By Jack Phillips
The U.S. military sent B-1 bombers “deep inside Iran” to target the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile systems on Sunday night, the U.S. Central Command said on Monday.
CENTCOM also provided footage of a B-1 bomber, a supersonic heavy bomber known as the Lancer that has been used by the U.S. military since the mid-1980s, being serviced and taking off from an air base.
“Last night, U.S. B-1 bombers, struck deep inside Iran to degrade Iranian ballistic missile capabilities,” CENTCOM said in a post on X. “As the President stated, ‘we’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.’”
Earlier on Monday, CENTCOM confirmed that a total of four U.S. service members have died since the start of the Iran campaign. Meanwhile, three F-15 fighter jets have been lost to friendly fire as the U.S. military confirmed that Kuwaiti air defenses shot them down.
Previously, the military confirmed it had used B-2 Spirit stealth bombers to strike at Iranian missile facilities on Saturday night. They were equipped with 2,000-pound bombs.
In his first public briefing since the attacks, U.S. War Secretary Pete Hegseth defended America’s decision to strike Iran, adding that regime officials spent weeks stalling during the recent rounds of U.S. negotiations as part of their plans to attack. The strikes are designed to reduce Iran’s navy and end its nuclear and missile ambitions, he said.
At a White House event later on Monday, President Donald Trump said the military campaign is expected to take four to five weeks to accomplish but “we have the capability to go far longer than that.” Trump added that officials had also projected it would take four weeks to get rid of Iran’s military leadership, but that was quickly accomplished “so we’re ahead of schedule there.”
The strikes on Saturday killed Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and members of his family along with dozens of Iranian officials. Iran has not yet named a replacement for Khamenei, who ruled the country in a theocratic dictatorship since 1989.
Trump said U.S. attacks have already “knocked out” 10 ships, and that attacks on Iran’s missile capacity ensure their destruction while also stopping “their capacity to produce brand ones.”
In separate comments, Trump told the New York Post on Monday that he wasn’t ruling out U.S. military forces entering Iran if “they were necessary.“ Using a sports term that can mean qualms, he said, “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.”
The U.S. strikes came as Washington and Tehran had been negotiating for weeks over the future of the country’s nuclear program, which western officials say was being used to attempt to produce nuclear weapons.
Trump also told the Post that his recent decision was in response to the Islamic Republic’s actions against the United States since it came into power in 1979. “Don’t forget, this has been going on for 47 years—for 47 years, they were, they were playing bad,” he said, referring to the 1979-1981 hostage crisis that resulted in dozens of Americans being captured at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the 1983 bombings in Beirut that killed 241 Americans.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
