The Trump administration keeps suggesting that the Iran war could wrap up soon. The reason? Because it’s accomplishing its goals.

“We are going to achieve our objectives in a matter of weeks, not months,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told ABC News on Monday.

But when it comes to precisely what those goals are, the administration has been remarkably inconsistent.

Officials have regularly listed four objectives, but they’ve often changed depending upon the date and who’s providing them.

And even the frequently mentioned ones have been adjusted and scaled back.

Let’s recap.

When the US launched strikes on Iran on February 28, the administration had done remarkably little legwork in building a case for war or laying out its objectives.

But it finally clarified the latter on March 2.

At a briefing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described four objectives:

“Destroy Iranian offensive missiles”

“Destroy Iranian missile production”

“Destroy their navy and other security infrastructure” and

“They will never have nuclear weapons”

Those four more or less matched the things President Donald Trump mentioned in a video released the morning of the first strikes.

But just hours after Hegseth’s comments, Trump debuted an amended list at a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House.

Numbers 3 and 4 were the same, but numbers 1 and 2 were merged into one goal — “destroying Iran’s missile capabilities.” And he added a new fourth goal concerning Iran’s Middle East proxy groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis: “Ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.”

Two days later, we saw a similar split. Rubio echoed Hegseth’s list in a social media post. But shortly thereafter, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed Trump’s amended list. She ran through four goals that again included neutralizing the proxy threat, which Rubio hadn’t mentioned.

And the split has largely continued along those lines, with Leavitt including the proxy threat but others like Hegseth and Rubio omitting it.

We’ve seen yet more shifts this past week.

On Friday, Rubio added “destroy their air force” on top of his previously stated objective of destroying Iran’s navy.

And during interviews Monday with ABC and Al Jazeera, he made destroying the air force one of the four numbered objectives, in place of Iran never obtaining a nuclear weapon.

(Rubio still mentioned preventing Iran from obtaining nukes. But he treated it as more of a side effect of the declared goals, while Hegseth and Leavitt have listed it as one of the four enumerated goals.)

You can see the difference in the lists that Rubio posted on March 4 (mentions nukes but not the air force) and that the State Department posted on Monday (mentions the air force but not nukes).

But lest anyone understand Rubio’s list as the final word, Leavitt on Monday gave another list that differed from what the secretary of state laid out in interviews the very same day.

There were three distinctions: Hers did not mention destroying Iran’s air force. She listed “preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon” as a distinct goal, unlike Rubio. And she again included combatting Iran’s proxies, despite Rubio not mentioning them in either the ABC or the Al Jazeera interviews.

And even when the general subject matter of the goals has stayed consistent, the wording has evolved.

Early on, the US signaled it sought complete and utter destruction of Iran’s missile program. Trump on February 28 said the US would “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.”

“It will be totally, again, obliterated,” the president said.

By March 2, Hegseth said the goals were to “destroy” both Iran’s offensive missiles and its missile production. And Trump said, “We’re destroying Iran’s missile capabilities.”

Later, that objective evolved to include destroying Iran’s “ability to make” missiles and also to destroy its missile launchers.

Over the past week, Rubio has seemed to lay out a more limited version.

He said Friday that the goal was to “dramatically reduce” Iran’s missile launchers. In the Al Jazeera interview, he cited a “significant reduction” in them. And in the ABC interview, he said the goal was a “severe diminishing of their missile launching capability,” rather than a complete destruction.

The proxies goal has also been scaled back.

Trump said on March 2 that the objective was “ensuring” that Iran “cannot continue to arm, fund and direct” the proxies. That would seem to be very difficult to accomplish and verify.

But Leavitt has since characterized the objective as instead trying to “weaken” the proxies, which would be more nebulous and subjective.

The two examples above seem to point to the administration trying to scale back expectations for what it must accomplish for a successful campaign.

Its initial goals suggested success would be achieved only if Iran had no missiles or ability to fire them, and if proxy groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen were cut off.

The amended goals from Rubio allow some wiggle room.

The other big question is how much the administration emphasizes eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat. Rubio’s recent rhetoric could be read to suggest the administration is more focused on combatting Iran’s delivery systems than going after its 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium — a mission that would very likely require ground troops.

At a briefing on Tuesday morning, Hegseth pitched the Iran war as different from other recent US wars, where he said the mission was ill-defined.

“In those wars, it was always about the next rotation, never knowing when the mission would end or exactly what the mission was, year after year,” Hegseth said. “Not with Epic Fury.”

But that’s exactly the sense the administration’s public comments about this war have given.

It makes it very difficult to measure the success of the war effort when the administration can’t even give a consistent list of four goals.

And the fact that those goals have shifted so much probably won’t calm the fears of Americans who don’t seem to understand what this war is about.