The crew of the carrier George Washington has been banned from drinking alcohol on or off base under a new set of liberty restrictions implemented in the wake of the deaths of two sailors following the ship’s arrival in Japan.

The updated rules, which apply to approximately 3,000 sailors assigned to the hulking ship, went into effect Nov. 26, a spokesperson for the carrier told Stars and Stripes. The restrictions are not intended to be permanent.

Also under the regulations, which were implemented four days after the ship pulled into Yokosuka Naval Base on Nov. 22, sailors under the age of 20 will not be allowed to take overnight liberty, Stripes reported.

Since October, restrictions put in place — beyond the temporary order — have prohibited Japan-based sailors from visiting or drinking alcohol in off-base businesses between midnight and 5 a.m.

The tightened guidelines come in the wake of two GW sailors’ deaths in separate incidents after the ship pulled into port.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Cuyler Burnett Condon and Seaman Dimitri Isacc Morales died within days of the ship’s return to U.S. 7th Fleet.

Condon was found unresponsive Nov. 22 in an on-base hotel room and was pronounced dead at the scene. Three days later, Morales was discovered unresponsive off base in Yokosuka and subsequently pronounced dead by local authorities.

The Naval Criminal Investigation Service is investigating the deaths alongside Japanese law enforcement, Stripes reported.

The enhanced restrictions, meanwhile, will remain in place as officials “monitor activities in town and communicate any changes to the policy,” the spokesperson told Stripes.

The GW, which includes the first F-35C Lightning II squadron to join forward-deployed naval forces in Japan, is now the Navy’s only forward-deployed carrier.

The ship replaced the carrier Ronald Reagan in Japan so the latter could undergo maintenance work in Bremerton, Washington.

Military Times reporters Diana Stancy and Riley Ceder contributed to this report.

Leaders at Fort Carson say they’re working to make changes following reports from soldiers about meager and unappetizing meals in the dining facilities at a Colorado Army base.

Objections about the food at Fort Carson spiked on the Yelp-style app, Hots&Cots, this fall. The app, launched by a former Army reservist last year, allows service members to anonymously review the quality of barracks and dining services.

Soldiers at Fort Carson, home to the 4th Infantry Division, posted on the app about inadequate protein, warm sushi and in one case, a meal consisting of lima beans and toast. One post said the dining facilities were overcrowded, which resulted in a 45-minute wait to get food. Other soldiers posted photos showing empty grab-and-go kiosks, which were meant to serve as supplemental food sources.

Lt. Col. Joey Payton, a spokesperson for Fort Carson, addressed the issues in a statement Wednesday.

“We recognize that we’ve had some challenges with consistency and quality of our soldiers’ dining experiences at our warrior restaurants and kiosks,” Payton said. “We’re committed to ensuring our Soldiers receive quality and healthy meals and can take full advantage of their meal benefit they are entitled to receive.”

The base directed the dining staff to make sure soldiers can select any item on the menu during the facilities’ open hours, Payton said. Fort Carson is also “reinvigorating” its dining facility council — a group of brigade-level leaders — “to ensure leader emphasis across our food service facilities.”

As DFACs close at Fort Carson, empty food kiosks leave soldiers hungry

As of early December, Fort Carson’s dining program was the subject of 39 posts on Hots&Cots, significantly more than the installation with the next-highest number of reviews. Many installations had received just one review.

Several posts remarked that soldiers were not getting enough nutrients to fuel their active lifestyles. In addition to the 4th Infantry Division, the base houses the 10th Airborne Special Forces Group and the World Class Athlete Program, which allows soldier-athletes to compete in the Olympics while serving in the Army.

“The amount of protein you get is terrible,” one soldier posted in late November. “The food is small, corn barely bigger than my pinky ... rice overcooked, bread hard. Terrible vegetable spread.”

Another soldier posted a photo of a to-go container of pasta salad earlier in November and wrote, “Zero protein, can’t build athletes on this.”

Reviews from the past week, particularly from Thanksgiving, are positive in nature.

A post from Monday shows a plate stacked with turkey, collard greens and macaroni and cheese with the message, “Warfighter’s Thanksgiving meal was awesome! Lines were quick and the food variety/quality were both outstanding. The live music was a nice touch too. The team killed it on this one! Loved seeing so much leader engagement.”

The barracks at Fort Carson can house over 8,000 troops, many of whom are single, enlisted soldiers, according to Army data. More than 4,600 soldiers are meal-card holders and rely on getting meals from on-base dining facilities, a Fort Carson official said.

Some of the soldiers may lack the equipment necessary to prepare their own meals. The Government Accountability Office has cited the lack of food preparation areas in Army barracks as a service-wide problem.

In a report last year, the federal watchdog said many barracks provided only refrigerators and microwaves, though Defense Department standards mandate that permanent party barracks without living rooms must include kitchenettes. Some soldiers told GAO investigators that they relied on microwaveable meals or fast food, leading to health problems.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to [email protected].

Update: This article has been revised to include the scheduled start of increment 5 for the Precision Strike Missile.

The Army’s next step in expanding the distance and survivability of its land-based rockets could see a missile delivered from an autonomous launcher to strike targets farther than 1,000 kilometers away.

On Tuesday, Maj. Gen. Winston Brooks, commander of the Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Brig. Gen. Rory Crooks, director of the Cross Functional Team-Long Range Precision Fires, discussed future work on “Increment 5″ of the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM.

If successful, the project would give even low-level tactical units the ability to conduct what are known as “strategic deep fires,” which range beyond 500 kilometers, according to Army data.

Two new missiles in the pipeline for longer range Army fires

Defense News reported that in November the Army conducted its first two PrSM salvo tests at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The testing involved firing the two missiles in rapid succession.

Testers used the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, launcher.

In his remarks Tuesday, Crooks cautioned that while there is much potential for developing the fires platform with the autonomous launcher, there isn’t yet a timeline for fully developing and fielding that technology.

But the missile is slated to enter its science and technology phase in October 2025.

Currently, the missile is limited by its platform. The M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS pod, is 13 feet long.

Crooks noted that because the autonomous platform doesn’t need a cab for a human driver, there could be a chance to put a longer missile on the frame at some point.

The PrSM program seeks to replace legacy systems such as the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System, the same weapon used by Ukrainian forces for the first time in October 2023 to strike Russian targets.

The U.S. missiles used by Ukrainians had shorter maximum distances than those used by the U.S. Army, limiting them to less than 300 kilometers, Military Times previously reported. The same system has been used more recently for deeper strikes into Russian territory.

The Increment 1 versions of the PrSM are being fielded now by Lockheed Martin. Those missiles have a range of at least 500 kilometers, according to the company.

Increment 2 is a land-based, anti-ship seeker; Increment 3 will add lethal payload options; and the Increment 4 project is seeking to push existing ranges beyond 1,000 kilometers.

A Fort Irwin, California-based Army specialist faces murder charges in the death of a fellow soldier.

The Army on Nov. 20 officially charged Spc. George Cornejo, 26, for the Oct. 28 death of Spc. Andrew Patrick Smith, 27, according to the Army’s Office of the Special Trial Counsel.

Smith’s cause of death remains under investigation, according to local media reports. Officials detained Cornejo the day after Smith’s death.

Both Cornejo and Smith were assigned to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, also known as the “Blackhorse Regiment.” The regiment is permanently assigned to Fort Irwin, the Army’s largest combat training center in the lower 48 states.

“Spc. Smith was loved by many and highly regarded amongst the team,” Col. Kevin Black, commander of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, said in a social media post. “As we mourn the loss of our teammate, our thoughts and prayers are with his family, friends and fellow troopers.”

Cornejo, a Fontana, California, native, had been working as a construction equipment repairer. Smith, from Rye, New York, served as a utilities equipment repairer.

Military police responded to Smith’s on base residence on Oct. 28, where they discovered Smith badly injured. Officials transported him to Weed Army Community Hospital at Fort Irwin, where he was pronounced dead.

Cornejo is being held in pretrial confinement at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Miramar, California, the Southern California Newspaper Group reported.

Smith joined the Army in August 2021 and was assigned to Fort Irwin in March 2022.

The investigation remains open.

Army Criminal Investigation Division officials declined further comment.

Work between the Army and an institute at a California university is perfecting a way to merge photos and videos to create a more realistic simulation experience.

The project, dubbed “3D Geospatial Terrain — Large-Scale Gaussian Splatting,” at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies provides such detail that users can see light patterns shift as they move around an object in a simulated environment.

In recent years, the Army has prioritized modernizing its modeling and simulations, primarily through its Program Executive Office-Simulation, Training and Instrumentation and its Cross Functional Team-Synthetic Training Environment.

Each of the services are seeking to upgrade and expand use of simulation technology for more cost-effective and safer supplements to live training.

Features of the Army-USC 3D terrain project are on display at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference in Orlando, Florida this week.

“It has very good potential to model very complicated environments with a lot of details,” Andrew Feng, associate director of the geospatial terrain research group at the institute, told National Defense.

NATO draws up plans for its own fleet of naval surveillance drones

The project combines aerial drones, artificial intelligence and video/photo merging software to build high-resolution, detailed representations of real places via digital scanning. The AI then identifies and adjusts characteristics to generate a more realistic experience.

The institute, established through Army funding in 1999, garnered public attention in 2018, when technology its team created to render human-like characters in movies — such as “Avatar,” “Blade Runner 2049″ and “Ready Player One” — won a Technical Achievement Award at the Oscars for a high-resolution facial scanning process that allowed users to digitize “every facial expression down to a tenth of a millimeter.”

At that time, the Army used the technology for a program called “Digital Survivor of Sexual Assault,” which allows soldiers to interact with a digital speaker and hear the speaker’s story, according to an Army release.

The IITSEC trade show, launched in 1966, encompasses cutting-edge technology geared primarily toward training needs for the military services using modeling and simulation technology.

Nearly 10,000 visitors attended the 2023 conference, which featured 517 companies from about 60 countries, according to conference data.

After years of deliberation, the Marine Corps is taking its first steps to embrace a program that would aim to make jarheads the most lethal versions of themselves — from sleep and stress level control to marksmanship.

The Office of Naval Research has begun work on an initiative known as Warrior Resiliency, which would use wearable technology and other data sensors to develop sophisticated predictions about how to supercharge Marines’ performance and adapt training for maximum effect.

The effort, which was funded through a $4.4 million allocation in fiscal 2024, is taking shape as the Army trumpets early successes of its Holistic Health and Fitness program, which aims to “unlock … peak performance” by giving soldiers access to expert coaches and equipment.

But the roots of Warrior Resiliency and similar efforts, according to those close to the initiative, date back years — to the Pentagon’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force, spearheaded by then-defense secretary Jim Mattis.

Established in 2018, the CCLTF aimed to close key capability gaps with joint solutions. One of those identified gaps was the individual performance of warfighters; a 2018 Defense Department memo establishing the task force directs that science and technology be leveraged to improve human performance “within ethical guidelines.”

But according to Chief Warrant Officer 5 Stephen LaRose, who served on the task force as an adviser and program manager until 2023, the Corps has struggled to put meaningful investment and support behind a program that would achieve these aims.

Despite a variety of limited objective experiments, he said, “there hasn’t been any program that’s been comprehensive enough … that would transition to a human performance program of record.”

A 2021 collaboration with Army Combat Capabilities Development Command resulted in an “Optimizing the Human Weapons System (OHWS)” roadmap to a Marine Corps program that would use wearables and smart devices to create a sophisticated dashboard showing troops’ “wellness inputs,” such as alcohol consumption and physical exercise, training load, sleep data and recovery stats.

A presentation of the plan, reviewed by Marine Corps Times, shows a timeline of milestones leading up to a needs analysis to be completed by Marine Corps Warfighting Lab in 2023.

That year, Brig. Gen. Kyle Ellison, then the commander of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, linked OHWS and Warrior Resiliency in an endorsement letter, calling for resources to establish a service program of record.

Peter Squire, ONR’s program officer for Human Performance Training and Education, told Marine Corps Times that Warrior Resiliency, in its current form, aims to create readiness “status indicators” for unit leaders by assessing Marines’ biometrics to prevent injury and optimize performance.

He noted that maturing wearable and biometric tracking technology enabled better and more effective monitoring now than had previously been possible.

“It’s really been, I think, within the past five years or so that we’ve seen the ability for accurate commercial wearable devices that can be used in a more continuous or persistent manner, where we can get information now to better understand status and indicators over time,” he said. “So, it’s sort of been the culmination of a couple different aspects over time, where we saw there was a good opportunity to put it forward.”

Many of the specifics of the effort remain under wraps. The first priority of Warrior Resiliency, which got underway in earnest last spring, has been the establishment of predictive algorithms and frameworks for processing data and making decisions.

Some experimentation has been conducted with active Marine Corps units, Squire said, although he declined to name which ones, pending the service’s authorization. The specific devices to be used in widespread data collection are still pending.

“Right now, we are focused on utilizing what the commercial market has available, and have working partnerships with a variety of different vendors,” Squire said.

Device accuracy will be a priority, he added, and the form factor of devices used — armbands versus rings or watches, for example — may depend on individual Marines’ preferences or their job duties.

Ultimately, Warrior Resiliency will be a “multi-year effort” resulting in prototype platforms and “knowledge products” to help the Corps establish a broad-edged program within the operating forces, Squire said.

He compared the expected result to the Corps’ Marksmanship Campaign Plan, released earlier this year, that represented the service’s most aggressive reimagining of arms training and skills development in a century.

Within the next eight months, he expects the Corps and ONR to reach decisions around larger-scale system testing and next steps, he said.

For LaRose, concerns remain that the Corps will fully embrace the work being done and build human performance assessment into regular training and operations.

“Every Marine a rifleman, but we got to get past the [sole focus on] marksmanship,” he said. “You’re … using the rifle to get to the stress, to the decisions, to the finite motor skills.”

The four nonprofit military relief societies have joined forces on Giving Tuesday to encourage donations to help service members and their families with emergency relief, financial assistance and educational support.

The Air Force Aid Society, Army Emergency Relief, Coast Guard Mutual Assistance and Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society help more than 2.5 million service members, families and qualified retirees in financial need. All are four-star Charity Navigator-rated nonprofits.

Last year, their Giving Tuesday campaign raised more than $270,000 in donations, and Lockheed Martin donated $1 million. This year, Lockheed Martin will match every donation made Tuesday up to $1 million. To donate to one or more of the military relief societies, visit missionGIVE.us.

Giving Tuesday, which is held on the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving, began in 2012 as a way to encourage people to donate to their favorite causes worldwide. This is the third consecutive year the relief societies have joined together to raise funds through their “Mission Give” campaign.

“In addition to life events, rising inflation, the threat of global conflict, frequent deployments, and most recently, natural disasters, military life presents some unique challenges that many people are unaware of,” said Robert R. Ruark, a retired Marine Corps general and president and CEO of Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, in the announcement about the fundraising campaign. “It is the generous and sustained support from the general public that allows us to mitigate many of these challenges and hardships.”

The nonprofits’ offices are usually located on military installations. They provide grants and interest-free loans to help service members and their families in need. Their programs and services include emergency relief, disaster assistance, financial assistance, scholarships and other support.

The military relief societies have long stepped in to help service members and families with a variety of emergency financial assistance, such as car repairs, travel for unexpected events such as funerals and basic living expenses such as rent and utilities.

Recently, relief society programs have also targeted the cost of shipping infant formula, the costs to secure housing in an increasingly competitive market and the high cost of shipping pets to and from overseas on permanent change of station orders. They helped military families in Hawaii with costs associated with fuel contamination in the Navy housing’s water supply.

The oldest of the military aid societies is Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, which was established in 1904.

Two sailors assigned to the aircraft carrier George Washington died just days after the ship’s return to its homeport in Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Cuyler Burnett Condon and Seaman Dimitri Isacc Morales died in separate incidents following the ship’s return to U.S. 7th Fleet, Stars and Stripes reported.

Condon, a Texas native who worked as an electrician’s mate nuclear, was found unresponsive on Nov. 22 in an on-base hotel room. He was pronounced dead at the scene, according to Stripes.

Three days later, on Nov. 25, Morales, an electrician’s mate fireman, was discovered unresponsive off base in Yokosuka and subsequently pronounced dead by Yokosuka authorities, the report said.

The Naval Criminal Investigation Service is reportedly investigating the deaths and working with Japanese law enforcement.

Condon joined the Navy in January 2019, according to Stripes, attending Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Illinois, before reporting to the carrier George Washington in January 2021.

USS George Washington returns to Japan after nearly a decade away

Morales enlisted in July 2022 and was assigned to the aircraft carrier in October 2023.

The George Washington returned to Japan on Nov. 22 for the first time in nearly a decade, establishing the ship as the Navy’s only forward-deployed carrier.

“A U.S. carrier represents the most advanced maritime capability we have, and it’s the most advanced investment we can make in the security of Japan and of the Western Pacific,” Vice Adm. Fred Kacher, commander of U.S. 7th Fleet, said in a statement at the time of the carrier’s arrival.

Yokosuka Naval Base was the carrier’s homeport from 2008 to 2015. The George Washington was eventually moved to Virginia in 2017 for a midlife refueling and maintenance overhaul. That process was initially slated to take four years, but delays pushed the completion back to May 2023.

The carrier replaced the Ronald Regan in Japan so the outgoing ship could undergo a tune-up in Bremerton, Washington.

When a Guard or Reserve unit gets called up to deploy, seemingly small personnel issues — like out-of-date dental exams — can throw planning into jeopardy. And with military personnel management systems often still run on disparate digital spreadsheets, finding troops who aren’t deployment-ready and notifying them in time to fix the problem can quickly become a crisis of urgency.

That’s the problem that motivated veterans John New and Tim Wood to build a new management system that leaves all the coordination to an AI algorithm, which spots personnel qualification or compliance issues and fires off notifications to the service member to fix the problem well before activation or deployment.

After successful limited employment within the Air Force Reserve, Wood and New say they hope other services will see the value in their product and adopt it more broadly.

Air Force wing deployments could leave bases understaffed, GAO warns

The two entrepreneurs, whose company, co-founded by New, an Army infantry veteran, is called WorkMerk, say the personnel management system was inspired by an idea from an airman, Master Sgt. Taylor Trani, then a technical sergeant in medical and dental administration at the New Jersey Air National Guard’s 177th Fighter Wing.

“[She] was sick and tired of the problem,” said Wood, who spent 22 years in the Navy SEALs. “And we just ran with it.”

Independent research confirmed how haphazard and inefficient military personnel management could be.

During one “deep dive” with the Air Force Reserve’s 932nd Airlift Wing out of Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, New and Wood found the wing’s unit deployment manager spent 30 hours of prep time simply to ensure personnel were ready for a drill weekend.

The unit’s medical and dental team, they said, worked for two full weeks to review medical records for the same weekend and verify appointments and documentation were up to date.

“Well, after that two weeks of work, they had approximately a 30% no-show rate, just because there was no connectivity directly with the airmen, and their supervisor had no visibility on it, and so on,” said Wood, who directs DOD business development and product for WorkMerk.

That spurred the launch of a pilot test of the system they’re now calling AFLINX, which began by collating medical and dental data for a full unit, automatically sampling that data and creating calendar invites for airmen, sent to their smartphones, for needed appointments.

To protect privacy, they said, they made sure no medical or personal identification information traveled out of the system — airmen would receive a fairly generic message telling them they had an appointment to schedule.

“It was the equivalent of having one extra body in that department,” Wood said, “saving them … approximately 1,000 hours a year throughout the whole wing of all the activities [they’d have to] schedule and put butts in seats to get something done for an airman during a calendar year.”

AFWERX, the Air Force’s innovation arm, saw the value in the system and began investing it around the time that research with the 177th began, in 2020, they said.

In a statement, AFWERX spokesman Matthew Clouse said WorkMerk to date has received five contracts work a total of $3.9 million and a tactical funding increase contract for AFLINX in August 2023 intended to help the software grow from prototype to fieldable project.

The 932nd, he said, “is exploring software solutions to enhance planning, administration, management, readiness and communication processes. While Airmen are not currently using the software during its prototype stage, they are providing input on use cases to ensure any future acquisition decisions are informed by operational needs and end-user requirements.”

While it can be difficult to generate excitement about innovations in personnel management, they’ve had a warm reception in pitch meetings to a number of Air Force Reserve components, they said, including the 22nd, 10th and 4th Air Forces, and Air Force Reserve Command.

“It’s not hitting targets over the horizon with a hypersonic missile, right. That’s why it’s kind of a slow burn on people talking about it,” Wood said. “But we’ve … had nothing but praise and only the questions of, ‘When will it be ready?’ and ‘How much will it cost?’”

That cost, New said, was on the order of $100,000 per unit of 1,200 to 1,400 troops.

While WorkMerk has yet to branch out to other services, a Marine officer who spoke with Military Times confirmed that Reserve personnel management was a joint headache.

Col. Brian Pate, G-3 operations officer for Marine Corps Cyberspace Command, said the limited purview that commanders have over the schedules of their reservists, who may be spread out over a wide geographic region when not drilling, made the challenge more difficult.

“They may not be near a military medical treatment facility,” he said. “So, when they’re coming in, it may be that they have a very short window of time to execute a medical appointment or to hit the readiness requirement.

“You need to do very detailed planning to make sure that they succeed in doing the activity. So, having a management tool, I think, would help with that.”

South Korean men between the age of 18 and 35 are required by law to serve in the country’s military — or civilian service equivalent — for approximately a year and a half.

The policy, enacted in 1957 for able-bodied males, has remained in effect while the nation continues what is technically a war with its neighbor to the north.

But for one man, exemption loopholes in the able-bodied requirements were taken to heart — and midsection — after he reportedly embarked on a multiyear binge-eating bonanza, gaining more than 44 pounds in an attempt to evade assignments traditionally reserved for one less corpulent.

And it worked, sort of.

Instead of immediate military service, the 26-year-old nearly joined the ranks of prison inmates after the Seoul Eastern District Court sentenced him to a suspended one-year term for violating the country’s service requirements.

The 5′6″ individual, who reportedly weighed 183 pounds during a 2017 physical examination, doubled his eating regimen at the behest of a friend, who advised the calorie crusader that he could instead fulfill his conscription duties in a relaxed civilian role, such as working at a community service center.

The portly plot was a go, with the man going as far as quitting his job as a delivery worker, according to the court, simply unwilling to sacrifice precious calories to the arduousness of moving one’s body.

In 2023, the man underwent another physical exam, reportedly after chugging water to tip the literal scales even more in his favor. He weighed in at just over 230 pounds.

(It’s worth noting that a strict diet of MREs could have netted these gains in one or two months instead of six years.)

The report did not specify how the individual was caught.

Military conscription, meanwhile, remains a hot-button topic in South Korea, where service often puts an unwelcome pause on professional or academic pursuits.

South Korea’s Military Manpower Administration reports an annual average of 50 to 60 cases of military exemptions or blatant dodging of military service.

Few, however, are exempt if fit to serve. All seven members of the wildly popular K-pop supergroup BTS, for instance, have donned their nation’s uniform, with the last members of the group slated to finish serving in June 2025.

The court overseeing the binge-eating case noted that the culprit vowed to fulfill his service.

For his advisory role in the scheme, the friend, also 26, similarly received a suspended one-year sentence.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Jody. The mere mention of the name is enough to send shivers down the spine of service members everywhere.

It is a foul beast lurking in the shadows, never tiring, ever vigilant, with craned neck vigorously leaning to hear the magic word that unleashes his sinister powers: “Deployment.”

The malefactor’s skulduggery has claimed divisions’ worth of saddened spouses, boyfriends and girlfriends as victims, forever helpless to the patron saint of chicanery.

Its influence even dates back to King David’s lustful pursuit of Bathsheba. (Pour one out for Uriah.) In fact, so pervasive a foe is the devious one that he became the subject of a 1943, WWII-themed Superman comic, one that was long-buried in the archives of Washington’s Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Much like the deployed troops serving in that comic, GIs based in India during World War II faced incessant Jody-based threats, so much so that, in a truly band-of-brothers moment, the jilted men turned their heartbreak into something meaningful.

Enter The Brush-Off Club. (A self-help book could never.)

The motivated Marine Corps origin of the ‘distracted boyfriend’ meme, 'rah?

According to the Jan. 24, 1943, issue of Yank, The Army Weekly, mournful hearts organized for the first time in military history to join forces in mutual lovers’ sorrow and sympathy.

The rules to join the club were fairly straightforward — if you were in possession of a broken heart “or a reasonable facsimile,” you were in.

The misery-loves-company cadre even featured vital, board-style functions, such as chief crier and chief consoler, according to Sgt. Ed Cunningham, field correspondent for Yank.

All members were “required to give each other the needle; i.e., full sympathy for all active members,” Cunningham continued.

“By-laws state: As we are all in the ‘same transport,’ we must provide willing shoulders to cry upon, and join fervently in all wailing and weeping.”

1943 Superman comic pits the Man of Steel against the military’s arch nemesis: Jody

For those nursing a heartbreak there was a small consolation. Namely, the more serious the offense — say, one’s fiancée marrying another — the faster one could rise through the ranks. For those most dreadfully scorned, there illuminated a path to Brush-Off presidency.

Members were further encouraged to practice wellness methods, such as turning frowns upside down, sipping beer and wailing at the moon for a brief time before moving on.

So it is written, so it shall be done.

This story was originally published on HistoryNet.com.

As the world and its soldiers went over the top and straight into mechanized warfare, the horrors of large-caliber machine guns and artillery warfare ushered in a new age of gruesome deaths and horrific injuries.

World War I claimed the lives of 8 million men, with another 21 million wounded. An estimated 60,500 British soldiers suffered head or eye injuries, according to a 2011 article in the British Journal Social History of Medicine. The numbers among French and German casualties of war were no doubt similar.

Beyond physical disfigurement, the maiming of a generation of men left many with deep psychological wounds as well.

The “effect on a man who must go through life, an object of horror to himself as well as to others, is beyond description,” wrote Dr. Fred Albee, an American surgeon working in France “…It is a fairly common experience for the maladjusted person to feel like a stranger to his world. It must be unmitigated hell to feel like a stranger to yourself.”

Yet with the help of Anna Coleman Ladd, an American socialite and sculptor turned Red Cross volunteer, some soldiers were once again able to face themselves — and the world.

Brought to France through her husband and appointed to direct the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross in Toul during the war, Ladd drew on her talents as a sculptor — she specialized in decorative fountains — to found the Studio for Portrait Masks in Paris in late 1917.

Inspired by British sculptor Francis Derwent Wood, who, in March 1916, started making masks for disfigured British soldiers, Ladd wondered if she could replicate something similar in France.

With plastic surgery still in its infancy, only so much could be done to repair destroyed jaws and missing noses, mouths and eyes.

“One man who came to us had been wounded 2 1/ 2 years before and had never been home,” according to a 1919 report from Ladd’s studio. “He did not want his mother to see how badly he looked.”

Patients who found their way to Ladd’s studio were treated to immense attention and care. A single mask created by Ladd required a month of detail.

“The mask itself would be fashioned of galvanized copper one thirty-second of an inch thick — or as a lady visitor to Ladd’s studio remarked, ‘the thinness of a visiting card,’” according to the Smithsonian Magazine. “Depending upon whether it covered the entire face, or as was often the case, only the upper or lower half, the mask weighed between four and nine ounces and was generally held on by spectacles.”

Calling the men her “brave faceless ones,” Ladd often worked with pre-injury photos to model her plaster cast as closely to the patient’s original appearance as possible.

The real difficulty lay in finding the right paint that had staying power — oil paint chipped too easily — and matched the color of the skin. Ladd found success in using a hard enamel that was easily washable and that, when painted on, had a dull, flesh-like finish.

According to the Smithsonian, Ladd painted the mask while the man himself was wearing it so as to match skin tones as closely as possible.

“Skin hues, which look bright on a dull day, show pallid and gray in bright sunshine, and somehow an average has to be struck,” wrote Grace Harper, the chief of the Bureau for the Reeducation of Mutilés. “The artist has to pitch her tone for both bright and cloudy weather and has to imitate the bluish tinge of shaven cheeks.”

By the end of 1919 Ladd and her four assistants were able to produce 185 masks for disfigured French soldiers. And while that number seemingly pales in comparison to the staggering number of wounded, the impact among those 185 was monumental.

Today, housed at the Smithsonian are a number of ephemera, photographs and letters of Ladd’s. Largely written in French, the sculptor received countless letters from men who were once grim casualties of war.

“I owe you great gratitude ... for I wear and will always ... wear the marvelous device that you created,” one soldier wrote. “Thanks to you I can live again. Thanks to you I haven’t buried myself in the depths of a hospital for the disabled.”

Another reads, “Thanks to you, I will have a home. … The woman I love no longer finds me repulsive, as she had a right to do. ... She will be my wife.”

This story was originally published on HistoryNet.com.

Lecturing to a group of young U.S. Army Rangers on a field at Fort Meade, Maryland, in May 1942, U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Francois d’Eliscu ordered a trainee to level his rifle and bayonet and charge at him, full bore.

“Come on, boy, like you mean business!” d’Eliscu shouted.

His voice was startlingly loud and sharp, especially considering that it came from such an elfin, exotic-­looking figure. Just 5′5 and 136 pounds, d’Eliscu was in his mid-40s and had a shiny balding head and finely chiseled features. The “Little Professor,” as some called him, had an intense glare and animated gestures — almost like a French intellectual debating over coffee in a Left Bank cafe. He had several graduate degrees and had taught at prestigious American universities.

But d’Eliscu’s confident stance, with his sinewy arms and shoulders poking out of his shirt, gave a hint that the man of letters was also well-schooled in violent confrontations. His own weapon was a six-foot length of sash cord.

The trainee lunged at his small target, the bare blade of his bayonet flashing. But d’Eliscu was a blur. Seconds later, the soldier lay flat on this back, trussed and unable to move for fear of strangling himself. D’Eliscu was unharmed, except for a patch of skin that the bayonet had shaved off his elbow as he’d disarmed his assailant.

After releasing the trainee, d’Eliscu continued his lecture. He proceeded to deride American-style boxing, with its rules barring foul blows and breaking clean from a clinch and its technique of striking with the fists.

“Sportsmanship!” he snarled. If the men ever faced off against German or Japanese soldiers in close-quarters hand-to-hand combat, he told them, there were no rules, and other parts of the body — open palms, elbows, feet — were more effective for striking the vulnerable spots on an enemy’s body.

“This — this — this,” d’Eliscu explained, demonstrating a series of strikes. “And he’s ruined.”

And then there was the sash cord, a seemingly innocuous everyday object that in d’Eliscu’s hands could disable or even kill.

“His speed and skill seem magical,” wrote R. P. Harriss, a columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun who was on hand to observe the demonstration. “This to make the victim speechless, this to blind…this to break the neck.”

It was a type of fighting that Harriss and most other Americans had probably never seen before.

“Most of us still think of the American soldier as a two-fisted man who wouldn’t think of hitting below the belt,” Harriss wrote, “much less letting fly a kick to the crotch.”

D’Eliscu’s training was intended to provide American soldiers with the skills to counter the mysterious martial arts expertise that many believed Japanese troops possessed. By one account, d’Eliscu had actually purloined the fighting secrets of the Japanese when he attended a jujitsu demonstration while visiting Japan and had sneakily committed the intricate techniques to memory.

D’Eliscu was just one of the many martial artists the United States had pressed into service during World War II to hone the hand-to-hand combat abilities of American soldiers.

According to Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth’s Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of History and Innovation, various service branches turned to experts ranging from boxing champion Jack Dempsey, who trained Coast Guard cadets, to Marine Corps knife-fighting expert J. Drexel Biddle, who popularized the Ka-Bar knife, and even professional wrestlers such as Charles “Dirty Dick” Raines and “Man Mountain Dean” (the ring name of Frank Simmons Leavitt), who taught their holds to army soldiers.

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, had its own hand-to-hand fighting system, designed by British expert William E. Fairbairn, which emphasized techniques such as palm strikes and knee-to-groin attacks.

But even among that group, d’Eliscu stood out, with his colorful, slightly eccentric, intellectual persona and his unorthodox fighting system, a mix of dirty wrestling holds and Japanese jujitsu that eschewed techniques popular in boxing or wrestling competitions that had sporting rules.

He also developed an extreme fitness regimen for his fighters that was brutal enough to make today’s CrossFit workouts look slothful by comparison. In the process, he became a sought-after subject for feature writers and military propagandists, who portrayed him as a sort of World War II Bruce Lee — a martial arts genius who could train American soldiers to give the Japanese a taste of their own medicine.

Few knew that d’Eliscu’s exotic persona was something he’d carefully constructed, down to adding a “d” and an apostrophe to his surname, in the fashion of French nobility. But his fighting prowess wasn’t all hype. In the course of the war, d’Eliscu would demonstrate his skills in real combat, with lives on the line.

“He can kill with a flick of his elbow — maim with a pinch of his fingers,” explained a 1942 profile of d’Eliscu in Yank magazine, which described him as one of the toughest men alive.

It helped that d’Eliscu evidently liked to demonstrate his techniques by taking on much larger opponents. One of his favorite partners was army major Tod Goodwin, a former New York Giants football player, who stood 6-foot-6 and outweighed d’Eliscu by 50 pounds. Yank noted that it was so dangerous to tangle with d’Eliscu that “an ambulance with three Medical Corps doctors was in attendance at all sessions.”

Harriss, who observed d’Eliscu in action, noted that nobody at Fort Meade who’d seen the Little Professor render opponents helpless ever expressed any doubts about the effectiveness of his techniques. For Harriss, the big question was whether enough soldiers would be capable of learning them.

“It is plain that he is far above normal in speed, skill, aptitude, and coordination,” he wrote. But Harris observed that a few carefully picked men, “intensely trained in this fashion,” might be valuable as hit-and-run raiders. Some of d’Eliscu’s sash cord techniques were designed for precisely that purpose — sneaking up behind an enemy sentry and rendering him “helpless and terrified.”

The press accounts of d’Eliscu’s techniques must certainly have reassured Americans who feared the brutal tactics of the Japanese. According to a 1943 article on d’Eliscu in Popular Science, the enemy soldiers knew “all the bone-breaking tricks of judo” and even supposedly carried small knives that, in the event of capture, they could use to slit the throats of unwary American guards. But thanks to d’Eliscu’s instruction, the profile in Yank magazine had pointed out, “the Rangers … actually know more about judo than the average Japanese.”

D’Eliscu’s past was in some ways as mysterious as his martial arts techniques. He apparently told Harriss that he spent some of his early years in France as well as in Japan, and an Associated Press profile once described him as having inherited his fighting prowess from a father who was an expert swordsman.

In reality, he was born on November 10, 1895 in New York City, the son of a French businessman, Frank Eliscu, and his Romanian wife, Sophia, who had emigrated to the United States seven years earlier. His younger brother, Edward, would go on to become a famous Hollywood songwriter.

In his 2001 autobiography With or Without a Song, Edward Eliscu recalled his teenage brother as “an introverted, buck-toothed loner” who went by the name Milton Eliscu.

At one point the future martial arts expert and military officer got a job stacking books at the 135th Street public library in Harlem, according to Edward. But after Milton returned home one evening with torn clothes and a bloody forehead, which he claimed he had received after being beaten by a mob in a racial confrontation, he began to change.

Though he’d never had much interest in exercise or sports, as a senior at DeWitt Clinton High School, he entered a cross country race and, surprisingly, finished first. After graduation he entered the Savage School for Physical Education, a teachers college off Columbus Circle, and gradually withdrew from his family, keeping them in the dark about the new identity he was forging as a physical fitness buff and coach for local high school football teams.

Around that time, items in the sports pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle show that he had Frenchified his last name with the “d” and apostrophe. When d’Eliscu graduated from Savage in 1917, Edward and his mother attended the event and were startled to see him give an exhibition of his gymnastic skills.

“Milton’s skill and grace left me breathless,” Edward later wrote. “A gymnastic Nijinsky, he outclassed his peers.”

Soon after that, Edward Eliscu recalled, d’Eliscu gathered a few belongings and told his family that he was off to join the U.S. Army. His mother, lamenting that Milton would never return, explained that he had converted to Christianity.

Edward got another fleeting glimpse of his brother a month or so later, when he noticed him in a military parade, wearing a mock bandage on his head as he bore a stretcher in a medical unit and “marching as though the war depended upon him alone.”

But d’Eliscu didn’t see combat in World War I. Instead he served at Fort Gordon in Georgia, where, according to local newspaper accounts, he supervised sporting activities and organized boxing and wrestling competitions for the soldiers. According to an Associated Press profile published decades later, he also worked as a bayonet instructor.

After the war d’Eliscu earned a bachelor’s degree in education, a master’s in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, a second master’s in science from Columbia University and later a doctorate from New York University. He also coached various collegiate sports, including varsity wrestling at New York University.

While he taught physical education and coached, d’Eliscu had a side career as a radio personality. He hosted a pair of early morning daily exercise programs on radio station WIP in Philadelphia, and he once donned a deep-sea diving suit to broadcast a show from the bottom of the ocean off Atlantic City — a stunt that nearly ended in disaster when one of his weighted shoes came off during the broadcast and he had to hang on for dear life in the strong current.

“When I came up, I found out that everybody thought I was dead,” he recalled with amusement. “It seems that the main tube from the microphone broke, and I was there talking away, and all that came out for the broadcast was glug-glug-glug-glug.”

He also dabbled in sportscasting, working the first Gene Tunney–Jack Dempsey fight in Philadelphia in 1926. In his spare time, he taught fly-fishing techniques at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn.

In the late 1920s d’Eliscu moved to Honolulu, where he became a newspaper sports columnist and organized amateur boxing competitions. He also helped to manage the U.S. Olympic swim team that featured Johnny Weissmuller in his premovie days. For a time, d’Eliscu also reportedly acted as the star swimmer’s personal manager, turning down early movie offers that didn’t seem sufficiently lucrative.

“Even granting that he would aggregate more than $25,000 the first year, which I know he would, there is no surety that he would go over in the movies or on the stage,” d’Eliscu told a newspaper interviewer.

He preferred instead to see Weissmuller become a professional swimming teacher and earn a living giving demonstrations and lectures, though Weissmuller did end up going into the movies and becoming an overnight star with the 1932 film Tarzan the Ape-Man.

D’Eliscu returned to Philadelphia in the early 1930s to serve as an athletic director, a track coach and an instructor in public health at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine.

It’s not clear where d’Eliscu acquired his apparent expertise at jujitsu. A 1919 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer mentions his participating in a jujitsu exhibition with Leo Pardello, an Italian heavyweight, to raise money for erecting a building for the American Legion.

Many articles about d’Eliscu and other military martial artists portrayed Japanese hand-to-hand fighting techniques as a closely guarded cultural secret and inherently underhanded. In reality, according to Green and Svinth’s history of martial arts, Westerners began going to Japan to study jujitsu in the late 1800s. After that, Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s spread judo — the modern martial art that evolved from jujitsu — throughout Europe and the United States. In the 1920s, one judo master, Taguchi Ryoichi, taught the art at Columbia University, one of the institutions that d’Eliscu attended.

The 1942 profile of d’Eliscu in Yank magazine offers a more colorful account. While on a trip to Tokyo with the U.S. swimming team in 1928, the story goes, d’Eliscu was invited to attend exhibitions at two judo schools, where he was invited to give a demonstration of Western wrestling techniques. The Japanese photographed his moves so that they could study them later. After d’Eliscu finished, he bowed to the head of the school.

“I have heard so much about your own form of wrestling,” he told the Japanese instructor. “Would you honor me by demonstrating some of your more complicated holds in return?”

At first the instructor was reluctant, but d’Eliscu’s flattery eventually won him over, and he demonstrated “his complete bag of tricks,” as the article put it. When it was over, d’Eliscu thanked him, bowed, and left. Fourteen years later, he supposedly taught some of the same Japanese techniques to American soldiers.

After World War II broke out, d’Eliscu — by then in his late 40s — rejoined the military. In early 1942 he was sent to Fort Meade, Maryland, to train elite Army Rangers.

To that end, d’Eliscu devised an almost inhuman training routine. Each day began with a two-mile run, followed by a 600-yard obstacle course, featuring a 15-foot-deep trap with smooth sides, from which the trainees had to find a way to get out. “If they can’t get out, let ‘em stay there,” d’Eliscu explained to a reporter. One officer stayed in the trap for five hours before he finally managed to escape.

But that was just the warm-up.

D’Eliscu put the men through unconventional drills in which they had to freeze in position on his command or hang from tree limbs. Then came pull-ups and other strength exercises. He also devised strange torments designed to boost soldiers’ fortitude. A photograph from Fort Meade shows d’Eliscu running over the supine bodies of his trainees, stepping on their abdomens as he makes his way across the field.

Then it was time for fighting, which included anything-­goes grappling and bare-knuckle boxing, with Medical Corps personnel on hand to tend injuries. To get his men accustomed to all-out, no-rules fighting, one of d’Eliscu’s tricks was to have trainees put on fatigues without rank insignias. Then he’d order them to get into a low crouch and at his command begin fighting each other from that position.

After they pushed, pulled, and threw a few punches, the trainees usually ended up falling together in a chaotic heap; they had to roll to get clear of one another’s bodies and avoid injury.

While d’Eliscu included Western-style boxing in the troops’ training regimen, he wasn’t keen on it as a fighting technique in the field. Instead, he wanted his fighters to employ more of their bodies and use a wider range of disabling techniques.

“Boxing — bah!” he once told his students. “Swing your right elbow like this, to crush his windpipe. Slap him with your other hand. Then follow through with the knee or abdomen.”

His methods were sufficiently unorthodox for Life magazine to send a photographer to shoot a June 1942 spread on what it labeled his “dirty fighting” system.

But for all his intensity about teaching lethal techniques, d’Eliscu also sometimes displayed a quirky sense of humor. As Harriss witnessed, he once stopped suddenly in the middle of a demonstration and segued into an unsettling monologue.

“Civilization! Christian ethics! Human progress!” d’Eliscu exclaimed. “All our studies in sociology, education, the humanities — and then we’re right back to the beast. What a world!”

On another occasion, d’Eliscu paused the training for some self-contemplation.

“The killer. That’s what they call me here, and I’d rather go trout fishing any day,” he told Harriss. “Kiddies, doggies, I love them. But c’est la guerre!”

U.S. Army leaders were sufficiently impressed with d’Eliscu’s fighting and fitness program that in early 1943 they sent him back to Hawaii to set up another school to prepare Rangers for jungle warfare in the brutal island campaign in the Pacific.

D’Eliscu set up a secret training site in the mountains that became known as the Mayhem Bowl, replete with ravines and dense brush. According to a United Press account that concealed the school’s exact location, a three-mile course there had trainees running up and down hillsides, navigating water hazards, scaling a wall, and running up a metal slide that was greased to make the going more difficult.

For a section of the course, trainees had to crawl a half mile with no part of their bodies more than 24 inches off the ground, an effort that typically took an hour.

A reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser described the training course as “sort of a mountain goat’s nightmare, covered with the three feet of mud and water.”

To make the battlefield frighteningly realistic, d’Eliscu used actual flamethrowers and tear gas as hazards.

“Fire and gas are a little unorthodox,” he explained. “But then, so is war.”

“My job was to make worms and turtles out of the men,” he later told a newspaper interviewer.

The training in Hawaii was even more grueling than that at Fort Meade. Among other ordeals, d’Eliscu put trainees through a particularly brutal exercise that required teams of men to lift and carry a 1,000-pound log up a steep hill multiple times — and then proceed to hand-to-hand fighting drills.

He also subjected them to life-threatening dangers, planting fields with explosives and using live ammunition, flamethrowers, and bare bayonets in training, to instill in them what he called “sane appreciation of a knife and a bullet.”

The regimen was so hazardous that by March 1943 trainees in the program had already suffered 1,600 injuries. But d’Eliscu didn’t seem concerned.

“Better to have a few men hurt now,” he said, “than to have them killed needlessly later.”

D’Eliscu even went through the workouts alongside his trainees. “I went through every test with the men,” he said, “never asking them to do a thing I wouldn’t or couldn’t do.”

Many prominent people visited the Hawaii training school. One archival photo shows a smiling First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in an American Red Cross uniform, towering over a stern-looking d’Eliscu in a sleeveless white undershirt. He also apparently taught a few judo techniques to Senator Albert B. Chandler of Kentucky, who appears in another photo throwing d’Eliscu over his shoulder.

While he led the training, d’Eliscu somehow also found time to write the instructional book How to Prepare for Military Fitness, published in 1943 by W. W. Norton & Co.

And of course, the Rangers learned d’Eliscu’s sash cord techniques.

A story in Popular Mechanics described one of his favorite moves. After front-kicking an enemy soldier in the stomach to knock him to the ground, the American soldier was to quickly loop the rope around his adversary’s knees and draw the loose ends around his neck.

“If the victim doesn’t strangle himself with his own struggles, the process is hastened by sitting on his face and pushing forward on his knees,” the magazine explained.

D’Eliscu believed that the sash cord was such an effective weapon that he predicted it would eventually become a standard part of every soldier’s equipment. By one account, he developed more than two dozen different techniques for strangulation.

“Our attitude and personal feelings in regards to sportsmanship and fair play must be changed,” d’Eliscu wrote after the war. “Strangling and killing are remote from our American Teachings, but not to our enemies.”

But teaching fighting techniques wasn’t enough for d’Eliscu. To him, it was important to see whether they actually worked in life-and-death situations. Despite his importance as a trainer for the U.S. war effort, he got his superiors to send him briefly into combat.

In November 1943 d’Eliscu went ashore with landing forces at Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands. As the men in his patrol made their way inland, they were pinned down by sniper fire and had to take cover.

D’Eliscu was walking behind a tall lieutenant who was suddenly hit in the arm by a sniper in a tree, according to a reconstruction of the incident by Ray Coll Jr., a correspondent for the Honolulu Advertiser, who interviewed woun­ded soldiers evacuated to Oahu.

D’Eliscu fired on the sniper and hit him, causing him to fall to the ground. According to Coll’s account, d’Eliscu rushed to the Japanese soldier, used the disarming techniques he’d taught at Fort Meade and in Hawaii to take the man’s rifle and knife away, and quickly killed him. That heroic act led to d’Eliscu being awarded the Silver Star three months later.

By July 1944, d’Eliscu was back in New York, where some of Edward Eliscu’s friends who worked for the Office of War Information were startled to spot a bald, wiry army officer with a familiar last name, giving a speech at an armory in which he castigated black marketeers and criticized unions for making trouble during the war.

“So Milton Eliscu, born in Brooklyn, raised on the Lower East Side and Harlem, had become Lt. Col. M. Francois d’Eliscu, leader of the rough Rangers,” Edward Eliscu wrote in his memoir, with more than a trace of bitterness.

D’Eliscu was sent to France to organize training at the officers’ candidate school at Fontainebleau. He was made a member of the Legion of Honor and awarded the Croix de Guerre. He also wrote a manual, Hand to Hand Combat (1945), that outlined his techniques for hip throws, joint locks, eye-gouging finger strikes, shin kicks, grappling on the ground and defensive tactics against knife attacks. (A reprint eventually became available on the civilian market.)

“Practice for speed and perfection,” d’Eliscu admonishes in it. “Be cautious. Do not take advantage of your partner in practice. Save your own personal techniques for the enemy!”

After the war d’Eliscu became athletic director at the University of Hawaii. But the United States soon needed him again. He served in the Korean War and was then sent to Ankara, Turkey, to train the nation’s infantry and paratroops as part of a foreign aid program.

While there, he and his wife got a chance to tour Europe, and near the end of his tour they spent some time living in the Turkish seaside town of Izmir before they returned to the United States in 1953.

D’Eliscu then headed to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he helped train U.S. troops, including commanding a force of paratroops who used guerrilla tactics against a National Guard battalion in a simulated battle on a mountainside in the middle of a blizzard.

D’Eliscu’s fighting techniques were eventually supplanted by even more sophisticated ones. Today, for example, Army Rangers learn a fighting system that blends techniques from wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai and judo with weapons skills from Kali, a Filipino martial art.

But the change in mindset that d’Eliscu brought to hand-to-hand combat, which may have been his biggest contribution to the military, endures.

After his retirement from the army in 1954, d’Eliscu and his wife resettled in Siesta Key, Florida, near Sarasota. He spent his last years teaching power boating safety courses. He died in 1972, at age 76. His brother Edward learned of his death when someone mailed him a newspaper obituary.

Edward wrote in his memoir that he didn’t grieve for d’Eliscu, whom he felt had turned his back on his family, but acknowledged that his brother had accomplished his life’s objectives. He had become “the leading authority on military fitness, a triple Rambo — with a life like a jigsaw puzzle only he could have put together.”

This story was originally published on HistoryNet.com.

What was intended to be a passionate hotel room rendezvous turned into nothing more than a smoldering chamber of sorrow after approximately 20 candles lit by a Marine sparked a fire that left the room’s confines crispier than intended.

The unnamed sergeant, assigned to Camp Schwab, told police the candles were intended to be “a surprise for his partner,” who he’d gone to pick up from the nearby Naha Airport on Nov. 14 while leaving what would become a conflagration unattended.

The Marine was arrested the following day by Okinawa Prefectural Police and taken into custody at the Naha police station, Stars and Stripes reported.

A police spokesperson told Stripes the room at the Prostyle Ryokan Naha Kenchomae hotel was “completely burned,” adding that the sergeant was arrested for “putting the people of the hotel and surrounding area at risk.”

Marine Corps officials confirmed the incident but provided no additional details, telling Stripes that the service is cooperating with the investigation. The damage, meanwhile, was fortunately contained to the one room, with no injuries or additional destruction reported.

Details on whether any charges would be filed — beyond the accusation of loving too intensely — have not yet been made available.

Not since professors Roger and Virginia Klarvin first entered the scalding waters of the hot tub at the Welshly Arms Hotel have affections burned more vigorously.

Still, one would think a branch commonly associated with crayon eating would be better versed in the properties of wax.

Update the safety brief.

A military family in South Carolina is suing Fort Jackson’s privatized housing provider after they say sewage contaminated their home, allegedly causing a life-altering bacterial infection in their 4-year-old son.

Travis Wilson, a chaplain in the Army, and his wife, Jaclyn Wilson, filed a complaint Nov. 18 against Fort Jackson Housing LLC and Balfour Beatty Military Housing Management LLC in the U.S. District Court of South Carolina for “negligent maintenance of upkeep of military housing,” including “sewage overflow and hazardous pollution,” according to the complaint.

The couple and their six children moved into Fort Jackson housing in South Carolina on Dec. 22, 2022. At move-in, the couple claims they were given a 7-year maintenance history that didn’t accurately represent the house’s conditions, specifically that the report failed to mention previous tenants’ complaints about sewage backflow, according to the complaint.

Shortly after the family moved in, sewage in the upstairs bathroom overflowed, according to the complaint.

Jaclyn Wilson said she reported the problem to maintenance, but after workers arrived, the complaint alleges, they closed the bathroom door and told her that they would return shortly, never materializing.

The sewage began leaking through the ceiling and into the kitchen below, with a putrid smell wafting through the home, the complaint states.

When the workers returned at a later unspecified date, they told the family the backflow problem had been fixed, according to the complaint.

However, several months later, in March 2023, the complaint states, there was a relapse in sewage leakage, with overflow again dripping through the ceiling into the kitchen below.

Five more military families sue privatized landlord alleging mold, vermin, lead paint and raw sewage

The maintenance workers returned, this time removing the toilet only to leave it in the tub for several weeks, the complaint states. During this time, the couple claims workers left a sewer pipe exposed.

Eventually, the family relocated to a hotel. The family returned at a later date to find the toilet still in the tub and the sewer pipe still exposed.

At the time of the alleged sewage leaks, the couple’s 4-year-old son often played on the house’s floors. In March, around the time of the second leak, the couple noticed he had become lethargic, according to the complaint. When his face began drooping, the couple became alarmed and took him to the emergency room, where they were informed that he was fighting a bacterial infection affecting his brain.

Doctors were so worried about the child’s health that they transferred him to a hospital nearly 400 miles away in Birmingham, Alabama, according to the complaint.

“There is something showing in the scan, and you need to leave for Birmingham now,” doctors informed the Wilson family, according to the complaint.

After eight neurologists evaluated the child, they determined the boy was experiencing acute disseminated encephalitis, a rare inflammatory disease that attacks the brain and spinal cord. The doctors also informed the family that the disease is typically caused by a bacterial infection, the complaint states.

Common symptoms include fever, fatigue, nausea, vomiting and sometimes seizures. The disease can also affect motor skills and negatively affect speech and vision.

The couple claims in their complaint that the bacterial infection was caused by the sewage overflow from their military housing.

They are seeking monetary damages in an amount to be proven at trial, as well as punitive damages, according to the complaint. The couple is also suing the housing organizations for the emotional distress they experienced as a result of their child’s sickness.

At the time of the complaint’s filing, the child is still dealing with symptoms of the disease.

Balfour Beatty Communities, one of the largest privatized military housing companies in the United States, manages Fort Jackson Housing.

“The health and well-being of our residents is our top priority,” a spokesperson for Balfour Beatty Communities said in an emailed statement. “As this matter is the subject of litigation, we will not comment beyond saying that we think the claims are entirely without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”

Fort Jackson Housing declined to comment.

The Wilson family’s complaint isn’t the first time Balfour Beatty Communities has come under fire for subpar military housing conditions. In December 2021, the housing contractor was ordered to pay over $65 million in fines and restitution for defrauding the U.S. military.

“Instead of promptly repairing housing for U.S. service members as required, BBC lied about the repairs to pocket millions of dollars in performance bonuses,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco in a Justice Department release at the time.

East Coast Marines will soon have their own MQ-9A Reaper drone training unit after recently completing a successful flight of the platform at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina.

The Marine Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Training Squadron, or VMUT 2, Marine Aircraft Group 14, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing conducted the unit’s first Reaper flight on Nov. 21, according to a release.

“This achievement is more than a technical success — it represents a bold step forward in the future of unmanned aerial systems within the Marine Corps,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Boersma, VMUT-2 commander.

The unit transitioned from an operational RQ-21A Blackjack drone squadron to the Corps’ Reaper Fleet Replacement Squadron in July 2023, according to the release. The unit will now work to build up a full squadron of Reaper drones, pilots, maintenance and support staff.

As demand rises, Marines need their own school for MQ-9 drone crews

Over the past five years the Corps has gone from leasing a handful of Reaper drones to building a training school, standing up an operational squadron and implementing a series of upgrades to stretch the capabilities of the platform.

The program, known as the Extended Range Marine Air-Ground Task Force Unmanned Expeditionary Medium-Altitude, High-Endurance aircraft, or MUX, was previously part of a larger “do-it-all” drone concept the Marine Corps sought to employ to quarterback all elements of the battle through sensors and communications links.

The MUX program seeks to use a single drone to conduct, coordinate and relay reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance, communications, electromagnetic attack and conventional strike missions.

But the original request for a new, purpose-built drone stalled in Congress, which pushed the Marines to use the legacy Reaper platform to test the new concepts.

Though the Reaper drone has been in service for decades, the Corps previously leased the platforms from General Atomics until the service acquired its first Reaper in 2021 at Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Squadron 1, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing in Yuma, Arizona.

The Air Force has operated the MQ-9 since 2007, and as of 2021 had more than 300 of them in its inventory. Earlier this year, the Corps had 10 Reapers in its fleet, with another 10 scheduled for delivery in fiscal year 2025.

The MQ-9 has a maximum takeoff weight of 10,500 pounds, and a payload capacity of 3,000 pounds. The drone can fly a maximum distance of 2,250 nautical miles. Its maximum flight time is 27 hours, according to Navy data.

The Marines established the 7318 military occupational specialty for MQ-9 pilots in 2020. Within two years the service had trained 38 drone pilots. In December 2023, the Corps announced it had trained 100 pilots for the MQ-9.

The MQ-9 is the Corps’ first Group 5 drone, which denotes a drone heavier than 1,320 pounds and one with an altitude capability of 18,000 feet and above.

In 2022, as the service acquired its first Reapers and trained pilots, then-Commandant Gen. David Berger announced that the Corps would stand up its first Reaper squadron in Hawaii and build out six unmanned aerial squadrons.

In August 2023, Marine Unmanned Aerial Squadron-3 at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii became the first squadron to reach initial operational capability.

A recent report recommends U.S. Special Operations Command take various actions to reduce high-risk training injuries and deaths, which account for the bulk of non-combat accidents.

Released this month, the Government Accountability Office report found that from 2012 to 2022, an estimated 80% of the 3,600 reported on-duty, non-combat accidents among special operations forces came from high-risk training. Forty percent of those incidents were from either parachute or combat dive training.

Officials determined that approximately 86% of those incidents were caused by human error. Only about 3% were the result of equipment failure, while another 3% were impacted by environmental factors like extreme heat or cold.

Green Beret's free fall death spotlights concerns, sparks working group

Four factors were highlighted as sole or combined contributors that cause human error, including “failure to adhere to training standards, standard operating procedures, or other policies and guidance,” “overconfidence, complacency or indiscipline,” “leadership supervision” and “poor or improper decision making.”

The number of training incidents fluctuated annually, ranging from as low as 120 in one year to as high as 402 during another. On average there were about 259 reported training incidents each year of the study period.

Broken down by category, high-risk training accidents between 2012 and 2022 included 972 incidents that involved parachutes, 188 involving weapons or explosives, 99 that occurred during dive operations and 83 involving tactical vehicles.

There were 48 reported fatalities across the studied period. One-third of those fatalities happened during parachute training, with more than 60% of the fatalities occurring between fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2015. SOCOM paused parachute training in 2015 as a result, making a series of changes to training policy and operations.

Army and Navy special operations personnel performed an average of more than 100,000 parachute jumps each year between 2012 and 2022. Over the course of the studied period, personnel assigned to Army and Navy units were involved in 685 and 237 reported parachute training accidents, respectively.

During an average year highlighted in the report, Army special operations fired off 48 million ammunition rounds and explosives. Around eight weapons and explosives training incidents were reported each year during that period.

Marine special operators fired off 7 million rounds and explosives each year, reporting approximately two related incidents annually.

Army and Navy special operators drove an average of 1 million and 250,000 tactical miles, respectively, over the decade measured. Together, the two forces averaged about three total tactical vehicle training accidents each year.

Navy special operators averaged 40,000 dives per year, meanwhile, with seven reported dive training incidents annually. Air Force special operations divers hit the water 3,600 times each year and reported less than one dive training incident per year.

In looking into incidents, the report authors dinged SOCOM in several areas.

Special Operations Command designated seven high-risk training areas in 2022 — airborne operations, combat dive, joint terminal attack controller, mountain operations, sniper, special operations urban combat and vertical lift operations — but has not yet determined whether these areas account for the greatest risk of training accidents, the authors noted.

The command also established a training and assessment program to oversee SOF training in 2022, but it has not yet implemented all components of the assessments. The command has not conducted an analysis of negative safety trends in high-risk training, the report added.

The GAO report offered recommendations to improve special operations training safety. Among those, the report suggests:

• The SOCOM commander should analyze negative safety trends when designating high-risk training areas in future training directive updates.
• The assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict should reevaluate the training assessment program to determine resources SOF service commands need to achieve program goals.
• The defense secretary should ensure that services’ corresponding special operations forces commanders establish milestones for their units to complete updates to high-risk training policies, including SOCOM’s oversight requirements.

The Pentagon agreed with all GAO recommendations. Read the full report here.

Service members participating in operations against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen are now authorized to receive the Global War on Terrorism Service and Expeditionary Medals, according to a Pentagon spokesperson.

In a June 18 memo, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Reserve Affairs Ronald T. Keohane stated personnel involved in three Red Sea missions combating Houthi rebels — Operations Prosperity Guardian, Poseidon Archer and Pandora Throttle — were qualified for the award.

The Global War on Terrorism Service and Expeditionary Medals were signed into existence in 2003 through an executive order by President George W. Bush. The Expeditionary Medal is for service members mobilized to a specific unit, while the Service Medal is for personnel who directly or indirectly supported operations.

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The Global War on Terrorism Service Medal was considered an essentially automatic award for troops since its introduction in 2003, with the Army, for example, stating in 2004 that all active duty troops who served after Sept. 11, 2001, deserved the award because they’d all “served in some way in support of GWOT.”

However, eligibility for the award has narrowed over the years. Eligibility requirements were amended so that troops had to serve 30 consecutive or 60 nonconsecutive days in support of a Global War on Terrorism-focused deployment, and in 2022, the Defense Department restricted the award further to service members who “directly served in a designated military [counter-terrorism] operation” for at least 30 days.

For Houthi operations, the area of eligibility for the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal includes “total airspace, land area, territorial waters, and boundaries of the Southern Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Bab A-l Mandeb Strait,” according to the June 18 memo.

The U.S. military has been engaged against the Houthis since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel, as U.S. warships and fighter jets have destroyed Houthi missiles and drones targeting civilian and military ships in the Red Sea and U.S. bombers have struck targets in Yemen.

In April, the Navy authorized combat awards and devices for sailors serving in the Red Sea area. Sailors from the destroyer Carney and the Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group have received the Combat Action Ribbon for their efforts to stop Houthi attacks during Middle East deployments.

Clarification: This article was updated to clarify the transitionary nature of the two general officer’s assignments at the new recruiting posts.

As the Army overhauls its recruiting structure, jobs and approaches to bringing in new talent, the service is injecting resources into areas that have previously been underserved — cities.

That’s one of a host of reasons that the Army Recruiting Command will soon post a one-star general in both Los Angeles, California, and Atlanta, Georgia, in the coming months.

Brig. Gen. Sara Dudley and Brig. Gen. Fred Hockett Jr. are overseeing transition teams to establish the offices in Atlanta and Los Angeles, respectively, starting in early 2025. Dudley currently serves as the deputy commanding general of operations at U.S. Army Recruiting Command, while Hockett serves as the command’s deputy commanding general for support. The two will continue in those duties as they run the transition.

The Atlanta office is expected to oversee recruiting efforts for the eastern half of the country. Los Angeles office will be the service’s recruiting hub for the nation’s western half.

Army enlists AI to identify prospective new recruits

Dudley told Army Times recently, following an overarching analysis of the Army’s recruiting approach, that the service found its recruiting efforts were too “centrally located in the United States.”

This shift, officials hope, will amplify support for recruiters by connecting them with community leaders and groups, such as mayors, school board members, business owners and others who might help the Army better connect with local communities.

“It’s a very complex mix of why people think that we don’t reach them,” Dudley said. “I think one of them is we don’t have the presence, and we don’t have the kind of tailored strategy having been around those areas that they can hear and then see themselves in.”

While much of the two generals’ work will not be seen by recruiters on a daily basis, both Dudley and Hockett said that over time their efforts should open more doors for those tasked with bringing in future talent.

“At the end of this I would want to hand off really solid relationships that exist between institutions or between communities and the Army,” Dudley said.

The service, meanwhile, met its recruiting mission for the first time in two years in fiscal year 2024, which ended in September. But the Army isn’t settling.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth announced in early October at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference that after meeting the service’s goal of bringing 55,000 new soldiers into the ranks, Army officials are eyeing a target of 61,000 new recruits in fiscal 2025.

“This goal is ambitious, but we believe it is achievable,” she said.

To help those future efforts, each one-star will be aided by about 30 staffers in their respective geographic areas. The concept is still being developed but is expected to be fully operational by 2026, officials said.

“What we’re really looking to get by having these headquarters in place [is] additional access to high schools that may be hard to get to,” Hockett said, “[and] to talk with school districts, school boards, local community leaders.”

One area where recruiters must adapt, he added, is through perfecting their knowledge about the process of joining and serving in the Army.

“A potential applicant can order something on Amazon [and] track it from the time it leaves until it shows up on their doorstep,” Hockett said. “They know every single part of that.”

Similarly, recruiters must be able to explain, in detail, every step about the Army process.

Dudley, Hockett and their respective teams, however, see a challenging fight ahead as they work to hit their target.

Beginning in 2026, there will be a 10% drop in the number of service-eligible college-age civilians, due in part to consequences from the 2008 financial recession, which saw fewer births, researchers found.

Recruiters must also continue to battle a growing civilian-military divide, which has yielded fewer Americans serving in the military than at any point in modern history. Many civilians, in turn, have little connection to military service and remain unfamiliar with what it entails.

But those recruiters will have new tools and specialists to assist their efforts.

Beginning last year, the Army restructured its recruiting efforts by reorganizing its recruiting command and bumping it up from a two-star to a three-star headquarters.

The service will also be using an artificial intelligence tool being developed by Deloitte, a professional services provider, in five U.S. cities to help recruiters identify and target potential recruits.

Additionally, the Army in July graduated its first cohort of warrant officer recruiters from the new job’s training course.

These collective efforts will be further enhanced by the service’s tool for potential recruits who may be struggling to meet and maintain the physical and academic standards required to attend basic training.

The Future Solder Prep Course, which started as a pilot in 2022 at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, provides new recruits physical and academic support for up to 90 days to meet Army standards. The Army has seen 28,000 prep course attendees successfully go on to serve since the program’s inception, Army Times previously reported.

These initiatives, Hockett noted, go far beyond recruiters hitting numbers.

“The reason why soldiers should care is the soldiers we recruit are going to be fighting with them on their left and right,” Hockett said.

Army investigators are offering a $15,000 reward for information on the theft of dozens of pistols, night vision goggles and a thermal optic that have been missing from Fort Moore, Georgia, since earlier this year.

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division posted a reward notice last week, which identified even more gear missing from the facility than originally indicated in a May 16 report. In that report, 31 M17 handguns were noted as missing from the installation’s Crescenz Consolidated Equipment Pool, according to an Army release.

Since the pistols were reported missing, investigators in late August and early October found that two sets of Enhanced Night Vision Goggles and an AN/PAS 13D Thermal Optic were also unaccounted for.

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The division could not provide additional information at this time, as the investigation is ongoing, CID spokesman Mark Lunardi told Army Times.

Tipsters can anonymously report information through a link provided by Army CID. The cash payout for military or federal employees is based on whether the information leads to a conviction.

According to the notice, the pistols may have gone missing between March and the date of the May report.

The Army is fielding the M17 pistol as the standard issue sidearm to replace the M9, both chambered in 9mm. The pistol is part of a Modular Handgun System, which includes an optic, adjustable hand grips and a holster.

The AN/PAS 13D thermal optic is used with the M2 .50 caliber and 7.62mm M240B machine guns. The Enhanced Night Vision Goggle, meanwhile, is the Army’s newest night vision device, fielded with thermal capability and the ability to link wirelessly to other weapon optics.

In July officials arrested an Army National Guard military police officer — who also served as a supply specialist — investigators allege stole military-grade equipment from New York-based units before selling the gear to the public.

Gordon Reynolds, previously assigned to the 272nd Military Police Detachment in Auburn, New York, was charged in the scheme.

Police recovered thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment from Texas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida and New York, according to a release.

Also in July, Army Chief Warrant Officer 3 Christopher Hammond was sentenced to three years in prison following a conviction on six charges connected to money laundering, theft of government property and wire fraud.

Hammond and his wife, Army Maj. Heather Hammond, were both arrested in May 2022 and found guilty in an April 2023 jury trial on charges of stealing $2 million in government gear and selling the equipment over a two-year period.

Heather Hammond was later acquitted in a second trial.

The Marine Corps has officially hit full operational capability on its new sniper rifle a year ahead of schedule.

The Corps chose the Mk22 Mod 0 Advanced Sniper Rifle, manufactured by Barrett Firearms, a company widely known for their groundbreaking work in developing the .50 caliber sniper rifle, as a changeable, multi-barrel rifle to replace two existing long rifles and give shooters three caliber options within their main shooting platform.

Those caliber options include the standard 7.62mm, the .300 Norma Magnum and .338 Norma Magnum. The caliber diversity allows shooters to select a munition for specific missions that might require more distance or more penetrating power. The rifle uses a 10-round magazine.

Marines to field mulit-barrel sniper rifle to replace two existing weapons

Marine Corps Systems Command in Quantico, Virginia, announced the milestone on Nov. 19, according to a release. The designation means that all Marine infantry and reconnaissance units, as well as associated schools, have been outfitted with the new rifle and received new equipment training on the system, officials said.

The bolt-action precision rifle, meanwhile, is one part of a system that includes a bipod, sound and muzzle flash suppressor, as well as a caliber agnostic 7x35 Precision Day Optic.

“Marines like the ability to conduct caliber conversions at their level, and the fact that they only have one rifle instead of the two it replaced,” said Kevin Marion, a logistics management specialist with Marine Corps Systems Command. “This shift improves operational efficiency, reduces the logistical burden on units and lightens the individual Marine’s load.”

The additional barrels and design of the rifle also allow for less maintenance time spent on weapons repairs, experts said in the release.

“[Replacing a barrel] was impossible with previous systems, where a condemned barrel would render the weapon unusable, directly affecting mission readiness,” said Brian Nelson, Mk22 project officer, Marine Corps Systems Command. “Now, the Mk22 ensures that even if a barrel fails, Marines are still mission ready.”

The rifle replaces both the Mk13 Mod 7 and the M40A6 sniper rifles currently in use. The Marine Corps noted in budget request documents at the inception of the program that they intended to purchase 250 Mk22 Mod 0 rifles.

The Army announced in 2021 that it would also replace its M107 sniper rifle and M2010 enhanced sniper rifle with the Mk22 Mod 0. At the time, the Army sought to purchase 2,800 Mk22 Mod 0 rifles by 2026.

The M40A6 is a heavily modified version of the original M40, which fires a 7.62mm round and was first fielded during the Vietnam War. The A6 model began fielding in 2016.

The Corps selected the legacy, Accuracy International/Remington Arms-manufactured Mk13 Mod 7 in 2018, chambered in .300 Winchester Magnum. U.S. Special Operations Command fielded an earlier variant.

The Mk22 traces its origins to a SOCOM program aimed at improving sniper rifle options for individual shooters. SOCOM officials first reported seeking a new precision sniper rifle in a late-2009 announcement. The command awarded the contract for the Mk22 Mod 0 in 2019.

The Mk22 weighs 15.2 pounds, according to the company website. The Mk13 Mod 7 and M40A6 weigh 11.4 pounds and 16.5 pounds, respectively. Both use a five-round magazine.

The Mk22′s effective firing range is 1,500 meters, while the effective firing ranges of the M40A6 and Mk13 Mod 7 are 800 meters and 1,300 meters, respectively.

All three legacy rifles are bolt-action.

ROVAJÄRVI, Finland — Roughly 100 kilometers from the Finnish-Russian border, on a snowy November day, a soldier’s command rips through the frigid air: “Avfyra!” That’s the Swedish call to fire the Archer self-propelled howitzer system that sits camouflaged between a line of thin trees. The gun lets out a burst of two shots, the rounds clearing the barrel to strike a target called in by Finnish soldiers elsewhere on the range.

These are some of the hundreds of munitions that were fired here near the Arctic circle during Exercise Lightning Strike 24 (LS24), where five NATO artillery units – the French, British, Swedish, Finnish and Americans – practiced joint long-range fire capabilities.

LS24 is part of the Dynamic Front series, the alliance’s largest artillery exercise series ever conducted in Europe, taking place across five countries – Finland, Estonia, Germany, Romania and Poland.

The name of the game here in Lapland, the northernmost region of Finland, was to have a call for fire made by one of the nations and the fires delivered by other ones to increase the interoperability of the different artillery systems. In total, this leg of the exercise included 130 pieces of artillery equipment, according to Finnish Col. Janne Makitalo, the event’s director.

The training was meant to rehearse the chain of forward observers finding simulated targets and sending their coordinates to the guns for “servicing,” as the jargon of artillerymen goes.

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The information passed digitally all the way to the different platforms, including to the unit in charge of allocating the fire mission, the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, or ARCC, a rapid reaction force maintained by NATO. Officials at that unit, alongside with supporting formations, determined where and which national artillery platform could best respond and would connect it with the assignment.

Ideally, it’s a relay race of sensors and shooters across multiple nationalities, in the blink of an eye.

“When we speak of deciding of the best platform – whether it is Swedish, British, or French – the decision is not based upon the national unit [per say], it is based upon how we can get the best effect on the ground,” British Col. Alex Forbes, commander of the multinational field artillery brigade told reporters.

The specific system that connects all the pieces is ASCA, which stands for Artillery Systems Cooperation Activities, NATO’s digital language for putting “warheads on foreheads,” as another U.S. military adage goes. It’s an encrypted software suite that creates a unified network of communication, digitally linking artillery and command and control systems from different nations.

The software also allowed the sharing of real-time information about the simulated battlefield to other units in Estonia and Germany. While it was created in the 1980s, it gets refined every time it is used in exercises or other events, based on what worked and what did not in the evolving nature of combat, U.S. officers told Defense News.

Fifteen countries used ASCA throughout the event, the highest number ever integrated in a NATO exercise, which allowed to nullify language barriers and share all targeting data between users regardless of individual fire control systems.

Forbes explained that in terms of artillery, the types of operations practiced here, while complex, were necessary to help further the “deconfliction of fires across a battlefield,” something participants were now achieving in an advanced manner.

The exercise scenario featured a simulated near-peer enemy confined to a small “kill-box” – another military term of art that describes a geographic location from which it’s best to stay away – that allies had to neutralize by “massing multinational fires to enable freedom of movement for infantry and armor forces,” Maj. Nicholas Chopp, deputy media chief for US Army Europe and Africa said.

Artillery units used small drones, deployed from concealed sites, to secure the fire missions while vulnerable. Finnish F-18 Hornets were also in the air to help service targets.

Shortening the ‘kill chain’

An objective identified by the heads of the participating artillery units, inspired in part by Russian tactics in Ukraine, was to shorten the amount of time required between the identification of a target and the shot.

“The link between C2 [command and control], the drone and the launcher has to be shortened… We are trying to work on this here, accelerating the time between the target acquisition and the firing,” French Brig. Gen. Eric Lendroit said during a press conference here on Nov. 20.

Maj. Gen. Rafferty, the head of the U.S. 56th artillery regiment, added that Ukraine served as a reminder that the Russian Army “is built around the fires of war-fighting action,” that is long-range artillery protected by sophisticated air defenses.

The U.S. official said that if they were to “counter” such an advantage, then NATO countries have to keep on practicing as a “multinational fires and artillery team” to enable combined arms maneuvers.

Even in light of significant shortages of ammunition faced by several European countries, officials told Defense News that magazine depth – that is, not having sufficient rounds in combat – was not a constraint of the exercise.

While Rafferty and Brig. Gen. Takamaa, Finnish deputy chief of staff for Army operations, said they were unconcerned about munition scarcity, given that the U.S. and Finland both accelerated the production of 155mm shells, the French official shared a different perspective.

“We all know that in [almost] all the nations the stock of ammunition is a key issue – but at the tactical level, [one thing we do practice] is to have the best target acquisition and ammo to produce the greatest effect to minimize our consumption of munitions,” he said during the press conference.

Kate Rubins was floating in zero gravity miles above Earth in 2020 when she decided to join the Army.

A little more than a year later, Rubins, already a biomedical researcher and astronaut, received a direct commission to the rank of major in the Army Reserve through training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Now, three years into her Army career, she’s joined the rare ranks of a handful of soldiers who have earned the right to wear the Army Aviation Badge with the Astronaut Device.

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On Thursday afternoon, Rubins pinned on the Army Aviation Badge with the Astronaut Device.

“It’s really an incredible honor to receive this device,” Rubins said. “To me, the meaning is really the fact that I’m able to serve in the Army Reserve.”

Rubins, who currently works as a health services officer with the 75th Innovation Command at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland, is the first Army reservist to receive the device.

Coming off her second space mission since joining NASA in 2009, she welcomed the challenges of becoming an Army officer. That’s in part due to the incredibly focused nature of years-long preparations for her trips to the International Space Station.

“The idea for me that I was going from one mission to another mission was actually incredibly helpful,” Rubins said in a call with media Thursday.

Possibly the rarest device in the Army, officials confirmed with Army Times on Friday that the device, originally called the Army Astronaut Badge, was created by the Chief of Staff of the Army in 1983.

Since its inception, officials said, only three other soldiers have earned the device: Col. Drew Morgan, who wears it on his Army Master Space Badge, and Cols. Anne McClain and Frank Rubio, who wear the device on their Aviation Badges.

Those three individuals are also the only members of the active duty Army with the device.

McClain was the first soldier to receive the device during a ceremony Nov. 10, 2020, at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, officials told Army Times. Though she received the device then, she qualified for it in 2018 following a space mission to the International Space Station.

Morgan and Rubio met the criteria for the device in 2019 and 2022, respectively.

It is a gold-colored device, 7/16-inch in length with a star emitting three contrails encircled by an elliptical orbit, according to Army Regulation 600-8-22.

The Army requires a soldier to complete astronaut training and achieve an altitude of 62 miles or greater, passing the Karman Line, which is the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space, to qualify for the device.

Rubins, a Farmington, Connecticut, native, earned a doctoral degree in cancer biology from Stanford University Medical School. She conducted undergraduate research on HIV-1 integration in the Infectious Disease Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, according to her official biography.

The major later lead a team of 14 researchers studying viral diseases that mostly affect Central and West Africa.

She has spent 300 days in space across two flights in 2016 and 2020 and conducted four spacewalks. Rubins was also the first person to sequence DNA in space.

The promotion of a notable Army lieutenant general, who has been tapped to lead U.S. Army Europe Command, stalled Nov. 21 when his name was left off a list of nearly 1,000 military promotions.

Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the current commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, which oversees the 82nd Airborne Division, 10th Mountain Division and 3rd Infantry Division, among other units, was among the names on the Pentagon’s recommended promotion list approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier that week.

However, once the list went to the full upper chamber of the Senate, his name did not advance, Politico first reported.

The Senate will not return from its holiday recess until December.

Last American soldier to leave Afghanistan to command US Army Europe

The Washington Post has reported that Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma put a hold on the nomination, ostensibly to give President-elect Trump and the new Republican-controlled Congress time to weigh in on the promotion.

Donahue has declined to comment on the potential promotion.

Donahue’s stalled promotion comes amid media reports, including NBC News, that President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is “compiling a list of current and former officers for possible court-martial” who were involved in the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

Trump representatives did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.

Trump’s transition team is contemplating making a commission to investigate the withdrawal, according to reports. The investigation would seek to identify individuals who were directly involved in the military leaders’ decisions about the conduct of the exit.

Thirteen U.S. troops and an estimated 170 Afghan civilians were killed in an attack on the Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate during the withdrawal.

An independent review published in 2022 by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction placed blame on both the Trump and Biden administrations for the calamity of the event.

Defense Secretary nominee and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth has previously said the U.S. military needs to be “radically overhauled” and that “lots of people need to be fired,” using the “debacle” of the Afghanistan exit as an example in his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors.”

Stalled military promotions are not unprecedented. Last year, the Senate relied on a Senate floor vote procedure to bypass a hold by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., which stalled the promotions of hundreds of flag and general officers for months in an effort to overturn a Pentagon policy that provides reproductive health care and abortion access for troops.

In addition to pinning a fourth star, Donahue has been tapped to lead U.S. Army Europe Command at a volatile time with the current state of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Donahue served in special operations before commanding the Army’s Infantry School and Soldier Lethality Cross Functional Team. He then went back to his roots briefly to lead the Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan in 2019.

By 2021, Donahue was thrust into the public’s attention when he was featured in a photo as the last U.S. soldier on the ground in Afghanistan.

He led the 18th Airborne Corps and was on a contingent of 82nd Airborne Division soldiers who responded in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.

If confirmed, he would take charge of the Army’s Europe-based assets and personnel as the United States continues in its support of NATO allies and Ukraine through training and military equipment.

Marines recently carried out the service’s first combat strikes using the F-35C Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter during air missions against Houthi targets near the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

Launching from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on Nov. 9 and 10, the “Black Knights” of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 314 (VMFA-314), 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing conducted multiple strikes on Houthi locations being used to target military and civilian vessels in the strategic waterway.

“The F-35C demonstrated its warfighting advantage by transiting contested airspace and striking targets in the heart of Houthi territory over multiple days,” Lt. Col. Jeffrey “Wiki” Davis, squadron commander, said in a release.

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The F-35C is a fifth-generation, long range stealth fighter built by Lockheed Martin and used by the Marines, Navy and Air Force. It handles a variety of missions, from air combat and air-to-ground strikes to reconnaissance and electronic warfare.

The Marine Corps’ long-term aviation plan seeks to fully field all variants of the F-35 by 2030, phasing out aircraft such as the AV-8B Harrier and F/A-18C/D Hornet.

“The offensive and defensive capabilities of the F-35C absolutely enhance our air wing’s striking arm,” Capt. Gerald “Dutch” Tritz, Abraham Lincoln commander, said in the release. “The now battle-tested Air Wing of the Future has proven itself a game changer across all carrier air wing missions.”

The F-35C is engineered for carrier-based operations, with landing gear suited for catapult launches and arrested landings, and foldable wings that allow for easier storage on the carrier deck. The “C” variant holds more fuel than other versions of the single-seat jet, providing nearly 20,000 pounds of internal fuel capacity for long-range flights.

Before the F-35C, the U.S. military fielded the F-35A and F-35B. The “B” variant saw its first combat while carrying out airstrikes in 2018 against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamic State in Syria, according to the release. The “A” variant was first used in combat in 2019 against ISIS targets in Iraq.

As of July, the Corps had eight operational F-35B squadrons and two training squadrons, totaling over 100 F-35B aircraft globally, Marine officials said.

The Miramar, California-based VMFA-314 transitioned from the F/A-18 to the F-35C in 2020, making it the first fleet squadron in both the Marine Corps and Navy to fly the aircraft. The unit achieved initial operational capability that same year.

VMFA 311, Marine Aircraft Group 11, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, was the second F-35C squadron to achieve that mark. The “Tomcats” of VMFA 311 flew more than 900 sorties, totaling nearly 1,700 flight hours, and carried out another 800 simulator hours and 2,400 maintenance actions to reach initial operational capability, Marine Corps Times previously reported.

Earlier this year the Marines hit another F-35 milestone, when they flew their still-developing XQ-58A Valkyrie drone alongside four F-35Bs and other joint aircraft.

“The flight focused on the use of tactical data links to enable digital communication between the XQ-58A and an airborne four-ship of F-35Bs from Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 214 and other joint aircraft,” said Col. Derek Brannon, branch head for the Cunningham Group, deputy commandant for aviation.

In February the Corps saw its first F-35 squadron on the East Coast reach initial operational capability, when VMFA 542, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, out of Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, achieved that status.

Once at full operational capability, each wing will have six squadrons comprising 10 jets each.

The most recently available figures from the 2022 Marine Corps Aviation Plan listed a procurement goal of 353 F-35Bs and 67 F-35Cs, for a total of 420 aircraft.

Those acquisitions will fill out 18 active component squadrons in the Corps, according to the plan.