US Press
US service chiefs warn Hegseth that prolonging the Iran war is unsustainable
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The heads of the American army, navy and air force have told the US defence secretary that large-scale operations against Iran cannot be sustained at their present scale, and that continuing them weakens Washington's ability to handle threats elsewhere.
The Washington Post reported the assessment on Sunday, attributing it to people familiar with material prepared for Pete Hegseth. The warnings, the paper reported, were set out by the three service chiefs together with the four-star commanders responsible for American operations in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and appear in the 14 August edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book.
The Post's account is of a professional military judgement about capacity, not a political objection to the war. Its wording is that prolonging the operations is unsustainable and risks weakening the ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the American homeland.
The detail beside it#
Politico's defence desk reported the same weekend that the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has passed Singapore on its way home from the Middle East, with a stop expected in Thailand.
Ship movements are not policy, and the Post's report does not say Hegseth has accepted the advice. Taken together, though, the two items describe an American military footprint in the region that its own commanders are arguing should get smaller.
Why this matters from Gaza and the West Bank#
For two years the working assumption in Palestinian political analysis has been that Washington's regional bandwidth determines how much attention Palestine gets, and in which direction.
An administration fully committed to a war with Iran has little appetite for pressing Israel on the West Bank, and the file that is stalled — the Gaza stabilisation force, the governance committee, the reconstruction money — needs sustained American attention to move at all. A judgement inside the Pentagon that the Iran operation must shrink is therefore relevant to Palestinians even though it says nothing about them.
It also cuts the other way. The same reporting shows the Iran war absorbing the resources and the political energy of the American government at a moment when the Gaza plan agreed last October has produced a peacekeeping force still assembling and a disarmament framework Israel has rejected.
Neither the Pentagon nor the White House has commented publicly on the assessment.
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