The six-month independent review, commissioned by Undersecretary of Defense Anthony Tata in December, was originally set to be performed by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a Washington, D.C.-area nonprofit that administers three research centers supported by federal funding. The effectiveness study, according to a Pentagon official, was set to kick off with the 10-year anniversary of Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s lifting of the ban on women in ground combat roles at the end of 2015.

This review, the official told Military Times on Monday, is “in line with standard [Department of War] practice for evaluating the effects of significant policy changes.”

But a reevaluation of study requirements has led to a reassignment of the work, the official said.

“The Department has since recognized the need to incorporate combat-relevant field tests, based on established tasks, conditions, and standards, into the independent review to produce the comprehensive data required for this effort,” the official said. “DoW has engaged the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to assume responsibility for the study from IDA, effective April 2026. JHU/APL, a University Affiliated Research Center, has the capability to examine existing personnel and operational data, as well as conduct the field tests, ensuring a unified effort that will further posture our warfighters to meet mission objectives.”

JHU/APL will now complete work over the next 12 months to inform what’s now being called the “Performance, Readiness, and Integrated Mission Effectiveness Assessment,” according to the Pentagon. The assessment will use established analytical techniques “to identify the dominant drivers of combat performance variance in ground combat units and provide evidence-based findings to inform force design, training, physical standards, and readiness decisions,” the official said.

A request for information to JHU/APL for more details on the study and data collection milestones did not receive an immediate response.

Pentagon officials emphasized the long tradition of conducting reviews of policy changes, citing specifically an internal assessment of the 2010 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal that was conducted in 2021, and reviews by the Pentagon-connected Rand Corporation of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 and the Blended Retirement System of 2015.

Historically, these analyses have been used to evaluate major changes and their impacts, but have not carried with them the possibility of reopening the matter for potential reversal. It’s not clear that the same considerations are in play here.

In a December memo first reported on by NPR, Tata described the review as gauging “the operational effectiveness of ground combat” elements and the impact of permitting women to enter the roles.

Leaders of the Army and Marine Corps were asked to provide the Institute for Defense Analyses with a broad slate of data ranging from training performance to command climate; and metrics showing individual service members’ readiness to deploy.

An email from Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson at the time also appeared to open the door to changes based on the review, saying the Pentagon “will not compromise standards to satisfy quotas or an ideological agenda — this is common sense.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed opposition to women serving in combat roles in his 2024 book “The War on Warriors,” saying they couldn’t meet the physical requirement and adding, “We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.”

His Senate confirmation hearing in 2025 softened the stance. He said then that women would continue to have access to ground combat roles, “given the standards remain high.”

In September, he announced that ground combat jobs would be reserved for those who meet “the highest male standard.”

The Pentagon official said the pending combat effectiveness review, now to be carried out by JHU/APL, showcased the military’s commitment to “continuous learning and improvement.”

“These types of studies enable the Department to maximize our efforts in support of peace through strength,” the Pentagon official said Monday. “The ‘Performance, Readiness, and Integrated Mission Effectiveness Assessment’ is expected to further this tradition, increasing the lethality and readiness of the force.”

Spc. Caleb Godbold and Sgt. Drew Schorsch finished first after completing a host of physical, technical and cognitive tasks at Fort Benning, Georgia, over the last week.

Ranger school is widely viewed as the Army’s premier leadership and small unit tactics course. The monthslong course has a high failure rate and its graduates earn a coveted Ranger tab — worn on the left shoulder sleeve of Army uniforms — that shows the soldier completed the school.

The competition, known formally as The Lt. Gen. David E. Grange Jr. Best Ranger Competition, pits two-man teams of Ranger graduates against each other.

On Sunday, the Army published the final standings for the 61 teams, with 75th Ranger Regiment taking the top three spots.

Godbold and Schorsch faced a gauntlet of events including marksmanship, land navigation and medical tasks while under sleep deprivation and fatigue.

First conceived in 1981 as a “Ranger Olympics,” the Best Ranger Competition began in 1982 at Fort Benning. Initially limited to members of the Ranger community, the competition later expanded to include Ranger-qualified soldiers from across the force.

In 2025, the competition welcomed its first female competitor, 1st Lt. Gabrielle White, who placed 14th with her teammate, Capt. Seth Deltenre.

Female soldiers were not allowed to attend Ranger school until 2015, when the schoolhouse opened to all soldiers, regardless of gender.

Staff Sgt. Tyler Johnson and Sgt. Spencer Harrell took first place at the annual competition, which was last week at Fort Benning, Georgia, becoming only the second Marine Corps team to win the event and the first since 2009.

In a lighthearted nod to the long-running joke about Marines and crayons, the winners posed with a Crayola 24-pack on the trophy, drawing delighted reactions on social media.

Two-man sniper teams from across the United States and partner nations were eligible to participate in the multiday competition, which tests long-range marksmanship, target detection, reconnaissance and reporting, and movement under stealth and concealment, according to the Army.

The experience also serves as a forum for service members to exchange tactics and best practices.

The International Sniper Competition was hosted from April 7-10 as part of the Army’s Infantry Week.

The competition in Georgia differs from the U.S. Army Special Operations Command International Sniper Competition, which was held in North Carolina in March.

In the link between distance and ease of aggression, there’s a direct relationship between empathy, physical proximity of the victim and the resultant difficulty and trauma of the kill, according to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his 1995 study “On Killing.”

For Vietnam veteran Eugene “Gene” Marion Simmers, a close proximity to death and the actions he wrought haunted him for more than fifty years.

Simmers was drafted soon after he graduated from Granville High School in Ohio in 1966. Serving as a combat medic with Company A, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, Simmers received a Silver Star for heroism after his unit found itself trapped as it approached a booby-trapped bridge over a rice paddy near Mo Duc, Vietnam.

“Upon hearing the explosion,” according to his Army citation, “Specialist Simmers rushed to the front of the company and came under intense sniper fire from scattered positions in the area. After taking momentary cover, he maneuvered through the hostile fire and administered first aid to those wounded in the explosion.

“Despite enemy fire impacting all around him, he moved throughout the area to aid his fellow soldiers. His courageous actions were directly responsible for saving the lives of his comrades.”

When asked about his memory of the incident in 2014 by a local news outlet, the Newark Advocate, Simmers recalled, “I just knew I had seven guys hit, and I had to do whatever I could to keep them alive.”

“War’s a bitch,” Simmers went on. “I was just doing my job, and they gave me a medal for it.”

However, up until his death on Nov. 28, 2022, it was not the lives of those men he saved that stayed with him, but that of an elderly Vietnamese woman he had killed during the war.

While the circumstances surrounding the woman’s death remain unclear, what is evident is the weight of her death on Simmers’ psyche.

The simple etching on his gravestone is short — but poignant. The burden of decades-long grief and trauma:

In memory of the elderly woman I killed in Vietnam.

Forgive me. I’m so sorry.

Gene Simmers

Trump also said in a post on Truth Social that the U.S. would interdict every vessel in international waters that had paid a toll to Iran, and begin destroying mines that he said the Iranians had dropped in the strait, a choke point for about 20% of global energy supplies that Iran has blocked.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.

“I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas,” Trump added.

“Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!” he added.

Each side had earlier blamed the other for the failure of talks to end six weeks of fighting that has killed thousands, roiled the global economy and sent oil prices soaring.

“The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement, and I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America,” Vice President JD Vance, the head of the U.S. delegation at the weekend talks, said earlier.

“We’ve made very clear what our red lines are,” Vance added.

IRAN CITES LACK OF TRUST

Iran’s Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who led his country’s delegation along with Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, blamed the U.S. for not winning Tehran’s trust despite his team offering “forward-looking initiatives.”

“The U.S. has understood Iran’s logic and principles and it’s time for them to decide whether they can earn our trust or not,” Qalibaf said on X.

The talks, after a ceasefire earlier in the week, were the first direct U.S.-Iranian meeting in more than a decade and the highest-level discussions since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Vance said Iran had chosen not to accept American terms, including not to build nuclear weapons.

“I could go into great detail, and talk about much that has been gotten but, there is only one thing that matters — IRAN IS UNWILLING TO GIVE UP ITS NUCLEAR AMBITIONS!” Trump said later.

Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said “excessive” U.S. demands had hindered reaching a deal. Other Iranian media said there was agreement on a number of issues, but the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear program were the main points of difference.

‘IMPERATIVE’ TO MAINTAIN CEASEFIRE

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said it was “imperative” to preserve the ceasefire that was agreed last Tuesday as the sides attempt to wind down a war that began on February 28 with air strikes by the U.S. and Israel on Iran.

Israeli security cabinet minister Zeev Elkin told Army Radio that more talks were still an option, but added: “The Iranians are playing with fire.”

In a brief press conference, Vance did not mention reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Even as the talks took place, U.S. ally Israel continued bombing Tehran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, insisting that that conflict was not part of the Iran-U.S. ceasefire. Iran says the fighting in Lebanon must stop.

The Israeli military said it struck Hezbollah rocket launchers overnight into Sunday and black smoke could be seen rising in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital Beirut on Sunday. In Israeli villages near the border, air raid sirens sounded, warning of incoming rocket fire from Lebanon.

IRANIAN DEMANDS

Tehran is demanding control of the Strait of Hormuz, payment of war reparations and a ceasefire across the region, including in Lebanon, according to Iranian state TV and officials, as well as the release of its frozen assets abroad.

Tehran also wants to collect transit fees in the Strait of Hormuz.

Despite the differences in Islamabad, three supertankers fully laden with oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, shipping data showed, in what appeared to be the first vessels to exit the Gulf since the ceasefire deal.

Hundreds of tankers are still stuck in the Gulf, waiting to exit during the two-week ceasefire period.

Trump’s stated goals have shifted, but as a minimum he wants free passage for global shipping through the strait and the crippling of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program to ensure it cannot produce an atomic bomb.

Tehran has long denied seeking to build a nuclear weapon.

“We’re now starting the process of clearing out the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, adding that “all 28” of Iran’s “mine dropper boats are also lying at the bottom of the sea.”

Minutes before Trump’s post, reports started to emerge about the presence of U.S. Navy ships in the strait.

An Axios journalist, citing an unnamed U.S. official, posted that “several” U.S. ships had crossed the strait on Saturday, though Iranian state TV soon after reported a denial from an official with Iran’s military.

Trump has repeatedly said that American forces have destroyed Iran’s navy and air force while crippling its ballistic missile and nuclear programs.

But fear of Iranian attacks on shipping over the past several weeks has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a critical conduit for global oil supplies. Throttling the strait has disrupted global energy markets.

U.S. gasoline prices have spiked even though most of the oil that flows through the waterway does not go to the United States.

Representatives from the U.S. and Iran began talks hosted by Pakistan in Islamabad on Saturday amid a fragile ceasefire in the conflict.

Marvin Glen Shields was born in Port Townsend, Washington, on Dec. 30, 1939. After high school his family moved in 1958 to Hyder, Alaska, where he worked in a gold mining project for the Mineral Basin Mining Company.

On Jan. 8, 1962, he enlisted in the Navy, choosing the multi-training of a construction battalion member, or Seabee. After training at Naval Air Station Glynco, Georgia, and Port Hueneme, California, he graduated as a naval construction mechanic in May 1963, and served his first assignment at Okinawa from Nov. 18 to Sept. 1964.

On Nov. 1, 1964, Construction Mechanic 3rd Class Shields swerved into harm’s way when he was assigned to Seabee Team 1104 of Naval Construction Battalion 11.

After final training, on Jan. 22, 1965, he and his nine-man unit transferred to Saigon, Vietnam, just 10 days later. From there, Team 1104 was transported 55 miles north to Dong Xoai, where it joined the 11 members of Army Special Forces Team, A-342, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces, in constructing a fortified Special Forces camp.

Further reinforcing the area were 200 local anti-communist Montagnards and 200 soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).

The area was also crawling with enemy troops, ranging from local guerrillas to full-fledged infantry units trained and organized in North Vietnam before returning south. The latter included the reinforced 272nd Regiment, about 2,000 strong, which on the night of June 9, 1965, set out to eliminate the compound at Dong Xoai.

Soon, every defender at Dong Xoai was fighting for his life.

As described in his citation, that included Shields, who was wounded early in the fighting as was the commander of Team 1104. In spite of that: “Shields continued to resupply his fellow Americans who needed ammunition and to return the enemy fire for a period of approximately three hours, at which time the Viet Cong launched a massive attack at close-range with flame throwers, hand grenades and small-arms fire.”

Though wounded a second time during this attack, Shields assisted in carrying a more critically wounded man to safety, then rejoined the fighting for another four hours.

Then a call came up from 2nd Lt. Charles Quincy Williams who, with the wounding of his commander, had taken charge of the Special Forces troops. He needed a volunteer to join him in a sally to eliminate a well-placed Viet Cong machine gunner whose accuracy was endangering the lives of all personnel in the compound.

Without hesitation, Shields volunteered for this hazardous mission. Proceeding toward their objective with a 3.5-inch rocket launcher, Williams and Shields closed to approximately 500 feet and Williams succeeded in destroying the machine gun emplacement.

As the Green Beret and the Seabee made their way back to their defensive positions, however, Shields was hit a third time and Williams twice more.

After a grueling 14-hour siege, Dong Xoai’s defenders were finally evacuated. In the process, Williams eventually recovered from his injuries. Shields was not so fortunate, dying before he reached Saigon. On June 19, he was buried in the presence of a Marine honor guard in Gardiner Cemetery, Washington.

Although the 272nd Regiment finally overran Dong Xoai, the VC knew enough not to hold it long against an enemy with complete air superiority. As far as casualties went, postwar statistics testify to the overnight siege’s butcher bill.

The Americans claimed to have killed 300 VC and captured 104 weapons, while Vietnamese records claimed the loss of 134 men killed and 290 wounded. On the South Vietnamese side, 416 of the ARVN and Montagnards stationed in and around the compound were killed and 176 wounded and 233 missing.

Of the Americans, nine Special Forces troops were killed and of the Seabees, besides Shields, Petty Officer 2nd Class William C. Hoover was killed in the VC’s opening mortar attack. All seven surviving Seabees were wounded.

On Sept. 13, 1966, Shields’ family traveled to the White House, where President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him a posthumous Medal of Honor. Later, on June 5, 1966, Charles Q. Williams was alive to receive his Medal of Honor. Shields’ name was later christened to the guided missile frigate USS Marvin Shields (FF-1066), as was Camp Marvin Shields Construction Battalion Support Base in Okinawa.

The Army Data Operations Center’s April 3 debut is part of an enormous push to further integrate data and machine learning into military operations, according to a Pentagon release.

The armed forces have used data from military, intelligence and business sources for the past several years.

Historically, that has been a somewhat cumbersome process, as different datasets are often separated from one another, necessitating different security clearances, or housed on different systems. The ADOC is meant to mitigate those issues, functioning as a kind of information hub.

“We don’t have a data problem. We have a data management problem, and data becomes the ammunition that we need to provide to our senior leaders in order for them to make quick and informed decisions and gain decision dominance,” Lt. Gen. Jeth Rey, deputy chief of staff for the Army G-6, said in the release.

The office will be housed under Army Cyber Command, the release states. It is scheduled to run as a pilot for six months, with the Pentagon potentially adopting it as a model, DefenseScoop reported.

OTHER INITIATIVES

The establishment of the ADOC, meanwhile, is just one step in a series of separate initiatives undertaken by the service in recent years to embrace AI’s role in the battlefields of tomorrow.

Experts say broadening the technology’s application is long overdue.

“Most of the AI development had all been toward enemy-centric targeting, looking for and refining that enemy target and helping us basically build out target sets and hit more faster, essentially target more faster in one way or another,” Wes Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force joint terminal attack controller and Pentagon whistleblower, told Military Times.

“But you didn’t really have much of anything related to the civilian environment,” Bryant continued. “That was one thing we were working on at the [Pentagon’s Civilian Protection] Center of Excellence — looking at ideas for AI integration in civilian environment mapping, in updating no strike lists in given areas.”

Jon Lindsay, associate professor at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said that AI is best suited to more mundane organizational tasks, such as “planning, intelligence, logistics administration.”

The Department of Defense has also put out contracting opportunities for commercial data centers on four U.S. military bases.

Two bases, Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and Fort Bliss, Texas, have entered into agreements already, according to a March 2026 release.

Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, are also listed as potential sites for the data centers, which provide the computing power and hardware for AI models and cloud services.

Under the agreements, the data centers would be operated by civilian firms but would provide computing power for the military’s use, according to Task & Purpose.

Those data centers are part of a government-wide effort to pursue “a golden age for American manufacturing and technological dominance,” per a July 2025 executive order.

The effort to achieve artificial general intelligence is a “race that has a very short-term horizon,” Ismael Arciniegas Rueda, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, told Military Times.

Housing the data centers on Army bases could provide an extra level of security for the centers, which are vulnerable to cyber and kinetic attacks.

But they also present potential downsides to the communities where they are built, like tremendous energy consumption.

That, combined with an aging power grid, is likely to drive up energy costs in the surrounding areas.

Just a little over a decade after World War I ended, Erich Maria Remarque’s readers found themselves behind the German front lines, empathizing with German soldiers who had once been mortal enemies to the Americans, British and the French.

Like the outcropping of surrealism after WWI, “All Quiet on the Western Front” opened up a new genre of books for veterans to process what they had gone through.

“The novel attracted global audiences in its own time — and continues to do so nearly a century later — because it lays bare features identifiable in virtually any war: deprivation, terror, trauma, kinship, black humor, alienation from society, and (usually) some questioning of the cause,” Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., writes in the forward of the book’s most recent translation.

However, while it is one of the most famous books to come out of WWI — or any war for that matter — “All Quiet on the Western Front” — until recently — had only been translated twice from German to English. Once in 1929 by an Australian; the second translation, from 1993, is available only in the United Kingdom.

Arthur Wesley Wheen’s 1929 edition, despite its numerous mistranslations and stylistic flaws, is the dominant one today, having been the only one available in the U.S. for almost one hundred years.

Maria Tatar, the John L. Loeb professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures & Folklore and Mythology Emerita, saw a gap in the literature and painstakingly restored the novel with contemporary prose while remaining faithful to Remarque’s voice.

With “All Quiet on the Western Front” now in the public domain, she writes in her foreword, “we have the opportunity to try to convey its power in a new translation, and to introduce it to a new generation.”

“I think my real mission was to bring back the voice of [protagonist] Paul Bäumer. To let him speak,” Tatar told Military Times. “In a way, this is a talking book. I’d like to think of it as a book that speaks to us, that gives somebody who is muted by the war, really, a voice.”

“We get to process the violence of war through Paul,” Tatar continued. “And the interesting thing is that, of course, war is this world-shattering experience. Not just world shattering, but also word shattering. So there’s a strange paradox embedded in the book — we’re getting these sorts of unmediated thoughts of the soldier as he’s experiencing combat. I really did see my mission as trying to capture the register of Bäumer’s voice in English, which is, I have to say, not as easy as I thought it would be.”

Calling the translation a “labor of love” and a “struggle,” Tatar strove to bring back, or rather preserve, the Germanness of “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

“Translation means carrying over, carrying across,” said Tatar. “And I felt as I was translating that I was rowing across the River Styx, bringing back a dead man, giving him a voice and channeling Remarque as well.”

Wheen’s 1929 translation has become the definitive translation of Remarque’s work, but according to Tatar, Wheen himself “admitted that his German was not very good.”

“The manuscript was sent to me,” Wheen later reported, “as being one able to understand it, and on reading I found that I understood it less by reason of my knowledge of German, which I have but imperfectly, than by virtue of having made the experience recorded in it.”

In some instances, Wheen includes the word “mate” in his translation — something no German on the Western Front would conceivably call his fellow soldiers. In another, Remarque writes about a guy “getting lucky,” which translates into English literally as “he had a pig.” According to Tatar, Wheen subsequently took that to mean the soldier had pork for dinner.

While Brian Murdoch’s 1993 version comes closer to a true rendering of “All Quiet,” Tatar notes that there were “places where I felt uncomfortable, where the dialog is so difficult to capture in the right way, to get the right tone. And although Murdoch is successful in many ways that’s where I think he fell short, in not working hard enough to get the dialog close to something like a Hemingway style.”

Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” serves as a semiautobiographical account of the author’s war. Conscripted in the German Army in 1917 at the age of 18, Remarque was hit by shrapnel in the leg, arm and neck and sent to a hospital to convalesce before returning once again to the front. Remarque’s unvarnished account of the war is evident in “All Quiet.”

“It is written from the heart, not from the head,” Tatar noted.

“Tim O’Brien describes in ‘The Things They Carried’ the majesty of combat,” said Tatar. “I think he calls it the ‘aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference.’ But what I find in Remarque’s work is more of a grotesque aesthetic. It’s not the majesty of combat. You get this fragmentation, destructive violence, disintegration, dissolution. And yet, in the face of all of that, there’s a subtext that endorses affective engagement, emotional engagement, sympathetic identification, almost as if to compensate for the unspeakable, physical injuries of war. So in the midst of all of this violence, we’re seeing what Paul sees. We’re feeling what he feels. You feel his pain in an extraordinary way.

“As I was translating the novel, I was so often on the edge of tears,” Tatar continued. “And part of it is that Remarque is so skillful as a narrator, in drawing you into combat. First you get all these acoustical effects — the roar of cannon, the explosions. And then he gives you all these sensory, visual details. You’re really drawn into this explosive, terrifying scene of time.”

The novel has endured for almost a century because while the tools for killing have evolved, much of warfare remains the same. There are and will always be soldiers seeking solace in the camaraderie of their peers and “wondering what the hell it achieves to kill and be killed for causes defined by others,” Powers writes.

It also details the painful, deep disconnect of soldiers returning home from war.

“They’re people I don’t understand,” Paul reflects. “And I both envy and loathe them.”

Human nature almost ensures that there will be more generations who empathize with Paul, but Tatar hopes that her translation has “found the words for a story that we must keep reading to keep from repeating it.”

Attempting to achieve energy levels considered necessary to unleash the beast, John Witt, 29, instead discovered an actual rotting beast after finishing the drink, according to local CBS affiliate WTKR News.

Witt, who said he purchased a pack of the drinks from a 7-Eleven in Norfolk, Virginia, promptly vomited several times, “naturally,” he told WTKR, which shared video of the canned corpse.

“It’s a full-size rat,” he said, “and it’s a big rat.”

The sailor first brought the issue to the attention of his chain of command, one member of which responded, correctly, “Go the ER, bro.”

Witt then checked into Portsmouth Naval Hospital, where he said medical personnel informed him that it was more than likely, “with the chemicals that are in Monster, that it should be OK.”

Unleash the embalming fluid.

“My antibodies should be able to fight it off,” Witt said, adding that medical staff wanted to closely monitor the situation for the next 48 hours.

Witt, a longtime beast unleasher, told WTKR that he has no plans to ever consume another Monster — or even closed-can beverages, for that matter.

“I’m never going to be able to drink anything that I can’t see again,” the new open-container advocate told the outlet.

Witt intends to file a report with the Food and Drug Administration, according to WTKR.

Select reports, meanwhile, suggest Master Splinter, having gotten on in years, may have confused the Monster can for mutagen, the chemical colloquially known as “Ooze.”

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could not be reached for comment.

In the early aughts of the 1990s, the Pentagon was working on developing a whole host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would render an enemy force incapable of being anything other than ... amorous or annoyed.

Within a three-page declassified document came a blink-and-you-miss-it line positing using “Chemicals that effect human behavior so that morale and discipline in enemy units is adversely affected.”

“One distasteful but completely non-lethal example,” it continued, “would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

In a word, a chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to one another — striking a blow to morale.

The randy chemical, later dubbed “gay bomb,” was just one of the many that the Wright Laboratory explored in its proposal dubbed “Project Sunshine.”

Among others, Project Sunshine contained a litany of ideas ranging from the absurd to impractical, including: making a “chemical that made personnel very sensitive to sunlight”; making a weapon that would attract swarms of enraged wasps or rats to an enemy position; and the development of a chemical that caused “severe and lasting halitosis.”

The lab requested $7.5 millions dollars over a five-year period to make their hair-brained ideas reality. The funding was not forthcoming. It did, however, eventually make its way to the mind of Tina Fey and 30 Rock.

As the saying goes, there are no bad ideas — only great ideas that go horribly wrong — but perhaps the Wright Laboratory is an exception that that rule.

No decision has been made, and the White House has not directed the Pentagon to draw up concrete plans for a troop reduction on the continent, said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

But the discussions alone underscore how sharply relations between Washington and its European NATO allies have deteriorated in recent months. They also suggest that a visit to the White House on Wednesday by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte failed to significantly improve transatlantic relations, which are arguably at their lowest point since NATO’s 1949 founding.

The White House has publicly said that Trump has considered withdrawing from the alliance altogether. Removing troops from Europe would allow Trump to dramatically lessen Washington’s security commitments on the continent, without formally withdrawing, a move that would test constitutional law.

The U.S. currently has more than 80,000 troops in Europe and has played a central role in Europe’s security architecture since World War Two. More than 30,000 of those troops are located in Germany, with sizeable numbers also stationed in Italy, the United Kingdom and Spain.

The official did not say which countries could be affected or how many troops might ultimately be withdrawn if Trump decides to move forward with the idea.

Asked for comment, a NATO spokesperson referred Reuters to Rutte’s interview with CNN on Wednesday.

In that interview, Rutte said that he understood Trump’s frustrations with the alliance, but that the “large majority of European nations” had been helpful to Washington’s war effort in Iran.

Following Rutte’s meeting with Trump, the secretary general told European governments that Trump wants concrete commitments to help secure the Strait of Hormuz within days, Reuters reported earlier on Thursday.

Alliance in crisis

While Trump has long had a tumultuous relationship with NATO — for years accusing European capitals of skimping on defense spending — the last three months have been particularly rocky.

In January, Trump provoked a transatlantic crisis when he renewed longstanding threats to annex Greenland, an overseas territory of Denmark. Since the war with Iran broke out on Feb. 28, he has expressed deep frustration that NATO allies have not offered to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital route for global energy supplies that has remained largely closed despite a fragile ceasefire announced this week.

NATO diplomats have previously said the U.S. has not made clear if it expects any mission in the Strait of Hormuz to start during or after the conflict, and they have also said the U.S. has not specified what particular capabilities it expects of each NATO country.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that senior administration officials were discussing moving troops stationed in Europe out of countries whose leaders had been critical of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and into European countries whose leaders had been more supportive.

The White House official told Reuters that Trump was specifically discussing bringing troops back to the U.S., rather than moving them to different foreign countries.

The official said Trump was particularly irked about what he perceives as Europe’s attempts to brush off his attempts to acquire Greenland.

After meeting with Rutte in Switzerland in January, Trump had suggested a deal was in sight to end the dispute over the Danish territory. No such agreement has come to fruition.

“He asked NATO specifically to come up with a plan when we were in Davos, and they’re sort of not taking it seriously,” the official said.

On a serene Saturday afternoon, thousands of miles from conflict, soldiers with the California Air National Guard are scattered among stations, hunched over a buddy. Some apply tourniquets. Others practice life-saving skills, checking for breathing, tilting chins to clear airways, searching for blood loss and hidden wounds.

This is how they learn to keep a soldier alive.

“They’re getting ready to deploy,” said Dr. Dean Winslow, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and an instructor at the Tactical Combat Casualty Care classes.

“This is very real.”

Drone warfare requires new age of battlefield medicine

To help them prepare for what they may encounter in the war with Iran, an update was added to the standard curriculum. Its title: Modern Warfare Concepts, POV Unmanned Aircraft System Explosives. Its focus: the risk of air attack and the importance of high-quality burn care.

As the U.S. confronts a changed character of combat, the trauma training for the 50 airmen at Moffett Federal Airfield, about 35 miles south of San Francisco, is urgent and essential. But is it enough?

Several new trends are driving concerns that military medical care needs to adapt to drone warfare, a defining feature of 21st-century conflicts.

“With injuries, it’s a new world now,” Winslow told The War Horse.

Wars have been inflicting explosive wounds ever since China’s early Ming Dynasty used “fire-weapons,” including a cast-iron grade bomb with gunpowder, in the 14th century. Sky-borne casualties are nothing new — Nazi Germany inflicted V-1 flying bombs on London residents during World War II. Improvised explosive devices were responsible for a surge of explosive injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, causing 74.4% of casualties; only 19.9% of casualties were caused by gunshot wounds.

But an analysis of injuries in Ukraine shows that drone-delivered explosives are more destructive and lead to a wider range and higher severity of traumatic injury, according to research by a team led by the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. The drones Russia has been launching on Ukraine are similar to the weapons used by Iran.

Ukrainian soldiers are suffering from a far higher range and severity of devastating wounds than U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, researchers found. The high-energy explosives, deployed in swarms, have the potential to create large clusters of casualties in relatively short periods of time.

The signature wound of the Russian drones is limb amputation, followed by multiple-limb injuries and severe burns. Detonating at close range, a drone can inflict a complicated constellation of upper-body, neck and head injuries, according to a report by the aid group MedGlobal.

“Drone warfare has drastically changed the complexity of the traumatized patient that we see,” said Dr. Michael Samotowka, a volunteer trauma surgeon with MedGlobal who frequently travels to Ukraine to treat soldiers injured by Russian drones.

“It has drastically changed the volume of injuries that require surgical intervention,” he told The War Horse. “It’s changed our whole mentality.”

Mounting medical challenges

Drones also mean that we can no longer rely on an old axiom of combat: Distance from the front is protective, and the place for life-saving care. Small and cheap, drones can fly for miles, linger in the air for hours and descend in swarms, evading air defenses.

If the skies aren’t safe to evacuate injured soldiers, prolonged casualty care will become the collective effort by close combat forces at the brigade-and-below levels, according to research led by Army trauma surgeon Col. Jennifer Gurney, chief of the Joint Trauma System at the Department of Defense’s Center of Excellence for Trauma.

The new threat also comes at a precarious time: The U.S. Department of Defense has downsized its hospitals, so military physicians aren’t getting enough experience with trauma patients to be ready for major casualties.

“Because Army and Navy medical personnel are not consistently assigned where they can sustain their wartime readiness skills, they may not provide high-quality, point-of-injury care to service members during deployments,” concluded a 2025 Department of Defense Inspector General report.

Iran most commonly uses a drone called the Shahed 136, according to the munitions tracking project Open Source Munitions Portal. Preprogrammed to fly up to 1,200 miles and carry warheads guided by a satellite navigation system, it can target embassies, hotels and other places where American troops are dispersed.

Shortly after the U.S. and Israel launched their surprise air assault to start the war, an Iranian drone strike on March 1 triggered an explosion in Kuwait at a U.S supply and logistics unit that killed six U.S. service members, injured about 30 others and set off a fire and frantic search for survivors in the rubble.

The unit had relocated to the civilian Port of Shuaiba from U.S. Army base Camp Arifjan in an effort to evade incoming strikes from Tehran. “They were dispersing because they were in fear that the base they were on was going to get attacked, and they felt it was safer in smaller groups in separated places,” Joey Amor — the husband of Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, who died in the attack — told The Associated Press.

It wasn’t the only drone attack to injure U.S. forces. About 29 drones and six ballistic missiles were blamed for a March 27 assault at Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan air base that injured at least 15 U.S. troops, including five seriously, according to The Associated Press.

That was one of the most significant breaches of U.S. air defenses since the conflict started. With President Trump threatening a major escalation of attacks, Iran and the U.S. on Tuesday agreed to a two-week ceasefire. As of March 31, at least 348 U.S. military personnel had been wounded, reported U.S. Central Command’s spokesperson Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, but reports are surfacing about whether this is an undercount.

Iraq and Afghanistan vs. Ukraine

Military combat care evolved to meet the needs of the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters. But this support — an agile and efficient network that quickly stabilized, treated and evacuated wounded service members — was based on relatively light patient loads in places where U.S. forces could safely evacuate injured service members to higher echelons of care.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, wounded soldiers and Marines could be evacuated from the field to an operating room within an hour, said Dan Elinoff, a combat medic in Iraq and Afghanistan and a former senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation. That helped reduce the case fatality rate from 36% in Vietnam to 10% in Iraq and Afghanistan — a saving of an estimated 1,000 lives.

But when drones are overhead, evacuation can be delayed. Surgical treatment within “the golden hour” — the critical 60-minute window when most lives are saved or lost — will become a goal, not an expectation.

“The main issue that I can see for drone warfare, compared to IEDs, is a real compromise of ‘the golden hour,’” Elinoff told The War Horse. In previous wars, “your main threat was on the front line. The rear area is a lot more secure. You can get people back there, and you can probably keep them a lot safer.

“With the abundance of drones, it’s much easier to hit those rear areas,” said Elinoff. “Your evacuation routes are a lot more compromised.”

In Ukraine, drone warfare has demanded a dramatic shift toward a more decentralized model of care, bringing more advanced care closer to hard-to-reach people on the front lines.

This decentralized model echoes patterns of treatment created in Syria and Yemen, where air bombardment and targeting of health sites forced medical care to move underground, onto mobile platforms or across dispersed community sites, according to the MedGlobal report.

Anticipating that it may take two to three days to evacuate an injured soldier in future conflicts, Fort Benning launched in 2022 a pilot Delayed Evacuation Casualty Management Course to train medics how to provide advanced care on the front lines.

The type of injuries may shift. In Iraq and Afghanistan between 50% and 60% of deaths and injuries were caused by roadside improvised explosive devices, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Manpower Data Center. Because these devices often exploded under vehicles, the lower torso and abdomen were common sites of wounds, particularly by blasts that forced damage upward.

Drones, by contrast, cause significant damage both on the ground and overhead. Data from Ukraine shows that they frequently attack from above, targeting the top of buildings, tanks and trucks. Or they explode in the air, showering metal fragments. Some precision-guided drones enter buildings. As a result, the most frequent injuries in Ukrainian soldiers occur in the head and neck, followed by lower extremities, upper extremities and chest and upper back.

Drone injuries also are typically more complex. One study found that nearly half of Ukrainian casualties involved “multisite trauma,” involving more than two regions of the body from blasts, high-temperature burns from thermobaric and incendiary munitions and traumatic brain injuries. About one in five had injuries in three or more body regions.

A drone “either showers down at a high energy, in small fragments, head down to toes, or it drops in front of the soldier and it blows up,” said Samotowka.

“If there’s 100 drones flying around you, looking for you, you can’t be evacuated.”

Too few trauma experts, too little practice

In future U.S. conflicts, even if evacuation is successful, there is an insufficient supply of highly skilled military surgeons and other experts to meet the demand.

That’s because after every war, the military loses resources and expertise, said Rear Adm. Dr. David Lane, a former commanding officer of Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune and former director of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

“Budget wonks in both Republican and Democratic administrations always look for a so-called peace dividend whenever we scale back from major combat operations,” he told The War Horse.

“During peacetime, there is a ying and a yang between the efficiency needed to run military hospitals and clinics on par with the best of the best civilian health care organizations,” he said. “Staying ready for combat trauma and diseases and nonbattle injuries requires time away [from military treatment facilities], disrupts continuity, and adds to the cost of care.”

In recent years, the Army Medical Corps’ rate of recruitment has not been able to keep up with the pace of separations, according to a RAND Corporation report. And retention is down. So positions at military treatment facilities and other units go empty.

At military hospitals, there is less exposure to complex trauma, said Elinoff. On bases, “people are pretty young and healthy. … It’s really hard to keep those skill sets up when you’re not seeing a lot.”

Opportunities for hands-on work are limited. The Army and Navy do not effectively assign medical personnel to locations where they could maintain their required wartime medical readiness skills, the Department of Defense Inspector General found.

It’s too hard and time-consuming to get military health care providers credentialed and integrated into community settings, Elinoff said. While several of the nation’s top trauma hospitals — including the University of Maryland and the University of Cincinnati — have partnered with the military to share their trauma cases, the rotations at trauma centers tend to be too brief.

Even at a busy civilian hospital, there are relatively few trauma patients. That’s because seat belts, air bags, smoke alarms and flame-retardant children’s sleepwear have reduced the number of severe injuries that require complex life-saving surgery. Gunshot injuries are increasing, but they typically involve one part of the body, not general trauma, said doctors.

And trauma patients are increasingly unlikely to be rushed to the operating table. Due to high-tech innovations in interventional radiology, for example, damaged blood vessels can be sealed to stop internal bleeding.

Many young surgeons may graduate after operating on only one or two liver injuries, said Samotowka.

Practice is essential in medicine, said Stefani Diedrich, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who served as an anesthesiologist for 24 years with deployments to Afghanistan and Niger.

“Any procedural skill needs to be practiced regularly or else it is lost,” she said. “Doing knee arthroscopy does not prepare you for a traumatic amputation. Doing a robotic hernia repair does not prepare you for an exploratory laparotomy for trauma.”

“You can’t ‘refresh’ trauma surgery skills. … You need to do it on a regular basis to not suck,” she said.

Stanford’s Winslow agreed. As the White House considers its next steps in the ongoing tensions with Iran, with thousands of additional U.S. troops heading to the Middle East theater, the challenge is no longer theoretical. There are now 50,000 American troops in the Middle East.

If there is a huge operation, Winslow said, “there’s no way that the active duty surgeons, or at least the majority of them, will have the recency of experience with handling major trauma.”

This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

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

The Army on April 7 preferred more charges against Maj. Blaine McGraw, an obstetrician-gynocologist assigned to the Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, according to a Wednesday statement from the Army Office of Special Trial Counsel. He is now facing six charges and 146 specifications related to sexual misconduct that the Army alleges occurred between October 2023 and December 2025.

McGraw remains innocent until proven guilty, the office said.

The charges include dozens of specifications of sexual assault and abuse, as well as allegations of indecent recording, conduct unbecoming of an officer and disobeying a superior officer. All but one of the alleged victims were patients treated during medical examinations at the Fort Hood facility. The other victim was allegedly recorded without consent at an off-post residence.

The new charges build upon an earlier case filed in December 2025. McGraw waived a preliminary hearing on the original charges, but now that more charges have been added, a new hearing will be required before the case can proceed to a general court-martial.

“As this case remains an open investigation, OSTC prosecutors will continue to coordinate with the Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division as the case progresses to determine if additional charges are warranted,” Michelle McCaskill, the communications director for the Office of Special Trial Counsel, said in a statement.

The investigation began in October 2025 after a patient reported being secretly recorded during an exam. MacGraw was previously stationed at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii before being assigned to Fort Hood. Tripler said in November 2025 that it was planning to notify the doctor’s former patients about the investigation.

McGraw is also accused of sexual misconduct, including the secret filming of a breast and pelvic exam in a lawsuit filed last November in Bell County, Texas.

Some aviators are hopeful about the change.

Bell and M1 Support Services this week announced advancement in the Army’s Flight School Next program, an initiative that would shift key parts of rotary-wing pilot training — including aircraft maintenance and both academic and flight instruction — to a contractor-owned, contractor-operated schoolhouse. The change would also include a new training aircraft.

Under the plan, contractors would provide a full training curriculum to produce 900 to 1,500 pilots annually, replacing the Army’s current initial entry rotary-wing training program. The change would mark the first time the Army has relied on a commercial system to train new aviators.

Congress has placed restrictions on the effort, requiring the Army to justify the new training model and demonstrate its effectiveness before funds can be used to move forward, according to provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2026.

The Army has not publicly said how many companies remain in the competition.

The contractors have centered their plans on different training aircraft; Bell has proposed training on its Bell 505 helicopter, while the M1 bid would use Robinson Helicopters’ R66.

The Army currently trains rotary-wing pilots on the UH-72A Lakota helicopter, which some aviators say has advanced systems that are too forgiving and allow trainees to rely on technology while learning.

Kurt Rosell is a former signal soldier who left the service in 2016. He now works as a civilian helicopter flight instructor and has trained many military pilots as they transition to the civilian sector.

Rosell said he sees promise in possibility of a new training aircraft.

“For somebody that’s learning, you’ve got to have the foundation set before you add highly complex systems. With the R66 and the Bell — they are stripped trainers — you will get skills and a fuller understanding of the real discipline of flying before you rely on systems,” he said.

The Army’s overhaul comes as the military faces a broader rise in aviation accidents. Pentagon data released in 2025 showed a roughly 55% increase in severe accidents during the 2024 budget year compared to four years earlier.

Army aviation has faced safety challenges in recent years. In the first half of fiscal year 2023, over a dozen Army aviators died in helicopter crashes, prompting an aviation-wide stand down in April of that year. During the stand-down, the service discovered that its pilots were significantly less experienced than pilots were during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The issue has drawn sharper attention since a January 2025 midair collision between an Army Black Hawk and a passenger jet near Washington, D.C., killed 67 people. A federal investigation found that the crash was the result of “systemic failures” across multiple agencies, including the Army and Federal Aviation Administration.

Carrier landings no longer required for Navy pilots’ Wings of Gold

Some former Army aviators are optimistic about the new proposal and say contractors are already widely used within the schoolhouse.

Jason Welch, a former Army officer and Chinook pilot who finished flight school in 2017, said the new model might place more focus on civilian flight requirements.

“A civilian owned and operated company is going to conduct their initial training like civilians would receive,” Welch said, adding, “this would likely contain more attention to federal flight regulations and other details that are often overlooked or skimmed over since the Army tends to focus on training its pilots to be Army pilots.”

A federal grand jury today charged Courtney Williams, 40, of Wagram, North Carolina, on a charge of willful transmission of national defense information, a violation of the Espionage Act. She was arrested on Tuesday and the FBI Charlotte Field Office is investigating the case.

From 2010 to 2016, Williams worked as an operational support specialist assigned to a Special Military Unit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the statement said, and she had daily access to classified information.

Between 2022 and 2025, Williams is alleged to have repeatedly communicated with a journalist who identified themselves as such and said they were seeking information about the unit for an article and book. The journalist then published statements naming Williams as a source, attributing classified information to her statements.

Williams also shared national defense information on her social media accounts, the department said.

In messages between Williams and the journalist, Williams confided that she was “concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed.” In another message to a different person, Williams admitted that she could be arrested for her classified disclosures.

The journalist was not named by the department, but in 2025 a reporter named Seth Harp published an article and a book detailing sexism, racism and cultural issues in one of the Army’s most elite units.

In his reporting, Harp features the experience of a woman named Courtney Williams who worked for Delta Force at Fort Bragg beginning in 2010.

“This indictment should serve as a stark warning to all current and former clearance holders thinking of violating their positions of trust,” said Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, adding “if you jeopardize our national security by disclosing classified information without authorization, the FBI will hold you accountable for your crimes.”

If convicted, Williams could face time in prison.

Over the course of a week-plus in February, personnel with 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), assigned to U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, conducted Exercise Deep Strike at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany.

The exercise tested operator teams of eight or more personnel in areas of infiltration, drone operations and survival amid harsh winter conditions, according to a service release published Wednesday.

Tasked with traversing over 90 miles of simulated enemy territory, teams had to move, undetected, infiltrate beyond a simulated conventional enemy and launch a strike drone at a mock high-value target.

Throughout the exercise, teams relied solely on mission-specific gear, without weapons, and restricted movements to night to reduce chances of detection by radar or civilians.

“This is no simple walk in the woods,” a team sergeant said in the release.

The training, which concluded with team members being extracted by helicopters, reflects the rapidly evolving challenge of drone operations encountered by boots on the ground.

In places like Ukraine, some drones are equipped with thermal sensors, making concealment increasingly difficult.

Recently, the U.S. Marine Corps began testing new camouflage systems, including full-body overgarments, designed to mask heat signatures and reduce detection by both ground- and aerial-based sensors.

“This exercise is designed to prepare our forces for the realities of modern warfare,” a planner with 10th SFG (A) said. “It closely replicates real-world battlefield conditions, including the complex electronic warfare environment. It’s about pushing our teams to the limit and testing their ability to adapt to changing circumstances.”

Future versions of Deep Strike are expected to broaden the training and include special operations forces from NATO.

While celebrating a recent birthday, Rackley, an information technology specialist, and other team members assigned to Headquarters Battery, 1st Battalion, 178th Field Artillery, were distributing food to local individuals experiencing homelessness in the area.

During the assignment, a local bystander alerted the team that a male nearby was experiencing a medical emergency, noting the man was unresponsive.

Rackley arrived first on the scene and identified the situation as a drug overdose. He subsequently administered Narcan and performed CPR, ultimately resulting in the individual’s resuscitation.

Five days later, Rackley was patrolling the same area of the city when he responded to another overdose by the same individual. Once again he saved the person’s life.

Since arriving in the nation’s capital, Rackley has been an active participant in patrols throughout the area. He recently declined an offer from leadership to take time off after the incidents.

“I don’t like not being on the mission,” Rackley said. ”It makes me feel like I could be doing something more.”

National Guardsmen assigned to the Joint Task Force-District of Columbia have administered naloxone to more than 100 individuals experiencing drug-related emergencies since August 2025, according to a March release.

In response to an increase of drug-related overdoses in nation’s capital, JTF-DC integrated the administration of naloxone, commonly referred to by its brand name Narcan, into the required training criteria for patrol personnel.

“The D.C. Safe and Beautiful mission is fundamentally about safeguarding the community,” Lt. Austin Coomes, a medical operations officer with the South Carolina National Guard, said in a recent release. “Equipping our personnel with naloxone provides them with a crucial, life-saving capability to intervene effectively in overdose situations, thereby enhancing the safety and well-being of the District’s residents.”

Lillian Juarez contributed to this report.

In the 40 days since the start of Operation Epic Fury against Iran, 13 U.S. service members have been killed and 381 have been wounded, according to data provided Wednesday by U.S. Central Command.

The Defense Department has added the war on Iran to its Defense Casualty Analysis System, a database that catalogues combat casualties dating to World War I.

As of Tuesday, the department listed seven service members as having been killed by enemy fire during the operation, presumably the Army soldiers who died March 1 in Saudi Arabia during an Iranian airstrike.

It also classified six Air Force deaths as “non-hostile,” the crew of a KC-135 refueling aircraft who died while supporting air operations.

And it said that 346 were wounded in action: 231 soldiers, 63 sailors, 33 airmen and 19 Marines.

But U.S. Central Command told Military Times Wednesday that the number of wounded now stands at 381. They did not provide any details on the extent or types of injuries.

In mid-March, CBS News reported that roughly 25 troops were being treated at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, a dozen were evacuated to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and one had been transported to Brooke Army Medical Center, DOD’s only Level I trauma center and home to the department’s top burn unit.

The United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire late Tuesday. Under the terms, the U.S. agreed to stop military strikes while Iran said it would immediately open the Strait of Hormuz, the key body of water through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas ships.

Iran has offered a 10-point proposal for ending the conflict, which President Donald Trump described as a “workable basis on which to negotiate.”

Attacks continued in the early hours of the temporary truce in Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. During a press conference Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iran would be wise to “find a way to get the carrier pigeon” to their troops to stop shooting.

“We’ll be hanging around. We’re not going anywhere. We will make sure that Iran complies with the ceasefire and ultimately comes to the table and makes a deal. … Our troops are prepared to restart at a moment’s notice,” Hegseth said.

As of midday Wednesday, just a handful of cargo vessels had traversed the strait and several oil tankers were heading to the passage, according to apps that track the maritime shipping industry.

“We have seen an uptick in the traffic in the strait today and I will reiterate the president’s expectation and demand that the Strait of Hormuz is reopened immediately and quickly and safely,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press conference Wednesday.

The U.S. military has more than 50,000 personnel in the region. According to U.S. Central Command, they have supported more than 13,000 strikes on targets and destroyed at least 155 Iranian vessels.

Iran’s health ministry has reported that more than 2,000 people have been killed and 20,000 wounded since the operation began.

A CENTCOM official declined to discuss the number of troops evacuated from theater, saying that the unit will not discuss locations or movements “to protect privacy and security of our service members.”

According to the official, 344 of the injured personnel have returned to duty. The official declined to describe the nature of the injuries, including wounds or head injuries.

“We have no additional information to provide,” the official said.

Walter Reed issued a press release Wednesday detailing how its medical evacuation team supports the transport of injured personnel from the battlefield to the facility, but it included no details on the number of personnel that have been evacuated from Operation Epic Fury.

According to the release, Walter Reed supports a 14-member team of Army, Navy and Air Force personnel who coordinate transport across U.S. Transportation Command, U.S. European Command, the Deployed Warrior Medical Management Center at Landstuhl and Air Force aeromedical staging facilities.

During the press conference Wednesday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged the sacrifices U.S. military personnel have made during the operation.

“I’m humbled by the service and sacrifice each and every day that I am lucky enough to see,” Caine said. “I ask that we never forget our fallen and their families — especially the 13 fallen from Operation Epic Fury. May we always be worthy of their sacrifice and honor their legacy,” Caine said.

The Selective Service System, the federal agency that maintains a database of registered U.S. males who are considered draft-eligible in the event of a national emergency, submitted a proposed rule to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on March 30, according to the office’s dashboard.

Automatic registration into Selective Service was mandated in December 2025, when President Donald Trump signed into law the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, the agency’s website says.

“This statutory change transfers responsibility for registration from individual men to SSS through integration with federal data sources,” the website reads.

Putting the effort in motion by this December is a move to simplify the registration process and the equivalent “workforce realignment,” according to the website.

The proposed rule is currently under review by the regulatory affairs office, awaiting finalization, per the dashboard.

The SSS coordinated with Congress throughout the 2026 NDAA process, the agency’s website says. In May 2024, lawmakers worked to incorporate language about the automatic registration into the annual defense authorization bill, citing money and legal challenges. The SSS costs around $30 million a year.

“This will also allow us to rededicate resources — basically that means money — towards [readiness] and towards mobilization … rather than towards education and advertising campaigns driven to register people,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., who sponsored the language, said at the time.

Currently, almost all male U.S. citizens and immigrants aged 18 through 25 are required to self-register within 30 days of their 18th birthday, with late registration available until an individual turns 26.

Men who fail to register are considered to be in violation of the Military Selective Service Act and can face penalties, such as ineligibility for federal programs, a fine up to $250,000 or five years imprisonment.

Registration for the draft has dwindled in recent years, partly because the option to register was removed from federal student loan forms in 2022, which accounted for nearly a quarter of all previous registrations.

Meanwhile, after some attempts from lawmakers, women are still exempt from registration.

The SSS was established in 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson after the U.S. entered World War I. President Gerald Ford suspended the draft in 1975, but it was reinstated just five years later in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

The U.S. hasn’t activated the draft since 1973 during the Vietnam War and has relied on volunteers ever since.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, said Annie Yaritza Ramos Alvarado was arrested on April 2, with a DHS spokesperson saying “she has no legal status to be in this country.”

Ramos, 22, recently married Sgt. Matthew Blank, 23.

On April 2, the couple were joined by relatives at Fort Polk, Louisiana, who were there to help register Ramos as a military spouse and get her moved in, Blank’s mother, Jen Rickling, told ABC News. However, ICE agents entered the facility and detained her.

The DHS spokesperson said ICE arrested Ramos “after she attempted to enter a military base.” The spokesperson alleged Ramos was in the country illegally, having entered the nation in early 2005 when she was less than two years old.

Attorney Jessie Schreier was cited by ABC News as saying that Ramos, who was born in Honduras, was 20 months old when she was issued an order of removal. The attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

ICE has been at the heart of Trump’s immigration crackdown and deportation drive that has been widely condemned by rights groups as violating free speech and due process rights. Rights advocates say the crackdown has created an unsafe environment and caused concerns of racial profiling.

Trump has said his actions are aimed at curbing illegal immigration and improving domestic security. The crackdown has faced judicial roadblocks.

The DHS spokesperson said Ramos had been released on order of supervision with a GPS monitor while she undergoes further removal proceedings and she would receive full due process.

“All I have ever wanted is to live with dignity in the country I have called home since I was a baby,” Ramos said in a statement cited by ABC News.

“I never imagined that trying to do the right thing — registering my wife so she could receive her military ID, access the benefits she is entitled to as my spouse, and begin the process toward her green card — would lead to her being taken away from me,” her husband said after her arrest.

In the statement, cited by ABC News, Blank said he was proud of his wife and proud to “serve this country.”

Mike, as his comrades-in-arms universally called him, spent World War II fighting in the Pacific and helping to liberate the Philippines. He was wounded twice over the course of the conflict and after the Japanese surrender, he served in the occupation of Japan.

He had indeed taken to his profession, albeit on his own terms, as explained to the local press by his brother, Alfredo: “One time they offered to make him a lieutenant, but he didn’t want it. He liked the action, the excitement, being with his men.”

As it was, by 1950 he had married and had risen among the non-commissioned ranks to master sergeant in Company F, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division.

With a world war behind him, Pena got a new, thoroughly unexpected helping of excitement on June 25, 1950, when the North Korean People’s Army (KPA) surged across the borders of South Korea, seized Seoul and threatened to unite the peninsula under the regime of Kim Il-Sung.

Taken by surprise, the United Nations gathered what armed forces it could muster to back up its Republic of Korea army allies, but by mid-August 1950 the communists had all but overrun the country, save for those UN forces holding onto the port of Pusan. Among them was the 5th Cavalry.

By late August 1950, American aircraft had driven the North Korean air force from sky and the KPA was starting to run out of its most vital advantage: the initiative.

While its senior officers did all they could to win a breakthrough in the Pusan Perimeter, the UN troops did all they could to counter each enemy move.

On Sept. 1, the KPA committed four divisions to face Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay’s 1st Cavalry Division and the 1st ROK Division over a 35-mile front from Tabu-dong to the Naktong River.

On the evening of Sept. 4, elements of the “5th Cav” moved up on the town of Waegwan and right into a meeting engagement in which Mike Pena established his place in 1st Cavalry Division annals:

“That evening, under cover of darkness and a dreary mist, an enemy battalion moved to within a few yards of Master Sergeant Pena’s platoon. Recognizing the enemy’s approach, Master Sergeant Pena and his men opened fire, but the enemy’s sudden emergence and accurate point blank fire forced the friendly troops to withdraw. Master Sergeant Pena rapidly reorganized his men and led them in a counterattack which succeeded in regaining the positions they had lost. He and his men quickly established a defensive perimeter and laid down devastating fire, but enemy troops continued to hurl themselves in overwhelming numbers. Realizing that their scarce supply of ammunition would soon make their positions untenable, Master Sgt. Pena ordered his men to fall back and manned a machine gun to cover their withdrawal, he singlehandedly held back the enemy until the early hours of the following morning when his position was overrun and he was killed.”

Pena’s body was recovered the next day, but the North Koreans gradually but slowly forced the 5th Cavalry and the 1st ROK back. On Sept. 15, however, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s landing at Inchon caught the weary North Koreans from their right flank and on the 16th the UN forces broke out of the Pusan Perimeter, driving the KPA into a full rout.

The Korean War had only begun, but the North Koreans would never have another chance like the one they had in September 1950. Saving South Korea and recovering Seoul did not come without sacrifice, however.

By the time the British 27th Commonwealth Brigade arrived to relieve its stretch of front, the 1st Cavalry Division suffered the death of 770 men killed, 2,616 wounded and 62 taken prisoner.

Pena was posthumously awarded Distinguished Service Cross, and a retroactive Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster as well as a Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster.

On March 18, 2014, in accordance with the Defense Authorization Act, Pena was among 14 service personnel judged unfairly honored due to their race, and his DSC was upgraded with President Barack Obama presenting the Medal of Honor to his son, Michael David Pena, in the White House.

Iranian state TV flashed an announcement claiming that Trump had accepted Iran’s terms for ending the war, describing it as a “humiliating retreat” by the U.S. president.

Iran said talks between the U.S. and Iran would begin on Friday in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Trump’s announcement on social media represented an abrupt turnaround from earlier in the day, when Trump issued an extraordinary warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if his demands were not met.

Trump said the last-minute deal, negotiated with Pakistan serving as a mediator, was subject to Iran’s agreement to pause its blockade of oil and gas supplies through the strait, which typically handles about one-fifth of global oil shipments.

“This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.”

Two White House officials confirmed that Israel has also agreed to the two-week ceasefire and to suspend its bombing campaign on Iran. A few minutes after Trump’s announcement, the Israeli military said that it identified missiles launched from Iran towards Israel.

Trump, who has issued a series of threats in recent weeks only to back away, claimed progress between the two sides. He said Iran had presented a 10-point proposal that was a “workable basis” for negotiations and that he expected an agreement to be “finalized and consummated” during the two-week ceasefire.

Abrupt turnaround

The abrupt turnaround capped a whirlwind day that was dominated by Trump’s threat to destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran unless Tehran reopened the strait, which unnerved world leaders, rattled global financial and energy markets and drew widespread condemnation, including criticism from the head of the United Nations and Pope Leo.

As the clock ticked down to Trump’s 8 p.m. EDT deadline, U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran intensified, hitting railway and road bridges, an airport and a petrochemical plant. U.S. forces attacked targets on Kharg Island, home to Iran’s main oil export terminal.

In response, Iran declared it would no longer hold back from hitting its Gulf neighbors’ infrastructure and said it had carried out fresh strikes on a ship in the Gulf and a huge Saudi petrochemical complex. Booms were heard in Doha late on Tuesday night, according to a Reuters witness in the Qatari capital.

The war, now in its sixth week, has claimed more than 5,000 lives in nearly a dozen countries, including more than 1,600 civilians in Iran, according to tallies from government sources and human rights groups.

The closure of the strait, through which almost a fifth of the world’s oil supply typically travels, has sharply increased oil prices, escalating the chances of a global economic downturn or even recession.

With the U.S. midterm election campaign ramping up, Trump’s approval ratings have hit their lowest level ever, leaving his Republican Party at risk of losing its grip on Congress. Polls show sizable majorities of Americans opposed to the war and frustrated by the rising cost of gasoline.

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

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

US special forces rescue second F-15 airman from Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The news comes about a week after the Army revealed it had approved the XM8 carbine. The service said it decided to procure the weapon system — rather than replace the M7 — in December after months of testing.

In an announcement, the Army said the variant had “undergone extensive government testing” to ensure it met “the Army’s rigorous standards for performance, reliability, effectiveness, and user acceptance.”

The Army said soldiers from a variety of units, including the 101st Airborne Division, conducted testing during an equipment evaluation event dubbed “Soldier Touch Point” in September 2025.

Exactly what feedback those soldiers provided remains unclear. The Army did not respond to questions from Military Times about testing or fielding the XM8 carbines.

According to the Army’s Lethality Portfolio, the XM8 carbine was created because soldiers wanted a “shorter, lighter, more mobile version of the M7.”

Like the M7, the XM8 is a select-fire, magazine-fed weapon chambered in 6.8mm. It uses a piston-driven gas operating system, features ambidextrous controls similar to the M4A1 and is issued with a suppressor.

The design also includes a nonreciprocating, left-side charging handle, a collapsible buttstock and a free-floating M-LOK handguard — a modernized rail system developed by Magpul Industries.

By the numbers, the XM8 carbine has an 11-inch barrel, an overall length of 32.79 inches that includes a suppressor and collapsed stock and a weight of 8.8 pounds.

Although testing results for the XM8 carbine are not immediately available, the Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation recently published its annual T&E Oversight List.

The document includes performance reviews of the Next Generation Squad Weapons — the series of 6.8mm firearms — but only covers the M7 rifle and M250, the initial weapons in the program.

According to the report, both weapons received generally positive performance reviews, noting that “soldiers consistently qualified with their NGSW and, when firing on the variable distance range, demonstrated the ability to engage targets at extended distances.”

The report also found that the 6.8mm ammunition delivered “increased lethality over the M855A1 (i.e., the standard ammunition for the legacy M4A1 weapon) against the tested targets.”