AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Today, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was on Capitol Hill asking Congress for billions of dollars to fund the war with Iran. It is the first public hearing on this war since May, with the U.S. now in its 10th day in a row of bombing Iran and four Americans dying in the past week as fighting has intensified. Lawmakers finally had a chance to press this administration on its strategy and on this funding request.
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PETE HEGSETH: This request is an urgent, necessary injection of resources to address the immediate needs of our department.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
That is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaking to the Senate Appropriations Committee today, asking for tens of billions of those funds, urgently, as the war escalates. It is the first time in more than two months that the Trump administration is giving an accounting on the state of the war.
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SUSAN COLLINS: But irrespective of our differing views about the military operations, the fact remains that there are must-pay bills and urgent requirements facing the department that affect the ability of our troops to be well trained and, more broadly, of the U.S. military to deter and defend against potential aggressors worldwide.
CHANG: That was Republican Susan Collins of Maine, the committee chair. Senators had all kinds of questions for Hegseth about the size of the request, where the money would go and about the administration's shifting goals for the war.
SUMMERS: Democrats, like Vice Chair Patty Murray told Hegseth...
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PATTY MURRAY: So I'll be blunt. The truth is your request does not make a lot of sense.
SUMMERS: ...And questioned the contradictory narratives about Iran's capabilities and who controls the Strait of Hormuz. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island was even more direct.
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JACK REED: We're talking about a war you started, not a situation in which oil was flowing freely. There was no conflict. We weren't losing personnel as a result of Iranian actions. So your fallback to the Biden administration is just a very, very obvious excuse for what I think is probably, as you described so often, gross negligence.
SUMMERS: NPR's Quil Lawrence is on the line to help us unpack some of this. Hi there.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Hi.
SUMMERS: So, Quil, we just, there, heard some of the more testy exchanges from this hearing. What struck you most?
LAWRENCE: Well, straight from their opening statements, I have to say that neither General Caine nor Secretary Hegseth mentioned Iran at all in their opening. And this has to be noted, Secretary Hegseth - I didn't hear him mention the casualties over the weekend. The senators who opened the hearing and General Caine did offer their condolences. I don't know how much to make of that fact, but it's a fact.
When the questions started, they were pretty bluntly dodged by the secretary and even the chairman. You heard Democrat Patty Murray just a second ago. She later asked Hegseth about President Trump's proposed toll on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, asking, who talked the president out of it? And Hegseth's answer was that the U.S. is blocking Iran's ports. Murray quoted Hegseth himself saying a few months ago that Iran's missiles were destroyed. And Hegseth's answer to that was that Iran is at its weakest point in 47 years.
So they were fairly well talking past each other. Republicans - very few of them even asked questions about the war. They focused on other budget issues, except, as said (ph) - as you mentioned, Louisiana Republican John Kennedy, who scolded Hegseth and General Caine for not answering questions. He said the topic was as serious as four heart attacks and a stroke, and he wanted straight answers.
SUMMERS: So it sounds to me like we didn't get much new information on what was going to be the first chance in months. We'll just note here, there has been no Pentagon briefing since May. Do you think that the senators know what's happening with Iran?
LAWRENCE: I don't think they do. Several senators have complained about a dearth of information coming out of the Department of Defense. The real - Pentagon Press Corps was kicked out last year, including NPR. A military official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed to NPR that the Pentagon is slow-walking information about wounded troops, for example. And the DOD spokesman yesterday confirmed that there have been 100 wounded in just the past two weeks, and that came out under some pressure from the press.
And the same with some former military officers. They tell me they're in the dark. They don't know how much damage has been done to bases in the region, to U.S. bases. They don't know how many aircraft have been lost on those bases. So it's very hard to draw lessons, for example, about how to defend against drones without these facts.
SUMMERS: Yeah. And meanwhile, the war with Iran continues to escalate - 10 straight days of bombardment and four Americans, at least, killed over the weekend and still no new information about how that happened.
LAWRENCE: Right. President Trump said today that some Iranian missiles had somehow slipped through, he said. And he seemed to suggest that the U.S. wasn't maybe in control of those missile defense systems on that base in Jordan, but the soldiers who died were all assigned to air defense teams.
SUMMERS: I mean, Quil, this war started with regime change. Then it was about keeping Iran from a nuclear weapon. And now it seems to be mostly about opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was not closed before the war, right? Help us understand.
LAWRENCE: Yes. I mean, these - Democratic Senator Murray listed those reasons given by the White House in her opening statement. And the president's statements over the past five months have sometimes been ignored or quickly walked back, like his suggestion to put a U.S. toll on traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Or they've been contradictory, like ceasefire deals being dead but also still under negotiation.
And many Democrats on the committee pointed out that whatever rationale for the war, as it evolves, none of these have landed well with the American people - certainly not well enough to understand why Americans are dying, albeit in relatively small numbers. But these are young soldiers who've died over the weekend.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
LAWRENCE: You know, Private Isabella Gonzales was just 19 years old.
SUMMERS: NPR's Quil Lawrence, thanks.
LAWRENCE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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