NEW YORK, March 5. /TASS/. The US administration has underestimated the fallout of hostilities it launched against Iran and is now rushing to add people and resources for a larger and longer conflict, Politico reported.

US Central Command, which is responsible for operations in the region, has asked the Pentagon to send more military intelligence officers to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to support operations against Iran "for at least 100 days but likely through September," a notification seen by Politico showed. This, according to the news website, shows that the team of US President Donald Trump had not fully anticipated the wide fallout of the war.

In an interview with Politico, Gerald Feierstein, a former senior US diplomat, called the war "a completely ad hoc operation that nobody actually understood or believed that military action was imminent." "It seems like they woke up on Saturday morning and decided that they were going to start a war," he said.

Jeffrey Feltman, a former US ambassador to Lebanon, criticized actions of the US Department of State regarding the security of Americans in the conflict zone as "a complete dereliction of duty." The US diplomatic agency issued its first alert to American citizens only on Monday, calling on them "to depart now" from 14 countries across the region.

The United States and Israel launched a military operation against Iran on February 28. Major Iranian cities, including Tehran, were struck. The White House justified the attack by citing alleged missile and nuclear threats from Iran. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and some other key Iranian leaders were killed in the joint US-Israeli attack. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced a retaliatory operation, targeting sites in Israel. US military bases in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, the Saudi Arabia, and the UAE were also hit.