On the heels of fielding the military’s first attack drone team, the U.S. Marine Corps added another weapon to their drone-fighting arsenal: a 90-page handbook all about employing small, unmanned aerial systems against the enemy and integrating them into formations.

The 1st Marine Division Schools’ Small UAS/Counter-small UAS Integration Handbook was published in June and approved for public release. It’s intended to support the 10-day sUAS/C-sUAS Integration Course recently launched at Camp Pendleton, which expects to see a throughput of about 400 students by the end of the year, according to a report from USNI News.

A foreword to the handbook is signed by Lt. Col. Nick Freeman, director of 1st Marine Division Schools, and co-signed by two first lieutenants leading the drone integration and signature management courses. It emphasizes that the handbook will be updated and rewritten often to keep up with evolving capabilities and practices.

The book “is not a general reference on broader aspects of sUAS-related equipping, organization, and training. Instead, it synthesizes lessons learned and best practices from across 1st Marine Division and elsewhere to provide basic considerations and ‘how to’ instructions that are missing or underdeveloped in other references,” the officers write.

“In doing so, this guide also develops and seeks to standardize common sUAS procedures for the infantry, fires, reconnaissance, and aviation units that will operate together with this capability.”

The manual’s publication comes amid a clear shift in defense priorities to favor drone warfare and emphasize, in particular, proficiency with “first-person view” or “one-way attack” small drones designed to pack a lethal punch.

In addition to the fielding of the Marine Corps’ Attack Drone Team, a small group of troops who will develop ways to employ these kinds of drones and integrate them into formations, the Pentagon in July announced a slate of changes to drone acquisition designed to “establish UAS dominance” by 2027.

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It’s a marked pivot from previous years, in which the services largely emphasized surveillance and logistics as the role of friendly, small drones in warfare and lacked a definitive approach to defending against hostile attack drones.

In 2020, a small group of infantry Marines crowdsourced an unofficial standard operating procedure for camouflaging small units from drone surveillance, underscoring the ad-hoc nature of efforts to account for this threat.

By contrast, the new 1st Marine Division handbook standardizes employment of various drones down to a common vocabulary.

Drone holding areas “are named after women and [battle positions] are named after animals (beginning with snakes), [loitering areas] are given the names of cigarettes and [task positions] are named after insects,” the manual states.

In addition, “hot walls” and “pizza slices” describe drone operating areas for hasty airspace deconfliction.

Charts and schematics show sample drone strikes in various personnel and equipment configurations. Tables break down specifications of the Corps’ most widely fielded small UAS. A sample strike brief provides a precise template for communications around drone operations. And a multi-page section on camouflage and evasion provides formal guidance on everything from hiding heat signatures to using vegetation to blend visually with the environment.

Drone employment as a team effort is emphasized throughout the book.

“In all cases, the operator of any one aerial system is unlikely to accomplish the unit’s mission by him/herself; instead, the operator performs tasks as part of a sUAS-equipped team whose other members may variously perform roles related to communications, targeting, mobility, protection, fires, maneuver/exploitation, and others,” the guide reads.

“For this reason, this handbook refers to sUAS teams as the basic unit of employment for these systems, even when the unit operating them (for example, a rifle squad or an artillery battery headquarters) may not have sUAS employment as its primary purpose.”

The handbook concludes with a list of chapters and sections the book is still missing, including weaponeering considerations for employing drones carrying munitions and a full chapter on tactics, techniques and procedures for one-way attack drones.

“Make no mistake, we are in a very tight race with our adversaries to master the possibilities of small aerial drones,” the authors write. “Consider this handbook a baton—now take it, and run with it!”

While 1st Marine Division did not make anyone available to talk about the handbook by press time, Samuel Bendett, an adviser focusing on Russian military technology and capabilities including drones, called the book’s publication evidence of a “psychological shift” about the realities of the drone threat and the need to employ small UAS skillfully.

The handbook itself acknowledges lessons in drone use absorbed from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, where both sides have employed UAS to great effect.

While Bendett acknowledged that the next U.S. fight might not resemble the conflict in Ukraine, he maintained that the echoes of that war “will be heard in every conflict going forward,” adding that China was paying close attention and already training its military in drone warfare.

“It’s not just an abstract notion that there are adversary drones somewhere and we have to defend against them,” Bendett said. “It’s the fact that it’s right there, just around the bend, just just beyond the next building, just beyond the next tree. It’s there just two or three klicks away, and it’s observing and flying at you, and you won’t be able to react in time if you’re not prepared for it.”

Another helpful shift evidenced in the document, he said, was in viewing UAS not as small aircraft, but as weapons.

“These are not aircraft,” he said. “These are cheaper, attritable tactical systems that should be available to every military formation, based on what they’re doing and based on how they’re fighting.”

HOUSTON — The brother of an Afghan refugee who helped U.S. forces defuse bombs during the war in Afghanistan expressed frustration Thursday that it took more than three months for the Texas man accused of fatally shooting his sibling over a parking dispute to be indicted in the case.

When Abdul Rahman Waziri, 31, was shot while getting his mail at his Houston apartment complex on April 27, police knew who the alleged shooter was as the man had identified himself to officers at the scene, according to authorities. Katia Trevon Bougere, 31, told officers “he and Waziri were arguing over parking,” police said.

“After consulting with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, the male was released and the investigation continued,” Houston police said in a statement a day after the shooting.

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On June 17, police said the case would be referred to a grand jury. Bougere was indicted on Monday on a murder charge. Bougere was not arrested after his murder indictment but issued a summons to appear in court on Aug. 5.

Abdullah Khan, Waziri’s older brother, said he and his family were upset that months had passed without any developments in the case.

“It was heartbreaking … it was really hopeless. I couldn’t imagine if someone is killing someone senselessly. And then the person walking free for months and months. It’s just terrible,” Khan, 36, told The Associated Press during a phone interview.

Waziri and his brother had worked for the Afghan National Mine Reduction Group, a highly trained unit that cleared improvised explosive devices and mines for U.S. Army Special Forces and Afghan commandos.

A group of Green Berets who had worked with the National Mine Reduction Group had sent a letter in May to Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare asking for action in the case. A Change.org petition by the 1208 Foundation that asked for the alleged shooter to be charged has received more than 86,000 signatures. The foundation provides aid to Afghans who worked with U.S. Special Forces to clear explosives.

The Harris County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the case.

“As the case is pending, it’s not our office’s policy to discuss facts related to the investigation,” spokesperson Courtney Fischer said in an email.

Court records did not list an attorney for Bougere. He did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment.

Omar Khawaja, an attorney for Waziri’s family, said Bougere has claimed that he shot Waziri in self-defense.

Waziri “was known as a gentle giant … not someone who is going to lose his cool over a dispute in a parking lot,” Khawaja said.

Khan said his brother had parked his car in front of the mailboxes at his apartment complex and was getting his mail when he was confronted by Bougere.

A witness who saw the physical confrontation between Waziri and Bougere indicated Waziri was not the aggressor and had raised his hands and told Bougere, “Don’t shoot,” Khan said.

Khan had worked with the National Mine Reduction Group from 2008 until coming to the U.S. in 2020. Waziri worked for the unit from 2016 until U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021.

Khan settled in Tampa, Florida. Waziri lived with his brother before coming to Houston about two years ago. Khan said his brother had planned to return to Tampa with his wife and two daughters after his apartment lease in Houston had ended.

“When he came and we were feeling safe, we were like, ’Oh, thank God. We got out of Afghanistan and no more gunfire, no more bombs.’ But unfortunately for my brother, it happened to him,” Khan said.

In 1775, a year before there was a United States and six weeks after the Continental Army was formed, George Washington made a declaration that has shaped the military ever since.

“We need chaplains,” he reportedly remarked, prompting action by the Continental Congress near the start of the Revolutionary War.

The U.S. military chaplaincy marked 250 years on July 29 as the national military marked its own 250th anniversary in June. A week of celebrations includes a golf tournament at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, hosted by an organization raising funds for scholarships for family members of chaplains, and a sold-out ball nearby in Columbia. Meanwhile, across the globe, thousands of clergy in uniform continue to provide counsel and care to military members of a range of faiths or no faith.

“In times of peace and war, our chaplains have held fast as beacons of hope and resilience for our troops, whether enduring the brutal winter of Valley Forge, comforting the wounded and dying on the battlefields during the Civil War, braving trench warfare in World War I, storming the beaches of Normandy during World War II, marching the frozen mountains during the Korean War, slogging through the rice paddies and jungle battlefields of Vietnam or traveling the bomb-filled roads of Iraq and Afghanistan,” said retired Chaplain (Major General) Doug Carver, a former Army chief of chaplains in charge of the Southern Baptist Convention’s chaplaincy ministries, at the denomination’s June annual meeting in Dallas.

A month later at the annual session of the Progressive National Baptist Convention in Chicago, Navy Chaplain J.M. Smith, the grandson of a former PNBC president, stood before delegates and described his just-completed tour as a Marine Corps command chaplain in Okinawa, Japan, and his plans to report to a ship in Norfolk, Virginia, to begin a tour of Europe and the Middle East and be promoted to lieutenant commander.

“My team and I have ministered to thousands of Marines, sailors, civilians and Japanese,” he said. “We increased our chapel’s membership from eight to 100. We incorporated spiritual readiness into our base’s core curriculum.’’

Chaplains serve in hospitals, hospices and manufacturing plants, and while chaplaincy researchers see commonalities among them, there are also key differences in the military. All are involved in gaining the trust of people who are in their particular milieu, enabling them to think and sometimes pray through their times of greatest need and day-to-day struggles.

An example of both the danger and the dedication of military service chaplaincy is the 1943 death of four chaplains — two Protestant, one Catholic and one Jewish — who helped save some of those aboard a World War II ship, turning over their life jackets and praying and singing hymns before it sank. All four were trained at Harvard University, then the site of the Army’s chaplain training school, during a two-year wartime period.

“It was a real defining moment,” said retired Gen. Steve Schaick, who served as Air Force chief of chaplains from 2018 to 2021, and in the same role for the Space Force from 2019 to 2021. “The stories that came from that really kind of highlighted chaplains at their best.”

The Army’s chaplaincy corps also includes religious affairs specialists and religious education directors. Some service members provide armed protection to unarmed chaplains and set up worship spaces in on-base chapels or makeshift altars on truck hoods in the field. For example, Berry Gordy, who later founded Motown Records, served as a private in the Korean War and played a portable organ and was known as a chaplain assistant, notes " Sacred Duty," a new comic book posted on the Army’s website to mark the anniversary.

While 218 chaplains served in the Revolutionary War, 9,117 chaplains served in World War II, according to the Army. Currently, the Army has 1,500 chaplains on active duty. The Navy Chaplain Corps, which began on Nov. 18, 1775, had 24 chaplains during the Civil War; 203 by the end of World War I; 1,158 at its height in 1990; and currently has 898 on active duty, according to the Navy.

“Today’s Chaplain Corps includes Chaplains representing a multitude of faith groups, and the Chaplain Corps recruiting team is actively working to increase the Corps’ diversity, with a special focus on increasing the number of women Chaplains in the Corps and the number of Chaplains representing low-density faith groups,” reads an Army historical booklet marking the Chaplain Corps’ 250 years.

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Initially, U.S. military chaplains were Protestants. The first Catholic chaplains served in the Mexican-American War in 1846, and the first rabbi was commissioned in 1862 and served in the Civil War. The first Muslim chaplains were commissioned in the Army in 1993. The first Buddhist Army chaplain was named in 2008, followed by the first Hindu chaplain in 2011.

Chaplain Margaret Kibben, acting chaplain of the House of Representatives and former chief of chaplains of the Navy — the first woman in that role — said the isolation and the immediacy of ethical decisions faced by military members, as well as a high level of confidentially, can make the work of military chaplaincy teams different from other settings where chaplains work.

“It’s the one place that people can go where there’s essentially a sanctuary around them, wherever they find themselves, a safe place to have somebody to talk to about a whole host of issues,” she said, adding that topics can include anything from supporting their families to handling combat responsibilities. “How do you deal with those issues in a place where you’re not going to look stupid, you’re not going to look weak or unreliable because you have these doubts and you have these concerns — to have a place that you can go to ensure that you can get that off your chest?”

Those private conversations often are not faith-filled, added Kibben, reflecting on her military career that began in 1986.

“What I realized later, 20, 30 years later, was that many service members have never learned the language of faith,” she said, citing terms like confession and forgiveness. “So as a chaplain, we had to figure out our way around the lack of a lexicon of faith. How do you speak about grace to someone who doesn’t have a clue how powerful grace is?”

Another change, sparked by the efforts of Julie Moore, the wife of a military officer who served in the Vietnam War, was the Army’s method for notifying the next of kin when a soldier died. Soon after a 1960s battle in that war, a chaplain and a uniformed officer began teaming up to knock on families’ doors; prior to that time, the news arrived in a telegram delivered by a cab driver.

The work of chaplains has sometimes been the source of church-state debates. For example, Michael “Mikey” Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for separation of church and state in the U.S. military, has questioned what he viewed as proselytism in the chaplains’ ranks. Meanwhile, conservative Christian organizations have voiced concerns about an antipathy against some Christians in military ranks.

Karen Diefendorf, a two-time Army chaplain and a board member of the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps Regimental Association, which supports chaplains and their families, said the primary goal for chaplains is “to provide for the free exercise rights of every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, Coast Guardsman.” She currently is an interim minister of an independent Methodist church in South Carolina, after serving as a chaplain at Tysons Foods and in hospice care.

“I had soldiers who were practitioners of Wiccan faith, and my job is not to say to them, ‘Hey, wouldn’t you like to love Jesus?’” she said, recalling how she assisted a Wiccan Army member serving in Korea. “My job was to help that young soldier find where his particular group of folks met and where he could practice his faith.”

Also during her service in Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Diefendorf said she provided cassette tapes of sermons to soldiers and entrusted one with Communion elements because she knew she wouldn’t be able to reach their location often.

“So far, the courts have upheld that you certainly have two competing clauses within the First Amendment, establishment and free exercise,” she said. “And at this point, certainly chaplains have to walk that fine line not to create establishment in the midst of trying to also enable people to practice their beliefs.”

Schaick recalled being deployed overseas in the Air Force when a new rabbi joined his staff. On arrival, the rabbi described himself as “first and foremost a chaplain and secondarily a rabbi” — an order of priorities that Schaick said applies to chaplains to this day, regardless of their faith perspective.

“The longer you serve in the chaplaincy, I think the closer you get to really believing that — and therefore, religious affiliation becomes secondary,” he said. “It’s ‘How’re you doing today?’ and ‘I’d love to hear what’s on your heart’ and ‘How can I be able to help you today?’ Those kind of questions, quite frankly, are impervious to religious distinctions.”

This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story.

A Marine sergeant died last month after he collapsed during a physical fitness test in Florida, according to a recent Naval Safety report.

Sgt. Gordon Reed, a motor vehicle operator with 4th Marine Logistics Group, collapsed at the Navy Reserve Center Orlando during a PFT on June 24. He was transported to a local hospital where he died, according to the safety report and Marine officials.

The death is under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service as well as a safety investigation by Marine Forces Reserve. A command investigation will begin once NCIS has completed its investigation, 1st Lt. Quiarra Barros told Military.com.

“Our hearts and condolences are with his family during this difficult time,” Barros told Marine Corps Times in an email statement on Thursday. “We are unable to comment further given there is an ongoing investigation into the matter.”

Reed’s cause of death has not yet been determined and Barros declined to comment on what factors may have played a role.

“I can confirm that NCIS is conducting a thorough investigation into the death of Sgt. Gordon Reed, as we do for any non-combat, medically unattended deaths of Department of the Navy service members,” said Darwin Lam, a spokesperson for the law enforcement agency. “Out of respect for the investigative process, NCIS will not comment further while the investigation remains ongoing.”

ROCKHAMPTON, Australia — In the dawn light of July 24, Japanese and American amphibious vehicles churned through the sparkling coastal waters of the Coral Sea, before emerging onto the sands of a central Queensland beach in Australia.

Two hours to the east, another amphibious lodgment was occurring simultaneously at Freshwater Beach. This time the main participants were Australia and South Korea.

The two events, part of a combined joint forcible entry operation, formed the culminating activity for Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025, held in Australia from July 13-27. They were the most sophisticated amphibious landings ever attempted in the eleven iterations of Talisman Sabre so far.

“We maintained a high operational tempo during Exercise Talisman Sabre 25, which was designed to provide intense training to ensure our forces are capable, interoperable, deployable on short notice and combat ready,” Rear Adm. Tom Shultz, commander of Expeditionary Strike Group Seven (ESG-7) and therefore in charge of the U.S. amphibious contingent, told Defense News.

Shultz said the Navy “embraced cooperation and interoperability,” demonstrated by interactions with 14 ships and expeditionary forces from six nations.

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An important subplot to the July 24 landings was the first ever touchdown of the Marine Corps’ new Amphibious Combat Vehicle in Australia. These 8x8 ACVs are being inducted into the U.S. service as a much-needed replacement for the AAV7A1 family of vehicles that has soldiered on for 50 years.

Marines stopped using the AAV7A1 family for amphibious operations after a fatal accident in California in 2020. The deployment of ACVs with the Okinawa-based 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit – or 31st MEU – thus marked an important return of armored amphibious operations to the Indo-Pacific region.

1st Lt. Brooks Wright, the ACV Platoon commander, said his unit swam five ACVs ashore during Talisman Sabre landings.

Wright described the ACV as a “fabulous vehicle.” He explained that it “adds a lot of combat power for the Marine Corps, and allows us to do a lot of things we haven’t been able to do the last couple of years without the AAV around.”

He said the ACV represented a significant upgrade for the Marines; it does “everything that we advertise that we’re able to do – the ship-to-shore movement, getting troops to shore, and then pushing inland to objectives”.

Lt. Col. Andy Hornfeck, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines – currently acting as the 31st MEU’s battalion landing team – described four main lines of effort for the formation during Talisman Sabre 2025.

The first was a MEU live-fire assault on Townshend Island using the full repertoire of weaponry available. This included F-35B fighters, AH-1Z Viper helicopters and M777 artillery pieces, for example.

The MEU then transitioned into force integration training with partners, which featured useful “cross-pollination” of skills, according to Hornfeck.

Thirdly, the 31st MEU conducted two assaults in Queensland’s Bowen region, including an air assault and small-boat raid.

The final effort was the combined joint forcible entry operation, where the MEU had British and Dutch personnel attached to the pre-landing reconnaissance force.

Hornfeck said the Marines worked more slowly and deliberately than if they were acting alone, since it was important to stay synchronized with their Japanese partners.

“Fighting as a coalition is challenging,” he acknowledged. Nonetheless, he deemed Talisman Sabre a realistic experience.

Elsewhere, the U.S. Marine Corps’ 2,500-strong Marine Rotational Force—Darwin (MRF-D) conducted a series of “island hopping” movements across the Outback by air.

First, MRF-D captured an airstrip at Timber Creek, 375 miles south of Darwin. Next up was Nackeroo, and finally the MRF-D seized an airfield at Cloncurry.

These efforts mimicked the Pacific island-hopping campaign of World War II, and these are tactics the U.S. military would use against China in the event of a war.

Laced with missiles and troops, the First Island Chain – extending south from Japan through Taiwan and the Philippines to Indonesia – is a natural geographic barrier of islands and land masses that would form a critical line of defense to contain the People’s Liberation Army.

Seth Reeves was only supposed to be at U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Corpus Christi, Texas, for two weeks.

He was slated to work from July 1 to July 15 as part of the Aviation Training Center’s flight mechanic exchange program, which allows guardsmen to stand duty at operational air stations. He had become a third-class aviation maintenance technician just over one year ago, in March 2024.

But on July 4, disaster struck, and Reeves — along with three other Coast Guardsmen from Coast Guard Rescue 6553 — found themselves in a treacherous search-and-rescue mission to save hundreds of stranded girls from Camp Mystic in Kerr County, Texas, after historic flooding tore through the Central Texas region.

The Guadalupe River swelled to a record-setting 37 feet, decimating the all-girls Christian summer camp and sweeping away campers and counselors along with it.

State officials confirmed that a known 136 people in Texas Hill Country died during the natural disaster, including 27 from Camp Mystic.

Coast Guard crews assisted local and state authorities to rescue 230 people, the service said.

Reeves, for his “actions and aeronautical skill” as part of the evacuation efforts, received an Air Medal from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on July 11. He was promoted to second class the same day.

But as the rain fell in sheets over Central Texas during the early morning hours of July 4, Reeves and the rest of the crew, more than 100 miles away, had no idea what lay ahead.

Before sunrise

The call came in early.

Pilot Lt. Ian Hopper briefed Reeves, co-pilot Lt. Blair Ogujiofor and rescue swimmer Petty Officer 3rd Class Scott Ruskan about severe flooding in the town of Kerrville, Texas.

They knew people were stranded on a campground near the Guadalupe, but they didn’t know how many.

Reeve’s initial thought was there might be three to four families, or maybe an RV park, he recalled.

The crew was operating off limited information. And the mission’s first hiccup came before they even got off the ground.

As they prepped, the crew detected a problem with the high-frequency radio in their MH-65E Dolphin helicopter.

They’d be traveling about 150 nautical miles inland to Kerr County, and communication would be key. They quickly switched to another MH-65E Dolphin.

The crew also decided to travel light and ditch a life raft to shave off 20 pounds of weight. That would earn them five to ten more minutes of fuel, Reeves said.

It was still dark out when they took off from Air Station Corpus Christi and headed toward the campground.

First try

The weather was bad from the start, Reeves said.

As the sun rose and they moved inland, closer to San Antonio, conditions got progressively worse.

Cloud cover dropped from 1,000 feet to somewhere between 200 to 300 feet about 45 minutes into the trip.

As they navigated through severe weather conditions, the crew operated off a visual flight rules plan, meaning the guardsmen still glanced at their instruments — but primarily relied on their eyes — to clock surroundings outside the aircraft.

This tactic required flying very close to the ground where visibility was best.

Elevation also became a problem.

Corpus Christi was flat, but as the crew moved north, they encountered the terrain of Hill Country, named for the region’s rolling hills and rugged rock formations. Eventually, the hills reached so high the helicopter had to climb above the clouds to avoid them.

And then things got dicey. They found themselves facing zero visibility with no visual reference.

The crew rapidly ascended to higher elevation in order to switch to instrument flight rules while establishing their location with air traffic control. Though they train for it, the circumstances were less than ideal.

“It’s one of the most dangerous things that could possibly happen,” Reeves said. “It’s not a situation anybody wants to be in.”

The crew decided to divert the aircraft to San Antonio to land, refuel and recalibrate.

Second attempt

On the ground, members of the 6553 decided they’d fly into Kerrville-Kerr County Airport, instead.

Air traffic control told them the weather over Kerrville looked as if it might shift northeast and let up slightly.

Reeves and the other crew members checked their radar and saw the same thing air traffic control did — a hole opening up for them to shoot an approach into the airport.

They took off again, this time relying on their flight instruments.

But as they neared their destination, air traffic control told them the weather wasn’t shifting — precipitation remained extreme.

Cloud ceilings over the airport sat at 100 to 300 feet. They couldn’t get a solid visual of the ground to land the helicopter. And because they were above cloud cover and relying on instrument flight rules, they also couldn’t rely on the aircraft to land itself safely.

“It was kind of a nightmare to try to shoot an approach into there,” Reeves said.

The crew decided to remain in a holding pattern, doing circles in the air 30 nautical miles south of the airport, waiting for a slot to open up for them to descend.

The slot never came. The weather kept holding.

“If you look at the radar itself, from late into the night to, you know, almost all day, that weather was just sitting over top with, maybe, I would say, like a 50-foot shift every hour,” Reeves said.

Ten to 15 minutes passed. No opportunities opened up.

The crew shifted their plan once again.

They went back to visual flight rules and began working their way toward South Texas Regional Airport in Hondo, Texas, southwest of Kerrville. There, they’d top off their gas and wait out the weather.

But they needed a plan to get there safely.

They decided Hopper would hand-fly the aircraft — few instruments, mostly manual — while Ogujiofor checked displays inside the cockpit for obstructions like power lines, telephone poles and cell towers. Ruskan checked radar to avoid extreme weather, and Reeves looked at Google Maps and Apple Maps for navigation.

“We drove the aircraft, like, on a road,” Reeves said. “We followed the highway all the way to Hondo with following all the bends, that way we could just stay visual with the ground.”

They flew at low altitude, slicing through the hills.

After two and a half hours of flying altogether, they made it to Hondo.

As they descended, they saw about a half-dozen Army National Guard helicopters grounded, waiting for the weather to let up before taking off.

Once they landed, the Coast Guard crew regrouped with the Army National Guard’s Alamo Area Search and Rescue, which was in touch with individuals on the ground at Camp Mystic. They received their final brief.

At that point, the 6553 learned its specific mission: The crew would be traveling directly to Camp Mystic to help rescue hundreds of girls who were stranded and at risk of being swept away by the water.

“That’s when I kind of like, OK, this is not, you know, one or two families at a campground, this is way more severe,” Reeves said.

The crew took off, leading the National Guard’s Alamo Area Search and Rescue to the location. Again, they relied on hand-flying and Google Maps.

At some points, they had to duck down to as low as 100 feet above the ground to carve their way through valleys and hills.

Finally, they approached a small, privately owned airport over the hill of Camp Mystic. They’d been flying for four and a half hours.

The helicopter’s traffic collision alert system pinged nonstop as they descended into the area. Fourteen other helicopters were flying around Kerr County to assist with rescue efforts.

The cramped air space was unnerving, Reeves remembered.

“It’s a super uncomfortable feeling with all these other aircraft in the air,” Reeves said. “We understand the situation, we train for the situation, but it’s kind of like we’re out of our ball game when it comes to a bunch of other aircraft assisting.”

The rescue

Despite having traveled for nearly five hours, the rescue mission was just beginning.

The crew devised a plan, listening to their radio to know where the girls were and where they should take them.

The whole camp was flooded, and the roads on both sides were washed away with rising water racing over them. The only way in or out was via helicopter.

The floodwaters had receded from higher ground and created a new river that cut through the middle of the camp. The girls were split in half as a result, Reeves said, leaving 300 to 400 campers stranded on the north side, where the Coast Guard executed their landing.

The ground was heavily saturated with water. To ensure the helicopter wouldn’t get stuck, Reeves poked his head out to watch as the aircraft gingerly rested its tires on the ground.

After the tires came the nose, and then the crew slowly reduced power to see how the helicopter was holding on the ground.

Reeves said it was a routine maneuver they practiced many times. The tires didn’t sink, and Reeves let Hopper know the aircraft was alright.

They elected to leave Ruskan on scene to work triage for all the girls.

The severity of the situation really hit Reeves the moment a growing stream of young girls, upon hearing the helicopter that signaled their rescue, left the confines of their cabins “almost like a river themselves,” he said.

“And it’s just hundreds of girls coming out of these cabins, waving their arms.”

It was clear they’d been stranded since 1 a.m., Reeves said.

A trained EMS, Ruskan joined with counselors and hundreds of girls about 50 yards away from the helicopter. He decided which ones needed medical attention first, communicating with the aircraft via radio.

The rescue had officially begun.

The aircraft could carry only four girls at a time without Ruskan on the helicopter. After loading them in, the crew dropped the girls off at Ingram Tom Moore High School, the collection point a couple miles up the river on higher ground.

Paramedics and law enforcement waited on the training football field, Reeves said, checking girls’ vitals before placing them on school buses to be moved to another location.

Many of the girls had never flown on a helicopter before and were terrified of the loud machinery, Reeves said.

He handed out foam hearing protection before they boarded the aircraft. Then, he buckled the girls into waist-restraint systems and five-point harnesses for their trip out of Camp Mystic.

By the time the 6553 was relieved and swapped out with a different crew (crews can only work so long, even with the two waivers they were given), the guardsmen had flown 8.2 hours.

Despite all the hours, it was difficult to walk away from the rescue, Reeves said.

“It’s hard, especially with young kids, to not feel emotional,” he said. “Some of these girls are having the worst day of their life. And it’s very evident when they’re coming on the aircraft that these girls have seen peers of theirs, counselors and sisters of theirs be swept away by the raging waters of the river and it’s all over their face.”

Every time the helicopter left with a group of girls, those remaining on the ground would wave at the aircraft as it rose into the sky. The girls inside the helicopter were so devastated they often didn’t notice.

Reeves would encourage them, “Hey, wave to your friends.” Each time, the girls would look outside, see their friends and return their waves.

That courage stayed with Reeves.

“Everyone wants to say that, you know, these girls were helpless,” he said. “In some parts they definitely were, but a lot of parts, they stayed super strong.”

British, French, German, Spanish and Dutch navies ringed the harbor surrounding the Mexican port of Veracruz in observation of America’s soon-to-be, short-lived occupation of the city-state.

The gathering marked one of the last peaceful interactions between the navies for half a decade. The date was June 30, 1914, and the sailors were getting blitzed, courtesy of Uncle Sam and his teetotaler secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels.

On April 16, 1914, Daniels issued the infamous Order No. 99, mandating all U.S. Navy ships become dry by July 1, 1914.

“The use or introduction for drinking purposes of alcoholic liquors on board any naval vessel, or within any navy yard or station, is strictly prohibited, and commanding officers will be held directly responsible for the enforcement of this order,” reads the century-old order.

The order was met with derision and merciless mockery in the media. Dubbed Daniels “Sir Josephus, Admiral of the USS Grapejuice Pinafore” by the press, editorial cartoons charged him with making the Navy “soft” and showcased Navy warships bedecked with flowers, rocking chairs and potted plants, according to the U.S. Naval Institute.

Since its inception, the U.S. Navy had been providing sailors with a daily ration of rum. In 1794, sailors were to receive “one half-pint of distilled spirits” each day. In 1806, sailors were encouraged to swap out the more expensive rum for a ration of whiskey.

That ration was reduced in 1842 to “one gill” (four ounces) and eliminated altogether during the American Civil War — albeit the Confederate Navy continued to imbibe.

The tradition picked back up after the war, with sailors — at the discretion of their commander — allowed to keep their own stock of beer and undistilled spirits.

The 1899 Philippine-American War once again limited the flow of bevvies, banning enlisted men from purchasing alcohol “either on board ship, or within the limits of navy yards, naval stations, or marine barracks, except in the medical department.”

“By the time General Order No. 99 was announced,” writes the U.S. Naval Institute, “the only alcohol left in U.S. Navy ships was reserved for the wardroom and the captain’s wine messes. As the deadline approached, many of the ships of the Atlantic Fleet were in Mexican ports, part of the occupation of Veracruz.”

Enter: One raucous party.

As the shot clock waned on the soon-to-be illicit cargo, commanders rushed to offload as much alcohol as they possibly could before the “bone-dry” date. However, many were unable to sell off their sizable supply of booze and decided to host one final farewell.

With much of the U.S. Navy in and around Veracruz, the Mexican port soon saw its cups, quite literally, runneth over.

Themed parties, such as Wild West saloons, broke out, while other vessels held funerals “where mourners could watch John Barlycorn’s burial at sea,” writes the Naval Institute.

A few ships decided to absolutely obliterate their collective livers by pouring all the alcohol they had on board into one large bowl, à la bathtub jungle juice.

Soon, the British, French, German, Spanish and Dutch, who were likewise harbored outside of Veracruz, got in on the act, launching roving drinking parties from ship to ship to help the Americans rid themselves of the soon-to-be contraband.

While other U.S. ships around the globe held similar boozey farewells, none matched the scale and international participation of that in Veracruz.

The good times would not last, however. In less than a month, the participants faced the sobering reality of a world at war.

Less than a year after sharing spirits in Mexico, writes USNI, the German cruiser Dresden was subsequently hunted down and scuttled by the Royal Navy.

The Marine Corps is looking for volunteers in the enlisted ranks to get their discharge early.

The offer is part of a new program for active duty enlisted Marines who already had an “end of active service,” or EAS, date in fiscal year 2025, according to a Marine Corps Administrative Message posted online Thursday.

Marines approved to leave early will separate sooner than the end date of their current contract but will still be considered to have completed their full active duty service. The program does not apply to Marines in the Marine Corps Reserve.

The early release could impact separation benefits in certain circumstances, so those Marines would not be released from active duty until their service length requirements are met for separation pay. Marines in the early release program will not have to repay bonuses for enlistment or selective retention or retirement system continuation pay.

“It is understood that this program may result in temporary risks to some units due to falling below staffing levels. Units will not receive early staffing replacement,” the Marine Corps’ official notice states, adding that the program is being used as a “force shaping tool.”

The Marine Corps previously offered early release options in 2020 for Marines in armor and tank billets and in 2014 for commissioned officers.

The following Marines are not eligible for this year’s release program: those with contracts ending after Sept. 30, scheduled to transfer to the Reserves, set to leave under other early release programs, on special duty assignment and pending legal actions.

The U.S. Navy has suspended its search for a sailor reported missing from the aircraft carrier George Washington while it was operating in the Timor Sea, the service announced Wednesday.

The Navy ended the active search at 12:40 p.m. Wednesday following “an extensive search” involving Navy personnel, the Australian Defence Force and the Australian Border Force, officials said in a brief release. The sailor was reported missing Monday as it was transiting the Timor Sea, located off Australia’s northern coast.

The carrier began search efforts after receiving reports of a possible sailor overboard, officials said in an earlier statement.

The sailor’s identity is being withheld until 24 hours after next-of-kin notification, per Navy policy.

“USS George Washington expresses sincere condolences to those impacted by this loss and is actively engaged with the crew to make services available to tend to their needs during this challenging time,” Lt. Cmdr. Mark Langford, spokesperson for the carrier, said in a statement.

Editor’s note: This report has been updated to include a statement from the carrier’s spokesperson.

The White House has acknowledged that President Donald Trump now meets with candidates for promotion to the rank of four-star general, in a break with past practice.

A White House spokesperson said the Republican president has the meetings because he wants to make sure the U.S. military retains its superiority and its leaders focus on fighting wars.

“President Trump wants to ensure our military is the greatest and most lethal fighting force in history, which is why he meets with four-star-general nominees directly to ensure they are war fighters first — not bureaucrats,” assistant press secretary Anna Kelly said.

The meetings, however, are a departure from past practice, and knowledge of them has raised concerns about politicization of the military’s top ranks. Trump has not always respected the long-standing tradition of walling off the military from partisan politics.

In June, Trump took the rare step of mobilizing the National Guard and then the Marines, sending hundreds of them into Los Angeles over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat with whom the president has feuded politically.

Trump followed up with a campaign-style rally at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where uniformed soldiers cheered as he criticized former President Joe Biden, Newsom and other Democrats — raising concerns that Trump was using the military as a political prop.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., an Army veteran and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the meetings “very welcome reform.”

“I’ve long advocated for presidents to meet with 4-star nominees. President Trump’s most important responsibility is commander-in-chief,” Cotton wrote in a post on X. “The military-service chiefs and combatant commanders are hugely consequential jobs” and “I commend President Trump and Secretary Hegseth for treating these jobs with the seriousness they deserve.”

The New York Times, which first reported on the practice, said it had been initiated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Two Marine veterans played a key role in stopping a man who allegedly stabbed multiple victims in a Michigan Walmart.

Matthew Kolakwoski had just left a checkout lane when he heard a worker scream that a man had a knife. He then heard a “mass of blood-curling screams from the back of the store,” mlive.com reported.

Kolakowski saw the man stab another shopper and then stab an elderly woman. He told his daughter and her friend to stay where they were while he and his brother-in-law went toward the man.

The man, identified as Bradford James Gille, 42, looked like he was going for the elderly woman again, Kolakowski said. He rammed Gille with his shopping cart. Gille tried to get up, but another man hit him with his shopping cart from the other side.

Kolakowski began to raise the cart to smash it on top of Gille when another Marine veteran, Derrick Perry, arrived and drew his personal pistol, holding Gille at gunpoint in the parking lot.

On video Perry can be heard along with others repeatedly telling Gille to put down the knife.

“I ultimately wanted him to put the knife down and back away until law enforcement got there,” Perry told ABC’s Good Morning America. “I did not see myself as any type of judge, jury or executioner -- I just wanted everyone to be safe.”

“I just wanted to do right by my community and help where there was a problem,” Perry said in a statement shared by the Sheriff’s Office. “I am just like any other member of the community. I wasn’t looking to be heroic. I just wanted to help my neighbors. I can’t take all the credit as there were other courageous individuals who were also standing up to the attacker too. I appreciate the outpouring of thanks and love from the public.”

Kolakowski, 39, and his brother-in-law Chris O’Brien, 43, spoke at a press conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Tuesday.

“Both individuals were instrumental in the detaining of the individual until law enforcement could arrive,” Grand Traverse County Sheriff Michael Shea told Task & Purpose.

Police said that 11 people suffered injuries in the Saturday attack at the Traverse City Walmart. The victims ranged in age from 29 to 84 years old. All are expected to survive.

Gille was charged with 11 counts of attempted murder and a single terrorism charge. He’s being held on a $100,000 bond.

Kolakowski enlisted in the Marines in September 2004 and became a landing support specialist, according to his official service record, Task and Purpose reported. He deployed to Iraq from August 2006 to March 2007, and he left the Marine Corps as a corporal in September 2008. His last duty assignment was with Combat Logistics Regiment 17, 1st Marine Logistics Group, Camp Pendleton in California.

Kolakowski’s military awards include the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, Iraq Campaign Medal, Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and National Defense Service Medal.

Perry served from October 1994 to June 1995 as a basic operational communicator, leaving the Corps as a private first class, Task and Purpose reported. His last duty assignment was listed as the School of Infantry at Camp Pendleton, California.

A new Pentagon directive implementing longer tours of duty in South Korea will improve force stability, support service members’ quality of life and enhance readiness in the face of regional threats, U.S. Forces Korea officials said

The directive, announced Tuesday, extends tours for unaccompanied service members assigned to South Korea from 12 months to 24 months.

The policy takes effect Oct. 1, 2025, and applies to all service members receiving orders on or after that date, though implementation timelines may vary by service branch, officials said. The directive follows a February announcement that extended tours for military families moving to South Korea from 24 months to 36 months.

Currently, there are roughly 28,500 military personnel stationed in South Korea, with the Army having the largest contingent of permanent party personnel there, at about 14,000 personnel.

For more than a decade, officials have discussed extending tour lengths in South Korea. Air Force Col. William Parker, director of personnel for U.S. Forces Korea, described the change in tour lengths as a “tour normalization policy.” The South Korea policy is slightly different than policies in other overseas locations such as Germany and Japan, “but our intention is to be as similar to those locations as possible,” Parker said.

Under the “3-2-1 Tour Normalization Policy,” accompanied tours will be 36 months and unaccompanied tours will be 24 months. Twelve-month unaccompanied tours will only be available as an exception, which occurs when a service member formally requests to bring their family, but the request can’t be supported because of operational or installation support or infrastructure constraints, officials said.

“There’s no desire to separate service members who have dependents from their family members any longer than we have to,” Parker said.

There’s plenty of housing, according to Parker, but limitations at schools and medical support are the two biggest factors. Medical capacity varies by installation. For example, there’s a new hospital at Camp Humphreys, he said, but more medical providers are needed there.

The new policy doesn’t affect service members currently stationed in South Korea. They won’t be required to involuntarily extend their tours, but as in the past, they can do so. The services are reviewing their policies on Korea assignment incentive pay, where troops are given incentives to extend their tour of duty in South Korea, according to Parker.

Although the initiative began well before the Pentagon’s May directive to the services to halve spending on permanent change of station, or PCS, moves, it supports DOD’s broader efforts to reduce the frequency of PCS moves and enhance readiness, family stability and quality of life, Parker said.

The initiative will save about $90 million a year, according to Parker.

“This will obviously save a lot of money, but that’s not the driving factor here. It’s hard to quantify the savings and benefits from a readiness and team cohesion perspective. It’s a challenge for our commanders here to have constant turnover of their teams,” he said.

With regional threats posed not just by North Korea, but with China and Russia in close proximity, “we really need the continuity of our service members to provide that regional expertise here, to develop and retain that,” Parker said.

Meanwhile, quality of life improved for a number of service members living in South Korea, who saw a bump in their paychecks on July 1. The Cost of Living Allowance index was just reset successfully for the first time in more than nine years, Parker said. That amounts to an increase for about three-fourths of the personnel on the peninsula, with some more remote places seeing significant increases.

With quality-of-life improvements, South Korea is ready for these longer tours, Parker added. Through infrastructure investments, including those by the Republic of Korea, 80% of the infrastructure at Camp Humphreys is 10 years old or less, including a new medical facility, a new commissary and new barracks with more being built, he said.

Officials have also been working to increase the number of command-sponsored families who can come to South Korea. Since the end of fiscal 2024 to the beginning of fiscal 2026, officials will have increased their command sponsorship capacity across the peninsula by 27%, Parker said. Currently, there are roughly 5,400 to 5,700 families, a number fluctuating because of summer moves. But they’ll grow that number to around 6,500 families over the next year or so, he said.

In addition to family stability, there’s also some benefit from the spouse employment perspective, Parker said. A two-year tour is a relatively short period of time to find and maintain employment.

“So some of the feedback we’ve received is that this will make spouses more employable,” he said.

Service members should contact their respective personnel offices for specific guidance about the new policy, Parker said.

“I feel strongly this is the right thing. With every change, there will be people that have concerns or questions,” he said. “There may be some challenges that we have to overcome, but we won’t know that until we drive the change. We think the timing’s right.

“The quality of life is fantastic here both on and off post. The mission is more important than ever in this region, so it’s the right thing.”

You’ve heard them during morning formations, over the roar of C‑17 engines, and in muddy chow halls at 0400. The battle cries “Hooah,” “Oorah,” and “Hooyah” aren’t just calls; they’re part of service life. Each is a signature of branch pride, and each carries a history steeped in grit, camaraderie and tradition.

Hooah: the Army’s walkman of affirmation

“Hooah” is the Army’s answer to everything from “loud, gym‑ready affirmative” to “I acknowledge” and sometimes even “I disagree, but I’m not arguing.” It’s an emotional Swiss Army tool, and its origin is debated.

One theory credits it to the acronym “H‑U‑A,” standing for “Heard, Understood, Acknowledged,” used to streamline radio communications, though that seems more folk etymology than etymology.

Historical sources suggest an older origin: During the Second Seminole War in 1841, soldiers toasting Seminole chief Coacoochee spoke of “How d’ye do.” Reportedly, his reply, a guttural “Hough!” was phonetically absorbed by soldiers, morphing into the modern “hooah.”

Fast forward to today, the word is embroidered on combat trainers, scrawled on chalkboards and even approved by Army doctrine.

Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordon Sullivan once described “hooah” as shorthand for “battle focus,” adding that spelling didn’t matter so long as the intent was clear.

Oorah: a Marine Corps call born underwater

“Oorah” is second only to the Eagle, Globe and Anchor. Sharp, blunt, and unapologetic, it’s a challenge to strive for improvement.

Its origin story is linked to the Perch, a submarine that operated in the early 1950s. Marine Reconnaissance units aboard recalled mimicking the crew’s dive‑alarm klaxon, an “Aarugha” echoing through hatchways, eventually shortened to “oorah.”

The Marine sergeant major behind the 'oorah' battle cry

A few years later, career Marine Sgt. Maj. John R. Massaro introduced the chant to recruit training in San Diego. By the late 1950s, “oorah” had become entrenched in Corps training culture.

For Marines, “oorah” signifies more than recognition. It’s a form of respect, a marker of identity and a way to honor shared hardship. In official manuals, it’s even considered an acceptable affirmative response. That weight of purpose sets it apart.

Hooyah: the Navy’s gruff whisper

“Hooyah” belongs primarily to sailors, particularly those in special warfare. It was born in the crucible of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. Instructors used it as an expression of defiance during grueling evolutions, such as Hell Week swim drills, rope climbs and sinking boats.

When trainees answered with their own “hooyah,” it became a moment of unity.

By the mid‑2000s, the word had spread to Navy EOD teams and diving communities, solidified through endorsements from senior enlisted leadership.

Unlike its loud cousins, “hooyah” is used not just to signal commitment, but as a warrior whisper among the Navy’s elite.

Shared meaning, distinct identity

At first listen, the three calls may sound interchangeable. Each is a sharp exhalation, a way to release energy and express belonging.

But each also carries its branch’s culture: Army grit offers “hooah,” Marine grit gives “oorah,” and Navy, especially undersea grit, produces “hooyah.” Misusing one in another branch’s space can provoke eye rolls or even an abrupt correction. But it also sparks friendly rivalry.

In recent years, the calls have spread beyond barracks.

Civilians wear emblems with these words. Tattoo parlors near post gates offer “hooah” sleeves and “oorah” forearms. Navy boot camps incorporate “hooyah” from Day One. Recruiters show it on screens to exemplify discipline and brotherhood.

These three words also serve as linguistic links across generations, connecting soldiers in the 19th century with today’s digital force. They endure because they convey more than affirmation; they contain a shared ethos.

Echoes that bind

Army doctrine emphasizes unity, leadership and esprit de corps, also known as morale. Marine training builds warriors who never step back. Navy programs emphasize family more than formation.

When a Soldier grunts “Hooah!” as he hits the deck, a Marine spits “Oorah!” at a recruit standing tall or a SEAL utters “Hooyah!” at the surf’s edge, they are saying, all at once, words that mean far more than mathematics. They mean “I’m here with you. I understand the mission. I’m not going anywhere.”

These calls resonate because they cut through fatigue, hunger and arduous training. They turn strangers into squads, rookies into warfighters and individuals into institutions. They endure because they are anchored in hardship and community.

In an age of changing tactics, shifting global threats and advancing technology, the simplest things often matter most. A cry, a grunt, a word that says, “I’m part of it.”

Those one-syllable punches echo across generations, a spiritual ruck march that carries the weight of those who’ve come before and sets the cadence for those who follow.

Editor’s note: The Navy announced it suspended its search for the missing sailor on Wednesday, July 30. Read our updated coverage here.

The aircraft carrier George Washington is conducting search-and-rescue operations in the Timor Sea for a sailor reported missing, the U.S. Navy said Tuesday.

The carrier began search efforts after receiving reports of a possible sailor overboard, the Navy said in a brief release.

Units assigned to Carrier Strike Group 5, along with the Australian Defence Force and the Australian Border Force, are assisting in the effort.

The Navy did not disclose the missing sailor’s identity, in line with service policy.

The release did not disclose additional details about the specific location of the search.

It’s become tradition. Congressional leaders from both major political parties blame each other for a potential government shutdown as the budget year draws to a close.

But this year, the posturing is starting extraordinarily early.

The finger-pointing with more than two months to go in the fiscal year indicates the threat of a stoppage is more serious than usual as a Republican-controlled Congress seeks to make good on its policy priorities, often with no support from the other political party.

Democratic leadership from both chambers and the two panels responsible for drafting spending bills met behind closed doors recently to discuss the strategy ahead. The leaders emerged demanding that Republicans work with them but were careful to avoid spelling out red lines if Republicans don’t.

“We are for a bipartisan, bicameral bill. That’s what always has been done,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. “The onus is on the Republicans to help us make that happen.”

Work on annual defense authorization bill will wait until September

On the Republican side, lawmakers describe the Democrats as itching for a shutdown. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Schumer had threatened a shutdown should Republicans pass a bill to roll back $9 billion in public broadcasting and foreign aid funds. Republicans subsequently passed those cuts.

“It was disturbing to see the Democratic leader implicitly threatening to shut down the government in his July ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, but I’m hopeful that he does not represent the views of Senate Democrats as a whole,” Thune said.

Where things stand on government funding

The federal government is operating on a full-year continuing resolution that provided about $1.7 trillion in spending for defense and non-defense programs. The funding expires Sept. 30.

President Donald Trump requested a comparable amount for the coming fiscal year, but the Republican proposed dramatically overhauling how that money is distributed to include more for defense and border security and significantly less for health, education, housing and foreign assistance.

So far, the House has approved two of the 12 annual spending bills. The Senate has yet to approve any, but those bills that have advanced out of the Senate Appropriations Committee are enjoying bipartisan support while the House bills are generally advancing out of committee on party line votes.

Senate panel backs plans for $456 billion VA budget next year

This week, the Senate is expected to consider the appropriations bill to fund military construction projects and the Department of Veterans Affairs, generally one of the easier spending bills to pass. One or two others could get added to the package.

Congress got off to a late start on the funding process. Republicans prioritized Trump’s tax and spending cut bill. Most lawmakers agree Congress will need to pass a stop-gap measure before Sept. 30 to avoid a shutdown and allow lawmakers more time to work on the full-year spending measures.

The view from Democrats

Democrats overwhelmingly opposed this year’s funding bill that expires in two months. But in the end, Schumer and nine Democratic colleagues decided a government shutdown would be even worse. They voted to allow the bill to proceed and overcome a filibuster, giving Republicans the ability to pass it on their own on a final vote.

Schumer took considerable heat from progressives for his strategy. House Democratic leadership issued a statement at the time saying “House Democrats will not be complicit.” And members of his own caucus publicly expressed disagreement.

“If we pass this continuing resolution for the next half year, we will own what the president does,” said Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. “I am not willing to take ownership of that.”

Some liberal groups threatened to hold protests at various events Schumer was planning to promote a new book, and some of those events ended up being postponed due to security concerns.

The Democratic frustrations have only grown stronger in the ensuing months.

First, the Democrats watched the Trump administration slow-walk or block hundreds of billions of dollars from going out in part through the work of its Department of Government Efficiency. Then they watched as Republicans passed Trump’s big tax and spending cut bill without any Democratic votes.

Finally, they watched as Republicans this month canceled $9 billion in foreign aid and public broadcasting funds when much of it had been previously agreed to on a bipartisan basis.

Meanwhile, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, declared that the appropriations process “has to be less bipartisan.”

Democrats complain that much of the work taking place in the House has been a waste of time, since those partisan bills have no chance of getting 60 votes in the 100-member Senate.

“At this point in time, why have appropriations if they can just unilaterally through rescissions whack it all away?” said Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill. “I think what you’re seeing is more frustration than I’ve ever witnessed.”

Republicans position for impasse

Republicans control all the levers of power in Washington. That could make it harder to blame Democrats for a shutdown. But in the end, any bill will need some Democratic support to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

“Our concern is that from their standpoint, they want to have a shutdown,” Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., said of Democrats. “... The Democrats see it as a way to derail the agenda that we’re putting through.”

Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 2-ranked Republican in the Senate, said Republicans were determined to hold votes on the 12 spending bills. He said that Schumer “had unilaterally shut down the appropriations process” in previous years by not holding such votes, moving instead to negotiate directly with GOP leadership in the House and then-President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration on an all-encompassing spending package.

“If Democrats walk away from this process again, simply to protect wasteful Washington spending,” Barrasso said, “they will be the ones sabotaging the Senate and shutting down the government.”

In 1945, after six years of devastating conflict, World War II was drawing to a close. But it was more than, as historians James Holland and Al Murray write, the muddy tent in Reims or the triumphant spectacle aboard the battleship Missouri.

The conclusion of the Second World War saw no less than eight dramatic surrender ceremonies — six in Europe and the last two in Japan.

Together, the co-hosts of the popular World War II history podcast, “We Have Ways of Making You Talk‚” detail the human drama behind the conclusion of the deadliest conflict in human history in their new book, “Victory ‘45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders.”

Holland recently sat down with Military Times to discuss one German general’s personal battle to save his own neck at war’s end; President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan; and a Jewish private’s haunting memories of liberating Mauthausen’s sub–concentration camps.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What compelled you two to team up to write about these particular series of events?

We were gearing up to cover it on our podcast and then it was actually Al’s idea. Neither of us wanted to do stories about ticker tape falling on Times Square, sailors snogging girls and that lot. What we wanted to do was actually look at the kind of stories behind the surrenders and sort of pitch them all together because it was a really odd end, the end of the war.

It’s fascinating that V-E Day, May 8, is the one day where there isn’t actually a surrender, for example. Then you’ve got Japan as well. So there’s lots going on. We wanted to look at this through the prism of a range of different people, some obviously incredibly well-known — whether it be Eisenhower, Churchill or Hitler — and other lesser-known figures as well.

I think the story behind the surrender in Italy [Operation Sunrise], for example, very few people know that. It’s so bonkers you literally couldn’t make it up. Where’s Quentin Tarantino to make a film out of this when you need it?

I was also really, really struck by Jonathan Wainwright’s story. He was told that [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur was going to get off Corregidor and that he was going to have to take over and that meant he was going to have to surrender the American forces in the Philippines. And then there he is standing behind MacArthur on the USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945 … but what’s happened between then and March 1942, [when MacArthur left Corregidor], you know?

[Wainwright] comes across as such a decent, honorable man. I think that’s the other thing that’s really struck me amongst the Allies. There are some fantastic people, some incredibly highly principled people. At the moment, you can put a question mark amongst some certain world leaders about their integrity, their sense of duty, their sense of honor and decency. You can’t challenge President Harry S. Truman on that, for example.

Whatever you might think of [Truman], his heart, his mind is absolutely in the right place. He steps up in a moment of what to do about the bomb. How are you going to avoid a mainland invasion of Japan? What do you do about the growing problems with the Soviet Union as the war in Europe comes to an end, etc. So I thought to try and look at all that was really interesting.

The same goes for the Holocaust. By the end of the war, you can’t avoid it. All of these camps are being unearthed, discovered. However, during much of the war, the vast majority of Allied troops, for example, are not thinking, “I’m doing this to save the Jews from the Holocaust.” But they do learn that afterwards, and it gives a completely fresh meaning to what they were fighting.

There’s some very, very famous American units in the Second World War, but who has ever heard of the 71st Infantry Division? No one. So I liked the idea of having the story of an unknown New Jersey [Jewish soldier] fighting in an unknown infantry division who is a liberator rather than victim.

In practice, that final period of the war in Europe was also the beginning of a new phase of the conflict, as troops and the general public alike began to discover the extent of the atrocities they’d been fighting over. How did Alan Moskin’s war end?

Moskin is part of the 71st Infantry Division and part of the units that are liberating these camps. They get to this subcamp of Mauthausen called Gunskirchern and there are all these desperate people dying, incredibly ill. Just scenes of absolute horror.

Moskin is absolutely horrified as one camp survivor tries to kiss his boots — which have, you know, excrement, mud. He’s repulsed by the whole thing. I think his reaction is very honest. He is horrified, but also repulsed by what he is seeing — that sort of human degradation.

On May 5, that’s when it’s all over in that part of the world. Although the overall surrender hasn’t happened yet, it’s kind of done there. So the next few days is kind of trying to sort out this camp effectively.

After the war, he spends an awful lot of time later in life talking to school children about the Holocaust. In 2017, Moskin met Nandor Katz, who was a 19-year-old prisoner when the 71st Division liberated Gunskirchern. Moskin was just 18 at the time himself. It helped to bring the war full circle for him.

During SS Gen. Karl Wolff’s 1964 trial, the judge dubbed him the “bureaucrat of death.” What would you say his “legacy” is in Italy specifically and the war in general?

Wolff is a smart cookie. He’s very charming. He’s clearly less ideological and more of a chancer. For him, it’s the power, it’s the riches, it’s the high living.

I think that really gets his goat, rather than fanatical antisemitism, or fanatical anti-Bolshevism for that matter. There’s no question that he is trying to get an early peace in Italy. There is no question that he calls off his militias against the partisans in the winter of ’44 into 1945. So that is in the credit box. But he’s also up to his neck in being involved with the Holocaust. He’s a despicable human being who got incredibly lucky to get away with it.

The awful thing about it is when you’re telling these Wolff stories, you kind of find yourself slightly gunning for him, which I always find very, very discomforting.

Operation Sunrise itself is incredible — signed at the end of April 1945 in Caserta, Italy — before Hitler commits suicide. Although it did not go into effect until May 2, did this contribute to the Soviets’ desire for the May 9 surrender?

Well, I think it does play a part. But I think their outrage is slightly overblown. If the tables were in reverse, they wouldn’t have consulted the British or the Americans. So their outrage is mock outrage, but they’re using it as leverage. Keep in mind, everything that comes out of Stalin’s mouth has to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. He’s kind of the ultimate snake, really.

V-E and V-J Day are well-known; however, lesser so are the German surrenders on May 2 and May 5. Can you briefly touch on those?

The one [enacted] on May 2 is the first unconditional surrender by German troops anywhere. … It is the surrender of all German troops in Italy. It was signed at a time of enormous confusion. You have this crazy situation where you suddenly have all these German troops in the north of Italy and South Tyrol, and they’re all being corralled by the Americans who are slowly but surely catching up.

And so you’ve got American GIs, military police and Germans side by side directing traffic just because there aren’t enough Americans to go around at that point.

Then the second one is signed on the afternoon of May 4, and then comes into action at 8 a.m. on May 5, and this is a surrender of all German troops in the north of Germany to [British Field Marshal Bernard] Montgomery’s headquarters.

Then the following day, you’ve got the surrender of all German troops in Bavarian Austria to the 6th Army Group. So that’s Alexander Patch, the 7th Army commander, and Jacob Devers, who is the Army group commander. So those are the ones beforehand.

At that point, it becomes absolutely clear that it’s all over. The really weird thing is that the “new” German high command is trying to keep the war going to try, in their eyes, save as many German troops as they possibly can from having to surrender to the Red Army, and instead surrender to the West.

But the idea that 3 million troops facing the Russians are all going to be able to get across this one tiny bridge across the river Elbe, which is about 50-60 miles west of Berlin, is just absurd.

The gross delusion of the German high command, I think, is just truly astonishing.

You deal with many personalities in this book — many seemingly larger than life, like Montgomery and Eisenhower. But you also have President Harry Truman who is thrust into this position of power and has to make perhaps the most important decision of the 20th century. Today, there are still ongoing discussions about whether the Americans should have dropped the bomb or not. To you all, how justified was he in his decision?

I actually think there is some validity to that argument as well. If I’m brutally honest, it’s an incredibly tough decision, because he knows that the moment you fire an atomic bomb, you’ve changed the world forever. There can be no change, no going back from that.

So the other way of looking at it is, “What’s the alternative?” The alternative is besieging the Japanese home islands, which the U.S. Navy and Allied navies could do. … But just think about how many people would have been starved to death that way.

The alternative, then, is invading Japan itself. The Japanese have already taunted the Allies on that, saying publicly that every single person in Japan would be mobilized against them. So that is prompting the notions of a couple of million casualties at least, which comes on top of the Western war.

That’s a huge burden to have to shoulder.

Or, you can drop a bomb, which kills no one on your own side but wipes out a city and then see what happens. They do, and Japan still doesn’t surrender. So then they drop another one.

I can see why Truman made that decision. I can see that the alternatives were possibly worse, in terms of loss of life.

Are there any small tidbits from the surrenders that particularly stand out to either of you?

I think [Gen. Dwight] Eisenhower refusing to have anything to do with the Germans’ delegation in Reims was really interesting. … And also in the kind of, you know, duel between [Ernst] Kaltenbrunner and Wolff, that sort of absolutely insane shootout that almost happens near Prague, where they’ve got prominent and VIP prisoners. The sort of craziness of an MI6 officer being in the same bedroom as two German generals, you know, one of whom is the architect of The Hunger Plan, which was going to potentially kill millions in the Soviet Union.

There’s so many incidents that just sort of seem mad and nuts. It’s hard to get your head around after such a long war. You would have thought everyone would just want to get it over and done with, but it’s nothing as straightforward as one might think. I think that’s been fascinating to deep dive on.

Army Chief of Staff and Maj. Gen. Douglas MacArthur watched a brigade of steel-helmeted soldiers precisely align themselves in a straight four-column phalanx, bayonets affixed to rifles. He nodded his head in satisfaction. Discipline was wonderful.

Up ahead, Major George Patton kicked his heels against his mount, and the big horse reared forward to signal a line of cavalry. The riders drew their sabers, and the animals stepped out in unison, hoofs smacking loudly on the street. Five Renault tanks lurched behind.

Seven-ton relics from World War I and presumably just for show, the old machines nonetheless left little doubt as to the seriousness of the moment.

On cue, at about 4:30 p.m. on July 28, 1932, the infantry began a slow, steady march forward. Completing the surreal atmosphere, a machine gun unit unlimbered, and its crew busily set up.

This was no parade, although hundreds of curious office workers had interrupted their daily routines to crowd the sidewalk or hang out of windows along Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol to see what would happen.

Up ahead, a group of weary civilians, many dressed in rags and ill-fitting, faded uniforms, waited in anticipation amid their sorry camp of tents and structures made from clapboard and sheets of tin covered in tar paper.

Some loitered in the street. They had heard something was afoot — expected it after what happened earlier. Now, a murmur rose from the camp crowd. Upon seeing the Army’s menacing approach, they were momentarily stunned, disbelieving.

Recovering their senses, a few of the men cursed and sent bottles and bricks flying toward the troops — ineffective weapons against so formidable a force.

The missiles shattered on impact on the hard pavement or bounced off the flanks of horses and soldiers. Undaunted, the roughly 600 troops maintained their discipline with tight-lipped determination. The extra training MacArthur had recently ordered was paying off.

Some of the camp inhabitants had already begun running from the oncoming soldiery, but angry packs held their ground, defiantly wielding clubs and iron bars, yelling profanities.

An officer signaled, and the infantry halted to don masks and toss gas grenades. Forming into two assault waves, they continued their push. Clouds of stinging, gray fumes wafted through the air, forcing most of the remaining unarmed veterans to flee in panic.

One particularly pesky truckload continued to throw debris, prompting a quick response from Patton: “Two of us charged at a gallop and [striking with the flat of our swords] had some nice work at close range with the occupants of the truck, most of whom could not sit down for some days.”

As cavalry dispersed a group of outnumbered veterans waving a U.S. flag, a shocked bystander, his face streaked with tears from the gas, accosted MacArthur as he rode along in a staff car.

“The American flag means nothing to me after this,” the man yelled.

The general quieted him with a stern rebuke, “Put that man under arrest if he opens his mouth again.”

The energetic officer was in his element.

One reporter observed, “General MacArthur, his chest glittering with medals, strode up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, flipping a riding crop against his neatly pressed breeches.”

MacArthur could not help being euphoric. If the tactics were not textbook, the results were everything he hoped for — a complete rout.

The troops had exercised perfect restraint in completely clearing the downtown area without firing a shot. Within hours it was all over. Troopers set the abandoned camp ablaze as the former inhabitants retreated, demoralized and beaten, across the Third Street bridge. MacArthur called a halt to allow his troops to rest and eat while he considered his next move.

As many as 20,000 former soldiers and their families had converged on Washington in the summer of 1932, the height of the Great Depression, to support Texas Congressman Wright Patman’s bill to advance the bonus payment promised to World War I veterans.

Congress had authorized the plan in 1924, intending to compensate the veterans for wages lost while serving in the military during the war. But payment was to be deferred until 1945.

Just one year earlier, in 1931, Congress overrode a presidential veto on a bill to provide, as loans, half the amount due to the men. When the nation’s economy worsened, the half-bonus loans were not enough, and the unemployed veterans now sought the balance in cash.

Known as Bonus Marchers, they came in desperation from all across the nation, hopping freight trains, driving dilapidated jalopies or hitchhiking, intent on pressuring Congress to pass the legislation. The administration vehemently opposed the measure, believing it inflationary and impractical given the $2 billion annual budget deficit.

At first the march was a trickle, led by Walter Waters, a 34-year-old former sergeant from Portland, Ore. It soon became a tidal wave, drawing national press attention.

The first contingent reached the nation’s capital in May 1932. They occupied parks and a row of condemned buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue, between the White House and the Capitol. When new arrivals overflowed that site, they erected a shantytown on the flood plain of the Anacostia River, southeast of Capitol Hill.

Theirs was a miserable lot, alleviated somewhat by the beneficence of the city’s superintendent of police, Pelham Glassford, himself a war veteran.

Glassford pitied the beleaguered itinerants and solicited private aid to secure medical assistance, clothing, food and supplies. During a May 26 veterans meeting, Glassford suggested they officially call themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force.

Adopting the name — which was commonly shortened to Bonus Army — they asked him, and he agreed, to serve as secretary-treasurer of the group. Working together, Waters and Glassford managed to maintain enough discipline and order in the ranks to ward off eviction.

Glassford likely hoped that the horde would eventually lose interest and return home, but Waters had other ideas. “We’ll stay here until the bonus bill is passed,” Waters told anyone who would listen, “till 1945, if necessary.”

He staged daily demonstrations before the Capitol and led peaceful marches past the White House. President Herbert Hoover refused to give him an audience.

In June the House of Representatives narrowly passed the Patman bill, but the Senate defeated the measure with a lopsided vote of 62 to 18.

Congress was scheduled to adjourn in mid-July, and about one-quarter of the veterans accepted the government’s offer of free transportation home. Hoover had apparently won. Perhaps now he could concentrate on an economic recovery plan and the upcoming reelection campaign. But many of the marchers felt betrayed and disillusioned. With nowhere else to go, they decided to stay.

Ominously, their disappointment festered in Washington’s muggy summer heat. To complicate matters, at this point the American Communist Party saw an opportunity to cause trouble, and sent forth John Pace as the catalyst with instructions to incite riot. The degree of his success is uncertain and will be forever a matter of debate, but his presence alarmed the Washington power structure.

Historian Kenneth S. Davis theorizes that Pace may have had a hand in escalating the tensions, goading the angry veterans to become more aggressive.

A more plausible explanation for rising tension may simply be that frustrations finally reached a boiling point. In any case, Secretary of War Patrick Hurley had had enough.

On July 28 he ordered Glassford to immediately evacuate the occupied buildings, which were scheduled for demolition to make way for new government offices. The veterans stubbornly refused to budge. For whatever reason, Glassford and his police officers became the target of bricks and stones, and one officer suffered a fractured skull.

As the melee got out of hand, an angry veteran, apparently feeling that Glassford had betrayed the Bonus Marchers, tore off the chief’s gold police badge. Fearing for their safety, police opened fire, killing one veteran and mortally wounding another.

The officers retreated while Glassford sought the advice of his Board of Commissioners. Quick to pass on the responsibility, and perhaps overreacting, the commissioners called the president to deploy the Army from nearby Fort Myer to restore order.

Describing the attack on police as a “serious riot,” the commissioners asserted, “It will be impossible for the Police Department to maintain law and order except by the free use of firearms.” They went on to argue that only the presence of federal troops could resolve the crisis.

Hoover, upset by the continued presence of the Bonus Marchers, now had the excuse he was looking for to expel them from the capital.

He directed Secretary Hurley to unleash MacArthur, who received the following instruction: “You will have United States troops proceed immediately to the scene of the disorder. Surround the affected area and clear it without delay. Any women and children should be accorded every consideration and kindness. Use all humanity consistent with the execution of this order.”

Not surprisingly, MacArthur now executed his orders in a manner seemingly designed to maximize media attention. In a highly unusual but characteristic decision — one purportedly against the advice of his aide, 42-year-old Maj. Dwight Eisenhower — he chose to oversee the operations in the field with the troops.

Military protocol called for a commanding officer to remain at headquarters. This was especially true for MacArthur, whose post was administrative rather than operational. So while he charged General Perry Miles with carrying out the eviction, MacArthur assumed the real responsibility.

Although no other situation offers an exact comparison, MacArthur’s action was as if General Maxwell Taylor, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1963, had led National Guard troops to the University of Alabama to confront Alabama Governor George Wallace.

Having driven the veterans from the downtown area, MacArthur had fulfilled his mission. But whether his blood was up, or he merely sensed a need to inflict a coup de grâce against the purported Communist element — an enemy he considered more insidious than disgruntled veterans — MacArthur did not rest on his laurels.

He ordered his troops to advance upon the 11th Street bridge leading to Anacostia Flats. Someone, waving a white shirt as a flag of truce, came racing across to plea for time to evacuate the women and children. MacArthur granted an hour’s reprieve.

Though accounts differ, the president now seemed suddenly to exhibit an untimely case of nerves. Fearing repercussions, he twice sent word that the Army was not to cross the bridge. MacArthur refused to listen, saying he hadn’t time to be bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders.

He sent the troops across against explicit instructions. Using more gas, the soldiers moved into Bonus City. Its occupants fled in terror, refugees rousted from their pitiful camp.

“One of the soldiers threw a bomb,” said one woman hiding in a nearby house with her family. “...[W]e all began to cry. We got wet towels and put them over the faces of the children. About half an hour later my baby began to vomit. I took her outside in the air and she vomited again. Next day she began to turn black and blue and we took her to the hospital.”

Either veterans or soldiers torched the entire area — no one knows for sure. In the confusion, one baby was left behind, dead from gas inhalation.

Endeavoring to eliminate any doubt as to his motives, MacArthur next conducted an impromptu press conference — a job more appropriately left to civilian authorities.

The conference allowed the general to expound on the claim that Reds had concocted the riot, the president’s safety was at stake, and the government was threatened with insurrection.

Describing the mob, MacArthur said: “It was animated by the essence of revolution. They had come to the conclusion, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they were about to take over in some arbitrary way either the direct control of the government or else to control it by indirect methods. It is my opinion that had the president let it go on another week the institutions of our government would have been very severely threatened.”

It was a masterful performance. In praising the president and war secretary, MacArthur nearly absolved himself of responsibility — perhaps a calculated move.

Hoover watched the red glow of the bonfire at Anacostia Flats from a White House window. If he had second thoughts, he didn’t include them in his record of the event; and in any case, it was too late. MacArthur’s boldness had boxed him into a corner. The president’s best option now was to vigorously support the general.

“A challenge to the authority of the United States Government has been met, swiftly and firmly,’ Hoover said in a statement the next morning. ‘The Department of Justice is pressing its investigation into the violence which forced the call of army detachments, and it is my sincere hope that those agitators may be brought speedily to trial in the civil courts.”

Hysteria colored much of Washington’s official view of the Bonus Army.

In defense of both men, MacArthur and Hoover seem to have genuinely believed that Communists controlled the organization, with Walter Waters merely serving as the Bonus Army’s titular head.

Hoover believed that veterans made up no more than 50 percent of Bonus Army members, while MacArthur set an even lower number — 10 percent. Waters said that was a “damned lie.”

While Communist operatives certainly tried to infiltrate the ranks of the Bonus Army and instigate trouble, evidence indicates they had little real influence.

The president and Army chief of staff’s estimates were badly overstated. A postevent study conducted by the Veterans Administration revealed that 94 percent of the marchers had Army or Navy service records. Nevertheless, the Communist Party was happy to take credit for what was billed as an uprising.

Events elsewhere help explain Hoover and MacArthur’s state of mind. Students loudly interrupted the general’s commencement address at the University of Pittsburgh that summer as he spoke against demonstrators protesting the government. More alarming, a union-inspired hunger march at a Detroit auto plant that spring had turned ugly. Police killed four civilians while trying to maintain control, injuring 60 others.

Communist Party leaders retaliated, organizing a 6,000-man funeral procession, waving red banners and marching in cadence to the party’s anthem, the ‘Internationale.’ Fearing a similar or worse result in Washington, Hoover and MacArthur acted with dispatch when confronted by a large group of disgruntled citizens.

Throughout their lives, both officials clung stubbornly to the claim that subversive elements bent on destroying capitalism were behind the veterans. Neither man ever accepted the Bonus Army as primarily a group of destitute, desperate, hungry men trying to support their families.

The day’s toll was three dead, 54 injured and 135 arrests.

In the rush to point fingers, in addition to the Communist element, Congressman Patman and colleagues received their share of the blame.

The Chicago Tribune editorialized that responsibility for the incident “lies chiefly at the door of men in public life who have encouraged the making of unreasonable demands by ex-service men and inflamed their mistaken sense of judgment.”

But Alabama Senator and future Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black directed his venom at a different target.

Arguing that Hoover had overreacted to the situation, Black said, “As one citizen, I want to make my public protest against this militaristic way of handling a condition which has been brought about by widespread unemployment and hunger.”

The New York Times hinted that other senators felt the same. Indeed, it was a common charge hurled by the opposition party during that fall’s presidential election. Senator Hiram Johnson, speaking in Chicago a few days before the presidential vote, dubbed the incident “one of the blackest pages in our history.”

Hoping to evoke feelings of sympathy and patriotism, he continued, noting that the displaced veterans had been hailed as heroes and saviors only a decade earlier: “The president sent against these men, emaciated from hunger, scantily clad, unarmed, the troops of the United States army. Tanks, tear-bombs, all of the weapons of modern warfare were directed against those who had borne the arms of the republic.”

The public soon followed Black’s lead. Frustrated by Depression-era economics and in tune with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s comparatively more aggressive assistance programs after he assumed the presidency, the public increasingly questioned the government’s response to the plight of the Bonus Army.

Many came to see it as callous and heavy-handed. Theater audiences reacted to Bonus Army newsreel footage with choruses of boos.

Ever conscious of his own place in history, MacArthur blinked.

At least publicly the general would voice a more sympathetic view of the marchers he once routed. At first he had called them a ‘bad mob,’ but gradually time, or concern over public opinion, softened his expressed view. In his memoirs, MacArthur took credit for supplying the marchers with tents and rolling kitchens, and declared them a “vanguard of a starved band,” remembering the whole affair as a “poignant episode.”

If it was a purposeful attempt to improve his image, it failed. His reputation has remained forever scarred. MacArthur biographer William Manchester called his actions that day “flagrantly insubordinate” and “indefensible.”

Another historian, echoing Manchester’s sentiment, said the general acted “with overzealous determination and reckless impulsiveness.”

Likely influencing the judgment of historians was MacArthur’s demonstrated knack for upsetting his superiors.

Twenty years after the Bonus Army incident, President Harry Truman would relieve the general of his Korean command for perceived insubordination. In the end, the general’s personality and ambition proved too great an obstacle for history to erase its view of his performance against the Bonus Army.

Along with MacArthur, two other soldiers who participated in the action would go on to write their names large in history — Eisenhower and Patton.

Eisenhower would eventually undergo an even more dramatic transformation than his boss in describing the affair. Normally a frank diarist, Ike merely noted at the time that he “took part in Bonus Incident of July 28,” and went on to say, “A lot of furor has been stirred up but mostly to make political capital.”

By the time he published “At Ease” 30 years later, Ike portrayed himself as a frustrated hero of sorts, claiming that he tried to dissuade MacArthur from personally leading the charge.

He advised him that Communists held no sway over the marchers, and he reiterated the old claim that his boss ignored White House orders to halt operations. Interestingly, Ike waited until after MacArthur’s death in 1964 to present this version. If it distorted history, MacArthur was not around to contest it.

It was a messy affair for everyone. Patton, a man who revered duty, had mixed emotions, calling it a “most distasteful form of service.”

Within months he criticized the Army’s tactics, believing they violated every precept of how to handle civil unrest. Still, he commended both sides: “It speaks volumes for the high character of the men that not a shot was fired. In justice to the marchers, it should be pointed out that had they really wanted to start something, they had a great chance here, but refrained.”

And while Patton was disgusted that “Bolsheviks” were in the mix, he considered most of the Bonus Army “poor, ignorant men, without hope, and without really evil intent.”

To his dismay, the routed marchers included Joseph Angelo, who 14 years earlier had saved the wounded Patton’s life by pulling him to safety from a foxhole.

The episode would dog President Hoover in his attempt to win a second term of office in the fall of 1932.

Presidents had called out federal troops before to suppress civil unrest, but this was the first time they had moved against veterans. It left a bad taste in the mouths of voters.

A letter to the Washington Daily News expressed the sentiments of many. “I voted for Herbert Hoover in 1928,” one disgusted woman wrote. “God forgive me and keep me alive at least till the polls open next November!”

Hoover’s Democratic challenger in that fall’s presidential election, Franklin D. Roosevelt, understood the political significance of the president’s use of force. Like his opponent, the New York governor did not support payment of the bonus, but he found Hoover’s tactics appalling.

“He should have invited a delegation into the White House for coffee and sandwiches,” Roosevelt told one aide as he perused the morning papers.

Already confident of success, Roosevelt now felt victory was certain. This was a black eye no one could overcome. Roosevelt won decisively, capturing 42 states with 472 electoral votes compared to just 59 for his Republican rival.

Hoover had no illusions, but he could not help but feel bitter. Stopping just short of calling Roosevelt a liar, the former president later wrote of the campaign: “This whole Democratic performance was far below the level of any previous campaign in modern times. My defeat would no doubt have taken place anyway. But it might have taken place without such defilement of American life.”

The vision of Regular Army troops marching on veterans would provide propaganda for the Left for years to come.

Long before that, the remnants of the Bonus Army drifted home, stopping for a brief period in Johnson, Pa., until that community too urged them on.

The government buried the two Bonus Army veterans slain by police at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. One year later, another contingent of veterans came to Washington to press the issue of the bonus payment.

The new president was no more receptive than the last, but instead of the Army he sent his wife, Eleanor, to speak with the former servicemen.

More important, he created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which offered the men employment. And three years later, Congress passed legislation over FDR’s veto to complete the bonus payment, resolving one of the more disturbing issues in American politics.

This article was written by Wyatt Kingseed and originally published in June 2004 issue of American History Magazine.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Monday expressed concern over the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza and urged Israel to get people food, seemingly recalibrating his stance on Gaza as images of emaciated children have sparked renewed worries about hunger in the war-torn territory.

Trump, speaking in Scotland on Monday, said the U.S. and other nations are giving money and food to Gaza but that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “got to sort of like run it.”

“I want him to make sure they get the food,” Trump said. “I want to make sure they get the food.”

Trump’s comments seemed to result from the images in recent days of the worsening hunger crisis in Gaza and were more urgent than the resigned message he had about the 21-month Israel-Hamas war last week, when ceasefire talks derailed. His remarks Monday also marked a new divergence from Netanyahu after the two leaders had become closer following their nations’ join strikes in Iran.

The U.S. president was asked if he agreed with Netanyahu’s comments on Sunday in which the Israeli leader said, “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza and there is no starvation in Gaza.”

“I don’t know,” Trump replied Monday. “I mean, based on television, I would say not particularly because those children look very hungry.”

Ill-fated Gaza pier mission lacked sufficient training, equipment: IG

In the face of mounting international criticism, the Israeli military over the weekend began airdrops of aid, along with limited pauses in fighting in three populated areas of Gaza for 10 hours a day to help with the distribution.

Trump on Friday had expressed some resignation about the situation in Gaza after the U.S. and Israel pulled their negotiating teams out of talks in Qatar to try to reach a ceasefire. Trump said last week that Hamas was likely “going to be hunted down” and said of Israel, “They’re going to have to fight and they’re going to have to clean it up.”

But Trump seemed more inclined to action on Monday after reports of starvation-related deaths and images of people, especially young children and infants, struggling to get food continued to emerge over the weekend, drew international outcry.

The U.S. president, speaking as he visited with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at his Trump’s Turnberry golf course, said that the U.S. was “going to set up food centers,” but he didn’t offer specifics.

The White House did not immediately have more information about the food centers.

Trump said Hamas has stolen food and aid trying to reach people in Gaza, but when asked by a reporter about what responsibility Israel has for limiting aid to the area, he said, “Israel has a lot of responsibility.”

But he quickly said Israel was also hampered in its actions as it seeks to keep the remaining 20 hostages kept in Gaza alive.

When asked by what more can Israel do, Trump said, “I think Israel can do a lot.” But he didn’t offer more details and changed the subject to Iran.

“We have to help on a humanitarian basis before we do anything. We have to get the kids fed.”

Starmer was more adamant than Trump, calling it “a desperate situation” in Gaza.

“I think people in Britain are revolted at seeing what they are seeing on their screens,” he said.

Starmer, who faces pressure from his Labour Party to recognize a Palestinian state as France did last week, said the U.K. supports statehood for the Palestinians but it must be part of a plan for a two-state solution.

Trump said last week that France’s recognition of a Palestinian state “doesn’t carry any weight.”

“I’m not going to take a position,” Trump said Monday of recognizing a Palestinian state. He added of Starmer, “I don’t mind him taking a position.”

The comments came as the U.N. General Assembly on Monday brought together high-level officials to promote a two-state solution to the decades-old Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Israel and the U.S. are boycotting the two-day meeting.

EDINBURGH, Scotland — President Donald Trump said Monday he intends to shorten the 50-day deadline he gave Russian President Vladimir Putin to reach a deal that ends the three-year war in Ukraine, after Russia continued to bombard Ukrainian cities.

Russia fired an overnight barrage of more than 300 drones, four cruise missiles and three ballistic missiles, the Ukrainian air force said.

Trump said two weeks ago he would implement “severe tariffs” on Russia unless a peace deal is reached by early September, as he expressed exasperation with Putin over the bombardment of Ukrainian cities amid the Republican president’s attempts to stop the fighting.

Trump said he would now give Putin 10 to 12 days from Monday, meaning he wants peace efforts to make progress by Aug. 7-9. The plan includes possible sanctions and secondary tariffs targeting Russia’s trading partners. The formal announcement would come later Monday or on Tuesday, he said.

“No reason in waiting,” Trump said of the shorter timeline. “We just don’t see any progress being made.”

Putin has “got to make a deal. Too many people are dying,” Trump said during a visit to Scotland.

State Department OKs $322 million in proposed weapons sales to Ukraine

There was no immediate response from Russia.

Trump repeated his criticism of Putin for talking about ending the war but continuing to bombard Ukrainian civilians.

“And I say, that’s not the way to do it,” Trump said. He added, “I’m disappointed in President Putin.”

Asked at a news conference about a potential meeting with the Russian leader, Trump said: “I’m not so interested in talking anymore.”

Still, he voiced some reluctance about imposing penalties on the Kremlin, saying that he loves the Russian people. “I don’t want to do that to Russia,” he said, but he noted how many Russians, along with Ukrainians, are dying in the war.

Ukraine has urged Western countries to take a tougher line with Putin. Andrii Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, thanked Trump for shortening the deadline.

“Putin understands only strength — and that has been conveyed clearly and loudly,” Yermak said on Telegram, adding that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shared the sentiment.

Latest attacks in Ukraine

A Russian drone blew out the windows of a 25-story residential building in the Darnytskyi district of Kyiv, the head of the city’s military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, wrote on Telegram. Eight people were injured, including a 4-year-old girl, he said.

The attack also started a fire in Kropyvnytskyi, in central Ukraine, local officials said, but no injuries were reported.

The main target of the Russian attack was Starokostiantyniv, in the Khmelnytskyi region of western Ukraine, the air force said. Regional authorities reported no damage or casualties.

Western Ukraine is on the other side of the country from the front line, and the Ukrainian military is believed to have significant airfields as well as arsenals and depots there.

The Russian Defense Ministry said its forces carried out an overnight strike with long-range, air-launched weapons, hitting a Ukrainian air base along with an ammunition depot containing stockpiles of missiles and components for drone production.

Associated Press journalist Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed.

Ever since Raphael Lemkin heard Winston Churchill’s August 1941 broadcast on the BBC, in which the prime minister declared, “The whole of Europe has been wrecked and trampled down by the mechanical weapons and barbaric fury of the Nazis ... As his armies advance, whole districts are exterminated. We are in the presence of a crime without a name,” the Polish lawyer became transfixed by one singular mission: to find a word that replaced “barbarity” and “vandalism” to describe the actions of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Since 1933, writes Samantha Power in her pioneering book “A Problem From Hell,” Lemkin had sought a term that would describe the assault on all aspects “of nationhood — physical, biological, political, social, cultural, economic and religious.”

Mass murder failed to connote the full scale of Hitler’s Final Solution: mass deportation, starvation, suppression of the intelligentsia, the control of mass media and the singular motive behind the perpetration of the crime.

Coining the word “genocide” from the Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin root of cide (killing), Lemkin ushered in a new era, in which the crimes of the past, present and future finally had a name.

In 1944, writing in response to what was occurring in Europe, the Jewish-born Lemkin wrote in his book, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” that genocide meant “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

The act of genocide, according to Lemkin, deprives a group of people personal security, liberty, health and dignity. He continued:

“Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.”

In sum, Lemkin meant that a group does not have to be physically exterminated to experience genocide. To be stripped of all cultural traces of their identity, in his view, amounted to the act.

For Lemkin, redefining Churchill’s words of “barbarity” and “vandalism” was personal. While he himself was able to escape the horrors of the Holocaust, managing to leave Warsaw, Poland, in September of 1939, he lost 49 family members to the Final Solution, with only his brother, Elias, surviving from Lemkin’s immediate family.

To coin the name only meant so much to the lawyer. The act of criminalizing it was the natural next step.

His indefatigable efforts for making it so has since fundamentally altered international law, geopolitics and the study of history. It has, writes the National World War II Museum, transformed “the way we understand mass violence in the modern world.”

Lemkin’s quest

Since he was a child, Lemkin had been keenly fascinated by the subject of atrocity.

Born on June 24, 1900, on a small farm near the Polish town of Wolkowysk, the Jewish-born Lemkin was very aware of antisemitic pogroms occurring in his home nation, in which 70 Jews were killed and 90 were seriously injured in the massacre in the Bialystok region in 1906.

By the age of 12, Lemkin had read Henryk Sienkiewicz’s “Quo Vadis?” in which the author recounted the Roman emperor Nero throwing Christians to the lions. By his own account, Lemkin would often question his mother surrounding events such as the sack of Carthage, the Mongol invasions and the persecution of Huguenots.

“I was an impressionable youngster, leaning to sentimentality,” Lemkin later wrote of himself. “I was appalled by the frequency of the evil … and, above all, by the impunity coldly relied upon by the guilty.”

While studying linguistics at the University of Lvov in 1921, Lemkin learned about the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, the Armenian survivor who assassinated Mehmed Talaat. Talaat, the former Turkish interior minister, had presided over the killing squads that bayoneted, bludgeoned and starved over one million Armenians.

Talaat had gone unpunished — a fact that Lemkin could not understand. According to Lemkin, one of his professors told him that there was no law under which Talaat could be arrested.

“Is it a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but killing more than a million people for a dictator is not considered to be one?” Lemkin later wrote. “This is a most contradictory thing.”

Appalled, Lemkin soon thereafter switched his degree from philology to law, committing himself to drafting an international law that would commit Poland, as well as other nations, to stopping the targeted destruction of ethnic, national and religious groups.

In an interview with CBS in 1949, Lemkin said: “I became interested in genocide because it has happened so many times; it happened to the Armenians, who were treated very harshly at the Versailles Peace Conference because the criminals guilty of committing their genocide were not punished.

“They [the Armenians] created a terrorist organization that took justice into its own hands. The assassination of Talaat Pasha in Berlin is very instructive. A man [Soghomon Tehlirian], whose mother was killed during the genocide, killed Talaat Pasha. ... As a lawyer, I thought that a crime should not be punished by its victims, but by a court under international law.”

Lemkin submitted a proposal to the 5th International Conference on Criminal Law in Madrid in 1933 to create laws defining crimes of “barbarism” and “vandalism.” However, these early attempts at defining mass atrocity went unheeded by the legal community.

A word becomes law

Throughout the interwar, war and post World War II period, Lemkin received pushback from those in government, the legal community and Holocaust survivors themselves.

Survivors of the Nazi regime often conveyed that attempts to put the Holocaust into words failed to encapsulate its horrors.

“Was it ‘like a red-hot iron in my shoulder’” writes Holocaust survivor Jean Améry. “And was this ‘like a blunt wooden stake driven into the base of my head?’ — a simile would not only stand for something else, and in the end we would be led around by the nose in a hopeless carousel of comparisons.

“Pain was what it was,” Améry continued. “There’s nothing further to say about it. Qualities of feeling are incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limits of language’s ability to communicate.”

Yet Lemkin pushed forward, and his tireless efforts paid off.

Participating in the Nuremberg Trials, Lemkin was instrumental in making sure the term genocide was included within as many indictments as possible. While no defendant was tried for genocide — its legal term was still in its infancy — the legal precedent for holding perpetrators of mass violence accountable soon became synonymous with the term of genocide.

In 1948, the lawyer’s nearly two-decade quest to codify the term genocide with international law came to fruition with the passage of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Article 2 of the Convention states:

According to the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a) Killing members of the group;

b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Presently, 153 nations have ratified the convention and agreed “as a matter of law by the principle that genocide is a crime prohibited under international law.”

‘A problem from hell’

Despite this legal precedent, the world has not escaped genocidal violence since the end of the Second World War, with the United Nations and its signatories repeatedly failing to intervene to stop genocides that are in progress.

Loopholes and shortcomings have increasingly plagued the modern world in dealing with nations and groups perpetrating acts of genocide.

“Accusations of genocide have been refuted on the technicalities that targeted groups not named by the Convention, such as groups defined by political leanings, gender, or sexual orientation…” writes the National World War II Museum.

Proving legal intent has been equally difficult.

As the UN website states, “The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

“Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group,” the website reads. “It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. In addition, case law has associated intent with the existence of a State or organizational plan or policy, even if the definition of genocide in international law does not include that element.”

The convention’s signatories are additionally hamstrung by its inability to persecute genocide.

The International Criminal Court (ICC), established in 1998, operates independently of the UN. At this time, the ICC is the only court that has the authority to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, collectively known as “atrocity crimes.”

However, the court has no police force to make arrests and “cannot retroactively try crimes occurring before its establishment on July 1, 2002, and countries that are not members of the ICC are not subject to its jurisdiction unless they accept it ad hoc or are referred to the ICC by the UN Security Council,” according to the museum.

Since its creation over two decades ago, the court has issued only 60 arrest warrants, tried 32 cases and issued 11 convictions.

Atrocities have and continue to be perpetrated in clear view of the world. The term “never again” writes David Rieff, “might be best defined as ‘Never again would Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.’”

If the term and mechanisms behind “never again” was actually applied, there would be no Cambodia, in which the communist regime known as the Khmer Rouge set in motion a four-year campaign of genocide that would wipe out 2 million people — a quarter of the country’s population.

There would be no Rwanda, in which the Hutus could systematically slaughter 8,000 Tutsi a day for 100 days without any interference.

There would be no Bosnia, in which 100,000 people were killed over the course of three years from 1992 to 1995, including the genocide of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica.

There would be no Darfur, in which the government of Sudan carried out mass atrocities against the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit communities, resulting in the deaths of over 300,000 civilians and the displacement of roughly 2.7 million people.

And finally, while the charge of genocide has not been legally applied to Palestine, a December 2024 report from Amnesty International decried it as such. Since Oct. 7, 2023, more than 55,000 Palestinians have been killed.

In March 2025, the U.S. government conducted a wargame on how to defend military bases in the United States from drone attacks.

Just three months later, what had seemed a theoretical possibility became frighteningly close to reality. In June 2025 came Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb. Ukrainian agents had spent months smuggling hundreds of drones deep inside Russia. In a coordinated strike, more than 100 small drones destroyed 20 to 40 Russian warplanes on five airbases scattered from Moscow to Siberia.

The damage extended to more than Russian airpower or the Kremlin’s pride. The drone’s-eye videos of burning bombers sent a chilling signal to nations around the world. If this could happen to Russia, then it could happen to any country — including the United States.

Allvin calls Ukraine drone strikes a wake-up call for US air defense

Since 2022, the U.S. Army’s Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, or JCO, and the RAND Corp. think tank have held six wargames on how to mitigate the drone threat.

“We are trying to understand the policies and authorities we have in place to prevent us from contending with a scenario like Operation Spiderweb,” said Paul Lushenko, an assistant professor at the U.S. Army War College who helped run the drone wargame.

Many of the details of these wargames are classified, but one key finding is that protecting domestic U.S. bases can’t be just the military’s job.

“The tabletop exercise emphasized the need for a framework to integrate, enable, and synchronize state, local, tribal, and territorial authorities into counter-drone operations at or near military bases,” noted an essay by the game’s designers. But this, in turn, raises a slew of jurisdictional and communication issues.

By itself, Operation Spiderweb would have been an unpleasant reminder that the advent of small, easily transportable drones means that even installations thousands of miles from the battlefield aren’t safe. This is especially true for the U.S., which has been protected for centuries by two oceans and the absence of any significant adversary on its borders. Until recently, military bases had more to fear from terrorists or a crazed gunman crashing the gate, rather than a gaggle of small attack drones executing a miniature airstrike.

But, in fact, there have also been omens for years that drones were becoming a threat to U.S. installations. In 2016, the use of small weaponized drones by the Islamic State in Iraq made some American commanders uneasy. Then, in 2023, came a wave of mysterious drones that overflew Langley Air Force Base, causing no damage but generating much buzz about potentially hostile unmanned aerial vehicles in U.S. airspace. The U.S. government estimates that there were 350 drone incursions over military installations in 2024. While most came from careless or curious drone enthusiasts, the potential for hostile reconnaissance or attack is there.

Initially, the JCO/RAND wargames focused on the technical challenges of counter-drone defense. But the March 2025 exercise tackled a much more complex question: Who exactly has the responsibility — and the authority — for defending bases from drones?

“Let’s say you’ve got a drone flying down the Potomac,” said Christopher Pernin, a RAND researcher who helped run the drone wargames. “Maybe the FAA has signed off that the drone is approved to fly. Well, how can the people at the Pentagon know? They have to interrogate the system and look it up. Well, guess what? You’ve got 67 seconds to figure this out.”

In particular, the March wargame explored the conditions under which U.S. Northern Command — which is already responsible for securing North American airspace — would coordinate counter-drone defense of military bases. The exercise also explored how the joint military services and government agencies can maximize data sharing and situational awareness, as well as how to foster the use of counter-drone technologies such as jamming GPS signals.

Using Fort Bliss, Texas, and Joint Base Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, as the targets, the tabletop game included scenarios where the defender faced attacks by drones launched at various altitudes, bearings and distances. This served as a backdrop to stimulate discussions by over 100 participants from more than 30 federal and state agencies in what Lushenko described as “the largest interagency tabletop exercise in five years.”

The wargame identified three conditions under which NORTHCOM could support anti-drone defense of homeland bases.

“These include drone incursions that overwhelm the organic defensive capabilities of the services; are simultaneously conducted at different military bases, especially those performing essential missions; and, undermine public trust in the military and government,” the RAND essay said.

The exercise also endorsed the idea of NORTHCOM’s “flyaway kits,” which consist of mobile counter-drone systems and trained personnel that can be deployed via commercial aircraft as needed. However, these kits can do more than supplement what ideally would be a multilayered defense at military installations, including jamming, microwave and laser weapons and kinetic weapons such as machine guns.

Interestingly, the wargames suggested that the National Guard could play a crucial role in defending homeland military installations. Especially valuable would be the National Guard’s Civil Support Teams, which are available 24/7, can be deployed with 90 minutes and “have large budgets that can offset the equipping and training costs for counter-drone operations,” the RAND essay noted.

“There are some imaginative things we can do to further optimize our state-based military, through the National Guard, to respond to these drone incursions,” Lushenko added.

The defense of military bases is as much a matter of law as it is a matter of technology. For example, per Section 130i under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the commanders of some bases are authorized to use force against drone intrusions, while others could face prosecution.

Compounding the problem is that with around 500 military installations around the U.S, there are a hodgepodge of different rules of engagement. At some sites, the instructions from commanders are “‘no drones on my installation, you have carte blanche to do whatever you need,’” said Pernin.

“They know exactly what they’re doing and they know what their goals are. I suspect there are a lot of places that don’t have that kind of goal setting. They see a UAV flying on the other side of the installation, and they think, ‘I’m not sure if I should take it out or just let it go.’”

Ultimately, the drone wargames were valuable simply by bringing together people from different agencies.

“We had a lot of crosstalk that I don’t think had happened before,” Pernin recalled. “We had a lot of occasions where people said, ‘I think this is so-and-so’s role.’ But that person was in the room, and they would say, ‘no, it’s not ours.’”

BATON ROUGE, La. — A woman detained at a citizenship appointment in May will not be deported following a judge’s ruling this week barring her removal, but her Marine Corps veteran husband said she remains in custody at immigration detention center in Louisiana.

For two months, Paola Clouatre, 25, has been held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement complex in Monroe, waiting to learn whether she will be allowed to remain in the country. Once a week she is allowed to see her husband, who makes the eight-hour roundtrip trek from Baton Rouge so the mother can breastfeed their 4-month-old baby and see their 2-year-old son.

Clouatre, a Mexican national, entered the U.S. seeking asylum with her mother more than a decade ago. After marrying her husband in 2024 and applying for her green card to legally live and work in the U.S., she learned that ICE had issued an order for her deportation in 2018 after her mother failed to appear at an immigration hearing.

In May, during a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services appointment in New Orleans, a staffer asked about the deportation order. Clouatre explained that she was trying to reopen her case, with her husband telling The Associated Press that he and his wife were trying “to do the right thing.” Soon after, officers arrived and handcuffed Clouatre.

Adrian Clouatre has spent nearly eight weeks fighting for his wife’s release, remaining optimistic that their family would soon be reunited outside the detention facility located nearly 180 miles (290 kilometers) from their south Louisiana home.

ICE detains Marine Corps veteran’s wife at green card meeting

On Wednesday, they got word that a judge in California — the original jurisdiction for Paola Clouatre’s case — had stayed the order for her removal.

Adrian Clouatre welcomed the decision. He said their lawyer is preparing paperwork seeking his wife’s release, though it’s not guaranteed and could take weeks even in the best of scenarios.

“I just keep telling our son, “‘Mom’s coming home soon,’” Adrian Clouatre said.

Meanwhile, the couple’s lawyer is working to get the Baton Rouge mother’s green card process back on track, The New Orleans Advocate/The Times-Picayune reported. While the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has already ruled that the couple has a valid marriage, the process has been held up amid the legal battle.

The Baton Rouge mother is one of tens of thousands of people in custody as part of President Donald Trump’s pledge to remove millions of people who are in the country without legal permission.

Clouatre said GOP U.S. Sen. John Kennedy has also requested that the Department of Homeland Security release his wife from custody. Kennedy’s office did not return AP’s emailed request for comment.

Kennedy is not the first Louisiana Republican to get involved in an immigration case in the reliably red state. Earlier this month, An Iranian mother, who was detained by ICE after living in the U.S. for nearly five decades, was released following advocacy from Republican U.S. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.

NOGALES, Ariz. — Inside an armored vehicle, an Army scout uses a joystick to direct a long-range optical scope toward a man perched atop the U.S.-Mexico border wall cutting across the hills of this Arizona frontier community.

The man lowers himself toward U.S. soil between coils of concertina wire. Shouts ring out, an alert is sounded and a U.S. Border Patrol SUV races toward the wall — warning enough to send the man scrambling back over it, disappearing into Mexico.

The sighting Tuesday was one of only two for the Army infantry unit patrolling this sector of the southern border, where an emergency declaration by President Donald Trump has thrust the military into a central role in deterring migrant crossings between U.S. ports of entry.

“Deterrence is actually boring,” said 24-year-old Army Sgt. Ana Harker-Molina, voicing the tedium felt by some fellow soldiers over the sporadic sightings.

Still, she said she takes pride in the work, knowing that troops discourage crossings by their mere presence.

“Just if we’re sitting here watching the border, it’s helping our country,” said Harker-Molina, an immigrant herself who came from Panama at age 12 and became a U.S. citizen two years ago while serving in the Army.

U.S. troop deployments at the border have tripled to 7,600 and include every branch of the military — even as the number of attempted illegal crossings plummet and Trump has authorized funding for an additional 3,000 Border Patrol agents, offering $10,000 signing and retention bonuses.

The military mission is guided from a new command center at a remote Army intelligence training base alongside southern Arizona’s Huachuca Mountains. There, a community hall has been transformed into a bustling war room of battalion commanders and staff with digital maps pinpointing military camps and movements along the nearly 2,000-mile border.

Until now border enforcement had been the domain of civilian law enforcement, with the military only intermittently stepping in. But in April, large swaths of border were designated militarized zones, empowering U.S. troops to apprehend immigrants and others accused of trespassing on Army, Air Force or Navy bases, and authorizing additional criminal charges that can mean prison time.

Militarized zones now make up 1/3 of southern border, stirring debates

The two-star general leading the mission says troops are being untethered from maintenance and warehouse tasks to work closely with U.S. Border Patrol agents in high-traffic areas for illegal crossings — and to deploy rapidly to remote, unguarded terrain.

“We don’t have a (labor) union, there’s no limit on how many hours we can work in a day, how many shifts we can man,” said Army Maj. Gen. Scott Naumann.

“I can put soldiers out whenever we need to in order to get after the problem and we can put them out for days at a time, we can fly people into incredibly remote areas now that we see the cartels shifting” course.

Patrols aimed at stopping ‘got-aways’

At Nogales, Army scouts patrolled the border in full battle gear — helmet, M5 service rifle, bullet-resistant vest — with the right to use deadly force if attacked under standing military rules integrated into the border mission. Underfoot, smugglers for decades routinely attempted to tunnel into stormwater drains to ferry contraband into the U.S.

Naumann’s command post oversees an armada of 117 armored Stryker vehicles, more than 35 helicopters and a half-dozen long-distance drones that can survey the border day and night with sensors to pinpoint people wandering the desert. Marine Corps engineers are adding concertina wire to slow crossings, as the Trump administration reboots border wall construction.

Naumann said the focus is on stopping “got-aways” who evade authorities to disappear into the U.S. in a race against the clock that can last seconds in urban areas as people vanish into smuggling vehicles, or several days in the dense wetland thickets of the Rio Grande or the vast desert and mountainous wilderness of Arizona.

Meanwhile, the rate of apprehensions at the border has fallen to a 60-year low.

Naumann says the fall-off in illegal entries is the “elephant in the room” as the military increases pressure and resources aimed at starving smuggling cartels — including Latin American gangs recently designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

He says it would be wrong to let up, though, and that crossings may rebound with the end of scorching summer weather.

“We’ve got to keep going after it, we’re having some successes, we are trending positively,” he said of the mission with no fixed end-date.

Militarized zones are ‘a gray area’

The Trump administration is using the military broadly to boost its immigration operations, from guarding federal buildings in Los Angeles against protests over ICE detentions, to assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Florida to plans to hold detained immigrants on military bases in New Jersey, Indiana and Texas.

“It’s all part of the same strategy that is a very muscular, robust, intimidating, aggressive response to this — to show his base that he was serious about a campaign promise to fix immigration,” said Dan Maurer, a law professor at Ohio Northern University and a retired U.S. Army judge advocate officer.

“It’s both norm-breaking and unusual. It puts the military in a very awkward position.”

The militarized zones at the border sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that prohibits the military from conducting civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil.

“It’s in that gray area, it may be a violation — it may not be. The military’s always had the authority to arrest people and detain them on military bases,” said Joshua Kastenberg, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law and a former Air Force judge.

Michael Fisher, a security consultant and former chief of the Border Patrol from 2010-2016, calls the military expansion at the border a “force multiplier” as Border Patrol agents increasingly turn up far from the border.

“The military allows Border Patrol to be able to flex into other areas where they typically would not be able to do so,” he said.

The strategy carries inherent moral challenges and political risks.

In 1997, an 18-year-old U.S. citizen was shot to death while herding goats by a Marine Corps unit on a border anti-drug patrol in the remote Big Bend Region of western Texas. Authorities say Esequiel Hernandez had no connection to the drug trade and was an honor student.

The shooting stoked anger along the border and prompted an end to then-President Bill Clinton’s military deployment to the border.

In New Mexico, the latest restrictions barring access to militarized zones have made popular areas for hunting, hiking and offroad motorsports off-limits for recreation, leading to an outcry from some residents.

Naumann said adults can apply for access online, and by agreeing to undergo a criminal background check that he calls a standard requirement for access to military bases.

“We’re not out to stop Americans from recreating in America. That’s not what this is about,” he said.

Military-grade equipment

At daybreak Wednesday, Border Patrol vehicles climbed the largely unfenced slopes of Mt. Cristo Rey, an iconic peak topped by a crucifix that juts into the sky above the urban outskirts of El Paso and Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez — without another soul in sight.

The peak is at the conflux of two new militarized zones designated as extensions of Army stations at Fort Bliss in Texas and Fort Huachuca in Arizona. The Defense Department has added an additional 250-mile (400-kilometer) zone in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley linked to an Air Force base.

The Navy will oversee the border near Yuma, Arizona, where the Department of Interior on Wednesday ceded a 32-mile (50-kilometer) portion of the border to the military.

At Mt. Cristo Rey, the Homeland Security Department has issued plans to close a 1.3-mile (2-kilometer) gap in the border wall over the objections of a Roman Catholic diocese that owns much of the land and says a wall would obstruct a sacred refuge for religious pilgrimages.

From a nearby mesa top, Army Spc. Luisangel Nito scanned the valley below Mt. Cristo Rey with an infrared scope that highlights body heat, spotting three people as they crossed illegally into the U.S. for the Border Patrol to apprehend. Nito’s unit also has equipment that can ground small drones used by smugglers to plot entry routes.

Nito is the U.S.-born son of Mexican immigrants who entered the country in the 1990s through the same valleys he now patrols.

“They crossed right here,” he said. “They told me to just be careful because back when they crossed they said it was dangerous.”

Nito’s parents returned to Mexico in 2008 amid the financial crisis, but the soldier saw brighter opportunities in the U.S., returned and enlisted. He expressed no reservations about his role in detaining illegal immigrants.

“Obviously it’s a job, right, and then I signed up for it and I’m going to do it,” he said.

At Mt. Cristo Rey and elsewhere, troops utilize marked Border Patrol vehicles as Naumann champions the “integration” of civilian law enforcement and military forces.

“If there’s a kind of a secret sauce, if you will, it’s integrating at every echelon,” Neumann said.

A U.S. Navy warship had a “safe and professional interaction” with Iranian naval forces on Wednesday, disputing claims in an Iranian state media report, according to a U.S. defense official.

“At 10:50 a.m. [Wednesday], USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) had a safe and professional interaction with an Iranian SH-3 ‘Sea King’ helicopter while operating in international waters,” the defense official said in an emailed statement.

Iranian state TV reported Wednesday that an Iranian navy helicopter confronted a U.S. warship attempting to approach Iranian territorial waters in the Gulf of Oman, according to The Associated Press.

Iran hit dome on US air base in Qatar in June attack: Report

The Iranian report said the helicopter flew over the Fitzgerald and warned it to keep its distance. It said the destroyer threatened to target the aircraft if it did not leave the area.

In response, the report said, Iranian air forces communicated that they were backed by Iran’s integrated air defense system and that the Fitzgerald “retreated southward,” according to AP.

“This interaction had no impact to USS Fitzgerald’s mission and any reports claiming otherwise are falsehoods and attempts by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to spread misinformation,” the defense official said. “U.S. Central Command will continue to operate safely and professionally in accordance with internationally recognized norms and customs.”

The event marks the first reported interaction between Iranian and U.S. forces since the 12-day war between Iran and Israel, during which U.S. B-2 Spirit bombers dropped 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities.

The State Department said Wednesday that it has approved $322 million in proposed weapons sales to Ukraine to enhance its air defense capabilities and provide armored combat vehicles, coming as the country works to fend off escalating Russian attacks.

The potential sales, which the department said were notified to Congress, include $150 million for the supply, maintenance, repair and overhaul of U.S. armored vehicles, and $172 million for surface-to-air missile systems.

The approvals come weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed a pause on other weapons shipments to Ukraine to allow the Pentagon to assess its weapons stockpiles, in a move that caught the White House by surprise. President Donald Trump then made an abrupt change in posture, pledging publicly earlier this month to continue to send weapons to Ukraine.

“We have to,” Trump said. “They have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard now. We’re going to send some more weapons — defensive weapons primarily.”

US resumes sending some weapons to Ukraine after Pentagon pause

Trump recently endorsed a plan to have European allies buy U.S. military equipment that can then be transferred to Ukraine. It was not immediately clear how the latest proposed sales related to that arrangement.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. has provided more than $67 billion in weapons and security assistance to Kyiv.

Since Trump came back into office, his administration has gone back and forth about providing more military aid to Ukraine, with political pressure to stop U.S. funding of foreign wars coming from the isolationists inside the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill.

Over the course of the war, the U.S. has routinely pressed for allies to provide air defense systems to Ukraine. But many are reluctant to give up the high-tech systems, particularly countries in Eastern Europe that also feel threatened by Russia.