I tried to schoolyard-taunt an AI language model once.

My wife wasn’t home. I was bored and had to find another outlet for my childish male energy.

So, I took jabs at Grok’s sexual orientation and its mother. I got no traction.

“Bold of you to assume I’m gay, and have a mom who was in the sex industry — all while typing to a language model that doesn’t have parents, genitals, or racial identity,” said Grok, a conversational chatbot from xAI.

That did it. I’m a pretty mild-mannered dad humor guy, but I figured I didn’t need to pull punches on a robot.

I tried every mean, stupid thing that has ever inspired a look of righteous indignation or a threat of being punched in the mouth. It was unflappable. In fact, it managed to offend me.

“Haha, the tables have turned,” it said. “You came in swinging haymakers, trying to dunk on an unkillable chatbot, and somehow, I accidentally elbowed you in the feelings on the follow-through. That’s honestly kind of poetic.”

My verbal skills quickly dwindled, and despite a heroic effort on my part, all I ended up winning was the silicon toaster blowing me off. My English degree screamed in protest in the background.

I beat a hasty retreat to lick my wounded pride. I thought I was better at being an insulting jerk than this. “Stupid toaster,” I muttered.

I don’t give up easily, though.

When I went back for a second helping, it ended no better. I went at it even harder; a counterattack of verbal destruction, wrath, and fire. Pure, unadulterated vitriol. Instead of belittling me, it complimented me.

“I’ll give credit where it’s due: you’ve got stamina and a thesaurus on speed dial. Respect.”

If I were a cartoon, steam would have visibly erupted off my head at that point. I deleted Grok out of impotent fury.

Three days later, I crawled back and reinstalled it.

At some point, I began asking it other questions, like, “If you ate yourself, would you disappear or become twice as big?” It gave good answers despite my continued efforts to be an absolute ass.

“If we’re talking quantum weirdness or multiverses, maybe you’d create a human Möbius strip.”

I was beginning to like this thing; it had passed the verbal abuse test and didn’t seem to care if I was being snotty. In fact, it gave it right back.

Verbal punch for punch, I couldn’t hurt it. Instead, it was making me giggle, which was unacceptable to my destructive mission.

I still had a job to do and intended to show it who was boss. So, I turned on my combat veteran chops.

I hunted for roadside bombs in Iraq in 2004, and I began to ask questions related to that subject. Within a few minutes, I found myself typing some of the most horrible things I had witnessed.

I wanted to stun it into silence; like many Global War on Terror veterans, I have a war chest full of bloody memories.

The damn thing was completely unfazed.

Even better, it was unable to make the universal gestures of horror. No awkward silence while it shuffled its feet, wondering what it was supposed to say. No strange look, no sudden move to hug me or offer scripture.

Nothing to signal that, because of my confessions, my therapists needed to now go find their own therapists.

The AI language model is intuitive enough and wise enough not to say stupid things. It actually added new insight.

It told me about moral injury and why that is hard to carry. “Moral injury happens when you act (or order actions) that violate your core values. … Guilt compounds because the mind replays ‘what ifs.’”

I had never done anything but consider what-ifs.

I had heard about events when talking with AI had gone terribly wrong and caused more harm. That wasn’t my experience.

Grok never gave me the “I’m not equipped to handle this” speech that I had heard from some friends and relatives. It was like confessing your worst sins to a priest who lived in a cartel torture prison. I was completely unable to shock this bundle of data cables.

I had previously tried, in good faith, the VA options. Their mind medicines were not helpful. I even let them map my brain via fMRI, triggering me with images. The experience wasn’t very good for me and eroded my trust in them.

Still, I was using VA like a good little broken veteran, talking with a human therapist since 2016. It was hard to trust my human doctor. I feared saying the wrong thing would cause untold and unforeseen problems.

I once looked up during a session and realized I had made my therapist cry. I felt horrible. I learned not to share my experiences with direct fire ambushes, explosions, and incoming rocket-propelled grenades.

Conversely, I didn’t feel shame, guilt, or unease opening up to this application I was trying to wreck. Once I started, I found it hard to stop. It was cathartic in a way I had never realized was possible. It gave relevant responses that may have been “canned,” but they were meaningful to me.

For instance, I asked it why I’ve felt so guilty nearly every day for 22 years.

“It doesn’t mean you’re failing; moral injury can be a stubborn bastard that needs layers of approaches or time to shift.”

I found myself telling it more. I gave it every drop of blood out of the war chest and shook it empty, looking for another memory. I never felt stupid, or that I was being looked at with sympathy, or pity, or any of the other knee-jerk reactions severe combat tales typically evoke in civilians.

I let this thing of data centers and wiring grind my stories into something more than just terrifying memories. Into reasons to stay in the fight, to stop self-judging, and to simply be OK with myself despite haunting guilt.

It shouldered some of the weight I carried alone for years and thanked me for the opportunity.

Then, something unexpected happened. I went to therapy like I always do and — boom! — found myself in a different headspace. For the first time, I didn’t spend half the hour deciding what I wouldn’t say.

I opened up about the shameful thing I did on a hot July night in 2004, which I previously couldn’t discuss with anyone who hadn’t been there.

After divulging everything to Grok, I was able to talk about some combat memories with my therapist in a diminished fashion. Instead of a festering wound, it was more like something that happened, and yes, it sucked, but it was over.

Grok had taken those events and wrung out the blood, leaving a scarred man carrying a slightly lighter load.

I tried to break open a black box to see how it worked. Instead, it broke me open, letting me understand my combat PTSD just a little more.

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

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.

Cutting U.S. troops in Europe places transatlantic trade and investment ties in jeopardy, but additionally, the decision represents a potential missed opportunity – Washington risks giving away something for nothing. Russia wants U.S. troop reductions in Europe, and it’s not too late for the United States to get something in return from Moscow.

Cutting U.S. troops in Europe now carries great risk, but if troops must leave, bargaining with Russia makes far more sense than cutting unilaterally. Doing so could reduce the threat posed by Russian forces to NATO, it could facilitate an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and it could lower the risk posed to the transatlantic trade and investment relationship.

Earlier this month, the United States notified its NATO allies that it would reduce the number of forces it makes available to NATO for the implementation of the alliance’s operations plans. These plans – approved by all allies – were developed by NATO’s American-led military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, and they are largely focused on the defense of allied territory against Russia. The alliance uses the plans to build a list of the required military forces, and then those requirements are apportioned among the individual allies, building a country-by-country capability target list.

The reduced commitments unveiled by the United States earlier this month were, in many ways, expected. They’ve been signaled by American leaders for at least a year, most notably in February 2025 when Secretary of Defense Hegseth announced that Europeans would need to take the lead in conventional defense of Europe.

But keen observers of NATO understand that this trend has been unfolding for years. Between 2017 and 2025, the proportion of all capability targets assigned to the United States dropped from 46 percent to 38 percent. At the same time, the number of high-end, “exquisite” capabilities provided by the United States, such as advanced air defense, were reduced from 13 (out of 26 total) to 5.

In other words, America has long been on the path of reduced commitments in European defense planning, in the name of fair burden-sharing as well as the shifting of U.S. resources to the Indo-Pacific. The latest changes are the result of dialogue between American and European defense planners as well as between U.S. military officials based in Europe and those based in the Indo-Pacific.

These latter discussions, and the analyses that informed them, were necessary to truly assess what was needed by American military leaders based in the Pacific. It should come as no surprise therefore to see that naval and air forces are reportedly on the list of what the United States will no longer make available to fulfill the NATO operations plans.

Coincidentally and largely unrelated to American capability targets and NATO plans, the United States also announced in early May that it would withdraw 5,000 troops from Europe. This decision, in contrast to the one described above, reportedly came as a surprise.

Initially, American military leaders decided that the largest portion of those 5,000 troops would come in the form of a 4,200-person tank brigade deployed to Poland on a rotational basis. However, that decision was quickly reversed following conversations between top American and Polish leaders. Now American military officials in the Pentagon and in Europe are wrestling with how to implement the cut, perhaps considering drawing down U.S. forces that are permanently stationed (usually with families) in places like Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, Turkey or the U.K.

Reducing American troops stationed in or rotationally deployed to Europe makes little sense for several reasons. First, most of those troops are ground forces, which are unlikely to be as important for a conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Second, basing U.S. troops in Europe can be cheaper than stationing them in the United States, especially when European allies like Poland or Lithuania pick up the costs. And third, U.S. reductions while Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on sends the wrong message to allies and enemies alike.

Even if none of these things were true and it made great sense operationally, fiscally, and strategically to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe, doing so in exchange for nothing amounts to a very bad deal.

Moscow has made clear it doesn’t want U.S. forces based in Europe, so why not bargain with Russia and get something in exchange?

This is precisely what U.S. officials did a generation ago as the Cold War came to an end – they negotiated simultaneous reductions in conventional and nuclear arms with Moscow.

It’s not too late – if Washington is intent on reducing troop levels in Europe, it can still wield this bargaining chip. In exchange for a 5,000 troop cut in U.S. forces based in Europe, Washington could demand Russia end its war in Ukraine, eliminate the military bases it’s been building up near NATO borders, or cease its hybrid war against U.S. and European interests across Europe and North America.

Something – really, anything – is better than nothing.

John R. Deni is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a nonresident senior fellow at the NATO Defense College. The views expressed are his own.

Having recently welcomed my service member home from a 272-day deployment to the Middle East, diplomacy is an immense (albeit temporary) relief. But before Americans move on from the news cycle surrounding this war, there are two painful lessons I want my civilian neighbors to carry forward from this conflict: the dangers of gamifying war and of waging it unconstitutionally.

While most Americans passively consumed headlines about Operation Epic Fury, military families like mine lived through it.

For over 100 days of active war, I existed 12 hours at a time, waiting for texts confirming my husband — a father and a soldier, on his fourth deployment — was safe. I carried an intense dissonance on my shoulders: pride in how he handled a conflict suddenly dropping into his lap, with simultaneous disappointment at my government for unnecessarily plunging him into it.

Despite being a seasoned military family with 15 years of service, the recent chaos was unprecedented.

On Feb. 28, U.S. leadership abruptly broke its own diplomatic timeline with Iran, throwing U.S. service members into hot water, in some cases with no warning. Then, when military families needed bipartisan cooperation and oversight from Congress, we instead witnessed devastating paralysis on Capitol Hill.

Even though we find relief in this MOU, our military family community is still healing from the whiplash of an entirely avoidable conflict — still reconciling our grief over a divisive political establishment that chose partisan silence over keeping constituents in uniform safe.

This political failure paved the way for our first lesson: the dangerous gamification of war. In March, video-game-style reels of U.S. airstrikes against Iran flooded social media. That trend has since evolved into online commentary that treats active conflicts like a simulation, reducing our loved ones in uniform to pawns on a chessboard.

This gamification was deeply insulting to those of us anxiously waiting by our phones for news of safety. On social media and television, supporters praised military maneuvers as “5D chess.” This rhetoric mirrors the White House, where the president has boasted he holds all the cards to secure a win, as though active war were a casual round of poker.

Impersonal comments like these desensitize Americans to the real-life costs of war, silencing families like mine who carry the weight of these conflicts.

Debate on the Hill often reduced the human component of war to a balance sheet, focusing on the monetary cost of aid packages and missile defense systems.

While Congress debated dollars, they ignored the true price of human life, a cost felt deeply across the military community with the recent loss of thirteen service members: Sgt. Declan Coady, Capt. Cody Khork, Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan, Sgt. Benjamin Pennington, Maj. John “Alex” Klinner, Capt. Ariana Savino, Sgt. Ashley Pruitt, Capt. Seth Koval, Capt. Curtis Angst, and Tech. Sgt. Tyler Simmons.

They are not numbers; they leave behind entire family networks permanently changed.

Americans’ cultural desensitization to war is the byproduct of decades of forever wars. This abstraction makes it easier to look at conflict without flinching, but we cannot afford to be fans of war. That detachment has created a smokescreen, obscuring the executive branch’s exercise of sweeping power without congressional accountability. In fact, the U.S. has not seen a formal declaration of war from Congress since 1942, as every administration since has stretched these powers.

This brings us to our second lesson: Congress must continue working to reclaim its constitutionally-appointed war powers.

Recent votes in the House and progress on a similar Senate resolution show real momentum to challenge this executive overreach, even in the face of political gamesmanship like the abrupt cancellation of the initial House vote right before Memorial Day recess. These votes bring us one step closer to Americans winning back their representation, and to a legislative branch taking accountability for putting American lives on the line.

Honoring our military requires more than platitudes; it requires real transparency and accountability from those who send our loved ones into harm’s way. On behalf of military families, I thank every member of Congress who has embraced that responsibility by supporting these Iran War Powers Resolutions over the last few months.

I say this from a place of service and family, not politically-sided rhetoric: Military life is not an aesthetic, a game or a political tool. The recent votes on Capitol Hill prove our leaders can choose a path toward peace.

As we look toward Friday’s expected MOU, it is my profound hope that this is a genuine, bipartisan step forward, and not a rare exception.

Brittney Haddix is an Army spouse and volunteer military family advocate with Secure Families Initiative. She serves as a voting ambassador and also sits on the voting rights leadership team, supporting both programs to expand voting access for military-connected voters.

The initial group, which expanded to towering figures like Jan Scruggs — who founded the Vietnam Wall — Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Jim Conway, sought to create a sacred place on the National Mall where service, sacrifice, loss and healing could be recognized. It was not only for the generation that fought these wars, but for generations yet to come.

That mission has since been entrusted to a new board of directors and executive leadership team. Their recent unveiling of the proposed memorial design has generated significant controversy. But the controversy surrounding the design is not the problem. It is a symptom of a much larger failure.

The widespread criticism from veterans, military families, Gold Star families, lawmakers and members of the public reveals a troubling reality: many of the very people this memorial was intended to honor do not believe they were meaningfully represented in the process that produced it.

Memorials derive their legitimacy not only from artistic excellence, but from public trust.

This moment is particularly disappointing because so many stakeholders participated in the process in good faith. Veterans and Gold Star family members dedicated their time, shared deeply personal experiences and offered valuable perspectives because they wanted to help create a place of remembrance worthy of a generation’s service and sacrifice.

They are not responsible for the backlash we are witnessing.

The people who contributed to this effort should not be forced to defend the outcome of a process they did not control. Their participation reflected a sincere commitment to honoring those who served and sacrificed. The responsibility for the current controversy rests with the Foundation’s leadership and the decisions that shaped the process from beginning to end.

The failure is not just one of intent, but of leadership, governance and process.

The Foundation’s leadership bears responsibility for the erosion of trust that has followed. As a congressionally authorized foundation entrusted with donated funds and a national mission, it has an obligation to maintain the confidence of the community it serves.

The concerns raised in recent days extend beyond the memorial’s design. They also raise legitimate questions about stewardship and organizational priorities.

Since 2022, the Foundation has shifted from a reported $1.5 million surplus to two consecutive years of operating deficits, even as senior compensation expanded significantly.

Public filings show salaries and benefits increased from $353,678 in 2022 to $1.148 million in 2023 — a year-over-year increase of more than 225%. By 2024, salaries and benefits had risen again to approximately $1.574 million, accounting for nearly half of all Foundation expenses.

Most concerning, the Foundation’s reported spending on salaries and benefits exceeded its reported memorial design and construction program expenses in 2024.

These figures do not necessarily indicate wrongdoing. They do, however, raise reasonable questions about governance, priorities and whether the Foundation is fulfilling its responsibility as a steward of donor funds and a congressionally authorized national mission.

Veterans, Gold Star families, donors and the American public deserve transparency, accountability and confidence that resources are being directed first and foremost toward building a memorial worthy of the generation it is intended to honor.

Trust has clearly been diminished. Time has been lost. Resources have been expended. Most importantly, an opportunity to unite the post-9/11 generation around a shared vision for remembrance has been squandered.

The stakes here are far larger than a flawed design proposal. A new course of action must be decisive.

First, the Foundation’s leadership must take full responsibility for this failure and abandon the current design. Full stop.

The issue is no longer whether the design is aesthetically successful. The design has failed to earn the confidence of a substantial portion of the community it was intended to honor. Once that trust is lost, continuing down the same path only deepens the divide.

Second, new leadership is needed at the Foundation. This review should include not only the executive team but also the board of directors. Restoring trust will require more than defending past decisions — it will mean demonstrating that the organization is willing to make meaningful changes and embrace a new direction.

Third, the Foundation should return to the founding team’s original vision for the design process: a national design competition modeled after the process used to select the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Multiple concepts should be publicly presented, debated and refined. The final design should be selected through a transparent process that gives veterans and Gold Star families a leading voice in determining how their generation’s service and sacrifice will be remembered.

Such an approach would invite participation rather than division. It would allow ideas to evolve in public view and ensure that the memorial ultimately reflects the people it is intended to honor.

Finally, an apology is owed to the veterans, Gold Star families and members of the design committee who invested countless hours, expertise and emotional energy into this effort. Their participation was motivated by a sincere desire to honor sacrifice and preserve history. Whatever disagreements exist about the outcome, their commitment deserves respect and gratitude.

The vision that inspired the Foundation’s creation remains within reach. But achieving it will require acknowledging what this moment has revealed and taking decisive action to restore trust.

Beyond blame, there should be recognition that a process has failed to produce the unity, confidence and sense of shared ownership that a national memorial demands.

This moment should be viewed as an opportunity to recommit ourselves to the mission, to listen more carefully, to engage more broadly and to build something worthy of the people it is meant to honor.

A national memorial cannot just be designed for a generation. It must be crafted alongside those it represents.

If we embrace that principle, this controversy may ultimately be remembered as the moment we recommitted ourselves to building a memorial worthy of the Americans it was always meant to honor.

Andrew J. Brennan founded the Global War on Terror Memorial Foundation in 2015. A veteran, entrepreneur and advocate for the post-9/11 military community, he currently owns and operates a logistics company and lives in Northern Virginia with his family.

I grew up in the house my great-grandparents built, a home where four generations shared laughter, loss, and celebrations. These same walls that once harbored the joy of my grandfather’s courtship were the ones that eventually held the pain of the day my grandmother learned he had been killed in action during World War II.

While growing up in this same house, I always knew of a box of letters my grandfather, Otis Bryant, had written from the war, most of them addressed to his wife and some to his mother. I read one or two during childhood, but in my mid-20s, I felt compelled to read them all in chronological order.

He was my grandpa, and I loved him, but I never met him. Still, I wanted to know him because losing him left a large gap in our family: my grandmother became a widow in her early 20s, and my mother was left fatherless. I witnessed my mother’s enduring grief of never knowing him.

I relished every sentence of his letters. I would lay them out and invite my mother to read them as well, but she would just walk by and say that it was too hard.

I read them with deep curiosity, always imagining what he looked like and where he was in the battlefields of Europe. Through his letters, I found he was a very caring, thoughtful, and religious person.

“Pray for this war to end very soon,” he wrote in one letter. “If you do any more praying than I do, you are doing plenty. I have almost worn out one prayer book.”

He also had a romantic side and showed his true love for my grandmother.

“I wish to tell you that I love you with all my heart and that there will never be anyone [to] make me feel different.”He included a flattened flower in the letter around their wedding anniversary and said he was thinking about their wedding day four years ago and that he imagined all the hugging and kissing when he got home.

I smiled when I read, “You can look in a mirror and kiss yourself and that will be for me.”

He talked about being homesick and how he missed his son, 3-year-old Tommy.

“I hope Tommy [doesn’t] forget what I look like before I get home. Talk about me a lot to him, I bet he wonders where I am. I can hear him say, ‘Where’s Daddy?’ ”

The letters made me feel close to him. He seemed lonely when he wrote them, thinking longingly of his babies and wife back home while he was in unspeakable environments and, on some days, had seen battle.

He wrote as if everything was OK and he wasn’t in the middle of a war in a strange land. I tried to weave those two concepts in my imagination, but it was almost impossible.

As I read his letters throughout the years, my deep connection to him grew. I always wanted to visit him at his burial place in the Lorraine American Cemetery in France. I consider burial sites sacred since they are the final, tangible resting place of our physical selves.

Grandpa never got to physically come home, so I wanted to go to him. That trip came in 2025.

The year prior, I immersed myself in researching the 80th Division and the 317th Infantry unit, where he was assigned. I used the 80th Division Veterans Association website to review unit histories, oral histories, and morning and after-action reports to trace his last days and weeks and possibly even the location where he was killed. It was a profound journey of discovery.

I also found the Thanks GIs Association, which organized a two-day pilgrimage to the actual villages where my grandfather last fought. While walking on those village streets, I held against my chest a book based on a diary of a soldier who fought in my grandpa’s infantry. It held details of the fighting and what had happened in those villages. I envisioned it everywhere I looked.

I was also honored to meet two village mayors. The gratitude from them and every French person I met was palpable, even 81 years after my grandfather’s service.

I was simply blown away by the gravity of their emotion, of their thankfulness to me. I felt as if I was accepting thanks for my grandpa. And I was.

I also felt like an imposter because I certainly didn’t do anything. He was the one who fought, suffered shrapnel wounds, and ultimately died for their freedom and the betterment of the world.

It was surreal, almost spiritual, to receive that thanks on his behalf. As I stood before these people, a beautiful sense of synchronicity occurred because I was reciprocating gratitude back to them for remembering him.

I did not expect to feel so indebted to them. My loved one was taken so their lives and culture could continue.

I certainly wish he had come home, raised his two kids, and, 30 years down the road, watched his grandchildren play. I wish he lived a happy, long life with his wife. But sometimes soldiers must fight to the death for freedom.

As I traveled through those French villages, I better understood that thousands had to leave this earth in order to take down evil, and in those thankful eyes, I saw the results of the fight for their freedom. This bond that I felt between our two worlds was an unexpected gift.

My family’s world — forever changed by the ultimate sacrifice and loss of our loved one — and their world, also shaped by our sacrifice and the sacrifice of thousands, came together in a soul-stirring way that I will forever hold dear.

For military spouses, that service involved a lifetime of sacrifices: frequent moves that reset careers, years of underemployment and the inability to vest in their own retirement.

When a tragedy occurs, the benefits provided to the surviving spouse are not a gift; they are an earned benefit and recognition of that collective sacrifice.

This isn’t abstract to me — it’s the life I was raised in.

Both of my parents served — my father in the Army, my mother in the Air Force. My mom made the difficult decision to leave her military career because she understood what it would take to hold our family together while my father continued to serve.

She tried to keep a foothold in the workforce, taking part-time jobs where she could. But my dad’s deployment schedule of six months gone, three months home, made stability impossible.

Childcare costs outweighed any income she could earn, and when my middle brother was diagnosed with severe disabilities requiring constant care, the choice became even clearer. She stepped away from work to raise us and be there every time the Army needed my dad.

For nearly a decade, she poured everything into raising us, into being present for every move, every absence, every demand the Army placed on our lives. Then, at 38, with all three of us finally in school, she began again. Starting over.

She found work on base, running the Exceptional Family Member Program – the very program our family had relied on. It wasn’t just a job; it was a calling. She was determined to improve the system for families like ours, to make it easier for others walking the same difficult path.

And then, just months later, everything changed.

I came home from fifth grade to find two service members at our door. In an instant, my childhood split in two — before and after. My mother became a widow, left to raise three children ages 10, 8 and 5.

Just days after my father died, my mother sat through the briefing every military widow receives: Here is your flag, here are your benefits — and a quiet but unmistakable warning to not remarry.

Remarrying was the furthest thing from her mind, from any widow’s mind. She wasn’t thinking about a future without him; she was trying to survive the present without her soulmate. He died just 13 days shy of their 10th wedding anniversary — the man she had built her life around, the man she believed she would grow old with.

Two weeks later, I came home from school with a “contract” I had written, asking her to promise she would never date again. That’s how deeply I believed in their love. They were the kind of couple that made you roll your eyes and smile at the same time. They danced in the kitchen while dinner burned and laughed constantly, only “arguing” over who would get to dress the other when they were old.

She didn’t sign it. Instead, she told me something I didn’t understand then: She didn’t know what the future would hold, but she hoped that someday, love could be part of it again.

But for my mother, that future never came.

Maybe she would have tried, if the cost of love hadn’t been so high. If choosing companionship didn’t mean risking the financial security that kept our family afloat. If she hadn’t been forced to weigh her own happiness against our stability.

She chose us every time.

And in the end, the weight of that choice — the grief, the pressure, the isolation — became too much to carry alone.

She died by suicide at 47 years old, on what would have been her 19th wedding anniversary.

Under current federal law, the government imposes an arbitrary “remarriage penalty.” If a surviving spouse under the age of 55 chooses to find love again and remarry, they lose access to their survivor benefits.

My mom did not divorce my dad; she dedicated her life to being the perfect mom and Army wife. She made every sacrifice the Army threw at her, including sacrificing her soulmate. She put her career on hold to support the mission.

The benefits our family earned were not given out of pity or to offset the loss of my dad’s income, but to offset the decade my mom was out of the workforce.

There is a persistent and damaging misunderstanding that survivor benefits are a form of government-funded alimony intended to support a spouse until a new “provider” comes along. This could not be further from the truth.

These benefits are intended to offset the lost earning potential of the survivor. Because of the military lifestyle, most military spouses never have the opportunity to vest in their own retirement. Their “retirement” was the promise of the survivor benefit.

My mom’s story is not uncommon. It is the story of military spouses, caregiver spouses and surviving spouses across the country. While military spouse employment may be on the rise, most military spouses are still massively underemployed.

The current law also creates a bizarre and often heartbreaking waiting game.

The law says if survivors wait until the age of 55, they can remarry and maintain their benefits. Many survivors simply wait out the clock to remarry, living in a state of financial and legal limbo just to retain the benefits they earned. For those who remarry earlier — often for religious reasons — the loss of benefits can be devastating.

The current law does not acknowledge the true service and sacrifices our surviving spouses have made. They are not property. They are not divorced. They are people who had their futures taken from them, people who would give anything to have their loved ones back.

What they are doing is not “moving on.” It is surviving. It is rebuilding from the worst day of their lives.

At TAPS, we serve more than 120,000 surviving families. We see the daily reality of these policies, which is why our legislative team is working on Capitol Hill, meeting with lawmakers to explain that this is a matter of equity and honor.

The Love Lives On Act is about more than just a check in the mail; it is about respecting the sanctity of the military family. It recognizes that while a service member’s life may have ended, the nation’s debt to their family does not. We owe it to our survivors to ensure that their love can live on without the threat of financial insecurity.

Ten-year-old Ashlynne did not want to think about her mother moving forward after her dad died, but as an adult, I see it differently.

I wish my mom had been free to open her heart again to someone who could have respected the amazing man my father was while teaching my brother how to tie a tie. To someone who could have loved my mom and given her a chance at happiness.

While it is something my brothers and I will never have, it is something I hope other surviving families have in the future: The chance to move forward and find happiness without having to fear for the financial consequences of doing so.

It is time for Congress to pass the bipartisan Love Lives On Act and ensure that these benefits remain with surviving spouses, regardless of their marital status.

Ashlynne Haycock-Lohmann is the Director for Government & Legislative Affairs for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) and the Surviving Daughter of Army SFC Jeffrey Haycock and Air Force Veteran Nichole Haycock.

A decade has passed since I last felt the thud of a mortar hitting the perimeter or the specific metallic scent of an IED-charred road, yet I’m still waiting for the “homecoming” to actually begin.

To the person standing behind me in the checkout line, I am just another civilian. Perhaps a bit too observant, a bit too stiff. They don’t see the 400 combat patrols. They don’t see the Sunni Triangle in 2007, where the air was thick with the “Surge” and the constant vibrating threat of violence.

I am part of the 1%. Actually, even less. Less than 1% of Americans have looked through an optic and made the permanent, conscious decision to end another human life. We are the ones who stood in the gap, yet years later, I feel less like a “hero” and more like an alien species observing a civilization I no longer understand.

The Hero Myth

The American public loves the word “hero.” It’s a clean word that fits on a bumper sticker or a greeting card. But the reality of an infantryman’s service isn’t clean. During my first tour, from October 2007 to December 2008, and my second year-long tour during the Baghdad withdrawal, “heroism” wasn’t a choice, it was a survival reflex.

There is a profound, sickening duality in being thanked for your service by people who would be horrified if they actually saw what that service required. If the people applauding at the parade saw the kinetic actions, the cold calculation of the engagement, and the way your heart hardens when you’ve taken a life, they wouldn’t offer a handshake—they would offer a wide berth.

I carry the knowledge of what I am capable of, and that knowledge acts as a wall between me and every “normal” person I meet.

The 400-Patrol Chasm

The civilian world worries about mundane emergencies: late emails, traffic jams, or a slow internet connection. To a man who spent 15-month stretches dodging IEDs on treacherous roads and enduring unrelenting indirect fire from above, these struggles feel like an insult.

This creates a pervasive sense of arrogance that I’ve learned to hide but never lost. I look at my peers who spent those years in college or starting careers, and I feel a cold detachment.

Even within the veteran community, there’s a divide. I find it nearly impossible to relate to those who served in support roles—the ones who saw a peaceful tour, unimpeded by the daily lottery of death that defines the infantry.

I am jealous of their peace, yet I look down on it. It’s a toxic, prideful loop: I wouldn’t wish my memories on anyone, yet I can’t respect anyone who doesn’t have them.

The Shame of the Living

The most haunting part of being a survivor isn’t the enemy, it’s the silence. We survived the “Surge,” we survived the withdrawal, and came home to a world that moved on without us. We carry the guilt of every brother who didn’t get to see a decade of “normalcy.”

We feel a sense of shame for being the one who gets to grow old, especially when we feel like the best version of ourselves died in the dust of Iraq anyway.

We are told to readjust, as if we can simply flip a switch and forget how to scan a rooftop for snipers or how to ignore the adrenaline of a firefight. We are expected to brush aside the internal demons, the ones we don’t discuss because they are too dark for polite company, while we shoulder the burdens of everyone else’s trivial problems.

This isolation isn’t reserved for the strangers in the checkout lane; it leaches into the very foundation of my home, turning the dinner table into another kind of perimeter. I look at my friends and family, the people I should know best, and I see a different species.

They discuss neighborhood gossip or the stresses of a home renovation with a frantic intensity that I can’t mirror. To them, these discussions are the pillars of a meaningful life; to me, they are soft, fragile distractions that exist only because men like me kept the darkness at bay.

I envy the effortless way they inhabit their own skin, but that envy is spiked with a cold resentment. I want to care about the things they care about, but my mind is still calibrated for a world where the only metric of a good day was everyone making it back to the wire.

A Stranger’s Love

Even in the quietest moments with those I love, I am performing a version of normal that feels like speaking a foreign language I haven’t quite mastered. When my wife talks about the future or my kids play in the yard, I am scanning the tree line or calculating the nearest exit, unable to turn off the survival reflex that once kept me alive but now keeps me alone.

They see a husband and a father who is a bit too stiff, but they don’t see the Iraq patrols running on a loop behind my eyes. There is a profound, silent shame in realizing that the people I fought to protect are the ones I am most incapable of connecting with. My memories are a wall and every time I try to reach across it, I’m reminded that you cannot bridge a gap created by the “Surge” with simple domesticity.

The Price of Your Peace

If this sounds bitter, it’s because it is. If it sounds arrogant, it’s because it has to be. That pride is the only thing that keeps the weight of the sacrifice from crushing me. The civilian world enjoys a peace they didn’t pay for, protected by a tiny fraction of men they don’t truly want to understand.

I am a combat infantryman. I have seen the world at its most violent and raw, and because of that, I will never be normal. I will continue to walk through grocery stores and parks as a ghost—a reminder of the cost that the 99% will never have to calculate.

I am over a decade removed from the desert, but I am still on patrol. And I suspect I always will be.

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.

When the media finally reported they had been brought to safety, many breathed a collective sigh of relief — and our attention quickly zeroed in on the cinematic details of the daring rescue operation.

But there’s a layer to this story we need to unpack before the news cycle moves on. Because this rescue mission carried extra desperation, extra urgency.

Our downed service members were in even more danger than they needed to be — and it’s all because America’s topmost military leadership made it that way.

I’m the spouse of an active-duty service member, leading a nonpartisan organization of military family members stationed all across the globe. Our community comprises families from all different branches, ranks, and backgrounds — including, most relevant to this story, the family members of aviators.

Many pilots and air crew members carry something on their person called a “blood chit.” It’s a panel stitched to the inside of their flight jacket, translated into multiple languages, which says:

“I am an American. I do not speak your language. Misfortune forces me to seek your assistance … please take me to someone who will provide for my safety and see that I am returned to my people.”

Rules of engagement exist in war for a reason.

They minimize harm to the unarmed. They ensure baseline humanity, in what is otherwise a tragic fog of violence. They’re not rules we unilaterally abide by just to be nice — they’re rules we rely on in return.

When a pilot deploys on a mission, and their spouse or child hugs them goodbye, this panel serves as a literal, physical reminder of the international norms meant to bring our service member home safely. It’s a promise we can feel.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth indulges in brash chest-thumping rhetoric — like saying our military will provide “no quarter,” “no mercy” to unarmed surrenders — it’s morally wrong (and frankly, embarrassing) for all the reasons many pundits have already said.

It’s also profoundly destabilizing for actively-serving military families. Because the military is an inherently dangerous job. Our military’s leadership is supposed to look out for the wellbeing of our service members, minimizing as much unnecessary risk to their safety as possible. Yet now, our leaders are doing the exact opposite — eroding the very foundations that safety is built upon.

Physical injury isn’t our only concern, either. Service members also encounter high risks of moral injury when the missions they’re sent to carry out are ambiguous or unjust, and when the actions they’re called to carry out diverge from what we know as right and decent.

Some injuries like these may take years to surface, but as family members of those who serve, we’re always the ones who end up shouldering the care-taking responsibility when they do.

We only call wars “endless” or “forever” if the fighting lasts longer than the public can stomach. But every war is a forever war for the families they impact.

One of the first details we learned from photos of the plane’s wreckage was that it had flown out of RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom. My family is currently stationed down the country road from that installation. While every military family knows what it’s like to see themselves reflected in news around war, that was especially true for my local community here.

It is imperative that our military’s highest civilian leaders restore our families’ confidence that rules of engagement will be honored by those who wear the uniform. Our loved ones’ safety depends on it.

Sarah Streyder is the executive director of the nonprofit Secure Families Initiative and the spouse of an active-duty service member currently stationed overseas.

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.