Editor’s note: This is a developing story.

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

Two of the 10 personnel, all of whom were reportedly inside an installation building at the time of the attack, are in serious condition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So have they?

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

His math was off by thousands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National Defense Areas: ‘Declared a restricted area’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Mexico National Defense Area was just the beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blurring missions: From G-BOSS to drones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buoys: A giant divider down the Rio Grande

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s the illusion of national security.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The baseballs were placed at the gravesites of:

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

Editor’s note: This is a developing story.

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

Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Baron von Steuben: Fraud Turned Hero

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

And yet in America, he became a hero.

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

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

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

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

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

2. Casimir Pułaski: No English, all courage

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

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

Enter Casimir Pułaski.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Michael Kováts: Hungry for battle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His command would, alas, be short.

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

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

6. Bernardo de Gálvez: Our Spaniard in Louisiana

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

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

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

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

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

7. The Marquis de Lafayette: You know this guy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Navy struggles with drone boats

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

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

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

Hawkins declined to comment on the testing setbacks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Majority of American voters oppose the Iran war, poll finds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MISSION TO GUAM

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

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

A POLITE DISCUSSION ABOUT WAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEFT IN QUESTIONABLE HANDS

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

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

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

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

This story was originally published on HistoryNet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what went wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are still waiting for an official explanation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a homecoming of sorts — decades overdue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unrecognizable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘PARANOID ABOUT BEING BOXED IN’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A ‘TRANSPARENT OCEAN’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘NEW TYPES OF COMBAT CAPABILITIES’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An unproven system

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A host of potential problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There’s no backup,” Connell said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mine threat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The possibility of success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The call has not been previously reported.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June attack targeted nuclear, missile sites

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump’s chance at history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An American-operated Patriot air defense battery likely fired the interceptor missile involved in a pre-dawn explosion that injured dozens of civilians and tore through homes in U.S.-ally Bahrain 10 days into the war on Iran, according to an analysis by academic researchers examined by Reuters.

Both Bahrain and Washington have blamed an Iranian drone attack for the March 9 blast, which the Gulf kingdom said injured 32 people including children, some seriously. Commenting on the day of the attack, U.S. Central Command said on X that an Iranian drone struck a residential neighborhood in Bahrain.

In response to questions from Reuters, Bahrain on Saturday acknowledged for the first time that a Patriot missile was involved in the explosion over the Mahazza neighborhood on Sitra island, offshore from the capital Manama and also home to an oil refinery.

In a statement, a Bahraini government spokesperson said the missile successfully intercepted an Iranian drone mid-air, saving lives.

“The damage and injuries sustained were not a result of a direct impact to the ground of either the Patriot interceptor or the Iranian drone,” the spokesperson said.

Neither Bahrain or Washington has provided evidence that an Iranian drone was involved in the Mahazza incident.

The use of costly, advanced weaponry to defend against attacks by far cheaper drones has been a defining feature of the war. The incident points to the risks and limitations of this strategy: The blast from the powerful Patriot, whether or not it intercepted a drone, contributed to widespread damage and casualties, while Bahrain’s air defenses were unable to prevent strikes that night on the nearby oil refinery, which declared force majeure hours later.

When asked for comment, the Pentagon referred Reuters to Central Command, which did not immediately reply to questions.

In response to questions sent to the White House, a senior U.S. official said the United States was “crushing” Iran’s ability to shoot or produce drones and missiles. “We will continue to address these threats to our country and our allies,” the official said, adding that the U.S. military “never targets civilians.” The official did not answer specific questions about the Patriot attack.

On February 28, the first day of U.S. strikes on Iran, an Iranian girls school took a direct hit. Investigators at the U.S. Defense Department believe U.S. forces were likely responsible, Reuters first reported, possibly because of outdated targeting data, two U.S. sources previously told the news agency.

Video of the aftermath of the Mahazza blast in Bahrain verified by Reuters shows rubble around houses, a thick layer of dust in the streets, an injured man and screaming residents.

Both Bahrain and the United States operate U.S. Patriot air defense batteries in the kingdom, a close U.S. ally located on the Persian Gulf that hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet along with the regional U.S. naval command.

Bahrain plays a critical role in the security of the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint that carries about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas and has been almost entirely closed by Iran, causing unprecedented disruption to world oil supplies.

On the night of the explosion in Mahazza, the refinery on Sitra came under Iranian attack, according to Bahraini national oil company Bapco. Videos show smoke rising from the facility on the morning of March 9.

Reuters could not establish whether the cause of the explosion during a night of Iranian attacks on Sitra would have been immediately apparent to U.S. and Bahraini forces. Bahrain in its statement did not say why it had not mentioned the involvement of a Patriot at the time. Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the incident.

Produced by Raytheon, part of RTX Corp. [RTX], the Patriot is the U.S. Army’s primary high-to-medium-range aircraft-and-missile interceptor system and forms the backbone of U.S. and allied air defenses. Raytheon didn’t respond to a request for comment about the incident.

Bahrain’s government declined to say whether the missile that detonated on March 9, was fired by its own forces or by the United States.

But research associates Sam Lair and Michael Duitsman and Professor Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey concluded with moderate-to-high confidence that the suspect missile was likely launched from a U.S. Patriot battery located about 4 miles (7 km) to the southwest of the Mahazza neighborhood.

The conclusions of the three American munitions and open-source intelligence researchers, reported here for the first time, were based on their review of open-source visuals and commercial satellite imagery.

Reuters showed the Middlebury analysis to two target-analysis experts and one Patriot system missile researcher, who found no reason to dispute its conclusion.

One of them, Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting advisor and policy analyst at the Pentagon, said Lair, Duitsman and Lewis’s conclusions were “pretty undeniable.”

Key to the Middlebury analysis was a video shot from an apartment building and shared on social media. The video shows the suspect Patriot roaring across the night sky at low altitude on a northeastern trajectory. It then angled downward and out of sight. A flash of light in the distance appeared to mark its detonation 1.3 seconds later.

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley specializing in digital forensics, reviewed the video for Reuters to determine if it was generated by artificial intelligence. He found “no obvious evidence that the video is fake.”

Lair, Duitsman and Lewis geolocated the video to a neighborhood in Riffa, Bahrain’s second-largest city. Reuters confirmed the geolocation. The earliest post of the video Reuters could find online was at around 2 am local time on March 9.

“The Riffa site’s location and orientation are consistent with the trajectory” of that of the suspect Patriot, the analysis said.

Multiple videos posted to social media the morning of March 9 show damage to residences in Block 602 of the Mahazza neighborhood. The researchers first geolocated the visuals using landmarks that appeared to match commercial satellite imagery of the area and visible street addresses. Reuters independently verified the geolocation.

The researchers then traced the trajectory of the suspect missile from Block 602 straight back to what they assessed – based on commercial satellite imagery – was the U.S. Patriot battery based less than half a mile from where the video of the missile in flight was recorded in Riffa.

A battery consists of a radar unit, a command hub and up to eight launchers that are integrated to detect, track and intercept aircraft and missiles.

Using commercial satellite imagery, the researchers determined that five launchers were visible at the Riffa site two days before the March 9 incident.

The battery has been there since at least 2009, according to satellite imagery. The Bahraini Defense Force did not start operating its own Patriot systems until 2024, according to a Lockheed Martin press release.

The Riffa site has features that are both distinctive to U.S. Patriot batteries in the region and different from those of known Bahrain-operated batteries, the researchers said, including protective walls, unpaved roads and a lack of permanent buildings. Based on these elements, the researchers concluded that the battery is likely operated by the United States, which uses Patriots to defend its naval sites in Bahrain.

The researchers were unable to say with confidence what caused the Patriot to explode. But they added that based on the available evidence, including the pattern and spread of damage on the ground, it appeared to have detonated mid-flight.

They concluded that it was possible the Patriot was aimed at a low-flying drone and that the combined explosion of the missile and drone ignited the blast, the analysis said.

“If this was the case, this was an irresponsible intercept attempt as it endangered the lives and the homes of allied civilians in a residential area,” the analysis said

This scenario matches what Bahrain’s government spokesperson said happened: that the Patriot intercepted an Iranian drone and both detonated in the air.

However, the analysis said, the direction of the damage and the lack of available evidence of a drone over the neighborhood suggested another scenario, that “the explosion was the result of the detonation of the warhead and unexpended propellant of a Patriot interceptor.”

Despite the claim by Bahrain, the researchers said it was less likely the missile made contact with a drone. Reuters could not independently verify the presence or not of an Iranian drone during the incident.

The analysis said that videos taken after the attack and photographs released by Bahrani authorities show that the blast damage was concentrated along four streets of Mahazza.

A Bahrain television news broadcast on March 9 and a government press release showed an extensively damaged home about 400 feet (120 meters) from the center of the main blast area, with interior photos showing holes in a wall created by shrapnel, the analysis said.

When all the damage is considered together, the Middlebury analysis noted, it matches what one would expect if a Patriot missile exploded in the air over a road intersection in the neighborhood. Pieces of the missile then flew about 120 meters farther and hit another house, the analysis said.

Robert Maher, an audio specialist who reviewed the video at the request of Reuters, said his analysis supports the approximate location of the explosion over the damaged homes.

In the video, a flash is seen about eight seconds in, but an explosion is never heard before the clip ends 19 seconds later. That’s because light travels faster than sound. Based on how long the sound would take to reach the person who shot the video, the explosion had to be more than four miles away. The damaged homes were about 4.6 miles (7.4 km) away, which fits with the timing.

Maher said that in the audio from the video he heard no drones or other missiles, although their sounds would have been faint or inaudible if they were more than four miles away from where the video was taken.

“I don’t see anything that is inconsistent with my observations from the audio,” Maher said after reviewing the Middlebury analysis.

Defense and industry officials say Patriot misfires are rare, but they do happen, including an errant missile in 2007 that hit a farm in Qatar.

In an X post on March 9, U.S. Central Command denounced Iranian and Russian news reports that said the incident in Mahazza was the result of a failed Patriot, calling it a “LIE.” It said an Iranian drone struck a residential neighborhood.

Reuters and the Middlebury researchers were unable to obtain or review any visual evidence of missile or drone fragments. Reuters attempted to contact witnesses in Bahrain, but several people declined to speak, citing fear of reprisals. Human Rights Watch has documented arrests of people in Bahrain during the war for posting videos on social media of attacks.

In the video of the suspect missile in flight, the Patriot appears to pass a much steeper smoke trail that the researchers said likely belonged to a first interceptor fired moments earlier.

Patriots are often fired in pairs to increase the chances that one hits the target. Neither the researchers or Reuters could establish what happened to the first missile.

The low trajectory of the second missile and its deviation from the route of the earlier launch could be signs of a possible problem, the researchers said. But they could not rule out the possibility that it was shot in that direction on purpose.

Bahrain’s spokesperson said any suggestion of malfunction or misfiring of the Patriots in Bahrain “was factually incorrect.”

A Veterans Affairs social worker died after being shot Tuesday at a VA clinic in Jasper, Georgia.

Nicholas “Nic” Crews of Marietta, Georgia, died Wednesday as a result of injuries suffered in a shooting at the clinic. He was airlifted from the scene for advanced medical treatment but succumbed to his injuries, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

His assailant, Lawrence Charles Michels, 51, of Jasper, was shot and killed by law enforcement, the GBI said in a release Thursday.

Michels was in the clinic for a walk-in mental health consultation; Crews was the clinic’s social work case manager, according to the GBI.

“Rest in peace to a dedicated @DeptVetAffairs colleague, Nicholas Crews, who died as a result of this week’s tragic shooting at the Pickens County VA Clinic in Jasper, GA. We are making sure Nicholas’ family, coworkers and local Veterans have the support they need during this difficult time,” VA Secretary Doug Collins wrote Thursday on X.

Crews leaves behind a wife and young children. According to the Atlanta-based 11Alive WXIA, Crews’ wife, Alyssa, is expecting the couple’s third child and is due in two weeks. He celebrated his 34^th birthday on March 14.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation will be investigating the shooting along with the GBI. The VA’s Office of Inspector General is also assisting with the case, according to VA Press Secretary Peter Kasperowicz.

Following the shooting, Michels left the clinic and encountered an armed civilian and police officers. Michaels, armed with a handgun, opened fire and was struck and killed.

According to the American College of Surgeons, health care workers are five times more likely to experience violence than other occupations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the rate of injuries among medical professionals from violence rose by 63% from 2011 to 2018 and has escalated significantly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Pickens County VA Clinic, part of the VA Atlanta Healthcare System, opened in 2020 and serves thousands of veterans in northern Georgia, providing primary care, mental health treatment, lab services and more.

The clinic remains closed through the remainder of the week. The VA has provided veterans and staff access to counseling and chaplain care, Kasperowicz said.

A family friend has set up a GoFundMe to help in the wake of Crews’ death.

“Our hearts are broken as we grieve the tragic loss of Nic Crews. He was deeply loved by so many and will be missed more than words can express,” wrote Amber Williams, a registered nurse from Cartersville, Georgia.

The United States military is deploying thousands of additional Marines and sailors to the Middle East, three U.S. officials told Reuters on Friday.

The deployments of the USS Boxer, along with its 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit and accompanying warship, comes as Reuters reported that President Donald Trump’s administration was considering deploying thousands of U.S. troops to reinforce its operation in the Middle East.

Trump told reporters on Thursday that he was not putting troops “anywhere,” but that if was going to, he would not tell journalists.

The sources, who were speaking on the condition of anonymity, did not say what the role of the additional troops would be.

But one of the officials said the troops were departing the West Coast of the United States about 3 weeks ahead of schedule.

The White House and Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The vehicles vying to replace the Marine Corps’ aging light armored vehicle fleet hit the water for the first time earlier this year, completing a series of tests to demonstrate safety and performance across a spectrum of sea conditions and highlighting some new features in the process.

The testing, which involved the variant of the future advanced reconnaissance vehicle, or ARV, equipped with a 30mm autocannon, took place in January and February at Camp Pendleton, California, according to a recent Marine Corps news release.

Prototypes by two designers, Textron Systems and General Dynamics Land Systems, underwent the water entry, swim and firing drills ahead of an upcoming competition period set to end with a down-select to one company around 2030.

In an exclusive interview with Military Times this month, Phil Skuta, GDLS’s director of Strategy and Business Development for the Marine Corps and Navy, described some of the challenges the new vehicle must overcome, including high-speed water entry and firing the autocannon on the water, both of which can involve weathering large and unpredictable waves.

He also described a new feature GDLS is asking the Marine Corps to evaluate: an “autotrim function” that would allow the ARV’s crew to outsource some of the work of driving the vessel in the water.

“You can set the course, the azimuth that you want to follow, and the vehicle will automatically stay on that course,” Skuta said. “So, we’re starting to build in a level of automation so that, while they’re doing, say, a long water-borne movement, that’s just one less thing the crew has to think about.

“They can think about the other activities involved in not only operating the vehicle but most importantly focusing on the enemy, so they don’t have to focus so much on, ‘Am I going in the correct direction? And is the vehicle being stable in the water?’”

Skuta said the function was somewhat similar to an aircraft autopilot function, but also like cruise control and automated lane-keeping in a ground vehicle.

“If you’re out of the lane, you might get a little buzz, so to speak,” he said. That’s more what this is right now — the first step.”

That’s particularly useful, from GDLS’ perspective, because the ARV’s swim system, separately from the ground automotive system, is piloted via a “small joystick” by a driver looking at internal screens, underscoring what a chore it is to do manual course corrections. The feature could also help the vehicle adapt to the increasingly automated future, Skuta said.

“We’re demonstrating by [incorporating] the automated trim course and azimuth function that we can eventually, in anticipation of future requirements, put more automation into the system, as well as robotic controls,” he said.

The ARV is expected to come in three variants: in addition to the ARV-30 autocannon platform there will be a Command, Control, Communications and Computers/Unmanned Aircraft Systems model, or C4/UAS, which has previously undergone testing; and a logistics variant, which will be featured in upcoming swim tests, Skuta said.

Textron and GDLS are both set to contract with the Marine Corps as soon as this fiscal quarter for 16 additional prototypes that will enable testing in coming years ahead of the final down-select.

Textron’s vehicle, which it calls the Cottonmouth, has six wheels compared to GDLS’ eight.

During the recent evolution, Skuta said, shoreside testing included a bilge pump demonstration, in which the ARV-30 was flooded with water, triggering safety sensors that automatically pump it out “like a water fountain.”

Water safety has been an increased focus since a July 2020 assault amphibious vehicle sinking off the coast of Pendleton, resulting in the deaths of nine service members. A malfunctioning bilge pump was found to have contributed to the tragedy.

Once in the water, the new vehicle was put through its paces on a five-kilometer swim course to test its maneuverability and stopping distance in calm conditions.

“You’re just kind of pivoting in the water to show the characteristics of how you can do very tight maneuvering in water spaces,” Skuta said. “And you know, that’s pretty important, because the Marines will find themselves crossing rivers and water obstacles while they’re in combat zones. And they need to have a good appreciation for how tight a turning radius the vehicle has in the water.”

Crews also practiced moving the turret around as if preparing for live fire on the water, which affects the vehicle’s center of gravity, he said.

“In a river-crossing scenario, [if the] enemy presents themselves on the far shoreline the Marines would fire from the vehicle in the water,” Skuta said. “So, that gives a good indication of how the turret and the fire control system will stabilize on a target while they’re in that water environment.”

Another tested skill, high-speed water entry, made for one of the “more fun” events to observe, he said.

The ARV-30 entered the water at progressively higher speeds, topping out at 25 miles per hour and sending a massive water plume into the air.

Notably, for all the testing with GDLS and Textron, Marines from the amphibious vehicles community were able to observe and monitor testing, Skuta said.

While the Marine Corps has not released any specific feedback from the demos, he said the onsite response from the Marines was encouraging.

“A lot of smiles, a lot of thumbs up from what they saw,” Skuta said.

A junior Marine’s 3D-printed fix for a fragile communications antenna is saving the Marine Corps hundreds of thousands of dollars and slashing months-long supply delays across the fleet.

Lance Cpl. Eirick Schule developed a low-cost replacement for a commonly broken antenna mast on a Mobile User Objective System, a fix now being used across multiple units to restore the critical communications gear.

The solution, detailed in a Marine Corps news release, highlights a broader shift as the service turns to 3D printing and in-house innovation to address persistent supply and maintenance gaps.

When Schule joined the Marine Corps in 2022 as an engineer equipment operator, he was assigned to be an armory custodian. But his superiors quickly realized he had untapped technical skills.

They learned he had previously worked as a computer numerically controlled, or CNC, machine operator at an industrial machining company and had an interest in 3D printing and design.

In April 2025, Schule attended a basic additive manufacturing course at the II Marine Expeditionary Force Innovation Campus, where he learned to reverse engineer and print replacement parts.

The campus, a 3D printing hub focused on solving equipment and supply challenges, recently received a Defense Department award for education and workforce development.

During his first week there, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Matthew Pine, the officer in charge, assigned Schule the antenna project, citing the simplicity of the design and the opportunity to evaluate his problem-solving approach.

Through trial and error, Schule refined the process and ultimately produced a replacement mast that passed durability testing and held up during a month-long field exercise.

The scale of the issue became clear that same month.

During a joint exercise, Pine observed antenna masts breaking across multiple units. Replacements cost more than $5,600 each and took over 220 days to arrive. He estimated more than $1 million in damaged equipment across the fleet.

Since then, the II MEF Innovation Campus has produced more than 100 replacement masts at roughly $10 a piece, saving an estimated $600,000 while eliminating years of cumulative supply delays.

For his part, Schule said that he’s “extremely happy” to see something that he made have such an impact.

“Now that I’m back in the (Fleet Marine Force), I’m very eager to see the product I designed be used,” he said. “Especially because I’m now in a communications battalion, so my likelihood of seeing it again is extremely high.”

A pair of U.S. Navy counter-mine vessels that are homeported in Bahrain arrived in Singapore this week, according to a U.S. Fifth Fleet spokesperson.

The Independence-class littoral combat ships USS Santa Barbara and USS Tulsa entered the U.S. Seventh Fleet area of responsibility earlier in the week, the spokesperson said, stopping first in Malaysia for a port call.

Each ship is equipped with a mine countermeasures mission package designed to detect and destroy naval mines.

“Tulsa and Santa Barbara are conducting scheduled maintenance and logistics stop in Singapore,” the spokesperson said.

The two nations, according to the spokesperson, have an agreement to allow littoral combat ships to operate primarily from Singapore as a logistics and maintenance hub.

As of Monday, the USS Canberra, the other Bahrain-based LCS with a mine countermeasures package, was in the Indian Ocean, parts of which are in the U.S. Fifth Fleet area of responsibility.

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

The U.S. Navy previously deployed four Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships in the Middle East, but they were decommissioned in 2025 after each serving for over 30 years.

Those minesweepers are made of wood and fiberglass and possess a nonmagnetic signature and low acoustic footprint that allows them to operate inside and near a mine zone.

The vessels used acoustic devices, electromagnetic tools, cables and cutters to hunt, detonate and destroy over 1,000 mines off of Kuwait during the Gulf War.

Three Independence-class littoral combat ships with a mine countermeasures mission package replaced those vessels in 2025.

The LCS with the MCM package is made of aluminum and can only operate outside the mine threat zone.

These ships deploy unmanned surface and underwater vehicles, along with an attached Sikorsky MH-60S Seahawk helicopter, to identify and destroy mines.

The migration of the two littoral combat ships with the MCM package could be a strategic repositioning by the U.S. Navy, according to Dr. Steven Wills, a navalist for the Center for Maritime Strategy and a U.S. Navy veteran who served aboard a mine countermeasures ship.

“I think that was a desire to just reduce the number of targets,” Wills said.

The LCS has a 57mm MK-110 gun system and a SeaRAM self-defense system, but it isn’t as defensively capable as a destroyer, which wields a vertical launch system, according to Wills.

U.S. service members will now be granted religious exemptions from grooming standards only on “sincerely held religious beliefs,” according to a recent Pentagon memorandum.

Current service members and those applying for military service who request an exception for religious reasons must provide “a sworn written attestation affirming the requester’s belief is sincerely held and religious in nature,” according to the March 11 Department of Defense memorandum.

In their requests, service members must provide statements describing the specific religious beliefs that are held and explanations of how the current clean-shaven grooming standard conflicts with their exercise of religion, per the memo.

Troops must also provide evidence that their religious beliefs are “sincerely held,” such as personal testimonies or corroborating statements from religious leaders or community members.

False statements can be subject to disciplinary action under Article 107 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice or denial of ascension, the statement says.

The memo, signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, first circulated on the unofficial U.S. Army Subreddit r/Army page Tuesday. Task & Purpose was the first to report on the memo. A Pentagon official confirmed the memo’s authenticity to Military Times on Thursday.

Previously, the military granted shaving waivers for facial hair for a variety of faiths, including Norse Pagan, Sikh and others, but following a September 2025 speech by Hegseth to military leaders, a slew of memos and a review on grooming and appearance standards surfaced.

This new guidance follows Hegseth’s newfound commitment to physical fitness and grooming standards for troops, calling for “no beardos” and leaving some religious groups worried about the department’s adherence to religious rights of service members.

“No more beards, long hair, superficial, individual expression. We’re going to cut our hair, shave our beards and adhere to standards,” Hegseth said in the September 2025 speech to military leaders.

This March memo states that unit commanders must provide a written assessment of the requester’s sincerity of religious belief and specific information regarding the requester’s current and anticipated work, like use of protective equipment or scheduled deployments, when forwarding requests to the “decision authority.”

The memo did not elaborate on who or what department is considered the authority on this matter.

“Decision authorities must review requests for accommodation on an individual basis, applying the ‘compelling government interest’ and ‘least restrictive means’ criteria,” the memo says.

The memo states that military departments are required to provide training on “applicable laws and procedures” to unit commanders and personnel involved in reviewing religious-based requests for exception from grooming standards for facial hair.

Religious accommodations related to grooming standards that have already been approved must be reevaluated within 90 days of these new guidelines, the memo reads.

“To prevent abuse and maintain military combat readiness, determining the sincerity of a religious belief in whether a military policy, practice or duty substantially burdens a service member’s exercise of religion is a critical component of the review process,” the memo states.

The memo says that decision authorities must consider any evidence that the request is based upon personal preference. They must get input from a first-line supervisor on the individual’s character, as well as from a military chaplain on the nature of the religious belief and from other sources at the unit commander’s discretion.

An attachment of the memo states that a legal advisor must give counsel to the deciding official to ensure compliance with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and other applicable policies. Service members whose applications are denied may voluntarily separate, according to the memo.

Implementation plans must be submitted to the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness within 30 days of the memo’s release date.

A U.S. F-35 fighter jet was forced to make an emergency landing after flying a combat mission over Iran, U.S. Central Command confirmed on Thursday.

The pilot, who was able to guide the aircraft to a U.S. air base in the region, is in stable condition, a command spokesperson said.

CNN first reported the incident, with sources telling the outlet the aircraft was struck by an Iranian munition.

“We are aware of reports that a U.S. F-35 aircraft conducted an emergency landing at a regional U.S airbase after flying a combat mission over Iran,” Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins said in an emailed statement.

The incident is under investigation.

Prior to Thursday’s incident, the U.S. had lost four manned aircraft across the month of March.

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 and roughly 200 wounded.

While the majority of the wounded troops have since returned to duty, 10 are considered seriously injured, CENTCOM announced Monday.