Vice President JD Vance quietly went around the Pentagon to call military commanders directly for blunt assessments of the Iran War.
The New York Times reported Thursday that Vance wanted the commanders' individual judgments as they saw them before those views were merged into an official Pentagon position. The Times described Vance as opposed to the war from the outset, and he was tasked by President Donald Trump with helping to end it.
The vice president reached commanders in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, pressing them on the war's objectives, casualty estimates, how much punishment Tehran's government could absorb, and what was left in their weapons stockpiles, according to the report.
The answers were sobering as officers were most alarmed by their shrinking supply of Patriot interceptors, which are the mainstay of U.S. air defenses. One theater of the conflict dropped below 100 of them by late spring, The Times reported.
Those private assessments clashed sharply with what the administration has said in public. Trump has continued to falsely claim the United States has already won, that Iran's military has been demolished, and that there are no problems with American weapons supplies, The Times noted. Vance himself recently played down the notion that the country was even at war.
Behind closed doors, the president has raged at coverage of the depleted stockpiles and branded the reporting treasonous, according to The Times. Investigators later subjected dozens of senior Pentagon officers to polygraph tests.
The administration pushed back on the reporting. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the defense secretary had "facilitated direct access to combatant commanders" for the vice president and other senior White House officials.
Joseph Holstead, a spokesman for General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted "there is no gap in the military advice" provided to the president, vice president, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.