In President Trump’s view, generals are chest-thumping, tough-talking cheerleaders for the military and the operations he, as commander in chief, orders them to carry out.

It’s a view that often puts the senior military officers who serve under him in an impossible position. On Thursday morning, it fell to Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to meet Mr. Trump’s expectations without politicizing the institution he serves.

He did it by painting an earnest, at times florid, picture of the men and women involved in the attack this weekend on Iran’s nuclear site at Fordo, and largely sidestepping the question of how successful the strike had been.

General Caine’s first big test began with a preliminary report from the Defense Intelligence Agency this week suggesting that the attack at the site and two others in Iran had set back the country’s nuclear program by only a few months, according to officials familiar with the findings.

News about that report infuriated Mr. Trump, who described the strikes in social media posts as “legendary” and insisted that Iran’s nuclear sites had been “obliterated.”

At the Pentagon on Thursday, Mr. Hegseth spent 10 minutes excoriating reporters as unpatriotic and “irresponsible.”