The Chaplain Corps, the Navy’s oldest staff corps, is part of that tradition. That is why Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent directive is deeply concerning.

The defense secretary directed military chaplains to keep their rank but no longer display it on their uniforms. Instead, they will wear only religious insignia.

He describes the change as a way to show that a chaplain is “first and foremost a chaplain, and an officer second.” That is not a narrow administrative change; it announces a dangerous principle.

The real question is: What comes next if the Pentagon decides some commissioned officers should be treated as less than others?

If chaplains are to be presented as clergy first and officers second, what prevents future political appointees from applying the same logic to other staff corps?

Military physicians are doctors first in their training and vocation. Judge advocates are lawyers first in their professional formation. Nurses, dentists and medical service officers all enter the force with distinct professional identities joined to a military commission.

Those identities are intentionally integrated. Staff corps professionals are effective precisely because they are also officers, entrusted with authority and accountability inside a military system.

That is why rank matters.

Rank is not decoration. It signals responsibility, authority and accountability. Over time, staff corps officers do not cease to be professionals; they become senior advisors whose expertise carries greater institutional weight because it is joined to a commission in the armed forces and to the duties that commission carries.

That commission is not merely administrative; it reflects a sworn obligation under the Constitution and within the chain of command. Hiding rank while insisting it still exists symbolically diminishes that commission.

This is especially misguided in the chaplaincy.

The chaplain corps has always embodied a deliberate dual role. A chaplain is both a religious leader and a commissioned officer. That tension is not a design flaw. It is the design.

I saw this firsthand as a junior officer. In disciplinary proceedings, the chaplain could offer insight about a service member that the chain of command might not know, but ought to consider.

That counsel carried weight, not only because they were a religious leader, but because they were a commissioned officer who understood discipline, morale and good order. Their role was made possible, not weakened, by that commission.

I also saw chaplains serve across lines of rank, belief and circumstance. As a Protestant, I sometimes sought counsel from Roman Catholic and Jewish chaplains. That was evidence of what military chaplaincy is meant to be: a trusted institution inside a pluralistic force.

Reducing chaplains to religious identity alone does not clarify their mission; it distorts it by implying that military rank contaminates ministry rather than enabling it.

Hegseth argues that removing rank insignia will make junior personnel more comfortable approaching chaplains with sensitive issues. But service members already approach senior physicians for medical care, JAG officers for legal advice and chaplains for confidential counseling because of professional trust, not insignia.

If troops are reluctant to seek help, the answer is not symbolic rank erasure but a command climate that reinforces trust in professional confidentiality.

More troubling is the precedent. Once civilian leadership redefines one staff corps by stripping visible rank, the door opens to doing the same elsewhere.

Today, the claim is that chaplains should look less like officers. Tomorrow, perhaps military lawyers are told they should look less like officers because they are guardians of justice, or doctors because they are healers first. The specific rationale will change. The institutional damage will not.

The Navy places chaplains alongside JAG, Medical Corps, Nurse Corps, Dental Corps, Supply Corps and other staff corps communities. That reflects a longstanding truth: The U.S. military depends on highly trained professional officers whose expertise must remain fully integrated into the officer corps, not symbolically detached from it.

A military serious about professionalism does not create two classes of officers, one of them told that its rank exists but should no longer be visible. Regardless of how they receive their commission, they are still officers in the military.

If this directive stands, chaplains will be the first proof of concept. The larger danger is not to this one group alone. It is to the principle that professional expertise and a military commission belong together.

The Pentagon should reverse course, withdraw the directive and reaffirm that chaplains, like all staff corps officers, serve both as professionals and as commissioned officers.

Dave Petri is a retired Navy Commander and currently the communications director for National Security Leaders for America.

The global price of oil continues to skyrocket as Iran’s missiles and drones hit vital infrastructure in Arab Gulf states. Billion-dollar American radar systems have also been targeted and destroyed across the Middle East by Iran, seemingly degrading U.S. defenses.

U.S. military presence near Iran includes dozens of locations and tens of thousands of troops in harm’s way. This raises the question: If a missile is launched from Iran toward a U.S. military base in the region, how do service members know in time to stay safe?

The United States and its allies have built a layered system to watch the skies day and night. This system uses satellites in space, radar on the ground, ships at sea and aircraft in the air. It also depends on well-trained military members from U.S. Space Command who make quick decisions with the data. As a former U.S. Air Force officer and now aerospace and national security law professor at the University of Mississippi, I’ve studied the vast network of alliances and systems that make this happen.

Patriot air defense interception is costly: Here’s how it works

Together, these tools form a missile defense network that can spot danger early and give warnings. The fastest way to spot a missile is from space. U.S. satellites, like the U.S. Space Force’s Space-Based Infrared System, circle high above Earth. These billion-dollar satellites, the crown jewels of missile defense, can spot the bright heat from a missile launch almost instantly.

When a missile is fired, it creates a strong enough heat signal to be seen in space. The satellites detect this heat using sensitive, infrared sensors and send an alert within seconds. This early warning is critical. It gives the military on the ground or at sea time to get defense systems ready.

The warning signal from space is then received on the ground by systems known as the U.S. Space Force’s Joint Tactical Ground Stations. The signal is sent from space using secure satellite communications, received by these ground stations and then quickly distributed to other parts of the missile defense network.

Radar to detect and track missiles

But satellites cannot do everything to detect and track missiles. They need help from systems on Earth. After a missile is launched, ground-based radars take over from the initial satellite signal. Radars work by sending out radio waves. When those waves hit an object, like a missile, they bounce back. The radar then uses that information to track where the object is and where it is going throughout its flight.

The U.S. uses both short and long-range radars together. One powerful, long-range radar is the AN/FPS-132 Upgraded Early Warning Radar. It can see missiles from over 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) away and track them as they travel. Another key system is the U.S. Army’s AN/TPY-2 Surveillance Transportable Radar. This radar has a range of almost 2,000 miles (3,219 kilometers) and looks more closely at the missile to provide more information about the threat. TPY-2 systems typically sit right next to weapons systems that will destroy the missile to ensure the timely relay of tracking data.

In sum, satellites spot the launch and radars follow the missile through the sky until defense systems destroy it.

However, Iranian forces recently struck both a TPY-2 in Jordan and a FPS-132 in Qatar. These systems are expensive and difficult to quickly replace. This has required the U.S. to move an additional TPY-2 from Korea to place it in the Middle East.

U.S. missile defense tracking was certainly degraded by losing these resources, but other radars are still part of the network. For example, the U.S. Space Force operates another FPS-132 in the U.K., which could potentially provide radar support to the Middle East.

In addition to ground and space-based sensors, U.S. Navy ships carry powerful radar systems as part of their Aegis Combat System, known as the AN/SPY-1, which can provide up to 200 miles (322 kilometers) of coverage. Ships can sail closer to areas where threats may come from and help fill gaps that land-based radars cannot cover.

U.S. Air Force aircraft also play a big role. Planes like the E-3 Sentry can watch large areas using radar from the sky. Drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper can stay in the air for long periods and track activity below with radar and sensors. These moving sensors help the system stay flexible. If one area needs more coverage or is degraded, ships and aircraft can move there to fill in.

Why drones are harder to catch

Drones require a different set of tracking tools and have proven more difficult to destroy than missiles from Iran. The legacy systems are simply better suited to missiles than new drone technology. To detect drones, the U.S. typically uses several tools: radar; radio signal tracking, which can pick up control signals; and cameras and other sensors, which can see drones directly.

Missiles are fast and hot, which makes them easier to detect with the current systems. Iranian drones, such as the Shahed system, are different. Their heat signature is often minimal due to using gas-powered engines not easily detected by infrared sensors. Without this heat signature, that initial warning cue is delayed, making it difficult for radar to know what to track.

Drones are usually smaller and fly low to the ground, making them hard to see on radar. They can be hidden by buildings or tough to distinguish from birds and other objects. Some are made of materials that do not show up well on radar, such as fiberglass and plastic. Others move slowly, which can make them harder to notice or stand out.

Many of Iran’s drones do not show up on radio signal detection systems because they cannot be remotely controlled. These drones are programmed with GPS coordinates and navigate themselves to a target.

Multiple methods

No single method works all the time to defend against drone attacks. Instead, these tools work together to find and track drones. The U.S. and its allies continue to improve their systems to catch both missiles and drones. For example, the U.S. is in discussions to buy acoustics sensors from Ukraine, which can hear drones coming when they cannot be seen using other methods.

New sensors, better software and faster communication will all help strengthen defenses. The goal is simple: Detect threats earlier, respond faster and hit the target faster.

Aaron Brynildson is a law instructor at the University of Mississippi.

What I did know was that I had already spent nearly two decades developing the tactical and operational skills required of a Marine officer through professional military education, various command and staff assignments, and multiple overseas deployments. I did not need additional instruction in tactics, the mechanics of military operations or further cultivation of the warrior ethos that years of military service had already instilled. What I needed at that stage of my career was a broader perspective on strategy and leadership.

And that is precisely what the fellowship provided.

The Pentagon’s recent decision to eliminate Senior Service College fellowships at Ivy League and other leading civilian universities deserves reconsideration. These fellowships help prepare senior officers for strategic responsibilities while also giving civilian students and scholars greater insight into the complexities of employing military power. By the time fellows are selected, they have already demonstrated the tactical, operational and joint competencies expected of Senior Service College candidates. Programs like this build on that foundation by immersing officers in the intellectual debates that shape national strategy.

Conversations at Yale were never one-sided and emphasized critical thinking when examining complex issues. I participated in seminars alongside some of the nation’s most accomplished scholars and practitioners. Professors John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy, along with the late Charles Hill, served as my primary mentors. I shared an office with Ambassador John Negroponte, who offered valuable insights on global affairs, and I had frequent opportunities for one-on-one conversations with distinguished policymakers, journalists and authors.

Engaging with thinkers and practitioners of that caliber challenged me to examine national security problems from a vantage point I would not have had at a military service college. Colleagues who attended fellowships at other leading universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins and MIT had similar experiences.

I was well aware of Yale’s past relationship with the military before arriving on campus. Like several Ivy League schools, Yale implemented policies during the Vietnam War that reduced the presence of active-duty military personnel at the university and had only recently reestablished its ROTC program when I arrived. Coming straight from a deployment to Afghanistan, a few friends joked that I might find the atmosphere less welcoming in New Haven than in Helmand Province. Nothing could have been further from the truth, and that kind of thinking reflects some of the inaccurate and outdated stereotypes that persist between the military and academia — stereotypes that programs like these fellowships help overcome.

Yale, like other civilian universities that host military fellows, also benefited from the exchange. Much of my time there involved sharing my experiences with members of the university community who were eager to better understand how the military functions. Many welcomed the opportunity to engage with someone who had spent much of his life in uniform, and I soon found myself invited to participate in seminars and panel discussions across campus where military insight was often lacking. Some of the best students I have ever met regularly stopped by my office with questions sparked by events in the news, trying to understand how civilian casualties occur in combat or how commanders balance protecting noncombatants with accomplishing the mission and safeguarding their forces.

The Pentagon has argued that these fellowships expose officers to ideological environments that do not align with the military’s needs and that professional military education institutions can provide everything officers require. That was not my experience. Programs like the one at Yale allow senior officers to engage directly with scholars and future policymakers who might otherwise have little or no exposure to those serving in the military. This interaction actually helps reduce misconceptions on both sides and strengthens the civil-military dialogue on which national strategy depends.

As someone who later spent eight years teaching at the U.S. Naval War College, I have enormous respect for the role our professional military education institutions play. Service colleges are essential for preparing officers for higher command and increasing responsibility. Educational opportunities at leading civilian universities offer something that cannot easily be replicated in a military classroom, and together they form a complementary system for developing future strategic leaders.

At a time when the United States faces increasingly complex global challenges, developing leaders who can think across disciplines is more important than ever. Before dismantling programs that have long contributed to the intellectual development of the officer corps, the Pentagon should carefully reconsider the full value they provide to the military and the nation it serves.

Craig Wonson is a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel and combat veteran who served for 32 years on active duty. He was the first Marine Corps Fellow in Yale University’s International Security Studies and Grand Strategy programs, and later taught at the U.S. Naval War College.

Then they get elected.

Standing next to a veteran for a photo or soundbite costs nothing. It requires no courage, no compromise and no work. It fits effortlessly into campaign messaging, where symbolism is rewarded and accountability is absent. But governing is where promises are supposed to turn into policy.

Recent Congresses rank among the least productive in modern history, paralyzed by dysfunction, partisan infighting and an apparent inability to do the basic job voters sent them to Washington to do. Veterans pay the price for that inaction. When Congress stalls, veterans wait longer for care, benefits and justice they have already earned.

Take the Major Richard Star Act, for example. This DAV-supported bipartisan legislation would fix a long-standing injustice that strips combat-injured veterans of the full benefits they earned through sacrifice. It has broad support on both sides of the aisle and has been championed for years. And yet Congress still hasn’t finished the job. Veterans are told to wait — again — while lawmakers find time for partisan theater.

Even worse, Congress routinely hides behind budget tricks like PAYGO, short for “pay as you go,” a rule that requires Congress to offset new federal spending with cuts or revenue elsewhere. This self-imposed, arcane get-out-of-jail-free-card is a convenient excuse to delay or deny veteran legislation. It’s waived for other priorities, but when it comes time to do right by veterans, suddenly the rules are ironclad. That’s not fiscal responsibility — it’s moral cowardice.

We hear endless speeches praising our service. But respect without action is meaningless. Veterans’ issues are complex, but every member of Congress asked for this job. Each of them raised their hand knowing it would be tough. Difficulty is not an excuse for failure.

Veterans are often reluctant to demand more. We’re trained to endure, adapt and push forward without complaint. Too many politicians exploit that, assuming we’ll accept delays, half-measures and excuses.

Veterans deserve better than applause lines and empty promises. And that’s why DAV remains so committed to ensuring these promises are kept. Our mission is to advocate — loudly and relentlessly, just as we are this week during the 2026 DAV Mid-Winter Conference in Washington — for veterans, their families, caregivers and survivors.

And we will continue to remind Congress of this simple truth: Honoring service isn’t a campaign moment. It’s a responsibility measured by laws passed, promises kept and lives improved, not by how many veterans appear in a campaign ad.

Barry Jesinoski is the national adjutant and CEO of Disabled American Veterans (DAV).

During my junior year at West Point in 2017, I attended a ceremony honoring the namesake of the school’s newest barracks: Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. This was the first building at West Point named after an African American, and I glowed with pride knowing that the academy was finally celebrating a person who looked like me.

It was a meaningful, but ultimately insufficient, gesture: Less than 100 meters from Benjamin O. Davis barracks was one named for Robert E. Lee, one of almost two dozen Confederate monuments on West Point’s campus at the time.

Walking to class every day, I passed the plaque for the Lee Award for Mathematics in Thayer Hall, complete with the inscription, “Donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.” After class, I often ran down Lee Road, through Lee Housing Complex, to Lee Gate. As I sat in the library on the weekends, a grand portrait of Lee in Confederate gray loomed over me, while a haunting depiction of a Black man in tattered clothes walked barefoot alongside Lee’s horse in the painting’s background.

The years I spent in the shadow of West Point’s Confederate monuments made me who I am today. My character development, the cornerstone of a West Point education, was forged by countless hours spent reading books, writing papers and sitting in lectures about moral courage and West Point’s guiding values of duty, honor and country.

But my understanding of actually living those values, being what we called “a leader of character,” was shaped in resistance to my alma mater’s Confederate idols and totems. I was not alone in my feelings of anger and dissatisfaction.

This collective feeling drove my friends and me to organize the “Hot Topics Forum” in 2017. At this event, likely for the first time since the Civil War, more than 200 members of the West Point community, including our commanding generals, gathered to discuss West Point’s memory of the Confederacy.

Speakers included those from both sides of the issue, including a white woman who shared how her Southern heritage shaped her understanding of and appreciation for Confederate monuments.

She was followed by a white cadet named Rob, also from the South, who grew up having few friendships with people of other races. During his freshman year, he hung a Confederate battle flag, which he considered a symbol of honor and tradition, in his barracks room.

He later spoke with other cadets, many of them Black, who explained how the flag was a distressing symbol of a dark and painful history. These conversations broadened his understanding of what the symbols meant, leading him to remove his Confederate flag and encourage the school to do the same with their Confederate symbols.

Following the forum, several people shared how hearing those personal stories changed their minds about Confederate monuments. I challenged some of West Point’s senior leaders: “Now that your mind is changed, what will you do about it?”

Each time, I was told that they would not take any action because West Point “couldn’t get ahead of the Army,” which still had nine bases named for Confederate soldiers.

After graduating from West Point and commissioning as a transportation officer, I was sent to one of those bases, Fort Lee, Virginia, to begin training as an Army logistician. The move to Virginia led me to discover parts of my family’s roots.

Every time I called my great-grandma Stith, she would say, “You know, you got lots of cousins down there in Virginia!” Her husband, Carroll Stith, was born in 1916 in Sussex County, part of Virginia’s “Black Belt.” The following year, just 30 miles north of my great-grandfather’s birthplace, Camp Lee opened.

Growing up with little knowledge of my family history, the South always felt distant. But when I learned about this historical intersection between my great-granddad’s childhood and the opening of Camp Lee, I thought back to a trip I’d made to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

There I gazed at dozens of steel coffins hanging overhead, each engraved with the names of a county where a lynching had occurred. I didn’t know it then, but above me hung the names of people lynched in the counties where my great-granddad was born and where I lived while serving at Fort Lee.

It is this legacy of racial violence that ties these two stories together. My great-grandfather and his brother fled north during the Great Migration, joining millions of refugees from the campaign of racial terrorism throughout the Postbellum South. As Black families were being driven from their homes, the U.S. Army decided to celebrate Robert E. Lee, the leader of a violent rebellion to maintain white supremacy and African slavery.

Like me, great-granddad Stith was an Army logistician. He was part of the extraordinary logistical effort during World War II to sustain a war on two fronts and on opposite sides of the globe, executed in large part by units of Black soldiers.

He deployed to the Pacific with a segregated unit to build airfields and roads, joining not only the Black truck drivers on the famous Red Ball Express, but also Black soldiers serving as engineers, quartermasters, construction workers and supply troops that sustained the U.S. military around the world.

I never heard the stories of Black World War II veterans until I searched for stories about my great-granddad. Looking for those stories brought me to discover the soldiers from the 320th Balloon Barrage Battalion, who were among the first to land at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

As much as I was inspired by the heroism of Black soldiers like Waverly Woodson Jr., I was angry that their stories and so many other were not included in movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” in hundreds of pages of Stephen Ambrose books and many more of the war’s most famous retellings.

By leaving out the contributions of women and people of color, storytellers sidestep the contradictions and complications their presence brings to this American story. But it was these contradictions that I found most compelling because I saw my own experiences in them.

The Black GIs fought what they called the Double Victory Campaign, seeking to defeat fascism abroad and racism at home. Many of their stories took me back to Virginia.

The bases where I served were where many segregated units trained before deploying to Europe and the Pacific. Before landing on the beaches of Normandy, some of the soldiers who later joined the 320th Balloon Barrage Battalion trained at Fort Eustis, Virginia, where I served for almost three years as a lieutenant. I can still remember feeling chills run through my body as I read the words of a soldier from New York: “I never knew what discrimination was until I went to Fort Eustis.” At the same time, Black soldiers training at then-Camp Lee recalled being slapped, threatened and called racial slurs daily.

One of the Black soldiers during that period was Arthur Gregg. When Gregg served as a second lieutenant at Fort Lee in 1950, he was banned from the segregated officers’ club.

In 2023, I watched from the audience as then-94-year-old retired Lt. Gen. Gregg walked to the podium on the day Fort Lee was redesignated to Fort Gregg-Adams, part of a congressional effort to bar military installations from honoring Confederate leaders. He stood in front of that very same officers’ club and watched as his name was hung in front of the door.

The ceremony carried the unmistakable mood of a family reunion. Dozens of Black women, descendants of the women who served in the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion with Lt. Col. Charity Adams, were in attendance, showing off their matching white T-shirts with Gregg and Adams’ faces printed on the front, and the words “From Lee … To Gregg-Adams” written on the back.

I was so excited that the place where my soldiers would learn our craft would be named after people we could be proud of. And more than that, people who would finally represent the diversity of the men and women who served there, past and present.

As I drove through the gate that day and saw banners with Gregg and Adams’ faces prominently displayed on every light pole, I felt a weight lift. I no longer had to carry the resentment toward the fact that the same symbols that intimidated my great-grandfather and his community were still standing as a barrier to inclusion for me and other soldiers.

After twice serving at the base near Petersburg, once while it was named Fort Lee and again after it was redesignated as Fort Gregg-Adams, I took command of a company of Army logisticians. Today, people of color make up the majority of the logistics branches; Black service members represent exactly 50%. In the transportation company I command, almost half my soldiers are Black and more than a quarter are Latino.

Every single one of them starts their Army career at the Sustainment Center of Excellence, which, after the 2025 decision to restore former base names, is located at a place once again called Fort Lee.

When I first learned about the reversion to Confederate base names, my bewildered frustration quickly led towards despair. So many of my assumptions about the world and how to better it were turned upside down. There was a good faith assumption behind Hot Topics. We believed that if we could connect with people, we could change their minds, and through that, change policy.

The decision to remove Confederate names was proof that our stories were finally heard. And because of this, the reversal to Confederate names felt like open mockery.

Compounding the hurt, some of the people around me eagerly embraced the change. They laughed as it was all torn down. In a meeting with fellow commissioned and noncommissioned officers in my battalion, a chorus of smiling white men shouted almost in unison, “It’s called Fort Bragg now!” at their first chance to start using Confederate names again. I waited for someone around me to express the same outrage and betrayal I was feeling. But it never came.

One afternoon, I got a call from my granddad. When I answered, he skipped the pleasantries and asked, “How can you keep putting up with this?” I could sense the anger and concern in his voice. He then moved directly to Confederate base names, saying, “They are dismantling everything that people like you and your friends fought to correct.”

That comment knocked the wind out of me. Normally, my grandparents overflow with pride when they talk about the Army. My grandma wears my West Point necklace religiously, as my granddad does with his West Point baseball cap. They jump at any chance to talk about their West Point grandson, even introducing me to their neighbors as “Capt. Jack Lowe.”

But even all the love of a proud grandparent could not stop them from being filled with shame and disappointment in the Army I now represent. Even as I continue to put on the uniform, I share many of my grandparents’ feelings.

But from the stories of Black soldiers who came before me, I learned that I’m not the first to feel this way, and unfortunately, I won’t be the last. The Double Victory Campaign continues.

Jack Lowe is a captain in the U.S. Army Logistics Branch with years of experience serving in transportation companies, including during a deployment to Poland in support of Operation Atlantic Resolve. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2019 and earned a degree in sociology. He is the first Black cadet to be awarded the Fulbright scholarship and earned a master’s degree in cultural criminology at Lund University in Sweden. His academic work, published in the Nordic Journal of Criminology, analyzes how narratives about crime and immigration shape the boundaries of acceptable punishment and national identity.

The author is writing this essay in his personal capacity, with no association to any official military position. The views expressed are those of the individual only and not those of the U.S. Army or the Department of Defense.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

This omission is not without consequence. One of the strongest predictors of birthing mothers’ mental health is partner support. That finding is not new, controversial or theoretical. A partner’s capacity to provide support is directly shaped by their own psychological health; when nonbirthing partners experience untreated distress, depression or anxiety this predictably erodes their ability to support the birthing partner.

Further, perceived partner support during pregnancy lowers maternal emotional distress postpartum, and even correlates with reduced distress in infants, demonstrating the importance of supportive relationships in both parent and child well-being.

Decades of research and federal policy discussions, including the last two National Defense Authorization Acts, acknowledge the importance of family mental health by framing access to behavioral health care and early identification of risk as readiness priorities — emphasizing prevention during periods of elevated risk. In practice, however, clinics screen birth mothers, while the nonbirthing partners’ mental health remains virtually ignored. That is until a crisis forces attention. Such crises could be prevented or significantly reduced if partners were intentionally screened and supported. Preventative care for partners remains largely absent.

Even setting aside the growing body of evidence that fathers experience significant psychological and emotional changes during the pregnancy and postpartum period, the readiness argument alone should demand change. Men account for almost 84% of the active-duty Army. That means the majority of the force is navigating the perinatal period and transition to parenthood — a time of known increased risk — without formalized support. Research indicates approximately 8% to 10% of new fathers experience significant depressive symptoms, some studies show up to 15% or higher when anxiety is included — rates likely mirrored in the active-duty population. These unmet mental health needs very likely affect new parents’ readiness and performance.

If we are serious about force readiness, we should work to identify and mitigate risk before it manifests as untreated psychological distress, substance misuse, family violence or relationship dissolution. These outcomes do not just affect individual families, they degrade unit readiness, retention and long-term force health.

Currently, pregnant service members and Tricare beneficiaries have the opportunity to be screened for depression an estimated 10 to 15 times before the child is even born. Yet clinical practice guidelines do not recommend screening nonbirthing partners.

This gap in parental support extends beyond health care. Active Army pregnant service members are also enrolled in Pregnancy Postpartum Physical Training, or P3T, which at most installations includes one day of education a week that covers topics such as emotional regulation, relationship changes and available resources to support the entire family system. Yet no comparable standardized touchpoints exist for partners, despite their central and critical role in maternal and infant outcomes.

The absence of screening and education for the partner does not reduce the burden. Instead, it shifts it by implicitly placing responsibility for the entire family system’s psychological well-being (and ability to triage it with resources) on the mother at a time when she herself is navigating immense physical, emotional and relational change.

A pilot initiative underway at Fort Carson suggests what many clinicians already know: Fathers want to be involved. They care; they simply lack a platform, language and an invitation to engage. When given structured opportunities, they participate.

This initiative meets nonbirthing partners once per trimester and twice postpartum (6 weeks and 3 months) to screen for depression, emotional lability and relational distress. It provides psychoeducation aligned with their stage in the perinatal period and shares resources to support them and their family. Supporting the entire family system is not a distraction from maternal care but an enhancement to it.

To address this gap, DHA should build on pilot initiatives like the one at Fort Carson, which systematically engages nonbirthing partners throughout the perinatal period. This means implementing routine screenings for depression, anxiety and relational stress; providing stage-specific psychoeducation; and connecting partners to resources that support both their well-being and the family system.

Additionally, this calls for DHA to invest in research to better understand the experiences of fathers and nonbirthing partners, using these insights to develop evidence-based standards of care that fully integrate the entire family into perinatal support.

This is not just a maternal health issue — it is a population health and readiness issue, and addressing it proactively strengthens families, service members and the Army as a whole.

Capt. Lauren Finch currently serves as an active-duty Army behavioral health officer and licensed social worker currently at Fort Carson, Colorado. She has served in both operational and clinical roles, and holds a Master of Social Work through the Army’s program through the University of Kentucky. Her work focuses on perinatal mental health, family readiness, retention and policies, and improving behavioral health access and outcomes for the family system. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy of the department of the Army, Defense Health Agency, the Defense Department or the U.S. government.

Over the last quarter-century, especially since the war on terrorism began, the United States has produced a quiet army of combat veterans. Many carry injuries you can see: shrapnel wounds, limps, missing appendages. Others carry scars you cannot: the flinch at fireworks, a 3 a.m. stare at the ceiling, the sudden urge to check the locks three times before bed.

“Combat” is a slippery word. One man stands 200 meters from the blast and tells the story at the bar. Another stands 20 meters away, pulls his friend’s helmet from the wreckage and never speaks of it again. Same explosion, different wars inside their heads.

I know, because I hunted roadside bombs in Iraq as a mobilized reservist. That earned me a Combat Action Badge, an Army Commendation Medal and a Meritorious Unit citation.

It also earned me a mind that short-circuited in Afghanistan from being rocketed and seeing a 747 slam down Bagram’s runway in a ball of fire. Nineteen months of combat exposure, then 14 years of holding my body together. The military teaches combat arms how to apply violence to accomplish the mission. They don’t teach us how to process the wreckage afterwards.

My knees, back and shoulders never filed a disability claim, but my brain did. While my body held up to the rigors of service, my mind broke under the strains of combat.

From 2016 to 2025, I attended nine veteran retreats. This is not a retreat brochure, though I’ll describe some of them here. This is a field report from the inside of one veteran’s head, written for the veteran who still wonders if their next breath is worth the effort, and for the civilian who wants to understand why some of us keep signing up for another week in the woods with strangers who smell like gun oil and hope.

The first: Sea kayaking

My first retreat was sea kayaking in 2016. I don’t remember how I found the program. I only remember my wife packing my bag with the same careful hands that waved goodbye to the man who left in 2004 and never quite came home the same.

Ten of us launched from Harkers Island into the Outer Banks. None of us could paddle worth a damn. By day three, we moved like a pod, cutting eelgrass and laughing at dolphins riding our wakes like we were worth following.

On the last night, we camped on a barrier island. Wild horses, possibly left by Spanish shipwrecks centuries ago, galloped through the surf at dawn.

When the van pulled away for the airport, I buried my face in a ball cap so no one would see my tears.

I came home with salt-crusted gear and a new hobby — kayaking. More importantly, I came home with a question I had not asked in years: “What else can I still learn?” The answer was a bachelor of arts in English, 3.7 GPA, earned on night shifts and day classes.

I also came home knowing there was a path back to my family’s trust, and the monster they now lived with might still be worth saving. However, I was not managing my malady but ignoring it, believing that my new goal would change everything. It didn’t.

By 2019, PTSD had eaten my career. A supervisor who hated veterans watched me come apart. COVID walked in and finished the job. The final straw was the VA stamping me as “unemployable.” Stagnation, isolation and a complete loss of self-worth — I thought this was my fate now.

It was like standing in a hallway full of doors all simultaneously shutting and locking, a booming slam and click. I felt my opportunities vanish. I had no idea how I was supposed to take care of my family, much less myself. In my despair, I had forgotten the hope I’d previously found. My .45 started looking like the easiest door left again.

Hiking and climbing

Fortunately, my wife located an application for an Outward Bound retreat in my browser history and filled it out herself. Same deal: 10 veterans, two instructors, no cell phones. This time, the classroom was granite and rope, with a group pushing harder than they thought they could go.

I learned I wasn’t the only one who still tasted cordite 10 years after the last blast or was still waking up covered in a cold sweat. Surrounded by fellow warriors, I felt safe. They felt safe.

We knew we had all seen “it”: ambushes, mortars, rockets and IEDs; the close “whizzz” of a missed shot; washing our brothers’ blood from our clothes and trucks. We knew we had each other’s backs and owned the terrifying memories with the medals to match.

I learned self-forgiveness wasn’t surrender, and that it was the only way to stop punishing myself and the people whom I hadn’t yet pushed away.

I came home with a new hobby — climbing — and a spreadsheet from a brother that listed every veteran retreat in America. I went application-crazy. My wife smiled for the first time in years and bought bigger suitcases.

Another retreat gave me three days in a 10th Mountain Division hut above Aspen, Colorado. Vietnam vets had guided the program; who better? The genius move was having a therapist hike in with us, which finally lowered the drawbridge on my anxiety and let imprisoned memories out.

We read Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and others around the fire.

For the first time in years, I was unguarded. No one flinched. That’s when it hit me: Not only was I forgivable, I had seen terrible things people shouldn’t see. I couldn’t process those memories and that wasn’t my fault. I felt validated.

I then realized I had allowed PTSD to turn me into a remote-control IED, the thing I feared most, blowing up suddenly, shredding the people closest to me without warning. I walked out of those mountains knowing the detonator wasn’t in my enemy’s hand anymore — it was in mine.

Tools, feats and brotherhood

In Texas, the invitation was combat vets only. My first all-trigger-pullers retreat. Yoga at dawn, equine therapy at noon, group circle at dusk.

What they served up wasn’t inspiration; it was tools. Devices, methods and exposure to ways of living I hadn’t known existed. I sat across from men whose shared experiences mirrored my own and found the forgiveness I didn’t know I still needed.

Shrapnel left in spines. Bullet wounds. Burn wards. It mattered.

The brotherhood was immediate and absolute. I learned to be present. The warrior-turned-yogi gave me the single most useful explanation I’ve ever heard about it:

“It’s being in the now, without reservation, and most importantly, without judgment.

It’s refusing to live where your memories insist you belong.

It’s breathing this breath, right here, and being grateful for whatever life you have left.”

For the first time, I understood presence wasn’t some hippie buzzword. It was the only place the war couldn’t follow me. Stay in the now, or the past will keep detonating the present. That standard operating procedure has saved my life more times than body armor ever did.

One place after another, one set of amazing people and veterans at each. I was not just feeling better, I was surrounding myself with better people.

In Alaska, I was again honored to be with a four-man team of warriors. We buzzed around on ATVs and sluiced for gold. Rain canceled the salmon fishing, but Denali still punched through the clouds like a promise. There was no cost of admission, simply a nod and a handshake; no therapy, no modality required.

That fall, I rappelled 210 feet down the Gunsight Notch of Seneca Rocks in West Virginia, boots skimming lichen, heart in my throat, grinning like a kid who just discovered gravity can be negotiated with.

Recreation in amazing places forced my brain to stop seeing the things that hurt it. Instead of looking back at trauma, I was looking forward to the next adventure and more healing. I was staying present.

A few years went by while I digested what I had learned; I climbed, I kayaked.

I lost my big brother suddenly; it devastated me. Several men I had served with also passed. Things felt bleak again, but I was still working with all the tools I had gained. I navigated through a rough patch because my paddle was strong, my rope was solid and most importantly, my team was powerful.

Another opportunity reached out. My wife kept smiling, and my kids liked me again.

This retreat handed me skis, lessons and gave me a new lease on life. I carved my first turns and overcame fear. We ate like kings, did yoga together and had discussions on “being enough.” I shared my story with strangers without tears for the first time and surprised myself.

An application to discovery

I was very nearly a statistic. The numbers were all stacked against me, but I found a way to stay in the fight. The first step to getting better wasn’t medication, it was an application. If we never sign up, we never go.

Undoubtedly, many opportunities are available out there. Not all are the same. Some organizations’ focus seems to be on federal dollars, not altruism.

There’s no holy grail for PTSD; no one-size-fits-all modality, and no ritual that makes it all better. But there is something offered at these events that is truly special: resilience to stay in the fight, be present, end isolation and stagnation, and find self-forgiveness, self-worth, and a renewed sense of purpose.

I am finally the father and husband I was supposed to be before war and PTSD, and that’s a gift from strangers and donors who will never know how much it made a difference.

If you are a civilian, know that your tax dollars and donations buy more than medals — they buy wild horses at dawn and a man who can look his wife in the eye again.

I still flinch at fireworks. I still check the locks. But I also own a kayak, a climbing rope and a pair of skis that fit like forgiveness.

If you are a veteran staring at the ceiling at 0300, know that eight strangers in kayaks taught me the world is still wide and worth seeing.

Casey Elliott was born and raised in Minnesota. He has a bachelor’s degree in English with a writing emphasis from Winona State University. Between retreats, he helps other veterans get their benefits, plays with his two dogs (River and Inara), kayaks, climbs and skis. He has been married for 25 years to a truly wonderful person and they have two kids.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Kim Vo wrote the headline.

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

What is less frequently recognized is how this transformation has radically altered the injuries soldiers sustain on the battlefield. Drone warfare has exposed how the medical demands of future wars will require a revolution in battlefield medicine.

For decades, the cornerstone of U.S. battlefield medical training has been tactical combat casualty care, or TCCC. Developed in response to preventable casualties from the Vietnam War and continuously modified by committees of physicians, medics and combat veterans since 1996, TCCC has saved countless lives. Its focus on hemorrhage control, airway management and rapid evacuation was perfectly suited for conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, where blast injuries from improvised explosive devices and small-arms fire predominated and air superiority allowed for relatively rapid medical evacuation.

But the drone-dominated battlefield is different and, just like contemporary technology, more complex. In Ukraine, soldiers are sustaining complicated polytrauma from blasts, high-temperature burns from thermobaric and incendiary munitions and traumatic brain injuries. As anyone can see from the graphic videos posted on social media: Drones strike without warning, evacuation corridors are targeted and casualties sometimes lie untreated for hours or days.

Basic medical instruction given to soldiers today still reflects assumptions rooted in the war on terror such as predictable casualty flows and reliable evacuation timelines. However, in a drone-plagued war, those assumptions will collapse as the front line blurs, our capacity for movement and maneuver is limited and medical personnel become targets.

Our medical priority will no longer solely be to stop the bleeding and evacuate. Casualties will face prolonged field care, repeated blast exposure, horrifying burns and neurological injury on a scale foreign to even our most experienced medical personnel.

Despite the grim situation, there are many paths forward to meet these new challenges.

Initiatives across the U.S. military, such as the Army’s comprehensive medical modernization strategy, are already adapting to contemporary concerns, but there needs to be further awareness of the changes needed.

Some changes will be rooted in education and training. For example, we can fundamentally alter how we teach medical skills in basic training and initial entry pipelines. Hemorrhage control remains essential, although no longer solely sufficient. Soldiers and medics need more advanced education on blast and burn wound management, prolonged field care and neurological injuries. Training, from medics to physicians, must also focus on operating while concealed, dispersed and without immediate evacuation support.

Furthermore, we must rethink the logistics of combat medical care, starting with what is in the Individual First Aid Kit, or IFAK. The modern IFAK is optimized for bleeding control and rapid handoff; however, in a drone-saturated environment, kits should reflect prolonged care realities. Research is required to develop an optimized IFAK for drone warfare, and this need is rapidly approaching. New IFAKs will likely require advanced-burn dressings; tools for managing blast injuries; medications for pain, infection, and neuroprotection; and equipment that balances effectiveness with concealment and weight.

Additionally, the organization and placement of medical units will change because the war in Ukraine has demonstrated that large, centralized aid stations are vulnerable and often untenable. Medical care will be more distributed and mobile with better camouflage and protection via anti-drone netting and air defense capabilities. Inherent to this will also be higher levels of medical autonomy at lower echelons.

Crucially, these challenges are not limited to medicine, and the necessity of transforming battlefield medical care is inseparable from the broader logistical revolution demanded by drone warfare. Supplying medical equipment under constant aerial threat requires rethinking how we maintain, supply and transport our forces. If drones can disrupt convoys and destroy supply depots with impunity, then every logistical branch will be forced to evolve alongside medical services.

We should not wait for American soldiers to be engaged in a drone war to modernize how we train, equip and support those tasked with saving them. Battlefield medicine must evolve at the same pace as battlefield violence, or we risk losing lives we could have saved. Critically, it is up to all of us, at every echelon, to adapt to the needs of tomorrow and win our nation’s wars.

RJ Russel is a 2022 graduate of West Point. He is currently a fourth-year medical student at Harvard Medical School and will soon start an emergency medicine residency in the U.S. Army. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy of the Department of the Army, the Defense Department or the U.S. government.

It does not, and forcing the issue actually weakens U.S. national security.

Much of this is tied to the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system, though specific details of the program have yet to fully emerge. House and Senate appropriators noted in the fiscal defense appropriations bill that “due to insufficient budgetary information, the House and Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittees were unable to effectively assess resources available to specific program elements and to conduct oversight of planned programs and projects for fiscal year 2026 Golden Dome efforts in consideration of the final agreement,” even given that they “support the operational objectives of Golden Dome for national security.”

Additionally, Greenland is repeatedly mentioned in the Trump administration’s recent National Defense Strategy as a place where the U.S. needs guaranteed military access.

US military has a long history in Greenland, from WWII to Cold War

But based on the originating executive order released by the White House in January 2025 and the few related unclassified discussions, Golden Dome is intended to be a multilayered system that would protect the United States from all types of threats: ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hypersonic weapons and even drones. It would be a system of systems that would incorporate many of the existing missile defense architecture’s elements, including the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, intended to defend against ICBMs. It is reported to entail four interceptor layers — three land based, one space based — plus 11 short-range missile defense batteries scattered across the U.S. And it would use various sensors, including one that has been part of the U.S. early-warning network for decades: the ground-based radar at the Space Force’s Pituffik Space Base in Greenland.

But let’s say that the U.S. decides it must expand the U.S. military footprint in Greenland in order to meet (as yet undefined) Golden Dome architecture plans. The terms of the 1951 agreement between the U.S. and Denmark are very flexible. It says that the U.S. has the right “to improve and generally to fit the area for military use” and “to construct, install, maintain, and operate facilities and equipment,” as well as having “the right of free access to and movement between the defense areas through Greenland” and “the right to exercise exclusive jurisdiction over those defense areas in Greenland.”

Precedence exists about how the U.S. and Denmark have dealt with changing missile defense priorities. When the George W. Bush administration wanted to upgrade its radar there, a request to the Danish parliament was unanimously approved in 2004. However, none of the reporting about Golden Dome indicates that new ground-based sensors would be created as part of it, with the focus instead on building space-based sensor networks.

What about placing interceptors in Greenland? Again, under the current military agreement, the U.S. could already do this. But even so, Greenland is not needed as a new interceptor site. The U.S. has 44 GMD interceptors fielded in Alaska and California, and the Missile Defense Agency has received funding to create a third basing site for GMD interceptors at Fort Drum, New York.

This accommodates any need for a more northern position without the requirement to have a site outside the United States. Plus, the number of fielded GMD interceptors has been 44 for over 20 years; these are expensive to build, operate and maintain, and MDA has been focused more on working on upgrades (and struggling to do so) than building out the supply. So it’s not like there is a waiting warehouse full of GMD interceptors. And the GMD system is the only system intended to defend against ICBMs.

Further, forcibly annexing Greenland does nothing to bolster U.S. national security — rather the opposite.

By menacing a NATO ally, the U.S. weakens a military alliance that has served us well for over seven decades. Space Force officials have repeatedly said that one of our strongest assets are our international partners and allies. This move kneecaps strategies put in place by the Space Force to utilize them, including its International Partnership Strategy released in July 2025. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said at the time, “Spacepower is the ultimate team sport. … Therefore, if the service is to achieve its mission to secure our nation’s interests in, from, and to space, then it absolutely must cultivate partnerships with partners upon whom it can depend on.”

Golden Dome is problematic for many reasons, including its astronomical cost, technical complexity and contribution to the weaponization of space. Don’t let it be used to justify the annexation of a NATO ally’s territory as well.

Victoria Samson is chief director of space security and stability for the Secure World Foundation where Krystal Azelton is senior director of program planning.

On the morning of May 25, 2006, I didn’t go out. Capt. Doug Dicenzo invited me to come along to meet some local Iraqi leaders, and I had previously shown him the safer routes to take. But on the day of the meeting, I had other duties to attend to. Truthfully, I had survived enough near misses and just didn’t want to go.

Doug and his gunner, Robert Blair went and were killed by a roadside bomb. Two others were severely wounded.

Their deaths were a failure. My failure. And for nearly 20 years, I have experienced guilt, self-doubt and anger for my decision. Their deaths, preceded by my simple decision, created a black hole; whenever I think of it, I can only see darkness.

Doug joined my company in mid-2005 and his arrival was a relief. His predecessor relied on rank and intimidation, but Doug was something else entirely. There was no doubt where his thoughts went when he twisted his wedding ring during meetings: his wife and son.

Once, a newlywed came with a request: She wanted more time with her husband, so couldn’t someone else drive the Bradley Fighting Vehicle? Doug listened without interruption, pulling his chair away from the desk so they sat as equals. Then he twisted his ring and talked about the challenges military life presented to his own new and growing family. His empathy eclipsed her disappointment.

Robert was a bull-rider, cowboy, soldier and adventurer. In Kuwait, where the empty blue sky settled and shimmered along the burning sand, Bedouins harvested our expended brass casings. Robert, a bridge between cultures, waved them over, their camels trailing behind. He negotiated a trade: MREs for some short camel rides, no casings involved. Doug saw us and, in short order, was riding too.

By May, we were deep in the sectarian war that engulfed Baghdad. I patrolled the neighborhoods of al-Saydiah, al-Baya’a, al-al’Amil and al-Jihad with a cavalry unit. Most of Charlie Company, including Doug and Robert, were in an area south of my platoon where convoy escorts and sparsely populated farms grated against our infantry mentality to take the fight to the enemy.

After two months of patrolling tightly cluttered streets and markets, Charlie Company came north and reunited with us. Doug discussed the dynamics with me: Sunni residents were erecting makeshift barricades to defend against Shia militias. Doug did not like this entrepreneurial approach to neighborhood security since it limited freedom of movement in his area of operations.

I warned him that certain roads were extremely dangerous due to sophisticated roadside bomb strikes. I tapped the map along the side road: “Don’t go here unless you have a good reason. Secure the neighborhoods using different access roads.”

Robert and others were eager to get out into Baghdad proper: take the fight to an enemy littering the city with roadside bombs and creating victims of civil warfare and insurgency alike. Sunni residents sought to keep our American patrols nearby as long as possible. Our proximity kept the militias at bay, at least temporarily. Residents offered us thick, sweet chai and watermelon, hopeful that their hospitality would keep us present longer, even if only by a few bites.

The day that ended their lives began well enough. Doug was excited to head out for a meeting with local leadership. He offered to save me a spot in his Humvee. I declined — burnt down from daily, sleep-warping patrols by this point; plus it was our maintenance day. The truth was, I didn’t want to go.

Other dangerous encounters had scratched that itch to prove myself long ago. Doug and the patrol left early for the meeting with the local council, and I continued with my usual routine.

The crack-boom ripped through the late morning air, the kind of concussive burst of atmosphere that briefly stopped animals in their tracks. I know, because that’s how I reacted walking on the forward operating base as my inner ear registered the disturbance. It wasn’t thunder.

I cannot fully recall that day. The memory shrapnel is not physically harmful, but still dangerous with its own subtle violence. The casualty information came over the radio. The same grids on the map where I tapped out my warning. Orders came swiftly, and I led a patrol to the ambush site to relieve the quick reaction patrol.

I walked out into the street, the spot marked by a jagged crater, oriented toward the opposing lane, the nearby cafe and intersection empty except for soldiers removing concertina wire.

I wanted to hear some good news — that it wasn’t as bad as we suspected. I can’t recall anyone talking. I can’t remember if the broken Humvee was there or gone, its gutted side door a figment of the dreams that would follow.

I do clearly remember the scattered watermelon chunks on the ground. I didn’t remember a melon stand there before; I had, despite my own warnings, patrolled this place of spite.

I stopped and looked at the crater, up and down again. Wait, the watermelon wasn’t right. Moistened globules of road dirt and grime, combined with dark liquid, viscous and drying, lay all around. The realization uncoiled — an instant stretched into a dark moment: These are the pieces of Doug and Robert that did not get collected.

The image of body pieces and memory shrapnel coalesced. I failed to convince them to take another route; I failed to go out myself. My patrol might have found the IED, and if not, it should have been me. I had been assigned to that area for longer.

I’ve tried to pretend the guilt and horror of those deaths don’t exist. I’ve poured sacrifices into it: drink, energy, mistakes, and counseling. The memory rises, interrupting the gentle moments before I drift off to sleep, and at times jerks me by my leg from a deep slumber.

The memory thanks me for my sacrifices and then asks for more, always more. I learned the hard way not to unleash it with celebratory libations that turned sour on holidays and birthdays. No matter how fast I forced myself to run during training, or what accolades I earned later in my career, the memory remains. “You failed, Mike.”

I have searched for hope. My hunt continues.

For two years now, I’ve “done the work” in counseling, with a group and individually.

From debriefs and conversations to counseling sessions and now to friends, family, and professionals, they all assure me it wasn’t my fault.

I dutifully repeat the words, like a test I’ve studied for.

I just don’t believe the answer.

J. Michael Comstock is a veteran of the Iraq War, where he served as a mechanized infantry platoon leader in southwestern Baghdad and later as an intelligence advisor to a Kurdish battalion and an Iraqi Army Brigade south of Kirkuk. He draws on his military experiences to write poetry and prose exploring memory, distant cultures, and, eventually, fresh adventures. He lives with his family in Virginia.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Kim Vo wrote the headlines.

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

That’s why “Groundhog Day” remains a cultural shorthand inside the military for the experience of living inside routine long enough that time itself stops feeling linear.

For service members, the reference to the 1993 film, in which Bill Murray portrays a weatherman trapped in a time loop in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, who’s forced to relive Feb. 2, works because it captures something service members immediately recognize: days repeat, routines harden and progress feels frozen.

Long before modern deployments and rotation schedules, American soldiers were trained to dig in, hold position and stay ready while nothing happened. Patience was not just expected – it was enforced, practiced and rewarded. That rhythm of repetition and delay shaped how wars were fought and how service members learned to endure them.

During the Civil War, waiting became a survival skill. Despite portrayals of constant movement and dramatic charges, much of the conflict was defined by immobility. Armies spent extended periods digging trenches, reinforcing earthworks and watching enemy lines from a distance. Commanders learned quickly that rushing fortified positions often led to catastrophic losses, while patience preserved manpower and momentum.

Modern deployments are still built around long stretches of repetition, where readiness matters more than action and boredom becomes a stressor in its own right. Deployed troops have described days dominated by maintenance cycles, guard shifts and the mental effort of staying sharp while time feels frozen, pushing back against the sense that every day is the same.

This is not an accident or a failure of planning.

Militaries are designed to operate under uncertainty, and uncertainty rarely allows for constant movement. Waiting creates space for observation, coordination and restraint. It prevents impulsive decisions driven by pressure rather than intelligence. More importantly, it conditions service members to stay alert even when nothing appears to be happening.

From the earliest days of service, troops are conditioned to accept delay as normal. You wait to eat. You wait to move. You wait for orders that may change or never come.

These moments are often framed as discipline, but they are also preparation. Combat rarely unfolds on a clean timeline, so the ability to remain ready during prolonged inactivity is a survival skill.

Even in high-tempo operations, waiting dominates. Surveillance missions involve hours of observation for seconds of usable intelligence. Convoys pause repeatedly for coordination and clearance. Naval crews spend days at sea without contact. Aircrews train for years for missions that may never materialize.

“Groundhog Day” resonates with service members because the film’s conflict rests not in danger but in repetition. Murray’s character, Phil Connors, is trapped not by violence but by routine. His escape from reliving the same day repeatedly comes only after he learns to live meaningfully within the time loop. That mirrors how many service members endure long deployments or static assignments. You do not defeat waiting; you adapt to it.

The alarm clock keeps ringing. The waiting continues. And for the military, it always has.

In the summer of 1959, a group of American soldiers began carving trenches in the Greenland ice sheet. Those trenches would become the snow-covered tunnels of Camp Century, a secret Arctic research base powered by a nuclear reactor.

It was located about 150 miles inland from Thule, now Pituffik, a large American military base set up in north-western Greenland after a military agreement with Denmark during world war two.

Camp Century operated for six years, during which time the scientists based there managed to drill a mile down to collect a unique set of ice cores. But by 1966, Camp Century had been abandoned, deemed too expensive and difficult to maintain.

Today, Donald Trump’s territorial ambitions for Greenland continue to cause concern and confusion in Europe, particularly for Denmark and Greenlanders themselves, who insist their island is not for sale.

One of the attractions of Greenland is the gleam of its rich mineral wealth, particularly rare earth minerals. Now that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting due to global warming, will this make the mineral riches easier to get at?

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we talk to Paul Bierman, a geologist and expert on Greenland’s ice at the University of Vermont in the U.S. He explains why the history of what happened to Camp Century – and the secrets of its ice cores, misplaced for decades, but now back under the microscope – help us to understand why it’s not that simple.

Listen to the interview with Paul Bierman on The Conversation Weekly podcast. You can also read articles by him about the history of US involvement in Greenland and the difficulty of mining on the island.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Mixing by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer.

Newsclips in this episode from New York Times Podcasts, the BBC and NBC News.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

Our president and secretary of war understand that wars are won before they are fought. The first battle of the next war began last April when President Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth unleashed sweeping reforms to modernize our military. The Army heard that order loud and clear, and we’ve been battling complacency, calcification and decades of contorted decision-making ever since.

In September, Hegseth stated, “Standards must be uniform, gender-neutral, and high. If not, they’re not standards — they’re just suggestions, suggestions that get our sons and daughters killed.”

That has been the Army’s lodestar over the past year, but also since our founding, over 250 years ago: prepare our soldiers to dominate the battlefield, raise their quality of life while they’re home and remove any obstacles to achieving that goal. Giving our soldiers anything less, then sending them to war, is unconscionable.

Nearly a year later, we are proud to say that we have made substantial progress toward our goal of preparing soldiers to dominate on the battlefield.

Operationally, soldiers are innovating and driving change. Units like the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii and the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell are leveraging cutting-edge technologies, such as 3D printing, to create drones tailored to their missions.

The Army Software Factory is empowering soldiers to develop software solutions that enhance operational effectiveness. Transformation in Contact units are embedding engineers and coders directly into operational environments, closing the innovation loop and iterating quickly to ensure soldiers have the tools they need to succeed in dynamic and unpredictable battlespaces.

Institutionally, we’ve made fundamental acquisition reforms to take operator feedback and quickly deliver what soldiers need. Inspired by the president’s call for modernization and Secretary Hegseth’s mandate to eliminate inefficiency, we cut bureaucracy and delegated decision-making authority to Program Acquisition Executives, enabling them to move quickly and scale validated capabilities. FUZE, the Army’s venture funding model, identifies, seeds, tests and matures promising technologies.

Advanced manufacturing initiatives led by Army Materiel Command allow us to produce equipment organically, respond rapidly to demand and keep our force ready. These reforms ensure soldiers have access to the best tools and technologies to dominate the battlefield.

Culturally, we’ve promoted a mindset of lethality, innovation and uncompromising standards. Secretary Hegseth’s declaration that “standards must be uniform, gender-neutral and high” has guided our efforts to enforce rigorous training and empower leaders at every level.

Soldiers, from overseas deployments to basic training, are experimenting, learning and pushing lessons learned all the way to the Pentagon. Everywhere we go, soldiers report there is a tangible change — they can feel it in their formations — and it’s absolutely refreshing.

Soldiers make sacrifices for our nation, but their quality of life should not be one of them.

We are aggressively supporting Secretary Hegseth’s “Clean, Comfortable, Safe” mandate to improve living conditions in our barracks. Army-wide housing inspections are underway, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated to address deficiencies.

Free barracks WiFi initiatives are expanding rapidly, starting with Fort Riley, to ensure soldiers stay connected.

In partnership with leaders like Robert Irvine, we are launching campus-style dining options that provide convenient, affordable and healthy meals, expanding to five installations this year. Improving soldiers’ quality of life is not just a moral obligation — it is essential to maintaining a ready and resilient force.

We’ve reduced barriers to these reforms, but we need help.

Within our Title 10 authorities, we aggressively tore down bureaucratic obstacles. We moved funding away from wasteful spending and obsolete programs and aligned it toward initiatives that benefit our soldiers — like FUZE, drones and the ISV.

We cut headquarters billets, introduced automation to increase output and moved more soldiers and leaders to fighting formations. Amid record-setting recruiting and retention numbers, we raised our standards for appearance, performance and conduct.

But to sustain this momentum, we need Congress to continue to support agile funding and modernization efforts. We need help moving away from legacy platforms and toward capabilities that meet the demands of modern warfare. Most importantly, we need the American people to advocate for change and support our soldiers.

Enabling our soldiers to fight, win and return home is in every American’s interest. It is incumbent that our efforts bolster the Army’s ability to remain the most lethal and capable fighting force in the world.

We made great headway in 2025 to prepare our soldiers, improve their quality of life and reduce barriers — but we have only scratched the surface. These changes will manifest, they will compound and our Army will be stronger than ever.

Our adversaries are relentless and will not hesitate to challenge our way of life. American soldiers stand ready to face that challenge, but they cannot do it alone. We must all ensure they are ready to fight, win and return home.

Daniel P. Driscoll became the 26th secretary of the U.S. Army on Feb. 25, 2025. A native of Boone, North Carolina, he oversees operations, modernization and resource allocation for nearly one million active, Guard and Reserve soldiers and more than 265,000 Army Civilians. He is a former Army officer who led a cavalry platoon of the 10th Mountain Division in combat in Iraq. He subsequently received a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School and became a business leader in the private sector.

It was something I had done a dozen times before, but in a flash I was on my back, ears ringing, lungs full of dust.

The blast knocked me out cold. When I came to, nothing was where it had been. The explosion left me with a traumatic brain injury and partial deafness in my right ear, with tinnitus that still rings to this day. I deal with memory loss, light sensitivity and sudden moments of confusion or panic that attack without warning.

So, when the possibility to test a virtual reality therapy program developed by Neurova Labs became available, I took it — not as a paid endorsement or promotional experiment, but as a disabled veteran looking for something that might actually help. I went into the process cautiously. PTSD and traumatic brain injuries do not present the same way for everyone, and there is no universal solution.

I am not a medical professional nor can I explain the underlying science in clinical terms. What I can offer here is a firsthand account of what this three week experience looked like and what, if anything, changed.

The therapy, first launched in 2024, follows a structured but approachable format. The program is designed as a three-week regimen, with two active weeks of VR sessions conducted four days per week.

Each session lasts between 45 minutes to an hour. Every session begins with a warm-up using a commercially available application that emphasizes fast-paced interaction with a virtual pistol. It is engaging and requires focus, coordination and quick reactions.

That warm-up is followed by the core Neurova Labs environment, which centers on a target practice-style scenario. Each session includes five rounds, roughly lasting five minutes apiece. The pace is steady and immersive, requiring sustained attention without becoming overwhelming.

The session ends with a cooldown phase that is intentionally slower and more abstract. This final segment uses calming sounds, soft music and shifting colors, with only limited interaction. The goal is clearly to bring the body down from heightened alertness into a calmer state.

I was skeptical going in, particularly about whether something so technology-driven could meaningfully impact symptoms rooted in trauma. What surprised me most was how quickly I noticed the changes, starting with my sleep regimen.

Before starting the program, I routinely woke up very early in the morning, often around 4 or 4:30 a.m., and struggled to fall back asleep. By the second week of therapy, I was sleeping later and more consistently, often until around 8:30 a.m.

The time it took me to fall asleep also shortened. That alone had a noticeable effect on my mood and energy throughout the day.

Sleep was not the only area where I saw improvement. Over the course of the three weeks, I noticed a shift in how I reacted to stress. As a freelance writer and creative, my work involves deadlines, travel and uncertainty. Combined with the broader stress of daily life, it is easy to slip into a constant state of anxiety.

During this period, I found that my fight or flight response did not take over as quickly, and when it did, I was able to step out of it faster than before. The stress was still there, but it felt more manageable.

That distinction matters.

For many people with PTSD, the challenge is not avoiding stress altogether, but shortening the amount of time the body stays stuck in a heightened state. Being able to regroup more quickly can change the course of an entire day.

Another encouraging aspect of the experience was seeing how actively the software is being developed. The program is still in its testing phase, and during my three weeks of use the program received multiple updates. That signaled an ongoing effort to refine and improve the product rather than treating it as a finished, static solution, which happens with a lot of the treatment programs offered to veterans today.

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Accessibility may be the most significant strength of the Neurova Labs approach. Traditional treatment pathways, particularly within the Department of Veterans Affairs, can be difficult to navigate. Appointments, long waits, unfamiliar clinical environments and administrative hurdles can themselves become sources of stress. For many veterans, that friction leads to disengagement from treatment entirely.

This model removes many of those barriers. As long as you have the headset, therapy can be done at home, on your schedule and in an environment you control. Morning sessions with coffee, afternoon sessions between work obligations or evening sessions after a difficult day are all possible. That level of autonomy changes how treatment feels. It becomes something you opt into rather than something you endure.

I spoke with other users who approach the program differently. One former Marine described using the therapy as a situational tool — logging sessions before or after known stressors rather than following a strict schedule. That flexibility suggests a broader range of use beyond structured programs, which may be especially helpful for veterans balancing work, family and ongoing care.

It is also important to be clear about what this is not. This is not a cure-all, and it is not a replacement for counseling, psychiatric care, or other evidence-based treatments. Neurova Labs does not present it that way.

What it offered me was an entry point. Feeling tangible improvement in one area made me more open to continuing therapy elsewhere, including reengaging with the VA and seeking additional counseling when needed.

Over the last three weeks my quality of life improved. I slept better. My mood was steadier. Social interaction felt less overwhelming.

As the company continues to refine its product and explore wider availability, accessibility may ultimately be its most meaningful contribution: Treatment that meets veterans where they are, rather than forcing them into systems they distrust.

That alone has the potential to keep more people engaged in care. For me, the biggest takeaway was simple. For the first time in a long time, I felt hopeful. That alone made it easier to keep going.

Camouflage patterns were designed to break up a human silhouette in various environments. Load-bearing vests, cargo pockets, reinforced boots and standardized cuts were functional necessities — solutions to problems that involved weight, heat, concealment and survival.

Over the last two decades, however, those solutions have been pulled into civilian fashion, stripped of context and resold as style.

Camo pants appear on runways. Tactical vests are worn to music festivals. Combat boots become seasonal staples. What was once functional equipment tied to service, sacrifice and sometimes trauma is now treated as visual shorthand for toughness or rebellion.

Ralph Lauren can’t stop ripping off military clothing

Camouflage is the clearest example. The pattern is now everywhere, from luxury collections to fast-fashion racks, often marketed as edgy or ironic. A 2025 Cosmopolitan article on camo’s resurgence outlined how patterns originally designed for concealment are now used to attract attention, often paired with bright colors, exaggerated cuts or intentionally impractical silhouettes.

That shift matters because camouflage was never neutral. Patterns were developed through research, testing and real-world application. They were worn by people operating in environments where being seen could mean death. When those patterns are removed from that context, they become abstract. The issue is not that civilians wear camo, but that camo becomes detached from the reality that produced it.

The same applies to tactical silhouettes. Plate carrier-style vests, MOLLE-inspired straps and oversized cargo pockets have become common in streetwear, especially among younger consumers. A New York Post article last year highlighted backlash aimed at Gen Z influencers who have embraced what critics called “World War III cosplay,” featuring combat-themed outfits worn purely for aesthetic effect. The criticism was less about age or taste and more about tone. To veterans and military families, those silhouettes are associated with training cycles, deployments and loss, not vibes.

The politics of military fashion are also difficult to separate from the visuals.

A New York Times piece published earlier this year examined how camo clothing exists at the intersection of military history, political identity and consumer culture, noting that what was once a government-issued pattern now signals everything from protest to patriotism depending on who is wearing it and why. The same jacket can read as anti-establishment, pro authority or simply trendy, depending on the context that is often flattened in mass marketing.

For veterans, this flattening can feel jarring. Military uniforms are not costumes. Even after leaving service, many veterans are conscious of what they wear and when. There is an unspoken rule about earned symbols, especially patches, unit identifiers and medals.

While most service members understand that camo pants or boots are not stolen valor, the casual use of tactical gear can still land strangely.

As an Army veteran, I spent years wearing uniforms that were issued, inspected and worn for specific reasons. Every pocket had a purpose. Every strap was adjusted for weight distribution. When I see a tactical vest worn over a mesh shirt at a festival, my first instinct is not offense but confusion.

That disconnect is where frustration often lives for veterans. It is not about ownership of style. It is about meaning. Military gear is designed through lessons learned, often the hard way. Removing that function turns hard experience into aesthetic shorthand, and that shorthand rarely tells the full story.

There is also a difference between influence and imitation. Military surplus has long been part of civilian wardrobes, especially after major wars. Field jackets, peacoats and boots entered mainstream fashion because they were durable and practical. The adoption was organic. What feels different now is the deliberate styling of combat as an accessory, divorced from utility and marketed at scale.

None of this means civilians should avoid military-inspired clothing. Fashion has always borrowed from institutions, subcultures and history — the issue is awareness. Wearing camo is not inherently disrespectful, but pretending it has no origin is dismissive.

Some brands have begun to acknowledge this gap by working with veterans, donating proceeds to service organizations or providing educational context alongside collections. Those efforts do not solve everything, but they show an understanding that aesthetics do not exist in a vacuum.

Veterans are not a monolith in how they respond to these trends. Some shrug it off. Others avoid military aesthetics entirely after leaving service. Some embrace the irony. What unites most responses is a desire for honesty.

Fashion will continue to cycle military aesthetics in and out of relevance. That is inevitable. What is not inevitable is forgetting where those aesthetics came from. Remembering the function behind the form does not ruin the look. It deepens it.

The morning after my retirement ceremony, I opened the closet and stared. For 30 years, the Army had made getting dressed simple. Although the look of the uniforms changed over my career, the functions remained the same: PT, duty and dress.

Now, I faced choices every morning. What belt matched? Footwear? None of it felt like me. I put on a pair of khakis and a matching shirt, but it felt like a costume. Standing there, I felt like I was looking at someone I didn’t know. I realized the question wasn’t about clothes at all. It was much deeper and sharper: Who am I now, without the uniform?

My retirement ceremony had been full of smiles. The master of ceremonies read a summary of my career, and my commander pinned a retirement award on my chest — the last military award that I would receive. Hands were shaken and promises to stay in touch were exchanged. My family beamed with pride. Old friends told stories that made us laugh and wince in equal measure.

It felt like a proper ending — until the next morning, when there was only silence. No reveille, no formation, no mission brief. Just a house that suddenly seemed too quiet and a calendar with nothing written on it.

For three decades, I knew exactly where I belonged. My rank and position told the world — and me — who I was. People stood when I entered a room. My experience counted. My signature carried weight. Every morning, I woke with a mission. And then, in a single ceremony, it all ended. I had nowhere to be and nothing to do.

The absence hit harder than I expected. I didn’t miss the 5 a.m. alarms, physical training in weather so cold it made your lungs hurt, the deployments or the endless paperwork.

I missed the tribe — my people. I missed being part of something larger than myself. I missed walking into a room and knowing that everyone there was chasing the same goal. The type A personalities engaged in a dance of natural competition, elevating both the individual and the organization. Outside this environment, I felt unmoored.

In the first weeks of my retirement, I found myself reaching for my phone at 5 a.m. and waiting for a text or a phone call that would never come. I was still guided by muscle memory from years of responsibility that no longer belonged to me. The instincts were still there, but the mission was gone.

One afternoon, not long after I retired, I called a close friend, another Army colonel who had taken off the uniform around the same time. “It’s strange,” he said, “to walk into a room and not be introduced by rank.”

He felt as if he had lost his “aimpoint, the goal that drives daily life.” His words were like a mirror before me. It wasn’t just me. Hearing it in his voice gave me permission to admit what I had been reluctant to say out loud: I felt lost and disconnected, too.

Those early months of retirement were disorienting. I rested, reconnected with family and caught up on everything I had postponed for years. I volunteered in my community, finished projects around the house and spent a few mornings improving my golf game. My family was happy to have me home, but they couldn’t feel the weight of what I’d lost. The Army had been more than a job; it was my compass.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table one morning, staring at the empty coffee cup. In the Army, that same hour would have been filled with a briefing or a staff huddle. Now, it was just quiet. A few of my old friends stayed in touch, shared tales of the latest stupid thing that happened at work or discussed an upcoming mission.

Their words made me smile but reminded me that my time in that world was over. I began to question, “Was the part of me that mattered most gone with the uniform?”

There were reminders everywhere. The photos on the wall showed me in uniform, flanked by soldiers whose names I could still rattle off. The coins and plaques that had once decorated my office now sat in boxes or leaned against the wall as if waiting to be hung, heavy with meaning but oddly useless.

Even the way people greeted me changed. Neighbors called me “Alan” instead of “Colonel.” Even when I went to the VA clinic for medical care, I was referred to as “Mr. Evans.” My identity had shifted overnight, and the world moved on without ceremony.

Eventually, I found my way back into federal service. Today, I work for the federal government in another department. The mission is different, the pace slower, but the sense of responsibility feels familiar. I still lead people, still solve problems, still try to make the right call when no one is looking.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t feel the same. In uniform, identity and mission were inseparable; every task fed into something larger than me. Now, the mission is mine to define. Sure, there is an overall strategy, but my agency allows me to set priorities based on the region my team serves. There is freedom in that, but also uncertainty. The Army gave me clear orders; this chapter requires me to write my own.

Over time, I realized that the mission hadn’t disappeared; it had just changed. It transformed into mentoring the next generation, showing up for my family in ways I once couldn’t, and finding new ways to serve.

I still live by the principles that once guided me in uniform: integrity, courage and care for those I lead. I’ve learned that purpose doesn’t always announce itself with fanfare. Sometimes it’s found in the small, steady acts that make a difference, like showing up for a friend who’s struggling, sharing a story that makes someone feel less alone, or simply doing the right thing when no one is watching. The career gives me purpose; the personal mission gives me meaning. It’s quieter than the Army, but no less important.

Dr. Alan M. Evans is a retired U.S. Army colonel who now serves in a leadership role within the federal government. He holds a doctorate in strategic leadership from Liberty University, where his research explored the impact of followership dynamics on leadership effectiveness. Drawing on more than three decades of service and experience, he writes about leadership, identity and purpose in and beyond the military.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Kim Vo wrote the headline.

President Donald Trump’s insistence that the U.S. will acquire Greenland “whether they like it or not” is just the latest chapter in a co-dependent and often complicated relationship between America and the Arctic’s largest island — one that stretches back more than a century.

Americans have long pursued policies in Greenland that U.S. leaders considered strategic and economic imperatives. As I recounted in my 2024 book, “When the Ice is Gone,” about Greenland’s environmental, military and scientific history, some of these ideas were little more than engineering fantasies, while others reflected unfettered military bravado.

Why the US military has cared about climate change since the Cold War

But today’s world isn’t the same as when the United States last had a significant presence in Greenland, decades ago during the Cold War.

Before charging headlong into this icy island again, the U.S. would be remiss not to learn from past failures and consider how Earth’s rapidly changing climate is fundamentally altering the region.

Early US plundering of Greenland’s metals

In 1909, Robert Peary, a U.S. Navy officer, announced that he had won the race to the North Pole — a spectacular claim debated fiercely at the time. Before that, Peary had spent years exploring Greenland by dogsled, often taking what he found.

In 1894, he convinced six Greenlanders to come with him to New York, reportedly promising them tools and weapons in return. Within a few months, all but two of the Inuit had died from diseases.

Peary also took three huge fragments of the Cape York iron meteorite, known to Greenlanders as Saviksoah. It was a unique source of metal that Greenlandic Inuit had used for centuries to make tools. The largest piece of the meteorite, Ahnighito, weighed 34 tons. Today, it sits in the American Museum of Natural History, which reportedly paid Peary U.S. $40,000 for the space rocks.

World War II: Strategic location and minerals

World War II put Greenland on the map strategically for the U.S. military. In spring 1941, Denmark’s ambassador signed a treaty giving the U.S. military access to Greenland to help protect the island from Nazi Germany and contribute to the war effort in Europe. That treaty remains in effect today.

New American bases in western and southern Greenland became crucial refueling stops for planes flying from America to Europe.

Hundreds of American soldiers were garrisoned at Ivittuut, a remote town on the southern Greenland coast where they protected the world’s largest cryolite mine. The rare mineral was used for smelting aluminum, critical for building airplanes during the war.

And because Greenland is upwind from Europe, weather data collected on the island proved essential for battlefield forecasts as officers planned their moves during World War II.

Both the Americans and Germans built weather stations on Greenland, starting what historians refer to as the weather war. There was little combat, though allied patrols routinely scoured the east coast of the island for Nazi encampments. The weather war ended in 1944 when the U.S. Coast Guard, and its East Greenland dogsled patrol, found the last of four German weather stations and captured their meteorologists.

Cold War: Fanciful engineering ideas vs. the ice

The heyday of U.S. military engineering dreams in Greenland arrived during the Cold War in the 1950s.

To counter the risk of Soviet missiles and bombers coming over the Arctic, the U.S. military transported about 5,000 men, 280,000 tons of supplies, 500 trucks and 129 bulldozers, according to The New York Times, to a barren, northwest Greenland beach — 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) from the North Pole and 2,752 miles (4,430 kilometers) from Moscow.

There, in one top-secret summer, they built the sprawling American air base at Thule. It housed bombers, fighters, nuclear missiles and more than 10,000 soldiers. The whole operation was revealed to the world the following year, on a September 1952 cover of LIFE magazine and by the U.S. Army in its weekly television show, “The Big Picture.”

But in the realm of ideas born out of paranoia, Camp Century and Project Iceworm were the pinnacle.

The U.S. Army built Camp Century, a nuclear-powered base, inside the ice sheet by digging deep trenches and then covering them with snow. The base held 200 men in bunkrooms heated to 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius). It was the center of U.S. Army research on snow and ice and became a reminder to the USSR that the American military could operate at will in the Arctic.

The Army also imagined hundreds of miles of rail lines buried inside Greenland’s ice sheet. On Project Iceworm’s tracks, atomic-powered trains would move nuclear-tipped missiles in snow tunnels between hidden launch stations — a shell game covering an area about the size of Alabama.

In the end, Project Iceworm never got beyond a 1,300-foot (400-meter) tunnel the Army excavated at Camp Century. The soft snow and ice, constantly moving, buckled that track as the tunnel walls closed in. In the early 1960s, first the White House, and then NATO, rejected Project Iceworm.

In 1966, the Army abandoned Camp Century, leaving hundreds of tons of waste inside the ice sheet. Today, the crushed and abandoned camp lies more than 100 feet (30 meters) below the ice sheet surface. But as the climate warms and the ice melts, that waste will resurface: millions of gallons of frozen sewage, asbestos-wrapped pipes, toxic lead paint and carcinogenic PCBs.

Who will clean up the mess and at what cost is an open question.

Greenland remains a tough place to turn a profit

In the past, the American focus in Greenland was on short-term gains with little regard for the future. Abandoned bases, scattered around the island today and in need of cleanup, are one example. Peary’s disregard of the lives of local Greenlanders is another.

History shows that many of the fanciful ideas for Greenland failed because they showed little consideration of the island’s isolation, harsh climate and dynamic ice sheet.

Trump’s demands for American control of the island as a source of wealth and U.S. security are similarly shortsighted. In today’s rapidly warming climate, disregarding the dramatic effects of climate change in Greenland can doom projects to failure as Arctic temperatures climb.

Recent floods, fed by Greenland’s melting ice sheet, have swept away bridges that had stood for half a century. The permafrost that underlies the island is rapidly thawing and destabilizing infrastructure, including the critical radar installation and runway at Thule, renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2022. The island’s mountain sides are crashing into the sea as the ice holding them together melts.

The U.S. and Denmark have conducted geological surveys in Greenland and pinpointed deposits of critical minerals along the rocky, exposed coasts. However, most of the mining so far has been limited to cryolite and some small-scale extraction of lead, iron, copper and zinc. Today, only one small mine extracting the mineral anorthosite, which is useful for its aluminum and silica, is running.

It’s the ice that matters

The greatest value of Greenland for humanity is not its strategic location or potential mineral resources, but its ice.

If human activities continue to heat the planet, melting Greenland’s ice sheet, sea level will rise until the ice is gone. Losing even part of the ice sheet, which holds enough water to raise global sea level 24 feet in all, would have disastrous effects for coastal cities and island nations around the world.

That’s big-time global insecurity. The most forward-looking strategy is to protect Greenland’s ice sheet rather than plundering a remote Arctic island while ramping up fossil fuel production and accelerating climate change around the world.

Paul Bierman is a professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Vermont.

There is training, often portrayed as brutal, transformative and loud in films like “Full Metal Jacket,” which has become shorthand for how civilians imagine the making of a service member. Then there is combat, depicted as chaotic and decisive in movies such as “Black Hawk Down” or “American Sniper.”

These stories dominate popular culture, but they leave out where most of military life actually happens. Between training and combat exists a long stretch of routine, waiting, repetition and administrative work that defines daily service for millions of troops.

That routine majority of military life remains largely absent from how the military is portrayed, and its absence shapes how civilians view service and how veterans understand their own experience.

For most of my time in uniform as a public affairs noncommissioned officer and a National Guard soldier, my days were not filled with action or drama. They were filled with calendars, schedules, briefings and forms. I coordinated media visits that ultimately did not result in coverage. I stood in formation in weather that never made a movie montage. I wrote releases about training events that looked impressive on paper but felt painfully ordinary in reality.

I spent hours waiting for vehicles to move, for radios to work, for someone higher ranking to make a decision.

None of that fits neatly into a two-hour runtime, yet it is how a majority of service members spend their service.

Popular culture tends to avoid this middle ground because it resists clean storytelling. Training has a clear beginning and end. Combat has obvious stakes. Routine does not. It is ongoing and unresolved by design. That does not mean it lacks meaning; it means meaning is built slowly through shared experience rather than singular moments.

Some works have tried to capture this. The HBO miniseries “Generation Kill” is often cited by veterans because it shows long stretches of confusion, boredom, gallows humor and frustration during the early days of the Iraq War. Much of the series focuses not on firefights but on broken vehicles, unclear orders and young Marines arguing about music and leadership.

That depiction felt honest because it reflected how military operations actually unfold for those living them.

Even films that attempt to address boredom are often misunderstood. “Jarhead” tried to show the frustration of a generation of Marines trained for combat and then denied it during the Gulf War. Much of the film is about waiting, sexual tension, resentment and the psychological strain of being prepared for violence that never comes.

When it was released, some audiences criticized it for lacking action, which only reinforced the idea that military stories are expected to deliver combat or risk being dismissed.

Failure to portray what most troops actually experience day to day has real consequences.

Civilians often struggle to understand why service members describe their time in uniform as exhausting, even if they never saw combat. Families sometimes expect a clear narrative of trauma or triumph when what their loved one experienced was years of disrupted routines, missed holidays and constant low-level stress.

Veterans themselves can feel disconnected from public recognition when their service does not match the narrow stories society celebrates.

In the National Guard, this gap is even more pronounced. Much of Guard service happens far from public view. Drill weekends are spent conducting inventory, updating training requirements and preparing for contingencies that may never occur. Annual training often feels anticlimactic to outsiders despite being physically and mentally demanding.

These experiences rarely make headlines, yet they represent the bulk of how the Guard contributes to readiness and domestic response. When pop culture ignores this reality, it also ignores the legitimacy of that service.

Some documentaries have come closer to capturing this truth. “Restrepo,” which follows a platoon deployed to Afghanistan, is often remembered for its intensity. What stands out to veterans, however, are the quiet moments. Soldiers smoking, cleaning weapons, talking about home and waiting for something to happen. Those scenes communicate more about military life than any explosion.

The dominance of combat-focused narratives also shapes policy conversations. Discussions about veteran mental health often center on combat trauma alone. While combat exposure is a critical factor, it is not the only one. Years of sustained stress, lack of control over daily life and the constant postponement of normal milestones all take a toll. Those pressures are harder to explain when popular culture does not give them language or visibility.

I remember sitting through safety briefs that lasted longer than the training they preceded. I remember writing press releases late at night because someone deserved recognition, even if no one outside the unit would ever know. I remember the pride of seeing a plan executed smoothly, precisely because nothing dramatic happened.

Those moments taught me responsibility and patience. They taught me how institutions function and how people carry weight quietly. They are not lesser experiences because they lack spectacle. They are foundational.

There is room in American culture to tell these stories.

Audiences have embraced shows and films in other genres that focus on the ordinary rather than the extraordinary. Military storytelling does not need to abandon combat narratives to evolve. It needs to widen the lens. By acknowledging everyday military life, storytellers can present a more accurate and humane picture of service. Civilians gain understanding. Veterans see themselves reflected honestly. The military is no longer reduced to a highlight reel.

The new NATO expenditure targets are driven by a threat environment that is both severely challenging and dynamic, broadly speaking, and related to biological threats specifically. Russia is bending many norms in its war against Ukraine, including regular use of chemical agents that NATO nations now believe indicates a serious lack of restraint in their willingness to conduct illegal chemical and biological attacks.

Beyond looming Russian threats, artificial intelligence, robotics and other technologies are transforming the landscape of who is capable of developing and engineering biological weapons for a broader range of distinct purposes.

While it is clear that this threat environment will require concerted biodefense investments, active, ongoing discussions focus on what to count as core defense spending — the focus of NATO’s new target of 3.5% of GDP annually — and what should count as the non-military portion of societal resilience, for which NATO nations have pledged to spend 1.5% annually of GDP by 2035. This question has arisen in part because most countries have rarely (if ever) quantified their biodefense spending, and because many of the tools for addressing biological threats can be used for both military purposes and civilian functions. This includes resilience to pandemics and general emergency response.

As such, let’s focus on the 3.5% for core defense spending. Generally, this includes funds to man, train, equip and command military forces, or others, such as the coast guard or national police, when used for military purposes. It can also cover the stockpiling of equipment and supplies for wartime reserves, research and development for military purposes and common infrastructure, such as command-and-control networks and surveillance systems, along with personnel costs.

Military biodefense capabilities fall into this category in a clear-cut way.

Many NATO nations have laboratories operated by defense agencies that are central to detecting, characterizing and defending against biological threats (in addition to chemical weapons and other militarily significant threats). These include the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in the United States, the Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology in Germany, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in the United Kingdom and others.

These labs are essential for addressing biological weapons threats and deterring the development and use of prohibited biological weapons.

Likewise, investments in biological threat detection and characterization equipment, personal protective equipment and medical countermeasures for military forces fall squarely within the 3.5% as part of equipment and supplies under operations and maintenance. Because these types of items are often stockpiled, they are easily quantifiable. For example, the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile contains enough doses of smallpox vaccine for the adult population, and many nations subscribe to the 100 Days Mission goal of developing diagnostics and countermeasures for a newly emergent pathogen within 100 days. Such goals can be easily tailored for military requirements and what is needed to support them directly.

Similar to how NATO maintains situational awareness for space and cyber, a biodefense capability target should focus on ensuring that every NATO nation’s military base has biological threat detection and early warning assets in place, as soon as possible. Basic capacity should be cost-effective to set up. For example, wastewater sequencing and other approaches have scaled incredibly in recent years. For wastewater and environmental monitoring, as well as other early warning tools, the analytical approaches used to characterize pathogen threats are rapidly growing more powerful and cost effective.

The capability targets set by NATO in this space should also ratchet up over time. Examples could include plans to scale the number of sites with metagenomic sequencing-based early warning systems; and decreasing the time to detect and characterize a novel, engineered pathogen to hours rather than days.

Additionally, investments that aim at biological weapons attribution and verification of noncompliance by adversaries with the Biological Weapons Convention clearly apply to core defense and deterrence. Russia’s sustained, flagrant treaty violations need to be monitored and called out.

Yet another biodefense expenditure category is military training and exercises, for both responding to a biological weapons attack and preparing to maintain operational force readiness during outbreaks, even if the source of the causative pathogen has not yet been determined. Indeed, such exercises should also be used to incorporate evolving technological developments so capability targets can be refined to ensure NATO force readiness against biological threats. Exercises and related public affairs activities aimed at increasing awareness of biodefense efforts, both for deterrence and to pre-bunk information threats, are a crucial part of core defense spending.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it demonstrates that NATO countries have many clear starting points for detailing a full suite of biodefense capability targets and quantifying investments in those capabilities. This will help ensure that NATO meets core biological defense and deterrence needs effectively, in the face of rising biological threats.

Hon. Andy Weber is a senior fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks and previously served as assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs.

Christine Parthemore is the CEO of the Council on Strategic Risks and previously served at the Pentagon.

An image circulated over media the weekend of Jan. 3 and 4 was meant to convey dominance: Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, blindfolded and handcuffed aboard a U.S. naval vessel. Shortly after the operation that seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would now “run” Venezuela until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” could be arranged.

The Trump administration’s move is not an aberration; it reflects a broader trend in U.S. foreign policy I described here some six years ago as “America the Bully.”

Washington increasingly relies on coercion — military, economic and political — not only to deter adversaries but to compel compliance from weaker nations. This may deliver short-term obedience, but it is counterproductive as a strategy for building durable power, which depends on legitimacy and capacity. When coercion is applied to governance, it can harden resistance, narrow diplomatic options and transform local political failures into contests of national pride.

There is no dispute that Maduro’s dictatorship led to Venezuela’s catastrophic collapse. Under his rule, Venezuela’s economy imploded, democratic institutions were hollowed out, criminal networks fused with the state, and millions fled the country — many for the United States.

But removing a leader — even a brutal and incompetent one — is not the same as advancing a legitimate political order.

Nicolas Maduro on board the USS Iwo Jima. pic.twitter.com/omF2UpDJhA

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 3, 2026

Force doesn’t equal legitimacy

By declaring its intent to govern Venezuela, the United States is creating a governance trap of its own making — one in which external force is mistakenly treated as a substitute for domestic legitimacy.

I write as a scholar of international security, civil wars and U.S. foreign policy, and as author of “Dying by the Sword,” which examines why states repeatedly reach for military solutions, and why such interventions rarely produce durable peace.

The core finding of that research is straightforward: Force can topple rulers, but it cannot generate political authority.

When violence and what I have described elsewhere as “kinetic diplomacy” become a substitute for full spectrum action — which includes diplomacy, economics and what the late political scientist Joseph Nye called “soft power” — it tends to deepen instability rather than resolve it.

More force, less statecraft

The Venezuela episode reflects this broader shift in how the United States uses its power. My co-author Sidita Kushi and I document this by analyzing detailed data from the new Military Intervention Project. We show that since the end of the Cold War, the United States has sharply increased the frequency of military interventions while systematically underinvesting in diplomacy and other tools of statecraft.

One striking feature of the trends we uncover is that if Americans tended to justify excessive military intervention during the Cold War between 1945–1989 due to the perception that the Soviet Union was an existential threat, what we would expect is far fewer military interventions following the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse. That has not happened.

Even more striking, the mission profile has changed. Interventions that once aimed at short-term stabilization now routinely expand into prolonged governance and security management, as they did in both Iraq after 2003 and Afghanistan after 2001.

This pattern is reinforced by institutional imbalance. In 2026, for every single dollar the United States invests in the diplomatic “scalpel” of the State Department to prevent conflict, it allocates $28 to the military “hammer” of the Department of Defense, effectively ensuring that force becomes a first rather than last resort.

“Kinetic diplomacy” — in the Venezuela case, regime change by force — becomes the default not because it is more effective, but because it is the only tool of statecraft immediately available. On Jan. 4, Trump told The Atlantic magazine that if Delcy Rodríguez, the acting leader of Venezuela, “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Lessons from Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya

The consequences of this imbalance are visible across the past quarter-century.

In Afghanistan, the U.S.-led attempt to engineer authority built on external force alone proved brittle by its very nature. The U.S. had invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to topple the Taliban regime, deemed responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the subsequent two decades of foreign-backed state-building collapsed almost instantly once U.S. forces withdrew in 2021. No amount of reconstruction spending could compensate for the absence of a political order rooted in domestic consent.

Following the invasion by the U.S. and surrender of Iraq’s armed forces in 2003, both the U.S. Department of State and the Department of Defense proposed plans for Iraq’s transition to a stable democratic nation. President George W. Bush gave the nod to the Defense Department’s plan.

That plan, unlike the State Department’s, ignored key cultural, social and historical conditions. Instead, it proposed an approach that assumed a credible threat to use coercion, supplemented by private contractors, would prove sufficient to lead to a rapid and effective transition to a democratic Iraq. The United States became responsible not only for security, but also for electricity, water, jobs and political reconciliation — tasks no foreign power can perform without becoming, as the United States did, an object of resistance.

Libya demonstrated a different failure mode. There, intervention by a U.S.-backed NATO force in 2011 and removal of dictator Moammar Gadhafi and his regime were not followed by governance at all. The result was civil war, fragmentation, militia rule and a prolonged struggle over sovereignty and economic development that continues today.

The common thread across all three cases is hubris: the belief that American management — either limited or oppressive — could replace political legitimacy.

Venezuela’s infrastructure is already in ruins. If the United States assumes responsibility for governance, it will be blamed for every blackout, every food shortage and every bureaucratic failure. The liberator will quickly become the occupier.

Costs of ‘running’ a country

Taking on governance in Venezuela would also carry broader strategic costs, even if those costs are not the primary reason the strategy would fail.

A military attack followed by foreign administration is a combination that undermines the principles of sovereignty and nonintervention that underpin the international order the United States claims to support. It complicates alliance diplomacy by forcing partners to reconcile U.S. actions with the very rules they are trying to defend elsewhere.

The United States has historically been strongest when it anchored an open sphere built on collaboration with allies, shared rules and voluntary alignment. Launching a military operation and then assuming responsibility for governance shifts Washington toward a closed, coercive model of power — one that relies on force to establish authority and is prohibitively costly to sustain over time.

These signals are read not only in Berlin, London and Paris. They are watched closely in Taipei, Tokyo and Seoul — and just as carefully in Beijing and Moscow.

When the United States attacks a sovereign state and then claims the right to administer it, it weakens its ability to contest rival arguments that force alone, rather than legitimacy, determines political authority.

Beijing needs only to point to U.S. behavior to argue that great powers rule as they please where they can — an argument that can justify the takeover of Taiwan. Moscow, likewise, can cite such precedent to justify the use of force in its near abroad and not just in Ukraine.

This matters in practice, not theory. The more the United States normalizes unilateral governance, the easier it becomes for rivals to dismiss American appeals to sovereignty as selective and self-serving, and the more difficult it becomes for allies to justify their ties to the U.S.

That erosion of credibility does not produce dramatic rupture, but it steadily narrows the space for cooperation over time and the advancement of U.S. interests and capabilities.

Force is fast. Legitimacy is slow. But legitimacy is the only currency that buys durable peace and stability — both of which remain enduring U.S. interests.

If Washington governs by force in Venezuela, it will repeat the failures of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya: Power can topple regimes, but it cannot create political authority. Outside rule invites resistance, not stability.

Monica Duffy Toft is a professor of International Politics and director of the Center for Strategic Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University.

But such scuttlebutt, spread among the dense fog blanketing smoke pits and fanned by whispers of the E-4 Mafia and Lance Corporal Underground, is prone to sparking.

In mere moments, the falsehood became a conflagration of indisputable fact: Beloved pop icon Jennifer Lopez had passed away.

Marines deployed to far-flung theaters during the early years of the global war on terror were crushed.

Forget the anxiety of imminent combat, the heat, the intestinal issues stemming from MREs and the ammo crate toilets bearing the brunt of the fallout. To hell with the micromanagement of horseshoe haircut-adorned first sergeants or the indecisiveness of milquetoast officers who inexplicably outranked good brass.

Among a knuckle-dragging herd of testosterone-rich 20-somethings, J-Lo commanded attention. So indelible was the mark of her alleged demise that it made its way into “Generation Kill,” a seven-part HBO miniseries based on a book of the same name by Evan Wright, who accompanied the Marine Corps’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

At the center of that 2008 on-screen adaptation, crafted by “The Wire” creators David Simon and Ed Burns, was actor James Ransone, who managed, among a versatile two-decade career, to take a seven-episode run and churn out a character so relatable that most Marines would bat nary an eye if informed he had previously been one.

The Baltimore native, who also starred as Ziggy Sobotka in season two of “The Wire,” among numerous other roles, died by suicide Dec. 19. He was 46 years old.

Years had elapsed since the last time I’d watched Ransone’s masterful orchestration of Marine Cpl. Josh Ray Person, who had as much a penchant for combat — because “peace sucks a hairy asshole” — as he did for quoting the great warrior poet Ice Cube or belting Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag” during a convoy.

Starting the series once more this past weekend elicited renewed appreciation for his character — beginning with his concerns for J-Lo’s well-being — and its familial impression.

“Lieutenant, have you gotten any word?” Person asks Lt. Nathaniel Fick (Stark Sands) early in the series.

“I only get what’s passed on to me from Godfather, and the only word he gets is from the BBC,” Fick replies. “If we’re lucky, Saddam will back down, let the inspectors in and we can go home. The important thing is we are doing our jobs by being here. All of you should be proud.”

“Sir, that’s not the word I was asking about. I was — we wanted to know if you knew anything about J-Lo being killed.”

“Ray, the battalion commander offered no sitrep as to J-Lo’s status.”

The exchange was brief, but set a recognizable tone. Most Marines who deployed to combat will say they’ve known dozens of iterations of Ransone’s on-screen persona.

“We all sort of regressed into 11-year-old boys,” Ranson said about the filming process. “It’s very ‘Lord of the Flies’ at this point.”

Immense stressors are accordingly processed — and rationalized — through a lens of uniquely juvenile vulgarity that would result in instant termination in any civilian profession.

Every bystander within a 15-meter radius is subjected to scathing dismantling — about appearance, intelligence and, of course, the promiscuity of mothers.

Incessant comments about the dearth of first-world comforts — “the suck” — are articulated with such hateful eloquence as to warrant its own art category.

“If Marines could get what they needed — when they needed it — we would be happy and wouldn’t be ready to kill people all of the time,” Person says in one episode. “The Marine Corps is like America’s pitbull. They beat us, mistreat us and every once in awhile, they let us out to attack someone.”

Despite the absence of luxuries, few would trade experiences in the suck for anything. Combat aside, bonds are forged in the mundane. And few demographics enjoy more of a love-hate relationship with it than Marines.

Discussing his portrayal in an interview with HBO, the real Josh Ray Person commented, “I know I probably come off a little cynical about even the Marine Corps itself.

“Even though I may seem cynical to a lot of the other guys, I loved them like [brothers],” he added. “I could say things and make fun of them, but the very second that somebody else does it that’s not in our group, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

It’s far too easy, amid today’s deluge of divisive online vitriol and corresponding doom scrolling, to lose sight of those bonds that once enraptured us — when primary concerns among a gaggle of acne-riddled young men were relegated to porno mags, Jody and subsisting on a diet of Copenhagen and Rip Its.

Thanks to Ransone, this past weekend allowed for a return to that period of my life, now 20 years on.

I’m not sure Ransone was aware of how much his performance resonated with Marines. If he was, it’s unfortunate more of us will never be able to tell him how easily his character still tethers us to simpler times.

Fair winds and following seas.

It started as a rumor. But like war stories, rumors tend to grow with the telling, and as deployment dragged on, the number of packages we were expecting doubled and doubled again, eventually reaching delirious heights that surpassed all reason.

A hundred care packages?

Too high and too round a number, I thought. Clearly made up; a conversational exaggeration pulled out of someone’s ass.

These mythical parcels had supposedly been assembled by the very best of front porch America, real Norman Rockwell patriots of some down-home church group connected to one of the guys on my team through his wife’s cousin’s roommate or something. And when this church group heard that a team of Green Berets was deployed to the beige desolation of Iraq for six months, they put out a call for care packages, and the pious congregation had offered up a most goodly bounty.

Not that we were desperate for material salvation. Deployment to Iraq in 2018 was like a government-funded “Lawrence of Arabia” summer camp. We lived at the biggest base in the country, next to the Baghdad airport and far from anything going boom. We ate at chow hall with an omelet bar, slept in air-conditioned shipping containers converted into living spaces and shopped at a small PX selling drinks and snacks.

We even had a Green Beans coffee shop to supply us with mediocre lattes, and a rec center where I played Settlers of Catan every week with doctors and nurses from the hospital. It was austere, but for a combat zone, it was five-star luxury.

Besides the odd helicopter dropping off combat casualties, we felt distanced from the horrors and privations of war. Our biggest struggle was being away from our families and civilian careers (which, as reservists, we’d taken leave from).

Even a cush deployment means half a year away from birthdays, weddings, recitals, graduations and a normal life.

I’d paused my plans for graduate school to become a physician assistant, which would require at least a year of post-baccalaureate coursework. I couldn’t start from a combat zone with shaky Wi-Fi. My girlfriend and I abruptly ended our five years together over Skype, distance having made visible the irreparable cracks in our relationship.

Everything was the color of dirty sand: the T-walls, the housing units, the dust on our vehicles, the days themselves, which faded one into the next as we trained Iraqis who didn’t want to be trained and delivered them equipment they didn’t know how to maintain.

Our deployment felt like the war in miniature, a costly disruption with no clear intention and no end in sight.

Care packages broke up the monotony and sometimes provided us with useful things. Shortly before Christmas, my dad sent me a black, folding pocket knife. Utilitarian enough for everyday use but sporting a point mean enough to ruin someone’s day. Tucked in my right pocket, it went everywhere with me, whether I was flying on a helicopter or walking to the chow hall.

A teammate happened to know the owner of a company that made flat caps, like those worn by golfers and old-school cabbies. That company surprised our team with a box of army green flat caps that matched our camo fatigues. We looked cool as hell.

Exercising our Special Forces prerogative to flout Army uniform regulations, we sported the caps as an unofficial uniform, raising our profile on base as well as our spirits.

What I really needed, though, was a jacket. In packing for my first deployment, I didn’t realize how chilly the desert could get. Some nights dropped as low as 40 degrees, and I foolishly hadn’t packed anything warmer than a sweatshirt. I ordered a Patagonia jacket online and waited weeks, then months, for it to appear in the mailroom.

I didn’t expect any fashionable outerwear to come in the fabled haul of packages we’d been told about, but speculating about what loot they might contain turned into a game at our morning meetings. Most of us were lifters and hoped for tubs of pre-workout and protein powder. The dip addicts crossed their fingers for logs of Copenhagen. All wished for bags of gourmet coffee, pouches of beef jerky, energy drinks, maybe even board games.

A few weeks into the New Year, the day arrived. I discovered about 30 boxes stacked in the mailroom addressed to us, and the mail sergeant informed me another 90 were on the way.

A hundred and twenty! Even the rumored 100 had been a lowball. I piled them — all red-white-and-blue Priority Mail boxes the size of a birthday cake — high in my dusty Suburban, texted the boys and escorted the precious cargo over the bumpy dirt roads to our team room across base.

And then there we were at last. Green Berets circled like giddy children around a Christmas tree, each having selected one box from the pile and savoring those last moments of mystery before the riches were revealed.

What we found under those box flaps defied all our expectations: Fun-size Snickers and Milky Ways, decorated with jack-o’-lanterns — marking them as trick-or-treater rejects of three months prior — now grotesquely warped in their wrappers after melting in transit.

Canned foods, hearty staples a hermit might select to line the concrete walls of a survivalist bunker: beef stew, baked beans, creamed corn. Dried ramen noodles, brittle in their orange plastic five-packs and adorned with green circular “99¢” stickers no one had bothered to remove.

The senders, as if anticipating gastrointestinal distress from this dollar-store diet, thoughtfully included several rolls of toilet paper. And finally, in every box, there were exactly three pairs of bargain-bin white tube socks.

At first, the quiet was broken by a few quizzical chuckles as we pulled each item out of the boxes, which we soon realized were all packed with a depressing uniformity. Then the heavy silence of disbelief and shock. At last, my teammate said what we all were thinking: “What the fuck? Do they think we’re deployed, or homeless?”

Our gratitude was displaced by second-hand embarrassment, like hearing a badly delivered joke. The well-meaning rubes assembling these packages apparently envisioned us as refugees fleeing some unspeakable calamity that had left us starving, barefoot and without means to wipe ourselves, rather than residing at a sprawling, well-appointed manifestation of the 21st-century military-industrial complex, complete with running water, indoor plumbing and a dining hall serving three kinds of cake.

There were comforts of home that we pined for, but they sure as hell weren’t cheap socks and toilet paper.

Each box struck me as a physical manifestation of Thank You for Your Service — a gesture of appreciation nice enough on the outside but empty of substance. Missing from the packages was also what’s missing in Thank You for Your Service: minimal effort to understand the challenges that people in the military face. And without understanding, you can’t show genuine empathy. Instead, you get performative patriotism and a hundred boxes of things normally collected for homeless shelters.

If those citizens had simply asked any Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom veteran in their town, or even online, what soldiers on deployment need, they could have spent a fraction of the money on things we could’ve used, like that tub of pre-workout powder, a single bag of gourmet coffee, or in my case, a light jacket.

It was unsettling to learn that many civilians apparently have no grasp of the military-industrial behemoth their own taxes are funding. Like shipping ice cubes to Antarctica, these fellow citizens had sent us dried ramen and TP, while untold millions of their tax dollars were providing us with flush toilets and hot meals on a fully developed base established there over a decade ago.

So these people not only didn’t get our individual needs as soldiers, they were voting taxpayers with no comprehension of the resources given to us by the officials they elected and the defense budget they funded.

The boxes kept coming, multiplying like dividing cells. Soon our team room resembled a USPS distribution center, red-white-and-blue boxes stacked up the walls. We’d crack one or two in each batch to make sure the contents didn’t vary, and they never did: always the same cheap socks, the same beef stew, the same melted candies.

In the end we did what our government had so effectively taught us to do: We gave it all to the Iraqis. The whole damn pile. Waste disposal disguised as international aid.

We loaded up a truck, drove outside the wire and across the street to the Iraqi base, piled all 120 boxes in an orderly tower on a dusty concrete floor between crates of expired tourniquets and castoff camo fatigues — as if these TP rolls, socks and canned goods were part of the grand U.S. strategy all along — and walked away.

And for all I know, they could still be there, stacked neatly in a dark Iraqi warehouse — boxes we didn’t need, regifted to others in the same unsolicited way they’d been bestowed on us. No one bothered to ask the Iraqis if they liked creamed corn.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Zach West has served in the Army Special Forces in the Middle East, Europe and South America. He has also worked as a New York City paramedic, rare bookseller and contributor for Duffel Blog. A 2021 Tillman Scholar, he earned his master’s from Stanford School of Medicine and a doctorate from Butler University. He lives in California and practices as an internal medicine PA at Stanford Hospital.

Nikoletta Stoyanova, a Ukrainian photographer, watched as the six-armed behemoth took flight before soldiers hurried her into a basement. It was the dead of night in the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine, near the besieged city of Kupyansk. The city had already traded hands twice — the Russians had captured the city in the first days of the war, and the Ukrainians liberated it six months later.

Over the last year, the world’s attention has been focused on the U.S. administration’s chaotic push for a peace deal in Ukraine. The high drama of diplomacy between Trump, Putin and Zelensky has stolen the spotlight away from the gray, bloody realities on the battlefield. But the fact is that any settlement will be based on the realities on these frontlines.

It is here that the situation has been seriously deteriorating for Ukraine. The Russians, with a large advantage in manpower and munitions, are making serious advances into Ukrainian territory. New drone technology, and a lack of Western countermeasures, have aided them in slowly breaking down Ukraine’s weary troops.

The Ukrainian soldiers who had strapped the munitions to the drone hurried Stoyanova into the basement, where another group of soldiers are staring intently into screens, controllers in hands as if they were playing video games. These drone pilots are now Ukraine’s most crucial defense against the advancing Russians. Warfare has been revolutionized on these battlefields — and America is far behind in its understanding of how it operates.

She had gone to their base, in the embattled East, to see how the sky, full of thousands of drones, were changing modern warfare.

“Everything at the front line must be done at night, logistics are awful,” Stoyanova said from Ukraine’s Donetsk region. “They want to get as close to our cities as they can so they can terrorize them as much as possible with drones.”

Last time here she heard loud artillery, but the drones that replaced them are quiet killers.

“The war is more silent, and more deadly,” Stoyanova noted.

Ill-prepared for modern war?

What observers see on the dark, drone-infested front line looks nothing like the battlespace that America and its allies have been training their troops for.

Belatedly, the Pentagon is starting to take notice. A Department of Defense account was widely ridiculed among Ukraine watchers when it posted a video of a training exercise asking viewers whether they had ever watched a drone drop a grenade.

In fact, anyone can see thousands of such videos on Telegram channels and X accounts, some going back to as early as the first year of the war in Ukraine.

In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth led a tour of a Defense Department drone exhibition, calling drones “the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation, accounting for most of this year’s casualties in Ukraine.”

“Our adversaries collectively produce millions of cheap drones each year,” he said, adding that the U.S. is trailing behind.

Pentagon brass bragged that they had lowered the concept-to-development time for such weaponry from six years to 18 months. But in Ukraine, the newest battlefield development can be obsolete in weeks.

The U.S. is still far behind Ukraine and peer rivals such as China and Russia when it comes to integrating drone technologies into the modern battlespace.

Some U.S. companies have sent drones to be used in Ukraine, but as the Wall Street Journal reported, and Ukrainian soldiers have confirmed, Western drone technology does not measure up.

This mismatch reflects deeper problems in how the U.S. is still thinking about procurement and warfighting. In the early days of the war, the U.S. supplied many high-tech, expensive but powerful systems that radically improved Ukraine’s battlefield fortunes. But as the war has ground on, and the Russians developed countermeasures, developing a quantity of cheap systems has become far more important than a few high-ticket items.

As Dronesense reported, “a typical U.S. commercial drone intended for military use can cost upwards of $80,000, while a basic Ukrainian FPV attack drone costs under $500. This 160-fold cost difference makes the American systems economically unsustainable in a conflict that consumes approximately 10,000 drones per month. … Modern, high-intensity warfare … favors mass, adaptability, and attrition tolerance."

In Ukraine, drones have also added an element of civilian involvement into military procurement, with many ordinary civilians transforming their garages, basements and bedrooms into makeshift drone factories, while others hold crowdfunders to buy cheap commercial drones online that can be refitted for military purposes.

This allows average Ukrainians to contribute to their country’s war effort much more directly than they ever could before, with channels like YouTube and Telegram teaching how to assemble drones and ammunition in minutes.

Ukrainian soldiers complain that U.S. companies lack an understanding of electronic warfare, as well as the different types of air defense and other countermeasures that both sides use against the drone threat. If the U.S. is ever dragged into a large-scale war against a peer or near-peer adversary like China or Iran, it will be ill-equipped for a drone-heavy background like that in Ukraine.

On the ground in Ukraine

Back in Kharkiv, soldiers must drive navigating via hand torch until the last kilometer or two of their destination, then they must navigate by memory.

“Everything has changed because of drones. … Now there are hundreds of guys putting up nets over the road,” said Stoyanova. Other men by the side of the road wait with drone detectors and shotguns on the roadside ready to shoot.

Because of this, everything has become more dangerous under the dronescape, from the rotation of troops to resupplying front-line infantry.

“With shells, you hear the crack, and the whistle, and have a couple of seconds to hide or take cover. With the drones, you don’t hear anything until the explosion,” a senior official in the military administration stationed in Kherson, a liberated city in southern Ukraine that is under constant threat of Russian drone strikes, said.

Unless the U.S. adapts, the next war it fights may be just as silent, and far more deadly.

The Army has a way of deciding what you’re good at before you ever get a vote. One Thanksgiving, our command sergeant major decided he wanted a Ranger scroll carved out of ice for the battalion dinner. Nobody knew why, and nobody wanted the job. I was the newest private, which made me the perfect candidate.

Two days later, I was on a plane to Fresno, California, to attend something called the Academy of Ice Carving and Design. I thought it was a prank. It wasn’t. The place was real: a full workshop stocked with chainsaws, chisels, and instructors who treated frozen water like marble.

For 48 hours, I lived in a blur of cold air, loud tools, and bad decisions. I learned just enough to be dangerous: how to trace a pattern, how to keep the surface from fogging, how to move a 300-pound block without losing a foot. My hands were nicked, my ego slightly deflated, but all my limbs were intact. I had two days to become the Michelangelo of ice carving.

On my last night in town, I went to a bar with a few locals. Fresno nightlife wasn’t exactly Times Square, but after two days in a freezer, neon lights and jukebox country felt like Vegas. I met a girl who said she’d never met a soldier who could sculpt. She laughed when I told her the Army had made me an artist. We talked, drank too much, and I remember her saying she was that kind of girl. Later, she texted that she was outside my hotel door.

I saw the messages the next morning. Whatever version of me she hoped to meet was already sleeping soundly in the arms of Jim Beam. My head felt like a crew-served live-fire range, and I still had to produce a perfect Ranger scroll out of ice by noon.

I stumbled into the shop, hands shaking, eyes half shut, and started hacking away at the block. My breath fogged the air; my hangover fogged everything else. Somehow, muscle memory and stubborn pride took over. When I finally stepped back, the scroll gleamed under the fluorescent lights — clean lines, perfect curve, a little blood frozen near the edge for authenticity.

The instructors clapped. I tried not to vomit.

Back at the battalion, I thought the nightmare was over. Then they told me to make another one for the real event. And there was a time crunch: eight hours, no fancy tools, no rig to move 300-pound blocks of ice. Just a chainsaw, a chisel, and a sarcastic “good luck.” My reward? A case of beer.

So I did what Rangers do: adapt, improvise, swear under my breath … got drunk again, sliced my hand open on a chainsaw, and still finished in under six hours. It didn’t look as good as the one I made while drunk at the ice carving academy. But at the battalion dinner, everyone else was so drunk, it looked like magic to them anyway.

The Ranger Battalion dinner at Hunter Army Airfield was a contradiction in dress blues: part opera, part bar fight. The air reeked of starch, bourbon, and Grizzly wintergreen. Chandeliers flickered like interrogation lamps over men who’d learned to survive on adrenaline, rage, and instant coffee but were here pretending to be civilized. Prime rib bled across white linen while laughter cracked like gunfire down the tables. Every toast felt like a dare — raise it too slow and you were soft, too fast and you were already gone.

At dinner, the command sergeant major stood behind his gleaming ice scroll like it was the Ark of the Covenant. He nodded once and said, “Outstanding.” That was it. Hours of frostbite, blood, and bourbon distilled into three syllables.

By midnight, the speeches had dissolved into laughter, and the laughter into something harder to name. My ice sculpture wept onto a marble floor. The candles guttered out, leaving the room lit by the glow of half-emptied glasses and the strange warmth of shared ruin.

Yet when the final toast was raised — to those who never made it home — the noise died like the power had been cut. Every head bowed, every jaw clenched. In the silence, you could almost hear the ghosts moving through the room like wind through tall grass. For a moment, amid the spilled bourbon and melted ice, the whole place felt holy.

Looking back, it’s still one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever been asked to do, and I used to jump out of planes in the dark with winds so high we’d end up miles from the drop zone. But that’s the Army for you. One minute you’re training to destroy the enemy, the next, you’re attending art school in Fresno because some sergeant major wants to impress his in-laws at Thanksgiving.

The logic doesn’t matter, only the order. And there’s a school for everything.

A buddy of mine got sent to a course that taught you how to hotwire cars in case you had to make a getaway behind enemy lines. They never sent me to that class, probably for everyone’s safety. I did ask though.

Back then, I thought those detours were pointless. But now I think they were the point: to see if you could adapt to absurdity with the same seriousness you brought to combat. To wake up hungover, get handed a task you didn’t choose or understand, and still make it work. That’s the real test.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Matt Stone, a cook who earned his Ranger tab, served in the 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment from 2008 to 2012. After leaving the Army, he earned an associate degree in criminal justice, a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and a master’s degree in international relations from American University. He is the author of The Spelling Bee Champ and the subscription newsletter Grounded. Most importantly, he learned how to turn struggle into meaning, chaos into lessons, bedlam into cosmic order.

Consider the following scenario. There’s a ransomware attack, enhanced by AI, which paralyses NHS systems — delaying medical care across the country.

Simultaneously, deepfake videos circulate online, spreading false information about the government’s response. At the same time, a foreign power quietly manipulates critical mineral markets to exert pressure on the economy.

The scenario is not just a theory. It is a situation waiting to be rehearsed. And research suggests an old tool called wargaming — an exercise or simulation of a threatening situation — provides the method to do exactly that. Researchers are indeed calling for a new research agenda for experimental design for such games, applied to modern scenarios.

In a world of compounding crises, the U.K. government has published its first-ever chronic risks analysis, delivering a stark warning. It says the threats of the 21st century are already here and they’re deeply interconnected.

From AI-driven cybercrime to biodiversity loss and demographic shifts, the report maps 26 chronic risks that are slowly eroding national security, economic resilience and social cohesion.

The analysis rightly calls for a broader response, urging collaboration across government, industry, academia and society at large.

If chronic risks are the century’s slow burns, then wargaming is the fire drill we haven’t run. In brief, wargaming is a centuries-old tool to explore “what if” scenarios by simulating real-world crises.

In a wargame, participants take on roles, usually in opposing teams, and make decisions in response to unfolding events. Depending on the scenario, participants are recruited to act in a way that would be characteristic for the military, government, industry or humanitarian organizations.

By revealing gaps, stress points and unexpected outcomes, wargaming helps decision-makers plan smarter and respond faster when the real thing hits. Ignoring these feedback loops risks turning slow moving challenges into sudden, systemic shocks.

Historically limited to traditional warfighting, it increasingly offers a way to stress-test systems against cascading threats, from resource scarcity driving geopolitical tensions to digital exclusion fueling misinformation.

Beyond war

Wargaming is still popular among organizations across the world. The Pentagon uses red team exercises to anticipate hybrid warfare. Red-teaming includes modeling of the adversary and attempting to predict their reasoning, planning and actions.

Nato’s “locked shields” exercises simulate cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. And the EU runs tabletops, exercises that help help stress-test defense capability development plans.

Developments in AI have recently been translated into gaming techniques. The Rand corporation has run wargames on issues from antimicrobial resistance to climate change.

Singapore has used wargaming to test urban development policies involving climate adaptation, transportation and population growth.

At a recent Rand Europe wargame examining the governance of AI in health care, players were asked to act as policymakers deciding whether to impose strict, moderate or minimal regulation on new AI tools such as automated transcription of doctor visits. They had to balance this with concerns about safety, privacy and equitable access.

The game illustrated how competing priorities, such as innovation speed versus regulatory oversight, shape real-world decisions. Despite the complexity of the topic, participants typically reached a consensus within minutes, revealing not only preferred policies but also the trade-offs that were revealed under pressure. The results of the game showed that regulation has to adapt to emerging risks, rather than be rigid.

Exercises like this demonstrate how wargaming can expose underlying assumptions and offer policymakers, practitioners and the public a structured way to debate difficult choices before or as they appear in the real world.

Depending on the scope of the game, you could choose to play one round or scenario, or extend it to more in-depth questions. The game results are the most relevant for those who will have to make such decisions, but it’s also very telling to provide them with pathways chosen by the public.

So what games should we be playing? The rapid evolution of crypto-based scams could be explored through a matrix game that includes financial regulators, banks and tech companies. A matrix game allows for a quick role-play of specific agendas with proposed actions judged by an expert facilitator. Participants would be divided into groups of criminals, law enforcement, industry and financial sector. They would then simulate a scenario where fraud spreads faster than enforcement can respond, revealing regulatory blind spots and communication failures.

In another exercise, policymakers could model how a terrorist group might weaponize AI-generated deepfakes. Participants from law enforcement, public health and social media platforms would need to determine how quickly they could identify and respond to the threat while maintaining public trust.

A third scenario could focus on geopolitical competition over critical minerals. A simulated trigger event involving European, Chinese and African actors would allow players to explore the impacts on trade policy, infrastructure security and diplomatic engagement.

These simulations would not predict the future, but would reveal how different people might behave when systems come under stress. Indeed, research into wargaming shows that while these tools aren’t perfect, they are extremely useful.

Wargaming offers a range of techniques suited to different risks. Matrix games allow multiple actors to make decisions in an evolving scenario. This makes them ideal for exploring uncertainty and conflicting interests. Red teaming helps organizations see their systems from the perspective of an adversary, exposing vulnerabilities that may go unnoticed in internal assessments. And tabletop exercises can help policymakers trace the second- and third-order effects of a crisis.

We conduct fire drills, flood drills and emergency alerts for physical disasters. It is time we have more opportunities to do the same for digital blackouts, deepfake terrorism and financial manipulation. These risks are not theoretical. They are already beginning to reshape our world — governments must take heed.

Reports like the chronic risks analysis are vital for naming and describing the dangers ahead. But they must be matched with tools that prepare us to navigate them. Wargaming gives us a chance to practice the future — to uncover the gaps in our systems, to rehearse our collective response and to build the resilience we will need in the years to come.

We might not be able to predict the future perfectly given the speed of change. But we can test the options for potential futures. Wargaming is how we start.

Natalia Zwarts is a research leader in wargaming at Rand Europe. Ondrej Palicka is a junior researcher at Rand Europe.