The A-10 pilot was subsequently rescued, two U.S. officials told The New York Times.

Iranian state media stated the A-10 was targeted in southern waters near the strait.

Reports of the A-10 going down Friday followed confirmation that a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle had been shot down by enemy fire.

One of two F-15E crew members had reportedly been rescued as of Friday afternoon. A search for the second crew member was ongoing.

Search-and-rescue efforts were launched in the immediate aftermath of the fighter jet crash, with videos circulating on social media appearing to show a low-flying U.S. Air Force HC-130 refueling a pair of HH-60G Pave Hawks over Iran.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday told Military Times “the president has been briefed” on the downed U.S. F-15E fighter jet.

The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command have not yet responded to requests for comment.

Iranian state media on Friday shared images of aircraft debris alongside claims that Iran had downed a U.S. F-35 fighter jet.

However, images of the aircraft’s tailfin, specifically the red stripe on its vertical stabilizer, are consistent with markings used by the 494th Fighter Squadron, 48th Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath.

Iran also shared an image of an Advanced Concept Ejection Seat allegedly from the shot down F-15E.

The shoot-down of the F-15E marks the first time during Operation Epic Fury that a manned U.S. aircraft has been brought down by enemy fire.

A U.S. F-35 fighter jet was reportedly hit by enemy fire during a combat mission over Iran on March 19, but was able to make an emergency landing at a U.S. air base in the region.

Six U.S. airmen were killed on March 12 when their KC-135 refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq during combat operations.

On March 1, three U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets were shot down by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 in a friendly fire incident. All six F-15 crew members ejected and were safely recovered.

The A-10, meanwhile, has seen an increased role since the start of the Iran war. The attack aircraft has joined maritime interdiction operations, among other missions, along the southern edges of the conflict, targeting Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fast-attack watercraft in the Strait of Hormuz, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said last month.

Military Times reporter Michael Scanlon contributed to this report.

One of two U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle crew members shot down by enemy fire in Iran has been rescued, Israeli media first reported. U.S. officials confirmed the reports in statements to CBS News, Axios and Reuters.

A search for the second crew member is ongoing.

A multi-aircraft search-and-rescue effort for survivors was launched on Friday in the immediate aftermath of the engagement, with videos circulating on social media appearing to show a low-flying U.S. Air Force HC-130 refueling a pair of HH-60G Pave Hawks over Iran.

Israel’s N12 News first reported the rescue of the one crew member.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday told Military Times “the president has been briefed” on the downed U.S. F-15E fighter jet.

The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Iranian state media on Friday shared images of aircraft debris alongside claims that Iran had downed a U.S. F-35 fighter jet.

However, images of the aircraft’s tailfin, specifically the red stripe on its vertical stabilizer, are consistent with markings used by the 494th Fighter Squadron, 48th Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath.

Iran also shared an image of an Advanced Concept Ejection Seat allegedly from the shot down F-15E.

The shoot-down of the F-15E marks the first time during Operation Epic Fury that a manned U.S. aircraft has been brought down by enemy fire.

A U.S. F-35 fighter jet was reportedly hit by enemy fire during a combat mission over Iran on March 19, but was able to make an emergency landing at a U.S. air base in the region.

Six U.S. airmen were killed on March 12 when their KC-135 refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq during combat operations.

On March 1, three U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets were shot down by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 in a friendly fire incident. All six F-15 crew members ejected and were safely recovered.

A total of 13 U.S. service members have been killed during combat actions against Iran.

The 2027 budget request comes as the president faces risky choices abroad, with the administration sending U.S. service members to the Middle East, and a public at home feeling the economic crunch of skyrocketing gas prices due to the conflict.

The request ultimately requires approval by Congress, where disagreement over Trump’s spending decisions recently led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

The president’s budget also reflects the administration’s political priorities ahead of the 2026 midterm elections in November, when Trump’s Republicans hope to maintain their small majorities in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

The huge proposed surge in defense spending to $1.5 trillion, up from about $1 trillion in 2026, includes a 5-7% pay raise for military personnel at a time when thousands of service members are actively deployed.

The defense request will please defense hawks on Capitol Hill, but also highlights how Trump is trying to pay for his doubling-down on military pursuits, even after Republicans boosted defense spending last year in party-line legislation.

The Pentagon already requested $200 billion in extra funding to pay for the Iran war, but the White House has not yet officially made that request to Congress, where it is also likely to face scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties.

Other specific funding increases proposed by Trump include his controversial Golden Dome missile defense shield, money to build up critical mineral supplies for the defense industry and $65.8 billion to build 34 new combat and support ships.

Funds for shipbuilding, a priority for Trump since his first term, include initial funding for the so-called Trump-class battleship as well as submarines.

It is unclear how this new spending would impact the U.S. budget deficit because the projections were not included by the White House. The deficit is expected to grow slightly in fiscal 2026 to $1.853 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill often treat White House budget requests as suggestive, as appropriators try to negotiate behind the scenes to maintain their own legislative priorities. But Trump’s latest budget will likely add to the ongoing tension with congressional Democrats over funding federal programs that they see as important — and plan to campaign to protect — as the president seeks to cut federal programs.

“Savings are achieved by reducing or eliminating woke, weaponized, and wasteful programs, and by returning state and local responsibilities to their respective governments,” the White House said in a budget fact sheet.

A United States F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet has been shot down by enemy fire over Iran, U.S. officials confirmed.

One of the aircraft’s two crew members has been rescued, Israeli media first reported. U.S. officials confirmed the reports in statements to CBS News and Axios.

A search for the second crew member is ongoing.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Military Times “the president has been briefed” on the downed fighter jet.

The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Officials in Iran, meanwhile, called for the search and capture of any surviving crew members of the jet, according to reports by the semi-official ISNA news agency and the Young Journalists Club.

The governor of one of the Islamic Republic’s provinces stated that anyone who captures or kills the crew would receive a special commendation.

Video circulating on social media appeared to show a low-flying U.S. Air Force HC-130 refueling a pair of HH-60G Pave Hawks over Iran while conducting a search for the downed crew.

Iranian state media on Friday shared images of aircraft debris alongside claims that Iran had downed a U.S. F-35 fighter jet.

However, images of the aircraft’s tailfin, specifically the red stripe on its vertical stabilizer, are consistent with markings used by the 494th Fighter Squadron, 48th Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath.

Iran also shared an image of an Advanced Concept Ejection Seat allegedly from the shot down F-15E.

The search-and-rescue effort inside Iran during an ongoing conflict greatly raises the stakes for the United States.

U.S. Central Command on Tuesday issued a statement denying claims that “Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps downed an ‘enemy’ fighter jet over Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz.”

“All U.S. fighter aircraft are accounted for,” the CENTCOM statement read. “Iran’s IRGC has made the same false claim at least half a dozen times.”

The location of the downed jet has not yet been confirmed.

The shoot-down marks the first time during Operation Epic Fury that a manned U.S. aircraft has been brought down by enemy fire.

A U.S. F-35 fighter jet was reportedly hit by enemy fire during a combat mission over Iran on March 19, but was able to make an emergency landing at a U.S. air base in the region.

Six U.S. airmen were killed on March 12 when their KC-135 refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq during combat operations.

On March 1, three U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets were shot down by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 in a friendly fire incident. All six F-15 crew members ejected and were safely recovered.

A total of 13 U.S. service members have been killed during combat actions against Iran.

As of March 31, 348 U.S. personnel have been wounded, Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, U.S. Central Command spokesperson, told DefenseScoop. Of those injured, the majority have since returned to duty. Six remain seriously wounded.

Reuters contributed to this report.

“The War Department’s uniformed service members are trained at the highest and unwavering standards. These warfighters — entrusted with the safety of our nation — are no less entitled to exercise their God-given right to keep and bear arms than any other American,” Hegseth announced in a video posted to social media.

The memorandum instructed installation commanders to consider requests with a “presumption of approval,” reversing what Hegseth described as a system that made it “virtually impossible for troops to carry or store personal firearms in accordance with state laws, the Pentagon said in a statement on Thursday.

The policy builds on existing authority under the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, the Pentagon said, and the new guidance directs Pentagon officials to update regulations to formalize the process for approvals.

Hegseth framed the move as a constitutional issue and in response to recent active-shooter situations on military installations. He specifically cited a 2019 attack at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, where three people were killed and eight others injured; a 2025 shooting that wounded five soldiers at Fort Stewart in Georgia; and a 2026 shooting at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico that killed one person and injured another.

In emergencies like those, he said, “minutes are a lifetime, and our service members have the courage and training to make those precious, short minutes count.”

The directive also applies to personnel working at the Pentagon, where the Pentagon Force Protection Agency must adopt the same presumption of approval. However, the policy does not allow personal to carry inside the building itself, instead permitting storage of the firearms in vehicles on Pentagon grounds.

The abrupt move, one of three significant changes made by Hegseth the same day, cuts short George’s tenure, which began in September 2023, well before the end of the typical four-year term.

The Pentagon intends to replace him with a leader aligned with Hegseth and President Donald Trump’s vision for the Army, the official added. They did not specify what this vision entails.

George has more than four decades of military service, according to the Army. He was commissioned as an infantry officer from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1988 and served in the Gulf War, with subsequent deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that the current vice chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Christopher LaNeve, will replace George on an interim basis.

Parnell asserted that LaNeve is “a battle-tested leader with decades of operational experience and is completely trusted by Secretary Hegseth to carry out the vision of this administration without fault.”

The Department of Defense said it “has nothing further to provide at the moment.”

Hegseth on Thursday also removed Gen. David Horne, a former Army Ranger who had been overseeing the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, and Maj. Gen. William Green, the Army chief of chaplains, a Pentagon official confirmed to Military Times.

Since taking office, Hegseth has fired over a dozen generals and admirals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti.

The latest shakeup coincides with the Pentagon’s deployment of thousands of troops from the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East, as the war with Iran enters its fifth week.

The ouster was first reported by CBS News.

Funding for Trump’s marquee but controversial $185 billion “Golden Dome” missile defense shield is expected to be included in the budget request as well as Lockheed Martin F-35 jets and warships.

Procurement of Virginia-class submarines made by General Dynamics, and Huntington Ingalls Industries as well as other top shipbuilding priorities is expected.

Last year, Trump asked Congress for a national defense budget of $892.6 billion then added $150 billion through a supplemental budget request, sending the total price tag over $1 trillion for the first time in history.

While the budget request framework for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2027 is set to be unveiled on Friday, a Pentagon official said more details on the defense budget will be announced on April 21.

Earlier this year, the administration was contemplating whether the $1.5 trillion budget request could be in the form of a $900 billion national security budget, with a $400 billion to $600 billion additional request, similar to the structure used in 2026.

The administration plans to use funds for more weapons production in the hopes of deterring Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region and to rebuild weapons stocks depleted by conflicts in Israel, Iran and Ukraine.

The budget request will be debated in Congress in the coming weeks and months.

Haunting Russian FPV drone footage that they themselves have uploaded to the internet shows the hum of drones as they stalk their human prey — civilians who find themselves caught in the quagmire of war.

“They’re talking about hunting humans,” former Navy pilot Ken Harbaugh told Military Times. “They’re talking about it as a kind of flex, and they post these images on Telegram, and they share them around. … It’s not collateral damage. Civilians are the targets. Little old ladies walking back from the market with shopping bags under their arms. They’re the targets.”

While just 17 minutes, “Drone Hunters of Kherson” displays the adaptability of this new war landscape, as Ukrainian counter-drone units patrol on foot to protect the people of Kherson and Odessa from Russian attacks.

The documentary follows Harbaugh — the first American to embed with the elite 11th “M. Hrushevskyi” Brigade, the 34th Coastal Defense Brigade and the 30th Marine Corps — as he takes viewers into what he describes as “a blend of trench warfare and the Terminator.”

Ukraine is, as the documentary puts it, ground zero of 21st century drone warfare, with Russia rewriting the rules of modern combat.

Harbaugh, alongside former U.S. representative Denver Riggleman, who serves as an executive producer of the film, argue that the United States is woefully unprepared for the new landscape of warfare — starting with procurement and adaptability.

“We don’t have an answer for it,” said Harbaugh. “The public is barely even aware of the threat. They know what drones are, but they do not know about their offensive capabilities and just how cheap and ubiquitous they are and how easily they can be turned into weapons.”

Both men are witnesses to what Harbaugh termed the “compressed the innovation cycle.”

“I have seen the innovation cycle at the front in Ukraine occur in a matter — I’m not exaggerating — of hours, and I’ve seen triggering mechanisms for warheads that are about to be fitted to the next day’s drones being 3-D printed the night before based on the next day’s targets,” Harbaugh said.

These are Ukraine’s $1,000 interceptor drones the Pentagon wants to buy

“That kind of innovation, which takes hours or days in Ukraine, literally takes years in the United States when you go through the procurement process, the design iterations and all the various approvals … unless we adopt some of the Ukrainian approach to innovation, we’re never going to be able to adapt to a battlefield that changes by the day. We cannot have an innovation system that operates in timescales of years and decades responding to a battlefield that changes by the day.”

“Even with the biggest military budget in the world, we’re trying to catch up,” Riggleman added.

The documentary, which was filmed last fall, takes on new meaning as the United States enters its second month of war with Iran.

Since the United States and Israel began their joint offensive against Iran on Feb. 28, 13 service members have been killed in action and nearly 300 wounded during Operation Epic Fury.

Just last Friday, an Iranian missile and drone attack injured a dozen U.S. service members at Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia. Two of the 12 injuries are considered to be serious.

Pentagon acknowledges tough quest to counter Iranian drones

“I think the lack of preparedness was evident that the first U.S. service members killed was by a Shahed [drone],” Riggleman said. “When you’re looking at drone warfare, we should have been well ahead of the curve with a U.S. military the might that we have, and instead, we’re at the mercy of countries that had to adapt in real time in a wartime environment.”

In Ukraine, drones are being used not only by the Russians for specific terror missions, but are used to actually control the front lines — from surveillance to targeting.

“You have people underground living like [it’s] 1916, while you have fiber optic and radio-controlled drones buzzing around,” said Riggleman.

In the case of fiber optic drones, Ukraine must deploy foot patrols — placing its soldiers between the Russians and its civilians. Fiber optic drones cannot be jammed. They cannot be detected. There is no electromagnetic signature. It all runs through wire, “so you have to have people between the drone operator and the civilian targets,” said Harbaugh.

The best way right now to shoot down drones is with a Kalashnikov … or with a .50 cal,” said Riggleman. “I actually got to do that training, and even in a simulated environment, I was lucky to get 20 to 30%. These guys [have] got to be on target every time.”

The short but impactful film delivers a stark warning to America and its allies: one must adapt — and quickly — in order to survive.

The attacks, conducted in coordination with the Somali government, come after U.S. Africa Command carried out 124 strikes in 2025, a dramatic jump from just 10 in 2024, according to an AFRICOM spokesperson.

“Alongside the Federal Government of Somalia and the Somali Armed Forces, our efforts continue to degrade ISIS and al Shabaab capabilities,” the spokesperson said in a Wednesday statement.

The most recent strike targeted al-Shabaab last week, according to a statement released by the command on Monday. The strike hit around 82 miles northwest of Kismayo, a port city on the country’s southern coast. The command said it would not divulge specific details about units or assets to protect operations in the region.

Al Shabab is an al-Qaeda linked insurgent group that has repeatedly attacked civilians and government forces.

The U.S. carried out 18 strikes in Somalia in 2023 and 16 in 2022.

Two weeks earlier, on March 13, five KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft were damaged on the flight line, two U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal, as reported by Military Times.

Since Feb. 28, Iran has struck radar systems, satellite communications and mission-critical aircraft at at least seven U.S. bases across Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The attacks have focused on infrastructure that U.S. forces depend on to detect threats, refuel aircraft and direct air operations in the region.

By late March, Iranian missile and drone launches had dropped more than 90% since the conflict began, according to U.S. Central Command. Meanwhile, the attacks that persist have zeroed in on radar sites, SATCOM terminals, tankers and now an AWACS.

Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, said the pattern points to deliberate targeting, rather than opportunism. The strikes are systematic and target three “distinct functional categories,” she said, including radar and communications infrastructure, aerial refueling tankers and now the AWACS.

“Each is a critical enabler of U.S. air operations,” Grieco told Defense News. “That’s not random. That’s a target set derived from an understanding of how U.S. airpower functions and where it is most exposed. The pattern suggests deliberate doctrine, or something close enough to it, not opportunism.”

Joe Costa, director of the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense program and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for plans and posture, said Iran’s targeting approach makes tactical sense.

“It’s much easier to hit stationary infrastructure on the ground than planes flying in the air,” Costa said. “The U.S. has a dynamic process to quickly reallocate global resources to mitigate risks to troops and the mission, but the real cost is the cumulative impacts this operation will have on long-term readiness for other U.S. priorities.

“The more assets we use and lose now, the less will be available later until maintenance cycles, repairs and new purchases are complete.”

Strikes on communications, missile defense infrastructure

Iran’s retaliatory campaign targeted communications infrastructure from the opening hours of the conflict.

On Feb. 28, an Iranian drone struck Naval Support Activity Bahrain, home of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. Satellite imagery later obtained by The New York Times showed damage to large SATCOM terminals at the installation.

Satellite imagery also confirmed damage to the AN/FPS-132 phased array early warning radar in Qatar, with at least one of the system’s three arrays struck in the opening days of the conflict, according to Planet Labs imagery obtained by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Similar strikes hit radar facilities at Al Ruwais and Al Sader in the UAE, according to satellite imagery reported by The War Zone.

Qatar purchased the AN/FPS-132 radar system from the U.S. in 2013 for $1.1 billion. The Iranian drones used to strike it cost an estimated $20,000 to $60,000 per unit.

CENTCOM and Space Force Public Affairs directed Defense News to previously released operational updates and declined to comment further about the strikes.

The targeting also extended to missile defense infrastructure.

Satellite imagery confirmed the AN/TPY-2 radar for a U.S. THAAD battery at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan was struck and apparently destroyed in the opening days of the conflict, later confirmed by a U.S. official. The AN/TPY-2 is the primary sensor for the THAAD system. Without it, a THAAD battery cannot independently search for or track targets.

An already waning E-3 fleet

The damage to the Prince Sultan E-3 on March 27 comes at a time when the fleet is already stretched thin. The Air Force’s E-3 inventory has dwindled to 16 aircraft, the last delivered by Boeing in 1992.

In fiscal 2024, the fleet posted a mission-capable rate of 55.68%, according to Air Force data reported by Air & Space Forces Magazine, meaning fewer than nine aircraft were operationally available on any given day.

As of March 26, the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense program, which tracks U.S. military assets committed to Operation Epic Fury, estimated that between 66% and 75% of the available E-3 fleet was deployed to the theater.

Air & Space Forces Magazine, which reviewed imagery of the damaged aircraft, reported the extent of the damage likely renders the E-3 unrepairable.

Grieco said the near-term impact is real, but manageable. Prior to the damage, six aircraft were forward-deployed, and the theater was operating “at the margins of what continuous battle management coverage requires,” she told Defense News.

“Five aircraft means accepting either a single continuous orbit or periodic gaps when a second cannot be regularly sustained. In those gaps, the air picture degrades, air battle management is less effective and the theater’s ability to coordinate a complex, multi-aircraft operation becomes significantly more constrained,” she said.

“The United States could send another E-3 to the theater,” Grieco added, “but there are only 15 left in the entire fleet — and every one deployed to the Middle East is one less available everywhere else.”

Philip Sheers, an associate fellow in the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, said the loss emphasizes the burden on the airborne battle management fleet. About half of the 16-aircraft E-3 fleet is mission capable, he said, and with six in the Middle East, only two or three remain for other needs.

“There is very little slack remaining for flexibility and adjustment, and that places a huge burden on the remaining fleet as well as other systems to fill in the gaps, potentially at the expense of other priorities,” Sheers said.

A ‘massive alarm bell’ for air defense

A March 2026 report by the Center for a New American Security warned that proposed alternatives to dedicated airborne battle management aircraft, including space-based sensors and fighter-based networks, are either longer-term technological prospects, unproven at battle management or highly vulnerable, and should be treated as complements rather than substitutes.

Replacing the airborne capability will take time.

The Pentagon moved to cancel the E-7 Wedgetail program in its fiscal 2026 budget request, citing cost growth, from $588 million to $724 million per aircraft, as well as survivability concerns in contested airspace. Congress reversed the decision, preserving the program in the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act and blocking further E-3 retirements until enough Wedgetails are in service.

According to the Government Accountability Office, the E-7’s first flight has slipped to May 2027, with full operational capability now projected for the early 2030s. Space-based systems proposed by the Pentagon as a longer-term alternative face a similar timeline, according to Space Force officials.

Near-term, Sheers said the loss will increase operational strain on the remaining E-3s and could result in increased dependence on carrier-based E-2 Hawkeyes and the Australian E-7 Wedgetail.

“The demand for airborne sensing to manage cruise missile and drone threats is not going anywhere,” he told Defense News. “Medium and long-term, this all bodes very poorly for E-3 readiness and highlights the need for DoD and Congress to resource a real solution to the shrinking and aging E-3 fleet.”

The KC-135 tanker fleet faces parallel pressures. Already cannibalizing parts from the boneyard, the Cold War-era jets have absorbed repeated strikes.

In addition to the five KC-135s damaged at Prince Sultan on March 13, multiple refueling aircraft were also hit in the March 27 strike, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Costa pointed to broader implications that outlast the current conflict.

“The continued use and possible reallocation of high-demand, low-density assets like air defense systems will impact readiness for other U.S. global priorities,” Costa said. “That’s the real strategic tradeoff.”

Sheers said the conflict should serve as a warning well beyond the Middle East.

“The entirety of this conflict should be a massive alarm bell on the need for passive defenses, not just for U.S. forces in the Middle East, but over the homeland where drone incursions are increasingly frequent, and especially in the Indo-Pacific, where the Chinese missile threat is orders of magnitude larger and more difficult to suppress,” he told Defense News.

“Airbase vulnerability has been an issue for decades, and the drumbeat of independent analysis on this issue could not be louder,” he added. “If DoD doesn’t take these events as a wake-up call, we are setting ourselves up for disaster in a future great power conflict.”

Grieco suggested the effects may already be rippling through the campaign in ways that don’t show up in publicly available strike counts.

Those “less visible metrics” include tanker availability, AWACS coverage gaps and stockpile constraints, she said.

“If Iran’s strikes on radar and communications infrastructure are compressing warning times and creating gaps in the missile defense network, that’s operationally significant even if no additional aircraft are destroyed,” she said.

“The threshold for material degradation isn’t a single dramatic loss. It’s the accumulation of constraints that make the campaign more expensive, less flexible and less effective over time. We may already be past it in ways that won’t be visible until the campaign’s operational history is written.”

In a post on social media, Hegseth thanked the rocker and said “pilots suspension LIFTED. No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots.”

The statement came after Kid Rock, whose name is Richard James Ritchie, posted two videos waving to an Apache helicopter as it lingered near the pool outside of his Nashville estate. The musician said “God Bless America and all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to defend her,” in the caption of one post that also included hurled insults at the governor of California.

The video was taken at the rocker’s “Southern White House,” a Nashville mansion he has modeled after the president’s traditional D.C. residence. A human-sized Statue of Liberty is also visible in the video by the edge of the pool.

The Army on Tuesday confirmed that two Apache helicopters from the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade at Fort Campbell had taken part in the now-publicized flight and those involved had been suspended while the event was investigated.

“The Army takes any allegations of unauthorized or unsafe flight operations very seriously and is committed to enforcing standards and holding personnel accountable.” Army spokesman, Maj. Montrell Russell said in a statement Tuesday.

Kid Rock brushed off the possibility of repercussions for the pilots in a Monday interview with WKRN, dismissing concerns about the Apache’s crew facing possible repercussions.

“I think they’re going to be alright — my buddy is the commander in chief,” Kid Rock said, referencing his longtime friendship with President Donald Trump.

“Expertise is not a drone, but a skill, a strategy, a system where a drone is one part of the defense,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Reuters on Monday.

Ukraine now produces roughly 1,000 interceptor drones a day through hundreds of vetted manufacturers, deliberately dispersed so that no single strike can cripple the supply chain, Zelenskyy reported last month. The country has the technical capacity to double that figure, he said, but lacks the budget to do so.

While Ukraine has built that infrastructure gradually over the last few years, most countries now trying to integrate interceptors into the air defense have not invested in building the necessary logistical framework needed to effectively build, arm or deploy the cheap flyers.

Some countries have already learned this lesson the hard way.

After some Ukrainian companies built interceptor drone factories abroad without state approval, multiple buyers complained because the drones were sold without the warheads or expertise needed to operate them properly, Zelenskyy said on Friday, per Ukrainska Pravda.

“They had also been sold a certain number of interceptors — again without explosives,” Zelenskyy said about a European country he visited recently. “And they asked me whether we could send more operators. I said no.”

The bottleneck isn’t the interceptor itself, but the logistics infrastructure to produce and sustain them at scale, officials said.

“It seems there is still a misconception,” Artem Moroz, head of investor relations at Brave1, wrote on LinkedIn last month.

Brave1, Ukraine’s defense-tech accelerator, has worked with more than 500 defense startups since 2023 and now serves as the primary gateway for foreign governments seeking access to Ukrainian drone technology and production partnerships.

“Many believe Ukraine could simply send a few hundred interceptor drones to the Middle East and stop the Shahed drones currently hitting critical infrastructure,” Moroz said. “Drone warfare is far more complex than that.

“Yes, hardware matters. And Ukraine knows how to build drones at scale. But the real advantage lies in the infrastructure behind them.”

Companies launch drone-production innovations

The gap between buying a drone and building the system to sustain it is the market several defense companies are now racing to fill.

A handful of defense companies from Helsinki to San Francisco are offering the production line, the detection system and the supply infrastructure compressed into a portable unit that can be shipped anywhere to produce up to dozens of drones a day.

Sensofusion, a Finnish defense company founded in 2016, sells a full-cycle drone production chain as one of the latest innovators in this arena.

The company’s $2.4 million (€2.1 million Euros) Tactical Drone Factory is a standard 20-foot shipping container equipped with industrial 3D printers, an electronics assembly station and enough spares to run around the clock with a crew of three, producing up to 50 interceptor drones a day, according to the company.

What sets the Finnish system apart from its competitors is that it’s not just a factory: It ships as a package with Sensofusion’s Airfence radio-frequency detection and tracking platform, designed to detect a hostile drone, cue an interceptor and guide it to the kill — a full sensor-to-effector chain in a box.

The company says each interceptor costs less than $580 (€500) and is built to chase targets at speeds up to 310 mph (500 km/h).

Although Sensofusion boasts some of the highest production numbers on the market, it’s not the first company to market the concept of a portable all-in-one drone production hub.

Firestorm Labs' xCell system, the most tested U.S. equivalent to Sensofusion, uses two containers and works at a significantly slower pace by producing roughly 50 drones per month. Its newly announced SQUALL airframe is the first drone purpose-built to come off a mobile factory line, according to the company.

Founded in 2022, Firestorm’s biggest selling point is its testing and validation. The company holds a $100 million U.S. Air Force contract, has run field exercises with Air Force Special Operations Command and the Air National Guard and raised $47 million in Series A funding.

Per Se Systems, a French firm, operates in a middle ground by building micro drone factories on trailers — instead of shipping containers — that produce up to ten drones per hour on a generator with 19 hours of autonomous operation.

Per Se has been field-tested with 12 French Army regiments and is embedded in four active development projects with the French military, according to Army Recognition.

The drawbacks of production containers

Some logistics and strategy specialists say the all-in-one package wrapped into the portable factory concept ignores some critical battlefield questions that could render the projects useless.

A container full of printers, raw materials, sensitive electronics and proprietary design files concentrates exactly the kind of capability an adversary would want to destroy or capture, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis that identified several strategic vulnerabilities in frontline drone production.

And the problems compound from there.

Airframes can be printed, but the motors, batteries, electronic speed controllers, radios and sensors that make a drone combat-capable cannot, and those components must be trucked to the container through the same supply chains the factory is supposed to bypass.

Quality control under field conditions remains untested. Vibration, temperature swings, dust and intermittent power degrade the dimensional tolerances that 3D-printed parts require, and no company has demonstrated sustained production outside a controlled environment.

“Industrial resilience is combat power,” the CSIS experts concluded. “The next war will not be won by who initially fields the most drones, but by who sustains building them at scale.”

Several countries are catching on to the growing need to invest in drone production logistics.

Five NATO nations — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Poland — launched a joint initiative in February to develop affordable interceptor drones within a year under a program called LEAP, explicitly drawing on Ukrainian battlefield know-how to do it.

Ukraine’s experts say they are ready and willing to share their hard-earned lessons with allies, including the strategies to build a new layer of defense alongside the new weapons themselves.

“What Ukraine has built is a deep operational ecosystem across multiple domains, designed for conflicts where entirely new types of threats appear,” Brave1’s Moroz said.

“And ecosystems like this are extremely hard to copy,” he explained. “Even investing hundreds of billions or a trillion today would not easily replicate the experience, integration, and speed of iteration built over years of real combat.”

His final words of advice to allies?

“Drones are the tool. The infrastructure is the weapon.”

In two videos posted to his X account, Kid Rock, whose name is Richard James Ritchie, waved to a U.S. Army Apache helicopter as it hovered near the pool in front of his human-sized Statue of Liberty replica.

The singer has spent years building the miniature “White House” atop Nashville’s hills, complete with tall columns and an enormous American flag.

“God Bless America and all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to defend her,” the musician mused in the caption of one post after an insult-laden line criticizing California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Kid Rock may have been “born free,” as he crooned in 2010, but military aviators are subject to a host of military and federal regulations that govern the skies.

An Army spokesperson on Tuesday confirmed that two Apache helicopters from the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade at Fort Campbell took part in a flight that has now been publicized.

“This incident is now under an Army Regulation 15-6 administrative investigation. The personnel involved have been suspended from flight duties while the Army reviews the circumstances surrounding the mission, including compliance with relevant FAA regulations, aviation safety protocol, and approval requirements,” Maj. Montrell Russell said in a statement. The investigation is ongoing, he said, adding that the Army takes allegations of dangerous flight operations seriously.

In a Monday interview with WKRN, Kid Rock dismissed concerns about the Apache’s crew facing possible repercussions.

“I think they’re going to be alright — my buddy is the commander in chief,” Kid Rock said, referencing his friendship with President Donald Trump.

Kid Rock has long supported Trump, and he visited the Oval Office in March 2025 as the president signed an executive order cracking down on ticket scalping.

This is not the first time a military aircraft has potentially run afoul of aviation rules. In May of last year, Montana Army National Guard members faced trespassing charges after they were accused of landing a Black Hawk on private land to take elk antlers.

Kid Rock and Newsom have a history of clashes, with social media spats rivaling rockstar-level backstage brawls.

In a February post from his press office’s X account, Newsom said he had banned Kid Rock from California. He also insulted the rocker’s fitness, saying Kid Rock in an earlier video had demonstrated “SOME OF THE WEAKEST PUSHUPS EVER WITNESSED.”

A Department of Defense suicide report found that 471 service members died by suicide in calendar year 2024, down from 531 in 2023, according to the report released Tuesday.

In the Department of Defense’s seventh-annual report on suicide in the military, the department found that even though the total force suicide rate decreased by around 11% for 2024’s calendar year, suicide rates have gradually increased in the active component from 2011 to 2024.

The department began collecting data on service members’ suicides in 2011 when the Defense Suicide Prevention Office was established. After accounting for age and sex, the increase in active component suicide rates from 2011 to 2024 reflects the increase in U.S. population suicide rates, the report says.

“Overall military suicide rates have not differed meaningfully from those of the U.S. population for most years since 2011,” the report states.

“This result indicates that the military suicide rates resemble trends in the country as a whole,” the report continues.

Like previous years, the majority of the active-duty service members who died by suicide in 2024 were enlisted males under the age of 30 — making up 64% of the service members who died by suicide during that year, according to the report.

Even as the active component’s suicides have steadily increased since 2011, the rate has decreased by around 16% from 2023 to 2024, the department found.

While the Reserve suicide rate decreased by approximately 14%, the National Guard suicide rate increased by around 13%. Suicide rates for the Reserve component, including the National Guard, have remained stable from 2011 to 2024.

Divorces or separated service members had a higher suicide rate compared to the overall active component between 2022 and 2024, while female service members who were 30 or older or a warrant or commissioned officer had a lower suicide rate.

The report states that firearm usage was the most common death by suicide method in the active component, Reserve and National Guard in 2024 and in the U.S. population in 2023. Poisoning was the leading method for attempted suicides, the report says.

“Recognizing that every death by suicide is a tragedy, the Department will continue to take action to support our men and women in uniform and their families, promote the wellbeing and resilience of the force, and take steps to prevent suicide in our military community,” the Tuesday statement announcing the report’s results reads.

To help service members in need of support, the Department of Defense has expanded the availability of clinical services, like telehealth, and service members can also self-refer for mental health evaluations as part of the Brandon Act, the report says.

In its 2025 suicide prevention campaign, the department focused on building connections across the military and reducing stigma, while the Defense Suicide Prevention Office uses social media as a way to reach service members.

The Defense Department has paired with the Department of Veterans Affairs, among other federal agencies, to increase publicly accessible mobile app usage that supports mental health, like Virtual Hope Box and Breathe2Relax.

For veterans, there has been a downward trend in suicides since 2018, shown by the February release of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ suicide prevention report for 2023. Over 6,000 veterans died by suicide in 2023, with roughly 17.5 veterans’ deaths per day, last month’s VA report found.

Hegseth, speaking during a press briefing at the Pentagon, asserted that morale is high and service members are determined to “finish the mission.” He declined to disclose the precise location of the bases that he toured over the weekend.

More than a month into the joint U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran, Hegseth warned that the coming days could prove pivotal, even as the broader course of the conflict remains unsettled.

“The upcoming days will be decisive. Iran knows that, and there’s nothing they can militarily do about it,” he said. “We have more and more options, and they have less.”

Pressed on whether the influx of newly arrived Marines and Army paratroopers might be used in ground operations on Iranian territory, Hegseth offered no indication either way.

“You can’t fight and win a war if you tell your adversary what you are willing to do or what you are not willing to do, to include boots on the ground,” Hegseth said. “Our adversary right now thinks there are 15 different ways we could come at them with boots on the ground and guess what? There are.”

He added: “If we needed to, we could execute those options on behalf of the President of the United States and this department. Or maybe we don’t have to use them at all.”

Limited missions, big risks: What a US ground fight in Iran could become

Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that B-52 Stratofortress bombers have begun conducting missions over Iran, taking advantage of U.S. forces gaining air superiority over the country.

Caine said the campaign remains focused on “interdicting and destroying the logistical and supply chains that feed” the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile, drone and naval production facilities, aiming to limit Tehran’s ability to replenish key weapons.

The Pentagon news conference began roughly one hour after President Donald Trump, in a post on Truth Social, lashed out at American allies for resisting his demands for help in the Middle East. He told nations who are facing fuel shortages to “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.”

The United States “won’t be there to help you anymore,” Trump said, adding that “Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your oil!”

The de facto shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz since the conflict began has sent global energy prices soaring, imperiling supply chains that under normal circumstances transport roughly a fifth of the world’s oil.

Hegseth echoed the president’s message in his Pentagon briefing, calling on America’s partners — specifically the United Kingdom — to assume a larger role.

“There are countries around the world who ought be prepared to step up on this critical waterway as well,” Hegseth said. “It’s not just the United States Navy. The last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad, Royal Navy that could be prepared to do things like that as well.”

Military analysts point to several possibilities, including coastal assaults, nuclear site raids or operations deeper inside the country.

Any one of these missions could unfold alone or evolve into something more broad. But across each scenario, U.S. forces would enter an environment where Iranian missiles, drones and ground units could begin targeting them as soon as they arrive.

A battle for the waterway

One version of the fight would likely unfold along the water.

U.S. forces could be tasked with seizing islands or coastal positions to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a global shipping route that has been heavily disrupted by the war with Iran.

The mission could be a limited ground incursion, with Marines and airborne units deploying to seize important terrain, said Joe Costa, director of the Forward Defense program at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center.

President Donald Trump has publicly threatened Kharg Island, Iran’s primary oil export hub, which is located off the country’s coast.

In a Truth Social post on Monday, he said the U.S. would finish its “stay” in Iran, by “completely obliterating” Kharg Island.

Costa, a former senior Pentagon official who worked on U.S. war plans, including Iran, acknowledged speculation about Kharg, but also described a scenario in which U.S. forces would try to secure islands such as Abu Musa, Larak and the Tunbs, off Iran’s southern coast.

“This helps us take out Iranian reconnaissance units as we think of ways to reopen Hormuz. If you have the ability to secure some of the ports along the coast as well, you go a long way to supporting naval assets to start to open up the Strait,” Costa said, adding that the operation could rely on Marine units for the initial assault, with airborne forces supporting limited incursions and air assault operations — all under U.S. air superiority.

The USS Tripoli and embarked 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit arrived in the region’s waters last Friday, and the elements of the 82nd Airborne Division are deploying to the Middle East, the Pentagon confirmed last week.

An opening fight would not be in isolation, Costa said, and though there are mixed reports about Iranian military capacity right now, the country still appears to have functional command and control and is capable of attacks.

The first waves of U.S. ground troops would undoubtedly face Iranian fire, Costa warned.

“We have overwhelming force and would likely be successful in securing territory, but at that point every commander will face the daily decision of assuming risk to troops or risk to mission — force protection becomes paramount, especially if we start to see casualties mount up,” he said, adding, “There’s a high risk of that in this operation.”

Targeting nuclear sites

A different type of operation would focus on Iran’s nuclear program instead of territory.

Instead of seizing ground, U.S. forces could be tasked with entering fortified sites and securing material, likely under fire and deep within Iranian territory.

An operation aimed at seizing enriched uranium would likely involve special forces at a nuclear site in Isfahan, a populous city in the center of the country, said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iran’s missiles and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Excavating nuclear material would require a myriad of support, from construction equipment to Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear assets, Grajewski, a professor at Sciences Po, said.

Ground forces would likely have to dig deep underground to access the highly enriched uranium canisters “and then go in there, excavate it, then get out of the country,” she added.

An extraction team would likely be met with force. The area is heavily trafficked, and the nuclear site in Isfahan is located near numerous military and missile facilities, making it exceedingly risky.

Grajewski described the operation as likely “one that the U.S. military has not really done before,” and said experts could only speculate on how it would be accomplished.

“I’m not sure how they’re thinking about doing it,” she said, pondering if “they’re going to fly in there and do this quick extraction under the guise of night?”

Iran’s response

Even targeted operations like seizing an island or extracting nuclear materials carry the risk of evolving into something larger.

Dan Grazier, the director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center, said the challenges U.S. forces may face goes beyond securing land or items. It centers on how Iran chooses to fight once American soldiers are on its ground.

“The Iranians are going to do whatever they can to kill and capture as many Americans as they can,” said Grazier, who is also a Marine Corps veteran, “for the propaganda victory alone.”

Rather than seeking decisive engagement, Iranian forces would likely avoid conventional confrontation and stretch the conflict over time, he said. Instead of defeating U.S. forces, he added, Iran’s objective becomes making the conflict costly and prolonged, forcing leaders in Washington to decide whether the fight is worth continuing.

Any sustained ground operation would also risk widening the battlefield, as Iran could activate proxy groups across the region to further target U.S. forces and partners.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies in early March estimated that the first 100 hours of the war cost billions of dollars, and experts warn that critical air defense interceptors could be depleted faster than the rate of replacement.

The human cost has also risen as the war enters its second month. Thirteen American service members had been killed and over 300 injured as of late March. A survey earlier in March found that a majority of Americans thought the war had gone too far, and a separate poll showed diminished confidence in the president’s handling of it.

“The Iranians don’t stand any chance of defeating the United States on the ground, I don’t think,” Grazier said. “They do stand a chance of defeating the United States politically back home.”

Unlike their forefathers, who were met with lethal sprays of machine guns and shells on the shores of the Pacific and Europe during World War II, these Marines were, almost comically, met by the mayor of Da Nang with girls placing wreaths around the Marines’ necks. Four American soldiers met them with a large sign stating: “Welcome, Gallant Marines.”

“Garlanded like ancient heroes, they then marched off to seize Hill 327, which turned out to be occupied only by rock apes — gorillas instead of guerrillas, as the joke went — who did not contest the intrusion of their upright and heavily armed cousins,” writes the Council on Foreign Relations.

While the U.S. had been involved in Vietnam for over a decade, with the U. S. Military Assistance Advisory Group existing in Vietnam as early as 1950, the arrival of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade historically marks the Americanization of the Vietnam War.

Many in the upper echelons of American policymaking welcomed the landings. However, Maxwell Taylor, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam at the time and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed strong reservations. He predicted that it would be difficult to “hold the line” on further force commitments.

His fears would prove accurate.

By the end of 1965, 185,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam. Less than three years later, the city that welcomed the Americans with handshakes and leis had become the host to high-level U.S. and South Vietnamese operations, including the headquarters of I Corps, the military zone encompassing South Vietnam’s northern provinces.

March of Folly

From the moment he was sworn into the presidency on Nov. 22, 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson was hardened to the notion that he was not going to be the first American president to lose a war, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman in her book “The March of Folly”.

“Johnson’s idea was to fight and negotiate simultaneously,” she wrote. “The difficulty was that the limited war aim … was unachievable by limited war. The North had no intention of ever conceding a non-Communist South, and since such a concession could have been forced upon them only by military victory, and since such a victory was unattainable by the United States short of total war and invasion, which it was unwilling to undertake, the American war aim was therefore foreclosed.

“If this was recognized by some, it was not acted upon because no one was prepared to admit American failure. Activists could believe the bombing might succeed; doubters could vaguely hope some solution would turn up.”

As Johnson chose to fight and negotiate simultaneously, Operation Rolling Thunder began in earnest. The soon-to-be frequently interrupted bombing campaign had begun just prior to the sustained American ground campaign. The operation, which began on Feb. 24, 1965, had initially begun as a diplomatic signal to impress the North Vietnamese of America’s determination and serve as a warning that the violence would continue to escalate unless Ho Chi Minh “blinked.”

According to the Air Force Historical Division, Gen. Curtis LeMay argued that “military targets, rather than the enemy’s resolve, should be attacked and that the blows should be rapid and sharp.” When that outcome failed to arise after the first several weeks in March 1965, “the purpose of the campaign began to change.”

Throughout the next decade, more than 2.6 million U.S. servicemen and women eventually rotated through Vietnam. More than 58,000 of them died there, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Now, with President Donald Trump weighing his next steps in the war against Iran and thousands of soldiers from the U.S. Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division arriving in the Middle East, certain parallels have begun to emerge between the opening days of the wars with Vietnam and Iran.

Operation Epic Fury

Since Operation Epic Fury, a joint undertaking by U.S. and Israeli militaries against the Islamic Republic that began on Feb. 28, over 11,000 targets have been struck.

“Targetry never makes up for a lack of strategy,” Gen. Jim Mattis, who served as Trump’s first defense secretary, cautioned in a recent interview. “By that I mean 15,000 targets have been hit. There have been significant military successes. But they are not matched by strategic outcomes”

Now, according to the Washington Post, the Pentagon is putting together plans for weeks of ground operations in Iran as U.S. forces amass in the region.

Citing multiple U.S. officials, the Post report suggested ground operations could involve both conventional infantry and special operations elements, but would not yet rise to the level of a full-scale invasion.

“It’s the job of the Pentagon to make preparations in order to give the commander in chief maximum optionality,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement provided to Military Times. “It does not mean the president has made a decision.”

The Post’s report comes as U.S. military assets continue to flood the region. On Friday, U.S. Marines and sailors assigned to the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group arrived in U.S. Central Command waters.

The Pentagon has also confirmed elements from the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters and a brigade combat team are deploying to the Middle East. Based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the 82nd acts as the Army’s rapid-response force and is often among the first units sent to respond to emerging crises.

The report also comes on the heels of an Iranian missile and drone attack on Friday that injured a dozen U.S. service members at Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia. Two of the 12 injuries are considered to be serious.

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

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

Jon Simkins contributed to this report.

Reuters first reported on March 18 that Trump’s administration was considering deploying thousands of additional U.S. troops to the Middle East, a move that would expand options to include the deployment of forces ​inside Iranian territory.

The paratroopers, based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, add to the thousands of additional sailors, Marines and Special Operations forces sent to the region. Over the weekend, about 2,500 Marines arrived in the Middle East.

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, did not say specifically where the soldiers were deploying to, but the move was expected.

The additional Army soldiers include elements of the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters, some logistics and other support, and one brigade combat team.

No decision has been made to send troops into Iran, but they will build up capacity for potential future operations in the region, one of the sources said.

Options for Trump

The soldiers could be used for several purposes in the Iran war, including an attempt to seize Kharg Island, the hub for 90% of Iran’s oil exports.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported there had been discussions within the Trump administration about an operation to take the island. Such a move would be highly risky, since Iran can reach the island with missiles and drones.

Reuters has previously reported the administration has discussed using ground forces inside Iran to extract highly enriched uranium, though that option could mean U.S. troops deeper inside Iran for potentially longer periods of time, trying to dig out material that is deep underground.

Pentagon reportedly preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran

The internal Trump administration discussions have also included potentially putting U.S. troops inside Iran to secure safe passage for oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. While that mission would be accomplished primarily through air and naval forces, it could also mean deploying U.S. troops to Iran’s shoreline.

Trump said on Monday the United States was in ​talks with a “more reasonable regime” to end ‌the war in Iran, but repeated his warning to Tehran to open the Strait of Hormuz or risk U.S. attacks on its oil wells ​and power plants.

Any use of U.S. ground troops — even for a limited mission — could pose significant political risks for Trump, given low ⁠American public ​support for the Iran campaign and Trump’s own pre-election promises to avoid entangling the ​U.S. in new Middle East conflicts.

Since operations started on February 28, the U.S. has carried out strikes against more than 11,000 targets. More than 300 U.S. troops have been injured and 13 service members have been killed as part of Operation Epic Fury.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., placed a hold Wednesday on the promotions of Marine Lt. Col. Vincent Noble, Col. Thomas Siverts and Navy Lt. Cmdr. Thomas MacNeil, saying his objections to a process that would quickly approve the promotions as a bloc was based on “misconduct or concerning judgement.”

In responses provided to Military Times, Wyden’s office made clear that the holds were a direct response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s reported decision to pull two Black and two female military officers from a list of troops up for promotion to general or flag officer.

“Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have launched an unprecedented politicization of the military promotion process, most recently, reportedly blocking promotions for Black and female officers,” Wyden said. “I asked my staff to vet potential promotions, to ensure the Senate is doing its job to ensure the officers leading our armed forces continue to meet the services’ high standards.”

In the case of Noble and MacNeil, Wyden cited their proximity to highly publicized war crimes cases dating as far back as 2007.

Noble, then a captain, had been the leader of a Marine Corps special operations platoon deployed to Afghanistan in 2007 when the unit became involved in an ambush that left up to 19 Afghans dead and dozens more wounded.

The Marines were accused of war crimes, and Noble and another officer, Maj. Fred Galvin, were sent to a rare court of inquiry military proceeding back in the states. But ultimately, the government opted not to charge the men after a three-star overseeing the case determined they “acted appropriately.”

Military Times investigated the incident in 2015, finding through the examination of newly declassified documents that the Marines were unjustly held to account for what was a combat engagement.

Wyden described it differently in his statement Wednesday in the congressional record.

“Military investigations found that Lieutenant Colonel Noble’s platoon fired indiscriminately on civilians in Afghanistan in 2007, and he was disciplined for filing a false report and asking Marines under his command to lie about the attack, according to military records,” the senator said, though he linked to a New York Times report from the time that quoted a source saying neither Galvin nor Noble fired a weapon in the engagement.

Wyden’s office did not provide additional information or context when asked about the statements regarding Noble.

MacNeil’s war zone case, which dates to 2017, is linked to that of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was accused by his own unit of war crimes in Iraq, including stabbing a 17-year-old ISIS-linked prisoner to death. Gallagher was acquitted on charges linked to the death but found guilty of posing for photos with the prisoner’s corpse.

President Donald Trump intervened in 2019 to keep Gallagher from being stripped of his SEAL trident in the matter. MacNeil, then a lieutenant, testified against Gallagher in his trial but can be seen in a unit photo with him and nine other SEALs posing behind the corpse.

After Trump’s intervention with Gallagher, the Navy gave up efforts to strip MacNeil and two other SEALs of their tridents, and the matter was dealt with through internal “administrative measures,” acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly said at the time.

“While MacNeil was the junior member of his platoon and eventually testified against Gallagher, he exercised poor judgement as an officer and should not be promoted within the United States military,” Wyden said in arguing against his promotion.

The case of Siverts is different. Wyden highlighted appearances on a podcast, The Berm Pit, co-hosted by the colonel’s brother, Scott Siverts. The Anti-Defamation League, a global anti-hate organization, describes the podcast as far-right and antisemitic, and its social media feeds reveal re-posts of antisemitic memes and other offensive content.

The left-wing news outlet RawStory, which regularly covers extremism, previously reported that Siverts, who has served most recently with the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, had been reported to the Defense Department Inspector General for appearing on an episode of The Berm Pit in which one of the co-hosts joked about wanting to put “six bullets” into Hegseth’s head.

The IG opted not to open an investigation into the matter, and it’s not clear whether any administrative action was taken.

Wyden’s statement highlights a March 2023 appearance by Siverts on the podcast, since removed from the internet.

“Siverts’s participation in a podcast whose hosts espouse such bigotry raises serious questions about his character and professionalism, which are both relevant to his promotion to Brigadier General,” Wyden wrote. “To date, the Marine Corps has not provided me with a copy of this podcast episode to verify the nature of his participation in this podcast, nor has Siverts publicly apologized or expressed regret for his association with this podcast.”

A co-host of The Berm Pit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wyden told Military Times that he didn’t know how the nominations for Noble, MacNeil and Siverts made it out of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“The military should not promote officers who violate military codes, were involved in war crimes, or fail to live up to the U.S. armed forces standards. Our country is stronger and more secure when military leaders are promoted based on their qualifications and records, and held accountable when they fall short of those standards,” he said. " … I won’t shortcut the Senate process to help unfit personnel lead our servicemembers and degrade the fitness of our armed forces."

Citing multiple U.S. officials, the Post report suggested ground operations could involve both conventional infantry and special operations elements, but would not yet rise to the level of a full-scale invasion.

Decisions on whether or not to green light operations, which would put U.S. troops at substantially more risk to Iranian threats, now rest with President Donald Trump.

“It’s the job of the Pentagon to make preparations in order to give the commander in chief maximum optionality,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement provided to Military Times. “It does not mean the president has made a decision.”

The Post’s report comes as U.S. military assets continue to flood the region. On Friday, U.S. Marines and sailors assigned to the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group arrived in U.S. Central Command waters.

The group, which is led by the America-class amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli and includes the embarked 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, departed earlier this month from its homeport of Sasebo, Japan.

The Pentagon has also confirmed elements from the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters and a brigade combat team are slated to deploy to the Middle East. Based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the 82nd acts as the Army’s rapid-response force and is often among the first units sent to respond to emerging crises.

The report also comes on the heels of an Iranian missile and drone attack on Friday that injured a dozen U.S. service members at Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia. Two of the 12 injuries are considered to be serious.

The strike also reportedly damaged multiple U.S. aircraft, including an E-3 Sentry AWACS and multiple KC-135 tankers.

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

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

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

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

Two of the 12 personnel, all of whom were reportedly inside an installation building at the time of the attack, are in serious condition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So have they?

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

His math was off by thousands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National Defense Areas: ‘Declared a restricted area’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Mexico National Defense Area was just the beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blurring missions: From G-BOSS to drones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buoys: A giant divider down the Rio Grande

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s the illusion of national security.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The baseballs were placed at the gravesites of:

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

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

Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

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

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

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

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

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

1. Baron von Steuben: Fraud Turned Hero

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

And yet in America, he became a hero.

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

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

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

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

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

2. Casimir Pułaski: No English, all courage

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

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

Enter Casimir Pułaski.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Michael Kováts: Hungry for battle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His command would, alas, be short.

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

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

6. Bernardo de Gálvez: Our Spaniard in Louisiana

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

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

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

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

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

7. The Marquis de Lafayette: You know this guy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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