As the U.S.-Israel military campaign against Iran enters its fifth week, one of Washington’s most respected defense analysts is offering a clear-eyed assessment of what American forces are actually trying to achieve — and why the numbers suggest they are succeeding.

Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of its Keystone Defense Initiative, joined The Josh Hammer Show to lay out the objectives of Operation Epic Fury with unusual precision at a moment when mixed signals from Washington have left many Americans uncertain about the mission’s scope and endgame.

Heinrichs identified the Strait of Hormuz as the most immediate expression of that threat — the chokepoint through which roughly 20 percent of global energy supply flows and which Iran has effectively held hostage since closing it at the outset of the conflict.

“Those all strike me as eminently reasonable and achievable goals,” Heinrichs said, before turning to the question of whether progress has matched ambition. Her answer was unambiguous.

“I think if you just look at just metrics, basic metrics, the Iranians have been totally defanged in their ability to significantly project power outside their borders,” she said, pointing to the degradation of roughly 90 percent of Iran’s missile production capacity as a key indicator.

The behavioral evidence is just as telling. Rather than launching high-volume salvos across the region, Tehran has shifted to small, dispersed bursts — a strategy Heinrichs interpreted not as ingenuity but as desperation. “That tells me that we have just degraded their missile program and their drone program, and then their ability to reproduce these things,” she said.

The deployment of additional Marines — described by Heinrichs as “the Swiss Army knife” of U.S. expeditionary forces — signals that the campaign is entering a new, more targeted phase. These are not invasion forces, she stressed, but units trained for precision raids and specific objectives.

Those objectives could include two particularly sensitive remaining tasks: extracting or destroying nuclear material still inside Iran, and eliminating cruise missile systems believed to be hidden in caves along the Iranian coastline — the very assets keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed to international shipping.

“Now you might see the United States kind of doing the other parts of the campaign,” Heinrichs said, “removing the nuclear material from inside Iran, or taking out these cruise missile targets that might be nested in the caves along the coast of Iran, which we want to finally extricate and remove so that the strait can be open for free and open commerce through the region.”

On the charged question of whether full regime change is a required outcome, Heinrichs echoed the assessment of her Hudson Institute colleague Michael Doran: it is not a strict condition for declaring success. “Americans are already safer today,” she said flatly, adding that the conditions are now being set for the Iranian people themselves to take greater control of their own future — without the United States being in the business of managing the outcome.

Looking ahead one year, Heinrichs offered a measured but hopeful prognosis: a regime that, while perhaps still nominally adversarial in its posture, has been stripped of the coercive military tools that made it genuinely dangerous — and that is now, by necessity, more pragmatic in dealing with Washington, Jerusalem, and the Gulf states seeking regional normalcy.

Follow Rebeccah Heinrichs on X at @RLHeinrichs and Josh Hammer at @josh_hammer. Faith & Freedom News will continue live coverage of U.S.-Iran operations at fandfnews.com.