Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, left, speaks at a news conference with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine at the Pentagon on Thursday. Kevin Wolf - ap

By ERIC SCHMITT AND HELENE COOPER | THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday offered the Trump administration's most detailed descriptions yet of the planning and execution of U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

But Hegseth and Caine gave no new assessments of the state of Iran's nuclear program or the damage to the sites. Both men referred those questions to the nation's spy agencies.

They also pushed back against a preliminary classified Defense Intelligence Agency report that said the bombings set back the country's nuclear program by only a few months.

Asked about the movement of enriched uranium from the Fardo site, the deepest underground facility, Hegseth said he was "not aware" of any intelligence that "anything" was out of place. He implied, but did not say, that the enriched uranium was in place in Fardo.

Hegseth began what was only his second news conference at the Pentagon by saying that the news media, in his view, had not been kind to Trump. "Searching for scandals, you miss historic moments like recruiting at the Pentagon, historic levels in the Army, the Air Force and the Navy."

Hegseth has fashioned himself as an amplifier of Trump, as part of his role as defense secretary. He took a combative tone at Thursday's news conference, singling out reporters who have covered the Pentagon for years under successive administrations, both Republican and Democratic, and complained that they were not properly cheering for the one he represented.

Then he reached for history. "President Trump directed the most secret and most complex military operation in history," Hegseth said. No mention was made of the D-Day landings at Normandy, which involved intricate planning, 160,000 troops from allied nations, fake radio transmissions and false radar readings, paratroopers, pilots, Army rangers and spies. Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unaware of the exact time of the mission until just before it began.

Caine, by contrast, could not have been more different in his remarks and presentation. He played videos of the bombing attack on the nuclear sites and described how they were carried out. He steered clear of Hegseth's political points, and instead focused on the personnel who developed the 30,000-pound bombs that the B-2s dropped, the bomber crew members who flew the 37-hour-round-trip mission and the troops who defended a major American base from Iranian retaliation.

Caine said only two Patriot missile defense batteries remained at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar when Iran retaliated for American strikes with a missile barrage Monday. The oldest American soldier on the base was a 28-year-old captain, he said, and the youngest was 21.

He painted a portrait of tension on the base, in an almost lyrical way. "At 7:30 p.m. in Qatar, as the sun sets in the west, Iran attacks," he said.

Asked later if he had been pressured to provide a rosy assessment of the mission, Caine, an F-16 pilot, said: "No, I have not, and no, I would not."

Caine focused mainly on the mission's operational details and refused to address the impact of the strikes on Iran's nuclear program, saying the military does not do "battle damage assessment." That task is up to the CIA and other spy agencies.

But that is an imprecise explanation. With its vast array of sensors and surveillance aircraft, the military is most equipped to look at the damage the bombs caused, while the intelligence agencies would have the expertise to judge the degree of damage to Iran's overall nuclear program and ability to build a nuclear bomb.