The intelligence community does. But here's what we know following the attacks and the strikes on Fordo. First, that the weapons were built, tested and loaded properly. Two, the weapons were released on speed and on parameters. Three, the weapons all guided to their intended targets and to their intended aim points.

Four, the weapons functioned as designed, meaning they exploded. And we know this through other means, intelligence means that we have, that we're visibly -- we are visibly able to see them. And we know that the trailing jets saw the first weapons function, and the pilots stated, "This was the brightest explosion that I've ever seen. It literally looked like daylight."

Let me now turn to the bomber crews themselves, give you a few details about them. The crews that attacked Fordo were from the active duty Air Force and the Missouri Air National Guard. The crews ranked from captain to colonel, and most were graduates of the Air Force Weapons School headquartered at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. I will state for the record that there is no beach volleyball or football at the Air Force Weapons School.

There were male and female aviators on this mission. And a crew member told me when I talked to them on video the other day that this felt like the Super Bowl, the thousands of scientists, airmen and maintainers all coming together.

One last story about people. When the crews went to work on Friday, they kissed their loved ones goodbye not knowing when or if they'd be home. Late on Saturday night, their families became aware of what was happening. And on Sunday, when those jets returned from Whiteman, their families were there, flags flying and tears flowing. I have chills literally talking about this.

The jets rejoined into a formation of four airplanes followed by a formation of three and came up overhead Whiteman proudly in the traffic pattern, pitching out to land right over the base, and landing to the incredible cheers of their families, who sacrifice and serve right alongside their family members. Like I said, there were a lot of flags and a lot of tears.

One commander told me this is a moment in the lives of our families that they will never forget. That, my friends, is what America's joint force does. We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we test, we evaluate every single day. And when the call comes to deliver, we do so.

I could not be more proud standing up here today of our joint force. I'm filled with gratitude that I get to tell their story. And as we stand here right now, our forces remain on a high state of readiness in the region prepared to defend themselves.

And one last thing. 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 will continue to do so.

Thank you very much. I apologize for the length.

I look forward to your questions.

Original Text and Video Source: Defense.gov

Original Image Source: DVIDShub.net

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Image Credit: This work, SD, CJCS Conduct Pentagon Press Briefing by Kashif Basharat,

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Page Created: 6/26/25

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