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First Reports Are Always Wrong. The Iran Strike Is No Exception.
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First Reports Are Always Wrong. The Iran Strike Is No Exception.

Before we—or our political leaders—jump to conclusions, we should let the professionals work.

Mark Hertling's avatar
Mark Hertling
Jun 25, 2025
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First Reports Are Always Wrong. The Iran Strike Is No Exception.
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(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock / Graphs via DIA 2019 Iran Report)

EARLY IN MY CAREER, AS A YOUNG LIEUTENANT, I made a mistake that still haunts me. After a high-tempo mission, I rushed to assess the outcome and tell my boss about what I believed was our overwhelming success. Without full intelligence. Without all the details. Without confirmation from those carrying out the mission. I let adrenaline and optimism get ahead of the facts. I won’t go into the details, but I still carry the scar tissue from that experience, where I was both wrong and embarrassed when I had to correct the record. Since then, I’ve carried the lesson that all good military commanders understand: First reports are always wrong.

That’s a mantra among seasoned military leaders. After any action, especially air strikes in which the people releasing the bombs are miles from the target, and particularly against high-value or heavily defended targets, commanders wait for ground truth before claiming success. They don’t speak in superlatives or hyperbole. They wait for and listen to the intelligence professionals—the ones trained to separate smoke and rubble from strategic effect.

Enter the Defense Intelligence Agency. A description of a classified, preliminary assessment of the U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities unsurprisingly found its way into the press. Contrary to the confident early headlines, DIA has apparently concluded—even with the caveat of “low certainty” due to it being an initial assessment—that the operation was possibly far less effective than advertised.

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The rule of first reports also applies here: What the New York Times reported on was apparently not a DIA document itself, but characterizations of a document relayed by unnamed sources, who may or may not have accurately characterized the contents of the document. And because the document is preliminary—which could mean that it was the first report and others would follow, or that it was the judgment of only one part of the DIA, or that other parts of the intelligence community have yet to weigh in—there still may be some disagreement or reconciliation that hasn’t yet happened. So the DIA report itself may lack confirmation, or the reporting from the press may be wrong.

But even without trusting the news reports about the DIA assessment implicitly, I still take the DIA report seriously. The Defense Intelligence Agency may not be known to most Americans, but for those in uniform it’s an indispensable intelligence collection and assessment organization. While the more famous CIA collects foreign political and human intelligence for the president and national policymakers, DIA is the Pentagon’s in-house intelligence organization laser-focused on military targets, capabilities, and operational impact. Its customers are senior military leaders, including combatant commanders and policymakers in the Pentagon, and their products provide real-time, all-source intelligence in support of tactical and strategic planning. As one of the eighteen agencies overseen by the director of national intelligence, it also contributes to interagency assessments that inform all senior government policymakers, up to and including the president.

DIA analysts are embedded with military staffs, forward deployed with commands, and plugged into every echelon of U.S. defense operations. One of their principle duties is to provide battle damage assessment—the disciplined, methodical process of determining whether a strike accomplished its intended effect.

This isn’t guesswork. DIA uses imagery, signals, human reporting, thermal signatures, and geospatial analysis to determine whether a target was destroyed, degraded, or unaffected. It isn’t just “eyes in the sky,” as some politicians have suggested. And in the case of the strikes in Iran, they’ve reportedly concluded that the recent mission did not fully neutralize Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

According to reporting, DIA assessed that several key facilities were either missed entirely or only partially damaged, including hardened centrifuge halls and subterranean power nodes essential to Iran’s ability to continue uranium enrichment. Some of these targets had long been assessed as deeply fortified beneath up to 90 feet of granite reinforced by concrete, likely requiring multiple rounds of strikes even with the “Massive Ordnance Penetrator,” or MOP, a weapon designed specifically for this purpose.

The professionals at DIA know that strategic effects aren’t always determined by the size of the explosions—the effects of any strike are confirmed by analysis. It appears we delivered a message, but we may not have delivered a knockout punch. It may still be too soon to know the strategic effect of the strike because, ultimately, what matters most is how the Iranians respond in the medium to long term. If they abandon their nuclear program, the strikes will have been a resounding success. If they try to cobble together a bomb as fast as possible, maybe not.

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If our leaders or the public walk away with the wrong impression of what the strikes accomplished, we risk crafting future policy based on fiction rather than fact.

There’s a tendency—especially in complex geopolitical environments—for policymakers to seize on moments of action as definitive turning points. But when action is divorced from outcome, it creates a false sense of accomplishment and blinds us to what must come next. The key lesson is that the more complicated the target, the more important it is to wait for DIA’s report before claiming results.

I’ve worked with the DIA in combat and peacetime. They are a bunch of pros. DIA analysts don’t write talking points. They write assessments. Their conclusions are rooted in disciplined analysis, not wishful thinking. And while their findings rarely make the news, they often shape decisions and required follow-on actions. Whether a target set should be revised. Whether an adversary’s capability has been diminished—or simply disrupted.

The CIA, NSA, and other agencies all play vital roles in our national security enterprise. But when it comes to assessing what a missile or bomb did, no organization is more trusted by military commanders than DIA. Their tools are sharper and their connections to the battlefield are closer.

This latest DIA report should serve as a reset—not just in terms of operational planning, but in our public conversation. It’s a reminder that truth takes time, that outcomes matter more than optics, and that intelligence exists to inform decisions—not to validate assumptions.

The strike against Iran was bold. But boldness doesn’t always equal unbridled success. Hopefully we’ll learn from this and acknowledge that the best way to move forward is to stop congratulating ourselves prematurely and start listening to the quiet professionals who know what happened.

Because if you’ve worn the uniform, if you’ve commanded troops, or if you’ve lived through the sting of an incorrect early call, you know one thing above all: First reports are always wrong.

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A guest post by
Mark Hertling
Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) (@MarkHertling) was commander of U.S. Army Europe from 2011 to 2012. He also commanded 1st Armored Division in Germany and Multinational Division-North during the surge in Iraq from 2007 to 2009.
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