President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday sought to assert its control over Venezuelan oil, seizing a pair of sanctioned tankers transporting petroleum and announcing plans to relax some sanctions so the U.S. can oversee the sale of Venezuela’s petroleum worldwide.

Trump’s administration intends to control the distribution of Venezuela’s oil products globally following its ouster of President Nicolás Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid, with the Energy Department saying the “only oil transported in and out of Venezuela” will be through approved channels consistent with U.S. law and national security interests. That level of control over the world’s largest proven reserves of crude oil could give the Trump administration a tight hold on oil supplies globally in ways that could enable it to influence prices.

The seizures of the tankers in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea reflect the Republican administration’s determination to enforce an existing oil embargo on Venezuela as Trump has pledged the U.S. will “run” the country.

Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested the oil seized by the U.S. with sanctioned vessels would be sold as part of the deal announced by Trump on Tuesday under which Venezuela would provide up to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S.

“One of those ships that was seized that had oil in the Caribbean, you know what the interim authorities are asking for in Venezuela?” Rubio said. “They want that oil that was seized to be part of this deal. They understand that the only way they can move oil and generate revenue and not have economic collapse is if they cooperate and work with the United States.”

The press office for Venezuela’s government did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment on the seizures.

Seizing 2 more vessels

U.S. European Command announced in a social media post the merchant vessel Bella 1 was seized in the North Atlantic for “violations of U.S. sanctions.” The U.S. had been pursuing the tanker since last month after it tried to evade a blockade on sanctioned oil vessels around Venezuela.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem then revealed U.S. forces also took control of the motor tanker M Sophia in the Caribbean Sea. Noem said in a social media post both ships were “either last docked in Venezuela or en route to it.”

The two ships taken over Wednesday join at least two others taken by U.S. forces last month, the Skipper and the Centuries.

The Bella 1 had been cruising across the Atlantic nearing the Caribbean on Dec. 15 when it abruptly turned and headed north, toward Europe. The change in direction came days after the first U.S. tanker seizure of a ship on Dec. 10 after it had left Venezuela carrying a cargo of oil.

The U.S. Coast Guard tried to board the Bella 1 in the Caribbean in December as it headed for Venezuela. Instead, the ship fled across the Atlantic. U.S. European Command said a Coast Guard vessel had tracked the ship “pursuant to a warrant issued by a U.S. federal court.”

It was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2024 on allegations of smuggling cargo for a company linked to Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran.

As the U.S. pursued it, the Bella 1 was renamed Marinera and flagged to Russia, shipping databases show. A U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations, also confirmed that the ship’s crew had painted a Russian flag on the side of the hull.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that it had information about Russian nationals among the Marinera’s crew.

“Taking into account the incoming information about Russian citizens among the crew, we demand that the American side ensure humane and dignified treatment of them, strictly respect their rights and interests, and not hinder their speedy return to their homeland,” the ministry said in a statement carried by Russia’s state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti.

Separately, senior Russian lawmaker Andrei Klishas decried the U.S. action as “blatant piracy.”

Easing some Venezuela sanctions so US can sell its oil

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is “selectively” removing sanctions to enable the shipping and sale of Venezuelan oil to markets worldwide, according to an outline of the policies published Wednesday by the Energy Department.

The oil sales are slated to begin immediately with the sale of 30 million to 50 million barrels from the South American country. The U.S. government said the sales “will continue indefinitely,” with the proceeds settling in U.S.-controlled accounts at “globally recognized banks.” The money would be disbursed to the U.S. and Venezuelan populations at the “discretion” of Trump’s government.

The U.S. plans to authorize the importation of oil field equipment, parts and services to increase Venezuela’s oil production, which has been roughly 1 million barrels a day. The Trump administration has indicated it also will invest in Venezuela’s electricity grid to increase production and the quality of life for people in Venezuela, whose economy has been unraveling amid changes to foreign aid and cuts to state subsidies, making necessities, including food, unaffordable to millions.

The seizure in the North Atlantic

Earlier Wednesday, open-source maritime tracking sites showed the position of the now-named Marinera as between Scotland and Iceland, traveling north.

Flight tracking websites showed several U-28A U.S. special operations aircraft landing at Wick John O’Groats airport on the northern tip of Scotland, before flying further north toward Iceland. P8 Poseidon submarine-hunting aircraft and KC-135 refueling planes were also seen on tracking websites and heading to the area near the tanker.

After the seizure, the U.K. defense ministry said Britain’s military provided support, including surveillance aircraft and a support ship, for the operation. It said the “enabling support” — including the use of U.K. bases — was “in full compliance with international law.”

U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey said the action was part of global efforts to crack down on sanctions-busting.

“This ship, with a nefarious history, is part of a Russian-Iranian axis of sanctions evasion which is fueling terrorism, conflict, and misery from the Middle East to Ukraine,” he said. “The U.K. will continue to step up our action against shadow fleet activity to protect our national security, our economy, and global stability — making Britain secure at home and strong abroad.”

The Sophia

The capture of the second tanker announced Wednesday was much less prolonged. A ship named M Sophia is on the U.S. sanctions list for moving illicit cargos of oil from Russia.

The ship is “running dark,” not having transmitted location data since July. Tankers involved in smuggling often turn off their transponders or broadcast inaccurate data to hide their locations.

Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, said his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document that at least 16 tankers had left the Venezuelan coast since Saturday, after the U.S. captured Maduro.

The M Sophia is among those ships, Madani said, citing a recent photo showing it in the waters near Jose Terminal, Venezuela’s main oil export hub.

Windward, a maritime intelligence firm that tracks such vessels, said in a briefing to reporters the M Sophia loaded at the terminal on Dec. 26 and was carrying about 1.8 million barrels of crude oil — a cargo that would be worth about $108 million at current price of about $60 a barrel.

Lawless reported from London.

Even in its formative years during World War I, military aviators became aware that their worst enemy was anti-aircraft fire. And if one made it through that gantlet, the next worst thing a pilot could do was to return to his designated target, where an aroused and ready enemy waited. In the case of Capt. Merlyn Dethlefsen, however, mission came first, even if it set him against all the surface-to-air missiles anti-aircraft artillery and fighter planes the enemy could throw at him.

The son of a farmer and schoolteacher, the Iowan graduated high school at age 16 in 1951 and joined the United States Air Force in 1954 as a cadet in Royal, Iowa.

After more than a decade in the Air Force, Dethlefsen received his first combat assignment in October 1966 as part of the aerial fight in the Vietnam War. Dethlefsen flew Republic F-105s in the 333rd Tactical Fighter Squadron and later the 354th TFS of the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing, based at Takhli Royal Thai AFB.

The wing flew both single-seat Republic F-105D Thunderchief fighter bombers and two-seater F-105Fs. The latter, nicknamed “Wild Weasels,” carried a weapon systems officer to seek and destroy Soviet-built SA-2 SAMs or the radar that controlled them.

These “Iron Hand” SAM suppression missions, carried out at high speeds at low altitudes, had their own special dangers, made the more hazardous by the AAA and Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) fighters that were coordinated with by North Vietnamese ground control interception (GCI).

On March 10, 1967, Dethlefsen was flying his 78th combat mission and his target was the area around the Thai Nguyen Steel Plant, a heavily defended industrial complex about 50 miles north of Hanoi in North Vietnam, according to the State Department. At the time, the plant was North Vietnam’s first industrial center and produced 20% of its steel.

Dethlefsen’s WSO, Capt. Kevin “Mike” Gilroy, later commented that his pilot was “taciturn, a born-again Christian, and not at all the typical fighter pilot.” In Dethlefsen’s case, however, those traits proved right for the job.

As the Americans, led by Maj. David Everson with Capt. Jose Luna as his WSO, neared Thai Nguyen, the defenses opened up, blacking out the sky with a curtain of 85mm AAA. The flight’s No.4 man, Maj. Kenneth Holmes Bell, suffered major damage early on. Dethlefsen later reported on what followed:

“Both Mike [Gilroy] and I had seen some pretty intense flak in North Vietnam, but nothing to compare with this. The sky was literally black with flak — a greasy, deadly black. I lost sight of Lead in all the smoke. Suddenly I saw Lincoln 2 [Capt. William F. Hoeft] break to the right and heard the tell-tale shriek of a parachute beeper! Lincoln Lead [Everson] had been shot down! And Lincoln 2 wasn’t in too good a shape either. By all the rules I should have squirted off my missiles and gotten the hell out of there, but the strike force was still very vulnerable, I had fuel, missiles, bombs and guns, and the job wasn’t done yet.”

Merlyn Dethlefsen

Dethlefsen flew a brief reconnaissance of the area. “It really wasn’t a matter of avoiding flak, that was impossible,” he said. “I had to find the least intensive area. The SAM site we were after was placed in close with several large 100mm anti-aircraft sites. Not guns—SITES! Each site had multiple guns in it.”

Having lost contact with Bell, Dethlefsen set up a “wagon wheel” pattern of attack. “I rolled in and began lining up the SAM site for a Shrike attack when something caught my eye,” he said. “How I picked put the MiGs in all that smoke and confusion I don’t know. I fired the Shrike and broke to the right, just as the MiG launched a missile at me.”

More worried about MiGs or SAMs at that moment, Dethlefsen flew into the AAA instead. During his second run through it, however, he felt “a slight bump.” They were hit. Evading a second MiG’s attack and sustaining another flak hit, Dethlefsen made a final strafing dive, firing off the last of his 20mm cannon ammunition before making for Takhli.

Among other things, he had destroyed two SAM sites and dodged two MiG missiles, helping the bombers carry out what was judged a successful mission.

However, the mission cost Dethlefsen his flight leader, Everson and Luna, who were taken prisoner and endured 2,187 days of hardship and torture in the “Hanoi Hilton” before their release on March 4, 1973. Bell and Hoeft managed to bring back their battered F-105Ds.

Unknown to the Americans at the time, the few MiGs they encountered were not North Vietnamese, but North Korean. Although the USAF confirmed both, a postwar check of Vietnamese records revealed a unit called Group Z that fought alongside the North Vietnamese.

On Feb. 1, 1968, Dethlefsen received the Medal of Honor from President Lyndon B. Johnson for his March 1967 exploits. Among the highlights of his subsequent career was service as assistant director of Lockheed SR-71 Blackbirds at Beale AFB, California, and director of operations for the Boeing B-52 wing at Dyess AFB, Texas before retiring as a colonel.

He died in Tarrant County, Texas, on Dec. 14, 1987, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

The Pentagon has launched a formal review of the “effectiveness” of women in ground-combat positions, nearly a decade after the Department of Defense ended a ban that had excluded them from front-line infantry, armor and artillery units.

The six-month assessment, first reported by NPR on Tuesday, will require Army and Marine Corp leaders to submit data on readiness, training, performance, casualties and command climate of ground combat units and personnel, according to a December memo sent by Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel Anthony Tata. Pentagon officials cast the move as a way to gauge “the operational effectiveness of ground combat” units and examine how women have integrated into combat roles over the last ten years.

“The Institute for Defense Analyses is reviewing the effectiveness of having women in ground combat roles to ensure standards are met and the United States maintains the most lethal military,” Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement to Military Times.

The institute is a private, nonprofit organization that is largely financed by the federal government to research and analyze national security issues for the Department of Defense.

“Our standards for combat arms positions will be elite, uniform, and sex neutral because the weight of a rucksack or a human being doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman,” Wilson added, noting that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “will not compromise standards to satisfy quotas or an ideological agenda – this is common sense.”

Hegseth — who previously expressed opposition to women serving in ground combat roles — outlined new physical fitness standards for combat posts during an address to hundreds of military leaders in September. The Pentagon chief said he is requiring every combat position to return to the “highest male standard,” while acknowledging that “if that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it.”

“I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in [a] combat unit with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men,” Hegseth asserted. “Standards must be uniform, gender neutral and high. If not, they’re not standards. They’re just suggestions, suggestions that get our sons and daughters killed.”

Before he was nominated as defense secretary, Hegseth, speaking on Shawn Ryan’s podcast, bluntly said: “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated.”

Asked about his views on women in the military during his confirmation hearing, Hegseth responded “women will have access to ground combat roles given the standards remain high, and we will have a review to ensure the standards have not been eroded.”

Data released in 2023 showed that women accounted for 17.7% of active-duty troops in the military.

The entire mission hinged on a narrow break in Venezuela’s weather.

When that window opened, the U.S. military moved fast, launching more than 150 aircraft from 20 bases in a high-risk operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from the country’s populated capital over the weekend.

After a tightly synchronized mission that lasted less than five hours from authorization to exfiltration, Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken Saturday by U.S. forces from their Caracas compound, according to President Donald Trump and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Videos suggest stealthy Air Force drone flew recon for Maduro capture

One defense expert, who was not involved in the operation, said that unlike past regime-change operations that involved the deployment of troops en masse, this operation appeared to have been designed to be precise.

“This was surgical,” Carlton Haelig, a fellow with the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, told Military Times. “But in terms of the tactical and support elements surrounding it, it was still relatively large scale.”

Though many details remain opaque, the mission, dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve, offered a rare public look at how today’s military plans and executes complicated, high-stakes interagency operations.

Months of planning, days of waiting

According to Caine, intelligence planning for the mission began months earlier and relied heavily on intelligence work to track Maduro’s whereabouts — “where he lived, where he traveled, what he ate, what he wore,” — and even information about his pets.

In a press conference Saturday, Caine said the apprehension would not have been possible without the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, though he did not elaborate on each branch’s exact contributions.

Adam Taichi Kraft, a former intelligence collection strategist with the Defense Intelligence Agency who now consults on national security issues, speaking generally, said that for missions like this, information gathering never stops.

“Intelligence collection is going on 24/7, all around the world,” he said in an interview with Military Times. “You cannot hide; we are in a zero-privacy world.”

He emphasized that watching people’s behavior — whether in person or online — cannot be understated.

“If you are breathing oxygen, if you leave a fingerprint on a cab door, if you go to the doctor, if you order Starbucks, you are opening yourself up to surveillance,” he said.

Haelig said mapping the patterns of Maduro’s life was essential, but equally important would also be the military intelligence that enables U.S. forces to safely enter and exit a targeted area.

“Most of that comes from knowing the enemy’s order of battle — where their defensive assets are positioned. What are their response capabilities? What needs to occur in order to take those capabilities offline — whether that’s kinetically — through missile and air strikes — or by other means like electronic jamming,” he said.

Outlets including Reuters and The New York Times reported that the U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force practiced the extraction using a mockup of Maduro’s compound, but officials have not publicly confirmed which units were involved in the mission.

Even with extensive preparation, operations of this scale carry inherent uncertainty, including the possibility of shifting air defense and unseen threats along a route, Haelig said.

Those risks, he said, “were almost certainly something that was in the back of the minds of all of the planners and the operators themselves.”

And yet, the final go-ahead hinged on weather. In a Saturday morning phone interview on “Fox and Friends Weekend,” Trump said military forces had been waiting for “days” until the weather was right.

Into Caracas

Trump gave the green light at 10:46 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Jan. 2, according to Caine, and over 150 aircraft began to launch across the Western Hemisphere.

“As the night began, the helicopters took off with the extraction force, which included law enforcement officers, and began their flight into Venezuela at 100 feet above the water,” Caine said in a statement.

The helicopters, skimming the water at such a low altitude to avoid detection, were protected by a fleet that included fighter jets, bombers and surveillance aircrafts.

After clearing the last stretch of high terrain, leaders determined that the force had maintained the element of surprise, Caine said.

The force descended.

Shortly after one in the morning Saturday, helicopters arrived at Maduro’s compound. A firefight ensued, and according to Caine, one aircraft was hit but did not sustain catastrophic damage and was able to remain flyable.

Trump said in his “Fox and Friends Weekend” interview that Maduro “got bum-rushed so fast” in “a house that was more like a fortress than a house.”

By 3:29 a.m., the force had left the compound with Maduro and his wife and were “over the water,” Caine said, after multiple engagements.

Trump on Saturday posted a photo of a blindfolded man who he said was Maduro post-capture aboard the USS Iwo Jima. Maduro is now facing federal criminal charges in New York.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday in a speech that nearly 200 Americans were on the ground in Caracas during the operation; he did not specify if that number represented soldiers or others supporting the operation.

When asked to clarify if special operations forces were involved in the mission, the Pentagon declined to comment citing operational security.

Col. Allie Weiskopf, the U.S. Special Operations Command director of public affairs, said in an email Tuesday that the operation belonged to the U.S. Southern Command.

Haelig said that many have speculated — based on the rotary wing aircraft seen in videos posted on social media by people on the ground in Venezuela — that the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment was involved in the mission. That unit, known as the Night Stalkers, is trained for risky aviation missions at low altitudes.

“They work equally with Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 on missions like this,” he said, adding that “both are absolutely capable and trained for high value target missions.” Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 are elite units trained to conduct the military’s most sensitive operations — often at night and in close coordination with intelligence agencies.

The people selected for these missions, Kraft said, are extremely high caliber and often handpicked.

“These guys are so well-rehearsed and so mature,” he said, adding “there are contingencies and branch plans as part of training. They’re always practicing. So if something goes wrong, they’re able to accomplish the mission regardless.”

On Oct. 28, 1951, 1st Lt. Lloyd Burke was at his unit’s command post, looking at the ticket in his hand. His 13-month tour of duty in Korea was ending and two miles to the rear an airplane was waiting to fly him out.

He’d soon be reunited with his wife and infant son back in Arkansas. At that very same time, however, his unit, G Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, was trying to advance across the Ch’ongch’on River and assault Chong-dong, but things were not going well.

For the past few days Chinese soldiers dug in on Hill 200 had ground the company’s progress to an exhausted halt. The lieutenant visited the 35 remaining troops of his platoon and recognized in their the “thousand mile stare” of broken men.

“Scooter” Burke, as his men called him, had no requirement — in fact, no authorization — to push his luck any further, but he picked up some grenades and rejoined his men. Later, he explained, “I couldn’t see leaving my guys up there without trying to do some something.”

Born in Tichnor, Arkansas, on Sept. 29, 1924, Burke dropped out of Henderson State College in 1943 to join the U.S. Army and served as a combat engineer in Italy, rising to sergeant when World War II ended.

In 1946, he returned to Henderson State, where he graduated in 1950 as a member of Phi Sigma Epsilon fraternity, Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and his school’s Distinguished Military Graduate. When he returned to Regular Army service in Korea, he was a commissioned second lieutenant. It was thus, as he was finishing his tour, that he plunged into his most unnecessary —and most distinguished — day of battle.

Calling on his troops to a renewed effort on the hill, Burke obtained an M1 rifle and a grenade throwing adaptor and led an assault on three key enemy emplacements to what his citation called an “exposed vantage point.”

There he led an assault on one of the emplacements, taking the center of the bunker and killing three of the enemy. As he charged the third enemy position, Chinese soldiers threw grenades at him, only to see him pick them up and hurl them back.

Inspired by his example, his men overran another position, but were then pinned down again. Securing a .30-caliber Browning M1919 machine gun and three boxes of ammunition, Burke dashed over an open knoll, set his weapon up in an advantageous position and killed 75 enemy troops.

Although he himself was wounded in the fight, Burke retired only to obtain more ammo and return to his machine gun, with which he and his platoon wiped out two mortars and a machine gun position. Then, cradling the heavy M1919, he joined his men in securing the bunker complex, having killed another 25 Chinese in the process.

Having played an unofficial role in reversing his platoon’s fortunes, Burke returned home with a Silver Star. On April 11, 1952, however, he was called to Washington to receive an upgrade from President Harry Truman — to the Medal of Honor.

Continuing his Army career, Burke entered his third conflict as commander of 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam — only to see the Viet Cong achieve what the Chinese could not. On July 22, 1965, his helicopter was shot down near Bien Hoa and his injuries put him out of the war. After recovering, he was stationed in Germany and later served as the Army’s liaison officer to the U.S. Congress.

In 1978, Burke retired as a colonel with the Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross and five Purple Hearts. Lloyd L. Burke died in Hot Springs, Arkansas on June 1, 1999, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Location, location, location. Greenland’s position above the Arctic Circle makes the world’s largest island a key part of security strategy. But for whom?

Increasing international tensions, global warming and the changing world economy have put Greenland at the heart of the debate over global trade and security, and U.S. President Donald Trump wants to make sure his country controls this mineral-rich island that guards the Arctic and North Atlantic approaches to North America.

Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark, a longtime U.S. ally that has rejected Trump’s overtures. Greenland’s own government also opposes U.S. designs on the island, saying the people of Greenland will decide their own future.

The island, 80% of which lies above the Arctic Circle, is home to about 56,000 mostly Inuit people who until now have been largely ignored by the rest of the world.

Here’s why Greenland is strategically important to Arctic security:

Greenland’s location is key

Greenland sits off the northeastern coast of Canada, with more than two-thirds of its territory lying within the Arctic Circle. That has made it crucial to the defense of North America since World War II, when the U.S. occupied Greenland to ensure it didn’t fall into the hands of Nazi Germany and to protect crucial North Atlantic shipping lanes.

Following the Cold War, the Arctic was largely an area of international cooperation. But climate change is thinning the Arctic ice, promising to create a northwest passage for international trade and reigniting competition with Russia, China and other countries over access to the region’s mineral resources.

Security threats to the Arctic

In 2018, China declared itself a “near-Arctic state” in an effort to gain more influence in the region. China has also announced plans to build a “Polar Silk Road” as part of its global Belt and Road Initiative, which has created economic links with countries around the world.

Then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rejected China’s move, saying, “Do we want the Arctic Ocean to transform into a new South China Sea, fraught with militarization and competing territorial claims?”

Meanwhile, Russia has sought to assert its influence over wide areas of the Arctic in competition with the U.S., Canada, Denmark and Norway. Moscow has also sought to boost its military presence in the polar region, home to its Northern Fleet and a site where the Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons. Russian military officials have said that the site is ready for resuming the tests, if necessary.

The Russian military in recent years has been restoring old Soviet infrastructure in the Arctic and building new facilities. Since 2014, the Russian military has opened several military bases in the Arctic and worked on reconstructing airfields.

European leaders’ concerns were heightened following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that Russia is worried about NATO’s activities in the Arctic and will respond by strengthening the capability of its armed forces there.

“Russia has never threatened anyone in the Arctic, but we will closely follow the developments and mount an appropriate response by increasing our military capability and modernizing military infrastructure,” Putin said in March at a policy forum in the Arctic port of Murmansk.

He added, however, that Moscow was holding the door open to broader international cooperation in the region.

U.S. military presence in Greenland

The U.S. Department of Defense operates the remote Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, which was built after the U.S. and Denmark signed the Defense of Greenland Treaty in 1951. It supports missile warning, missile defense and space surveillance operations for the U.S. and NATO.

Greenland also guards part of what is known as the GIUK — Greenland, Iceland, United Kingdom — Gap, where NATO monitors Russian naval movements in the North Atlantic.

Danish armed forces in Greenland

Denmark is moving to strengthen its military presence around Greenland and in the wider North Atlantic. Last year, the government announced a roughly 14.6 billion-kroner ($2.3 billion) agreement with parties including the governments of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, another self-governing territory of Denmark, to “improve capabilities for surveillance and maintaining sovereignty in the region.”

The plan includes three new Arctic naval vessels, two additional long-range surveillance drones and satellite capacity.

Denmark’s Joint Arctic Command is headquartered in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, and tasked with the “surveillance, assertion of sovereignty and military defense of Greenland and the Faroe Islands,” according to its website. It has smaller satellite stations across the island.

The Sirius Dog Sled Patrol, an elite Danish naval unit that conducts long-range reconnaissance and enforces Danish sovereignty in the Arctic wilderness, is also stationed in Greenland.

Rich source of rare earth minerals

Greenland is also a rich source of the so-called rare earth minerals that are a key component of mobile phones, computers, batteries and other hi-tech gadgets that are expected to power the world’s economy in the coming decades.

That has attracted the interest of the U.S. and other Western powers as they try to ease China’s dominance of the market for these critical minerals.

Development of Greenland’s mineral resources is challenging because of the island’s harsh climate, while strict environmental controls have proved an additional hurdle for potential investors.

Stefanie Dazio in Berlin and Dasha Litvinova in Tallinn, Estonia, contributed to this report.

A U.S. Marine Corps Forces Reserve member is the first to change rank from master sergeant to first sergeant this month as part of the new E-8 pilot redesignation initiative.

Master Sgt. Joseph B. Stoker was selected from applicants to be the first to benefit from the pilot program, according to a late December DVIDS memo. The aim of the program is to grant new leadership opportunities to experienced Marines and give them greater control over their careers.

“I came into the Marine Corps from a place of uncertainty, but it gave me a chance to build a life and purpose I never thought possible,” Stoker said in the memo.

“As I transition to First Sergeant, I’m determined to give back, leading Marines with the same integrity and dedication that was shown to me,” he said.

The pilot program, established through a Marine administrative message, allows qualified master sergeants to apply for the first sergeant military occupational specialty.

“The E-8 redesignation program was designed to ensure that experienced leaders like Stoker could apply their skills to meet the evolving needs of the Marine Corps,” the memo says.

As first sergeant, Stoker continues his leadership role in his unit but his new rank requires him to take a broader focus on the overall health and success of the unit.

Stoker is based in New Orleans and has 17 years of service in the Marines, according to the release.

He has served in numerous roles such as drill instructor, senior enlisted adviser and wing aircraft maintenance/material readiness chief with 4th Marine Aircraft Wing.

“Master Sgt. Stoker was a first sergeant in all but rank. The chevron wasn’t a promotion, but a confirmation of the leader he has always been,” Sgt. Maj. Edwin A. Mota, command senior enlisted leader of U.S. Marine Corps Forces Reserve and U.S. Marine Corps Forces, South, said in the memo.

Before the pilot program, Marines were solely formally selected by a board process to the rank of either first or master sergeant after serving as an E-7, with a gunnery sergeant rank.

With the ousting of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump cited the Monroe Doctrine, the 200-year-old lodestar of U.S. diplomacy — which the Obama administration declared dead in 2013.

“We have superseded it by a lot,” Trump told reporters Saturday.

“They now call it the ‘Donroe Doctrine.’ American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” he said.

First articulated by President James Monroe during a Dec. 2, 1823, congressional address, Monroe warned European powers to accept that the Western Hemisphere was solely within America’s sphere of interest and it “soon became a watchword of U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere,” according to the National Archives.

Both Monroe and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, feared European excursions within the newly independent Latin America countries and the doctrine was designed to break the New World from the Old.

Decades prior, Adams’ own father, John Adams, who would become the country’s second president, spelled out this fear during the 1782 Preliminary Articles of Peace negotiations between the United States and Britain to British commissioner Richard Oswald.

When taunted by Oswald for being “afraid of being made the tools of the powers of Europe,” Adams replied bluntly: “Indeed I am.”

“It is obvious,” he continued, “that all the powers of Europe will be continually maneuvering with us to work us into real or imaginary balances of power. They will all wish to make us a make-weight candle, when they are weighing out their pounds. Indeed, it is not surprising; for we shall very often, if not always, be able to turn the scale. But I think it out to be our rule not to meddle.”

Since Monroe first uttered the foreign policy, however, the Monroe Doctrine has been codified and used to justify American interventions is Latin America.

Forty-two years later, the declaration, combined with the ideas of Manifest Destiny, “provided precedent and support for U.S. expansion on the American continent,” writes the State Department.

In 1865, the U.S. government, in support of Mexican President Benito Juárez, exerted military and diplomatic pressure that enabled Juárez to remove Emperor Maximilian, who had been placed on the throne by the French government.

The Monroe Doctrine came into its own and acquired its imperialist character, however, under President Theodore Roosevelt and his “Big Stick” foreign policy.

In his 1904 message to Congress, Roosevelt issued his own corollary, tying action to the doctrine.

“Chronic wrongdoing ... may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation,” he said.

“And in the Western Hemisphere,” Roosevelt noted, “the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”

Acting as an “international police power” saw the U.S. annex Hawaii, seize Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam, intervene in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic and help foment Panama’s secession from Colombia to pave the way for the Panama Canal.

The Cold War led to further interventions regarding fruit in Guatemala and oil in Iran, Mark T. Gilderhus, a former diplomatic history professor at Texas Christian University, wrote in 2006.

Couched in rhetoric emphasizing commitments to solidarity and democracy, Gilderhus wrote, the doctrine had “consistently served U.S. policy makers as a means for advancing what they understood as national strategic and economic interests.”

Yet in the latter half of the 20th century, the Monroe Doctrine and empire building fell out of vogue.

Under the Trump administration, however, the policy is back in fashion.

On Saturday, Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were extracted from their home in the capital of Venezuela and arrived in New York to face U.S. charges of participating in narco-terrorism.

Trump emphasized that Venezuela, under Maduro’s rule, had been “increasingly hosting foreign adversaries in our region and acquiring menacing offensive weapons that could threaten U.S. interests.”

On Saturday, Trump defended his Cabinet’s move by citing the Monroe Doctrine, describing Maduro’s actions as being “in gross violation of the core principles of American foreign policy dating back more than two centuries.”

He also cited one factor that appears to be decisive: oil.

“We want to surround ourselves with good neighbors, we want to surround ourselves with stability, and we want to surround ourselves with energy. We have tremendous energy in that country. It’s very important that we protect it. We need that for ourselves. We need that for the world,” he said.

In recent months, Venezuela has emerged as a focus for Trump because, as the Wall Street Journal reports, it encapsulates a number of his priorities, including deporting migrants, fighting drug traffickers, asserting U.S. power across the Western Hemisphere and securing access to the country’s massive oil reserves.

Maduro’s extraction is the most assertive American action regarding regime change since the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

“America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people or drive us … out of our own hemisphere,” Trump said. “The future will be determined by the ability to protect commerce and territory and resources that are core to national security.”

Laid out in the November U.S. National Security Strategy, the administration cites the Monroe Doctrine and, like Roosevelt, dubbed its policy in the Western Hemisphere the “Trump Corollary.”

“After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region,” the document said.

“We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests,” it continued.

Maduro’s government has called the American seizure “imperialist.”

“If we normalize the kidnapping of a head of state, no country is safe,” Maduro’s son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra, said Monday.

“Today it’s Venezuela, tomorrow it could be any nation that refuses to submit. This is not a regional problem, it is a direct threat to global stability, to humanity and to the sovereign equality of nations.”

After months of growing military pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump ordered a brazen operation into the South American country to capture its leader and whisk him to the United States, where his administration planned to put him on trial.

In a Saturday morning interview on “Fox and Friends Weekend,” Trump laid out the details of the overnight strike, after which he said Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were flown by helicopter to a U.S. warship.

Maduro was in a ‘fortress,’ Trump says

Trump described Maduro as being “highly guarded” in a presidential palace that was “like a fortress,” although the Venezuelan leader was not able to get to a safe room.

American forces were armed with “massive blowtorches,” which they would have used to cut through steel walls had Maduro locked himself in the room, Trump said.

“It had what they call a safety space, where it’s solid steel all around,” Trump said. “He didn’t get that space closed. He was trying to get into it, but he got bum-rushed right so fast that he didn’t get into that. We were prepared.”

Part of that preparation, Trump said, included practicing maneuvers on a replica building.

“They actually built a house which was identical to the one they went into with all the same, all that steel all over the place,” Trump said.

‘We turned off all the lights’

Trump said that the U.S. operation took place in darkness, although he did not detail how that had happened. He said the U.S. turned off “almost all of the lights in Caracas,” the capital of Venezuela.

“This thing was so organized,” he said. “And they go into a dark space with machine guns facing them all over the place.”

At least seven explosions were heard in Caracas. The attack lasted less than 30 minutes.

Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who under that country’s law takes power, said some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed.

Trump says ‘a couple of guys injured’

Trump said a few U.S. members of the operation were injured but he believed no one was killed.

“A couple of guys were hit, but they came back and they’re supposed to be in pretty good shape,” he said.

The Republican president said the U.S. had lost no aircraft, but that a helicopter was “hit pretty hard.”

“We had to do it because it’s a war,” he added.

The weather was a factor

The president also said U.S. forces held off on conducting the operation for days, waiting for cloud cover to pass because the “weather has to be perfect.”

“We waited four days,” he said. “We were going to do this four days ago, three days ago, two days ago. And then all of a sudden it opened up and we said, go. And I’ll tell you ... it was just amazing.”

Where is Maduro now?

Trump said that Maduro and Flores were flown by helicopter to a U.S. warship and would go on to New York to face charges.

The Justice Department released an indictment accusing the pair of having an alleged role in a narco-terrorism conspiracy.

Months of escalating actions

The raid was a dramatic escalation from a series of strikes the U.S. military has carried out on what Trump has said were drug carrying boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since early September. There had been 35 known strikes that killed at least 115 people.

On Dec. 29, Trump said the U.S. struck a facility where boats accused of carrying drugs “load up.”

The CIA was behind the drone strike at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels. It was the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. began its strikes in September.

The United States hit Venezuela with a “large-scale strike” early Saturday and said its president had been captured and flown out of the country after months of intense pressure on Nicolás Maduro’s government — an extraordinary nighttime operation announced by President Donald Trump on social media hours after the attack.

The legal authority for the strike — and whether Trump consulted Congress beforehand — was not immediately clear. The stunning, lightning-fast American military action, which plucked a nation’s sitting leader from office, echoed the U.S. invasion of Panama that led to the surrender and seizure of its leader, Manuel Antonio Noriega, in 1990 — exactly 36 years ago Saturday.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, would face charges after an indictment in New York. Bondi vowed in a social media post that the couple would “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”

Maduro was indicted in 2020 on “narco-terrorism” conspiracy charges, but it was not previously known that his wife had been.

Early Saturday, multiple explosions rang out and low-flying aircraft swept through the Venezuelan capital, and Maduro’s government accused the United States of attacking civilian and military installations, calling it an “imperialist attack” and urging citizens to take to the streets.

With Maduro’s whereabouts not known, the vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, would take power under Venezuelan law. There was no confirmation that had happened, though she did issue a statement after the strike.

“We do not know the whereabouts of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores,” Rodriguez said. “We demand proof of life.”

Maduro, Trump said, “has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement.” He set a news conference for later Saturday morning.

The attack itself lasted less than 30 minutes and the explosions — at least seven blasts — sent people rushing into the streets, while others took to social media to report what they’d seen and heard.

Some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed, said Rodríguez, without giving a number. Trump said some U.S. forces were injured in Venezuela but he believed none were killed.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, posted on X that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had briefed him on the strike and said that Maduro “has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States.”

The White House did not immediately respond to queries on where Maduro and his wife were being flown to.

Maduro last appeared on state television Friday while meeting with a delegation of Chinese officials in Caracas.

The strike came after the Trump administration spent months increasing the pressure on Maduro, including a major buildup of American forces in the waters off South America and attacks on boats in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean accused of carrying drugs.

Last week, the CIA was behind a drone strike at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels — the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. began strikes in September.

As of Friday, the number of known boat strikes was 35 and the number of people killed at least 115, according to the Trump administration. Trump said that the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels and has justified the boat strikes as a necessary to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S.

Maduro has decried the U.S. military operations as a thinly veiled effort to oust him from power.

Some streets in Caracas fill up

Armed individuals and uniformed members of a civilian militia took to the streets of a Caracas neighborhood long considered a stronghold of the ruling party. As daylight broke, some rallied while holding posters of Maduro.

In other areas of the city, the streets remained empty hours after the attack. Parts of the city remained without power, but vehicles moved freely.

Video obtained from Caracas and an unidentified coastal city showed tracers and smoke clouding the landscape as repeated muted explosions illuminated the night sky. Other footage showed cars passing on a highway as blasts illuminated the hills behind them. The videos were verified by The Associated Press.

Smoke was seen rising from the hangar of a military base in Caracas, while another military installation in the capital was without power.

“The whole ground shook. This is horrible. We heard explosions and planes,” said Carmen Hidalgo, a 21-year-old office worker, her voice trembling. She was walking briskly with two relatives, returning from a birthday party. “We felt like the air was hitting us.”

Venezuela’s government responded to the attack with a call to action: “People to the streets!”

The statement added that Maduro had “ordered all national defense plans to be implemented” and declared “a state of external disturbance.” That state of emergency gives him the power to suspend people’s rights and expand the role of the armed forces.

The website of the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, a post that has been closed since 2019, issued a warning to American citizens in the country, saying it was “aware of reports of explosions in and around Caracas.”

“U.S. citizens in Venezuela should shelter in place,” the warning said.

Reaction begins to emerge

Inquiries to the Pentagon and U.S. Southern Command since Trump’s social media post went unanswered. The FAA warned all commercial and private U.S. pilots that the airspace over Venezuela and the small island nation of Curacao, just off the coast of the country, was off limits “due to safety-of-flight risks associated with ongoing military activity.”

The Armed Services committees in both houses of Congress, which have jurisdiction over military matters, have not been notified by the administration of any actions, according to a person familiar with the matter and granted anonymity to discuss it.

Lawmakers from both political parties in Congress have raised deep reservations and flat out objections to the U.S. attacks on boats suspected of drug smuggling on boats near the Venezuelan coast and Congress has not specifically approved an authorization for the use of military force for such operations in the region.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the military action and seizure of Maduro marks “a new dawn for Venezuela,” saying that “the tyrant is gone.”

He posted on X hours after the strike. His boss, Rubio, reposted a post from July that said Maduro “is NOT the President of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government.”

Cuba, a supporter of the Maduro government and a longtime adversary of the United States, called for the international community to respond to what president Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez called “the criminal attack.”

“Our zone of peace is being brutally assaulted,” he said on X. Iran’s Foreign Ministry also condemned the strikes.

President Javier Milei of Argentina praised the claim by his close ally, Trump, that Maduro had been captured with a political slogan he often deploys to celebrate right-wing advances: “Long live freedom, dammit!”

Behind his Louisiana Cajun drawl, Jefferson Joseph DeBlanc harbored the intellect of an academic with the physique of a star athlete. Born on Feb. 15, 1921, in Lockport, Louisiana, he graduated from high school in 1938, but cut college short to try his hand at military aviation. He allegedly claimed that as a loyal Southerner he could not abide joining “the Yankee army,” so he enlisted in the U.S. Marines instead.

DeBlanc entered U.S. Navy flight training in July 1941, then transferred to the Marine Corps upon completion. Commissioned a second lieutenant on April 3, 1942, and rated a naval aviator on May 4, he joined Marine fighter squadron VMF-112 10 days before it shipped overseas — just long enough to get a few flying hours in the Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat.

Arriving at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, DeBlanc did not get his first crack at the enemy until Nov. 12, when elements of VMF-112 and Capt. Joseph J. Foss’s flight of VMF-121 found themselves above an onslaught of Mitsubishi G4M1 twin-engine bombers attacking American shipping.

It was, he later recalled, “a fighter pilot’s dream,” or would have been had it not been for the antiaircraft fire thrown up by the ships. Two Wildcats were brought down by that flak, the Japanese or both, but both of their pilots survived.

DeBlanc closed to near-collision range with his first target, which splashed in the sea, and quickly followed that with a second bomber and a possible third that was not confirmed.

He would not get another chance at the enemy until Dec. 18, when he came upon a Douglas SBD-3 Dauntless dive bomber pursued by an aggressively flown Mitsubishi F1M2 two-seat biplane. As he attacked, the floatplane exploded.

Promoted to first lieutenant, DeBlanc suffered a temporary setback on Jan. 29, 1943, when his Wildcat suffered engine trouble and he had to take to his parachute. He was swiftly picked up by the destroyer Jenkins (DD-447), but this proved only the prelude for the busy day he was about to have.

On Jan. 31, DeBlanc was flying his Wildcat at the head of eight others and engaging enemy fighters when he learned of 12 Grumman TBF-1 Avengers and SBDs attacking enemy shipping near Kolombangara.

Leading his pilots south, he came upon the bombers beset by ferociously manned Mitsubishi F1Ms. Coming down along the topside, DeBlanc shot down one bomber’s pursuer, then surprised another from below and behind, sending that floatplane down as well.

At that point, DeBlanc heard someone radio “Zeros!” Fuel was running low and the enemy had the altitude, but resigning himself to a long swim home, DeBlanc joined with Staff Sgt. James A. Feliton of VMF-121 to employ mutually supporting Thach weave tactics against their opponents.

DeBlanc shot down two of the fighters, but Feliton was hit in the engine. Then, after downing his fifth victim of the day, DeBlanc was wounded and set afire by yet another adversary and had to bail out. Both he and Feliton parachuted into Vella Gulf, swam to Kolombangara and were rescued by native coastwatchers, who subsequently hid them, reported their status to Solomons Air Command and arranged their return to Guadalcanal on Feb. 12.

Unknown to DeBlanc and Feliton, the “Zeros” they’d fought were actually Nakajima Ki.43 army fighters, which had just been assigned to Rabaul while the navy’s Zero units were withdrawn to replace their losses over the past half year.

Both Marines were apparently credited to Sgt. Takeo Takahashi, whose eventual wartime score totaled 13 when he was shot down and killed in a transport plane over Manila Bay, Philippines, on Nov. 13, 1944.

The flying boat that picked up DeBlanc was escorted by the first Vought F4U-1 Corsair mission, one of which was flown by future Medal of Honor recipient Lt. Kenneth A. Walsh.

For his own part, LeBlanc learned that his action-packed day’s mission, including the first quintuple aerial victory by a Marine, had been observed by the bombers and a coastwatcher. This led his squadron commander, Maj. Paul J. Fontana, to recommend him for a Navy Cross and an Air Medal. The former was later upgraded to a Medal of Honor, which he received from President Harry Truman on Dec. 6, 1946.

DeBlanc was promoted to captain, effective May 31, 1943, then returned to States in June as a tactics instructor. He returned to a relatively placid combat zone with VMF-422 in the Marshall Islands in 1944, returning to more active climes in April 1945, when his unit moved on to Okinawa. His ninth and last victory was scored 5 miles south of Yokoate, Okinawa.

Ever the advocate of education, LeBlanc earned four degrees, including a Doctorate of Education from McNeese State University. He taught math and physics in American and European schools while retaining his reserve commission until his retirement as a colonel from the New Orleans Marine Air Group in 1972.

DeBlanc died in Saint Martinville, Louisiana, on Nov.7, 2007. In addition to an formidable lifetime of achievement — military and civilian — he left behind a family history. “Once They Lived by the Sword,” was published as a booklet in 1988 and his memoir, “The Guadalcanal Air War,” was published in 2008.

An image shows a column of fire and billows of deep black smoke in the aftermath of a bomb blast in downtown Kiev. A news story purporting to be from CNN raises alarm about a rash of drone sightings causing community panic in Syracuse, New York.

Aside from their plausibility in changing and uncertain times, what these media reports have in common is that they’re totally fake: computer-generated products of the Synthetic Media Lab at Syracuse University.

The school doesn’t use these deepfakes to deceive the American public, as many hostile foreign actors seek to do; they use them to build tools that will help organizations including the U.S. military to distinguish truth from hoax. And they’re doing it with the help of some of the school’s Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets.

For the school, the work dates back to 2020, when the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications got an $830,958 subcontract agreement from DARPA to develop tools to combat the spread of fake news. Since then, the work has expanded and continued, though faculty members said they couldn’t provide many specifics on the scope of their work or the DoD entity they were supporting.

The AI technological revolution has increased the challenge and the need for solutions, said Jason Davis, a research professor at the school and co-principal investigator on the deepfakes effort.

“The AI moment happened, and we said, oh, okay, so we’re not just humans creating this kind of information,” he said. “There’s an automation and a scale that comes with AI and large language models and image generators that are just changing the entire landscape of how this can happen.

“So we skilled up, we rode that wild wave of, you know, large language model generation and synthetic AI generated content. How do we create content in an automated fashion? How do we interface as humans with those tools, and how do we sort of model that new threat as well as the traditional, conventional threat? And then we continued to grow our our capabilities from there.”

Now, according to co-principal investigator Regina Luttrell, a senior associate dean at Newhouse, the lab has more than 20 tools that aid deepfake detection and creation, to further study and identify the differences between synthetic and authentic media.

ROTC students joined the work around 2021, Davis said, after he reached out to the ROTC program and explained the work to them. The ROTC cohorts have always been small — the current one is just three students, faculty members said — but the work is not only meaningful, it’s useful in future careers. Two of the four students in the first cohort went on to get first-choice assignments in military cyber roles, Davis said.

“We were giving them the skills to go and be immediately useful and helpful for the DoD space that they were interested in, so there was a lot of benefit in it for them and for the DoD,” he said. “So we’re now on our second cohort of students, and we hope to continue to keep this going and grow it if we can.”

One of the current cadets, 20-year-old Glenn Miller, is spearheading a specific program focused on deepfake video detection, with the goal of developing tools to identify if someone is using a face swap or other identity masking mechanism on a video call.

Miller, who wants to enter the Army as an engineering officer, said he’s currently feeding his computer model a series of videos of himself in hopes of creating an effective “me detector” that can’t be fooled by digital fakes. It’s exacting work, and has to be done in concert with other priorities including ROTC commitments and classwork, but he can also already see how the work will have bearing on his future military career.

“I think [AI is] really just going to be crucial to our understanding and the military’s understanding of information,” Miller, a junior with a 2027 graduation date, said. “I think that’s where it’s going to be most crucial, how can it decipher, or how can people decipher information to be what it actually is, and determining the quality of that information is where AI is going to be very crucial going forward.”

Current agreements have the lab collaborating with the DoD for at least the next two years, faculty members said. The work now being prioritized focuses on building human confidence in the AI agents and tools they engage with — for example, developing checks and safeguards to make sure the chatbot assisting in online shopping needs isn’t a malicious agent trying to steal their data and scam them.

Having taskers from the military also helps keep the researchers from getting sidetracked “chasing butterflies” amid broad and competing demand signals, Davis said.

“This is sort of a sensory overload space for me some days, but with that critical mission in mind, and those high-priority targets coming from the DoD … it really gives us a fine point to put our focus on,” he said. “And that, actually, we’ll continue to use as a guidepost on what we should work on next.”

President Donald Trump has presided over a rapid surge of U.S. military activity abroad since returning to the Oval Office.

In the first year of his second term, he has authorized a series of strikes ranging from the unprecedented use of bunker-buster bombs against Iran’s most fortified nuclear sites to a sustained counternarcotics campaign off the Venezuelan coast.

Trump, who has labeled himself a “peace president,” frames the expansion of force as a strategy of “peace through strength.”

At his inaugural ball in January, he declared, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

Trump added that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”

Since taking office on Jan. 20, 2025, Trump has overseen at least 626 air strikes, according to data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project that was shared with Military Times.

By comparison, his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, launched a total of 555 strikes in his entire four-year term.

Here is where the U.S. military operated overseas in 2025.

Somalia – Feb. 1 and ongoing

The first major strike in the second Trump administration targeted the Islamic State in Somalia.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the strikes aimed to degrade ISIS’ ability to “plot and conduct terrorist attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners, and innocent civilians.”

The campaign has continued in the region, representing a sustained U.S. military presence against ISIS affiliates in East Africa.

Iraq – March 13

A U.S.-led coalition strike in Iraq’s Anbar Province killed ISIS’ second-highest ranking leader, Abdallah Makki Muslih al-Rifai, and one other insurgent.

Iraq’s prime minister described al-Rifai as “one of the most dangerous terrorists in Iraq and the world.”

Yemen – March 15 to May 6

In mid-March, the Trump administration began an air campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The strikes targeted command-and-control hubs, air defense systems and facilities used for manufacturing and storing advanced weapons, according to the Pentagon.

The offensive — which used JASSM long-range cruise missiles, JSOWs and Tomahawk missiles — surpassed $1 billion in costs within its first month.

The operation concluded on May 6 following an Oman-brokered ceasefire with the Houthis.

Iran – June 22

Operation Midnight Hammer deployed seven B-2 stealth bombers from Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base to strike Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities.

The bombers dropped 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordinance Penetrators on Fordo and Natanz, while a U.S. Navy submarine in the region launched more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at Isfahan.

Trump, in a primetime address, declared the mission achieved “total obliteration” of Iran’s enrichment capabilities, though Tehran disputed that assessment.

The Pentagon estimates the military strikes likely set back Iran’s nuclear program by up to two years.

Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean – Sept. 2 and ongoing

Since September, the U.S. military has waged a sustained campaign of lethal maritime strikes in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific, part of what the Trump administration says is an attempt to dismantle powerful drug cartels and stop the flow of Venezuelan narcotics into the United States.

Trump boasts that the deployment involves the “largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America,” and pledged it will “only get bigger.”

At least 106 people have been killed in strikes on alleged drug-carrying vessels.

Syria – Dec. 19

Operation Hawkeye Strike was launched by Trump to avenge the deaths of two U.S. soldiers, Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard and Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres Tovar, and a civilian U.S. interpreter, Ayad Mansoor Sakat, killed in a terrorist attack in Syria.

American fighter jets, attack helicopters, and artillery struck more than 70 suspected ISIS targets across central Syria, according to CENTCOM.

The operation was named in honor of the fallen soldiers from Iowa, the “Hawkeye State.”

Nigeria – Dec. 25

On Christmas Day, Trump announced the U.S. carried out airstrikes against ISIS in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.

The president said he acted to protect Christians who he asserts are being “mass slaughtered” by “radical Islamists,” and chose the date for symbolic reasons.

“They were going to do it earlier,” Trump said in an interview. “And I said, ‘nope, let’s give a Christmas present.’”

The operation involved more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from a Navy ship in the Gulf of Guinea and was coordinated with the Nigerian military.

Venezuela – December and ongoing

The C.I.A. reportedly carried out a drone strike on a facility in Venezuela – the first known U.S. attack inside the country since the Trump administration intensified its pressure campaign against the government of Nicolás Maduro.

The strike targeted a dock along Venezuela’s coast that officials said was being used by the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua to store narcotics and potentially prepare them for shipment, according to CNN.

“The French like to maintain that the outbreak of war is always marked by a poor vintage, and victory by a gloriously celebratory one. Thus 1945 was a great vintage, 1939 mediocre, 1918 good, 1914 dismal,” writes Julian Barnes. It was as if the ground itself knew of the invasion and then, six long years later, of victory.

Alcohol and war have always been intrinsically tied, with a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealing that “service members consume alcohol on more days of the year than any other profession.”

Soldiers drink. It’s been an enduring love affair for well over 9,000 years. Hominids learned to walk. Our Homo erectus descendants discovered fire. Man discovered alcohol. So it goes.

But during World War II, the French Resistance used the Germans’ penchant to reach for a bottle before battle to gain valuable intelligence.

By late 1940, the Resistance caught on that the Germans would demand large quantities of alcohol in the lead up to major campaigns.

The shipment directives themselves could be telling. Prior to the Nazi campaign in North Africa in February of 1941, the Germans ordered that French wine and champagne be specially corked and packaged for extreme heat. This information was passed on to British intelligence just prior to the invasion.

Unlike field marshal Hermann Göring or propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler was not a big drinker. However, he sought to drain French wine and champagne reserves to not only lubricate his troops, but to wreak havoc on the nation’s export of wine, and damage the psyche of the nation.

To implement this, the Nazis appointed weinführers in various regions around France. In the Champagne province, Otto Klaebisch — a French-born German — was put in charge.

Klaebisch set a nearly impossible demand of 400,000 bottles per week to be sent back to Germany. Count Robert-Jean de Vogüé, the head of Moët & Chandon, led other Champagne makers and pushed back against the order, forming the Comité Interprofessionnel du vin de Champagne to help mitigate and protect the interests of the region.

De Vogüé, himself a member of the Resistance in Epernay, was eventually arrested by the Gestapo in November 1943 on the charge of obstructing trade demands. He was sentenced to death, a charge never commuted by the Germans, and sent to the Ziegenhain concentration camp.

De Vogüé survived the war, barely, after contracting gangrene in his right pinky finger. Denied medical attention, de Vogüé, without anesthetic, cut off his own finger with a shard of glass to stop the infection. British paratroopers eventually liberated the camp in May 1945.

During the five years of occupation, the French hid what wine they could and mislabeled others — with some of nation’s most illustrious winegrowing regions plastering the label “poison” on their best vintage bottles.

In one incident, retold in "Wine & War: The French, The Nazis & The Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure," a troop of German soldiers seized what they believed to be a cache of eau-de-Santenay gin. It was, in fact, a laxative.

The fight to preserve one of France’s greatest treasures in World War II was met with creativity and courageousness on the part of vintners. In “Wine & War,” Claude Terrail, owner of the Restaurant La Tour d’Argent relates that “To be a Frenchman means to fight for your country and its wine.”

On May 7, 1945, almost fittingly, the German High Command surrendered in Reims, the capital of the Champagne region.

After the American victory over the British on Jan. 3, 1777, Gen. George Washington managed to hang on to his army — but just barely.

As both British and American armies settled into their winter quarters both were back to almost the same positions held in mid-November.

Except for a small garrison at Paulus Hook across the Hudson from lower Manhattan, all of New Jersey had been abandoned by the British, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Rick Atkinson.

The withdrawal left thousands of New Jersey loyalists to fend for themselves against the agitated rebels, with one loyalist writing of “mortification and resentment” at being left by the British.

The retreat had “made our brave fellows almost gnaw their own flesh out of rage,” the loyalist added.

The forfeiture of the New Jersey granary, according to Atkinson, further stressed British logistics. All supplies, seemingly, would have to come via 3,000 miles of open ocean.

“The Treasury Board calculated that feeding 40,000 soldiers for the next year would take 7,300 tons of flour and 4,500 tons of salt meat, among other foodstuffs,” writes Atkinson. “Also, 4,000 army horses would consume 20,000 tons of hay and oats annually; Howe was told that 15,000 tons could be purchased in Rhode Island, but to date he had received barely a hundred.”

So began the frantic search for forage, devolving into a little-known partisan campaign between the Patriots and British as both sides competed for scarce resources.

These skirmishes and small engagements continued throughout the winter of 1776-1777, with Washington issuing orders that his men were to be “constantly harassing the enemy.”

One such clash occurred in Spanktown, New Jersey, (present-day Rahway). Named thusly after an early settler publicly took his spouse across his knee and chastised her in the town center, Spanktown was to play an important role in the later dubbed Forage Wars.

On Feb. 23, 1777, British Lt. Col. Charles Mawhood sent out a battalion each of light infantry and grenadiers, plus the 3rd Brigade. Near Spanktown, Mawhood and his men found a group of militia herding some livestock and, thinking he had flanked a party of the New Jersey militia, attacked.

It was a trap.

Soon, Mawhood found his advance force flanked by Continental Army Brig. Gen. William Maxwell and his men who were lying in wait.

Superior knowledge of the geography had allowed Maxwell to set his trap and his larger force soon enveloped Mawhood and his grenadier company.

The initial ambush resulted in the loss of 26 British soldiers, but the Americans kept coming. For nearly 12 hours the British and Americans clashed until Mawhood ordered his men to fall back.

Mauled by the Patriots in their retreat, Mawhood later counted 69 killed and wounded and 6 missing in action. For their part, the Americans had lost five killed and nine wounded.

Just a few weeks later according to the Crossroads of the American Revolution, the badly spanked British decided to abandon New Brunswick and the surrounding areas, and would never again exert their control over the New Jersey countryside.

The U.S. military said Tuesday that it had carried out a series of recent operations against the Islamic State in Syria, resulting in the death or detention of “nearly 25 ISIS operatives,” according to a U.S. Central Command release.

Over a nine-day period, U.S. and allied forces conducted 11 operations that killed at least seven ISIS fighters and destroyed four of the group’s weapons caches, the release stated.

“We will not relent,” CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said in a statement. “We are steadfast in [our] commitment to working with regional partners to root out the ISIS threat posed to U.S. and regional security.”

The operations followed Operation Hawkeye Strike, a retaliatory campaign launched after the deaths of three Americans on Dec. 13 in Palmyra, Syria.

A lone gunman carrying out the Dec. 13 ambush killed two members of the Iowa National Guard, Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard, 29, and Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar, 25, and an American civilian interpreter, Ayad Mansoor Sakat. The assailant was subsequently killed by partner forces.

Both soldiers were assigned to 1st Squadron, 113th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, which is currently deployed to the region in support of ongoing counter-terror operations. Three other U.S. service members were wounded in the attack.

Named for the two soldiers from Iowa — the “Hawkeye State” — the campaign involved U.S. and Jordanian forces striking more than 70 targets with over 100 precision-guided munitions, the military said.

Officials noted that the operation included A-10 attack jets, F-15 Eagle fighter jets, Apache attack helicopters and the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System.

“This is not the beginning of the war — it is a declaration of vengeance,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said at the time, adding that anyone targeting Americans “will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you.”

Central Command said ISIS had inspired at least 11 plots or attacks against targets in the United States over the past year.

In response, CENTCOM said its partner operations in Syria, which number more than 80 over the past six months, have resulted in more than 300 insurgents being detained and over 20 killed.

The Dec. 13 ambush, meanwhile, marked the first combat deaths during Trump’s second term and the first such attack since the government of former Syrian President Bashar Assad was overthrown in December 2024.

The gunman had reportedly joined Syria’s security forces as a base guard two months prior to the attack, but had been reassigned after concerns were raised about potential IS-affiliation, according to Syrian Interior Ministry spokesperson Nour al-Din al-Baba.

In the wake of the attack, President Donald Trump vowed “very serious retaliation,” and noted that Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa was “devastated” and “extremely angry” about the incident.

Al-Sharaa, a one-time al-Qaida-linked target who made a historic visit to the White House last month, led the forces that toppled the Assad regime.

The U.S. currently has hundreds of troops deployed to the Middle East as part of Operation Inherent Resolve.

A July 2025 assessment of the Islamic State by the United Nations Security Council reported that “terrorist fighters at large in the Syrian Arab Republic are estimated at more than 5,000.”

In 1978, the Defense Department conducted an exercise to simulate what would happen if it needed to mobilize all U.S. forces globally in the face of an existential conflict.

It didn’t go well.

The 21-day exercise, dubbed “Nifty Nugget,” brought two dozen military commands to bear to support a notional conflict in Europe. Due to major holes in planning, communication and logistics, up to half a million troops were late to the fight, and the conflict resulted in 400,000 U.S. casualties. While the exercise did result in useful insights, such as helping to prompt the creation of U.S. Transportation Command in 1987, the concept of a mass mobilization exercise was summarily shelved.

Until now.

In the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Donald Trump in early December, a provision calls for a study modeled on Nifty Nugget and focused on Reserve force mobilization “to assess the capability of the Armed Forces to respond to a high-intensity contingency in the Indo-Pacific region.”

The law requires the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs to collaborate with the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to assess the military’s ability to “rapidly mobilize, deploy, and sustain active and reserve component forces in response to a conflict scenario involving the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, or similar Indo-Pacific flashpoint.”

The requirement comes as China’s threats to invade Taiwan intensify. While the U.S. has maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity” over whether it would come to Taiwan’s aid militarily, the prospect of a Taiwan invasion has long been considered a potential trigger for major war.

The mandated study also needs to include an evaluation of strategic lift, sustainment and logistics capabilities; analysis of interagency coordination procedures; an evaluation of joint and allied interoperability “with particular attention to coordination mechanisms with Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and Taiwan”; and the creation of an inventory of the civilian job and education skills within the military’s Reserve component.

These skills include foreign language and cultural proficiency; advanced degrees and academic credentials; skills in high-demand fields such as cybersecurity and data science; and private-sector leadership experience.

A report from the study, due two years from now, must include findings and recommendations, including best practices, and a data analysis that shows how many reservists are likely to be available to reinforce active units in combat in the first 30, 60 and 90 days of a major war in the Pacific, as well as the number of reservists likely needed to shore up sustainment operations at home.

This requirement comes on the heels of a 2024 report from the Center for a New America Security that assessed the ability of the U.S. to mobilize and deploy conscripts if a major war required the country to activate the draft for the first time since the Vietnam war.

That study found, in a best-case scenario, that it would take about seven months to mobilize 100,000 conscripts. Without perfect conditions, such as all conscripts responding to their draft notices, it might take as long as three-and-a-half years to reach that target, the study found.

While renewing a draft would entail more robust challenges than a mass activation of reservists who already have military training and have in the past met standards, the groups share common obstacles — like getting a huge surge of personnel up-to-date on medical and dental deployment prerequisites.

The report called for the National Security Council to begin holding full-scale mobilization exercises across the government every two years to ensure readiness for war.

Katherine Kuzminski, the primary author of that report, told Military Times that although she wasn’t sure of the impetus behind the new NDAA provision, she had briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2024 about the findings of her report and emphasized the value of bringing back mobilization trials.

“When Nifty Nugget was run back in 1978, the headline from it was, it was a total failure,” she said. “But as an exercise, it was not a failure. The point of the exercise is to expose where all the gaps and problems would be if you were in a crisis situation, and we wanted to find those. That was the point.”

The addition of the study requirement in the defense policy bill, Kuzminski said, tells her that lawmakers are taking the prospect of a major conflict in the Indo-Pacific seriously. It also, she added, surfaced a critical component of warfighting that can sometimes be downplayed: the human cost of war.

“When I was digging into what existed about manpower mobilization, is that every open source war game, at least, was looking at, you know, what are the impacts on ships and tanks and equipment? But there was nothing along the lines of, what are the manpower requirements for an actual no-kidding conflict in the Indo-Pacific,” she said. “And that leads to another really unsavory thing you have to think about, which is, what would the casualty rates be.”

Another element addressed in the CNAS report that may feature in the Defense Department analysis is the role of technology and a changing world, and how factors like social media might affect the likelihood of conscripts and members of the Individual Ready Reserve to comply with a mobilization mandate when their country calls on them.

“I think there are a lot of gaps, and seams that will be uncovered in a 2025 scenario, just like we had in 1978,” she said. “And I think that coverage of the gaps and seams being identified can’t be framed as like the military is failing. No — that’s why we’re running this exercise: to identify where those gaps and seams might be.”

As far as the origins of the bizarre Nifty Nugget name, Kuzminski’s research remains inconclusive.

Keeping in step with the Pentagon’s push for legions of new drones, the Marine Corps is instituting new training to ensure the service has the right personnel to operate them.

The service is kicking off a series of new pilot programs aimed at meeting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s $1 billion industry push to get more than 300,000 one-way attack drones into the hands of troops by 2028, according to a release.

Part of that pursuit includes practicing on new off-the-shelf platforms that, in turn, warrant standardized training prior to unit integration, the release stated.

“We are fielding these courses as pilot programs to move quickly,” Lt. Gen. Benjamin T. Watson, commanding general of Marine Corps Training and Education Command, said in a release. “This allows us to validate all aspects of the training, from prerequisites and instructional methods to resourcing needs and certification standards, ensuring that we refine and perfect the curriculum before it becomes part of our long-term training framework.”

Six pilot training programs and eight certifications are being established, each of which, while expected to evolve over time, will be aimed at providing fundamental skills in using both armed and unarmed systems while informing the best training approach, officials said in a Dec. 29 memo.

The names and descriptions of the six courses, which are open to any military occupational specialty, according to the memo, include:

• Basic Drone Operator (BD-O) Course: “Provide the foundational skills required to assemble, maintain and operate both full-acro and stabilized non-lethal drones in an operational environment.”
• Attack Drone Operator (AD-O) Course: “Provide the foundational skills required to tactically employ lethal attack drones.”
• Attack Drone Leader (AD-L) Course: “Provide the instructional understanding of Fire Support Plan integration, threat assessment, system capabilities and coordination with maneuver and fires.”
• Payload Specialist (PS) Course: “Provide the foundational skills and basic knowledge for safe explosive handling and preparation of pre-fabricated warheads used to arm lethal drones in an operational environment.”
• Attack Drone Instructor (AD-I) Course: “Provide the instructional skills required to administer and certify Marines in the BD-O, AD-O, and AD-L courses.”
• Payload Specialist Instructor (PS-I) Course: “Provide the instructional skills required to administer and certify Marines in the PS course.”

Marines seeking to attend any of the above courses must contact unit leadership, who must then coordinate with regional training hubs to confirm course dates and availability, the release said.

Regional hubs include the 1st Marine Division Schools; the 2nd Marine Division Unmanned Systems Center of Excellence; III MEF Expeditionary Operations Training Group; School of Infantry East; School of Infantry West; the Tactical Training and Exercise Control Group; and Marine Forces Special Operations Command.

The Corps’ Weapons Training Battalion in Quantico, Virginia, will serve as an interim central training hub until a long-term location is established, the memo added.

The Marine Corps has continued to find itself at the forefront of new drone technology adaptation, standing up the military’s first drone attack team this past March and, in June, publishing a 90-page guidebook on integrating small unmanned aerial systems, or sUAS, into formations.

Additional information about unmanned training programs and certifications can be found here.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has reinstated a near-total ban on abortion services for veterans and their dependents after new guidance from the Justice Department concluded that the agency lacks legal authority to provide the procedure — including in cases of rape or incest.

A VA spokesperson confirmed to Military Times the restrictions took effect immediately.

“The Department of Justice’s opinion states that VA is not legally authorized to provide abortions, and VA is complying with it immediately,” VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz said in a statement.

“The DOJ’s opinion is consistent with VA’s proposed rule, which continues to work its way through the regulatory process,” he added.

The guidance, issued in a Dec. 18 memo, restores “the full exclusion on abortions and abortion counseling from the medical benefits package,” reversing a Biden-era policy adopted in 2022.

That policy had, for the first time, allowed the VA to provide abortion counseling and, in limited circumstances, the procedure itself “when the life or health of the pregnant veteran would be endangered if the pregnancy were carried to term, or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.”

The revised policy has a single exception: it will allow abortion-related care in life-threatening circumstances.

A proposed rule filed in August, when the Trump administration first moved to implement the ban, emphasized that the VA “has never understood this policy to prohibit providing care to pregnant women in life-threatening circumstances, including treatment for ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages,” and said the exception would be formally codified.

The VA operates approximately 1,380 health care facilities nationwide and serves nearly 10 million veterans each year.

Democrats criticized the decision, saying it is depriving access to health care for women veterans.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in a Dec. 24 post on X, called the policy “a betrayal of our brave American veterans.”

Republicans, meanwhile, have previously praised the rollback, arguing that federal funds should not be used to pay for abortion services.

“It’s simple — taxpayers do not want their hard-earned money spent on paying for abortions,“ the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs said in a statement. ”And VA’s sole focus should always be providing service-connected health care and benefits to the veterans they serve.”

President Donald Trump has indicated that the U.S. has “hit” a dock facility along a shore as he wages a pressure campaign on Venezuela, but the U.S. offered few details.

Trump initially seemed to confirm a strike in what appeared to be an impromptu radio interview Friday, and when questioned Monday by reporters about “an explosion in Venezuela,” he said the U.S. struck a facility where boats accused of carrying drugs “load up.”

“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump said as he met in Florida with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “They load the boats up with drugs, so we hit all the boats and now we hit the area. It’s the implementation area. There’s where they implement. And that is no longer around.”

It is part of an escalating effort to target what the Trump administration says are boats smuggling drugs bound for the United States. It moves closer to shore strikes that so far have been carried out by the military in international waters in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.

Trump declined to say if the U.S. military or the CIA carried out the latest strike or where it occurred. He did not confirm it happened in Venezuela.

“I know exactly who it was, but I don’t want to say who it was. But you know it was along the shore,” Trump said.

Trump first referenced the strike on Friday, when he called radio host John Catsimatidis during a program on WABC radio and discussed the U.S. strikes on alleged drug-carrying boats. The attacks have killed at least 105 people in 29 known strikes since early September.

“I don’t know if you read or saw, they have a big plant or a big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from,” Trump said. ”Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So, we hit them very hard.”

Trump did not offer any additional details in the interview.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or one of the U.S. military’s social media accounts has in the past typically announced every boat strike in a post on X, but there has been no post of any strike on a facility.

The Pentagon on Monday referred questions to the White House, which did not immediately respond to a message seeking more details. The press office of Venezuela’s government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s statement.

Trump for months has suggested he may conduct land strikes in South America, in Venezuela or possibly another country, and in recent weeks has been saying the U.S. would move beyond striking boats and would strike on land “soon.”

In October, Trump confirmed he had authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela. The agency did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Monday.

Along with the strikes, the U.S. has sent warships, built up military forces in the region, seized two oil tankers and pursued a third.

The Trump administration has said it is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels and seeking to stop the flow of narcotics into the United States.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has insisted the real purpose of the U.S. military operations is to force him from power.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said in an interview with Vanity Fair published this month that Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro ‘cries uncle.’”

Neurova Labs began the way many veteran-founded health technologies do, with frustration, loss and a growing belief that the systems designed to help were not addressing the full scope of the problem.

Founder and CEO Brenden Borrowman is a retired Army veteran who was medically evacuated after being wounded in Afghanistan in 2011. During his recovery and time in a Warrior Transition Battalion, he was surrounded by service members dealing with post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, addiction and suicidal ideation.

After leaving the military, Borrowman lost friend after friend to suicide and became convinced that existing treatment models were missing something fundamental.

“What I saw was that these guys could function at an incredibly high level overseas,” Borrowman, who earned a PhD in Philosophy and is currently working on a PhD in Neurology, told Military Times. “But when they got home and were alone with their thoughts, everything fell apart. That told me there was a physical injury component we were not addressing.”

Borrowman spent years researching the process by which blood flow and oxygen delivery support brain function. His work led to the founding of Neurova Labs, a software company focused on treating what he describes as a physiological injury underlying conditions like PTSD and traumatic brain injury.

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Instead of relying on traditional talk therapy or exposure-based models, Neurova Labs uses immersive virtual reality gameplay to influence how the brain regulates blood flow under stress.

The system runs on a commercially available virtual reality headset paired with Neurova’s proprietary software. Users enter a fast-paced, first-person environment designed to alternate between heightened stimulation and controlled calming states. According to Borrowman, the goal is not entertainment for its own sake, but to force the brain to rebalance how it allocates resources while the body is under pressure.

“We are not therapists,” Borrowman said. “We are not here to give closure on trauma. We are here to heal the injury so the brain can function properly again. Everything else works better when the foundation is solid.”

That foundation has resonated with veterans who have spent years cycling through medications, therapy appointments and coping strategies without lasting relief.

Ladd Sheppard, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who served more than two decades with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa and the Middle East, first encountered Neurova Labs through professional work before becoming a user himself. Sheppard lives with PTSD and traumatic brain injury and relies on a service dog to navigate daily life.

During an early demonstration, Sheppard noticed something unusual before anyone explained the science.

“My service dog was losing her mind at first,” Sheppard said. “She was circling me, trying to interrupt, trying to calm me down. About fifteen minutes in, she laid down in the middle of a room full of strangers and fell asleep. That was my first clue that something real was happening.”

Sheppard went on to complete a four-day protocol after years of therapy, medication and adaptive strategies. The change, he said, was immediate and tangible.

“Before, when my kids pushed my buttons, my response was rage,” Sheppard said. “Four days later, I actually stopped and thought, should I yell or should I teach. That pause did not exist before. I had done years of work and never got that pause.”

He deliberately waited weeks before repeating the experience to see if the effect would fade. It did not. When stress builds now, Sheppard uses the system as needed rather than as a constant intervention.

“It reset my brain,” he said. “That is not marketing language. That is what it felt like.”

Similar experiences have emerged outside the veteran community, particularly among first responders who face repeated trauma over long careers.

Scott Stemmer, a Marine Corps veteran who served during Operation Iraqi Freedom and now works as a firefighter paramedic with Las Vegas Fire and Rescue, joined a Neurova Labs study earlier this year. Stemmer has dealt with PTSD for nearly two decades and previously sought help through the Department of Veterans Affairs, where he said treatment often meant heavy medication and little follow-up.

“I basically gave up hope that anything would actually work,” Stemmer said. “Sleep was terrible. Nightmares were constant. Irritability was through the roof.”

After four consecutive days using the VR system, Stemmer noticed changes he had not experienced since before military service.

“For the first time, when my head hit the pillow, I went to sleep,” he said. “My wife noticed before I did. No twitching. No yelling. And when I got called out at work in the middle of the night, I could come back and actually fall asleep again.”

When life interrupted his routine and he stopped using the headset for several weeks, the symptoms returned. Restarting the sessions brought relief again, reinforcing for him that the change was not a coincidence.

“This is the first PTSD related treatment I have ever done that felt tangible,” Stemmer said. “You can see it in how you feel, how you act, and even in clinical markers. That matters to people like us who have been burned before.”

Borrowman emphasizes that Neurova Labs is not positioned as a cure or replacement for therapy. Instead, he views it as a way to make other forms of care more effective by restoring basic neurological function.

“If the brain is stuck in survival mode, you cannot think your way out of it,” he said. “You would never send someone with a broken leg straight to physical therapy and expect them to run. You fix the injury first.”

The company has tested its technology with veterans, first responders, athletes, international partners and even with soldiers on the front line in Ukraine. Neurova Labs is also expanding into non-combat applications through partnerships with organizations like the YMCA and professional sports groups, including the UFC.

Privacy concerns, particularly among veterans wary of data misuse, are addressed by a deliberate design choice. According to Borrowman, the system does not collect personally identifiable information during normal use and can operate entirely offline, reducing the risk of data exposure.

For users like Sheppard and Stemmer, the appeal is not the technology itself but what it gives back.

“I can finally think,” Sheppard said. “Not just react.”

Stemmer echoed that sentiment, especially when talking about younger service members and firefighters he mentors.

“This gives people a chance to slow down before they hit the breaking point,” he said. “That matters.”

For veterans and first responders who have grown skeptical of new treatments after years of false starts, Neurova Labs does not promise miracles. What it offers, according to those who have used it, is something far rarer. A moment of quiet in a brain that has been stuck on high alert for years, and a chance to rebuild from there.

Neurova Labs is preparing for broader commercial availability while continuing research and pilot programs. More information about the company and its approach is available at https://neurovalabs.com.

He landed on the beaches of Normandy and battled through the bitter European winter in the Hürtgen forest and yet, on Aug. 23, 1945, when President Harry S. Truman placed the Medal of Honor around the neck of U.S. Army, Staff Sgt. Marcario García, he was not yet a U.S. citizen.

Born on Jan. 2, 1920 in Villa de Castaño, Mexico, Marcario was one of 10 children born to Luciano and Josefa García. The family earned a living picking crops in Texas and in 1923 it moved to Sugar Land, mostly working at the Paul Schumann Ranch. On Nov. 11, 1942, however, Marcario walked to a recruiting station in his adopted hometown and enlisted in the U.S. Army. Although not a citizen, he already felt a personal obligation toward his adopted home.

After training, García was sent to Britain with Company B, 1st Battalion, 22nd Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. In June 1944, just a few days after landing at Utah Beach, he was seriously wounded and spent four months in hospital.

Returning to his unit that fall, García, although still a private, was serving as an acting squad leader. On Nov. 27, his unit was advancing on Grosshau, a town in the Hürtgen Forest, where the German forces were literally fighting with their backs to the wall.

As B Company advanced, it came under machine gun, artillery and mortar fire. Taking the initiative, García crawled forward through meager cover to reach an enemy machine gun emplacement, threw grenades into it and, when the crew tried to flee, killed three with his rifle.

Although wounded in the shoulder and the foot, García eschewed retiring to a medical facility, instead crawling on along until he located another machine gun position. Again, he threw some grenades into the emplacement and shot three more crewmen dead, also taking four prisoners. He then held his position until his squad had advanced and secured the ground he’d taken.

García’s performance didn’t go unnoticed in the 4th Division. By the end of the war, he was a staff sergeant and received the Purple Heart, Bronze Star and Combat Infantryman’s Badge.

On Aug. 27, he was one of 27 servicemen called to the White House to receive the Medal of Honor from President Truman. Still being a Mexican citizen, he was subsequently summoned to Mexico City to receive the Condecoración al Mérito Militar — Mexico’s award for exceptional military merit — on Jan. 8, 1946.

García’s fight, however, was far from over.

After his honorable discharge, in September 1945 García entered a restaurant in Richmond, south of Houston, and was denied service by the proprietor, who like a good many in the area, made a policy of: “We Serve White’s Only—No Spanish or Mexicans.”

At another time and place, García might have resigned himself to that commonly practiced degradation, but his wartime experience and the cause for which he’d fought had given him a new perspective on the matter. The ensuing argument came to blows, the police intervened and they promptly arrested García.

His case soon became a local cause celebre. The League of United Latin American Citizens and the Comitié Patriótico Mexicano financed his legal needs and he was represented in court by John J. Herrera and later, James V. Allred — the future governor of Texas. The trial was constantly postponed, however, and in 1946 the charges against García were dropped.

On June 25, 1947, García achieved American citizenship, the only Medal of Honor recipient to have received it as a Mexican citizen. Making the most of the opportunities now open to him, in 1951 he earned his high school diploma. After some difficulty finding a steady job — a common problem among returning World War II veterans in general — he found one as a counselor in the Veterans Administration, which he held for 25 years. In 1970, he and the family moved to Alief in southwest Houston, Texas.

On Christmas Eve in 1972, however, he was caught up in a car crash and died of his injuries. He was buried in the National Cemetery in Houston.

García’s struggles and achievements in war and peace earned him a posthumous places in Texan history. His burial was attended by an honor guard from Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. In 1981, the Houston City Council changed 69th Street to Macario García Drive. In 1983, Vice President George H.W. Bush dedicated the Macario García Army Reserve Center and in 1994 a Sugar Land middle school was named in his honor.

A U.S. soldier participating in a clinical trial at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center is testing a neural-enabled prosthetic arm designed to restore the sense of touch through nerve stimulation, the Maryland hospital recently announced.

The concept for the device originated with Drs. Ranu Jung and James Abbas of the University of Arkansas, who are conducting a study and contacted Walter Reed to participate as a second site.

“We created this prosthetic system to allow someone who uses a motorized prosthesis to feel what they are touching,” Abbas said in a release last month. “When someone has a standard motorized prosthesis, when the hand closes and touches something, they don’t feel it.”

The participant, described in the release as a soldier with an amputation below the elbow, typically uses a standard prosthetic with no sensation. After volunteering to test the sensory hand, the soldier described what changes when touch is returned.

“The new [prosthetic] gives me a ‘feeling sensation’ when I grab an object,” the soldier said. “I don’t need to look at an object when I pick it up, because I know it’s there. If I reach over to grab a pillow, the electrodes in the fingertips of the hand make it so that I have the sensation of holding something.”

Dr. Paul Pasquina, chief of the Department of Rehabilitation at Walter Reed, said troops’ experience with limb loss during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan helped sharpen the need for better upper-limb prosthetics.

Combat trauma produces a higher percentage of upper-limb loss and multiple limb loss compared with disease-based amputations, which more often affect the lower limbs, Pasquina said in an interview with Military Times.

That gap, Pasquina said, also helped drive the Defense Department’s investment. He described early engagement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, including visits with wounded service members to better understand the limits of existing prosthetics.

Those conversations helped spur what became a multidisciplinary effort that brought together engineers, neuroscientists and clinicians to push both robotics and the human-machine interface forward, Pasquina said.

One of the biggest remaining limitations, he said, is sensory feedback, as there’s no prostheses available that provides such feedback.

Without sensation, users must rely on constant visual attention.

“If you have to look at everything that you’re picking up, your concentration needs to be on that thing you’re picking up,” Pasquina said. “It distracts you from other activities.”

“We cannot underestimate the importance of touch,” he added, citing the example of holding a child’s hand and knowing it is secure — moments that become far more complicated without sensation.

The trial aims to address that gap through an implanted interface paired with an advanced prosthetic hand. To enable sensation, the participant underwent surgery in which electrodes were implanted in their upper-arm nerves.

On the prosthetic itself, sensors in the fingertips connect to a box embedded in the forearm, described as an implant-hand interface that communicates with an implanted neurostimulator. When the soldier grasps an object, the system sends neural signals intended to re-create the feeling of touch, the release said.

The participant has tested the arm for more than a year and said it feels closer to a natural limb than any prosthetic used before.

The work presents challenges on both the surgical and engineering sides, according to Pasquina.

“These are tiny, tiny, fine wires that need to be implanted,” he said, describing the difficulty of placing electrodes near nerves while keeping the interface stable over time.

After implantation, the system must be calibrated, a process that relies heavily on participant feedback as engineers adjust stimulation frequency, intensity and duration to produce usable sensation.

Michelle Nordstrom, a research occupational therapist in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, said sensation restored through stimulation is not identical to natural touch, but it provides critical information users otherwise lack.

The added feedback can significantly reduce the mental effort required to use a myoelectric prosthesis, Nordstrom told Military Times. She described clinical testing in which participants struggled with certain tasks when stimulation was turned off. Examples include picking up a penny or maintaining a grip on a zipper pull.

“Once we turn the stimulation on,” she said, “they’re able to pick up that penny. They’re able to grab a hold of that zipper and maintain it.”

Restored sensation can increase confidence in everyday situations, from holding a drink in public to walking a dog using a prosthetic hand, Abbas, one of the device’s developers, told Military Times. He also noted the potential benefit for people with bilateral limb loss, particularly those injured by blasts, who lack an intact limb to compensate for sensory gaps.

Three of the seven participants in the study are connected to the military community, according to Nordstrom. She said the Walter Reed participant remains active in the Army, and two additional participants are veterans.

Trial participants commit to major surgery and years of testing without guarantees of success. That sense of service often resonates strongly with service members, even after injury, Abbas said.

“There are uncertainties, and we are asking a lot of the participants,” he said.

The study remains ongoing and is expected to move into a larger clinical trial. The device is not commercially available.

One of the biggest hurdles for widespread access is the economics of commercialization for relatively small patient populations, Pasquina said.

Further, insurance limitations in civilian settings can further restrict access to advanced prosthetics, a contrast to military care systems, Nordstrom noted.

Even after those limitations, prosthetic use remains a personal choice, Nordstrom said.

“There’s nothing wrong with someone choosing not to use a prosthetic device.”

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump said Thursday that the U.S. launched a “powerful and deadly” strike against Islamic State forces in Nigeria, after spending weeks accusing the West African country’s government of failing to rein in the persecution of Christians.

In a Christmas evening post on his social media site, Trump did not provide details or mention the extent of the damage caused by the strikes. But U.S. Africa Command said on X that strikes had been conducted “at the request of Nigerian authorities in Soboto State” and had killed “multiple ISIS terrorists.”

“Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!” Trump wrote.

US advances discussions on troops, sanctions in Nigeria

A Defense Department official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss details not made public, said the U.S. worked with Nigeria to carry out the strikes, and that they’d been approved by that country’s government.

Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the cooperation included exchange of intelligence and strategic coordination in ways “consistent with international law, mutual respect for sovereignty and shared commitments to regional and global security.”

“Terrorist violence in any form, whether directed at Christians, Muslims or other communities, remains an affront to Nigeria’s values and to international peace and security,” the ministry said in a statement.

Nigeria’s government has previously said in response to Trump’s criticisms that people of many faiths, not just Christians, have suffered attacks at the hands of extremists groups.

Trump ordered the Pentagon last month to begin planning for potential military action in Nigeria to try and curb Christian persecution. The State Department recently announced it would restrict visas for Nigerians and their family members involved in mass killings and violence against Christians there.

And the U.S. recently designated Nigeria a “country of particular concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act.

“I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was,” Trump wrote Thursday night. He said that U.S. defense officials had “executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing” and added that “our Country will not allow Radical Islamic Terrorism to prosper.”

In its X post, the U.S. Africa Command wrote that “lethal strikes against ISIS demonstrate the strength of our military and our commitment to eliminating terrorist threats against Americans at home and abroad.”

Nigeria’s population of 220 million is split almost equally between Christians and Muslims. The country has long faced insecurity from various fronts including the Boko Haram extremist group, which seeks to establish its radical interpretation of Islamic law and has also targeted Muslims it deems not Muslim enough.

But attacks in Nigeria often have varying motives. There are religiously motivated ones targeting both Christians and Muslims, clashes between farmers and herders over dwindling resources, communal rivalries, secessionist groups and ethnic clashes.

The U.S. security footprint has diminished in Africa, where military partnerships have either been scaled down or canceled. U.S. forces likely would have to be drawn from other parts of the world for any larger-scale military intervention in Nigeria.

Trump has nonetheless kept up the pressure as Nigeria faced a series of attacks on schools and churches in violence that experts and residents say targets both Christians and Muslims.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted Thursday night on X: “The President was clear last month: the killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria (and elsewhere) must end.”

Hegseth said that U.S. military forces are “always ready, so ISIS found out tonight — on Christmas” and added, “More to come…Grateful for Nigerian government support & cooperation” before signing off, “Merry Christmas!”

Associated Press writer Konstantin Toropin contributed from Washington.

An independent government watchdog found major issues in the way the U.S. Navy conducts fire safety prevention and contractor oversight for ships during maintenance periods.

Staffing shortages and ineffective tools for ensuring contractors comply with fire safety standards are the biggest hurdles for future fire risk aboard Navy ships, the Government Accountability Office warned in a Dec. 17 report.

Without addressing these issues, the service “risks creating an environment where unaccounted-for risks can accumulate in a manner that creates hazardous situations,” the report stated.

Between May 2008 and July 2020, there were 15 major fire incidents aboard Navy ships, thirteen of which occurred on those undergoing maintenance.

One of the worst fires occurred July 12, 2020, aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard, when 11 of the amphibious assault ship’s 14 decks caught fire. As a result of the damage, the vessel was retired 17 years earlier than planned and the Defense Department incurred billions of dollars in damage.

After the Bonhomme Richard fire, the Navy implemented changes that helped protect the service from future fires aboard vessels during maintenance, according to the report.

The Navy rewrote its 8010 Manual that addresses fire prevention during ship maintenance. The manual, which includes training requirements for fire safety officers and information on fire protection systems, was updated to include reformed fire safety requirements.

The service also revised NAVSEA Standard Items, a set of requirements inserted into ship maintenance contracts that outline safety standards.

The Navy began establishing 11 Commander, Naval Surface Groups to lead emergency management efforts during safety incidents, an effort that was previously fractured across multiple Navy organizations. The groups will develop emergency response plans and help ship crews understand fire regulations, among other jobs.

Further, the service published a new Fire Safety Assessment Program policy that allows Naval Surface Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet and Naval Surface Force Atlantic officials to inspect ships undergoing maintenance without providing notice beforehand.

Despite the evident strides in remediation, however, the Navy failed to address some glaring problems, GAO found.

USS Bonhomme Richard failed on fire safety, documents show

As part of its audit, GAO met with officials at Navy maintenance centers around the U.S. and observed staffing at Navy offices tasked with enforcing fire safety standards during ship maintenance periods. It also analyzed documents the Navy had given contractors that outlined fire safety compliance.

The watchdog found that staffing shortages among organizations specifically tasked with enforcing fire safety meant that there were fewer individuals to assist with prevention and emergency management during fire incidents.

A lack of staff at key organizations, including regional maintenance centers, meant there weren’t as many people to work outside normal business hours.

This was problematic since 11 of the 15 fire events that occurred since 2008 happened outside normal business hours, GAO said.

But filling the vacant roles isn’t so simple.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a civilian workforce hiring freeze Feb. 28 and, as a result, DOD organizations tasked with fire prevention have experienced difficulty in hiring the number of staff they need, according to GAO.

The Navy requires fire safety officers for ship maintenance in fiscal 2026 and 2027, according to the report, but budget requests for those years don’t allot enough money to address the number of fire safety staff hires needed to ensure adequate safety during maintenance.

The Navy’s July 2021 Major Fires Review, which was conducted after the Bonhomme Richard fire, said that 11 of the 15 fire events it reviewed happened when there was reduced personnel during ship maintenance.

Because of a lack of civilian staff, the Navy has had to rely on Navy crews to address fire safety.

In addition to their full-time service duties, these crews have had to help ensure fire safety compliance.

The intervention of service members, however, doesn’t necessarily mean contractors will adequately comply.

A ship commanding officer told GAO that Navy crew members will inform contractors that they are not following fire safety standards, but that doesn’t mean contractors will listen.

Making sure they fix their mistakes requires fire safety officers from the regional maintenance centers, the GAO said, which there aren’t enough of because of staffing shortages.

The watchdog also found that the Navy’s enforcement tools for correcting contractors for their mistakes or noncompliance don’t yield the solutions needed.

The service can issue a corrective action request to a contractor, asking that they better comply with contractual requirements. And if enough requests are sent, the Navy can issue a letter of concern that points out specific instances of malfeasance and asks the contractor to respond with a plan of action to fix the issues.

But there are no monetary penalties for not complying with the request, which makes it difficult for the Navy to ensure contractors will correct their mistakes.

The Navy can also wield quality assurance surveillance plans, which set the ground rules for what specific aspects of the maintenance work can be assessed by the Navy to ensure everything is following contractual obligations.

But GAO found that the Navy doesn’t utilize these surveillance plans to assess fire safety compliance, a missed opportunity to shore up the service’s defense against fire incidents.

The Navy also currently pays contractors 99% of their owed payment during the maintenance period, and only withholds 1% of the payment until the work is completed.

This reduces the amount of recourse if a contractor doesn’t comply with standards outlined in the contract.

Lastly, ship contractors don’t face as much financial liability in the event of a fire as they potentially should, according to the report, because of a DOD clause that stipulates the government will cover the majority of the cost if damage occurs to Navy vessels during ship maintenance. This creates an environment of unequal risk sharing, GAO found.

To address the myriad issues, GAO recommended that Navy Secretary John Phelan create a mechanism to maximize resources for fire safety oversight. It also tasked the Navy’s Learning to Action Board, which helps implement corrective actions from reviews and investigations, with focusing more on contractor fire safety compliance.

The watchdog also directed the service to improve the corrective action request process, update the service’s quality assurance surveillance plan to include fire safety performance standards, examine changing the payment process for contractors and reassess the limitation of liability clause for contractors.