In the days before the United States launched a major military campaign against Iran, President Donald Trump received repeated briefings that framed the action as a "high-risk, high-reward" undertaking, a U.S. official said.
The operation - which the Pentagon labeled "Operation Epic Fury" - began on Saturday and quickly expanded the violence in the Middle East into a new and unpredictable phase. U.S. and Israeli strikes struck multiple targets inside Iran, and Iran answered with attacks against Israel and neighboring Gulf Arab countries.
According to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity, the briefers presented the president with stark assessments: the campaign could produce major U.S. casualties even as it offered the possibility of producing a long-term strategic advantage for U.S. interests across the region.
How the president was briefed
The official said the national security team characterized the plan as high risk but with potentially large strategic gains. President Trump himself acknowledged the stakes as the operation began, telling viewers in a video address that "the lives of courageous American heroes may be lost."
"But we’re doing this not for now, we’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission," Trump said in announcing the start of major combat operations. "For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted death to America and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder ... We’re not gonna put up with it any longer."
Those briefings help explain why the president authorized what officials described as one of the riskiest U.S. military enterprises since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the run-up to the strikes, Trump received multiple briefings from senior officials including CIA Director John Ratcliffe, U.S. General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
On the Thursday before the operation, Admiral Brad Cooper - who leads U.S. forces in the Middle East as head of Central Command - traveled to Washington to join discussions held in the White House Situation Room, the official said.
Warnings about limits and retaliation
A second U.S. official, also speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of internal deliberations, said the White House had been warned of several risks tied to strikes on Iran. Those included retaliatory missile strikes against multiple U.S. bases in the region that could overwhelm defenses, and attacks on American forces in Iraq and Syria by Iranian proxies.
That official noted that despite a massive U.S. military buildup, there were limits to the air defense systems hurried into the theater. Experts interviewed in the course of planning cautioned that the conflict could evolve in dangerous directions and that the Pentagon’s planning did not guarantee a particular outcome in any extended conflict.
Political aims and operational scope
In the weeks before the strikes, the president ordered a sizable military buildup in the Middle East. Military planning envisioned the possibility of a sustained campaign against Iran if that course was chosen, and plans included targeting individual officials, officials said.
An Israeli official told U.S. authorities that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian were among those targeted, though the outcome of those specific strikes was not clear.
On Saturday, Trump articulated broad objectives for the campaign: he said the United States would move to end the threat Tehran poses to the United States and to provide Iranians with an opportunity to remove their rulers. He described plans to degrade Iran’s military capabilities and to deny Tehran the ability to build a nuclear weapon - a charge Iran rejects.
"We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground... We’re going to annihilate their navy," Trump said. "We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces."
Risk appetite compared with prior operations
Officials characterized the president’s decision to press ahead as reflecting a higher tolerance for operational risk than in recent months. Observers inside the U.S. government contrasted the scale and peril of this campaign with other recent operations, including an earlier special operations raid in Venezuela and previous strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards responded to the strikes by declaring threats against all U.S. bases and interests in the region and saying that retaliation would continue until "the enemy is decisively defeated." Analysts and officials warned that Tehran retains multiple means of responding, including missiles, drones and cyber capabilities.
Daniel Shapiro, a former senior Pentagon official for Middle East issues, said that despite the damage inflicted by U.S. and Israeli strikes, Iran would still be able to inflict pain. He warned that "Iran has many more ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. bases than the U.S. has interceptors ... some Iranian weapons will get through," and called the strikes "a major gamble."
Voices on the ground and political dynamics
Observers noted the limits of calls for a popular uprising inside Iran. Nicole Grajewski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that urging Iranians to topple their government is not straightforward: the opposition is fragmented, and it is unclear what level of domestic uprising the population is willing to undertake.
Both U.S. officials who described the briefings asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the discussions. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and the Pentagon declined to comment.
Outlook
The sequence of briefings, the buildup of forces and the operational choices made by U.S. and Israeli leaders set the stage for a campaign that planners acknowledge could produce significant casualties and unpredictable escalation. Officials framed the action as seeking long-term strategic gains, even as they warned senior policymakers of the immediate dangers and operational limits present in the theater.