B-2 stealth bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, flew a 36-hour nonstop mission over the weekend to drop bunker-buster bombs on an underground compound where commanders from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had gathered, a U.S. official told Military Times.

Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, gave the order after intelligence indicated a nexus of senior IRGC leaders was meeting at the location, the official said.

The B-2s are equipped to drop 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, also known as GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, to destroy deeply fortified structures. Their immense payload allows them to strike targets at a depth beyond the reach of conventional munitions, while their flying-wing design enables them to penetrate sophisticated defenses with minimal detection.

US special forces rescue second F-15 airman from Iran

That weapon was key to last June’s Operation Midnight Hammer, when bunker busters battered three of Iran’s nuclear installations. The B-2s made roughly the same 7,000-mile journey this time.

At the six-week mark of the assault against Iran, CENTCOM reported that U.S. forces had struck over 13,000 sites across the country. Other bombers in America’s squadrons, such as the B-1 and the B-52, have played prominent roles in the current campaign, Pentagon officials say.

Cooper’s directive coincided with a high-stakes search-and-rescue effort focused on two American airmen who ejected from a fighter jet over Iranian territory on Friday. President Donald Trump would later liken that operation to a Hollywood scene during a press conference at the White House.

“You would call it central casting if you were doing a movie for location,” he said Monday, revealing that hundreds of personnel were involved in the extraction. “Those pilots came in so fast and so quick and got out of there.”

Moments after extolling U.S. forces from the lectern, the president declared that when it came to the reach of the American military, nothing was off-limits. He warned he could destroy Iran’s critical infrastructure, including bridges and power plants.

The following day, in a post on Truth Social, Trump escalated the rhetoric even further, threatening to eradicate Iranian civilization if Tehran did not capitulate to his demands by 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump wrote. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Military Times that “only the president knows where things stand and what he will do.”

A new rotation of U.S. Marines in the Philippines suggest the force may be maintaining a more continuous presence in the country.

A command element from I Marine Expeditionary Force replaced the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit on March 31, the Marine Corps said in a statement, continuing the Marine Rotational Force-Southeast Asia, or MRF-SEA, mission in the Philippines.

This rotation “places greater emphasis on persistent integration with the Armed Forces of the Philippines and Philippine Marine Corps than previous rotations,” according to Capt. MacKenzie Margroum, a communications officer for the mission. She added that “the current command element will remain for a standard rotation, with follow-on forces continuing this effort alongside their Philippine counterparts.”

The MRF-SEA has traditionally deployed across different countries in the region for joint exercises and training. The increased focus on the Philippines comes as the United States deepens defense ties with the country.

The United States and the Philippines last year stood up a joint task force aimed at improving coordination and helping the allies respond more quickly to Chinese activity in the South China Sea. The move, according to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, represents an effort to shore up deterrence in the region.

The Army in 2025 quietly established a small rotational force in the Philippines, designed to maintain a more sustained presence and improve coordination with local forces. The United States and the Philippines have also moved to increase deployments of advanced missile systems in the country.

The Marine Corps said the current rotation is focused on training alongside Philippine forces to improve coordination between U.S. forces and the Armed Forces of the Philippines, or AFP, and strengthen the country’s defenses.

“This iteration of MRF-SEA reflects a deliberate shift from presence to presence with purpose,” Col. Robert S. Bunn, the new rotation’s commander said, adding, “We are integrating with the AFP to strengthen combined capabilities, enable faster response in crisis, and contribute to a credible, forward posture in the Indo-Pacific.”

The White House is requesting a pay raise for lower-ranked enlisted service members in its fiscal 2027 budget.

In the proposed budget for the Department of Defense, released this week, all troops ranked E-5 and below would receive a pay raise of 7%. The budget also allots 6% pay bumps for military personnel ranked E-6 and O-3, as well as 5% raises for those O-4 and above.

“The Administration recognizes the importance of America’s warfighters and their families,” the budget request reads.

Junior enlisted service members typically serve in pay grades E-1 to E-4 for their first enlistment term, which usually lasts four years. Mid-level noncommissioned officers include those E-5 to E-7, but the proposed budget only lists those ranked E-5 and E-6 to receive pay boosts.

Across the military, troops received a 3.8% pay increase in fiscal 2026. Traditionally, the annual pay raise for troops ranges from roughly 3% to 5%. But in 2025, junior enlisted service members saw a large 14.5% pay hike, adding between $3,000 to $6,000 to their basic pay.

Prior to that increase, the annual base pay for junior enlisted service members could be less than $30,000, but with the raise, it brings the base pay to around that figure before housing stipends and other pay incentives.

As of September 2025, there are around 540,000 active-duty junior enlisted service members E-4 and below across the branches, making up 50% of the enlisted military, according to a 2026 Congress Defense Primer.

There were approximately 378,000 personnel ranked E-5 and E-6 across the military in September 2025, per Congress’ report.

“This enduring investment, far above the standard annual military pay raise, builds on the President’s recruiting and retention success, by doubling down on the Administration’s goal to restore America’s fighting force,” the proposal says.

The White House proposed the fiscal 2027 budget on April 3, outlining the Trump administration’s requests to Congress for federal spending beginning on Oct. 1, 2026.

President Donald Trump is requesting $1.5 trillion for the Defense Department in fiscal 2027, a 44% increase from the already historic amount of nearly $1 trillion requested in fiscal 2026, per the proposal. The budget allocates $1.1 trillion in “base discretionary budget authority” for the DOD, the proposal says.

Before the upcoming fiscal year, presidents are required to submit their budget recommendations no later than the first Monday in February, but usually that deadline is missed. Congress then works to pass its own budget resolution after hearings. That can prove to be a challenge, as past stalemates in federal funding negotiations have led to government shutdowns.

If approved, the new budget, including the pay raises for lower-ranked service members, would begin Jan. 1, 2027.

U.S. strikes on Iran’s Kharg Island do not represent a change in American strategy, Vice President JD Vance said on Tuesday, as a U.S. official separately told Reuters the additional strikes on military targets did not impact oil infrastructure.

The official, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, described at least some of the strikes as targeting sites that had been previously struck before and said the attack occurred in the early morning hours of Tuesday.

Vance, speaking separately in Budapest, said the strikes were not a change in U.S. strategy, with the Trump administration confident that it can get a response from Iran by 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time in negotiations to end the conflict.

President Donald Trump is demanding Iran forswear nuclear weapons and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical oil transit waterway.

“We were going to strike some military targets on Kharg Island, and I believe we have done so,” Vance said.

“We’re not going to strike energy and infrastructure targets until the Iranians either make a proposal that we can get behind or don’t make a proposal,” he added. “I don’t think the news in Kharg Island ... represents a change in strategy, or represents any change from the President of the United States.”

On March 27, an Iranian missile scored a high-value hit on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, reducing an Air Force E-3 (AWACS) command center aircraft worth up to $500 million to splinters and shards.

While the strike underscored Iran’s capabilities, it also reignited a longstanding conversation about the need for the U.S. to protect its aircraft and other high-value equipment with underground bunkers and hardened shelters — an area in which analysts say adversaries like China have invested far more extensively.

“People are asking the valid question: What on earth was this half-billion dollar airplane doing sitting right out in the open, where commercial satellite imagery can see exactly where it was and target a weapon onto that, which apparently they did,” said Tom Shugart, a retired Navy submarine officer and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security’s Defense Program. “I think there’s really good questions being asked about, what are we doing here? And the bigger question is, why wasn’t it already done?”

As missiles continue to hit U.S. bases in the Middle East, the Pentagon is moving to ramp up investment in base hardening. As reported by The War Zone, which has been writing about gaps in infrastructure hardening and aircraft protection for years, March saw the publication of multiple contracting solicitations seeking near-term and long-term solutions, including a Space Force call for “prefabricated transportable bunkers” and a seven-year task order for infrastructure work at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called for “more and more bunkers,” saying during a trip to the Middle East that their rapid fielding was a “theater priority,” as also reported by TWZ.

While the emphasis thus far has been on bunkers, Shugart said the protection gap can be seen more clearly in hardened aircraft shelters, which are visible and countable via commercial imagery. A paper, “Concrete Sky,” that he coauthored last year with Timothy Walton of the Hudson Institute found that in the Indo-Pacific, China had more than doubled its number of hardened aircraft shelters between 2010 and 2020, reaching a total of about 800, while the U.S. and its allies had built just two in the same timeframe.

The paper particularly highlights as “foolish” the decision not to build hardened aircraft shelters for the coming fleet of B-21 bombers — describing the shelters as a $30 million investment to protect aircraft worth $600 million apiece.

In recent years, the Army Corps of Engineers has worked to make modest improvements to existing bunkers. Military Times reported in 2024 on reinforcement work including better blast doors intended to protect troops inside from traumatic brain injuries caused by overpressure.

But calls to protect aircraft have been dampened in the past by concerns from leaders about the value of doing so. Shugart noted that Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, then commander of Pacific Air Forces and now chief of staff of the Air Force, said in 2023 that he wasn’t “a big fan of hardening infrastructure.”

“You saw what we did to the Iraqi Air Force and their hardened aircraft shelters,” he said, referring to U.S. strikes during the Gulf War. “They’re not so hard when you put a 2,000-pound bomb right through the roof.”

If that was true at the time, Shugart said, it might not be as true anymore.

While one missile with submunitions may be able to wipe out multiple aircraft on the ground, it would take one missile to destroy a single hardened aircraft shelter, he said. In that scenario, he estimates the missile would cost $20 million; the shelter, $5 million.

“At that point, you’re at least on the right side of the cost curve,” he said.

Moreover, he added, the Air Force’s own think tanks have also pushed for better air base protection. A paper published in 2024 by J. Michael Dahm, a fellow at the Air Force’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, posited that air base defenses had “atrophied” over the last three decades and budgeting for resilient basing had actually declined.

“To date, neither Congress nor the Department of Defense (DOD) have adequately funded air base defense requirements. Without an immediate reversal of this trend, the Air Force may be unable to generate operationally relevant combat airpower in a near peer conflict, which would likely have devastating impacts on joint and combined campaigns,” Dahm wrote. “Inadequate air base defense also strains alliances, incentivizes potential aggressors, and may ultimately result in a strategic loss that has existential consequences for the United States and its allies.”

The Air Force does have a five-year contract for new Expedient Small Asset Protection shelters as part of its Agile Combat Employment strategy — “hangars in a box” for small aircraft or vehicles. It’s not clear, though, how many have been purchased and deployed since the first one was unveiled at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, in 2023.

Walton, at the Hudson Institute, said past assumptions about hardened shelter space constraints — that they’re mainly for fighters and wouldn’t fit a large plane like the AWACS to begin with — may not hold true. He pointed to the large shelters at Andersen that have been constructed for typhoon protection, saying that could be a starting point design for sheltering the biggest and most costly warfighting assets.

“This would give you an ability to put it in the large aircraft shelter, close the doors and have it not be vulnerable to drones or submission or weapons that are coming up top,” he said. “It could still be probably penetrated by certain classes of unitary warheads, but it helps.”

Both Walton and Shugart emphasized that the threat to U.S. aircraft on the tarmac shouldn’t be considered limited to the Indo-Pacific or the Middle East. With the rise of unmanned aircraft crossing onto military installations, the threat is domestic, too, they said.

“There’s been a slate over the past years of incursions of U.S. airfields and other critical infrastructure, even within the contiguous United States; incursions by drones,” Walton said. “And it exposes how vulnerable U.S. aircraft are to attack at airfields.”

Another Hudson Institute analysis called for 12 small hardened aircraft shelters and three large ones per airfield in the Pacific, where it focused, estimating between $9 billion and $10.5 billion to shore up resilient structures and passive defenses.

President Donald Trump on Monday told reporters that Iran could be taken out in one night, “and that night might be tomorrow night,” warning Tehran it had to make a deal by Tuesday night or face wider bombing raids.

Trump had earlier vowed to enforce a Tuesday night deadline for Iran to agree to a ceasefire deal or face broad attacks on power plants and other critical infrastructure. Trump is demanding Iran forswear nuclear weapons and reopen the Strait of Hormuz oil transit waterway.

“The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night,” Trump said during a White House press conference.

“I hope I don’t have to do it,” Trump said.

Critics have said Trump would be committing war crimes if the U.S. attacked civilian power plants, a point that Trump dismissed on Monday.

“I’m not worried about it. You know what’s a war crime? Having a nuclear weapon,” Trump said earlier on Monday during an Easter egg event for children on the White House South Lawn.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the briefing that the largest volume of strikes since day one of the operation against Iran would take place on Monday and warned Tuesday would have even more.

Rescue operation

Trump, joined by Hegseth and other top national security advisers, described in detail the weekend U.S. operation to recover a downed American airman who hid in mountainous Iranian terrain and eluded capture by Iranian forces.

He said the airman, identified only by “Dude 44 Bravo,” kept climbing higher in order to improve the chances for recovery. He said the airman was seen moving via an unidentified U.S. camera link. “It was like finding a needle in a haystack,” Trump said.

Hundreds of American forces were involved in the search and recovery mission and to prevent the Iranians from finding him first, he said.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who joined Trump at the event, said the agency had engaged in a “deception campaign” to convince the Iranians the airman was somewhere else.

Ratcliffe said that on Saturday morning the CIA got confirmation “one of America’s best and bravest was alive and concealed in a mountain crevice, still invisible to the enemy, but not to the CIA.”

The pilot, shot down on Friday, was recovered on Sunday morning.

US special forces rescue second F-15 airman from Iran

“In a breathtaking show of skill and precision, lethality and force, America’s military descended on the area, the real area, engaged the enemy, rescued the stranded officer, destroyed all threats and exited Iranian territory while taking no casualties of any kind,” Trump said.

Hegseth said the lost airman used an emergency transponder to show where he was and his first message was: “God is good.”

General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the recovered airman had been the “back seater” on the downed aircraft.

“In this case, the back seater’s absolute commitment to surviving made much of our efforts possible,” Caine said.

‘Willing to suffer’

Trump said, without providing evidence, that the United States has “numerous intercepts” from Iranian civilians urging the U.S. not to let up in trying to dislodge the Iranian government from power.

“They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom,” Trump said.

Speaking to reporters earlier at a White House Easter event, Trump said a proposal offered by Iran was inadequate.

“They made a proposal, and it’s a significant proposal. It’s a significant step. It’s not good enough,” Trump told reporters during the event.

Trump said the five-week conflict could end quickly if Iran does “what they have to do.”

“They have to do certain things. They know that, they’ve been negotiating I think in good faith,” he said.

The second-youngest living Medal of Honor recipient, who served as an active-duty Marine during the war in Afghanistan, graduated from the service’s Basic Reconnaissance Course on Friday at Camp Pendleton, according to a Facebook post from Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Carlos A. Ruiz.

Dakota Meyer, 37, was presented the Medal of Honor in 2011 by President Barack Obama for heroism in Afghanistan. Meyer reenlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in April 2025 because he believed he “had more to give,” he stated previously.

On Friday, Meyer earned the 0321 Military Occupational Specialty, the MOS designation for Reconnaissance Marine.

The Basic Reconnaissance Course is a demanding 12-week program “designed to train Marines in the tactics, techniques, and procedures of amphibious reconnaissance operations,” according to the service.

Meyer’s BRC graduation comes over 15 years after actions in Afghanistan that would earn him the nation’s highest award for combat valor.

On Sept. 8, 2009, Meyer, a 21-year-old infantryman at the time, repeatedly entered an enemy ambush zone during the Battle of Ganjgal to rescue wounded comrades and recover the bodies of fallen service members, according to a Pentagon release. His actions were credited with saving 13 Americans and 23 Afghan personnel.

Meyer left the service in 2010 and worked briefly in construction before becoming a volunteer firefighter and a veterans advocate.

He later became a vocal critic of the Biden administration for its disordered withdrawal from Afghanistan. During his reenlistment ceremony hosted by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he told reporters he would stay out of politics while in uniform.

“The great part about being in the reserves is I’m still a citizen when I’m not on orders,” he said. “When I’m on orders I’ll comply obviously with whatever the standard is.”

During the ceremony, Hegseth, who is reportedly close with Meyer, said his reenlistment will inspire young people across the country.

“[We’re doing] this as big as we can because I want the American people, I want your fellow Marines [and] I want other service members to look at [your] example and [know] you’re never too old, you’re never too experienced [and] you’ve never done too much to contribute, and I salute you,” Hegseth said.

Sgt. Maj. Ruiz noted in the Friday post that this graduating class is one of the final before a transition in the reconnaissance training progression aligning with the 2030 Force Design objectives.

Monumental battles between Allied and German forces in Holland, Belgium, eastern France, northern Italy and along Germany’s western frontier were still being waged when two American men — Frederick Ayer Jr. and Donald L. Daughters — stepped foot upon the pavement of the newly liberated Paris in August 1944.

“The reality of the men’s identities and their reason for traveling to newly liberated Paris would likely have surprised even the most observant and intuitive onlooker,” writes author and historian Stephen Harding in his latest, “G.I. G-Men.”

The men were not military intelligence officers, nor from the vaunted Office of Strategic Services helmed by William Joseph “Wild Bill” Donovan. They were, in fact, special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation tasked with rooting out American citizens who had collaborated with the Nazis or Italian Fascists.

Harding spoke with Military Times regarding his impeccably researched, superbly paced, stranger-than-fiction book, “G.I. G-Men,” and how and why “there have always been Americans willing to sell out America for money, power or a combination of all of those things.”

Military Times: For most Americans, the war ends on May 8 and Sept. 2, 1945, respectively. There’s a decided lack of awareness or understanding about the days, weeks, months — even years following the end of World War II. Can you talk about the work of the Army Liaison Unit in 1944 and in the immediate aftermath of the war?

Stephen Harding: The Army Liaison Unit was set up by the FBI specifically to track down and interrogate American citizens who had remained in Axis territory or Axis-controlled territory during the war and were suspected of collaborating with either the Italian fascists or the Nazis — either through radio or print propaganda or by, in some cases, providing money to them or simply sleeping with Germans or Italian fascists.

The program was an outgrowth of the FBI called the special intelligence service, the SIS, which [J. Edgar] Hoover had started as a way for FBI agents to operate in Central and South America in a counterintelligence role. Unfortunately, when they first started the program, he was sending agents down there who didn’t speak Portuguese or Spanish, so they kind of stood out.

Pretty quickly after America got into the war, [Hoover] sent an agent named Art Thurston to London. Thurston worked very closely with MI6, Britain’s Foreign Intelligence Service, which was already formulating plans to do the same thing for British subjects. Hoover thought this was a great idea, and he especially wanted to edge out Donovan because Hoover thought the OSS was a bunch of amateurs who were going to not do the job well.

All of these agents who were going to go to Europe needed to speak at least one European language fluently, not out of a Berlitz school or anything else. They had to be almost native speakers, and a couple of them were in the sense that of the roughly 20 guys who ended up going to Europe before the program ended, several of them had grown up in Europe or had been born in the United States of immigrant parents and spoke the language in the in the house.

The first agent sent overseas was a guy named Frank Amprim, who was the son of Italian immigrants. He had been a lawyer in Michigan and after Pearl Harbor he joined the FBI. He had no military background at all, however, and Hoover’s idea was that, because the war in Europe was ongoing, he wanted these guys to work under Army cover — meaning they were going to wear Army uniforms, have Army ranks. To do that, they needed to know something about the Army. So Amprim was the guinea pig.

In the meantime, as Amprim’s crossing North Africa, Hoover wants to put together a team that will operate in continental Europe after the Allied invasion of occupied Europe. The person he chooses to lead this effort is a gentleman named Frederick Ayer and his second in command, Don Daughters.

MT: When one thinks of collaborators, you think of Lord Haw Haw, Tokyo Rose, Coco Chanel. Never the Americans. What did you discover in “G.I. G-Men” that contradicts this notion?

Harding: I think what people have to remember is — and this is something we sort of very conveniently forgot — in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War there were thousands of Americans who were pro-Nazi or pro Italian Fascist. It was a huge movement in the United States, and it was supported by the German government. There were huge rallies at Madison Square Garden that attracted 10-12,000 people, many of them wearing Nazi style uniforms the swastikas. There were huge banners flying from the upper galleries with pictures of [Adolf] Hitler and George Washington. Fascism was a popular idea in the United States in the mid to late 30s.

A lot of Americans who ended up in the U.S. military during the war very conveniently forgot that they had been fascists before the war. And so you might have been a person of German heritage who had been a pro-fascist right up until you ended up going to shore on D-Day.

The interesting thing was, a lot of these files I had to do FOIA requests, both with the National Archives and with the FBI. The FBI was saying, “Well, all this stuff has been sent to the National Archives.” Not true. And unfortunately, when the first Trump administration existed, it started making a lot of stuff in the National Archives harder to get to. I was finding files on people that the FBI had investigated with the ALU that were still classified — and that was all still 75 years after the fact. I started wondering why these files are classified, and some of them were newly classified, meaning within months, in some cases, before I got to them.

These files weren’t redacted in 1945. Interestingly enough, a lot of the stuff that got newly classified at the National Archives was not classified at the U.K. National Archives. It wasn’t classified in the French archives either. I would have a document that I got from the U.S. National Archives that was redacted to the point that the only thing that wasn’t redacted was the heading. I found the same document in the U.K. with absolutely no redaction.

MT: From your research, how many American collaborators were there?

Harding: I had a list that I put together of about 135 people that the ALU either intensely investigated or looked at in a documentary sort of way. Now, they weren’t all German collaborators. There were a lot of French communists and French socialists, and remember, the French Communist Party played a huge role in the French Resistance against the Germans. There was a lot of politics involved.

MT: You write in the acknowledgements that you went into something you call “research rapture.” What was your favorite tidbit while working on “G.I. G-Men”?

Harding: I found out a lot of interesting little things, but there was this German spy who actually operated in the United States. He was one of the more successful. A successful spy should be invisible, both in looks and actions. And Ignatz T. Griebl, who was a doctor and ran a practice in the German parts of New York City. He was one of the most effective spies the Germans had until he split because he was under suspicion.

But it’s interesting, because he was successful despite the fact that he was a serial womanizer. This gentleman was prolific in his affairs, and he was married. He was having affairs with everybody and their sister and yet he was the mousiest looking guy you could ever imagine, in terms of the being invisible. Physically, you’d walk right by this guy and not notice him.

He had several sub-agents working for him, and I found that interesting. He eventually escaped from the United States, and he kept his head down in Austria for all of the war before he got popped by the ALU. He was brought into be interrogated but then he disappeared. He was never charged. He was interrogated, but never charged, and he was never found.

They did look for him because there was some thought that he’d gone over the Soviets. A lot of the files that I found in the U.S. National Archives on Griebl were hugely redacted. Why? What’s the story on that? That’s the kind of thing that catches my attention.

U.S. special forces rescued a downed airman in Iran in a complex operation that averted a potential crisis for President Donald Trump, as the war entered its sixth week with little sign of progress in diplomatic efforts for a resolution.

Trump announced the rescue in the early hours of Sunday in a social media post that described the operation, in a mountainous area of Iran, as “one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History.”

The airman, the weapons officer of an F-15 jet shot down on Friday, was wounded but “will be just fine,” Trump said in a message on X posted by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. The pilot of the aircraft was rescued on Friday.

A U.S. official said the operation, which Israel said it had assisted, involved dozens of military aircraft and encountered fierce resistance from Iranian forces.

Iran’s military said several U.S. aircraft were destroyed during the operation, including two military transport planes and two Black Hawk helicopters. Footage posted on social media showed burned out aircraft wreckage, which Reuters verified was in the area.

RESCUE INVOLVED ‘DECEPTION CAMPAIGN’

A U.S. official told Reuters U.S. forces had to destroy at least one of the aircraft used in the rescue mission because it had malfunctioned.

The Wall Street Journal reported that two specially equipped MC-130Js aircraft used to carry out covert infiltrations and to remove troops from beyond enemy lines were blown up by U.S. forces after malfunctioning.

A senior administration official in Washington said the rescue had involved a CIA deception campaign spreading word inside Iran that U.S. forces had already found the missing airman and were moving him on the ground for exfiltration out of the country.

While the Iranians were confused and uncertain of what was happening, the missing weapons officer was located inside a mountain crevice and rescued, the official said in a statement.

The rescue of the airman offered some good news for Trump, who has faced mounting pressure over a war that has sparked a global energy crisis and threatens lasting damage to the world economy.

On Saturday, he renewed a threat to intensify attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure, saying it had 48 hours to open up shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz, the vital conduit for around a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas supply, which has been largely shut down.

In an expletive-laden social media post on Sunday, Trump said Iran must open the Strait “or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!”

Adding to the pressure, a senior Israeli defense official said Israel, which attacked a major petrochemicals facility on Saturday, was preparing to attack Iranian energy facilities within the next week, and was awaiting approval from Washington.

But despite the heavy damage to its military and civilian infrastructure by weeks of U.S. and Israeli attacks, Iran’s chokehold over Hormuz has given it a powerful weapon and Tehran showed no sign of complying with Trump’s demand.

It has continued to launch missile and drone attacks against Israel and on Sunday, it underlined its ability to hit U.S. allies in the Gulf by launching a drone attack on petrochemicals plants in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi.

The Revolutionary Guards warned that more attacks would follow if civilian targets in Iran were hit.

PEACE EFFORTS PROVE FRUITLESS

Opinion polls show the war is viewed with skepticism by a majority of Americans, with the risks to U.S. service personnel among their major concerns, along with regional stability and the impact on their own finances.

The war, which has spread into Lebanon, where Israel has resumed its campaign against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, has killed thousands, mainly in Iran and Lebanon, where a Lebanese soldier was killed on Sunday.

But efforts brokered by Pakistan to bring the two sides to an agreement have so far been fruitless. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Tehran demanded a permanent halt to the U.S. and Israeli campaign launched on Feb. 28.

“What we care about are the terms of a conclusive and lasting END to the illegal war that is imposed on us,” he said in a message on X.

As the war has continued, the damage to vital economic infrastructure in Iran and neighboring Gulf countries has mounted and the impact is set to be felt months and even years after the fighting ends.

With oil coming through Hormuz down to a trickle, ministers from OPEC oil-producing countries were due to meet on Sunday. But the blockade of the Strait and the damage to infrastructure meant an immediate boost to oil production was not considered possible.

Israel and the U.S. have hit military and civilian infrastructure across Iran, including areas near its Bushehr nuclear plant, which Iran said posed a serious risk of radioactive contamination.

But they have not managed to suppress Iran’s ability to strike back and Iranian drone attacks have continued against industrial infrastructure in the Gulf including oil facilities, a major aluminum plant and petrochemical sites in recent days.

Earlier Iran also attacked an Israel-affiliated vessel with a drone in the Strait, setting the ship on fire, state media said, citing the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ navy.

A U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II reportedly crashed Friday near the Strait of Hormuz at around the same time an F-15E fighter jet was shot down in Iran.

The A-10 pilot was subsequently rescued, two U.S. officials told The New York Times.

Iranian state media stated the A-10 was targeted in southern waters near the strait.

Reports of the A-10 going down Friday followed confirmation that a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle had been shot down by enemy fire.

One of two F-15E crew members had reportedly been rescued as of Friday afternoon. A search for the second crew member was ongoing.

Search-and-rescue efforts were launched in the immediate aftermath of the fighter jet crash, with videos circulating on social media appearing to show a low-flying U.S. Air Force HC-130 refueling a pair of HH-60G Pave Hawks over Iran.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday told Military Times “the president has been briefed” on the downed U.S. F-15E fighter jet.

The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command have not yet responded to requests for comment.

Iranian state media on Friday shared images of aircraft debris alongside claims that Iran had downed a U.S. F-35 fighter jet.

However, images of the aircraft’s tailfin, specifically the red stripe on its vertical stabilizer, are consistent with markings used by the 494th Fighter Squadron, 48th Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath.

Iran also shared an image of an Advanced Concept Ejection Seat allegedly from the shot down F-15E.

The shoot-down of the F-15E marks the first time during Operation Epic Fury that a manned U.S. aircraft has been brought down by enemy fire.

A U.S. F-35 fighter jet was reportedly hit by enemy fire during a combat mission over Iran on March 19, but was able to make an emergency landing at a U.S. air base in the region.

Six U.S. airmen were killed on March 12 when their KC-135 refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq during combat operations.

On March 1, three U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets were shot down by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 in a friendly fire incident. All six F-15 crew members ejected and were safely recovered.

The A-10, meanwhile, has seen an increased role since the start of the Iran war. The attack aircraft has joined maritime interdiction operations, among other missions, along the southern edges of the conflict, targeting Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fast-attack watercraft in the Strait of Hormuz, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said last month.

Military Times reporter Michael Scanlon contributed to this report.

This is a developing story.

One of two U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle crew members shot down by enemy fire in Iran has been rescued, Israeli media first reported. U.S. officials confirmed the reports in statements to CBS News, Axios and Reuters.

A search for the second crew member is ongoing.

A multi-aircraft search-and-rescue effort for survivors was launched on Friday in the immediate aftermath of the engagement, with videos circulating on social media appearing to show a low-flying U.S. Air Force HC-130 refueling a pair of HH-60G Pave Hawks over Iran.

Israel’s N12 News first reported the rescue of the one crew member.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday told Military Times “the president has been briefed” on the downed U.S. F-15E fighter jet.

The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Iranian state media on Friday shared images of aircraft debris alongside claims that Iran had downed a U.S. F-35 fighter jet.

However, images of the aircraft’s tailfin, specifically the red stripe on its vertical stabilizer, are consistent with markings used by the 494th Fighter Squadron, 48th Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath.

Iran also shared an image of an Advanced Concept Ejection Seat allegedly from the shot down F-15E.

The shoot-down of the F-15E marks the first time during Operation Epic Fury that a manned U.S. aircraft has been brought down by enemy fire.

A U.S. F-35 fighter jet was reportedly hit by enemy fire during a combat mission over Iran on March 19, but was able to make an emergency landing at a U.S. air base in the region.

Six U.S. airmen were killed on March 12 when their KC-135 refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq during combat operations.

On March 1, three U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets were shot down by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 in a friendly fire incident. All six F-15 crew members ejected and were safely recovered.

A total of 13 U.S. service members have been killed during combat actions against Iran.

President Donald Trump on Friday requested a 10% cut in non-defense discretionary spending for fiscal 2027 and a massive $500 billion increase in defense spending, as the United States continues its war against Iran.

The 2027 budget request comes as the president faces risky choices abroad, with the administration sending U.S. service members to the Middle East, and a public at home feeling the economic crunch of skyrocketing gas prices due to the conflict.

The request ultimately requires approval by Congress, where disagreement over Trump’s spending decisions recently led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

The president’s budget also reflects the administration’s political priorities ahead of the 2026 midterm elections in November, when Trump’s Republicans hope to maintain their small majorities in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

The huge proposed surge in defense spending to $1.5 trillion, up from about $1 trillion in 2026, includes a 5-7% pay raise for military personnel at a time when thousands of service members are actively deployed.

The defense request will please defense hawks on Capitol Hill, but also highlights how Trump is trying to pay for his doubling-down on military pursuits, even after Republicans boosted defense spending last year in party-line legislation.

The Pentagon already requested $200 billion in extra funding to pay for the Iran war, but the White House has not yet officially made that request to Congress, where it is also likely to face scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties.

Other specific funding increases proposed by Trump include his controversial Golden Dome missile defense shield, money to build up critical mineral supplies for the defense industry and $65.8 billion to build 34 new combat and support ships.

Funds for shipbuilding, a priority for Trump since his first term, include initial funding for the so-called Trump-class battleship as well as submarines.

It is unclear how this new spending would impact the U.S. budget deficit because the projections were not included by the White House. The deficit is expected to grow slightly in fiscal 2026 to $1.853 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill often treat White House budget requests as suggestive, as appropriators try to negotiate behind the scenes to maintain their own legislative priorities. But Trump’s latest budget will likely add to the ongoing tension with congressional Democrats over funding federal programs that they see as important — and plan to campaign to protect — as the president seeks to cut federal programs.

“Savings are achieved by reducing or eliminating woke, weaponized, and wasteful programs, and by returning state and local responsibilities to their respective governments,” the White House said in a budget fact sheet.

This is a developing story.

A United States F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet has been shot down by enemy fire over Iran, U.S. officials confirmed.

One of the aircraft’s two crew members has been rescued, Israeli media first reported. U.S. officials confirmed the reports in statements to CBS News and Axios.

A search for the second crew member is ongoing.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Military Times “the president has been briefed” on the downed fighter jet.

The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Officials in Iran, meanwhile, called for the search and capture of any surviving crew members of the jet, according to reports by the semi-official ISNA news agency and the Young Journalists Club.

The governor of one of the Islamic Republic’s provinces stated that anyone who captures or kills the crew would receive a special commendation.

Video circulating on social media appeared to show a low-flying U.S. Air Force HC-130 refueling a pair of HH-60G Pave Hawks over Iran while conducting a search for the downed crew.

Iranian state media on Friday shared images of aircraft debris alongside claims that Iran had downed a U.S. F-35 fighter jet.

However, images of the aircraft’s tailfin, specifically the red stripe on its vertical stabilizer, are consistent with markings used by the 494th Fighter Squadron, 48th Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath.

Iran also shared an image of an Advanced Concept Ejection Seat allegedly from the shot down F-15E.

The search-and-rescue effort inside Iran during an ongoing conflict greatly raises the stakes for the United States.

U.S. Central Command on Tuesday issued a statement denying claims that “Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps downed an ‘enemy’ fighter jet over Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz.”

“All U.S. fighter aircraft are accounted for,” the CENTCOM statement read. “Iran’s IRGC has made the same false claim at least half a dozen times.”

The location of the downed jet has not yet been confirmed.

The shoot-down marks the first time during Operation Epic Fury that a manned U.S. aircraft has been brought down by enemy fire.

A U.S. F-35 fighter jet was reportedly hit by enemy fire during a combat mission over Iran on March 19, but was able to make an emergency landing at a U.S. air base in the region.

Six U.S. airmen were killed on March 12 when their KC-135 refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq during combat operations.

On March 1, three U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets were shot down by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 in a friendly fire incident. All six F-15 crew members ejected and were safely recovered.

A total of 13 U.S. service members have been killed during combat actions against Iran.

As of March 31, 348 U.S. personnel have been wounded, Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, U.S. Central Command spokesperson, told DefenseScoop. Of those injured, the majority have since returned to duty. Six remain seriously wounded.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday signed a directive allowing service members to request permission to carry privately owned firearms on military installations while off duty, the Pentagon said in a statement.

“The War Department’s uniformed service members are trained at the highest and unwavering standards. These warfighters — entrusted with the safety of our nation — are no less entitled to exercise their God-given right to keep and bear arms than any other American,” Hegseth announced in a video posted to social media.

The memorandum instructed installation commanders to consider requests with a “presumption of approval,” reversing what Hegseth described as a system that made it “virtually impossible for troops to carry or store personal firearms in accordance with state laws, the Pentagon said in a statement on Thursday.

The policy builds on existing authority under the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, the Pentagon said, and the new guidance directs Pentagon officials to update regulations to formalize the process for approvals.

Hegseth framed the move as a constitutional issue and in response to recent active-shooter situations on military installations. He specifically cited a 2019 attack at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, where three people were killed and eight others injured; a 2025 shooting that wounded five soldiers at Fort Stewart in Georgia; and a 2026 shooting at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico that killed one person and injured another.

In emergencies like those, he said, “minutes are a lifetime, and our service members have the courage and training to make those precious, short minutes count.”

The directive also applies to personnel working at the Pentagon, where the Pentagon Force Protection Agency must adopt the same presumption of approval. However, the policy does not allow personal to carry inside the building itself, instead permitting storage of the firearms in vehicles on Pentagon grounds.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday asked U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George to step down and retire effective immediately, a Pentagon official told Military Times.

The abrupt move, one of three significant changes made by Hegseth the same day, cuts short George’s tenure, which began in September 2023, well before the end of the typical four-year term.

The Pentagon intends to replace him with a leader aligned with Hegseth and President Donald Trump’s vision for the Army, the official added. They did not specify what this vision entails.

George has more than four decades of military service, according to the Army. He was commissioned as an infantry officer from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1988 and served in the Gulf War, with subsequent deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that the current vice chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Christopher LaNeve, will replace George on an interim basis.

Parnell asserted that LaNeve is “a battle-tested leader with decades of operational experience and is completely trusted by Secretary Hegseth to carry out the vision of this administration without fault.”

The Department of Defense said it “has nothing further to provide at the moment.”

Hegseth on Thursday also removed Gen. David Horne, a former Army Ranger who had been overseeing the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, and Maj. Gen. William Green, the Army chief of chaplains, a Pentagon official confirmed to Military Times.

Since taking office, Hegseth has fired over a dozen generals and admirals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti.

The latest shakeup coincides with the Pentagon’s deployment of thousands of troops from the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East, as the war with Iran enters its fifth week.

The ouster was first reported by CBS News.

The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford returned to sea Thursday after a five-day port call in Split, Croatia, the service announced.

The stop, which followed a brief visit to Naval Support Activity Souda Bay in Crete, comes as the Navy’s largest carrier has been plagued by maintenance issues that interrupted the ship’s participation in combat operations against Iran.

A non-combat fire in the ship’s laundry room on March 12 injured multiple sailors, caused smoke-related issues among hundreds of personnel and damaged 100 sleeping berths.

The Ford has also experienced well-documented issues with its plumbing system, with the carrier’s water transport and disposal vacuum causing repeated clogs among the ship’s 650 toilets.

The release did not specify whether the Ford would be returning to combat operations as part of Operation Epic Fury.

“Gerald R. Ford remains poised for full mission tasking in support of national objectives in any area of operation,” the release stated.

The ship has now been deployed for more than nine months, having departed from its homeport of Norfolk, Virginia, on June 24, 2025. It has conducted operations in the Arctic Circle, Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea during that span.

Speaking Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle said the carrier is likely to reach 11 months deployed by the time it returns home, potentially eclipsing the recent at-sea high of 341 days set by the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush and its strike group departed from Naval Station Norfolk on Tuesday, meanwhile, for a regularly scheduled deployment.

Whether the carrier Bush will relieve the Ford or act as an additional force amid ongoing combat operations has not been announced.

As the Ford underwent maintenance in port, sailors were able to disembark and enjoy local attractions, the release stated. Rear Adm. Paul Lanzilotta, commander of Carrier Strike Group 12, was joined by other group commanders in meeting with the U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, Nicole McGraw, the release stated.

The carrier Ford is the flagship of Carrier Strike Group 12, which includes the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill, Destroyer Squadron 2 and the embarked Carrier Air Wing 8.

President Donald Trump is set to unveil a $1.5 trillion defense budget request for the next fiscal year on Friday, by far the largest year-over-year increase in defense spending in the post-World War Two era.

Funding for Trump’s marquee but controversial $185 billion “Golden Dome” missile defense shield is expected to be included in the budget request as well as Lockheed Martin F-35 jets and warships.

Procurement of Virginia-class submarines made by General Dynamics, and Huntington Ingalls Industries as well as other top shipbuilding priorities is expected.

Last year, Trump asked Congress for a national defense budget of $892.6 billion then added $150 billion through a supplemental budget request, sending the total price tag over $1 trillion for the first time in history.

While the budget request framework for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2027 is set to be unveiled on Friday, a Pentagon official said more details on the defense budget will be announced on April 21.

Earlier this year, the administration was contemplating whether the $1.5 trillion budget request could be in the form of a $900 billion national security budget, with a $400 billion to $600 billion additional request, similar to the structure used in 2026.

The administration plans to use funds for more weapons production in the hopes of deterring Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region and to rebuild weapons stocks depleted by conflicts in Israel, Iran and Ukraine.

The budget request will be debated in Congress in the coming weeks and months.

In a weekend address to his troops as news headlines trumpeted the possibility of upcoming combat deployments, the three-star head of Marine Corps Reserve command had a message: Get your cammies ready.

In a March 26 message on his official letterhead, Lt. Gen. Leonard F. Anderson IV asked his troops to consider whether they were ready for the possibility of being called up in the Iran war.

“I ask you directly: Are you truly ready to deploy, fight, and win? Are your skills sharp, your standards high, and your gear prepared for immediate movement?” he wrote. “Is your desert MARPAT readily available, is your gear packed and ready to pick up and move, or is it stored away in a corner of your home? Are your family’s affairs in order?”

These questions, he continued, were about readiness.

“When the call comes, readiness will be assumed, not questioned,” he wrote. “Your readiness is not a declaration; it is a daily commitment.”

The letter made a stir as it circulated on social media channels, with some posters speculating that it was a fake and others questioning its meaning.

“Sounds like a warning order,” one user wrote on LinkedIn.

In an exclusive interview with Military Times on Thursday, Anderson said he hadn’t become aware until a few days prior that his letter, which he confirmed authentic, was creating a stir.

His handwritten postscript — “Fight’s On!” — was, he said, the slogan of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 312, his old squadron where he flew the F/A-18C Hornet.

“I just felt at a time on the planet and where we are as a force in the Marine Corps, it was just time for a reminder to the reserve force to be ready. And I wanted to get that message out as widely as possible,” he said. “I owe it to not only the Marines to make sure that they’re ready, but to their families, their parents, their wives, whatever it might be, if a reservist is activated and going forward.

“It’s my responsibility as the commander of Marine Forces Reserve to make sure that they are trained, equipped and prepared, and their families are prepared to put them forward. If I didn’t do that, if I wasn’t reminding the force to be ready, I’d be failing as a commander.”

Since the U.S. began strikes on Iran Feb. 28, the prospect of a longer fight involving ground troops has been the subject of intense speculation.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to rule out a boots-on-the-ground scenario early in the assault, saying he did not want to limit military options. The Pentagon has reportedly begun planning for ground operations lasting weeks, and U.S. troops on ships and aircraft continue to pour into the region, at the ready for a major operation.

Anderson said the response he’s seen to his letter has been “overwhelmingly positive.”

“I have not … dived down into the long Reddit chains to dwell on some of the negative comments there,” he said, adding, “I don’t think there was a question out there from the majority of the reserve force that, yes, we should be ready.”

While most of the roughly 33,600 Marine reservists are typically in a drilling status, holding down civilian jobs while maintaining readiness in a contingency, recent conflicts have seen the rapid activation of Reserve forces.

Reserve forces responded immediately in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and piloted the first fixed-wing aircraft into Afghan airspace, according to Air Force Reserve Command. Likewise, Reserve units were on the ground in the Middle East for months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Formally, full mobilization of the Reserves required a declaration of war or a national emergency by Congress. Partial mobilization of up to one million reservists for up to two years can be triggered by a presidential national emergency declaration.

An additional authority enables the president to call up 200,000 members of the Selected Reserve and up to 30,000 members of the Individual Ready Reserve — those who have recently left active duty — for up to a year.

The Iran conflict has also prompted speculation about the return to military conscription, a process that would require an act of Congress and, in ideal conditions, take the better part of a year to set in motion.

Anderson’s message emphasizes that readiness for drilling troops “is not a theoretical exercise.”

“Our forces are currently engaged in operations connected to Iran and are positioned to preserve stability in the Western Hemisphere,” he wrote. “Our enemies get a vote, and mass mobilization could become reality. We are operating in this environment now. History demands our readiness today, tomorrow, and every day.”

Anderson, who also commands Marine Forces South, is a career Hornet pilot and graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School, or TOPGUN, who served as a member of the Blue Angels demonstration team from 2002-2004.

He deployed twice to Iraq and Qatar in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, the coalition fight against ISIS. He has said the release of the original Top Gun film in 1986 influenced his decision to join the Marine Corps.

“Check your readiness,” Anderson wrote in the conclusion to his message. “Tighten your standards. Prepare your family.”

For the past century, the weapon of choice for inflicting mass causalities has been artillery. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, however, that has given way to something higher tech and cheaper — drones.

Haunting Russian FPV drone footage that they themselves have uploaded to the internet shows the hum of drones as they stalk their human prey — civilians who find themselves caught in the quagmire of war.

“They’re talking about hunting humans,” former Navy pilot Ken Harbaugh told Military Times. “They’re talking about it as a kind of flex, and they post these images on Telegram, and they share them around. … It’s not collateral damage. Civilians are the targets. Little old ladies walking back from the market with shopping bags under their arms. They’re the targets.”

While just 17 minutes, “Drone Hunters of Kherson” displays the adaptability of this new war landscape, as Ukrainian counter-drone units patrol on foot to protect the people of Kherson and Odessa from Russian attacks.

The documentary follows Harbaugh — the first American to embed with the elite 11th “M. Hrushevskyi” Brigade, the 34th Coastal Defense Brigade and the 30th Marine Corps — as he takes viewers into what he describes as “a blend of trench warfare and the Terminator.”

Ukraine is, as the documentary puts it, ground zero of 21st century drone warfare, with Russia rewriting the rules of modern combat.

Harbaugh, alongside former U.S. representative Denver Riggleman, who serves as an executive producer of the film, argue that the United States is woefully unprepared for the new landscape of warfare — starting with procurement and adaptability.

“We don’t have an answer for it,” said Harbaugh. “The public is barely even aware of the threat. They know what drones are, but they do not know about their offensive capabilities and just how cheap and ubiquitous they are and how easily they can be turned into weapons.”

Both men are witnesses to what Harbaugh termed the “compressed the innovation cycle.”

“I have seen the innovation cycle at the front in Ukraine occur in a matter — I’m not exaggerating — of hours, and I’ve seen triggering mechanisms for warheads that are about to be fitted to the next day’s drones being 3-D printed the night before based on the next day’s targets,” Harbaugh said.

These are Ukraine’s $1,000 interceptor drones the Pentagon wants to buy

“That kind of innovation, which takes hours or days in Ukraine, literally takes years in the United States when you go through the procurement process, the design iterations and all the various approvals … unless we adopt some of the Ukrainian approach to innovation, we’re never going to be able to adapt to a battlefield that changes by the day. We cannot have an innovation system that operates in timescales of years and decades responding to a battlefield that changes by the day.”

“Even with the biggest military budget in the world, we’re trying to catch up,” Riggleman added.

The documentary, which was filmed last fall, takes on new meaning as the United States enters its second month of war with Iran.

Since the United States and Israel began their joint offensive against Iran on Feb. 28, 13 service members have been killed in action and nearly 300 wounded during Operation Epic Fury.

Just last Friday, an Iranian missile and drone attack injured a dozen U.S. service members at Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia. Two of the 12 injuries are considered to be serious.

Pentagon acknowledges tough quest to counter Iranian drones

“I think the lack of preparedness was evident that the first U.S. service members killed was by a Shahed [drone],” Riggleman said. “When you’re looking at drone warfare, we should have been well ahead of the curve with a U.S. military the might that we have, and instead, we’re at the mercy of countries that had to adapt in real time in a wartime environment.”

In Ukraine, drones are being used not only by the Russians for specific terror missions, but are used to actually control the front lines — from surveillance to targeting.

“You have people underground living like [it’s] 1916, while you have fiber optic and radio-controlled drones buzzing around,” said Riggleman.

In the case of fiber optic drones, Ukraine must deploy foot patrols — placing its soldiers between the Russians and its civilians. Fiber optic drones cannot be jammed. They cannot be detected. There is no electromagnetic signature. It all runs through wire, “so you have to have people between the drone operator and the civilian targets,” said Harbaugh.

The best way right now to shoot down drones is with a Kalashnikov … or with a .50 cal,” said Riggleman. “I actually got to do that training, and even in a simulated environment, I was lucky to get 20 to 30%. These guys [have] got to be on target every time.”

The short but impactful film delivers a stark warning to America and its allies: one must adapt — and quickly — in order to survive.

A U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry, an airborne warning and control system, was among the aircraft damaged in a March 27 Iranian missile and drone attack on Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia — one of several strikes on the installation since Operation Epic Fury began Feb. 28.

Two weeks earlier, on March 13, five KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft were damaged on the flight line, two U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal, as reported by Military Times.

Since Feb. 28, Iran has struck radar systems, satellite communications and mission-critical aircraft at at least seven U.S. bases across Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The attacks have focused on infrastructure that U.S. forces depend on to detect threats, refuel aircraft and direct air operations in the region.

By late March, Iranian missile and drone launches had dropped more than 90% since the conflict began, according to U.S. Central Command. Meanwhile, the attacks that persist have zeroed in on radar sites, SATCOM terminals, tankers and now an AWACS.

Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, said the pattern points to deliberate targeting, rather than opportunism. The strikes are systematic and target three “distinct functional categories,” she said, including radar and communications infrastructure, aerial refueling tankers and now the AWACS.

“Each is a critical enabler of U.S. air operations,” Grieco told Defense News. “That’s not random. That’s a target set derived from an understanding of how U.S. airpower functions and where it is most exposed. The pattern suggests deliberate doctrine, or something close enough to it, not opportunism.”

Joe Costa, director of the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense program and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for plans and posture, said Iran’s targeting approach makes tactical sense.

“It’s much easier to hit stationary infrastructure on the ground than planes flying in the air,” Costa said. “The U.S. has a dynamic process to quickly reallocate global resources to mitigate risks to troops and the mission, but the real cost is the cumulative impacts this operation will have on long-term readiness for other U.S. priorities.

“The more assets we use and lose now, the less will be available later until maintenance cycles, repairs and new purchases are complete.”

Strikes on communications, missile defense infrastructure

Iran’s retaliatory campaign targeted communications infrastructure from the opening hours of the conflict.

On Feb. 28, an Iranian drone struck Naval Support Activity Bahrain, home of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. Satellite imagery later obtained by The New York Times showed damage to large SATCOM terminals at the installation.

Satellite imagery also confirmed damage to the AN/FPS-132 phased array early warning radar in Qatar, with at least one of the system’s three arrays struck in the opening days of the conflict, according to Planet Labs imagery obtained by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Similar strikes hit radar facilities at Al Ruwais and Al Sader in the UAE, according to satellite imagery reported by The War Zone.

Qatar purchased the AN/FPS-132 radar system from the U.S. in 2013 for $1.1 billion. The Iranian drones used to strike it cost an estimated $20,000 to $60,000 per unit.

CENTCOM and Space Force Public Affairs directed Defense News to previously released operational updates and declined to comment further about the strikes.

The targeting also extended to missile defense infrastructure.

Satellite imagery confirmed the AN/TPY-2 radar for a U.S. THAAD battery at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan was struck and apparently destroyed in the opening days of the conflict, later confirmed by a U.S. official. The AN/TPY-2 is the primary sensor for the THAAD system. Without it, a THAAD battery cannot independently search for or track targets.

An already waning E-3 fleet

The damage to the Prince Sultan E-3 on March 27 comes at a time when the fleet is already stretched thin. The Air Force’s E-3 inventory has dwindled to 16 aircraft, the last delivered by Boeing in 1992.

In fiscal 2024, the fleet posted a mission-capable rate of 55.68%, according to Air Force data reported by Air & Space Forces Magazine, meaning fewer than nine aircraft were operationally available on any given day.

As of March 26, the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense program, which tracks U.S. military assets committed to Operation Epic Fury, estimated that between 66% and 75% of the available E-3 fleet was deployed to the theater.

Air & Space Forces Magazine, which reviewed imagery of the damaged aircraft, reported the extent of the damage likely renders the E-3 unrepairable.

Grieco said the near-term impact is real, but manageable. Prior to the damage, six aircraft were forward-deployed, and the theater was operating “at the margins of what continuous battle management coverage requires,” she told Defense News.

“Five aircraft means accepting either a single continuous orbit or periodic gaps when a second cannot be regularly sustained. In those gaps, the air picture degrades, air battle management is less effective and the theater’s ability to coordinate a complex, multi-aircraft operation becomes significantly more constrained,” she said.

“The United States could send another E-3 to the theater,” Grieco added, “but there are only 15 left in the entire fleet — and every one deployed to the Middle East is one less available everywhere else.”

Philip Sheers, an associate fellow in the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, said the loss emphasizes the burden on the airborne battle management fleet. About half of the 16-aircraft E-3 fleet is mission capable, he said, and with six in the Middle East, only two or three remain for other needs.

“There is very little slack remaining for flexibility and adjustment, and that places a huge burden on the remaining fleet as well as other systems to fill in the gaps, potentially at the expense of other priorities,” Sheers said.

A ‘massive alarm bell’ for air defense

A March 2026 report by the Center for a New American Security warned that proposed alternatives to dedicated airborne battle management aircraft, including space-based sensors and fighter-based networks, are either longer-term technological prospects, unproven at battle management or highly vulnerable, and should be treated as complements rather than substitutes.

Replacing the airborne capability will take time.

The Pentagon moved to cancel the E-7 Wedgetail program in its fiscal 2026 budget request, citing cost growth, from $588 million to $724 million per aircraft, as well as survivability concerns in contested airspace. Congress reversed the decision, preserving the program in the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act and blocking further E-3 retirements until enough Wedgetails are in service.

According to the Government Accountability Office, the E-7’s first flight has slipped to May 2027, with full operational capability now projected for the early 2030s. Space-based systems proposed by the Pentagon as a longer-term alternative face a similar timeline, according to Space Force officials.

Near-term, Sheers said the loss will increase operational strain on the remaining E-3s and could result in increased dependence on carrier-based E-2 Hawkeyes and the Australian E-7 Wedgetail.

“The demand for airborne sensing to manage cruise missile and drone threats is not going anywhere,” he told Defense News. “Medium and long-term, this all bodes very poorly for E-3 readiness and highlights the need for DoD and Congress to resource a real solution to the shrinking and aging E-3 fleet.”

The KC-135 tanker fleet faces parallel pressures. Already cannibalizing parts from the boneyard, the Cold War-era jets have absorbed repeated strikes.

In addition to the five KC-135s damaged at Prince Sultan on March 13, multiple refueling aircraft were also hit in the March 27 strike, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Costa pointed to broader implications that outlast the current conflict.

“The continued use and possible reallocation of high-demand, low-density assets like air defense systems will impact readiness for other U.S. global priorities,” Costa said. “That’s the real strategic tradeoff.”

Sheers said the conflict should serve as a warning well beyond the Middle East.

“The entirety of this conflict should be a massive alarm bell on the need for passive defenses, not just for U.S. forces in the Middle East, but over the homeland where drone incursions are increasingly frequent, and especially in the Indo-Pacific, where the Chinese missile threat is orders of magnitude larger and more difficult to suppress,” he told Defense News.

“Airbase vulnerability has been an issue for decades, and the drumbeat of independent analysis on this issue could not be louder,” he added. “If DoD doesn’t take these events as a wake-up call, we are setting ourselves up for disaster in a future great power conflict.”

Grieco suggested the effects may already be rippling through the campaign in ways that don’t show up in publicly available strike counts.

Those “less visible metrics” include tanker availability, AWACS coverage gaps and stockpile constraints, she said.

“If Iran’s strikes on radar and communications infrastructure are compressing warning times and creating gaps in the missile defense network, that’s operationally significant even if no additional aircraft are destroyed,” she said.

“The threshold for material degradation isn’t a single dramatic loss. It’s the accumulation of constraints that make the campaign more expensive, less flexible and less effective over time. We may already be past it in ways that won’t be visible until the campaign’s operational history is written.”

KYIV, Ukraine — While interceptor drones have become one of the most sought-after commodities of the Iran war, Ukrainian officials and defense practitioners are cautioning allies to recognize that the pace of today’s battlefield requires them to buy into an entirely new system of production alongside the endpoint weapon.

“Expertise is not a drone, but a skill, a strategy, a system where a drone is one part of the defense,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Reuters on Monday.

Ukraine now produces roughly 1,000 interceptor drones a day through hundreds of vetted manufacturers, deliberately dispersed so that no single strike can cripple the supply chain, Zelenskyy reported last month. The country has the technical capacity to double that figure, he said, but lacks the budget to do so.

While Ukraine has built that infrastructure gradually over the last few years, most countries now trying to integrate interceptors into the air defense have not invested in building the necessary logistical framework needed to effectively build, arm or deploy the cheap flyers.

Some countries have already learned this lesson the hard way.

After some Ukrainian companies built interceptor drone factories abroad without state approval, multiple buyers complained because the drones were sold without the warheads or expertise needed to operate them properly, Zelenskyy said on Friday, per Ukrainska Pravda.

“They had also been sold a certain number of interceptors — again without explosives,” Zelenskyy said about a European country he visited recently. “And they asked me whether we could send more operators. I said no.”

The bottleneck isn’t the interceptor itself, but the logistics infrastructure to produce and sustain them at scale, officials said.

“It seems there is still a misconception,” Artem Moroz, head of investor relations at Brave1, wrote on LinkedIn last month.

Brave1, Ukraine’s defense-tech accelerator, has worked with more than 500 defense startups since 2023 and now serves as the primary gateway for foreign governments seeking access to Ukrainian drone technology and production partnerships.

“Many believe Ukraine could simply send a few hundred interceptor drones to the Middle East and stop the Shahed drones currently hitting critical infrastructure,” Moroz said. “Drone warfare is far more complex than that.

“Yes, hardware matters. And Ukraine knows how to build drones at scale. But the real advantage lies in the infrastructure behind them.”

Companies launch drone-production innovations

The gap between buying a drone and building the system to sustain it is the market several defense companies are now racing to fill.

A handful of defense companies from Helsinki to San Francisco are offering the production line, the detection system and the supply infrastructure compressed into a portable unit that can be shipped anywhere to produce up to dozens of drones a day.

Sensofusion, a Finnish defense company founded in 2016, sells a full-cycle drone production chain as one of the latest innovators in this arena.

The company’s $2.4 million (€2.1 million Euros) Tactical Drone Factory is a standard 20-foot shipping container equipped with industrial 3D printers, an electronics assembly station and enough spares to run around the clock with a crew of three, producing up to 50 interceptor drones a day, according to the company.

What sets the Finnish system apart from its competitors is that it’s not just a factory: It ships as a package with Sensofusion’s Airfence radio-frequency detection and tracking platform, designed to detect a hostile drone, cue an interceptor and guide it to the kill — a full sensor-to-effector chain in a box.

The company says each interceptor costs less than $580 (€500) and is built to chase targets at speeds up to 310 mph (500 km/h).

Although Sensofusion boasts some of the highest production numbers on the market, it’s not the first company to market the concept of a portable all-in-one drone production hub.

Firestorm Labs' xCell system, the most tested U.S. equivalent to Sensofusion, uses two containers and works at a significantly slower pace by producing roughly 50 drones per month. Its newly announced SQUALL airframe is the first drone purpose-built to come off a mobile factory line, according to the company.

Founded in 2022, Firestorm’s biggest selling point is its testing and validation. The company holds a $100 million U.S. Air Force contract, has run field exercises with Air Force Special Operations Command and the Air National Guard and raised $47 million in Series A funding.

Per Se Systems, a French firm, operates in a middle ground by building micro drone factories on trailers — instead of shipping containers — that produce up to ten drones per hour on a generator with 19 hours of autonomous operation.

Per Se has been field-tested with 12 French Army regiments and is embedded in four active development projects with the French military, according to Army Recognition.

The drawbacks of production containers

Some logistics and strategy specialists say the all-in-one package wrapped into the portable factory concept ignores some critical battlefield questions that could render the projects useless.

A container full of printers, raw materials, sensitive electronics and proprietary design files concentrates exactly the kind of capability an adversary would want to destroy or capture, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis that identified several strategic vulnerabilities in frontline drone production.

And the problems compound from there.

Airframes can be printed, but the motors, batteries, electronic speed controllers, radios and sensors that make a drone combat-capable cannot, and those components must be trucked to the container through the same supply chains the factory is supposed to bypass.

Quality control under field conditions remains untested. Vibration, temperature swings, dust and intermittent power degrade the dimensional tolerances that 3D-printed parts require, and no company has demonstrated sustained production outside a controlled environment.

“Industrial resilience is combat power,” the CSIS experts concluded. “The next war will not be won by who initially fields the most drones, but by who sustains building them at scale.”

Several countries are catching on to the growing need to invest in drone production logistics.

Five NATO nations — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Poland — launched a joint initiative in February to develop affordable interceptor drones within a year under a program called LEAP, explicitly drawing on Ukrainian battlefield know-how to do it.

Ukraine’s experts say they are ready and willing to share their hard-earned lessons with allies, including the strategies to build a new layer of defense alongside the new weapons themselves.

“What Ukraine has built is a deep operational ecosystem across multiple domains, designed for conflicts where entirely new types of threats appear,” Brave1’s Moroz said.

“And ecosystems like this are extremely hard to copy,” he explained. “Even investing hundreds of billions or a trillion today would not easily replicate the experience, integration, and speed of iteration built over years of real combat.”

His final words of advice to allies?

“Drones are the tool. The infrastructure is the weapon.”

Editor’s note: This report contains discussion of suicide. Troops, veterans and family members experiencing suicidal thoughts can call the 24-hour Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 and dial 1, text 838255 or visit VeteransCrisisLine.net.

A Department of Defense suicide report found that 471 service members died by suicide in calendar year 2024, down from 531 in 2023, according to the report released Tuesday.

In the Department of Defense’s seventh-annual report on suicide in the military, the department found that even though the total force suicide rate decreased by around 11% for 2024’s calendar year, suicide rates have gradually increased in the active component from 2011 to 2024.

The department began collecting data on service members’ suicides in 2011 when the Defense Suicide Prevention Office was established. After accounting for age and sex, the increase in active component suicide rates from 2011 to 2024 reflects the increase in U.S. population suicide rates, the report says.

“Overall military suicide rates have not differed meaningfully from those of the U.S. population for most years since 2011,” the report states.

“This result indicates that the military suicide rates resemble trends in the country as a whole,” the report continues.

Like previous years, the majority of the active-duty service members who died by suicide in 2024 were enlisted males under the age of 30 — making up 64% of the service members who died by suicide during that year, according to the report.

Even as the active component’s suicides have steadily increased since 2011, the rate has decreased by around 16% from 2023 to 2024, the department found.

While the Reserve suicide rate decreased by approximately 14%, the National Guard suicide rate increased by around 13%. Suicide rates for the Reserve component, including the National Guard, have remained stable from 2011 to 2024.

Divorces or separated service members had a higher suicide rate compared to the overall active component between 2022 and 2024, while female service members who were 30 or older or a warrant or commissioned officer had a lower suicide rate.

The report states that firearm usage was the most common death by suicide method in the active component, Reserve and National Guard in 2024 and in the U.S. population in 2023. Poisoning was the leading method for attempted suicides, the report says.

“Recognizing that every death by suicide is a tragedy, the Department will continue to take action to support our men and women in uniform and their families, promote the wellbeing and resilience of the force, and take steps to prevent suicide in our military community,” the Tuesday statement announcing the report’s results reads.

To help service members in need of support, the Department of Defense has expanded the availability of clinical services, like telehealth, and service members can also self-refer for mental health evaluations as part of the Brandon Act, the report says.

In its 2025 suicide prevention campaign, the department focused on building connections across the military and reducing stigma, while the Defense Suicide Prevention Office uses social media as a way to reach service members.

The Defense Department has paired with the Department of Veterans Affairs, among other federal agencies, to increase publicly accessible mobile app usage that supports mental health, like Virtual Hope Box and Breathe2Relax.

For veterans, there has been a downward trend in suicides since 2018, shown by the February release of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ suicide prevention report for 2023. Over 6,000 veterans died by suicide in 2023, with roughly 17.5 veterans’ deaths per day, last month’s VA report found.

Citing “increased force protection measures,” visitors to boot camp graduation and family days at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, can expect federal agents checking on their lawful immigration status, according to an announcement posted on the base’s official web page.

NBC, which first reported the news, confirmed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel would be posted outside the base, which trains about 20,000 recruits annually and holds about 40 graduation ceremonies a year.

Officials with Marine Corps Headquarters, Parris Island and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not immediately respond to Marine Corps Times queries about the move.

“Due to MCRD’s increased Force Protection Measures, Federal Law Enforcement personnel will be present at installation access points to conduct enhanced screening and lawful immigration status inquiries during Recruit Family and Graduation Days,” the Corps’ message read.

NBC published a confirmation from the Marine Corps that this is “the first time in recent memory that federal law enforcement agencies have supported base access operations,” as well as DHS statements saying ICE planned no on-site arrests as part of its work.

Notably, Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, the Corps’ West Coast training base, has published no public statement or alert about a federal presence there.

This development comes amid national efforts to locate and deport immigrants without legal residency status, ushering mass deployments of ICE agents to cities including Minneapolis and Chicago and, most recently, ICE reinforcements at U.S. airports.

It also comes as bases shore up security in recognition of increased threats as the U.S. enters its second month of conflict with Iran. Earlier this month, for example, Fort Meade, Maryland, announced that it was ramping up vehicle inspections and closing the base off to rideshare and delivery drivers who didn’t have a Defense Department-issued ID card.

Some bases in the Pacific, likewise, have raised their alert status from Alpha to Bravo, indicating “an increased or more predictable threat of terrorist activity exists” in light of the Iran threat.

The move to check the legal immigration status of military family members contrasts with efforts of some to promote the military as a pathway for children of the undocumented to secure a safe haven for their parents. In January, the New York Times reported on an Oregon-based National Guard recruiter who promoted the unique DHS Parole in Place program — available to military family members — as a reason to join the military.

The program, as described on the DHS website, grants parole, or protection from deportation on a case-by-case basis for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” It’s specifically for family members of U.S. service members.

The Times reported that 11,500 military family members took advantage of the offer in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday that he made a secret wartime trip to the Middle East to meet with American troops fighting in Operation Epic Fury.

Hegseth, speaking during a press briefing at the Pentagon, asserted that morale is high and service members are determined to “finish the mission.” He declined to disclose the precise location of the bases that he toured over the weekend.

More than a month into the joint U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran, Hegseth warned that the coming days could prove pivotal, even as the broader course of the conflict remains unsettled.

“The upcoming days will be decisive. Iran knows that, and there’s nothing they can militarily do about it,” he said. “We have more and more options, and they have less.”

Pressed on whether the influx of newly arrived Marines and Army paratroopers might be used in ground operations on Iranian territory, Hegseth offered no indication either way.

“You can’t fight and win a war if you tell your adversary what you are willing to do or what you are not willing to do, to include boots on the ground,” Hegseth said. “Our adversary right now thinks there are 15 different ways we could come at them with boots on the ground and guess what? There are.”

He added: “If we needed to, we could execute those options on behalf of the President of the United States and this department. Or maybe we don’t have to use them at all.”

Limited missions, big risks: What a US ground fight in Iran could become

Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that B-52 Stratofortress bombers have begun conducting missions over Iran, taking advantage of U.S. forces gaining air superiority over the country.

Caine said the campaign remains focused on “interdicting and destroying the logistical and supply chains that feed” the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile, drone and naval production facilities, aiming to limit Tehran’s ability to replenish key weapons.

The Pentagon news conference began roughly one hour after President Donald Trump, in a post on Truth Social, lashed out at American allies for resisting his demands for help in the Middle East. He told nations who are facing fuel shortages to “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.”

The United States “won’t be there to help you anymore,” Trump said, adding that “Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your oil!”

The de facto shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz since the conflict began has sent global energy prices soaring, imperiling supply chains that under normal circumstances transport roughly a fifth of the world’s oil.

Hegseth echoed the president’s message in his Pentagon briefing, calling on America’s partners — specifically the United Kingdom — to assume a larger role.

“There are countries around the world who ought be prepared to step up on this critical waterway as well,” Hegseth said. “It’s not just the United States Navy. The last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad, Royal Navy that could be prepared to do things like that as well.”

An ammunition technician specialist at the School of Infantry West stationed at Camp Pendleton, California, has been federally indicted for stealing Javelin Missile Systems, AT4 antitank weapons and ammunition “so lethal that the public cannot legally possess it,” the District Court of Arizona charges.

Andrew Paul Amarillas, a 23-year-old corporal in the Marine Corps, was stationed at Camp Pendleton from February 2022 through January 2026, during which he allegedly embezzled and stole U.S. military property and ammunition with the intent to resell them in Arizona, the district attorney charges.

According to a March 24, 2026, court filing, Amarillas has been charged with several federal crimes related to the theft and possession of government property.

Amarillas has been an active-duty Marine since 2021, joining shortly after he graduated from high school in Glendale, Arizona.

“Defendant is an active-duty U.S. Marine. But instead of faithfully serving his country, he has been stealing weapons and ammunition from the military base at which he was stationed for several years. … The full extent of how much Defendant stole, to whom he all sold it, and how it has been used is not yet known—though law enforcement is working feverishly to find out,” the Detention Memorandum reads.

Some — but not all — of the stolen material has been recovered.

Investigators say that Amarillas transported the stolen weapons and ammunition back to his home state, where he sold them to a network of co-conspirators who in turn resold the military-grade weaponry.

The court documents include text messages sent between Amarillas and his unnamed co-conspirators, with prosecutors noting that when police closed in on the Marine he “destroyed his phone (telling his parents he accidentally drove over it).”

In June 2025, after exchanging text messages about whom “‘Andrew’ was going to leave ‘that stuff with,’” two co-conspirators sent texts with an image of a rifle with a scope sitting on the top of a large, plastic crate, as well as a rifle with a scope sitting on top of a bed and two Javelin Missile Systems.

One of the unidentified co-conspirators noted, “Scope is on ready to go with ammo,” according to court documents.

Two months later, Amarillas texted: “Just [got] some javs and some other ones. [I] have 2 launchers that [I] think you’d like, if you want to take a look tomorrow.”

The Javelin Missile System, known as a “fire-and-forget” missile, is an anti-tank guided munition that can be carried and launched by a single person and used against a wide array of targets, including armored vehicles, bunkers and caves, according to Raytheon.

The weapons system is manufactured exclusively by Lockheed Martin and RTX Corp for the U.S. military and cannot be legally possessed or sold to members of the public unless explicitly demilitarized. According to prosecutors, the Javelin recovered in this case was not demilitarized — and its serial number matched one that Amarillas had signed out from the School of Infantry West, court documents show.

Prosecutors further allege that Amarillas sold M855A1 and M80A1 ammunition, as well as M855 “enhanced performance” rifle cartridges manufactured by Olin Winchester. While M855 rifle cartridges can be sold to the public, the Olin Winchester M855 cartridges sold to the U.S. military are packaged differently and cannot be resold or possessed by civilians.

November 2025 text messages show that Amarillas offered 30 cans of M855 ammunition, explaining to the co-conspirator that that meant 25,000 rounds.

Over the subsequent two weeks, the Marine stole 66 boxes of the rifle ammunition, with only a third being recovered — some purchased by undercover police officers, while others were seized.

Law enforcement traced the lot number on these cans from the Tooele Army Depot to the Ammo Supply Point at Camp Pendleton, according to court documents.

Amarillas was scheduled to leave Camp Pendleton for an eight-week training course in Quantico, Virginia, from January to March 2026, where upon completion, the Marine was set to deploy to the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar.

Law enforcement intercepted and arrested Amarillas before he completed that training.

On March 26, Amarillas pleaded not guilty to the charges in a Phoenix federal courthouse. If convicted, he faces up to five years imprisonment for a conspiracy charge and 10 years imprisonment for each of his substantive charges, according to the court documents.