CNN ONLINE

Trump administration officials told lawmakers during a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill Tuesday that Iran’s Shahed attack drones represent a major challenge and US air defences will not be able to intercept them all, according to a source in the briefing.

The drones, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine acknowledged, are posing a bigger problem than anticipated, two sources in the briefing told CNN. They are known to fly low and slow – a feature that makes them more able to evade air defences than ballistic missiles. Another source familiar with the briefing said the officials made an attempt to downplay concerns about the drones and noted that Gulf state partners had been stockpiling interceptors.

The officials were on the Hill briefing lawmakers as the war with Iran escalates, threatening to spark a global energy crisis and destabilize the Middle East. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that most of Iran’s military installations have been “knocked out” and that new strikes have targeted Iranian leadership.

The officials, a source familiar with the briefing told CNN, were dismissive of questions about how the US would prevent Iran from becoming a failed state, and they said that regime change was an ancillary goal. In their presentation to lawmakers, they reiterated Trump’s recently laid out goals: to destroy Iran’s missile capabilities, its navy, end its nuclear weapon ambitions and stop the country from arming militant groups.

The officials also did not indicate who they thought the next supreme leader would be, according to a source familiar with the briefing.

Lawmakers emerged from the meeting with vastly different expectations on how long the conflict could drag on. Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said the briefers, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, presented a timeline for US involvement in the conflict to be wrapped up in three to five weeks — echoing some of the president’s own public comments.

But GOP Sen Josh Hawley of Missouri, said he believed the officials did not communicate a possible end date. “It sounded very open-ended to me,” he said.