CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett sat down with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday to discuss the war with Iran, potential American casualties, and what an Iranian surrender could look like. CBS aired an edited version of this full interview on TV on Sunday.

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Watch the entire @60Minutes interview. You’ll understand what POTUS is doing for our country-and why.

And how we are learning from-and avoiding-the mistakes of previous administrations. https://t.co/q1qMRTl1RG

– Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) March 9, 2026

“We’re very much on track, on plan,” Hegseth said. “We’re not flying a mission accomplished banner– like George W. Bush on– on an aircraft carrier. We’re not doing that and we haven’t done that. But we can be clear with the American people that this is not a fair fight.” “Our capabilities are overwhelming compared to what Iran’s are. And frankly, when you combine our Air Force with the air force of the Israeli Defense Forces, it’s the two most powerful air forces in the world. ” “The ability for us to be up over the top and hunting with more conventional munitions, gravity bombs, 500-pound, 1,000-pound, 2,000-pound bombs on military targets– that– we haven’t even really begun to start that effort of the campaign, which is gonna showcase even more how– how we will execute on those objectives,” he said. CBS’s Major Garrett asked: “The president said recently there will be no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender. What does that look like, unconditional surrender? How will you know it’s real?” “It means we’re fighting to win,” Hegseth said. “It means we set the terms. We’ll know when they’re not capable of fighting. There’ll be a point where they’ll have no choice but to do that. Whe– whether they know it or not, they will be combat-ineffective. They will surrender.” Asked about the possibility of “boots on the ground,” Hegseth said: “Very fair question. People ask boots on the ground, no boots on the ground, four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, go in, go in? President Trump knows, I know, you don’t tell the enemy, you don’t tell the press, you don’t tell anybody what– what your limits would be on an operation. We’re willing to go as far as we need to in order to be successful.” “We reserve the right. We would be completely unwise if we did not reserve the right to take any particular option, whether it included boots on the ground or no boots on the ground,” he said. “It’s not a regime-change war in a conventional George W. Bush context of hundreds of thousands of troops. I mean, in Afghanistan what I watched as a young captain was Americans thinking we were gonna remake– a society that was basically biblical times with AK-47s and cellphones.” “The hubris of, We’re gonna take Afghanistan and turn it into a Jeffersonian democracy by building western-style forces and western-style institutions, it was never gonna work. And I saw it and watched it play out. And it doesn’t dispel the courage of the Americans who fought there, who I know there. But this is not a remaking of the Iranian society from an American perspective. We tried that. The American people have rejected that. President Trump called those wars dumb. And we’re not fighting that way.”
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