Top Commanders Signal Stronger Retaliation Capability
TEHRAN -- Two senior Iranian military spokesmen delivered a coordinated message on Saturday night, with the Armed Forces spokesman warning of "heavier, broader and more precise" strikes against any renewed U.S.-Israeli miscalculation.
Also, the Defense Ministry spokesman revealed that Iran has deployed part of its strategic capabilities in underground infrastructure to frustrate enemy calculations.
Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi, the senior spokesman for Iran's Armed Forces, declared that combat units across the country are at "100 percent readiness" and that the armed forces are "far more powerful today than in all past battles."
"If America and the Zionist regime once again fall into a calculational miscalculation, our strikes this time will be heavier, broader and more precise than before," Shekarchi said.
He added: "We are at full readiness and stronger than we were in the last two wars," warning that "if the Americans commit a new error in their calculations, we will respond more severely and on a broader scale than the previous two wars."
Shekarchi also responded to a claim by the CENTCOM commander that U.S. forces had supported the exit of over one billion barrels of crude oil from the Persian Gulf in two months, calling it "projection and a false and ridiculous claim" — a "failed psychological operation to boost the morale of the exhausted and worn-out forces of the terrorist American army in the region" and to justify America's "excessive financial and human costs."
He stated: "The initiative in the Strait of Hormuz remains in the hands of Iran's powerful armed forces."
In parallel remarks on Saturday, Defense Ministry spokesman Brigadier General Reza Talaei-Nik said Iran has deployed part of its Armed Forces' strategic capabilities in secure environments and underground infrastructure in recent years.
"Part of the strategic capabilities of the Armed Forces have in recent years been deployed in secure environments and underground infrastructure, a move that has frustrated the enemy's calculations regarding Iran's defense capabilities and weapons production capacity," Talaei-Nik said.
He said that although the war imposed costs and inflicted damage on Iran, the enemy failed to achieve its main strategic objectives, while Iran also imposed costs on them.
Talaei-Nik described the recent wars as wars of technology, specialists and hybrid warfare, saying that alongside the military arena, social, economic, media and cognitive domains had become major fields of confrontation.
The spokesman said the intensity of fire, speed of operations, geographical scope of the fighting, types of weapons and use of new technologies in recent wars were incomparable with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's eight-year war on Iran in the 1980s.
He underlined the need to simultaneously strengthen defense power and domestic capacity, saying Iran needed to increase resilience across various sectors to maintain deterrence.
Despite the enemy's use of advanced technologies and pursuit of new objectives, he added, it failed to achieve any of its strategic goals through two rounds of wars since last year.
The U.S. and Israel waged their first war against Iran in June 2025, lasting 12 days. Their second aggression began on Feb. 28, 2026, and halted in early April after 40 days. In both wars, Iran's resistance and retaliatory operations forced the aggressors to accept a ceasefire.
Iran has maintained a tight grip on the Strait of Hormuz since the early days of the second imposed war. In July, the U.S. conducted waves of deadly air raids on Iran and imposed a naval blockade in violation of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding signed on June 17.
In response, the Iranian Armed Forces launched devastating strikes against strategic American targets across West Asia and declared the Strait of Hormuz closed to all traffic.
The IRGC said Friday it will continue "punishing" the United States until Iran's seven conditions are met, while asserting that Iranian missiles are capable of destroying America's multilayered air-defense systems.