A set of Venezuelan military aircraft flew near a U.S. Navy vessel in international waters Thursday, two days after the U.S. said it struck a Venezuelan drug vessel, according to a Defense Department statement posted to X.

Two Venezuelan F-16s conducted the aggressive maneuver over the USS Jason Dunham, an Arleigh Burke-class Aegis guided missile destroyer, in a clear “show of force,” a U.S. defense official confirmed to Navy Times.

“This highly provocative move was designed to interfere with our counter narco-terror operations,” the DOD’s X post read.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday the U.S. struck a Venezuelan drug-carrying vessel in the southern Caribbean, killing 11 on board.

The boat contained Tren de Aragua narcoterrorists, Trump said in a Truth Social post.

US warships in South America and the reaction in Venezuela

Navy Times reached out to the White House, Navy and Pentagon for specifics about the drugs on board and the type of munitions used, as well as the process of classifying the vessel and those on board as worthy of a strike. The Navy referred Navy Times to the White House, which declined to comment along with the Pentagon.

“The cartel running Venezuela is strongly advised not to pursue any further effort to obstruct, deter or interfere with counter-narcotics and counter-terror operations carried out by the U.S. military,” the DOD’s X post read.

The U.S. deployed three Aegis guided-missile destroyers — the Gravely, Jason Dunham and Sampson — to the Caribbean in August. The move was designed to boost the Trump administration’s counter-narcotic efforts to target Latin American drug cartels, The Associated Press reported.

The Navy also deployed the cruiser USS Lake Erie in the Pacific Ocean off Latin America.

Trump signed an executive order on his first day of office designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, allowing the administration the authority to use military force against them.

Trump has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of trafficking drugs and supporting drug cartels.

On Aug. 7, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi offered a $50 million prize for his arrest, labeling him as a “threat to the national security” of the U.S.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on Sept. 3 to the Harlem Hellfighters, one of the most renowned Black combat units of World War I.

Descendants of those soldiers were in attendance to accept the recognition, Congress’ highest civilian award, on behalf of their ancestors’ actions during a ceremony in Washington, according to a DOD press release.

The approval of the medal was passed in Congress on Aug. 9, 2021, during the Biden administration.

Highly decorated, the 369th Infantry Regiment was initially nicknamed the “Black Rattlers” for the rattlesnake insignia that adorned their uniforms.

The French called the unit “Men of Bronze,” while it is believed that they gained their “Hellfighter” moniker from their German foes owing to their courage and ferocity in combat, according to the National Museum of American History and Culture.

The Hellfighters, like many non-white demographics in the 20th century, were forced to fight a war on two fronts. Before, during and well after the carnage of WWI, racism encountered by Black soldiers by their white American counterparts was severe.

U.S. Gen. John G. Pershing even went as far as authorizing the distribution of a pamphlet, titled “Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops,” advising America’s French allies against relying on — or even associating with — their Black peers.

In his correspondence, Pershing claimed the men of the 369th were “inferior” to white soldiers, acted as a “constant menace to the American” and didn’t possess a “civic and professional conscience.”

Burdened by a misguided reputation, the Harlem Hellfighters were initially relegated to labor-intensive duties. That was until they were ordered into battle in 1918 and assigned to the French Army, who seemed to care far less about race than their American allies.

It would be among the 16th Division of the French Army that the Harlem Hellfighters would learn how to survive the slog of trench warfare.

Such experiences, meanwhile, were left out of the Pentagon’s announcement this week, which only briefly acknowledged “racial tensions that came with serving in a segregated Army stateside.”

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.

According to the bill, the “369th never lost a foot of ground nor had a man taken prisoner, despite suffering a high number of casualties.”

“After the war,” writes the NMAHC, “the French government awarded the coveted Croix de Guerre medal to 171 members of the regiment, as well as a Croix de Guerre citation to the unit as a whole.”

Among those men was Henry Johnson, whose bravery on May 15, 1918, led to him being posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in 2015.

Johnson was standing guard with 17-year-old Needham Roberts early that morning when heard “snippin’ and clippin’” sounds of at least 12 Germans cutting their way through the wire encircling the guard post.

In the dark, Johnson tossed a grenade in the direction of the commotion and all hell broke loose. The German invaders unleashed a wall of gunfire and grenades toward the two watchmen, injuring Needham Roberts immediately.

Unable to walk, Roberts sat upright in the trench and continued to feed Johnson grenades — but the Germans kept coming.

Johnson quickly exhausted the supply and switched to his rifle. It jammed. Enemy soldiers were close enough to touch.

When the Germans attempted to grab Roberts from the trench and take him prisoner, Johnson, who stood at only 5-foot-4 and 130 pounds, went to work, abandoning the cover of the trench and swinging his rifle, fists and bolo knife in a blur of clubbing, punching and cutting.

“Each slash meant something, believe me,” Johnson recalled.

It was later determined by observers that Johnson killed four of the enemy and wounded upwards of a dozen more.

Of his feat, the self-effacing private later recalled, “there wasn’t anything so fine about it. Just fought for my life. A rabbit would have done that.”

In June 2023, the Louisiana installation Fort Polk shed its Confederate namesake to honor Johnson, who suffered 21 injuries in the melee, including bullet and stab wounds to his head, torso, right arm and left leg, as well as a shattered left foot.

This past July, Hegseth, who presented the Gold Medal to Hellfighter descendants this week, personally oversaw the stripping of Johnson’s name from the base in favor of returning it one adjacent to its Confederate past — Gen. James H. Polk, who was awarded the Silver Star for his World War II service.

The Hellfighters initially received a hero’s welcome at war’s end, but their fame quickly faded into a small coda of WWI history largely due to the nation’s virulent racism.

Johnson himself contracted tuberculosis and later died, destitute, in July 1929 of myocarditis at the age of 36. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

And while more than a century has passed since their heroic deeds, Congress has given recognition where it is due.

“The symbol of the men we honor today as the Harlem Hellfighters; the symbol of these soldiers who were the bravest Americans,” Hegseth said during the ceremony.

“We ought always thank almighty God for such men; and may we honor them forever, especially because they were not honored in their time,” he concluded.

Over a recent two-year period, the Pentagon funded hundreds of projects done in collaboration with universities in China and institutes linked to that nation’s defense industry, including many blacklisted by the U.S. government for working with the Chinese military, a congressional investigation has found.

The report, released Friday by House Republicans on the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, argues the projects have allowed China to exploit U.S. research partnerships for military gains while the two countries are locked in a tech and arms rivalry.

“American taxpayer dollars should be used to defend the nation — not strengthen its foremost strategic competitor,” Republicans wrote in the report.

“Failing to safeguard American research from hostile foreign exploitation will continue to erode U.S. technological dominance and place our national defense capabilities at risk,” it said.

US defense industry vulnerable to China, government watchdog warns

The Pentagon and didn’t immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment.

The congressional report said some officials at the Defense Department argued research should remain open as long as it is “neither controlled nor classified.”

The report makes several recommendations to scale back U.S. research collaboration with China. It also backs new legislation proposed by the committee’s chairman, Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Michigan. The bill would prohibit any Defense Department funding from going to projects done in collaboration with researchers affiliated with Chinese entities that the U.S. government identifies as safety risks.

Beijing has in the past said science and technological cooperation between the two countries is mutually beneficial and helps them cope with global challenges. The Chinese Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Republicans say the joint research could have military applications

The 80-page report builds on the committee’s findings last year that partnerships between U.S. and Chinese universities over the past decade allowed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to help Beijing develop critical technology. Amid pressure from Republicans, several U.S. universities have ended their joint programs with Chinese schools in recent years.

The new report focuses more narrowly on the Defense Department and its billions of dollars in annual research funding.

The committee’s investigation identified 1,400 research papers published between June 2023 and June 2025 that acknowledged support from the Pentagon and were done in collaboration with Chinese partners. The publications were funded by some 700 defense grants worth more than $2.5 billion. Of the 1,400 publications, more than half involved organizations affiliated with China’s defense research and industrial base.

Dozens of those organizations were flagged for potential security concerns on U.S. government lists, though federal law does not prohibit research collaborations with them. The Defense Department money supported research in fields including hypersonic technology, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, advanced materials and next-generation propulsion.

Many of the projects have clear military applications, according to the report.

In one case, a nuclear scientist at Carnegie Science, a research institution in Washington, worked extensively on Pentagon-backed research while holding appointments at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Hefei Institute of Physical Sciences.

‘Imminent’ threat? Hegseth escalates tone on China in key Asia speech

The scientist, who has done research on high-energy materials, nitrogen and high-pressure physics — all of which are relevant to nuclear weapons development — has been honored in China for his work to advance the country’s national development goals, the report said. It called the case “a deeply troubling example” of how Beijing can leverage U.S. taxpayer-funded research to further its weapons development.

In another Pentagon-backed project, Arizona State University and the University of Texas partnered with researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Beihang University to study high-stakes decision-making in uncertain environments, which has direct applications for electronic warfare and cyber defense, the report said. The money came from the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The Shanghai university is under the supervision of a central Chinese agency tasked with developing defense technology, and Beihang University, in the capital city of Beijing, is linked to the People’s Liberation Army and known for its aerospace programs.

Calls for scaling back research collaborations

The report takes issue with Defense Department policies that do not explicitly forbid research partnerships with foreign institutions that appear on U.S. government blacklists.

It makes more than a dozen recommendations, including a prohibition on any Pentagon research collaboration with entities that are on U.S. blacklists or “known to be part of China’s defense research and industrial base.”

China’s military wants to target US undersea sensor network: Analysis

Moolenaar’s legislation includes a similar provision and proposes a ban on Defense Department funding for U.S. universities that operate joint institutes with Chinese universities.

A senior Education Department official said the report “highlights the vulnerability of federally funded research to foreign infiltration on America’s campuses.” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said the findings reinforce the need for more transparency around U.S. universities’ international ties, along with a “whole-of-government approach to safeguard against the malign influence of hostile foreign actors.”

House investigators said they are not seeking to end all academic and research collaborations with China but those with connections to the Chinese military and its research and industrial base.

The attorney general for the District of Columbia says the nation’s capital is suing the Trump administration for deploying the National Guard within the city’s boundaries.

The attorney general’s office alleges the administration’s efforts are an “involuntary military occupation.”

“No American city should have the US military – particularly out-of-state military who are not accountable to the residents and untrained in local law enforcement – policing its streets,” Attorney General Brian Schwalb said. “It’s DC today but could be any other city tomorrow.”

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson downplayed the lawsuit Thursday, telling Military Times in a statement that the president’s actions fell “well within” his authorities.

“This lawsuit is nothing more than another attempt — at the detriment of DC residents and visitors — to undermine the President’s highly successful operations to stop violent crime in DC,” she said.

More than 2,200 National Guard troops are deployed in Washington, D.C., where crimes were already on the decline prior to their deployment, according to FBI crime data.

Since the deployment, crime has continued to decrease with the administration’s surge of federal resources.

“Guard members … remain committed to the President’s directive to address the epidemic of crime in the Nation’s capital,” said a spokesman for the Guard’s joint task force in the capital.

Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department data showed that 20-year homicide trends last year were at their lowest point since the 2020 pandemic.

Homicide rates in 2024 were 68% lower than the record highs of the 1990s, from about 80 homicides per 100,000 residents to about 25 homicides per 100,000 residents, FBI crime data shows. But those rates last year were almost twice as high as in 2012, when the nation’s capital experienced a 50-year low in the number of homicides per capita.

President Donald Trump has vowed to deploy the National Guard to other cities in the United States. He initially told reporters Tuesday that the Guard would be “going in” Chicago, which he described as a “hellhole” and “the murder capital of the world.”

On Wednesday, he shifted to say that the White House was making a determination on whether to go into Chicago or New Orleans, which he described as “a very nice section of the country that’s become quite tough.”

Neither city ranks among the top 10 for total crime rates of cities with more than 250,000 residents, and neither city ranks in the top 10 for violent crimes per 100,000 residents.

Memphis, Cleveland and St. Louis are plagued with the highest total crime rates, according to FBI crime data.

Critics of deploying the Guard say the president’s description of the two cities, one in a Blue state and the other in a Red state, emphasizes that politics, rather than a public safety emergency, are leading the White House’s deployments.

“It is absolutely the case where he is attacking and occupying Blue cities. There is no doubt about it, and the military members, these young men and women, they know they are political pawns, and it bothers them greatly,” retired Maj. Gen. Randy Manner, who served as vice chief of the National Guard Bureau, told Military Times.

Manner said the United States is in an “extremely dangerous situation” that is beginning to “drive a wedge, quite frankly, between our military and our citizens in these various cities where [Trump is] deploying them.”

He said that he feared further deployments could give rise to a divide reminiscent of when soldiers like his dad returned from Vietnam, a period when those protesting the war often took frustrations out on the military.

“It will no longer be that our military is part of us. It’ll be it’s those guys in uniform, those armed thugs,” he said.

Even as Chicago’s crime rates are down across the board this year, dozens of people were shot and at least seven people were killed in the city in a surge of violence over the Labor Day weekend.

Chicago and Illinois leaders have said they do not want U.S. troops to assist in the city.

“National Guard troops are not trained to do local law enforcement, but FBI agents, DEA agents, ATF agents are trained to fight crime, and they have collaborated with local law enforcement. So I would prefer more resources on that, [rather] than sending the military illegally into the streets of American cities against American citizens,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul told CNN on Tuesday.

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican running for governor in Tennessee, praised Trump’s efforts to fight crime by deploying troops to American cities.

“If your local leaders are going to fail and not accept that responsibility to keep their community safe, then it is going to be up to the president to bring that attention to that city,” Blackburn said Wednesday.

Earlier this week, a federal judge in California determined that the president illegally violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the power of the federal government to use military force for domestic matters, when he deployed 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles in June.

“The judge ruled that the president failed to show there was a rebellion or inability of civil authorities to respond to the demonstrations, which is the requirement in federal law to use troops over the objections of the governor. Accordingly, he will have the same issue should he try to do this in Chicago, and likely the same result,” retired Maj. Gen. William Enyart, a former congressman who also served as the 37th Adjutant General for the Illinois National Guard, told Military Times on Tuesday.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly called Breyer “a rogue judge” trying to “usurp the authority of the Commander-in-Chief” and vowed to fight the decision.

Veterans’ hospitals short on police guards have turned to a purported artificial intelligence-based weapons scanner with advertised features that offered an artificial sense of security compared to the actual capabilities of conventional metal detectors that cost about 25 times less, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

The Department of Veterans Affairs continues to pay a subscription — now valued at $372,000 — for the Evolv Express system in Buffalo, New York, and has plans to roll out more machines.

Last week, the department signed a contract worth up to $1 million for the installation of a different AI weapon-detection tool with similar advertising, federal databases and contracting papers show.

The VA’s inventory of AI uses acknowledges that the department operates and maintains the system.

The department’s interest in Express, meanwhile, has alarmed some law enforcement specialists and independent security testers.

“It is particularly problematic, given this is a federal agency, buying a federally-sanctioned product, and this is supposed to be put in hospitals, specifically to guard against active shooters and vets who might want to hurt themselves in the hospital,” said Jim Bueermann, a retired police chief who leads the Future Policing Institute, a nonprofit that helps law enforcement agencies use AI responsibly.

“We use scientific methods to test” security devices, “not the marketing material from the company that intends to make money off the sale of that system.”

When the VA contracted for detectors at the Buffalo VA Medical Center in August 2023, the Express webpage explained the device uses “proven artificial intelligence” to ensure “more accurate threat detection” than metal detectors and “a line-free experience without slowing down.”

Also at that time, the homepage of Evolv Technologies, the machine’s maker, touted that Express screens “in a touchless manner,” which “drastically reduces human errors by security guards.”

Additionally, Evolv’s “Virtual Demo” webpage declared that Express will “reduce labor costs by up to 70%.”

The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit in 2024, describing each of those performance claims as false, misleading or unsubstantiated. Nearly one year later, the company has not released independent, third-party tests to validate its claims.

VA police reforms slowed by confusing bureaucracy

In addition to the FTC case, three shareholder lawsuits accuse Evolv of marketing a system that fails to detect certain knives, guns and bombs, and raises alarms over harmless items as an AI alternative to traditional metal detectors.

Express actually employs common electromagnetic sensing, and not AI, to detect objects — and only metallic ones, the FTC complaint states.

Before the FTC took action, Evolv claimed that its AI can classify an object as either bad or benign by comparing the “metallic composition, shape, fragmentation,” and other traits that the sensing detects with the known traits, or “signatures,” of all weapons.

VA hospitals are not the only federally-funded buildings that display the $1 billion firm’s sleek, white archways. The U.S. government has agreed to pay roughly $4 million for various Express installations at schools and museums, including the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

Currently, security system vendors CEIA and Garrett Electronics lead the metal-detector market in the federal sector, with comparable walk-through machines for entrances costing less than $15,000.

Last week, a Chicago VA hospital inked a four-year deal worth up to $1.3 million to launch a newer “AI-powered weapon detection system,” called Xtract One SmartGateway, with advertised “touchless” and “non-invasive” performance features that, some independent testers say, have not been validated.

In response to questions about the concerns regarding these systems, VA Press Secretary Pete Kasperowicz said in an emailed statement, “VA employs a wide range of robust security measures to keep veterans, employees, and our facilities safe. To prevent circumvention of security measures, VA does not disclose protective techniques.”

Evolv Technologies did not provide a comment in response to concerns about the VA’s or other federal agencies’ specific purchases or uses of Express.

In an emailed statement, Evolv Chief Marketing Officer Alexandra Smith Ozerkis said, “We stand behind our technology.”

Across all industries, “roughly half of contracts that are up for renewal this year have already been renewed. These are customers that have deployed our technology, seen it work in real-world environments, and are choosing to renew and/or expand their investment,” Ozerkis said.

Evolv shares external testing results with prospective customers, Ozerkis added by email, declining to provide a copy.

VA’s ‘touchless’ weapons scanner needs more than two hands

The number of objects that Express can detect depends on the sensitivity level a user sets.

Security researchers explained that the higher levels require more staff supervision to triage false alarms involving laptops, canes or other harmless items, while the lower levels allow in more entrants — and some guns or umbrellas they are packing, unless staff manually check bags.

“For both of these approaches, you’ll still have to have human guards,” said Nikita Ermolaev, a senior research engineer at IPVM, an independent firm that tests and rates physical security tools.

Security staff are in increasingly short supply at the VA. Under former President Joe Biden’s administration last August, the VA inspector general identified police officer shortages as among the top five reported staffing gaps across VA hospitals.

That count emerged before current President Donald Trump’s administration announced plans to further slash 30,000 department employees by the end of September.

“At a hospital that is low on staff, Express can be set to the lower sensitivity setting, which will have the hospital dealing with fewer false alarms, but they will also be missing more weapons. And that could create a false sense of security,” Ermolaev warned.

While a proposed settlement with the FTC that admits no wrongdoing will ban Evolv from making unsupported claims about the technology’s ability to use AI for weapons detection, product descriptions in the VA’s purchasing plans still cite some of those assertions.

For example, VA Capitol Health Care Network procurement papers explain that Express’s use of AI to detect threats will ensure that entrants “are not required to divest any of their personal items or stop and pose in any manner.”

The documents also state, “Without this software and equipment, the potential exists for an insider threat/active shooter-based attack” within the Baltimore, West Virginia and Washington, D.C., medical centers.

Juliana Gruenwald Henderson, a deputy director at the FTC Office of Public Affairs, said in an email that the agency cannot comment on whether a company is complying with an FTC order.

The VA’s attraction to Express’s advertised AI capabilities may be part of a larger federal contracting problem, in which agencies refrain from questioning the inner workings of devices claiming to be high-tech, said Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group.

“VA hospitals are clamoring for some way of preventing any gun violence, which is a very real concern,” and to decide to “just throw technology at it is a shame,” Guariglia said.

Federal purchasing decisions “are so often rarely about actual science and so much more about the relationship between the buyer and the marketing person or a specific company,” he added.

Meanwhile, this spring, Chicago’s Jesse Brown VA Medical Center — the site of a recent active shooter and a self-inflicted fatal shooting — issued a solicitation for a “concealed weapons detection system” with product requirements that resemble Express’s advertised features.

The Chicago solicitation and the Capitol Health Care Network’s purchase plans for Express both specify the need for “AI and advanced algorithms to differentiate between threats (guns, Improvised Explosives Devices etc.) and nonthreat items such as phones, keys, belt buckles etc.),” such that individuals “are not required to divest everyday items.”

Xtract One, a smaller vendor that similarly claims to detect weapons while avoiding false alarms on harmless objects, ultimately won the work.

On Aug. 26, the VA initiated a four-year contract worth up to $1.3 million for the deployment of Xtract One’s machinery at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center.

IPVM’s Ermolaev said that, similar to Express, “real-life performance remains to be seen” with Xtract One, as independent testing results remain unavailable.

Earlier this summer, Xtract One said in an emailed statement that nondisclosure agreements cover tests that other organizations conducted, and “therefore, we cannot provide those results.”

“We believe that we have a strong solution to address the VA’s requirements,” the company added.

However, Ermolaev cautioned, “If you’re looking to find a lot of concealed weapons, whether it’s small, subcompact guns or knives, and you’re low on people, it’s a very difficult task to achieve with current state-of-the-art weapons detectors — and that goes beyond Express to their competitors — because the same fundamental trade-off applies,” meaning the trade-off between spotting the most weapons and hands-free screening.

False alarms at DOJ-funded schools, Marine Corps Museum

Advertisements aimed at schools that portrayed Express as an answer to the trade-off between security and convenience caught the FTC’s attention, according to the agency’s complaint, particularly after a New York school district’s scanners failed to detect a gun and knives, including a seven-inch one, that a student allegedly used to stab a peer in 2022.

The complaint explains that, the next year, Evolv offered a higher-sensitivity level and an acknowledgment: Schools may need more staff to run Express, as the machine may still miss some knives, trigger more false alarms and require the installation of a conveyor belt to divert harmless items.

By October 2023, the FTC had launched its investigation.

Not every school district or federal funding authority got word of the controversy. Officials at Colton Joint Unified School District in San Bernardino County, California, and Bristol City School District in Bristol, Tennessee, said via email that they were unaware of product-performance concerns when they applied for 2023 Department of Justice grants totaling $950,000 to purchase Express.

A federal spending database’s summaries of the Express grants emphasize features — such as AI-based “touchless security screening” and “allow[ing] for many students to pass through while still detecting potential weapons in their possession” — that Express does not offer, according to the FTC and the schools.

For example, in Bristol City, three-ring binders triggered alarms, which initially prompted staff to inspect backpacks manually, school officials said. Now, students must place them, along with cellphone chargers and laptops, on a table before entering.

In response to questions and concerns, Justice Department spokesperson Sheryl Thomas said in an emailed statement that DOJ’s Community Oriented Policing Services Office, which awards billions of dollars to state and local agencies, decided that funding the purchases of Express and other grantees’ projects may “improve security at schools and on school grounds” as part of “evidence-based school safety programs.”

Bristol City School District Superintendent David Scott, who was not in office at the time of the award, said by email, “I guess their marketing strategies had us convinced that the Evolv Express was the top tier.”

Bristol City schools intentionally dial the sensitivity “pretty high,” Scott noted. “We have added very expensive technology and still need to assign monitoring duties to two staff members per archway, one to watch the screen and one to be ready to accost someone who enters with a questionable object.”

Still, Scott pointed to real benefits, albeit ones also common to traditional metal detectors, such as displaying a commitment to security, keeping lines orderly and deterring students from smuggling in vape cartridges and other contraband.

Colton Joint Unified Communications Director Katie Orloff said by email that the school system has not finished ordering the machines and is aware of the ability to adjust the sensitivity level.

In addition to federally-funded hospitals and schools, several federal museums, among them the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Virginia, continue paying a premium for Express amid false alarms.

Staff at the Marine Corps museum said in an email that they were not aware of the FTC lawsuit until a reporter contacted the museum.

The museum sets its $350,390 Express system to “maximum sensitivity” to screen upwards of 150 people who attend the facility’s roughly 500 events each year — yielding “frequent false positives,” with the main culprits being umbrellas, phones or eyeglass cases, museum staff said.

Such false alarms can become a security threat themselves, according to researchers at the security and surveillance industry research group IPVM and the advocacy group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.).

Earlier this year, when the alarm rate hit 50% at one of New York City’s top museums, where concealed umbrellas on a rainy day made Express “cry wolf,” guards did not respond to two-thirds of alerts, an IPVM-S.T.O.P. field study found.

Marine Corps museum officials, after witnessing a high false-alarm rate during installation, trained security staff to examine the location of any alert manually, museum staff said.

“Security protocols still include visual bag checks,” staff added. “No cost savings have been identified.”

The Marine Corps museum sees other advantages — including the aesthetics that Express contributes to the facility. Previously, the museum assigned a guard to the minute-long task of wanding attendees with handheld metal detectors. Now, Express’s visual display of the location of flagged threats handles the process in seconds, museum staff said.

“Unlike earlier screening methods that resembled TSA checkpoints, Evolv makes visitor entry smoother and more pleasant,” they added, referring to Transportation Security Administration stations at airports.

Some law enforcement consultants remain wary, noting that TSA, unlike Evolv, does not claim its imaging systems will find improvised explosive devices.

“Most assuredly, commercial airports have a complete X-ray system in place, and they still swab for explosives,” said Phillip Lukens, a recently retired police chief recognized for incorporating AI into operations.

“I’m not sure that I understand how this system is so innovative that it’s able to detect an explosive, based on sensors or algorithms, if it can’t detect chemical composition … It gives me pause.”

Elizabeth Dole is best known as a true American trailblazer, having served — and this is a partial list — as the first female Secretary of Transportation, and thus the first female leader of a military service, the U.S. Coast Guard; the first woman to be elected a U.S. senator from North Carolina; a holder of cabinet positions in two presidential administrations; and a successor to Clara Barton as president of the American Red Cross.

But in 2010, Dole unexpectedly found herself in a new role: caregiver to her husband, the late former Senate Majority Leader and decorated World War II veteran Bob Dole. In the 11 months he spent at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center recovering from knee surgery and repeated bouts of pneumonia, Elizabeth Dole’s eyes were opened to a community of those who silently served: the family members who managed care and met the needs of their veteran loved ones, at great personal cost and often with little support.

“As I spent time around the hospital, I visited with other loved ones quietly looking after their wounded warriors. They shared stories about the emotional shock of their veterans’ injuries, their confusion about the medical decisions now in their hands, their frustration with the bureaucracy of our health system, and, in too many cases, a hopelessness about the future,” Dole, now 89, told Military Times. “As I brought them together for dinners or other informal gatherings, they found a lot of solace and support in spending time together.”

Dole’s establishment of the Elizabeth Dole Foundation brought these caregivers’ service into the national conversation, with celebrity-backed awareness campaigns and programs to support caregivers financially, physically and emotionally.

One of these caregivers was Rachel Clark, who found the foundation in a desperate internet search after being forced to commit her veteran husband to a mental health ward, Dole recalled. Clark later became a Dole Caregiver Fellow, contributing to a community of support for caregivers across the nation.

“Over the last eight years, Rachel and I have grown close as she has made tremendous contributions by sharing her knowledge and experiences with our Foundation partners and national leaders,” Dole said.

This year saw the passage of the Dole Act, which increased home care coverage under the Department of Veterans Affairs and created mental health grants for caregivers, while building and improving an array of benefits to support veterans in need. The legislation aptly illustrates Dole’s legacy of effecting meaningful change through advocacy — from working with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers to pass seatbelt laws in 29 states to achieving tobacco industry reforms while in office.

“That bill is the perfect example of the types of resources and changes that must come from Washington,” Dole said of the Dole Act, crediting the bill’s champions in Congress from both sides of the aisle. “Certainly, not every problem can be solved inside the beltway, but some solutions can only come from the federal government.”

As the 2025 recipient of the Military Times Foundation’s Chairman’s Award, Dole demonstrates the power and impact of a lifetime committed to service.

“My parents and my faith both instilled in me the principle that ‘to lead, is to serve,’” Dole said. “I also grew up in the shadow of the World War II generation, which engendered a spirit of patriotism and the ideal of working together toward a greater good. I can’t necessarily say what drew me to each career decision I have made along the way, but I always knew that whatever I did, I wanted to give back. I wanted to make a positive difference in the lives of others and to help those in need.”

On an ordinary Wednesday at U.S. Coast Guard Station Washington, D.C., Lt. Cmdr. Kim Jenish had just given her crew a motivating lecture about resilience and staying focused on their goals. She didn’t know that very evening would bring a crisis that would put her words to the test.

Just before 9 p.m. on Jan. 29, an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter collided with American Airlines Flight 5342 outside Washington, D.C., sending both aircraft plummeting into the Potomac River and leading to the deaths of all 67 people onboard.

Jenish was finishing dinner when she got the call from the unit’s duty officer: a plane had crashed and all available personnel were needed on the water.

The Potomac was freezing, with four to six inches of ice in places, she recalled, and the Coast Guard search-and-rescue boats weren’t designed to operate in those conditions. But the need was urgent, and the Coast Guardsmen went to work, using everything from hammers to weights to break ice around the boat launch so they could enter the water and begin search and rescue. Meanwhile, Station Washington became an incident command post, directing traffic as the river filled with rescue personnel.

“As boats were coming in, I was just using your classic whiteboard, writing, ‘Okay, what boats do we have?’ And then just sending them out and trying to place them,” Jenish recalled, adding that about eight Coast Guard vessels were on the water at a given time. “In those initial six hours that night, my team, we were responsible for taking every Coast Guard asset that arrived and sending them out on the water.”

For their heroic search and recovery efforts, Jenish and her entire Station Washington team are being honored as the Coast Guard Service Members of the Year.

The other team members include: Lt. Craig Oravitz; Lt. Cmdr. Matthew McGarity; Chief Petty Officer Logan Kellogg; Chief Petty Officer Jason Seraphin; Chief Petty Officer Ryan Rawding; Petty Officer 1st Class Tyler McGuinness; Petty Officer 1st Class Daniel Russo; Petty Officer 1st Class Ryan Smith; Petty Officer 1st Class Anthony Wallace; Petty Officer 1st Class James Nugent; Petty Officer 2nd Class Brandon Williams; Petty Officer 3rd Class Fabian Monorrez; Petty Officer 3rd Class Austin Vicars; Petty Officer 3rd Class Ian Frigiola; Petty Officer 3rd Class Danielle Zins; Seaman Nathan Cruz; and Seaman Colten McGalliard.

This was the first mass casualty response effort for Jenish and for the young Coast Guardsmen under her command. The tragedy and heartbreak of the event became real, she said, when she got word from the duty officer, about an hour into the operation, that a SAR team had recovered the first victim.

“I had to take a pause, because it just hit me, hearing that my youngest crew members are pulling up a body,” she recalled. “I think my mamma heart just broke for them.”

It would take days for Station Washington, working with an array of local response units, to recover all the people lost in the crash. For another three weeks, the Coast Guard maintained a safety perimeter on the Potomac, keeping boaters out of the wreckage sites and allowing crash investigators to work unhindered.

The unit came together after the mission was complete to process the tragedy with chaplains and a priority on mental health and recovery. But a week later, Jenish said, they were out on the water again, manning their assigned safety zones. Being recognized as service members of the year, she said, will help the unit come together once more.

“What they did that night was extraordinary — willing to take on that warranted risk, and willing to put out that heart, courage and dedication without being told to,” Jenish said. “I don’t know if closure is the right word, but I think this will certainly [play a] big part in their healing journey.”

Childhood astronaut dreams first attracted Staff Sgt. Yuji Moore to the mission of the Space Force. But while his career didn’t lead where he initially expected, he’s discovered an ability to reach new heights in every role he fills.

Moore, 25, began his military career in 2018 in the Air Force as an all-source intelligence analyst supporting remotely piloted aircraft operations. He calls the job his first small introduction to space, as satellite communications supported the work of his team.

But when the Space Force was born as the sixth military branch at the end of 2019, Moore knew he wanted to be in the first tranche of airmen to transfer over and build the new service.

“I knew I joined the military to get a different experience, so I wanted to jump into something new,” he recalled. And the new role delivered: “Standing up, we were working out of trailers, doing all these crazy operations on a dirt lot. So it was like being deployed every day. And that’s what the Space Force provided me.”

Moore was assigned to an electromagnetic warfare unit and completed a six-month deployment to Europe in his new role. When he returned, he had an opportunity to fulfill another dream: to be a military training instructor – a role he’d been inspired by as a high schooler in a summer Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program.

He put in an application, and in 2024 he learned he’d be headed to the Army Drill Sergeant Academy in Columbia, South Carolina. He’d be the first Space Force Guardian – and the first member of any joint service – to graduate.

Moore didn’t just graduate, though; he dominated the course, finishing at the top of his class with a 99% average grade across all training objectives.

Designated the class platoon first sergeant, he supervised 75 other troops from various services. He even got pulled into an equipment inventory project while in training with the Army, helping the service verify 137,000 items worth a total of $5 million and earning praise from leadership of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.

Moore said he put a lot of pressure on himself to show up ready, as he knew he’d need to learn another service’s structure and culture as well as the training material.

“Having zero personal Army experience was definitely daunting, so I made my best effort to absolutely prepare beforehand,” he said.

Back at the Space Force Moore is putting the knowledge he gained at the drill school to work, as one of the leads of a project to rewrite the entire curriculum for Space Force basic military training.

While the Space Force has up to this point closely followed Air Force training, Moore is now working to infuse more of the new service’s unique culture, principles and operational needs into the program.

He’s also seeking to be open about his personal struggles along the way. In early 2025, he said, he experienced a mental health crisis that forced him to seek help and reevaluate the pressure he placed on himself to achieve and excel.

“While I did see results from working so hard and doing all these different things, I now realize that you know you can do those things and also have boundaries and take care of yourself,” he said. “And I think it was an extremely important and valuable lesson for me to learn … and it allows me to be a more effective leader.”

When Iran dispatched some 200 attack drones and cruise missiles toward Israel in a brute-force attack on April 13, 2024, all of Capt. Carla Nava’s training was suddenly put to the test. A weapons systems officer with the 494th Fighter Squadron out of RAF Lakenheath, United Kingdom, Nava knew her F-15E Strike Eagle was prepped to be first in a two-ship formation if called upon. But when the pair of aircraft were launched from their undisclosed location in the Middle East — in the dark of night and more urgently than the crews expected — the intensity of the real-world mission was still disorienting.

“It just hits heavier when you know the Master Arm hot switch is on,” Nava recalled.

As the swarms of one-way attack drones came into view within just minutes of takeoff, the planes, flying at low altitudes, were tasked with taking them out before they could reach their targets.

The No. 2 aircraft got the first shot at an incoming drone, but missed. That cued up Nava’s aircraft and her role of double-checking the Strike Eagle’s targeting pod and giving the all-clear to shoot. The drone went down: a confirmed kill.

“It’s nerve-wracking, and then once you see it hit, it’s the biggest relief that you can have before you move on to the next target and rinse and repeat,” she said.

Nava, 29, is Military Times’ Airman of the Year. A first-generation American whose parents came to the U.S. from Venezuela, she fell in love with aviation while a cadet at the Air Force Academy. Nava had volunteered for the Middle East deployment that would put her unit in the action against Iranian drones.

The April 13 mission made her, along with pilot Capt. Claire “Atomic” Eddins, the Air Force’s first all-female crew of aces – signifying five air-to-air kills.

Beyond her achievements in combat, Nava has worked to improve the service for other female airmen, coordinating a “Flying While Pregnant Roadshow” while stationed in the UK and representing her unit at a convention focused on improving uniforms and equipment for women aviators.

During the counter-drone mission, an unprecedented Iranian assault and the largest air-to-air engagement for the Air Force in more than half a century, Nava also took on risk, delaying a refueling to remain in position as other aircraft expended their missiles and had to depart the area. They reached a “combat bingo” fuel state, meaning they’d have to land at a friendly foreign base near their location if they couldn’t secure an aerial refueling, which they ultimately did.

By the time they headed back to home station, the crew had expended all their missiles and taken out five Iranian drones. Their status as newly minted aces didn’t set in, Nava said, until the next day when they reviewed the plane’s targeting history.

“It was a win for everybody,” Nava said, adding that the Air Force hadn’t seen new aces in decades prior to the Iran showdown, with male and female aircrews alike were celebrating the achievement.

Now, Nava teaches future combat systems officers at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.

Being named Airman of the Year, Nava said, “speaks to the village that raised me,” adding that her village includes her parents and the Air Force itself.

“It’s an honor … and I hope I do it justice.”

Boatswain’s Mate 1st Class Ahmed El Haroun almost didn’t join the Navy. An immigrant from Egypt, he was proficient in a number of languages but insecure about his English skills and worried his different background would make it hard for him to fit in. But during a 2023 deployment to the Middle East, that background would enable him to engage with attacking Somali pirates and ensure the safety of his shipmates during a critical prisoner transfer.

El Haroun, 38, ultimately followed his American wife into the Navy, becoming a boatswain’s mate and embracing the exacting work of a boatswain’s mate, ensuring that ships run smoothly and safely.

“We do a lot of dangerous evolutions,” he said. “We have to pay a lot of attention to detail in everything we do.”

That focus would serve him well when he deployed to the Red Sea in late 2023 with the destroyer Mason, as the Middle East was still roiling in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel. As the leader of a team of five boatswain’s mates and 19 deck seamen, El Haroun put extra effort into preparation, arranging for the ship to carry extra repair parts so the crew could fix any equipment quickly, without outside resources. Throughout the deployment, he said, the ship had no major equipment casualties.

El Haroun’s duties took a turn on Nov. 24, 2023, when the Mason was tasked with responding to an emergency: Five pirates from Somalia were attempting to hijack a commercial vessel, the chemical tanker M/V Central Park in the Gulf of Aden, and holding its 22 crew members hostage. El Haroun was assigned to the Visit, Board, Search and Seizure, or VBSS, team before receiving a special job from the captain: to use his fluent Arabic to communicate with the pirates via megaphone.

The boatswain’s mate used not only his language skills but his cultural understanding to seize the upper hand, shouting and posturing aggressively in a show of dominance. As the VBSS team took the pirates into custody and transported them back to the Mason, El Haroun made sure he was their only point of contact, addressing them exclusively and facing them out to sea so they couldn’t threaten or intimidate crew members. He kept up the commanding posture and bravado even as the team spotted incoming missiles in the Gulf of Aden overhead.

For El Haroun, the mission demonstrated that his language background was not a weakness, but a unique strength.

“This is one of the reasons I really love the Navy,” he said. “They really don’t care where you’re coming from, they don’t care about your background. Just come be part of the team; do what you’re supposed to do, and you will succeed.”

El Haroun continues to be passionate about preserving the culture and traditions of the boatswain’s mate rating. He shares with more junior sailors the lessons he’s learned about remaining mentally ready under fire and in unfamiliar situations, and he recently made a series of how-to videos he plans to publish to YouTube about how to make by hand the elaborate traditional boatswain’s mates braided lanyards that he loves to wear and make for others.

When Zachary Sessa joined the Marine Corps, he signed a ground contract, paving the way for a career in the infantry. But as fate would have it, an opportunity came to switch to the high-demand fighter aviation field — giving him the chance to be a pilot like his father and grandfather. And that was where he’d end up making history.

Sessa, 33, from Butler, Pennsylvania, was named Military Times’ Marine of the Year for his distinguished leadership and performance during 2024 air strikes on Houthi rebel targets in Yemen from the Red Sea in what would be the first strike mission for his airframe. It’s the latest in a series of prestigious recognitions; Sessa was also named Marine Corps Aviator of the Year by the Corps in April.

Out of flight training, Sessa had been selected to fly the F-35C, the Navy’s carrier-capable variant of the Joint Strike Fighter. The rare assignment for a Marine officer allowed Sessa, early in his career, to participate in one of the aircraft’s first operational deployments as the Navy incorporated F-35Cs into its carrier air wings.

“It was fun to be at the leading edge of that,” he recalled.

In nearly a decade as a Marine Corps aviator, Sessa had served as a flight instructor in Kingsville, Texas, and completed a routine deployment with the F-35C to the Western Pacific. His second deployment in 2024 was initially expected to be another WestPac cruise, but the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, kicked off a wave of conflict in the Middle East, and Sessa’s squadron, VFMA-314, got word that they’d be headed to U.S. 5th Fleet instead.

Sessa, who served as the first Marine Corps F-35C weapons and tactics instructor, or WTI, during the deployment, had participated in defensive sorties earlier in the deployment. But in early November, he was briefed on a new mission: to strike Houthi weapons storage facilities in Yemen, a response to rebel attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It would be the F-35C’s first-ever strike mission.

Another WTI was mission commander for the first night of sorties on Nov. 9; Sessa commanded the second and final night of strikes on Nov. 10. Thanks to aggressive preparation and planning that took advantage of the F-35C’s stealthy profile and significant internal fuel capacity for long-range missions, the strikes went off without a hitch, Sessa recalled. Locked on the mission, Sessa and fellow squadron members saved their celebrations until they were safely back on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. And they didn’t celebrate alone.

“Watching the ordnance Marines all bending down to look up into the weapon bays to see that all the bombs were gone, and then the excitement there – all, you know, oh my gosh – that was honestly one of the most exciting parts of the mission," Sessa said. “Because that’s their Super Bowl.”

Sessa, now an F-35 instructor pilot in Yuma, Arizona, emphasized that his squadron, which was also honored as Marine Fighter Attack Squadron of the Year, deserved a full share of the credit for the airstrikes, as did the enablers who contributed to the readiness of aircraft and weapons.

“Everyone was prepared to go execute,” he said. “They all just contributed to squadron success.”

Staff Sgt. David Quay wasn’t a trained or experienced rescue swimmer. But he was ready and willing to go to any lengths to save a fellow soldier, and that made him the best man for the job.

Quay, 29, a standardization instructor with 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, was on deployment and conducting a routine training flight over the Mediterranean Sea on Nov. 10, 2023, when his MH-47 Chinook crew received word of a downed MH-60M Black Hawk helicopter in the region.

The Black Hawk had been conducting an aerial refueling when an in-flight emergency caused the crash.

Chief Warrant Officer 3 Stephen R. Dwyer, 38, of Clarksville, Tennessee, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Shane M. Barnes, 34, of Sacramento, California, Staff Sgt. Tanner W. Grone, 25, of Gorham, New Hampshire, Sgt. Andrew P. Southard, 27, of Apache Junction, Arizona, and Sgt. Cade M. Wolfe, 24, of Mankato, Minnesota, would ultimately perish in the crash.

But all Quay knew at the time was that fellow soldiers might need rescuing. The crew prepped the Chinook for overwater rescue, setting up a strop harness and hoist system and clearing the cabin to make space for anyone they might haul up. Quay had only ever taken these steps before during training.

After about 10 minutes of flight, the chopper was over the crash site. In the dark, the crew could see debris bobbing in the water and the red glow of chem lights that had been activated by soldiers in the Black Hawk. At first, no people were visible on the water. Then, Quay said, he spotted an arm waving a chem light. It was Grone, a Black Hawk repairer also with 160 SOAR.

The Chinook crew first attempted to send down the harness so they could pull Grone into the chopper, but they quickly realized he was too badly hurt to grab it.

“At that time, the best game plan was going to be to send me down the hoist to get into the water,” Quay recalled.

Quay was a competent recreational swimmer, but his reason for volunteering came down to duty.

“It was either, send someone else to do it, or I could do it,” he said. “And I felt like, since I was in charge of all the crew members, it was my job to do it.”

When Quay hit the water, it was chilly. He swam to Grone and first attempted to put the rescue harness around him, but quickly realized that wouldn’t work. The injured soldier was now unconscious. So Quay unhooked from the hoist and pulled Grone onto his chest, swimming with him toward an inflatable boat the Chinook crew had dropped into the water.

The helicopter rotor wash pushed the boat farther away from the crash site, and Quay had to swim about 100 meters while holding the injured soldier to reach it.

Unable to climb into the boat with Grone, Quay held onto the side, keeping Grone’s head above water for about 45 minutes while they waited for overwater rescue to arrive.

It wasn’t until the two soldiers had been brought to a medical facility that Quay realized how cold he’d gotten during that long night in the water. His body temperature had dropped to 92.8 degrees, and he required urgent treatment for hypothermia.

But his thoughts stayed with Grone, the soldier he risked his life to save. Weeks later, he met Grone’s parents and family members and learned more about the young soldier and the people who loved him.

Quay said he planned to take Grone’s mother, Erica Grone, to the award ceremony where he’ll be honored as the Military Times Soldier of the Year.

“At the end of the day, all of us would have done the same thing for one another,” Quay said. “And me getting on stage and accepting the award in their honor means that at least we’re doing something right there.”

District of Columbia National Guard troops who are deployed as part of President Donald Trump’s federal law enforcement intervention in the nation’s capital have had their orders extended through December, a National Guard official said.

The main purpose of the extension is to ensure that any D.C. Guard members out on the streets of Washington will continue to have uninterrupted benefits and pay for a mission that seems likely to persist for months, the official said.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said that while the extension doesn’t mean that all 950 D.C. Guard troops now deployed will serve until the end of December, it is a strong indication that their role is not winding down anytime soon.

Typically, Guard members need to be on active orders for more than 30 days to qualify for benefits like a housing allowance or health care, and issuing multiple extensions to those orders can sometimes cause interruptions.

National Guard members from Republican-led states also have been sent to Washington. How long those troops, who number 1,334, remain in the nation’s capital is up to their individual governors.

A spokesperson for the joint task force overseeing all Guard troops deployed to Washington and the Pentagon directed questions about the extension to the White House. In response to questions, a White House official said Trump was committed to the long-term safety and security of Washington.

The National Guard official said leaders also are expected to begin putting out policies on leave and time off for deployed troops — another sign that military leaders expect the deployment to go on for a longer period of time.

The task force acknowledged Monday that it was “aware of concerns regarding pay and benefits for members of Joint Task Force-District of Columbia.”

“While exceptions exist, the majority of service members are mobilized on orders extending beyond 30 days, ensuring they qualify for full benefits,” the task force said in a statement.

CNN was first to report the D.C. Guard’s extension.

When “Beetle Bailey” debuted in 1950, it was a college strip about a lanky underachiever who wanted to do as little as possible. Six months later, creator Mort Walker had Beetle enlist in the Army during the Korean War.

From that moment on, the reluctant private became one of the most recognizable characters in American comics, embodying the frustrations, absurdities and humor of military life.

Sept. 4 marks the strip’s 75th anniversary, a milestone few comics have ever reached. For the Walker family, it is both a celebration of their father’s creation and a continuation of a legacy that has outlived the man who drew it for more than six decades. Mort Walker died in 2018, but his sons Greg, Brian and Neal have kept the strip alive, publishing new gags every day in newspapers and online through Comics Kingdom and King Features Syndicate.

“It’s our entire life, almost,” Greg Walker said. “The strip was created soon after I was born. I’ve been here from the beginning. I started writing when I was in college more than 50 years ago, and it’s always been a part of us.”

The Army angle was never the plan. Beetle started at college, loafing his way through classes. However, circulation numbers were modest, and the strip was on the verge of cancellation.

When Walker placed Beetle in uniform, the dynamic changed. Suddenly, the laziness had higher stakes, bouncing off authority figures like Sergeant Snorkel, General Halftrack and the perpetually bewildered Lieutenant Fuzz.

By 1953, the strip’s popularity skyrocketed, fueled in part by controversy. Some military brass bristled at Walker’s portrayal of officers as incompetent or easily flustered. That criticism only drew more attention and more readers.

“The syndicate really played it up,” Brian Walker said. “There was all this publicity about whether the military had a sense of humor. That’s when the strip really took off.”

In the decades since, the Army has gone from being an antagonist of the strip to one of its champions. Mort Walker received the Distinguished Civilian Service Award in 2000, the Army’s highest honor for a civilian.

“He looked out at the audience and said, ‘I’m glad to see the Army finally has a sense of humor,’” Greg recalled with a laugh.

The longevity of “Beetle Bailey” is partly due to the ensemble cast. Characters like Cookie, Killer, Zero and Miss Buxley have developed personalities that go beyond one-note gags. Sergeant Snorkel, for instance, began as a mean-spirited drill instructor but over time became a more complex figure: gruff but loyal, lonely but devoted to his men.

“My father based Sarge on a real drill sergeant he had at Camp Crowder,” Brian said. “The guy yelled at them all day, but then one night he left poems on their pillows. That’s how Sarge evolved into someone tough but strangely lovable.”

For Neal Walker, who joined the strip’s creative process later, the evolution of characters like Miss Buxley showed how the strip could adapt.

“She started as more of a one-dimensional secretary,” Neal said. “Over time, we responded to feedback, made her more independent, more of a real person. That was important. The strip has always had to evolve.”

The family says that evolution is a constant balance. Camp Swampy, where the strip is set, is intentionally frozen in time. The uniforms and barracks evoke an earlier era, even if Beetle now checks his smartphone.

“People always ask why Beetle hasn’t deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan,” Brian said. “We keep him in basic training because that’s the one thing everyone in the military can relate to.”

The Walkers insist the strip is less about the Army itself than about human nature. That framework has given the family a foundation to tell jokes that remain relatable decades later.

“It’s really about people in an organization, dealing with bosses, rules, and authority,” Greg said. “It could be teachers, salesmen, or mechanics. The Army just provides the structure.”

Mort Walker’s work ethic was as disciplined as the Army life he parodied. While other cartoonists sometimes struggled to meet deadlines, he treated cartooning like a 9-to-5 job.

“He was always in his office in the morning and walked out at 5 p.m. at the end of the day,” Greg said. “It was like clockwork.”

That discipline produced an unmatched body of work. When Mort Walker died, he had drawn or overseen 24,576 “Beetle Bailey” strips over 67 years, three months and 12 days — a record for a single creator. He left his drawing board ready for the next installment.

Even after his death, the strip has remained a family project. Greg, Brian and Neal hold “gag conferences,” tossing around jokes until they find ones that fit the characters.

Sometimes the writing process produces hundreds of ideas, only a fraction of which make it into print.

“You write three times more than you need,” Brian said. “That’s how you keep the quality up.”

The Walkers guard the strip carefully. Hollywood has occasionally shown interest in adapting “Beetle Bailey” into a film or television series, but the family has resisted efforts to alter the characters or send Beetle on overseas adventures.

“We treat them like family,” Greg said. “We can’t let anyone change who they are.”

That protectiveness stems from how closely the Walkers see the characters as extensions of their father and themselves. Mort often modeled Beetle on his own college roommate, a world-class napper who once fell asleep on the floor mid-conversation. General Halftrack was based on a college professor. Fuzz reflected Mort’s own clumsy early days as a young officer.

“Every character has a real-world inspiration,” Neal said. “That’s part of why they feel so real to people.”

For readers, the appeal remains in the humor that cuts across generations. Whether it is Beetle dodging work, Sarge losing his temper or General Halftrack missing the point, the daily strip captures frustrations that resonate beyond the barracks.

Fans continue to find “Beetle Bailey” in print and increasingly online, through platforms like Comics Kingdom, and even social media. The move to digital has helped introduce Beetle to younger readers, keeping alive a comic born 20 years before the Vietnam War.

The strip’s cultural impact is still recognized at places like the University of Missouri’s Shack exhibit, a nod to the strip’s origins on that campus.

On the 75th anniversary, the Walkers plan to celebrate quietly, much like their father would have.

“Probably by playing golf,” Brian said with a laugh. “Dad would have liked that.”

Seventy-five years after Beetle stumbled into the Army, he is still on duty. Not because he wants to be, but because readers still want to see what he will do to get out of work tomorrow.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is scaling back its ambitions for a slate of upgrades called Block 4, the Government Accountability Office said Wednesday, as the aircraft struggles with production delays, cost overruns and supply chain snarls.

The downgrading of plans for F-35 upgrades, revealed in GAO’s report “F-35 Program: Actions Needed to Address Late Deliveries and Improve Future Development,” is the latest challenge for the vital — as well as troubled and expensive — program.

“The F-35 remains critical to our national defense, as well as that of our partners and allies, and is expected to retain critical roles for decades to come,” the report said. “After nearly 20 years of aircraft production, however, the F-35 program continues to overpromise and underdeliver.”

Block 4 is meant to boost the Lockheed Martin-made jet’s weapons capabilities, sensors and sensor fusion, and comes on the heels of another upgrade known as Technology Refresh 3, or TR-3. However, Block 4 is now at least $6 billion over budget and years behind schedule, in part due to delays with TR-3.

The F-35 program originally aimed to have Block 4’s 66 capabilities — which later swelled by more than a dozen — completed by 2026, but that deadline first slipped to 2029 and then further. A 2024 Defense Department review found the program was not on pace to start delivering the bulk of Block 4 upgrades until the mid-2030s, partly due to technical challenges, according to GAO.

Program officials then decided to focus on Block 4 capabilities that could be delivered by 2031 at the earliest — still at least six years behind schedule — and that wouldn’t require the additional power and cooling capacity of a planned engine upgrade. Block 4 is still on track to deliver improved electronic warfare, weapons, communication and navigation capabilities, GAO said, but a more detailed list was not available to auditors. Some capabilities, including those that depend on the improved engine, will be delayed, and others struck entirely because they are no longer needed, the report said.

GAO said program officials acknowledged the new plan for Block 4 doesn’t meet its original intent, but that the revised version could be realistically achieved within new cost, schedule and performance goals, and allow capabilities to be delivered at a more predictable pace.

A 2021 estimate also found Block 4 costs had grown from the original $10.6 billion to $16.5 billion; an updated estimate won’t be ready until the end of 2025.

In a statement to Defense News, Lockheed Martin stood by its work on the F-35 and pledged to keep moving forward on Block 4.

“The F-35 is combat proven, offers the most advanced capability and technology, and is the most affordable option to ensure America and its allies remain ahead of emerging threats,” Lockheed Martin said. “In partnership with the F-35 Joint Program Office, we will deliver 170 [to] 190 F-35s this year and continue fielding Block 4 capabilities to ensure the F-35 maintains its unmatched dominance in the skies.”

The GAO report also raised other concerns about the F-35 program, including rising costs and ongoing production delays.

The F-35’s acquisition costs — which include development and procurement — have grown to more than $485 billion, as of December 2023. That’s a nearly 10% increase from the December 2022 estimate of $442 billion, and more than double its original baseline cost from 2001.

Those costs are also $89.5 billion more than the rebaselining that was done in 2012. The F-35’s lifetime cost, including sustainment costs, is more than $2 trillion.

The F-35’s engine will also have to work harder to produce the level of power and cooling capacity the jet’s Block 4 upgrades will require, GAO said. This will result in more wear and tear on the engine, accounting for $38 billion of the program’s lifecycle cost estimate growth.

Lockheed is also still behind schedule on the TR-3 hardware and software that will make Block 4 possible. The company now expects to begin delivering those TR-3 elements in 2026, about three years after its original goal. Those delays were caused by problems maturing its integrated core processor and stabilizing its software so that TR-3 reliably starts up.

The TR-3 delays in 2023 led to the Pentagon ordering a halt, which ultimately lasted a year, to F-35 deliveries. Lockheed ended up storing dozens of new jets, which were slated to have TR-3, at locations such as its Fort Worth, Texas, facility as it scrambled to get TR-3 working.

Ultimately, Lockheed managed to get an interim version of the software working well enough for the Pentagon to begin accepting the jets, even though they were unable to fly in combat. This was done in part to avoid the risk of having more than 100 high-value F-35s parked together.

However, the TR-3 problem has worsened Lockheed’s years-long issue with delivery delays. In 2024, all 110 F-35s the company delivered were delivered late, with an average delay of 238 days behind schedule. That is far below where the company was in 2021, when it delivered 22 of its 142 aircraft late, with an average delay of 16 days behind schedule.

As of May, Lockheed was still working to deliver 20 remaining aircraft that were meant to be delivered in 2024.

Parts shortages have also contributed to F-35 delays, GAO said. This February, program officials said, Lockheed had 52 in-the-works jets that had to be taken off the production line and temporarily stored because necessary parts were so late.

That month, there were more than 4,000 parts shortages in the final stage of the production line, twice the historic average, according to the Defense Contract Management Agency. More than 1,600 of those parts are required for TR-3 hardware, the report said. And the flap on the front of the F-35’s wings is one of the main parts driving production delays over the last two years, GAO said.

DCMA officials told auditors that Lockheed has plans it hopes will fix the parts shortages, such as working with suppliers to more quickly identify risks to the supply chain. However, even with those plans, GAO said, parts delays and shortages will continue to delay deliveries through the rest of 2025.

GAO also noted that even when Lockheed delivers aircraft up to 60 days late, it still is able to receive partial incentive fees, which can total hundreds of millions of dollars. Auditors advised the Pentagon to rethink its use of those fees to avoid rewarding late deliveries.

RTX subsidiary Pratt & Whitney also failed to deliver any of the jet’s F-35 engines on time in 2023 and 2024, the report said. And last year, GAO said, those engines were 155 days late on average.

DCMA has repeatedly urged Pratt to speed up its engine deliveries, so far without success, GAO said. However, those engine delays haven’t affected aircraft production, auditors said.

The F-35 Joint Program Office and Pratt & Whitney did not respond to requests for comment by the time of this story’s publication.

President Donald Trump suggested Wednesday that New Orleans could be his next target for deploying the National Guard to fight crime, potentially expanding the number of cities around the nation where he may send federal law enforcement.

Trump has already said he plans to send the National Guard into Chicago and Baltimore following his administration deploying troops and federal agents to patrol the streets of Washington, D.C., last month.

“So we’re making a determination now,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during a meeting with Polish President Karol Nawrocki. “Do we go to Chicago? Do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in and straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become quite, you know, quite tough, quite bad.”

Trump now frequently boasts about turning Washington into a “safe zone.” The White House reports more than 1,760 arrests citywide since the president first announced he was mobilizing federal forces on Aug. 7.

But Washington is a federal district subject to laws giving Trump power to take over the local police force for up to 30 days. The decision to use troops to attempt to quell crime in other Democratic-controlled cities around the country would represent an important escalation.

Trump’s latest comments came a day after he declared “We’re going in” and suggested that the National Guard might soon be headed for Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, and Baltimore. That’s despite state and local officials, as well as many residents, both places staunchly opposing the idea.

President says he will deploy National Guard troops to Chicago

New Orleans, however, is a Democrat-controlled in a red state run by Landry.

“So we’re going to be going to maybe Louisiana, and you have New Orleans, which has a crime problem. We’ll straighten that out in about two weeks,” Trump said. “It’ll take us two weeks, easier than D.C.”

City leaders immediately balked at the idea.

“Crime is down in New Orleans,” City Councilmember Oliver Thomas, who is also a mayoral candidate, said via text message. “That would seem to be very political or a major overreaction!”

Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly railed against Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker for not requesting that the National Guard be deployed.

Some National Guard troops in DC now carrying service-issued weapons

“We could straighten out Chicago. All they have to do is ask us to go into Chicago. If we don’t have the support of some of these politicians, but I’ll tell you who is supporting us, the people of Chicago,” Trump said Wednesday.

Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have been adamant in saying Chicago doesn’t need or want military intervention. In Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore have remained similarly opposed.

In Washington, Mayor Muriel Bowser has said Trump’s decision to take over her city’s police force and flood streets with hundreds of federal law enforcement agents and National Guard troops has succeeded in reducing violent crime — but she’s also argued that similar results could have been achieved simply by having more city police officers in service.

Associated Press writer Jack Brook in New Orleans contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday justified the lethal military strike that his administration said was carried out a day earlier against a Venezuelan gang as a necessary effort by the United States to send an unmistakable message to Latin American cartels.

Asked why the military did not instead interdict the vessel and capture those on board, Trump said the operation would cause drug smugglers to think twice about trying to move drugs into the U.S.

“There was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people, and everybody fully understands that,” Trump said while hosting Polish President Karol Nawrocki at the White House. He added, “Obviously, they won’t be doing it again. And I think a lot of other people won’t be doing it again. When they watch that tape, they’re going to say, ‘Let’s not do this.’”

Tuesday’s strike was an astonishing departure from typical U.S. drug interdiction efforts at a time when Trump has ordered a major Navy buildup in the waters near Venezuela.

Later Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that such operations “will happen again.”

Rubio said previous U.S. interdiction efforts in Latin America have not worked in stemming the flow of illicit drugs into the United States and beyond.

“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,” Rubio said on a visit to Mexico.

US Coast Guard offloads record amount of narcotics

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on “Fox & Friends” that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was running his country “as a kingpin of a drug narco-state.”

Hegseth said officials “knew exactly who was in that boat” and “exactly what they were doing.” But the Republican administration has not presented any evidence supporting Trump’s claim that operators of the vessel were from the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and were trying to smuggle in drugs.

“President Trump is willing to go on offense in ways that others have not seen,” said Hegseth, who declined to detail how the strike was carried out.

Trump and administration officials have repeatedly blamed the gang for being at the root of the violence and illicit drug dealing that plague some American cities.

The president on Tuesday repeated his claim — contradicted by a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment — that Tren de Aragua is operating under Maduro’s control.

In announcing the strike, Trump said the operation, which he said killed 11, was carried out in international waters. He also noted that the gang is designated by the U.S. government as a foreign terrorist organization.

Unlike its counterparts from Colombia, Brazil and Central America, Tren de Aragua has no large-scale involvement in smuggling cocaine across international borders, according to InSight Crime, which last month published a 64-page report on the gang based on two years of research.

“We’ve found no direct participation of TdA in the transnational drug trade, although there are cases of them acting as subcontractors for other drug trafficking organizations,” said Jeremy McDermott, a Colombia-based co-founder of InSight Crime, referring to the Venezuelan gang by its initials.

Still, with affiliated cells spread across Latin America, it would not be a huge leap for Tren de Aragua to one day delve deeper into the drug trade, he said. Meanwhile, the rhetoric from officials in Washington who would blame TdA as a proxy for all Venezuelan drug traffickers assures it will remain a target of intense U.S. government focus.

“It is almost impossible today to determine who is TdA and who is not,” said McDermott. “Deportations and statements from the United States suggest that TdA is now being used as a catch-all description for Venezuelan criminals acting abroad.”

Some international warfare experts are questioning the legality of the strike.

“Intentional killing outside armed conflict hostilities is unlawful unless it is to save a life immediately,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, an expert on international law and the use of force at the University of Notre Dame Law School. “No hostilities were occurring in the Caribbean.”

Hegseth was opaque in his comments on Fox about whether Trump was looking to press for “regime change” in Venezuela.

“Well, that’s a presidential decision,” Hegseth said. He added that “anyone would prefer that” Maduro “would just give himself up. But that’s a presidential-level decision.”

The U.S. announced plans last month to boost its maritime force in the waters off Venezuela to combat threats from Latin American drug cartels.

Maduro’s government has responded by deploying troops along Venezuela’s coast and border with neighboring Colombia, as well as by urging Venezuelans to enlist in a civilian militia.

Ryan Berg, director of the Americas program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Tuesday’s strike clearly shows governments in the region, not only Maduro, the paradigm shift brought on by the U.S. decision to declare Tren de Aragua and Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

“This is a United States that sees security differently,” Berg said. “They’ve just demonstrated the ability to use deadly force in the Western Hemisphere, and they’ve already told Mexico that they’re going to do the same thing on Mexican territory if they don’t get the level of cooperation that they want.”

AP writer Regina Garcia Cano in Mexico City and Joshua Goodman in Miami contributed reporting.

“Dear Feloma,

Arrived safely and just got done eating supper. So far, I don’t like it at all.”

And with that letter, dated Aug. 19, 1943, Donald Fiorini’s war began.

Drafted in July of that year, Fiorini was to see and participate in intense combat in the Pacific Theater as a member of C Company, 321st Regiment, 81st Infantry Division. From Camp Adair, Oregon, to Angaur, Peleliu, the Philippines, Leyte Island and finally to the Japanese mainland, the ordinary young soldier from rural Pennsylvania witnessed the carnage of a world at war — and, extraordinarily, he wrote it all down for his wife to read back home.

And there his letters remained, in his wife Feloma’s possession, until both of their deaths in the late 2000s. Tucked away in the couple’s attic were over 500 letters that Fiorini had sent to Feloma, recounting his early, homesick days at basic training to the hellish battles of the Pacific. The letters provide an unvarnished account of the evolution of Fiorini and the war he waged.

Now, Fiorini’s granddaughter, Katie, who is the custodian of his papers, has teamed up with her friend, Carson, to share this personal slice of World War II in a new podcast titled “500 Letters to Nana.”

“My grandpa passed in 2014,” Katie recounted to Military Times in a recent interview. “My mom, my husband, my dad and I were going through the house and we went through the attic and found this trunk suitcase. We opened it up and it’s literally just full of letters, pictures and a scrapbook. My mom asked, ‘Do you want this or should we just chuck it?’ I was like, ‘No, no, no. I want it.”

“I then carried on the tradition by keeping them in a box for another 10 years,” she said, laughing.

In the past year, however, Katie began combing through the ephemera, hoping to scan them so that her mother would have all the letters in one place.

Soon after, Katie began regaling her husband, and then Carson, with some of the tidbits.

“My grandfather was hysterical,” said Katie. “He was so funny. He loved a gag. He loved a practical joke. He was constantly razzing people, in a good way, not in a mean way. In these letters, he’s so funny. He kept that. He truly kept his sense of humor his whole life. … It’s funny to see that parallel — from him in his 20s to him in his 80s.”

It was over a recent birthday dinner that Carson came up with the idea for the podcast.

“We both felt like we had this little special gem,” Carson told Military Times. “And we wanted to move it forward. We wanted to share it.”

And for the hosts, the subject matter — war and separation from a loved one — is something they can both relate to.

“My husband was special forces,” Carson noted. “In 2003, he called one night and he said, ‘Keep the kids up.’ So I kept them up to nine or 9:30, which was a couple hours past their bedtime. When he came home he said, ‘I’m leaving.’ It was like my brain just stopped computing, honestly. He left the next day at 4:30 in the morning. He was the first in Iraq.”

For Katie, some of the Army language struck her.

“Donald writes to Feloma that ‘We went through something called the Infiltration Course today during basic training. I have an actual letter from my husband from basic training saying we went through something called the Infiltration Course today. I read that and thought, ‘It’s exactly the same.’”

The pair plan to release one episode a week, drawing on the shared love story between Donald and Feloma. The letters became a lifeline for the couple, who married in 1940 at the age of 20.

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And while few letters remain in Feloma’s voice — “he would hang on to her letters for as long as he could before they would disintegrate,” Katie noted — the hosts want to make sure that Feloma remains centered at the heart of the story.

“We want to pull her into the episodes, because what was she going through? We don’t know, right? We don’t know. Occasionally in a letter, he says something that you know is a response to something she’s written, but she really is the heart of this, because she saved it all. She was so proud of him, and she saved everything. It’s incredible,” said Carson.

But it also follows Fiorini’s evolution from a nervous, homesick grunt to a man who has endured the savageness of war.

“When he’s in training, he’s very silly,” Katie said. “He’s very optimistic and funny and bright, and then after combat, while he’s still very funny and sarcastic … the swearing exponentially increases in the letters. It’s pretty raw, the difference. By the time he makes it to occupied Japan, he is just like, ‘No, I’m not doing any of this.’”

The war impacted Fiorini in other ways as well, however. Namely his palate.

“He never ate coconut again,” quipped Katie.

Stream all four episodes on “500 Letters to Nana” now.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the U.S. has carried out a strike in the southern Caribbean against a drug-carrying vessel that departed from Venezuela.

The president offered scant details on the operation.

“When you leave the room, you’ll see that we just, over the last few minutes, literally, shot a boat — a drug-carrying boat,” Trump told reporters during an unrelated Oval Office event. He added there were “a lot of drugs” on the vessel.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on X that the vessel was being operated by a “designated narco-terrorist organization.” The secretary described the operation as a lethal strike.

Rubio addressed the strike on Tuesday shortly before he was scheduled to depart for Mexico and Ecuador for talks on drug cartels, security, tariffs and more.

https://t.co/o5xOQ6HRFg pic.twitter.com/s9ktAlDQUi

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) September 2, 2025

The U.S. recently announced plans to boost its maritime force in the waters off Venezuela to combat threats from Latin American drug cartels.

The U.S. has not signaled any planned land incursion by the thousands of personnel being deployed. Still, President Nicolás Maduro’s government has responded by deploying troops along Venezuela’s coast and border with neighboring Colombia, as well as by urging Venezuelans to enlist in a civilian militia.

Maduro has insisted that the U.S. is building a false drug-trafficking narrative to try to force him out of office. He and other government officials have repeatedly cited a United Nations report that they say shows traffickers attempt to move only 5% of the cocaine produced in Colombia through Venezuela. Landlocked Bolivia and Colombia, with access to the Pacific and Caribbean, are the world’s top cocaine producers.

The latest U.N. World Drug Report shows that various countries in South America, including Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, reported larger cocaine seizures in 2022 than in 2021, but it does not assign Venezuela the outsize role that the White House has in recent months.

“The impact of increased cocaine trafficking has been felt in Ecuador in particular, which has seen a wave of lethal violence in recent years linked to both local and transnational crime groups, most notably from Mexico and the Balkan countries,” according to the report.

Maduro on Monday told reporters he “would constitutionally declare a republic in arms” if his country were attacked by U.S. forces deployed to the Caribbean.

The press office of Venezuela’s government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s announcement.

The Pentagon did not offer any immediate comment on the reported incident.

President Donald Trump says he will deploy the National Guard to Chicago to help with crime in the city.

“We’re going in. I didn’t say when. We’re going in,” Trump said at the White House on Tuesday.

“Chicago is a hellhole right now, Baltimore is a hellhole right now,” he added.

Chicago ranks 13th in total crime rates for American cities with populations of at least 250,000, with Memphis, Cleveland and St. Louis plagued with the highest total crime rates, according to FBI crime data.

Even as Chicago’s crimes rates are down across the board this year, dozens of people were shot and at least seven people were killed in the city in a surge of violence over the Labor Day weekend.

The city’s leaders and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker have said they do not want U.S. troops to assist in the city. Pritzker said Sunday such a move would be an “invasion,” and added that the Trump administration has not communicated any plans to his office.

“National Guard troops are not trained to do local law enforcement, but FBI agents, DEA agents, ATF agents are trained to fight crime, and they have collaborated with local law enforcement. So I would prefer more resources on that, [rather] than sending the military illegally into the streets of American cities against American citizens,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul told CNN on Tuesday.

The news comes hours after a federal judge in California determined that the president illegally violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the power of the federal government to use military force for domestic matters, when he deployed 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles in June.

“The judge ruled that the president failed to show there was a rebellion or inability of civil authorities to respond to the demonstrations, which is the requirement in federal law to use troops over the objections of the governor. Accordingly, he will have the same issue should he try to do this in Chicago, and likely the same result,” retired Maj. Gen. William Enyart, a former Congressman who also served as the 37th Adjutant General for the Illinois National Guard, told Military Times.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly called Breyer “a rogue judge” trying to “usurp the authority of the Commander-in-Chief” and vowed to fight the decision.

Guard deployment in DC

More than 2,200 National Guard troops are deployed in Washington, D.C., where crimes were already on the decline prior to their deployment, according to FBI crime data.

Since the deployment, crime has continued to decrease with the administration surge of federal resources.

Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department data showed that 20-year homicide trends last year were at their lowest point since the 2020 pandemic.

Homicide rates in 2024 were 68% lower than the record highs of the 1990s, from about 80 homicides per 100,000 residents to about 25 homicides per 100,000 residents, FBI crime data shows. But those rates last year were almost twice as high as in 2012, when the nation’s capital experienced a 50-year low in the number of homicides per capita.

President Trump has accused D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser of providing “highly inaccurate crime figures” by stating that total violent crime in the capital was at a 30-year low. The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether the Metropolitan Police Department has falsified its data.

The president has claimed that crime in D.C. was the “worst ever” and that it had been “many years” since the city had a murder-free stretch of even a week. Neither statement is supported by data.

On Tuesday, the president praised how much he felt that D.C. had changed since his deployment of federal law enforcement and National Guard troops, saying, “You can walk right down the street even by yourself, and you’re totally safe. Washington, D.C., is great.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved sending up to 600 military lawyers to the Justice Department to serve as temporary immigration judges, according to a memo reviewed by The Associated Press.

The military will begin sending groups of 150 attorneys — both military and civilians — to the Justice Department “as soon as practicable” and the military services should have the first round of people identified by next week, according to the memo, dated Aug. 27.

The effort comes as the Trump administration cracks down on immigration across the country, ramping up arrests and deportations. Immigration courts also already are dealing with a massive backlog of roughly 3.5 million cases that has ballooned in recent years.

However, numerous immigration judges have been fired or left voluntarily after taking deferred resignations offered by the administration, according to their union.

The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers said in July that at least 17 immigration judges had been fired “without cause” in courts across the country.

That has left about 600 immigration judges, union figures show, meaning the Pentagon move will double their ranks.

The move is being done at the request of the Justice Department, and the memo noted that the details will initially last no more than 179 days but can be renewable.

When asked about the move, a DOJ spokesperson referred questions about the plan to the Defense Department. Pentagon officials directed questions to the White House.

A White House official said Tuesday that the administration is looking at a variety of options to help resolve the significant backlog of immigration cases, including hiring additional immigration judges.

The official said the matter should be “a priority that everyone — including those waiting for adjudication — can rally around.”

At just 16, Frank S. Wright lied about his age to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps.

He entered the ranks of the 4th Marine Raiders and later the 21st Marines, 3rd Marine Division, and went on to fight in Guadalcanal, New Georgia, Guam and Iwo Jima.

He was bayoneted in the stomach while liberating Guam and shot in the chest and arm by enemy machine-gun fire during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Days ago, in a ceremony in Stockton, California, the now 100-year-old was promoted from corporal to honorary sergeant by the 39th Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Eric M. Smith — 79 years after his initial discharge.

Wright’s war

Inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words that “Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history,” Wright walked into his local enlistment office on Jan. 21, 1942, determined to do his bit. But he hit roadblocks: He was too young and too skinny.

Using his older brother’s birthday got him around one barrier … while bananas got him around the other.

“I went home and I got me about five pounds of bananas and put them in my pockets, my jacket,” Wright told CBS News. “I got enough so I could pass the weight part.”

Wright initially served in the 4th Raider Battalion, which was activated on Oct. 23, 1942 and commanded by Maj. James Roosevelt, who had been the XO to famed 2nd Marine Raiders’ Lt. Col. Evans Carlson. As part of the unit, Wright was almost immediately plunged into battle.

After hellish conditions on Guadalcanal, Wright openly recalled being bayoneted during vicious hand-to-hand fighting during the Battle of Guam.

“I tripped and a [Japanese soldier] stabbed me in the stomach as I was going down and then fell on top of me,” Wright wrote in his first book, “Battles in the Pacific: World War II, My Personal War Causing PTSD”.

“Taking the life of a person with a knife is a lot different than shooting someone with a rifle from fifty yards away,” Wright recounted in his second book. “When you see him up close, look into his eyes and hear him yell, well, it’s very different.”

According to Wright, the corpsman dressed his stomach and told him to finish the patrol “since [he] was able to walk.”

Iwo to the end

Disembarking from the combat ship Jackson on Feb. 19, 1945, the hardened Marine described the scenes upon Iwo Jima as his “first real look at a place called HELL on water.”

“It was hand-to-hand fighting from the day we arrived to the day I left,” Wright continued. “It was hard all the way through.”

While charging up a hill March 3, a Japanese soldier shot Wright in the chest. The bullets went through his right side, cracked his clavicle and punctured his lung — exiting through his left arm.

Wright was medically evacuated, eventually returning to full duty to finish his career as a drill instructor, according to a Camp Pendleton social media post. He was honorably discharged in 1946.

By war’s end, Wright’s military awards included the Purple Heart with two stars, Presidential Unit Citation with two stars, Navy Unit Commendation, American Campaign Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign with three service stars, Fleet Marine Force with four stars, Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal, Combat Action with four stars, Victory Medal and the Good Conduct Medal.

Now, at 100, he is a sergeant.

U.S. Navy pilots in training no longer have to complete a requirement previously considered integral for flight school success.

As of March 2025, students can qualify for graduation without landing a jet on an aircraft carrier, according to a Navy spokesperson who provided an emailed statement to the Navy Times. Pilots will instead complete carrier qualifications during follow-on training at the fleet replacement squadron they’re assigned to.

“The strategic decision of moving strike pipeline carrier qualifications from the training syllabus to their fleet replacement squadrons was driven by increased technological capabilities in the fleet,” the spokesperson said.

In 2016, the Navy rolled out new flight technology dizzyingly dubbed the “Maritime Augmented Guidance with Integrated Controls for Carrier Approach and Recovery Precision Enabling Technologies” — mercifully abbreviated to MAGIC CARPET — that streamlines aircraft carrier landings by reducing the number of moving parts a pilot must deal with prior to touching down on a carrier.

Before MAGIC CARPET, pilots had to coordinate glide slope, angle of attack and line up before landing, according to a Navy release at the time of the technology’s release. But the technology separates, or decouples, the three areas of responsibility so that adjusting one doesn’t require the pilot to adjust the others as much as before.

While Navy student pilots currently fly the T-45 Goshawk — a training aircraft that does not come equipped with MAGIC CARPET — there are plans underway to replace the aging jet.

The U.S. Navy launched the Undergraduate Jet Training System program in 2020, with the intention of finding the service’s next aircraft to train future pilots on, according to a Request for Information.

Students training to fly F/A-18s, F-35s and EA-18Gs are no longer required to land on a carriers before receiving their “Wings of Gold,” which are awarded to naval aviators after they’ve completed aviation training.

The Navy spokesperson said the requirement was also nixed to reduce training pipeline times and ensure fleets received qualified pilots faster.

However, students training to be future E-2 pilots, as well as international military students, are still required to complete carrier landing qualifications on a ship in the T-45 Goshawk before graduation.

The Coast Guard is getting its first MQ-9 drones to help counter human trafficking, assist with drug interdictions and improve search-and-rescue missions, an addition that current and former officials are heralding as a game-changer in the fight against smuggling.

Known for their long flight times needed for extensive surveillance missions, the MQ-9 is among the most sought-after drones for combatant commanders across the globe.

About $266 million of the nearly $25 billion that the Coast Guard received in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” signed into law in July will be used to procure the service’s own MQ-9 Alpha long-range unmanned aerial systems, Lieutenant Commander Steve Roth said.

Per U.S. Air Force data, an MQ-9 costs about $57 million, and the acquisition could increase the Coast Guard’s inventory from zero to as many as four of these units. Officials say the drones will not be armed.

Each drone can collect intelligence information for about 24 hours in a 60- to 80-mile radius of detection.

“That’s ions of improvement on the way we’ve been doing it with manned aviation,” Lt. Commander Andrew Denning, the long-range drone program manager for the Coast Guard, told Military Times.

Coast Guard C-130 Super Hercules planes can patrol for about 14 hours, while Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft can patrol for up to 10 hours at a time. The small crews on these manned aircraft work throughout the patrol, while MQ-9s rotate crews about every two hours.

“You have a fresh set of eyes, so you can really mitigate risk by doing that. By keeping the crew fresh, you can keep it out there, so you don’t have as many pass downs going from aircraft to aircraft. It’s pretty seamless,” Lieutenant Commander Ryan Major told Military Times.

The Coast Guard has partnered with U.S. Customs and Border Protection since the mid-2000’s to fly the CBP’s MQ-9 Alpha drones to execute mostly customs missions out of San Angelo, Texas. Major said the CBP missions the service has pursued have been successful.

“Right now, the southern border is almost closed up. We’re not seeing, we’re hardly seeing anybody trying to cross the southern border, so we’re moving operations out to the Gulf of America,” he said.

With the money from the Big Beautiful Bill, Denning said the Coast Guard will still partner with CBP but will now be able to launch its own program with its own equipment, extending its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) reach.

“We’re hoping to take it out of San Angelo, where we work with CBP, to West Coast and East coast locations where we can start to use them on our own, prosecute them and push them out into our own mission set,” Denning said.

The pilots said more drones could lead to more rescue successes. In November 2023, CBP and Coast Guard MQ-9 pilots at the Joint Program Office in San Angelo, Texas, were able to use one of the CBP’s drones to find a lost vessel with four people on board following an unsuccessful search by Coast Guard helicopters and vessels in the Corpus Christi, Texas, area.

“So I think it was a great case study that we can use these [drones] for search and rescue going forward,” Major said.

Retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Military Times the influx of resources in the Big Beautiful Bill shows the administration’s intense focus on homeland defense. The Coast Guard’s use of unmanned long-range surveillance, he added, will save money without impacting the Pentagon’s ISR platform stockpiles.

‘A nightmare’: The Coast Guard’s harrowing flight to Camp Mystic

The resources are critical to the Coast Guard’s Force Design 2028, which Acting Vice Commandant of the Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thomas Allan, Jr. described as a “once in a generation effort” to transform the service into a more agile, capable and response force. Speaking at a ceremony in Washington last week, Allan added that the Coast Guard was “significantly increasing” the use of unmanned aerial systems “as a key force multiplier.”

One way the service is enabling increased drone use is by expanding the UAS pilot pool to a broader range of qualified Coasties.

The Coast Guard had a policy in place in which it sent only designated naval aviators to the UAS mission, but it shifted to include pilots who have a commercial Federal Aviation Administration certificate and 1,000 hours of flight experience on any combination of manned aircraft.

During the Washington ceremony, Allan pinned the service’s new aviation pilot vehicle wings onto Major, the first Coastie to fly drones without previously being a naval aviator for the service.

“I’ve been in aviation my entire life,” said Major, who was a commercial flight instructor in 2001 and served as a helicopter mechanic in the Coast Guard before earning his UAS wings.

“My dream was always to fly, especially fly for the Coast Guard. I always wanted to do search and rescue. I always wanted to be a Coast Guard aviator,” he said.

President Donald Trump’s administration violated federal law in the use of National Guard troops during Southern California immigration enforcement operations and accompanying protests, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.

Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco did not require the remaining troops to be withdrawn, however. He set his order to go into effect on Friday.

The order comes after California sued, saying the troops sent to Los Angeles over the summer were violating a law that prohibits military enforcement of domestic laws.

Lawyers for Trump’s Republican administration have argued the Posse Comitatus Act doesn’t apply because the troops were protecting federal officers, not enforcing laws. They say the troops were mobilized under an authority that allows the president to deploy them.

The judge’s decision comes as Trump has discussed National Guard deployments in Democratic-led cities like Chicago, Baltimore and New York. He has already deployed the guard as part of his unprecedented law enforcement takeover in Washington, where he has direct legal control.

Trump federalized members of the California National Guard and sent them to the second-largest U.S. city over the objections of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and city leaders. Trump did so under a law that allows the president to call the guard into federal service when the country “is invaded,” when “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government,” or when the president is otherwise unable “to execute the laws of the United States.”

Trump has pushed the bounds of typical military activity on domestic soil, including through the creation of militarized zones along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Newsom posted on X, in an all-caps reflection of the president’s own social media style, “DONALD TRUMP LOSES AGAIN. The courts agree -- his militarization of our streets and use of the military against US citizens is ILLEGAL.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Breyer’s scathing ruling accused the Trump administration of “willfully” violating the law, saying it used troops for functions that were barred by their own training materials, refused to “meaningfully coordinate with state and local officials” and “coached” federal law enforcement agencies on the language to use when requesting assistance.

“These actions demonstrate that Defendants knew that they were ordering troops to execute domestic law beyond their usual authority,” he wrote. “The evidence at trial established that Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.”

Breyer also noted the Trump administration’s possible plans to call National Guard troops into other U.S. cities.

In Los Angeles, National Guard members joined an operation at MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles intended as a show of force against people in the U.S. illegally and those protesting the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

They also accompanied federal immigration officers on raids at two state-licensed marijuana nurseries in Ventura County, Army Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman testified.

Sherman, who initially commanded the troops deployed to Los Angeles, testified during the second day of the trial that he raised concerns the deployment could violate the Posse Comitatus Act.

He said soldiers were trained on the law and given materials that included a list of activities prohibited by the act, including doing security patrols and conducting traffic control, crowd control and riot control.

Sherman said that while the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits troops from carrying out those actions, he was told by his superiors that there was a “constitutional exception” that permitted such activities when the troops are protecting federal property or personnel.