Hegseth has repeatedly said the US is upping the frequency of its Iran strikes. The data tells a different story

By Haley Britzky, CNN

(CNN) — While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly stated that the number and intensity of the strikes the US is carrying out against Iran is only increasing, data provided by the US military shows a pace of operations that has ebbed and flowed over the last three weeks.

As Hegseth has gone to the podium alongside Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine in a series of press conferences, he has repeatedly asserted that the coming day would bring the most US strikes on Iran yet.

Starting on March 4, his second briefing on the war which began on February 28, Hegseth said “more and larger waves” of strikes were coming, and that the Defense Department was “accelerating, not decelerating.”

“Iran’s capabilities are evaporating by the hour,” he said. On March 10, he said that “today will be yet again our most intense day of strikes inside Iran.” And on Thursday, Hegseth said, “today will be the largest strike package yet, just like yesterday was.”

But data released publicly by US Central Command has not shown that the number of strikes has increased daily the way Hegseth has indicated, which could partly be due to the need to adjust the frequency of flights as aircraft and ships receive maintenance while operations continue, or because the military started with a set target list and is now working to identify and confirm new targets.

US Central Command referred questions from CNN to the Defense Department. The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The discrepancy speaks to a disconnect between how the war is being messaged and the reality on the ground. During briefings to the press, Hegseth has said the US is “winning decisively”; that Iran’s air defenses have been “flattened” and industrial base “overwhelmingly destroyed”; and that Iran has “no air defenses…no air force….no Navy.”

Undoubtedly, Iran’s military capabilities have been degraded significantly and Israel has killed senior Iranian leaders including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s National Security Council.

However, the US has struggled to secure safe passage for commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively closed due to threats from Iran. Tehran has continued retaliating against neighboring nations and US forces throughout the region. On Thursday, a US F-35 fighter jet made an emergency landing after sources said it was believed to have been struck by Iran during a combat mission, raising questions about Hegseth’s claim on March 4 that by the end of that week, the US and Israel would have “complete control of Iranian skies.”

And the public strike numbers released by US Central Command reveal that the waves of attacks since Hegseth’s first briefing have not been increasing steadily, despite Hegseth’s rhetoric indicating otherwise.

It’s not particularly surprising that the number of strikes would increase or decrease over time, Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Defense and Security Department told CNN. It could reflect that the operation is moving into a sustained air campaign, meaning the military will need to provide maintenance to aircraft and ships as the operations continue, whereas at the beginning, “you can just surge,” Cancian said. The USS Gerald R. Ford, for example, is moving away from participating in the operations briefly to conduct repairs in Souda Bay, Crete, after a fire broke out in the ship’s laundry area.

But the pace of operations could decrease and increase as the military works to find new targets, Cancian said. The military “started the campaign with a CENTCOM target list, which has been maintained for decades,” he said. Nearly three weeks and more than 7,000 targets later, they have likely worked through much of that list and are expanding it as more intelligence comes in.

“I think for both reasons, that rate of attacks has sort of moderated to a level that is on average, below 1,000 a day,” Cancian said.

Strike data has not been released daily showing the increase in targets hit; CENTCOM has instead released data every few days showing an increase in targets struck. Using that data, the average number of strikes per day in the interim shows the number of strikes has increased and decreased over time — though the peak was reached on the first day of the operation when CENTCOM said more than 1,000 targets were hit.

Numbers released by CENTCOM on March 9 and March 12, for example, show that targets struck increased by roughly 1,000, amount to an average of 333 strikes per day. But on March 10, in the middle of that period, Hegseth said, “today will be yet again our most intense day of strikes inside Iran, the most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes, intelligence more refined and better than ever.”

On March 13, Hegseth said that “today will be yet again the highest volume of strikes that America has put over the skies of Iran and Tehran.” But from March 12 to March 16, the US averaged roughly 250 strikes per day according to an average of CENTCOM’s data, as the targets struck increased from approximately 6,000 on March 12 to more than 7,000 on March 16.

There have been moments of uptick in the average number of strikes: On March 2, roughly 250 targets were struck, which increased to 450 targets struck on March 3. And between March 6 and March 9, there was an average of 666 targets hit per day, up from an average of 433 targets struck between March 3 and March 6.

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