Preliminary after-action reports following U.S. military operations are standard, but “almost always wrong,” according to President Donald Trump’s former deputy national security adviser.
The effectiveness of U.S. strikes Saturday on Iran’s three primary nuclear facilities was called into question in reporting from CNN and The New York Times that was based on a leaked initial Defense Intelligence Agency report that suggested the strikes only set Iran’s nuclear program back several months.
Initial reports are “in real time,” explained Victoria Coates, who served in Trump’s first term. Such reports, as was the case with the leaked DIA report, are “expressed with low confidence,” said Coates, now vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
The leak of the document, which was given to Congress, is “outrageous,” Coates told The Daily Signal, adding it is “unfortunate” that the early report received so much attention “because everything else that’s coming out suggests that the strike was a huge success and may have set them back as much as 10 or 15 years.”
Both Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been critical of the media coverage of the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the White House has said it will limit the classified information it shares with Congress in the wake of the leaked report.
For now, the strike appears to have accomplished not only the major objective of significantly degrading Iran’s nuclear program, but also bringing about a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. Asked whether she thinks peace will hold, Coates says her confidence is growing in the peace deal each day Israel and Iran continue to abide by the terms of the ceasefire.
Iran did respond to the U.S. strikes on its nuclear sites with an attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar, but no one was injured in the attack and the U.S. effectively intercepted the missiles Iran fired.
While the fighting between the U.S. and Iran, and between Israel and Iran, appears to be over for now, the threat of an activation of terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. does remain real, according to Coates.
“We know that some 1,500 Iranian nationals, some of them on terrorist watchlists, were apprehended at the border during the Biden administration and released into the country,” she said.
While the threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil is real, and one the administration is actively working to prevent, Coates says, the Iranian regime knows such an attack would escalate tensions between Iran and the U.S., which the Tehran regime likely wants to avoid.
“If they carried out an attack directly on American civilians, on American soil, they would cease to exist,” Coates says of the Iranian regime. “And the president sent that message very clearly as well, when he said, ‘I’m not going to take out the supreme leader, yet, but I could.’ So, the Ali Khamenei, [Iran’s supreme leader], is alive at the pleasure of the American president, which he knows.”
Coates sits down with The Daily Signal to discuss the Trump administration’s next steps as the U.S. remains committed to preventing a nuclear Iran.