The Trump administration questions the initial assessments of Iranian strike damage

A disclosed report of the Defense Intelligence Agency casts doubt on the assertion of President Donald Trump according to which the recent American air strikes “completely and completely erased” three Iranian nuclear installations, concluding rather than the mission only retains the Iranian program for several months.

The report, published by CNN and the New York Times, comes only a few days after Trump approved strikes in the midst of increasing tensions between Israel and Iran. In a national address immediately after the operation, Trump said the sites “completely and completely deleted”.

While members of the Trump administration waged a new war to discredit the initial report of the Pentagon Defense Intelligence Agency, several experts told Fox News Digital that there was too little information available at the moment to precisely determine the strikes of strikes.

Assembling an in-depth assessment of intelligence is complex and takes time, they said.

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Trump said on Saturday that the United States had finished a “very successful” strike against Iranian nuclear sites in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, saying that Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities were “erased”. (Fox News)

Dan Shapiro, who previously was deputy deputy secretary to the Defense for the Middle East and the American ambassador to Israel, said that he had not put much stock in the too pessimistic or too optimistic assessments that quickly emerged and declared that the initial evaluation of DIA was probably only based on satellite imagery.

“This is a piece of the puzzle of how you really do this evaluation,” Fox News Digital Shapiro told Fox News, now a main member of the Atlantic Council. “You would really like to have to test all other flows of intelligence, based on the intelligence of signals, human intelligence, other forms of site surveillance, potentially visit inspectors from the international atomic energy agency, potentially visiting other people.

“But I think it is likely that if the ammunition worked as expected, significant damage has been caused and the program would come back considerably,” said Shapiro.

General Dan Caine, president of the joint staff chiefs, said on Sunday that the initial evaluations of battle damage suggested that “the three sites had suffered extremely serious damage and destruction”, but he recognized that a final evaluation “would take some time”.

However, media reports based on the DIA report painted a different image, and CNN reports on the initial report indicated that the hiding place of uranium enriched by Iran was not destroyed in strikes, citing seven people who had been informed of the report. The results were based on an evaluation of the battle damage of the central American control, according to CNN.

Other members of the Trump administration, including the defense secretary Pete Hegseth, later postponed the conclusions of the DIA report, saying that the report had been described as “low confidence”.

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Defense secretary Pete Hegseth speaks at a press conference at Pentagon on Thursday, June 26, 2025, in Washington. (AP photo / Kevin Wolf)

The term is commonly used when labeling initial assessments and means that conclusions are based on limited data, according to experts.

Adm. Adm. Mark Montgomery, Adm. Mark Montgomery, who previously was director of transnational threats to the National Security Council of former President Bill Clinton, said that the description of low confidence is commonly used in the first evaluations.

“Little confidence means that the analyst is not sure of the accuracy of their evaluation,” said Montgomery, now a senior member of the Washington reflection group, the Defense Foundation of Democracies. “This is common when with a quick 24-hour assessment like this.”

Montgomery colleague Craig Singleton, also a main member of the basics of defense of democracies, said that the low confidence label was used in cases with thin evidence and serves as a warning for political decision -makers to search for additional information.

“More importantly, low confidence assessments are generally issued when key facts must still be verified, which certainly applies in this case,” said Singleton.

Rob Greenway, former deputy deputy assistant to Trump National Security Council, told Fox News Digital that it would take one or two to obtain a more in -depth assessment with higher confidence.

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President Donald Trump holds a meeting alongside Vice-President JD Vance in the White House situation room in Washington, DC, June 21, 2025. (The White House / Handout via Reuters)

Greenway also said that the strikes had been designed to create damage underground, which will complicate the evaluation of damage, because it is not immediately available and will require several sources of intelligence, such as signals or human intelligence, to draw conclusions.

Israel had also carried out strikes targeting the sites, adding to the analysis network which must be assessed, said Greenway.

“Each of these elements is a much wider piece of a puzzle, and you try to assess the ultimate effect of the entire puzzle, not just a special strike,” Greenway, now director of the Allison Center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation. “All this means that it will take time to do it.”

Despite this, Greenway said that the amount of ammunition had dropped on the sites – including more than 14,30,000 LB. BOMBES – means that the targeted installations have been so strongly compromised that they are no longer usable.

“We put the amount of ammunition necessary to make the desired effect twice, just to make sure that we did not have to return,” said Greenway.

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President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R) sit in the situation room while they were monitoring the mission that eliminated three Iranian nuclear enrichment sites at the White House on June 21, 2025, in Washington, DC (Daniel Torok / The White House via Getty Images)

“There is practically no mathematical probability in which one or the other of the facilities can be used again by Iran for provided, if necessary, which again means that everything is now in Israel’s capacity to strike if necessary,” said Greenway.

And Michael Allen, a former senior director of the National Security Council of the Administration George W. Bush, said that even if a final judgment of the intelligence community will not be ready soon, the intelligence portrait will become “richer” in the coming days.

“Tips are flocking, and we collect it, and they are trying to bust the White House as soon as possible,” Fox News Digital Allen, general manager of the Beacon Global Strategies, told Fox News Director.

The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told journalists that very few people had access to this report, and those who disclosed it to the media will be held responsible while the FBI investigates the document with the press.

“This person was irresponsible,” Leavitt told journalists on Thursday. “And we have to go to the bottom. And we have to strengthen this process to protect our national security and protect the American public.”