U.S. troops are deploying to the Middle East by the thousands as the Pentagon weighs the possibility of ground operations in Iran. The movement raises a question: What would those missions actually look like on the ground?

Military analysts point to several possibilities, including coastal assaults, nuclear site raids or operations deeper inside the country.

Any one of these missions could unfold alone or evolve into something more broad. But across each scenario, U.S. forces would enter an environment where Iranian missiles, drones and ground units could begin targeting them as soon as they arrive.

A battle for the waterway

One version of the fight would likely unfold along the water.

U.S. forces could be tasked with seizing islands or coastal positions to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a global shipping route that has been heavily disrupted by the war with Iran.

The mission could be a limited ground incursion, with Marines and airborne units deploying to seize important terrain, said Joe Costa, director of the Forward Defense program at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center.

President Donald Trump has publicly threatened Kharg Island, Iran’s primary oil export hub, which is located off the country’s coast.

In a Truth Social post on Monday, he said the U.S. would finish its “stay” in Iran, by “completely obliterating” Kharg Island.

Costa, a former senior Pentagon official who worked on U.S. war plans, including Iran, acknowledged speculation about Kharg, but also described a scenario in which U.S. forces would try to secure islands such as Abu Musa, Larak and the Tunbs, off Iran’s southern coast.

“This helps us take out Iranian reconnaissance units as we think of ways to reopen Hormuz. If you have the ability to secure some of the ports along the coast as well, you go a long way to supporting naval assets to start to open up the Strait,” Costa said, adding that the operation could rely on Marine units for the initial assault, with airborne forces supporting limited incursions and air assault operations — all under U.S. air superiority.

The USS Tripoli and embarked 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit arrived in the region’s waters last Friday, and the elements of the 82nd Airborne Division are deploying to the Middle East, the Pentagon confirmed last week.

An opening fight would not be in isolation, Costa said, and though there are mixed reports about Iranian military capacity right now, the country still appears to have functional command and control and is capable of attacks.

The first waves of U.S. ground troops would undoubtedly face Iranian fire, Costa warned.

“We have overwhelming force and would likely be successful in securing territory, but at that point every commander will face the daily decision of assuming risk to troops or risk to mission — force protection becomes paramount, especially if we start to see casualties mount up,” he said, adding, “There’s a high risk of that in this operation.”

Targeting nuclear sites

A different type of operation would focus on Iran’s nuclear program instead of territory.

Instead of seizing ground, U.S. forces could be tasked with entering fortified sites and securing material, likely under fire and deep within Iranian territory.

An operation aimed at seizing enriched uranium would likely involve special forces at a nuclear site in Isfahan, a populous city in the center of the country, said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iran’s missiles and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Excavating nuclear material would require a myriad of support, from construction equipment to Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear assets, Grajewski, a professor at Sciences Po, said.

Ground forces would likely have to dig deep underground to access the highly enriched uranium canisters “and then go in there, excavate it, then get out of the country,” she added.

An extraction team would likely be met with force. The area is heavily trafficked, and the nuclear site in Isfahan is located near numerous military and missile facilities, making it exceedingly risky.

Grajewski described the operation as likely “one that the U.S. military has not really done before,” and said experts could only speculate on how it would be accomplished.

“I’m not sure how they’re thinking about doing it,” she said, pondering if “they’re going to fly in there and do this quick extraction under the guise of night?”

Iran’s response

Even targeted operations like seizing an island or extracting nuclear materials carry the risk of evolving into something larger.

Dan Grazier, the director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center, said the challenges U.S. forces may face goes beyond securing land or items. It centers on how Iran chooses to fight once American soldiers are on its ground.

“The Iranians are going to do whatever they can to kill and capture as many Americans as they can,” said Grazier, who is also a Marine Corps veteran, “for the propaganda victory alone.”

Rather than seeking decisive engagement, Iranian forces would likely avoid conventional confrontation and stretch the conflict over time, he said. Instead of defeating U.S. forces, he added, Iran’s objective becomes making the conflict costly and prolonged, forcing leaders in Washington to decide whether the fight is worth continuing.

Any sustained ground operation would also risk widening the battlefield, as Iran could activate proxy groups across the region to further target U.S. forces and partners.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies in early March estimated that the first 100 hours of the war cost billions of dollars, and experts warn that critical air defense interceptors could be depleted faster than the rate of replacement.

The human cost has also risen as the war enters its second month. Thirteen American service members had been killed and over 300 injured as of late March. A survey earlier in March found that a majority of Americans thought the war had gone too far, and a separate poll showed diminished confidence in the president’s handling of it.

“The Iranians don’t stand any chance of defeating the United States on the ground, I don’t think,” Grazier said. “They do stand a chance of defeating the United States politically back home.”

On March 8, 1965, 3,500 Marines of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade — the first combat troops in Vietnam — waded ashore to the coastal city of Da Nang.

Unlike their forefathers, who were met with lethal sprays of machine guns and shells on the shores of the Pacific and Europe during World War II, these Marines were, almost comically, met by the mayor of Da Nang with girls placing wreaths around the Marines’ necks. Four American soldiers met them with a large sign stating: “Welcome, Gallant Marines.”

“Garlanded like ancient heroes, they then marched off to seize Hill 327, which turned out to be occupied only by rock apes — gorillas instead of guerrillas, as the joke went — who did not contest the intrusion of their upright and heavily armed cousins,” writes the Council on Foreign Relations.

While the U.S. had been involved in Vietnam for over a decade, with the U. S. Military Assistance Advisory Group existing in Vietnam as early as 1950, the arrival of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade historically marks the Americanization of the Vietnam War.

Many in the upper echelons of American policymaking welcomed the landings. However, Maxwell Taylor, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam at the time and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed strong reservations. He predicted that it would be difficult to “hold the line” on further force commitments.

His fears would prove accurate.

By the end of 1965, 185,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam. Less than three years later, the city that welcomed the Americans with handshakes and leis had become the host to high-level U.S. and South Vietnamese operations, including the headquarters of I Corps, the military zone encompassing South Vietnam’s northern provinces.

March of Folly

From the moment he was sworn into the presidency on Nov. 22, 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson was hardened to the notion that he was not going to be the first American president to lose a war, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman in her book “The March of Folly”.

“Johnson’s idea was to fight and negotiate simultaneously,” she wrote. “The difficulty was that the limited war aim … was unachievable by limited war. The North had no intention of ever conceding a non-Communist South, and since such a concession could have been forced upon them only by military victory, and since such a victory was unattainable by the United States short of total war and invasion, which it was unwilling to undertake, the American war aim was therefore foreclosed.

“If this was recognized by some, it was not acted upon because no one was prepared to admit American failure. Activists could believe the bombing might succeed; doubters could vaguely hope some solution would turn up.”

As Johnson chose to fight and negotiate simultaneously, Operation Rolling Thunder began in earnest. The soon-to-be frequently interrupted bombing campaign had begun just prior to the sustained American ground campaign. The operation, which began on Feb. 24, 1965, had initially begun as a diplomatic signal to impress the North Vietnamese of America’s determination and serve as a warning that the violence would continue to escalate unless Ho Chi Minh “blinked.”

According to the Air Force Historical Division, Gen. Curtis LeMay argued that “military targets, rather than the enemy’s resolve, should be attacked and that the blows should be rapid and sharp.” When that outcome failed to arise after the first several weeks in March 1965, “the purpose of the campaign began to change.”

Throughout the next decade, more than 2.6 million U.S. servicemen and women eventually rotated through Vietnam. More than 58,000 of them died there, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Now, with President Donald Trump weighing his next steps in the war against Iran and thousands of soldiers from the U.S. Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division arriving in the Middle East, certain parallels have begun to emerge between the opening days of the wars with Vietnam and Iran.

Operation Epic Fury

Since Operation Epic Fury, a joint undertaking by U.S. and Israeli militaries against the Islamic Republic that began on Feb. 28, over 11,000 targets have been struck.

“Targetry never makes up for a lack of strategy,” Gen. Jim Mattis, who served as Trump’s first defense secretary, cautioned in a recent interview. “By that I mean 15,000 targets have been hit. There have been significant military successes. But they are not matched by strategic outcomes”

Now, according to the Washington Post, the Pentagon is putting together plans for weeks of ground operations in Iran as U.S. forces amass in the region.

Citing multiple U.S. officials, the Post report suggested ground operations could involve both conventional infantry and special operations elements, but would not yet rise to the level of a full-scale invasion.

“It’s the job of the Pentagon to make preparations in order to give the commander in chief maximum optionality,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement provided to Military Times. “It does not mean the president has made a decision.”

The Post’s report comes as U.S. military assets continue to flood the region. On Friday, U.S. Marines and sailors assigned to the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group arrived in U.S. Central Command waters.

The Pentagon has also confirmed elements from the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters and a brigade combat team are deploying to the Middle East. Based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the 82nd acts as the Army’s rapid-response force and is often among the first units sent to respond to emerging crises.

The report also comes on the heels of an Iranian missile and drone attack on Friday that injured a dozen U.S. service members at Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia. Two of the 12 injuries are considered to be serious.

Thirteen service members have been killed in action and nearly 300 wounded during Operation Epic Fury, a joint undertaking by U.S. and Israeli militaries against the Islamic Republic that began on Feb. 28.

The majority of the wounded have since returned to duty, according to U.S. Central Command.

Jon Simkins contributed to this report.

Thousands of soldiers from the U.S. Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division have started arriving in the Middle East, two U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday, as President Donald Trump weighs his next steps in the war against Iran.

Reuters first reported on March 18 that Trump’s administration was considering deploying thousands of additional U.S. troops to the Middle East, a move that would expand options to include the deployment of forces ​inside Iranian territory.

The paratroopers, based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, add to the thousands of additional sailors, Marines and Special Operations forces sent to the region. Over the weekend, about 2,500 Marines arrived in the Middle East.

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, did not say specifically where the soldiers were deploying to, but the move was expected.

The additional Army soldiers include elements of the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters, some logistics and other support, and one brigade combat team.

No decision has been made to send troops into Iran, but they will build up capacity for potential future operations in the region, one of the sources said.

Options for Trump

The soldiers could be used for several purposes in the Iran war, including an attempt to seize Kharg Island, the hub for 90% of Iran’s oil exports.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported there had been discussions within the Trump administration about an operation to take the island. Such a move would be highly risky, since Iran can reach the island with missiles and drones.

Reuters has previously reported the administration has discussed using ground forces inside Iran to extract highly enriched uranium, though that option could mean U.S. troops deeper inside Iran for potentially longer periods of time, trying to dig out material that is deep underground.

Pentagon reportedly preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran

The internal Trump administration discussions have also included potentially putting U.S. troops inside Iran to secure safe passage for oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. While that mission would be accomplished primarily through air and naval forces, it could also mean deploying U.S. troops to Iran’s shoreline.

Trump said on Monday the United States was in ​talks with a “more reasonable regime” to end ‌the war in Iran, but repeated his warning to Tehran to open the Strait of Hormuz or risk U.S. attacks on its oil wells ​and power plants.

Any use of U.S. ground troops — even for a limited mission — could pose significant political risks for Trump, given low ⁠American public ​support for the Iran campaign and Trump’s own pre-election promises to avoid entangling the ​U.S. in new Middle East conflicts.

Since operations started on February 28, the U.S. has carried out strikes against more than 11,000 targets. More than 300 U.S. troops have been injured and 13 service members have been killed as part of Operation Epic Fury.

The Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division last month revealed the service’s new “Drone Killer Cartridge,” or DKC, a small-arms ammunition specifically designed to destroy small quadcopter drones.

In the announcement, Brian Hoffman, chief engineer of NSWC Crane’s Man-Portable Weapons, explained that the ammo works much like a shotshell in that it disperses a cluster of projectiles, but it’s designed to be fired from a service rifle or machine gun instead of a shotgun.

“The intent with our ammunition was to simply give operators a better chance of killing drones with cost-effective products that can be used in existing weapons,” Hoffman said in the release. “If you aren’t the world’s best shot or don’t have a lot of experience engaging aerial targets, your odds go up immediately with DKC.”

The cartridge’s design, coupled with the range and velocity of typical centerfire rifle ammo, increases the probability of “hit and kill” against drones, Hoffman said.

In a recent demonstration at Indiana’s Camp Atterbury, DKC achieved a 92% success rate.

Hoffman explained that the DKC product line is “already mature” and applicable for not just killing drones but also “home defense, personal protection and hunting.”

And if it sounds like he’s pitching the product line, that’s because he is. The other part of NSWC Crane’s announcement is that it’s looking for partners to manufacture DKC ammo.

The tech link

Hoffman explained that the Navy typically relies on the Army for small-caliber ammunition under the Single Manager for Conventional Ammunition directive. However, it procures ammo through government contracts with industry partners if not supported by the SMCA.

For that reason, NSWC Crane’s announcement was also featured on TechLink, a Defense Department-funded organization run by Montana State University that helps businesses license technology from federal laboratories.

Using the website, manufacturers can license and commercialize products, like DKC ammo, which have been fully developed and patented by the federal government. The intent behind the project is to help veterans, the military and small businesses.

As small drones are now seen as a common weapon on the battlefield, military and other agency leaders project needing millions of DKC rounds, Hoffman said.

“Ongoing conflicts abroad and operational requirements along the U.S. southern border highlight the immediate utility of DKC and its enhanced yet cost-effective capabilities,” he said in the release.

Exactly who is going to manufacture the ammo has not yet been announced. However, Hoffman added that NSWC Crane recently hosted a DKC-licensing event attended by several U.S. ammo makers, and they received even more interest because of the announcement.

Still, Hoffman said DKC ammo production will evolve in the not-too-distant future.

“Given projected requirements, meeting total DKC quantities will likely involve a combination of (Government‑Owned, Contractor‑Operated) production and licensed industry partners operating in parallel,” he said.

An Oregon senator has placed a hold on unanimous consent promotions for three military officers, citing behavior — including war zone misconduct allegations and a podcast with extremist language and viewpoints — that he says make the officers “unfit” for higher roles.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., placed a hold Wednesday on the promotions of Marine Lt. Col. Vincent Noble, Col. Thomas Siverts and Navy Lt. Cmdr. Thomas MacNeil, saying his objections to a process that would quickly approve the promotions as a bloc was based on “misconduct or concerning judgement.”

In responses provided to Military Times, Wyden’s office made clear that the holds were a direct response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s reported decision to pull two Black and two female military officers from a list of troops up for promotion to general or flag officer.

“Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have launched an unprecedented politicization of the military promotion process, most recently, reportedly blocking promotions for Black and female officers,” Wyden said. “I asked my staff to vet potential promotions, to ensure the Senate is doing its job to ensure the officers leading our armed forces continue to meet the services’ high standards.”

In the case of Noble and MacNeil, Wyden cited their proximity to highly publicized war crimes cases dating as far back as 2007.

Noble, then a captain, had been the leader of a Marine Corps special operations platoon deployed to Afghanistan in 2007 when the unit became involved in an ambush that left up to 19 Afghans dead and dozens more wounded.

The Marines were accused of war crimes, and Noble and another officer, Maj. Fred Galvin, were sent to a rare court of inquiry military proceeding back in the states. But ultimately, the government opted not to charge the men after a three-star overseeing the case determined they “acted appropriately.”

Military Times investigated the incident in 2015, finding through the examination of newly declassified documents that the Marines were unjustly held to account for what was a combat engagement.

Wyden described it differently in his statement Wednesday in the congressional record.

“Military investigations found that Lieutenant Colonel Noble’s platoon fired indiscriminately on civilians in Afghanistan in 2007, and he was disciplined for filing a false report and asking Marines under his command to lie about the attack, according to military records,” the senator said, though he linked to a New York Times report from the time that quoted a source saying neither Galvin nor Noble fired a weapon in the engagement.

Wyden’s office did not provide additional information or context when asked about the statements regarding Noble.

MacNeil’s war zone case, which dates to 2017, is linked to that of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was accused by his own unit of war crimes in Iraq, including stabbing a 17-year-old ISIS-linked prisoner to death. Gallagher was acquitted on charges linked to the death but found guilty of posing for photos with the prisoner’s corpse.

President Donald Trump intervened in 2019 to keep Gallagher from being stripped of his SEAL trident in the matter. MacNeil, then a lieutenant, testified against Gallagher in his trial but can be seen in a unit photo with him and nine other SEALs posing behind the corpse.

After Trump’s intervention with Gallagher, the Navy gave up efforts to strip MacNeil and two other SEALs of their tridents, and the matter was dealt with through internal “administrative measures,” acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly said at the time.

“While MacNeil was the junior member of his platoon and eventually testified against Gallagher, he exercised poor judgement as an officer and should not be promoted within the United States military,” Wyden said in arguing against his promotion.

The case of Siverts is different. Wyden highlighted appearances on a podcast, The Berm Pit, co-hosted by the colonel’s brother, Scott Siverts. The Anti-Defamation League, a global anti-hate organization, describes the podcast as far-right and antisemitic, and its social media feeds reveal re-posts of antisemitic memes and other offensive content.

The left-wing news outlet RawStory, which regularly covers extremism, previously reported that Siverts, who has served most recently with the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, had been reported to the Defense Department Inspector General for appearing on an episode of The Berm Pit in which one of the co-hosts joked about wanting to put “six bullets” into Hegseth’s head.

The IG opted not to open an investigation into the matter, and it’s not clear whether any administrative action was taken.

Wyden’s statement highlights a March 2023 appearance by Siverts on the podcast, since removed from the internet.

“Siverts’s participation in a podcast whose hosts espouse such bigotry raises serious questions about his character and professionalism, which are both relevant to his promotion to Brigadier General,” Wyden wrote. “To date, the Marine Corps has not provided me with a copy of this podcast episode to verify the nature of his participation in this podcast, nor has Siverts publicly apologized or expressed regret for his association with this podcast.”

A co-host of The Berm Pit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wyden told Military Times that he didn’t know how the nominations for Noble, MacNeil and Siverts made it out of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“The military should not promote officers who violate military codes, were involved in war crimes, or fail to live up to the U.S. armed forces standards. Our country is stronger and more secure when military leaders are promoted based on their qualifications and records, and held accountable when they fall short of those standards,” he said. " … I won’t shortcut the Senate process to help unfit personnel lead our servicemembers and degrade the fitness of our armed forces."

The Pentagon is putting together plans for weeks of ground operations in Iran as U.S. forces amass in the region, the Washington Post reported.

Citing multiple U.S. officials, the Post report suggested ground operations could involve both conventional infantry and special operations elements, but would not yet rise to the level of a full-scale invasion.

Decisions on whether or not to green light operations, which would put U.S. troops at substantially more risk to Iranian threats, now rest with President Donald Trump.

“It’s the job of the Pentagon to make preparations in order to give the commander in chief maximum optionality,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement provided to Military Times. “It does not mean the president has made a decision.”

The Post’s report comes as U.S. military assets continue to flood the region. On Friday, U.S. Marines and sailors assigned to the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group arrived in U.S. Central Command waters.

The group, which is led by the America-class amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli and includes the embarked 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, departed earlier this month from its homeport of Sasebo, Japan.

The Pentagon has also confirmed elements from the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters and a brigade combat team are slated to deploy to the Middle East. Based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the 82nd acts as the Army’s rapid-response force and is often among the first units sent to respond to emerging crises.

The report also comes on the heels of an Iranian missile and drone attack on Friday that injured a dozen U.S. service members at Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia. Two of the 12 injuries are considered to be serious.

The strike also reportedly damaged multiple U.S. aircraft, including an E-3 Sentry AWACS and multiple KC-135 tankers.

Thirteen service members have been killed in action and nearly 300 wounded during Operation Epic Fury, a joint undertaking by U.S. and Israeli militaries against the Islamic Republic that began on Feb. 28.

The majority of the wounded have since returned to duty, according to U.S. Central Command.

Prior to Friday’s attack, 10 U.S. troops remained in serious condition.

U.S. Marines and sailors assigned to the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group arrived in U.S. Central Command waters on Friday, the command announced.

The group, led by the America-class amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli, departed earlier this month from its homeport of Sasebo, Japan. Also included in the arriving force is the embarked 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit.

The Tripoli group began steaming toward the Middle East after U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly approved a CENTCOM request for additional support to help curtail Iran’s regional attacks.

Announcement of the group’s arrival comes one day after a dozen U.S. service members were wounded in an Iranian missile and drone strike on Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia, the Wall Street Journal first reported. Two of the 12 personnel are in serious condition.

That strike, which reportedly damaged multiple U.S. refueling aircraft, comes as the U.S. military continues to pour assets into the region.

The Pentagon on Wednesday confirmed elements from the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters and a brigade combat team are slated to deploy to the Middle East. Based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the 82nd acts as the Army’s rapid-response force and is often among the first units sent to respond to emerging crises.

The 31st MEU, meanwhile, includes a ground combat element, which features a battalion landing team — an infantry battalion and combat support elements — of around 1,100 Marines and sailors.

Also included is the MEU’s aviation combat element, which features tiltrotor and fixed-wing aircraft, transport and attack helicopters, ground support assets and air defense teams.

A combat logistics battalion with equipment and personnel capable of sustaining a MEU in austere environments for up to 15 days will also join the effort.

The 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, part of the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group, has also been rumored to serve as a potential reinforcement. The group deployed in recent weeks and is currently operating in the U.S. 3rd Fleet area of operations in the eastern Pacific.

The U.S. military on Saturday also announced that the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, which had been deployed in U.S.-Israeli operations against Iran, pulled into port in Split, Croatia, for maintenance.

Thirteen service members have been killed in action and nearly 300 wounded during Operation Epic Fury, a joint undertaking by U.S. and Israeli militaries against the Islamic Republic that began on Feb. 28.

The majority of the wounded have since returned to duty, according to U.S. Central Command. Prior to Friday’s attack, 10 U.S. troops reportedly remained in serious condition.

Military Times reporters Riley Ceder and Eve Sampson contributed to this report.

The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, which had been deployed in U.S.-Israeli operations against Iran, anchored in Croatia’s Adriatic port of Split on Saturday for repairs and maintenance.

The Ford, America’s newest and the world’s largest carrier, was operating in the Red Sea in support of Operation Epic Fury when a non-combat fire broke out in its main laundry room on March 12, injuring three sailors.

Nearly 200 sailors were also treated for smoke-related issues, a U.S. official said at the time. The fire took hours to bring under control and had an impact on roughly 100 sleeping berths.

The warship has been deployed for nine ​months and also took part in operations against Venezuela in the Caribbean ⁠prior to arriving in the Middle East.

It has been plagued by plumbing problems during its deployment, affecting the nearly 650 toilets.

The Ford had temporarily stopped at Souda Bay on the Greek island ​of Crete. The government of Croatia, which is a NATO-ally of the U.S., approved its arrival earlier this week.

“During its visit, the USS Gerald R. Ford will host local officials and key leaders to reaffirm the strong and enduring alliance between the United States and Croatia,” the U.S. embassy to Croatia said in a statement.

The carrier, staffed by more than 5,000 sailors, has more than 75 military aircraft aboard, including fighter aircraft like the F-18 Super Hornet, and boasts a sophisticated radar system for ⁠air ​traffic control and navigation.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story.

A dozen U.S. service members were wounded Friday in an Iranian missile strike on Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia, the Wall Street Journal first reported.

Two of the 12 personnel, all of whom were reportedly inside an installation building at the time of the attack, are in serious condition.

Attempts to contact U.S. Central Command had not been returned as of publication.

Friday’s strike, which reportedly damaged multiple U.S. refueling aircraft and involved Iranian drones as well, comes as the U.S. military continues to pour assets into the region.

The Pentagon on Wednesday confirmed elements from the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters and a brigade combat team are slated to deploy to the Middle East.

The 82nd, based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, acts as the Army’s rapid-response force and is often among the first units sent to respond to emerging crises.

U.S. Marines and sailors with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, which includes up to 5,000 personnel and several warships, are also reportedly heading toward the Middle East after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved a request from CENTCOM to help curtail Iran’s regional attacks.

The 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, part of the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group, has also been rumored to serve as a potential reinforcement. The group deployed in recent weeks and is currently operating in the U.S. 3rd Fleet area of operations in the eastern Pacific.

Marines and sailors with the 11th MEU carried out a large-scale amphibious assault exercise on March 2 aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California, prior to steaming toward open water.

Thirteen service members have been killed in action and nearly 300 wounded during Operation Epic Fury, a joint undertaking by U.S. and Israeli militaries against the Islamic Republic that began on Feb. 28.

The majority of the wounded have since returned to duty, according to U.S. Central Command.

Prior to Friday’s attack, 10 U.S. troops remained in serious condition.

Military Times reporters Eve Sampson and Riley Ceder contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service, and The Border Chronicle, which produces independent, investigative journalism on the U.S.-Mexico border.

On a warm, winter Sunday, the Playas de Tijuana in Mexico is filled with families picnicking.

The beach here presses right up against the border wall with the United States. Music blares, teenagers film TikTok videos next to the 30-foot high fence, which is covered in painted murals on the Mexican side—butterflies, faces, human hands reaching out.

Looking through the slotted wall to the American side, the beach is barren. On the other side of the wall is barbed concertina wire, and then another tall fence, also ringed with wire.

It’s a scene from a war zone, minus the war.

In between the two walls, white Jeep pickup trucks with U.S. Marines in full camouflage and battle helmets circle occasionally, watching the beachgoers; as the sun sets, a single Marine slowly walks toward the ocean and back, holding an M-38. But for the most part, the no-man’s-land between the walls is empty.

Days earlier, armed Border Patrol agents in military fatigues unleashed tear gas canisters on protesters in Minneapolis, 2,000 miles northeast from here. Both the Minnesota National Guard and active-duty troops were ordered to prepare to deploy to the city in America’s heartland.

“We all have been expecting this to happen,” said Jacqueline Cordero, who helps organize humanitarian supply drops in the mountains and desert east of San Diego. “Basically the border spreading to the rest of the country.”

It’s been a year since President Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border, but amid far-flung domestic deployments, dozens of deadly Caribbean boat strikes and now a war in Iran, the U.S.-Mexico border has in many ways become a forgotten emergency — a military buildup that persists, as others have before it, long after public attention has turned elsewhere.

Trump campaigned on the southern border, painting a picture of a region overrun with violent criminals. On Inauguration Day in January 2025, he declared the magnitude of the crisis required a military response. The resulting deployment — more than 20,000 troops in the past year from the most expensive fighting machine on the planet — has no end in sight.

“Our job, our role here on the border, is to gain full operational control,” said Lt. Col. Max Ferguson, who directed Joint Task Force Southern Border’s operations through September of last year. “Detect, respond, interdict, and ensure that nobody is doing illegal crossings from south to north into the United States.”

So have they?

“Today, the number of illegals crossing into our country is zero,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in December, holding up his hand to make a “0” during a speech laying out the national defense strategy.

His math was off by thousands.

This February, the government recorded 9,621 encounters with people illegally crossing the southern border — an average of more than 300 a day. That’s still a 90% decline since President Biden’s last full month in office. But it’s about the same as it was in February 2025, the first full month after Trump’s inauguration — and has not changed dramatically in the months before or after the military deployment reached full capacity over the summer.

Click here if you can’t see the graphic above.

While most of the country has moved on, the unprecedented military response to Trump’s “national emergency at the southern border” has quietly continued in tandem with the Department of Homeland Security. The War Horse and The Border Chronicle teamed up to examine how Trump’s pledge to secure the border has turbocharged the militarization of the 1,954-mile frontier. In the last 14 months, the administration has:

• transformed more than 40% of the border from public land into no-trespassing military zones, with new additions as recently as February;
• expanded an invisible surveillance network that monitors the wilderness and border communities, and ramped up the Department of Defense’s sharing of military-grade equipment and technology with U.S. Customs and Border Protection;
• begun installing the first stretch of hundreds of miles of sensor-enabled orange buoys, each nearly five feet in diameter, to create a barrier dividing Texas’ Rio Grande;
• quadrupled the number of troops while freeing up federal border agents to shift their focus to America’s cities as the battle over what Trump has called the “invasion” moved to Los Angeles, then D.C., then Chicago, and Minneapolis.

Trump sent the military to the border to seal it, promising a show of force. But as deadly encounters over immigration enforcement ramped up in U.S. cities, many residents along the border said the military’s presence has been more “show” than “force.”

The rollout: ‘What is this, the Middle East?’

Jerry Pacheco remembers a year ago when the military first stood up Joint Task Force Southern Border to oversee President Trump’s military border buildup.

“I recruit companies from all over the world,” said Pacheco, who heads the Border Industrial Association, an advocate for manufacturers on the New Mexico-Mexico border. “I had a Polish EV battery company come down, and they’re looking at setting up over here. And they saw the Strykers, two military personnel attached to the Stryker, and they said, ‘Man, look at that. What is this, the Middle East?’”

Actually, it was just outside neighboring El Paso, Texas. The 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, had arrived from Fort Carson, Colorado, to help patrol the Border Patrol’s central sectors along the southern border, from Big Bend, Texas, to Tucson, Arizona.

The backbone of a Stryker Brigade Combat Team is the Stryker itself, an eight-wheeled armored vehicle, built to withstand mines and IED attacks as it carries infantry squads in combat at speeds up to 60 miles per hour. Now there was a Stryker parked on a landfill overlooking the Sunland Park Elementary School.

The military buildup at the border was swift. Two days after Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, the Pentagon ordered 1,500 troops to deploy. That same day, it announced it would use military planes for deportation flights and quickly began ramping up airborne intelligence-gathering along the border.

Military police battalions from New York, Kentucky and Washington and engineering units from Georgia and Kansas boarded cargo planes to fly to the border. By the end of the week, Marines — some of whom had been helping to fight wildfires in California — were installing the concertina wire along the double fence between Tijuana and San Diego. About a month later, another 3,500 troops were activated.

Click here if you can’t see the graphic above.

Military planners scrambled for places to house the incoming soldiers. Troops have stayed at hotels in small towns and crammed into run-down barracks at military outposts, like the Doña Ana Range Complex, where an Inspector General report detailed raw sewage leaking from the plumbing, and Fort Bliss, where inspectors found as little as 45 square feet of living space per soldier.

To officially stand up Joint Task Force Southern Border, the Defense Department called on soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division — a rapidly deployable infantry unit from Fort Drum, New York, trained in mountain and cold-weather warfare. By the summer, more than 10,000 troops were deployed to the border. About 9,000 remain there today, according to Joint Task Force Southern Border, despite the escalating number of conflicts and operations in the Middle East, South America and Africa.

Many Trump supporters point to the dwindling number of illegal border crossings as a sign of the mission’s success.

“If you got a cop sitting on the corner in a police car, nobody’s going to rob the bank,” says Frank Antenori, a county supervisor in Cochise County, Arizona, and former Army Green Beret.

But others like Pacheco worry the growing military presence sends a signal to investors that the area isn’t safe — even though migrant crossings have plummeted to near all-time lows.

“It’s pure political show for people that are not from the border,” said Pacheco, who failed to land the Polish EV battery company, though because of tariffs, not the military.

The Stryker near the elementary school outside El Paso remained parked there for months. Ferguson said that visible troop presence has been an important deterrent to migrant crossings, that someone seeing a military vehicle and choosing not to cross is a victory.

Between October 2024 and September 2025, immigration officials recorded about 92,000 turnbacks — instances in which someone enters the U.S. but then immediately turns around — at the southern border. That’s around 9,000 fewer than the previous year.

People in communities along the border say they are seeing far fewer migrants than they did before Trump took office. But they also say they’re not seeing many soldiers. The border is nearly 2,000 miles long.

“There might be people in fatigues eating at Burgers and Beer in El Centro,” California, said Kelly Overton, who runs Border Kindness, a humanitarian aid organization. “But does it feel like, ‘Hey, the military has come here and taken over’? No.”

The military has emphasized that its southern border mission is in support of Customs and Border Protection and says troops conducted nearly 3,000 joint patrols with CBP over the past year.

But as the military sent reinforcement troops south to the border, Border Patrol agents — led by Greg Bovino, the hard-line chief at the time of CBP’s El Centro sector, east of San Diego — headed north, away from the border.

“We’re taking this show on the road,” Bovino said in September, “to a city near you.”

National Defense Areas: ‘Declared a restricted area’

Of all the places one might expect to see the military, it’s in the town of Columbus, New Mexico, just north of the border.

Last April, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced it was turning over more than 100,000 acres of land in New Mexico along the Mexican border to the Department of Defense to create a “National Defense Area” — essentially an annex of a military base.

There, troops would be authorized to arrest migrants, or anybody else who happened to stumble into the area, bypassing the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military from directly participating in civilian law enforcement.

Now Columbus is abutted by a confusing patchwork of new military-controlled land. But town leaders say they never heard from the Defense Department about what the nearby National Defense Area meant.

“Nobody’s really said anything,” says Norma Gomez, a co-chair of the chamber of commerce in Columbus.

Residents haven’t seen many troops. The only tank in town is a replica from the Mexican Revolution at Pancho Villa State Park.

“We’ve not really seen any evidence of anything out here,” says Phillip Skinner, the town’s mayor.

Occasional red-and-white signs near town are the only indication of a military takeover.

“WARNING,” they say in English and Spanish. “This Department of Defense property has been declared a restricted area. ... Photographing or making notes, drawings, maps, or making graphic representations of the area or its activities are prohibited.”

The New Mexico National Defense Area was just the beginning.

Click here if you can’t see the map above.

Over the last year, the Pentagon has established six separate National Defense Areas in all four border states, turning more than 800 miles of previously public land — about 42% of the U.S.-Mexico border — into military zones. Some are controlled by bases hundreds of miles away.

While the New Mexico National Defense Area stretches inland more than 3 miles in places, most of the other zones are just 60 feet wide, enough to ensure a migrant crosses directly onto military land, which carries additional criminal charges and permits soldiers to make those arrests.

But the U.S. government can already file misdemeanor charges for illegally crossing the border, says David Lindenmuth, a former federal prosecutor in South Texas, and it becomes a felony after multiple crossings.

“So why in the world are you going to do all this other mess just to get two other ways to prosecute the same person for misdemeanors?” The tactic, he says, is like “using a cannon to shoot at a mosquito.”

By the end of February, the Justice Department had lodged charges related to trespassing on military property in close to 5,000 cases. But as of mid-March, the Defense Department said that military troops have arrested only 68 people in National Defense Areas, meaning the vast majority of migrant arrests in the militarized zones have been by Border Patrol agents. Customs and Border Protection said it did not track arrests in National Defense Areas and could not comment on what happened on military property.

Attempts to prosecute people on the additional charges around trespassing on military land have struggled in courts, with judges in New Mexico and Texas throwing the charges out.

“The people being prosecuted there have no idea in most cases that this is going to be essentially a military installation,” says César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State.

The red-and-white signs that troops and military contractors have been installing near the defense areas are small, spaced far apart and sometimes only face Mexico. Otherwise, there’s little to stop someone from accidentally wandering onto a military base. And their locations haven’t always been exact: In November, the Mexican government announced it had removed six signs from a Mexican beach near the mouth of the Rio Grande that declared the land restricted U.S. military property.

While the boundaries of most military installations on U.S. soil are available on government maps, that’s not the case with National Defense Areas.

Reporters at The War Horse and Border Chronicle spent weeks being shuffled from agency to agency and from the military’s Joint Task Force Southern Border to individual branches in search of maps that no one supplied. To create maps of the National Defense Areas, we pieced together bureaucratic land-survey transfer notices in the Federal Register and information from the International Boundary and Water Commission.

James Holeman and Abbey Carpenter, who run Battalion Search and Rescue, a group that searches for lost migrants in the desert, say they’ve seen the signs as they work in New Mexico. They don’t always match the boundaries they’ve mapped out for themselves.

“We’ve had these arguments with Border Patrol where they are like, ‘This is the NDA [National Defense Area],’” Carpenter says. “And we’re like, ‘No, it’s not the NDA.’”

Other groups, like hunters and hikers, have also raised concerns. The starting point of the 2,600-mile-long Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches from the Mexican border to the Canadian border, now falls within a National Defense Area. For decades, hikers began the trek north by touching the border wall. The Pacific Crest Trail Association recently informed hikers that they could access the official southern starting point, a small gray stone monument. But under no circumstances could they touch the wall, just feet away and now ringed with concertina wire.

The military bases administering the defense areas say that hunters and campers can apply for permits to access the land. But Sherman Neal II, who helps run the Sierra Club’s military outdoors program, which works to bring veterans into the wilderness, says that’s not the point. The point of the great outdoors, he says, is to get away from it all.

“If I’m choosing to go recreate somewhere,” he says, “you know what, I probably don’t need to be in the vicinity of CBP, the Army, DHS.”

Blurring missions: From G-BOSS to drones

During the first Trump administration, the Defense Department funded most of the 458 miles of new wall and barriers that sprang up along the southern border. This time things are different.

Who needs the military when federal law enforcement agencies have military-grade equipment, military-style weapons, military-assisted surveillance capabilities, billions of dollars of funding and none of the prohibitions on policing civilians?

Despite the fanfare about the troops at the border, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill allotted the military a measly $1 billion for immigration, border operations and counternarcotics — less than 1% of the Pentagon’s budget.

Compare that with $46.5 billion that the Big Beautiful Bill gave Customs and Border Protection to build up to 700 miles of wall, 900 miles of river barriers and 600-plus miles of secondary barriers.

Click here if you can’t see the graphic above.

Still, troops deployed to the border have brought with them expertise in surveillance and unmanned aircraft systems hard-won on battlefields, supercharging a growing surveillance network that has long worried civil liberties experts.

On a recent January weekend outside of San Diego, past where the suburbs become empty hills, a pair of young Marines sat inside a white pickup truck.

Next to the truck was a high-tech camera system, equipped with infrared and radar, called a G-BOSS — short for ground-based operational surveillance system. It was originally designed to detect IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now it watches the desert for migrants.

One of the Marines said it was his fifth straight day of eight-hour shifts monitoring a screen in the pickup truck in the blazing desert sun. “It gets pretty boring sometimes,” he said.

This is the reality of much of the military’s mission here: keeping an eye on systems that keep an eye on the border.

For years, Customs and Border Protection has been developing a vast network of cameras and sensors throughout the borderlands that alert agents to potential migrant movement. Fiber optic cables attuned to the softest footfall snake through the desert in regions where migrants are known to cross. Cameras are hidden in construction cones and abandoned tires. Automatic surveillance towers use AI to detect human forms.

Some of this technology has ended up in interior cities this year, like the mobile facial recognition apps that immigration agents have used on protesters in Minneapolis. But in towns closer to the southern border, this sort of surveillance has long been common.

In Columbus, New Mexico, where no military presence marks the new military zone, surveillance towers ring the town of barely 1,500 residents. At the town’s entrance, there’s a small white trailer that contains a license plate reader tracking anyone who enters.

“When we think of the border, we tend to think of it as a line or a very thin stretch of land, and it’s not,” says Marianna Poyares, a researcher at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. “One element that folks don’t consider is that a lot of this apparatus is actually installed in neighborhoods, in actual American cities near the border.”

The Defense Department is increasingly working with DHS to integrate intelligence from this growing network of sensor and surveillance systems, adding its own assets that troops have brought to the border, like the G-BOSS and other high-tech imaging and radar systems. Military pilots are also now flying reconnaissance missions along the border.

U.S. Northern Command, which oversees Joint Task Force Southern Border, has capabilities and authorities as a combatant command that allow it to fuse military intelligence with law enforcement data, beyond what Border Patrol or the military branches alone could do, through its use of Palantir’s Maven system, the same AI-fueled intelligence platform reportedly used in military operations in Iran and Venezuela.

The military and border patrol are also collaborating on drone surveillance and countering drones.

Lt. Col. Ferguson says that cartels have increasingly been using drones to smuggle drugs and scout out law enforcement — though there is a debate among experts over how frequently.

An Army aviation officer, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said that he has seen small drones operating on the Mexican side of the border.

“Probably the majority of it we see are cartel scouts,” he said. “They’re using a lot of small UAS [unmanned aerial systems] to kind of probe areas and see where it’s clear.”

The military is authorized to intercept or shoot down drones over certain military facilities — but whether that includes smaller, temporary structures, like ones troops have constructed along the border this year as they patrol, is unclear. This year’s defense authorization bill ordered a review of how military departments are interpreting the law.

The need is clear. In just over a two-week span in February, the military used a laser to shoot down what turned out to be a Border Patrol drone, and the FAA shut down the airspace around El Paso with no notice after the government reported Customs and Border Protection officers operating an Army laser counter-drone system had taken out a cartel drone.

“The threat has been neutralized,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X.

But another explanation quickly emerged from multiple news reports: The incursion was a party balloon.

Buoys: A giant divider down the Rio Grande

Since October, small Coast Guard boats have been patrolling for migrants along 260 miles of the Rio Grande in Texas, from Brownsville to Mission: a stretch of river that has already been declared part of a National Defense Area.

They call it Operation River Wall — and it’s only part of the U.S. border’s growing floating blockade.

This January, DHS began installing 17 miles of enormous buoys in the Rio Grande, 15-foot-long orange cylinders, designed to spin backward if anyone tries to climb on them, at a cost of more than $5 million per mile. While they look like a massive swim-lane divider slung down the middle of the river, the buoys hide acoustic and vibration sensors to alert nearby Border Patrol to unusual movements. The agency has contracts for 130 miles of buoys, with plans to eventually extend the barrier to more than 500 miles.

In recent weeks, it’s been dividing folks in South Texas.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott pointed to the border to whip up a gathering at the Smoke BBQ in Harlingen during a get-out-the-vote rally a day before the Texas primary this month.

“There are Democrats who support open border policies, and they must not be allowed to hold office in Texas,” said Abbott, who paved the way for the federal military buildup by launching Operation Lone Star in 2021, spending billions in state money to deploy the National Guard, state police, and build border walls.

But protesters just a week earlier rallied against the buoys in Brownsville at a park next to the Rio Grande. A century ago, a ferry here would make trips across the river to Mexico. But today, the gathered crowd can’t even access the water because of an 18-foot-tall black fence, erected more than 15 years ago.

“Whether you agree or not with open border policy, whether you think that there should be a reinforcement of the border, the way that this is being done has been a tremendous waste of time and money,” says Aaron Millan, owner of Brownsville Kayaks, who called the buoys an “ecological disaster.”

The buoy project has a military precedent: In 2023, as part of Operation Lone Star, the Texas National Guard began installing buoys in a shallow section of the Rio Grande, near the small town of Eagle Pass.

Those were 4-foot-tall orange balls anchored to the riverbed with steel cables, connected by weighted mesh underwater, to prevent people from swimming beneath them. Serrated metal plates between the buoys deterred would-be crossers from climbing over.

“It looks like a medieval torture device, truthfully,” says Bekah Hinojosa, an artist and environmental activist in Brownsville. “We call them murder buoys.”

Not long after National Guard troops installed them, authorities found a body stuck to one of the buoys on the side facing Mexico.

After the November 2024 election, Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, visited Eagle Pass, where the original buoys were installed.

“This,” he said, “is a model we can take across the country.”

A year later: How ‘sealed’ is the border?

Just inside the National Defense Area in California, across from where the bustle of Tijuana turns to dry mountains, the towering border wall gives way to a small barbed wire fence, the kind that sometimes keeps cattle fields separated. If you follow the fence into the mountains, you can see places where it’s been trampled down, with no troops or Border Patrol in sight.

It would be easy to step into the military zone and cross into Mexico. Or cross from Mexico into the United States.

Migrant crossings have plummeted since Trump declared the emergency at the border. Still, everyone here — from military commanders to human rights activists — knows the border is still not sealed.

Border officials have apprehended as many as 12,000 unauthorized crossers in a month since Trump returned to office. Most are quickly sent back. Another statistic is harder to interpret: Between October 2024 and October 2025, Customs and Border Protection reported more than 70,000 “gotaways,” or cases where they know people have successfully crossed the border without encountering Border Patrol or military troops.

Click here if you can’t see the graphic above.

While that’s a dramatic drop from previous years, CBP doesn’t publicize the number of “gotaways” by month, so it’s unclear how the military’s deployment has impacted the trend.

The rhetoric often doesn’t square with the reality either. In December, less than a week after Hegseth gave the keynote at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, declaring “zero” illegal crossings, the Department of the Interior transferred a 125-mile stretch of land along the California-Mexico border to the U.S. Navy. It was still at risk from the dangers of an open border, the department said.

“This corridor is one of the highest traffic regions for unlawful crossings along the southern border, creating significant national security challenges,” said the news release.

A week later, Trump awarded a group of soldiers and Marines visiting the White House the new Mexican Border Defense Medal, presented to troops who have supported CBP on the border for 30 days.

“They made me look really good,” Trump said from the Oval Office, flanked by military leaders. “We went from having millions of people pouring over our border to having none, in the last eight months. None.”

Thousands of miles away from the border, Bovino — whose former CBP sector lies in the new California defense area — and the Border Patrol were about to make headlines in Minneapolis. Federal agents’ killings of U.S. citizens Renee Goode and Alex Pretti would lead to a reckoning.

Back in Arizona, Frank Antenori, the Cochise County supervisor and former Green Beret, says there’s a price that’s worth paying for security. Like the Chinook helicopters that he hears flying troops back and forth to their outposts on the eastern side of the state.

“I served 21 years in the Army, so I love helicopters,” he says. “It’s a little bit of noise, kind of noisy, and [people] are crying about them flying at like 11, 12 o’clock at night, or 2 in the morning. But, you know, that’s the military. That’s what they do. The border now is technically a military installation. You know, they can do whatever the hell they want basically.”

James Cordero isn’t buying it. He and his wife, Jacqueline, have been leading hikes for years to drop food, water and supplies in the mountains east of San Diego. In mid-January, as the group hiked near the new National Defense Area, they saw a trampled cattle fence separating the U.S. and Mexico.

“They bring in the military. They say the border’s closed 100%,” Cordero said, “And that’s why Border Patrol can go into the interior.

“It’s the illusion of national security.”

This project is a collaboration between The War Horse and The Border Chronicle to examine the impact one year into the U.S. military buildup along the southern border. It was reported by Sonner Kehrt, Melissa del Bosque and David Roza; edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Graphics produced by Airwars and The War Horse’s Hrisanthi Pickett and Amy DiPierro. Dante Dallago, Aasma Mojiz and Joe Dyke provided research assistance.

The War Horse is a nonprofit, independent newsroom that focuses on the human impact of military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

The Border Chronicle produces independent, investigative journalism on the U.S.-Mexico border. Subscribe to their newsletter.

This article first appeared on The War Horse and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The cherry blossoms are in bloom; glints of hope are still fresh in fans’ eyes; beer is flowing; hot dogs are being consumed at alarming rates— it’s baseball time.

But amid the festivities is a tradition, now in its third year, that intersects America’s favorite pastime and military service.

Ahead of Opening Day, Arlington National Cemetery placed official MLB baseballs — courtesy of the Nationals — on the gravesites of six men, all former baseball players turned citizen soldiers.

The baseballs were placed at the gravesites of:

• Luzerne “Lu” Blue: Blue, a D.C. native who rose to prominence under Ty Cobb’s Detroit Tigers. The first baseman had his career briefly interrupted in 1918 when he was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving at Camp Lee in Virginia until war’s end.
• Abner Doubleday: This Union general was among those who defended Fort Sumter during the 1861 bombardment, rose to fame for his gallantry at Gettysburg and — supposedly — invented baseball, writes Colleen Cheslak-Poulton for the American Battlefield Trust. While the claim is pure fabrication, it does make for an entertaining tale.
• William Eckert: Lt. Gen. Eckert, who at the time of his commission was the youngest three-star in the United States Armed Forces, became baseball’s commissioner following the recommendation of Gen. Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay.
• Elmer Gedeon: Gedeon was a player for the Washington Senators before his time in the league was cut short when he was drafted in 1941. Gedeon was shot down and killed on a mission over France in 1944. He and Harry O’Neill are the only two MLB players to have been killed during World War II.
• Spottswood “Spot” Poles: Poles, a Negro Leagues outfielder known for his speed and batting average — think .487 — served in the 369th Infantry Regiment, aka the Harlem Hellfighters, one of the most renowned Black combat units of World War I. The all-Black unit would go on to spend 191 days in continuous combat, more than any other American unit of its size. During that time, about 1,400 soldiers were killed or wounded, suffering more losses than any other American regiment during the war. In his own right, Poles earned five battle stars and a Purple Heart for his heroism.
• Ernest Judson “Jud” Wilson: Wilson, who grew up in Foggy Bottom, D.C., played for the Negro Leagues Homestead Grays in D.C. between 1931-32 and 1940-45. The third baseman served in World War I as a corporal in Company D, 417th Service Battalion and was posthumously inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. He is a member of the Ring of Honor at Nationals Park.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story.

The U.S. military has fired over 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles in four weeks of war with Iran, burning through the precision weapons at a rate that has alarmed some Pentagon officials and prompted internal discussions about how to make more available, The Washington Post reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

“The U.S. military has more than enough munitions, ammo, and weapons stockpiles to achieve the goals of Operation Epic Fury laid out by President Trump — and beyond," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to Reuters.

“Nevertheless, President Trump has always been intensely focused on (strengthening) our Armed Forces and he will continue to call on defense contractors to more speedily build American-made weapons, which are the best in the world,” Leavitt’s statement said.

Asked for comment, the Pentagon, which Trump has ordered renamed Department of War, said the military had all it required.

“The Department of War has everything it needs to execute any mission at the time and place of the President’s choosing and on any timeline,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement to Reuters.

Sure, we’ve all heard the tales of George Washington’s exploits, Paul Revere’s famous “one if by land, two if by sea” ride, Benjamin Franklin’s role in well, just about everything. But what about the foreign fighters that served with distinction, nay, may have even saved the revolution?

Here are seven foreigners who freely joined the fight for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

1. Baron von Steuben: Fraud Turned Hero

The Prussian’s resume was impressive. America’s diplomats in Paris, Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, claimed he was once the major general and quartermaster general in the Prussian army, as well as a one-time aide-de-camp to the legendary warrior-king Frederick the Great. But Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben, or Frederick William Augustus, Baron de Steuben, was a fraud. He had been none of those things.

And yet in America, he became a hero.

“[M]ore than any other individual,” writes historian Paul Lockhart, Baron von Steuben “was responsible for transmitting European military thought and practice to the army of the fledgling United States. He gave form to America’s first true army — and to those that followed.”

Despite his bolstered resume, the 47-year-old was a career soldier and did in fact have a keen military eye. He brought to the Continental Army a wealth of European military experience to rally an ill-clothed, starving and poorly trained army at Valley Forge into a professional force.

There, von Steuben introduced discipline, putting Washington’s entire army through Prussian-style drills. He noted to Washington that short enlistments meant constant turnover at the expense of order. There was no codified regiment size and different officers throughout the Continental Army used different military drill manuals meant chaos if other units attempted to work with one another.

“[It was] Steuben’s ability to bring this army the kind of training and understanding of tactics that made them able to stand toe to toe with the British,” historian Larrie Ferreiro told the Smithsonian.

Appointed inspector general of the Continental Army in May 1778, von Steuben’s methods categorically transformed the fledgling patriots before going on to write “Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States,” the first military manual for the American army.

2. Casimir Pułaski: No English, all courage

“In the 13 months since the United States had declared its independence from Great Britain, the Continental Congress had been unable to develop an effective mounted force or find men who could organize, lead and train one,” writes Ethan S. Rafuse. Yet in December 1776, after numerous defeats and retreats, Gen. George Washington called on the Continental Congress to change that.

“I am convinced there is no carrying on the War without them,” he wrote to John Hancock, “and I would therefore recommend the Establishment of one or more Corps…in Addition to those already raised in Virginia.”

Enter Casimir Pułaski.

Born into Polish nobility, Pułaski had made a name for himself under the Knights of the Holy Cross — the military arm of the Confederation of the Bar that opposed Russian rule.

As a cavalry commander, Pułaski earned widespread acclaim for his 1771 defense of the hallowed monastery of Częstochowa against 3,000 Russians.

However, the Pole was soon forced to flee and found himself in dire financial straits in France. He was soon offered a lifeline by Benjamin Franklin, who agreed to pay for Pułaski’s trip to America in June of 1777.

According to Rafuse, Franklin wrote to Washington lauding Pułaski as “an officer famous throughout Europe for his bravery and conduct in defense of the liberties of his country against the three great invading powers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia” and suggesting that he might “be highly useful to our service.”

First an aide to Washington, Pułaski was soon made brigadier general in the Continental cavalry — where, despite not speaking a word of English, soon proved his mettle.

By 1778, Pułaski was awarded command of the “Pulaski Legion,” an independent cavalry unit composed of American and foreign recruits. The following spring Pułaski and his Legion made their way south to defend the besieged city of Charleston. In October that year, Pułaski was mortally wounded by a grapeshop while leading a cavalry charge during the Siege of Savannah. The 34-year-old’s heroic death established him among the American Revolution’s most famous foreign volunteers and earned him the moniker as the “Father of American Cavalry.”

3. Michael Kováts: Hungry for battle

While Pułaski might be known as the Father of American Cavalry, Michael Kováts de Fabricy shouldn’t be overlooked.

He arrived in America four months prior to Pułaski after declaring to Benjamin Franklin, “I am a free man and a Hungarian. I was trained in the Royal Prussian Army and raised from the lowest rank to the dignity of a Captain of the Hussars.”

“Kováts had an even more impressive military record than Pułaski,” according to Rafuse. “Born in Karcag, Hungary, in 1724, Kováts belonged to a noble family whose history of service to the Hungarian crown went back centuries. In Hungary as in Poland, cavalry was the most important element of the army, and for the same reasons: the country’s open plains and acquisitive neighbors — in Hungary’s case, Habsburg Austria and the Ottoman Turks.”

Kováts forged a fiercesome reputation as a brave and effective officer, declaring that he rose through the ranks, “not so much by luck and the mercy of chance than by the most diligent self-discipline and the virtue of my arms.”

As a mercenary soldier, Kováts found himself training participants in Poland’s nascent patriot movement, which included members of the Pułaski family. Like Pułaski, Kováts soon found himself in France and then on a ship to the fledgling nation of America to offer his services to the revolution.

Despite struggling to gain a commission, Kováts eagerly began training men within the Pułaski Legion in April 1778. In his new unit, writes Rafuse, Kováts “particularly emphasized the ‘free corps’ concept popular in Europe in the 1740s and 1750s. To preserve the strength of their rigorously drilled and tightly disciplined battalions of infantry, Eastern European military leaders began accepting into their service units of light forces to operate around the fringes of their armies.” It was here that, under Pułaski, Kováts was able to organize and train one of the first hussar regiments in the American army.

Kováts was mortally wounded by a rifle shot during a clash with the British on May 11, 1779, in defense of Charleston.

4. Tadeusz Kościuszko: Loser in love, winner in war

Commissioned a colonel by the Continental Congress in 1777, the 30-year-old Kościuszko soon established himself as one of the Continental Army’s most brilliant, and much needed, combat engineers — all thanks to an unsuccessful attempt to elope with a lord’s daughter back in Poland.

After discovering his brother had spent all the family’s inheritence, Kościuszko was hired to tutor Louise Sosnowska, a wealthy lord’s daughter. The pair fell in love and attempted to elope in the fall of 1775 after Lord Sosnowski refused Kosciuszko’s request. According to the Smithsonian, “Kosciuszko told various friends, Sosnowski’s guards overtook their carriage on horseback, dragged it to a stop, knocked Kosciuszko unconscious, and took Louise home by force.”

Broke, heartbroken, and perhaps fearing repercussions for his actions, Kościuszko set sail across the Atlantic in June 1776. Upon arriving in Philadelphia, John Hancock appointed him a colonel in the Continental Army that October, and Benjamin Franklin hired him to design and build forts on the Delaware River to help defend Philadelphia from the British navy, writes the Smithsonian.

The Pole oversaw the damming of rivers and flooded fields to stem a British pursuit following their victory at Fort Ticonderoga in 1777. This action bought time for the patriots to regroup and prepare for their first major victory of the war — Saratoga. Fortifying Bemis Heights overlooking the Hudson, Kościuszko’s design contributed to the surrender of General John Burgoyne and precipitated the French’s entry into the war.

From there, Kościuszko’s oversaw the defense of West Point, with his fortifications so thorough that the British never deigned to attempt an assault.

At war’s end he was promoted to brigadier general with Thomas Jefferson praising the Pole, “As pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.”

5. Johann de Kalb: Died doing what he loved — fighting Brits

Who hated the British most during this time period? The French yes, but Germans were a close second.

Born outside the Prussian city of Nuremberg, Baron Johann de Kalb entered the service of France and fought in the Seven Years’ War against the British. He eventually rose to officer rank and was made a Knight of the Royal Order of Merit, according to the American Battlefield Trust.

When the Revolutionary War broke out, the veteran soldier saw a chance not only to fight for the ideals of the Enlightenment but to strike a blow to his old foe the British.

Initially denied a commission, a furious de Kalb was making his way back to France when he learned that the Marquis de Lafayette had influenced Congress to appoint him as major general. De Kalb survived the infamous winter at Valley Forge with George Washington and Lafayette, before taking command of 1,200 Maryland and Delaware troops in the war’s Southern theater in 1780.

His command would, alas, be short.

On the morning of August 16, 1780, Gen. Horatio Gates deployed to meet Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis in the now famous Battle of Camden. When Gates and his inexperienced militia broke ranks and began to run only de Kalb was left to defend against Cornwallis.

De Kalb and his infantry refused to retreat. Yet somewhere in the midst of melee, de Kalb fell — downed by some 11 wounds, the majority from a bayonet. Taken as prisoner by the British, de Kalb survived for three more days before supposedly telling a British officer: “I die the death I always prayed for: the death of a soldier fighting for the rights of man.”

6. Bernardo de Gálvez: Our Spaniard in Louisiana

A best friend is one with deep pockets — especially when you’re trying to win a war. And although Bernardo de Gálvez was never a soldier in the Continental Army, he certainly had the means to help supply the revolution.

As governor of the Spanish province of Louisiana, Gálvez, according to American Battlefield Trust, “began to smuggle supplies to the American Rebels — shipping gunpowder, muskets, uniforms, medicine, and other supplies through the British blockade to Ohio, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia by way of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.”

When Spain joined in the war effort against the British, Gálvez didn’t miss a beat and began planning a military campaign against the British where he eventually captured Pensacola, Mobile, Biloxi and Natchez — all four formerly British ports.

However, Gálvez is best remembered for his role “in denying the British the ability to encircle the American rebels from the south by pressing British forces in West Florida and for keeping a vital flow of supplies to Patriot troops across the colonies,” during the rocky beginnings of the war.

Gálvez was officially recognized by George Washington and the United States Congress for his aid to the colonies during the American Revolution and remains one of eight people in history to receive honorary citizenship.

7. The Marquis de Lafayette: You know this guy

Last but certainly not least, Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette. The skinny, red-haired 19-year-old had a family tradition of fighting against the English.

Three hundred years before he was born, writes James Smart, “a Gilbert Motier had ridden beside Joan of Arc as a marshal of France. In 1759, when Lafayette was two, his father had been cut in half by a cannonball at the Battle of Minden during the Seven Years’ War. In the newly declared and still embattled United States of America, Lafayette probably hoped to run across William Phillips, the officer who commanded the artillery that killed his father.”

Despite a growing feeling of irritation among the Continental Congress due to the high number of French officers applying for commission, the wealthy Lafayette was willing to serve without a salary and pay for his own expenses.

Wounded while commanding a fighting retreat at the Battle of Brandywine on Sept. 11, 1777, Lafayette soon earned the trust and admiration of George Washington.

In November of that year, Congress voted Lafayette command of a division, where the boy general served with distinction at the battles of Gloucester, Barren Hill and Monmouth.

Lafayette was instrumental in rallying crucial support in France for the patriot cause. By 1781, the then 24-year-old had grown out of his moniker as “boy general” and took command of an army in Virginia, playing a pivotal role in the entrapment of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, that eventually led to the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.

The general remains beloved in America to this day, with numerous streets, statues, and buildings erected and named throughout the United States in his honor.

NEW YORK — The United States has deployed uncrewed drone speedboats for patrols as part of its operations against Iran, the Pentagon said, the first time Washington has confirmed using such vessels in an active conflict.

The deployment of the vessels — which can be used for surveillance or kamikaze strikes — has not been previously reported. It comes despite a series of setbacks in the U.S. Navy’s years‑long effort to field a fleet of uncrewed surface vessels, Reuters reported last year.

Uncrewed vessels have risen to prominence in recent years after Ukraine used explosive‑laden speedboats to inflict significant damage on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Iran has used sea drones to attack oil tankers in the Gulf at least twice since the U.S. and Israel began strikes nearly a month ago. There was no indication the U.S. had used uncrewed vessels for offensive strikes.

In response to Reuters’ questions, Tim Hawkins, a Pentagon spokesperson for Central Command, said unmanned vessels built by Maryland-based BlackSea, known as the Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft, or GARC, had been used for patrols as part of the U.S. campaign against Iran, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury.”

“U.S. forces continue to employ unmanned systems in the Middle East region, including surface drone assets like the GARC. This platform, in particular, has successfully logged over 450 underway hours and more than 2,200 nautical miles during maritime patrols in support of Operation Epic Fury,” Hawkins said in a statement.

Hawkins declined to name any of the other unmanned systems being deployed. BlackSea declined to comment for this story.

Navy struggles with drone boats

The U.S. has for years been trying to build a fleet of autonomous uncrewed surface and underwater vessels, as a cheaper and faster alternative to manned ships and submarines, particularly to counter China’s growing naval power in the Pacific. The effort, however, has fallen behind schedule and been dogged by technical problems, cost concerns and a series of testing setbacks.

Last year, Reuters reported the GARC, an angular speedboat about five meters long, was involved in multiple performance and safety issues, including one where it collided with another boat at speed during a military test.

In recent weeks, during another failed test in the Middle East, one GARC boat became inoperable, according to a source who was briefed on the matter.

Hawkins declined to comment on the testing setbacks.

“The GARC is an emerging capability and part of a fleet of surface drones operated by U.S. 5th Fleet to enhance awareness of what’s happening in regional waters,” he said.

The House Armed Services Committee voted Thursday to approve broad aviation safety legislation that includes a myriad of safety recommendations issued after a deadly 2025 midair collision between a regional jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter near Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people.

The legislation, known as the Airspace Location and Enhanced Risk Transparency, or ALERT, Act, would require the military services to adopt reforms put forth by federal investigators in an effort to prevent similar accidents. The committee voted 53-0 in favor of advancing the bill to the full House for a vote.

“Improving aviation safety and protecting our national security are not mutually exclusive,” committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said in his opening remarks Thursday, adding that “by taking our time and following regular order, we have produced a bill that does both.”

The bill would require all military aircraft to install crash prevention technology by 2031, with the exception of drones and military fighter and bomber aircraft. If enacted, the legislation would be implemented over several years, giving the services time to install new systems and update training protocols.

The bill also aims to balance safety requirements with national security concerns, making sure aircraft can operate without incident and without disclosing sensitive flight data.

Federal investigators found that a series of failures by both the Federal Aviation Administration and the Army contributed to the fatal Jan. 29, 2025, crash, to include an overburdened air traffic control system, congested helicopter routes and missed warnings from earlier close calls in the area.

The National Transportation Safety Board issued more than a dozen recommendations following the crash, including changes to training, airspace management and safety oversight.

Most Americans deem the United States military’s strikes on Iran excessive, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Wednesday.

The survey, conducted from March 19 to March 23, found 59% of respondents say the scale of Operation Epic Fury has gone too far, while 26% believe it has been about right. Only 13% think the campaign has not gone far enough.

A separate Pew Research Center poll released earlier this week showed low confidence in President Donald Trump’s handling of the conflict, with 37% approving and 61% disapproving.

Majority of American voters oppose the Iran war, poll finds

The public’s skepticism comes as Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of the U.S. Central Command, announced that American forces have struck more than 10,000 military targets across Iran since the operation began on Feb. 28. Cooper said the U.S. has significantly degraded more than two-thirds of the Islamic Republic’s missile, drone and naval production facilities and shipyards.

Trump, for his part, declared on Thursday that the war against Iran is “ahead of schedule” and going to “end soon.”

“It won’t be long,” Trump told reporters during a cabinet meeting at the White House. “It’s going to end soon. But we had to take a little detour, go to Iran, and we had to put out a fire, a very dangerous fire that could have blown up big portions of the world, if not the whole thing.”

The president reiterated that the Iranians are “begging to make a deal. Not me.”

Later in the cabinet meeting, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s peace envoy, said Washington has presented Tehran a 15-point plan to end the war in the Middle East. The proposal was transmitted to Iranian officials through Pakistani intermediaries.

“We’ll see where things lead if we can convince Iran that this is the inflection point with no good alternatives for them other than more death and destruction,” Witkoff asserted. “We have strong signs that this is a possibility, and if a deal happens, it will be great for the country of Iran, for the entire region, and the world at large.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon emphasized that its offensive in Iran would continue.

“We pray for a deal and we welcome a deal,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Thursday. “But in the meantime, the Department of War will continue negotiating with bombs.”

It was perhaps the politest “battle” in human history.

Upon entering Guam’s harbor on June 20, 1898, instead of experiencing the expected whizz of bullets and the booms of a cannonade, U.S. Navy Capt. Henry Glass and his crew aboard the re-commissioned cruiser USS Charleston were greeted on the beaches by curious residents who mistook Charleston’s warning shoots as a salute.

No one had bothered to tell the residents on the island that they were at war.

The small, neglected island under Spanish rule hadn’t received a message from Spain since April 14, 1898 — a full month before hostilities broke out between their protectorate and the United States.

That did not stop the Americans from attempting to seize the far-flung Spanish holding.

MISSION TO GUAM

Earlier that month, upon receiving orders from Secretary of the Navy John D. Long “to stop at the Spanish Island of Guam … [and] use such force as may be necessary to capture the port,” the Charleston, with Glass at the helm, steamed toward the Spanish-held island.

One sailor recalled, “When the news of our destination and object was learned aboard the Australia there was considerable excitement, of course, and the cause of many pow-wows as ‘What about Guam and where is it anyway, and what do we want of it?’”

A POLITE DISCUSSION ABOUT WAR

Once they arrived in Guam, the Americans were hankering for a fight — Manifest Destiny on their minds — and soon began bombarding the fort at Santa Cruz.

Ironically, however, their act of violence was mistaken for a salute of respect, and the Spanish authorities on the island raced to obtain artillery to return the perceived salutations.

As Guamanian officials approached the Charleston by way of rowboat, they were shocked to learn that a state of war existed between the United States and Spain and that they were now technically prisoners of war.

Glass then dispatched Lt. William Braunersreuther to meet with governor Juan Marina Vega and collect the surrender of the small Spanish garrison.

According to Naval History and Heritage Command, Vega was taken aback that he had to go aboard the American vessel, as such an action was forbidden by Spanish law.

“I regret to have to decline this honor and to ask that you will kindly come on shore, where I await you to accede to your wishes as far as possible, and to agree to our mutual situations,” Vega responded.

Vega eventually acquiesced, along with surrendering his small Spanish garrison to the Americans.

LEFT IN QUESTIONABLE HANDS

Glass, eager to sail on to Manila posthaste to join Commodore George Dewey’s fleet, placed the island in the hands of Francisco Portusach, a 30-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen.

The former janitor was in the right place at the right time. Portusach’s only qualifying attribute was that he was an American, but that was enough for Glass, and he placed the island — and U.S. interests — in Portusach’s less than capable hands.

Unsurprisingly, after Glass’ departure, Portusach was unable to solidify his position as governor and was overthrown by Spaniard Jose Sisto, a former public administrator. Sisto, too, had a short reign and was quickly overthrown by the native Chamorro population.

The 1898 Treaty of Paris formalized the handover of Guam as a U.S. territory, which it remains today.

This story was originally published on HistoryNet.

Seventeen elite sniper teams put their skills to the test this month in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command International Sniper Competition at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The competition, which ran from March 15-19, is an international event designed to test combat readiness among elite, specialized snipers from across the joint force and partner nations.

“This competition represents the pinnacle of the sniper craft,” Army Col. Simon Powelson said in a release. “These competitors are not just here by chance; they are the product of intense and specialized training within their respective units.”

Participants included teams from the Army’s Green Berets and Rangers, Naval Special Warfare Command, Marine Forces Special Operations Command and Coast Guard units, as well as special operations forces from multiple allied nations.

At the end of the week, the Army Special Operations Command team took first place, followed by the Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group team.

Throughout the event, two-person sniper teams engaged targets at distances of up to 1,200 meters, using a variety of weapons, including sniper rifles, carbines and pistols.

Competitors completed both day and night operations, navigating challenging conditions. Rain, wind and cold plagued the event while adding realism to the exercises.

“The weather played a significant role,” Timothy Gozelski, sniper course instructor, mentioned in the release. “Being in sync with your teammate is equal in importance to communication. To be successful, the two have to talk and be on the same page in everything they do.”

Richard Cuza, another course instructor, added that communication in the harsh conditions was “beyond important; it’s crucial.”

The competition, now in its 17th year, was hosted by the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.

Special Forces sniper course instructors and leadership constructed the challenges and acted as scorekeepers.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said U.S. military chaplains will no longer wear rank insignia, instead displaying symbols of their faith.

Chaplains will retain their rank, he said in a video announcement Tuesday, but the new directive will shift how they are identified in uniform. Hegseth added that he would sign a memorandum solidifying the change.

Before the change, a chaplain’s uniform carried their rank insignia along with a symbol denoting their religion.

The policy, he said, “speaks to the difficult balance of the duality of a military chaplain. A chaplain is first and foremost a chaplain and an officer second. This change is a visual representation of that fact.”

Hegseth also said that removing rank allowed chaplains to “be seen among the highest ranks because of their divine calling.”

The directive follows a broader effort by Hegseth to reshape the military’s Chaplain Corps. In a December message, he said he wanted to restore chaplains’ focus on ministry and argued that the role had shifted toward counseling and support functions in recent years.

He terminated the Army’s spiritual fitness guide and said he would simplify how the military categorizes religious affiliation.

In his most recent message, Hegseth said that the number of religious affiliation codes was reduced from over 200 to just 31. Military Times was unable to independently verify these numbers.

The military uses those codes to categorize troops’ religious beliefs.

The move “brings the codes in line with its original purpose, giving chaplains clear, usable information so they can minister to service members in a way that aligns with that service member’s faith background and religious practice,” Hegseth said.

The defense secretary added that the Pentagon was not stopping with the pair of changes.

“We’re not even close to being done,” he said.

Defense Department civilian employee satisfaction and engagement scores declined markedly in 2025, according to an independent survey released last week by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.

The Partnership’s Public Service Viewpoint Survey — conducted after the Office of Personnel Management canceled the statutorily required Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, or FEVS — recorded a government-wide Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Index Score of 32 out of 100. The survey was fielded from Nov. 10 to Dec. 19, 2025, and received 11,083 responses from employees at 17 large agencies and 13 midsize agencies.

Among major DOD components, the Army posted the highest score at 48.1, Air Force civilians scored 38.5, and Navy and Marine Corps civilians scored 36.4, according to the Partnership’s data dashboard. Those figures are down from 70.3, 67.0, and 68.1, respectively, in the Partnership’s 2024 Best Places to Work rankings.

The Partnership cautioned that “significant differences still exist between the PSVS and FEVS,” and that results “should not be directly compared with the results of previous federal employee surveys.”

More than 58% of respondents government-wide reported that their engagement had worsened compared with late 2024.

Only 9.1% of Army civilians agreed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s political leadership team generates high levels of motivation in the workforce. Just 22.5% of federal employees overall said they were confident they could report suspected wrongdoing without fear of retaliation. More than 95% of respondents said it remains important that their work contributes to the public good.

Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, told Military Times that while DOD components posted the highest scores among large agencies surveyed, the results remain alarming.

“The scores were still alarmingly low, and uncover a workforce that has drastically less confidence in their political leadership and workplace performance compared to a year ago,” Stier said.

Stier added that the timing of the survey, which followed major 2025 workforce reductions, makes the findings more significant.

“This survey was conducted after the bulk of the federal workforce cuts had taken place, which makes the results even more disturbing,” he told Military Times. “It is likely that those who left were even more demoralized than those who stayed.”

OPM canceled the 2025 FEVS, the first interruption since the survey began in 2002, citing plans to refresh the questions and avoid prohibitive costs. The agency has said the FEVS will resume later in 2026.

DOD’s civilian workforce stood at roughly 694,000 people in early 2026, down from about 795,000 at the start of 2025, according to OPM data cited by Defense One. That included nearly 50,000 departures through the Deferred Resignation Program, with thousands more taking early retirement. About 30,000 positions deemed essential to national security were later refilled.

A Defense Contract Management Agency employee told Federal News Network that budget cuts and staffing shortfalls are undermining the agency’s ability to ensure weapons delivered to warfighters meet all performance requirements.

“We are asked to do more, but cannot,” the employee said. “Something will eventually fail and fail badly.”

An informal Federal News Network pulse poll of 141 current DOD employees conducted this month found rising strain as operational tempo increases. “Leadership has not shown leadership,” one respondent said. “The lack of morale will bite them if/when we need to go to a wartime pace. The workforce will not elevate the level of effort.”

Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson accused Defense One of cherry-picking data and described the Partnership for Public Service as anti-Trump, without specifying which parts of the survey would provide a more complete picture.

In response to the Pentagon’s characterization of the organization as anti-Trump, Stier told Military Times that over the past 20 years, the Partnership has helped leaders across the political spectrum to identify problems and track progress. It conducted the Public Service Viewpoint Survey to fill a “critical data gap on the federal employee experience” that was created with the cancelation of FEVs, he said.

“Good management shouldn’t be partisan. Every leader needs to understand their workforce, and federal agencies are no different,” Stier said. “DOD leadership should pay attention and act on to this very important and troubling data.”

In the Partnership’s press release, Stier said the findings are particularly concerning amid ongoing military operations: “Especially now as the U.S. engages in a new war with Iran, no government can serve or protect the public effectively with such rampant dysfunction.”

In response to a request for comment, the Army referred Military Times to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The Pentagon, Air Force and Navy did not respond to requests as of press time.

KYIV, Ukraine — On the first day of the U.S.-Iran war, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed — more than 100 of them under the age of 12, according to UN and Iranian officials.

The school building sat fewer than 100 yards from a long-time Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval installation and was previously located within the IRGC compound perimeter until a wall appeared between 2013 and 2016, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by Amnesty International.

By the time the U.S. and Israel launched their first strikes on Feb. 28, the school had been established several years prior. It was active on social media and had its own website, a Reuters investigation found.

So what went wrong?

“Was artificial intelligence, including the use of the Maven Smart System, used to identify the Shajareh Tayyebeh school as a target?” more than 120 House Democrats asked in a March 12 letter to the Pentagon, just days after 46 Senate Democrats sent a similar request demanding clarity on the deadly hit.

The Maven Smart System, a targeting and intelligence platform built by data analytics company Palantir Technologies under a $1.3 billion Pentagon contract, was built to solve a problem that has grown exponentially in recent years: information overload — with artificial intelligence as its secret weapon.

Maven fuses satellite imagery, drone feeds, radar data and signals intelligence into a single interface, then classifies targets, recommends weapons systems and generates strike packages in near real time, compressing kill-chain reasoning and decision making into the fastest timelines ever seen on the battlefield.

And it uses Anthropic’s Claude AI model, embedded in its system, to semi-autonomously rank targets by strategic importance, drafting automated legal justifications for each strike along the way.

The software generated hundreds of strike coordinates in the first 24 hours of the Iran campaign, enabling the U.S. to hit more than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the war, according to The Washington Post.

After sources briefed on preliminary findings told CNN that U.S. Central Command had created targeting coordinates using outdated intelligence provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency that had not been updated to reflect the school’s presence, one question became central to the inquiries: “If so, did a human verify the accuracy of this target?” they asked.

They are still waiting for an official explanation.

Ukrainian drone operators who build and deploy semi-autonomous targeting systems on the front line told Military Times they recognized the likely culprit immediately.

Ihor Matviyuk, the director of Aero Center, a Ukrainian drone company that builds and deploys semi-autonomous drones on the front lines of the war with Russia, said he can imagine exactly how the failure happened.

Although he has no inside knowledge of the Minab strike specifically, earlier this month he said that it bears the hallmarks of a targeting failure — not an AI malfunction.

“It was almost definitely a strike on the [given] coordinates,” Matviyuk told Military Times. “The main problem was not the AI — it was how close the military object was to the school.”

Last week, former military officials speaking to Semafor confirmed Matviyuk’s early assessment: “Humans — not AI — are to blame" for the school strike, they said, pointing to stale human-curated data fed to the Pentagon’s Maven targeting platform.

Matviyuk recognized the pattern because he’s had to decide how much AI to use in his own semi-autonomous weapon systems again and again as drone warfare and software capabilities have rapidly evolved on Ukraine’s battlefield.

“Automatic targeting allows us to capture less than half of the targets, not more,” Matviyuk said. “Because they are all still camouflaged.”

The Defense Department’s own data bears that out. Maven can correctly identify objects at roughly 60% accuracy overall — compared with 84% for human analysts.

But that rate drops below 30% in adverse conditions, such as bad weather or poor visibility, according to Pentagon data published in a 2024 Bloomberg report.

The risk of “collateral damage,” as the strike on the Minab school might be categorized in military terminology, is too high — that is why Aero Center and every other Ukrainian drone company that spoke with Military Times says they always leave the final strike decision to a human operator.

“The direct impact is always carried out by the operator’s command,” Matviyuk said, “to prevent civilians from getting under the blow.”

In 2021, an experimental U.S. Air Force targeting AI scored roughly 25% accuracy in real conditions, despite rating its own confidence at 90%, then-Maj. Gen. Daniel Simpson, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, told Defense One.

“It was confidently wrong,” Simpson said, summing up the program’s problems. “And that’s not the algorithm’s fault. It’s because we fed it the wrong training data.”

The situation is not expected to improve. Last month, Hegseth slashed the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence workforce by approximately 90% and cut CENTCOM’s civilian casualty assessment team from 10 to one, Politico reported.

Then, after leaving a skeleton staff to oversee the guardrails of the biggest expansion of AI in the military, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg signed a memo earlier this month formalizing AI’s role in military decision making — designating Maven an official program of record and pushing adoption across all U.S. military branches by September, Reuters reported on Friday.

Hegseth wants Pentagon to dump Claude, but military users say it’s not so easy

Ukrainian weapon makers like Matviyuk are not shying away from giving AI more autonomy, but they’re using it strategically.

Autonomous targeting is effective for “massive offensive operations, where targets are not camouflaged,” he said, a description that may fit Iran’s fixed military installations, which are far less concealed than most positions on the Ukrainian front.

“We support the idea of using the human element less and less in the drone operator job,” Matviyuk said. “Autonomy, autonomous elements of drones — that’s the stuff we are working on.”

The problem, in his view, was not that the Pentagon used AI. It was that the data behind the target had not been updated since a girls’ school replaced a military headquarters on the same coordinates — and the people whose job it was to verify that data had already been cut from the chain.

AI systems are only as reliable as the people who build, feed and oversee them, Matviyuk emphasized.

When the human link fails, whether through bad data, gutted oversight or compressed timelines — the machine will continue to execute the error with precision.

Former CENTCOM director of intelligence, Lt. Gen. Karen Gibson, was unequivocal about where accountability for lethal strikes lies, regardless of weapon autonomy, at a Center for Strategic and International Studies panel last week.

“I will always come back to the fundamental principle of human responsibility and accountability,” she said. “A commander somewhere will ultimately be held responsible — not a machine or a software engineer.”

It was a homecoming of sorts — decades overdue.

A dozen Vietnam veterans returned to the Southeast Asian country — with all but one having not been back since their combat boots left the soil of Vietnam for the last time some 50 years ago.

“I got back from Vietnam in ‘68 and luckily, I didn’t experience any disrespect,” Jerry Melcher, a combat medic in the U.S. Army told Military Times. “Just experienced nobody wanted to acknowledge or talk about it. So I went home, took off my uniform and kind of stuffed it in my back pocket.”

Rudy Dixon, who served in an Army recon team from 1970-1971, had a similar experience.

“[I] didn’t talk about it much because didn’t nobody want to hear about it back then,” he said.

The veterans, who range in age from 74 to 80, represent America’s decades-long war in almost every facet by way of air, land and sea, including: a former infantryman, helicopter pilots, combat medics, a Navy boatswain’s mate and Dixon, a former recon soldier.

All 12 men were part of a weeklong trip earlier this month, organized by the Eagle Society, a Nashville-based nonprofit, and Forever Young Veterans, aimed at supporting, honoring and preserving the memory of the veterans who fought in one of America’s most contested wars.

The Eagle Society has done several trips with veterans, including a pilgrimage to Okinawa with veterans of the Second World War, but the trip to Southeast Asia, dubbed “Vietnam Revisited,” was a first for the society.

“How do we honor these veterans? How do we elevate a level of dignity and purpose and ability and honor?” Michael Davidson, founder of Eagle Society, told Military Times in a phone call prior to the eight-day trip. “Let’s help the country digest because … we’re really still processing that era. We are still dealing with issues that reverberated since that era — everything from geopolitics to civic division. So how do we use experience to expose us to all those issues and help the veterans while we’re doing it?”

The war in Vietnam represented a fracture in American society and politics, which ultimately gave way to something new entirely. For the veterans, however, shedding the uniform, did not shed the memories.

“A lot of my friends [came] back and got on drugs and alcohol,” Dixon said. “We were sort of poor when I grew up, so all I had on my mind when I got back was, is going to work.”

“People that’s never been in combat … you can tell them something and you can tell they don’t believe it. They can’t understand it because they’ve never experienced it,” Dixon continued. “A lot of things I just never would say anything about because I knew it be too unbelievable to them. So most people that I’ll talk to about it is [with] other veterans.”

After his tour in Vietnam, Melcher, the Army combat medic, became motivated to heal himself — and his fellow veterans. The combat medic-turned-Army psychologist became a mental health specialist, “in part for self-help,” Melcher said.

“That’s supposed to be some light-hearted humor,” Melcher quipped.

“I never heard the term post-traumatic stress disorder. I just didn’t know what it was,” he continued. “And I didn’t talk to anybody and no one talked to me. Even my friends, my best buddy from high school, is a vet. We never talked about it.”

But even as a medic, Melcher was called to help.

“I talked with guys a lot, meaning, not only was I treating their physical sense, but trying to treat other things. When people got ‘Dear John’ letters and wanted to talk to somebody … I don’t know why, I just wanted to help and wanted to listen, and that’s what I ended up doing.”

Vietnam Revisited presented an opportunity for veterans to talk and reminisce among one another, but as Davidson put it, “when you get on the ground, you see, touch, feel, learn … it deepens engagement.”

The trip took participants through Hanoi, Da Nang, Hue and Ho Chi Minh City, however, the veterans “could opt out of anything” they wanted to opt out of, said Davidson.

“We try to make sure we our goal is to create the space for them, whatever it is, whatever version of grieving, healing, restoring, renewing, any version of it. We are going to respect and support their process. So our goal is to create options now,” Davidson added.

Unrecognizable

For veterans like Dixon, as a member of 1st Battalion, 52nd Infantry Regiment, a combat unit assigned to the 198th Infantry Brigade within the 23rd Infantry Division Americal Division, his memories of Vietnam don’t include city campaigns, but crawling through jungle tunnel complexes and traversing dense foliage against the threat of a hidden enemy.

His recon team, according to Dixon, worked in and off firebase LZ Stinson — going out for seven days, coming back in for four and rotating back and forth like that for nearly a year.

The war-torn nation he left was very much not the same more than 50 years on.

“I don’t know what I was expecting when I went back, but it was a totally different country,” said Dixon. “It wasn’t even the same place. I’ve never seen such a beautiful place in my life. … The beaches the South China Sea there and China beach and all it was just, man, it looked better than Hawaii.”

“I’ve never seen more courteous people. I mean, they acted like they wanted you there. They, you know, done everything they could to make your stay there as pleasant as they could. And I just, I couldn’t get over how the people were there toward us,” Dixon said of his time back in Vietnam.

For Dixon, memories of his service include shards of light.

While in basic training, a senior drill sergeant had found out that Dixon was likewise from Mississippi. Every morning while standing at attention, Dixon recounted, “he’d walk down that line and he’d get to me and he’d put his nose right, nearly against my nose, and he’d say, ‘Dixon, you ain’t never gonna make no soldier.’”

“And I’d say, ‘I know it, won’t you let me go home?’”

SYDNEY — China is conducting a vast undersea mapping and monitoring operation across the Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans, building detailed knowledge of marine conditions that naval experts say would be crucial for waging submarine warfare against the United States and its allies.

In one example, the Dong Fang Hong 3, a research vessel operated by Ocean University of China, spent 2024 and 2025 sailing back and forth in the seas near Taiwan and the U.S. stronghold of Guam, and around strategic stretches of the Indian Ocean, ship-tracking data reviewed by Reuters shows.

In October 2024, it checked on a set of powerful Chinese ocean sensors capable of identifying undersea objects near Japan, according to Ocean University, and visited the same area again last May. And in March 2025, it criss-crossed the waters between Sri Lanka and Indonesia, covering approaches to the Malacca Strait, a critical chokepoint for maritime commerce.

According to the university, the ship was carrying out mud surveys and climate research. But a scientific paper co-written by Ocean University academics shows it has also conducted extensive deep-sea mapping.

Naval-warfare experts and U.S. Navy officials say the type of deep-sea data being collected by the Dong Fang Hong 3 – via mapping and placement of sensors in the ocean – is giving China a picture of the subsea conditions it would need to deploy its submarines more effectively and hunt down those of its adversaries.

The Dong Fang Hong 3 isn’t operating alone. It is part of a broader ocean mapping and monitoring operation involving dozens of research vessels and hundreds of sensors.

In tracing this effort, Reuters examined Chinese government and university records, including journal articles and scientific studies, and analyzed more than five years of movement by 42 research vessels active in the Pacific, Indian or Arctic oceans using a ship-tracking platform built by New Zealand company Starboard Maritime Intelligence.

While the research has civilian purposes – some of the surveying covers fishing grounds or areas where China has mineral prospecting contracts – it also serves a military one, according to nine naval-warfare experts who reviewed Reuters’ findings.

To gather information about underwater terrain, research vessels map the sea floor while traveling back and forth in tight lines. The tracking data shows that type of movement by the vessels Reuters tracked across large sections of the Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans.

At least eight of the vessels Reuters tracked have conducted seabed mapping, while another 10 have carried equipment used for mapping, according to a review of Chinese state media articles, vessel descriptions published by Chinese universities, and press releases by government organizations.

The vessels’ survey data “would be potentially invaluable in preparation of the battlespace” for Chinese submarines, said Peter Scott, a former chief of Australia’s submarine force. “Any military submariner worth his salt will put a great deal of effort into understanding the environment he’s operating in.”

The ship-tracking data show that China’s seabed-surveying effort is focused in part on militarily important waters around the Philippines, near Guam and Hawaii, and near U.S. military facilities on Wake atoll in the north Pacific.

“The scale of what they’re doing is about more than just resources,” said Jennifer Parker, an adjunct professor of defense and security at the University of Western Australia and former Australian anti-submarine warfare officer. “If you look at the sheer extent of it, it’s very clear that they intend to have an expeditionary blue-water naval capability that also is built around submarine operations.”

Moreover, Parker and other experts added, even where data is gathered for scientific purposes, the integration of civilian scientific research and military technology development has become a key focus of the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping. Beijing refers to this approach as “civil-military fusion.”

China’s ministries of defense, foreign affairs and natural resources didn’t respond to requests for comment about the seabed mapping and ocean-monitoring activities.

The U.S. Defense Department didn’t respond to questions from Reuters.

In testimony to a congressional commission this month, Rear Admiral Mike Brookes, the commander of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, said China had dramatically expanded its surveying efforts, providing data that “enables submarine navigation, concealment, and positioning of seabed sensors or weapons.”

He added that “potential military intelligence collection” by Chinese research vessels “represents a strategic concern.”

America recently overhauled its own efforts to map and monitor the ocean, but it typically does so with military vessels that are allowed to turn off the tracking system monitored by civilian software. China’s civilian survey ships also sometimes disable tracking, meaning its campaign may go further than Reuters could determine.

This is the first time the extent of China’s mapping and monitoring across the Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans has been reported. Previous reporting has revealed a portion of the effort around Guam and Taiwan, and in parts of the Indian Ocean.

“It is frankly astonishing to see the enormous scale of Chinese marine scientific research,” said Ryan Martinson, an associate professor specializing in Chinese maritime strategy at the U.S. Naval War College.

“For decades, the U.S. Navy could assume an asymmetric advantage in its knowledge of the ocean battlespace,” added Martinson. China’s efforts “threaten to erode that advantage. It is obviously deeply concerning.”

‘PARANOID ABOUT BEING BOXED IN’

The data that Chinese research vessels are collecting about the seabed and water conditions is critical to submarine operations and anti-submarine warfare, according to naval experts. Most obviously, said Australian defense scholar Parker, commanders need information about underwater terrain to avoid collisions and hide their vessels.

But that data is also essential for detecting submarines, which operate within a few hundred meters of the surface. Typically, submarines are identified through the sounds they emit or echoes from signals sent by sonar systems.

Tom Shugart, a former U.S. submarine commander who is now an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said the movement of those sound waves changes depending on the underwater landscape.

Sound waves and submarine movements are also affected by water temperature, salinity and currents.

The vessels involved belong to Chinese state entities like the Ministry of Natural Resources or state-affiliated research institutions like Ocean University, whose president in 2021 publicly celebrated its “close ties” to China’s navy and commitment to “the construction of a maritime power and national defense.” The university didn’t respond to a request for comment.

China has done its most comprehensive ocean surveying east of the Philippines, which sits along the First Island Chain, the string of territories largely controlled by America’s allies that runs from the Japanese islands in the north through Taiwan and on to Borneo in the south. The chain forms a natural barrier between China’s coastal seas and the Pacific.

“They’re paranoid about being boxed in to the First Island Chain,” said Peter Leavy, formerly Australia’s naval attache to the U.S. and now president of the Australian Naval Institute. China’s mapping “indicates a desire to understand the maritime domain so they can break out.”

The tracking data shows that China’s mapping also covers waters surrounding Guam – where some American nuclear submarines are stationed.

Strikingly, Chinese vessels have also mapped waters around Hawaii, one of America’s other regional military hubs; examined an underwater ridge north of a naval base in Papua New Guinea to which the U.S. recently gained access; and scouted around Christmas Island, an Australian territory on a route between the South China Sea and a vital Australian submarine base.

China’s efforts extend further. It has mapped large swaths of the Indian Ocean, a critical route for Chinese imports of oil and other resources from the Middle East and Africa.

“China has some key vulnerabilities when it comes to dependencies on maritime trade,” said Parker, the former anti-submarine warfare officer. The surveying “indicates that they will likely be conducting more submarine operations in the Indian Ocean.”

China’s vessels have also mapped the seabed west and north of Alaska, an essential sea route into the Arctic. Beijing has identified the Arctic as a strategic frontier and declared its ambition to become a polar great power by the 2030s.

The extensive surveying and Beijing’s growing undersea capability are “symptomatic of China’s rise as a premier maritime power,” said Shugart, the former submarine commander.

A ‘TRANSPARENT OCEAN’

Around 2014, Wu Lixin, a scientist at Ocean University, proposed an ambitious effort to create a “transparent ocean” by deploying sensors that would give China a comprehensive view of water conditions and movement through specific areas, according to a statement published by the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Sciences. The proposal quickly received at least $85 million in support from the Shandong provincial government, according to comments by Shandong officials.

The project began in the South China Sea, where Ocean University public statements boast it has now built an observation system covering the deep-sea basin.

Brookes, the director of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, told the congressional commission that China is building undersea surveillance networks that “gather hydrographic data – water temperature, salinity, currents – to optimize sonar performance and enable persistent surveillance of submarines transiting critical waterways like the South China Sea.”

After surveying the South China Sea, Chinese scientists expanded the transparent ocean project to the Pacific and Indian oceans. In the Pacific, records from the Chinese Ministry of Natural Resources, Ocean University and the Shandong government show that China has deployed hundreds of sensors, buoys and subsea arrays to detect changes in water conditions like temperature, salinity and subsea movement through the ocean east of Japan, east of the Philippines, and around Guam.

In the Indian Ocean, documents from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Ministry of Natural Resources describe a sensor array ringing India and Sri Lanka, including along an underwater mountain range known as Ninety East Ridge. The ridge – which Chinese vessels have also combed, according to the Starboard data – is one of the world’s longest undersea mountain ranges and sits astride the approach to the strategically essential Malacca Strait, through which much of China’s oil supply passes.

Ocean University and the Institute of Oceanology, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have said the wider network of sensors now provides China with real-time data about water conditions and subsea movements.

Some naval-warfare experts expressed caution about that claim, given technical challenges with real-time communication of data from underwater. But even delayed data is valuable, Parker said, as it could help China detect U.S. submarine operations.

Many sensors are placed in sensitive locations. For example, Reuters recently reported on a U.S. effort to fortify a key strait between Taiwan and the Philippines to cut off Chinese access to the Pacific. Ocean University studies show that China has deployed advanced sensors in parts of the strait through which U.S. submarines would move to reach the South China Sea.

Chinese scientists say these sensors monitor changes in climate and ocean conditions. But in 2017, government officials from Shandong province said the transparent ocean project was intended to “ensure maritime defense and security” and explicitly compared the project with a U.S. military effort to build an American ocean-sensor network.

Shandong’s government, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Oceanology didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mapping-program founder Wu now oversees the network through the Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, whose partners include China’s Naval Submarine Academy, according to the academy’s website. Wu didn’t respond to Reuters questions.

‘NEW TYPES OF COMBAT CAPABILITIES’

Together, China’s mapping and monitoring give it sophisticated tools to detect rival submarines and deploy its own in some of the world’s most contested waters.

“This is a manifestation of China’s far-seas reach,” said Collin Koh, a senior fellow in maritime security at Singapore’s RSIS Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies. “They now have a reasonably good picture of the maritime domain they hope to operate in, either in peacetime or in war.”

Chinese researchers, similarly, see strategic value in their work. Zhou Chun, an Ocean University researcher who oversees the Indian and Pacific ocean sensor arrays, was quoted last year in an Ocean University press release as saying that his work had shown him “the rapid development of my country’s maritime defense and military capabilities.” He didn’t respond to Reuters questions.

Going forward, Zhou pledged to “transform the most advanced scientific and technological achievements into new types of combat capabilities for our military at sea.”

U.S. Navy counter-mine ships that replaced minesweepers last year in Bahrain have yet to demonstrate their reliability and effectiveness in the face of potential naval mine warfare, according to the Defense Department’s testing office and military experts.

The Pentagon was unable to determine the operational effectiveness or suitability of Independence-class littoral combat ships equipped with the mine countermeasures mission package due to insufficient data on its mine-hunting and mine-destroying technology, according to the Office of the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation’s fiscal 2025 annual report.

Several retired U.S. Navy captains who deployed on minesweepers and defense analysts also told Military Times that the LCS with the MCM mission package, which replaced four Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships in 2025, is not as effective as its predecessor due to a myriad of technological constraints and malfunctions.

“The Navy has not provided sufficient data from operational employment of [Airborne Mine Neutralization System] and [Airborne Laser Mine Detection System] to determine operational effectiveness of the Independence variant with MCM MP,” the March 13 DOT&E report stated.

Both of these counter-mine systems are deployed by MH-60S helicopters, which are attached to the littoral combat ship. They identify and destroys mines through sonar, lasers and deployed unmanned underwater vehicles.

The systems “demonstrated low reliability prior to fleet release,” according to a classified 2016 DOT&E report, the March 13 report said.

“The AMNS cannot neutralize most of the mines in the Navy’s threat scenarios,” a public version of the 2016 report said.

The 2025 DOT&E report also stated that the Unmanned Influence Sweep System, which is employed onboard the LCS and uses an unmanned surface vehicle to sweep mines with acoustic and electromagnetic generators, was “not operationally suitable.”

It cited a previous 2022 DOT&E report that said the system’s operational availability was 29%, “well below the Navy-defined minimum threshold,” and did “not support sustained mine sweeping operations.”

Despite ongoing concerns with the technology, the Navy declared the MCM mission package and AN/AQS-20 Sonar Mine Detection Sets operationally capable in 2023.

The Navy conducted no additional operational tests of the LCS with the MCM mission package in fiscal 2025, according to DOT&E’s report.

The service did not return Military Times’ request for comment by the time of this story’s publication.

An unproven system

“I’m a pessimist when it comes to our ability to deal with the mine warfare threat,” said retired Capt. Anthony Cowden.

Cowden spent one year assigned to a minesweeper during his 37-year career as a commissioned naval officer and said he didn’t believe that the LCS with the MCM mission package could prove as effective as the Avenger-class mine countermeasures ship.

The fact that it has never been proven in combat is a major concern for Cowden.

“The question is, it can reach [initial operation capability], but if it can only sweep 10% as effectively as the old capability, that doesn’t mean you’re not at IOC, it just means you’ve got a real problem,” Cowden said.

The Navy still has four Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships stationed in Sasebo, Japan, but decommissioned the four that were homeported in Bahrain in 2025 — USS Devastator, USS Dextrous, USS Gladiator and USS Sentry — each of which served for over 30 years.

The minesweepers have a proven track record of identifying and destroying naval mines, using their sonar, tethered remote operating systems and influence technology to sweep over 1,000 mines off the coast of Kuwait during the Gulf War.

The US Navy decommissioned Middle East minesweepers last year. Here’s what they did.

Three littoral combat ships with the MCM mission package arrived in the Middle East in 2025, including the USS Canberra, USS Santa Barbara and USS Tulsa.

The Canberra was stationed in the Indian Ocean as of March 16, and the Santa Barbara and Tulsa were conducting a port call in Singapore as of Thursday.

Minesweepers are made of wood and encased in fiberglass, which allows them to operate inside and near a mine-threat zone. The LCS with the MCM mission package, however, is made of aluminum and must sit outside the mine zone as it deploys helicopters and unmanned underwater and surface vehicles to mine hunt and minesweep.

This standoff distance, coupled with the littoral combat ship’s reliance on unproven autonomous systems to hunt and sweep mines, worries Cowden.

Capt. Sam Howard, who commanded the USS Raven minesweeper during his time in the Navy, said the point of the new MCM mission package was to keep service members outside of the mine field and protect them from danger.

But that doesn’t mean its efficacy rivals that of the Avenger-class minesweeper.

“They don’t have the endurance, nor has the automation arrived at the level of effectiveness that having manned systems historically has had,” Howard said.

A host of potential problems

Compared to its predecessor, the LCS with the MCM mission package has limited range.

The LCS mothership has to maintain line of sight with the unmanned surface vehicle or vessel it deploys to minesweep, which means its radius of operability is limited, since the LCS must remain outside the mine zone.

There has also been a host of other problems for the ship, which began its initial testing and evaluation in the fall of 2022 aboard the USS Cincinnati.

Ethan Connell, assistant director for George Mason University’s Taiwan Security Monitor, has written about America’s weaknesses when it comes to dealing with mine warfare for the Center of Maritime Strategy, a U.S. think tank focusing on national security in the sea domain.

He said that the MCM technology tasked with detecting mines had issues doing just that when it conducted testing off the coast of Southern California with clear water and no visibility hinderances.

The systems both detected more mines and less mines than were actually there, he said. The operability tests used threat-representative mine surrogates, which are devices meant to simulate mines.

If the ship was making these mistakes during ideal testing conditions, how would it fare in the murky waters of the Strait of Hormuz, he posited. The 2016 DTO&E report determined mine-hunting capabilities are limited in “other-than-benign environmental conditions.”

Further, the LCS with the MCM mission package has previously reported single points of failure, including: the platform lift that helps move the unmanned underwater vehicle from the mission bay to the hangar bay; the crane that places unmanned surface vehicles into the water; and the tow hook on the unmanned surface vehicles.

“There’s no backup,” Connell said.

If one of these elements were to go awry, the whole MCM mission package could not function, according to Connell, especially since sailors aboard the ship likely wouldn’t be able to fix the machinery and would need assistance from the manufacturer.

“Maintainers demonstrated limited capability to repair the [Unmanned Influence Sweep System] due to deficiencies in maintainer documentation for operational-level repairs and additional repairs that required subject matter expert intervention,” a nonpublic fiscal 2021 DOT&E report said, according to Breaking Defense.

These issues elongate the preparation time needed to deploy the autonomous aspects of the MCM mission package, Connell said. It takes four hours of premission maintenance followed by roughly 90 minutes to calibrate GPS and sonar to ensure the type of accuracy needed for MCM operations.

That’s nearly six hours that needs to be baked into planning before the mission can even begin.

“When you have a system where everything needs to be perfect in order for it to work, obviously, that is a really bad thing,” Connell said.

Even sailors tasked with the development of the technology have been candid about its status as a viable piece of technology.

Capt. Scott Hattaway, director of the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center’s Mine Countermeasures Technical Division, hinted at its potential shortcomings in 2025.

“I’m not saying we got it right, I’m saying we’re first out of the gate,” Hattaway told Naval News.

The mine threat

The naval mine threat in the Middle East has long been noted.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy views the maritime weapon as a key tenet of its military doctrine, according to a 2017 Office of Naval Intelligence report.

Iran reportedly began laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz as of March 11 and the country’s military possesses nearly 6,000 mines in its weapons stockpile, a recent report from Congress said.

Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, said March 16 that U.S. forces destroyed storage bunkers for naval mines during a March 13 U.S. strike on military targets on Iran’s oil export hub, Kharg Island.

U.S. forces destroyed 16 Iranian minelayers on March 10, according to CENTCOM.

And as of Monday, the U.S. has damaged or destroyed over 140 Iranian vessels, according to a CENTCOM fact sheet.

But Iran’s military still has ways to lay mines, according to Seth Jones, president of the defense and security department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank specializing in national security.

“The Iranians don’t have a lot of major capabilities for mine laying, but what they do have is hundreds of ships that are capable of laying two to three mines a piece, in addition to some subsurface vessels,” Jones said.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said Thursday during a Pentagon briefing that A-10 Warthogs were targeting Iran’s fast-attack watercraft in the Strait of Hormuz.

If Iran proves able to use these means to deploy mines in the sea passage, Jones said the U.S. military could potentially face challenges with its current MCM capabilities in the region, including the LCS.

If the naval mine warfare threat comes to fruition in the sea passage, the U.S. military will likely need to forward deploy its four Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships from Japan to the Middle East or ask U.S. allies with their own counter-mine capabilities for assistance, according to Jones.

The possibility of success

Others who spoke with Military Times weren’t so quick to deride the LCS with the MCM mission package.

Retired Capt. Mike Sparks, a former minesweeper commander who operated in the Persian Gulf aboard the USS Dextrous, understood the reticence to embrace the new technology.

During his time in the Middle East, in the early 2000s, there were concerns as to whether or not the minesweeper’s efforts would be successful, he said, but he and other sailors proved the ship could do its job effectively. He sees this as a sign that the LCS could do the same.

“The systems that I operated in the rivers of Iraq, were not intended to be used in the rivers of Iraq,” Sparks said.

As the Navy began rolling out the MCM mission package, his belief in the system was low and his criticism high. But his skepticism has since morphed to embrace the technology as it has advanced.

“The things that we have out there now I believe have a great deal of capability and optimally they will function as they have been designed,” Sparks said. “I expect the technology they have out there is going to succeed.”

Less than 48 hours before the U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran began, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone to President Donald Trump about the reasons for launching the kind of complex, far-off war the American leader once had campaigned against.

Both Trump and Netanyahu knew from intelligence briefings earlier in the week that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his key lieutenants would soon meet at his compound in Tehran, making them vulnerable to a “decapitation strike” – an attack against a country’s top leaders often used by Israelis but traditionally less so by the United States.

But new intelligence suggested that the meeting had been moved forward to Saturday morning from Saturday night, according to three people briefed on the call.

The call has not been previously reported.

Netanyahu, determined to move forward with an operation he had urged for decades, argued that there might never be a better chance to kill Khamenei and to avenge previous Iranian efforts to assassinate Trump, these people said. Those included a murder-for-hire plot allegedly orchestrated by Iran in 2024, when Trump was a candidate.

The Justice ‌Department has accused a Pakistani man of trying to recruit people in the United States in the plan, meant as retaliation for Washington’s killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard ​Corps’ top commander, Qassem Soleimani.

By the time the call took place, Trump already had approved the idea of the United States carrying out a military operation against Iran but had not yet decided when or under what circumstances the United States would get involved, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.

The U.S. military had for weeks built up a presence in the region, prompting many within the administration to conclude it was just a matter of when the president would decide to move forward. One possible date, just a few days earlier, had been scuttled because of bad weather.

Reuters was unable to determine how Netanyahu’s argument affected Trump as he contemplated issuing orders to strike, but the call amounted to the Israeli leader’s closing argument to his U.S. counterpart. The three sources briefed on the call said they believed it — along with the intelligence showing a closing window to kill Iran’s leader — was a catalyst for Trump’s final decision to order the military on February 27 to move ahead with Operation Epic Fury.

Trump could make history by helping eliminate an Iranian leadership long reviled by the West and by many Iranians, Netanyahu argued. Iranians might even take to the streets, he said, overthrowing a theocratic system that had governed the country since 1979 and been a leading source of global terrorism and instability ever since.

The first bombs struck on Saturday morning, February 28. Trump announced that evening that Khamenei was dead.

In response to a request for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly did not directly address the call between Trump and Netanyahu but told Reuters the military operation was designed to “destroy the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile and production capacity, annihilate the Iranian regime’s Navy, end their ability to arm proxies, and guarantee that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon.”

Neither Netanyahu’s office nor Iran’s U.N. representative responded to comment requests.

Netanyahu in a news conference on Thursday dismissed as “fake news” claims that “Israel somehow dragged the U.S. into a conflict with Iran. Does anyone really think that someone can tell President Trump what to do? Come on.”

Trump has said publicly that the decision to strike was his alone.

Reuters reporting, with officials and others close to both leaders speaking mostly on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of internal deliberations, does not suggest that Netanyahu forced Trump to go to war. But the reporting shows that the Israeli leader was an effective advocate and that his framing of the decision – including the opportunity to kill an Iranian leader who allegedly had overseen efforts to kill Trump – was persuasive to the president.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in early March suggested that revenge was at least one motive for the operation, telling reporters, “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”

June attack targeted nuclear, missile sites

Trump ran his campaign in 2024 based on his first administration’s foreign policy of “America First” and said publicly that he wanted to avoid war with Iran, preferring to deal with Tehran diplomatically.

But as discussions over Iran’s nuclear program failed to produce a deal last spring, Trump began contemplating a strike, according to the three people familiar with White House deliberations.

A first attack came in June, when Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities and missile sites, and killed several Iranian leaders. U.S. forces later joined the attack, and when that joint operation ended after 12 days, Trump publicly reveled in the success, saying the U.S. had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Yet months later, talks began again between the U.S. and Israel about a second aerial attack aimed at hitting additional missile facilities and preventing Iran from gaining the ability to build a nuclear weapon.

The Israelis also wanted to kill Khamenei, a longtime, bitter geopolitical foe who had repeatedly fired missiles into Israel and supported heavily armed proxy forces encircling the nation. That included the Hamas militant group that launched the surprise attack on October 7, 2023, from Gaza, and Hezbollah, based in Lebanon.

The Israelis began to plan their attack on Iran under the assumption they would be acting alone, Defense Minister Israel Katz told Israel’s N12 News on March 5.

But during a December visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Netanyahu told Trump that he was not fully satisfied with the outcome of the joint operation in June, said two people familiar with the relationship between the two leaders, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Trump indicated he was open to another bombing campaign, the people added, but he also wanted to try another round of diplomatic talks.

Two events pushed Trump toward attacking Iran again, according to several U.S. and Israeli officials and diplomats.

The U.S. operation on January 3 to capture Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas — which resulted in no American deaths while removing from power a longstanding U.S. foe — demonstrated the possibility that ambitious military operations could have few collateral consequences for U.S. forces.

Later that same month, massive anti-government protests erupted in Iran, prompting a vicious response by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, killing thousands. Trump vowed to help the protesters but did little immediately that was public.

Privately, however, cooperation intensified between the Israel Defense Forces and the U.S. military’s Middle East command, known as CENTCOM, with joint military planning conducted during secret meetings, according to two Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Not long after, during a February visit by Netanyahu to Washington, the Israeli leader briefed Trump on Iran’s growing ballistic missile program, pointing out specific sites of concern. He also laid out the dangers of the ballistic missile program, including the risk that Iran might eventually gain the ability to strike the American homeland, said three people familiar with the private conversations.

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s December and February meetings with Netanyahu.

Trump’s chance at history

By late February, many U.S. officials and regional diplomats considered a U.S. attack on Iran very likely to proceed, though the details remained uncertain, according to two other U.S. officials, one Israeli official and two additional officials familiar with the matter.

Trump was briefed by Pentagon and intelligence officials on the potential advantages to be gained from a successful attack, including the decimation of Iran’s missile program, according to two people familiar with those briefings.

Before the phone call between Netanyahu and Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a small group of top Congressional leaders on February 24 that Israel was likely to attack Iran, whether or not the U.S. participated, and Iran would then likely retaliate against U.S. targets, according to three people briefed on the meeting.

Behind Rubio’s warning was an assessment by American intelligence officials that such an attack would indeed provoke counterstrikes from Iran against U.S. diplomatic and military outposts and U.S. Gulf allies, said three sources familiar with U.S. intelligence reports.

This prediction proved accurate. The strikes have led to Iranian counterattacks on U.S. military assets, the deaths of more than 2,300 Iranian civilians and at least 13 U.S. service members, attacks on U.S. Gulf allies, the closure of one of the world’s most vital shipping routes and a historic spike in oil prices that is already being felt by consumers in the United States and beyond.

Trump had also been briefed that there was a chance, even if small, that the killing of Iran’s top leaders could usher in a government in Tehran that was more willing to negotiate with Washington, said two other people familiar with Rubio’s briefing.

The possibility of regime change was one of Netanyahu’s arguments in the call shortly before Trump gave final orders to attack Iran, said the people briefed on it.

That view was not held by the Central Intelligence Agency, which had assessed in the weeks prior that Khamenei would likely be replaced by an internal hardliner if he was killed, as Reuters previously reported.

The CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump repeatedly called for an uprising after Khamenei was killed. With the war in its fourth week and the region engulfed in conflict, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards still patrol the nation’s streets. Millions of Iranians remain sheltered in their homes.

Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, considered even more harshly anti-American than his father, has been named the new supreme leader of Iran.