Recently, DTRA made headlines living up to our mission to deter strategic attacks against the United States and our allies. We continue to prevent, reduce, and counter WMD and emerging threats and prevail against WMD-armed adversaries in crisis and conflict.

 

Watch Video from 26:15

 

Transcript:

Extracted DTRA Comments from CJCS, General Dan Caine
26 June 2025; 0800
00:05:09:48 - 00:05:38:31
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
This really demonstrates the combat capability and capacity of our Army Air Defenders. Simply stated, they absolutely crushed it. If you flip this over, thanks. Let me now let me next move to, a walkthrough of the GBU 57, Massive Ordnance Penetrator weapon and share a little bit about the planners who did this and their work on the weapon.
 
00:05:38:36 - 00:06:12:03
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
First, let me set the stage for you. There's an organization in the US called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency - DTRA. DTRA does a lot of things for our nation, but DTRA is the world's leading expert on deeply buried underground targets. In 2009, a Defense Threat Reduction Agency officer was brought into a vault at an undisclosed location and briefed on something going on in Iran for security purposes.
 
00:06:12:03 - 00:06:44:17
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
I'm not going to share his name. He was shown some photos and some highly classified intelligence of what looked like a major construction project in the mountains of Iran. He was tasked to study this facility, work with the intelligence community to understand it, and he was soon joined by an additional teammate. For more than 15 years, this officer and his teammate lived and breathed this single target Fordow, a critical element of Iran's covert nuclear weapons program.
 
00:06:44:22 - 00:07:08:04
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
He studied the geology. He watched the Iranians dig it out. He watched the construction, the weather, the discard material, the geology, the construction materials, where the materials came from. He looked at the vent shaft, the exhaust shaft, the electrical systems, the environmental control systems, every nook, every crater, every piece of equipment going in and every piece of equipment going out.
 
00:07:08:09 - 00:07:36:43
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
They literally dreamed about this target at night when they slept. They thought about it, driving back and forth to work. And they knew from the very first days what this was for. You do not build a multilayered underground bunker complex with centrifuges and other equipment in a mountain for any peaceful purpose. They weren't able to discuss this with their family, their wives, their kids, their friends.
 
00:07:36:57 - 00:08:10:30
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
But they just kept grinding it out. And along the way, they realized we did not have a weapon that could adequately strike and kill this target. So, they began a journey to work with industry and other tacticians to develop the GBU 57. They tested it over and over again, tried different options, tried more. After that, they accomplished hundreds of test shots and dropped many full-scale weapons against extremely realistic targets for a single purpose.
 
 
00:08:10:34 - 00:08:40:36
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
Kill this target at the time and place of our nation's choosing. And then on a day in June of 2025, more than 15 years after they started their life's work, the phone rang, and the President of the United States ordered the B-2 force that you've supported to go strike and kill this target. Yesterday, I had the incredible honor and privilege of spending time with these two Defense Threat Reduction Agency officers who've given so much.
 
00:08:40:40 - 00:09:01:40
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
One of them said, quote, “I can't even get my head around this. My heart is so filled with the pride of being a part of this team. I am so honored to be a part of this.” To you both, thank you and thank you to your families. Operation Midnight Hammer was the culmination of those 15 years of incredible work.
 
00:09:01:40 - 00:09:23:40
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
The air crews, the tanker crews, the weapons crews that built the weapons, the load crews that loaded it. Before I run through this video today, I want to talk a little bit about weaponeering and what goes into, into an attack. Weapon hearing is the science of a evaluating a target. I mentioned all of those factors before that these two ditch officers had thought about.
 
00:09:23:45 - 00:09:53:26
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
Ultimately, weaponeering is determining the right weapon and fuze combination to achieve the desired effects and maximum destruction against a target. In the case of Fordow, the Deter team understood with a high degree of confidence the elements of the target required to kill its functions, and the weapons were designed, planned and delivered to ensure that they achieve the effects in the mission space.
 
00:09:53:31 - 00:10:26:48
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
By the way, in the beginning of its development, we had so many PhDs working on the mock program, doing modeling and simulation that we were quietly and in a secret way, the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America. So let me talk about let me talk about the graphic, a little bit. And the GBU 57, which all of you I know, know is a 30 Pat, 30,000-pound weapon, dropped only by the B-2.
 
00:10:26:52 - 00:10:59:26
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
It's comprised of steel explosive and a fuze programed, bespokely for each weapon to achieve a particular effect inside the target. Each weapon had a unique desired impact angle. Arrival, final heading. In a fuze setting, the fuze is effectively what tells the bomb when to function. A longer delay in a fuze, the deeper the weapon will penetrate and drive into the target.
 
00:10:59:31 - 00:11:34:07
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
So, on Fordow in June of 2008, you can see, these three holes depicted here is the main exhaust shaft with two additional ventilation shafts on either side. The United States decided to strike these two ventilation shafts, as seen here on the main graphic, as the primary point of entry into the mission space. In the days preceding the attack against Fordow, the Iranians attempted to cover the shafts with concrete, to try to prevent, an attack.
 
00:11:34:12 - 00:12:16:53
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
I won't share the specific dimensions of the concrete cap, but you should know that we know what the dimensions of those concrete caps were. The planners had to account for this. They accounted for everything. The cap was forcibly removed by the first weapon, and the main shaft was uncovered. Weapons two, three, four, five were tasked to enter. The main shaft moved down into the complex at greater than 1000ft per second and explode in the mission space weapon number six was designed on each side, so there were six on each side.
 
00:12:16:53 - 00:12:42:31
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
Weapons. Number six was designed as a flex weapon to allow us to cover if one of the preceding jets, or one of the preceding weapons, did not work. The video I'm about to show you is a culmination of over 15 years of development and testing. As I said, hundreds of test shots on various models. This is one weapon.
 
00:12:42:36 - 00:13:00:46
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
So, if you take a view of this is five additional, you'll get a sense of, of of what this looks like. Hopefully you can see it. And there's not too, too much reflection. Tom runs our videos out there. We'll run it at full speed so you can see it and then go back through it.
 
00:13:00:46 - 00:13:32:24
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
Go ahead. Tom.
 
00:13:32:29 - 00:13:45:33
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
Keep it going for a minute. You'll see. Inside the inside. The mission space.
 
00:13:45:37 - 00:14:21:49
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
Unlike a normal surface bomb, you won't see an impact crater because they're designed to deeply bury and then function. I know there's been a lot of questions about that. All six weapons at each vent at Fordow went exactly where they were intended to go. A bomb has three effects that causes damage blast fragmentation, and overpressure. In this case, the primary kill mechanism in the mission space was a mix of overpressure and blast ripping through the open tunnels and destroying critical hardware.
 
00:14:21:54 - 00:14:47:51
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
The majority of the damage we assess based on our extensive modeling was a blast layer, combined with the impulse extending from the shock. Imagine what this looks like six times over a point that I want to make here. The joint force does not do BD by design. We don't create our own homework. The intelligence community does. But here's what we know.
 
00:14:47:51 - 00:15:21:51
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
Following the attacks and the strikes on Fordow first that the weapons were built, tested and loaded properly to the weapons were released on speed and on parameters. Three the weapons, all guided to their intended targets and to their intended aim points for the weapons, functioned as designed, meaning they exploded. We know this through other means. Intelligence means that we have that were visibly, we were visibly able to see them.
 
00:15:21:55 - 00:15:44:53
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
And we know that the trailing jets saw the first weapons function and the pilots stated, quote, this was the brightest explosion that I've ever seen. It literally looked like daylight. Let me now turn to the bomber. Crews themselves give you a few details about them. The crews that attacked Fordow were from the active-duty Air Force and the Missouri Air National Guard.
 
00:15:44:58 - 00:16:17:28
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
The crews ranked from captain to colonel, and most were graduates of the Air Force Weapons School, headquartered at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. I will state for the record that there is no beach volleyball, or football at the Air Force weapon school. There were male and female aviators on this mission, and a crew member told me when I talked to them on video the other day that this felt like the Super Bowl, the thousands of scientists, airmen and maintainers all coming together.
 
00:16:17:33 - 00:16:44:46
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
One last story about people. When the crews went to work on Friday, they kiss their loved ones goodbye, not knowing when or if they'd be home. Late on Saturday night, their families became aware of what was happening. And on Sunday, when those jets returned from white men, their families were there, flags flying and tears flowing. I have chills literally talking about this.
 
00:16:44:51 - 00:17:10:03
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
The Jets rejoined into a formation of four airplanes, followed by a formation of three and came up overhead. White men, proudly in the traffic pattern, pitching out to land right over the base and landing to the incredible cheers of their families who sacrifice and serve right alongside their family members. Like I said, there were a lot of flags and a lot of tears.
 
00:17:10:08 - 00:17:34:19
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine:
One commander told me, this is a moment in the lives of our families that they will never forget. That, my friends, is what America's joint force does. We think we develop, we train, we rehearse, we test, we evaluate every single day. And when the call comes to deliver, we do so I could not be more proud standing up here today of our joint force.
 
00:17:34:19 - 00:18:02:11
I'm filled with gratitude that I get to tell their story. And as we stand here right now, our forces remain on a high state of readiness in the region, prepared to defend themselves. And one last thing our adversaries around the world should know that there are other DTRA team members out there studying targets for the same amount of time and will continue to do so.