Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced Monday at the the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference that the service has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against “hostile adversary action.”

Meink announced in a keynote address Monday at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference that the service has on-orbit space control weapons that are capable of defending the joint force against “hostile adversary action.”

Meink offered no other details, saying only that the phrasing was “well thought out.” He said maintaining and being able to depend on U.S. space capabilities is necessary as adversaries develop their own capabilities to threaten them.

“It is critically important that we maintain our dominance not only in the air but in space, and so that we’ve had to take steps to make sure that when we’re threatened, we can take care of that,” he said during his speech.

During a media roundtable following the keynote, Meink declined to comment on the type of weapons or why the announcement was made now.

Meink’s statement is the most direct public acknowledgment by a U.S. official to date regarding space control weapons, but he did not say when the weapons were launched or how many are in orbit.

Meink said that for more than a decade, the U.S. has been aware that adversaries such as China and Russia were developing their own capabilities to threaten U.S. systems.

“We need to maintain dominance in space as it becomes more and more important to how we function, how we operate militarily and economically, civilian-wise,” he told reporters.

The secretary called it necessary for deterrence, but he would not give more details about the weapons, saying that would negate its purpose.

“I’m not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing, whether we’ve tested or not tested or anything else,” he said.

During a panel regarding counter-drone defenses at the Air and Space Cyber Conference, Hiatt noted that “everyone talks about cost asymmetry… and how important that solving that cost asymmetry problem is. But for the folks that are on the ground, the battle captain trying to make that assessment, it’s not a cost asymmetry problem. It’s a magazine doubt issue.”

“When you have a problem like UAS threats, they’re coming in mass,” Hiatt continued. Trust in an airman’s system, he emphasized, is crucial when the threat time has been cut down to seconds.

“I know that my DE [Directed Energy] weapons are gonna be able to take it out, and do so in a low-collateral way, in a very low cost per shot way, and most importantly, in a way that preserves my magazine — my scarce interceptors, and then they’ll be able to push that button.”

The challenge, according to Hiatt, is “putting that work in and building that trust. It’s not science fiction. It’s physics fact.”

For Hiatt, utilizing AI in counter-drone defense is a tool with humans initially “in the loop” but ultimately working towards a system where humans start the loop and then end up on the outside of the operating system. However, building that trust amid an industry that is still formulating its own AI policy regulations is difficult, the panelists concede.

But despite this, the panelists argue, the proverbial cat is out of the bag regarding artificial intelligence, and the U.S. military must work on how to combat fast and reckless enemy AI agents that don’t necessarily operate with the same oversight.

The military must continue “to evolve, because the threat is evolving,” said panelist Colton Wood, chief technology officer of Digital Force Technologies. “And if we don’t evolve our defenses to basically counter that, we’re just gonna always be on our heels.

During the panel, “Rethinking the Stockpile: Building the Right Mix for Future Conflict” at the Air and Space Cyber Conference on Monday, Lyons noted that the service is working to balance “capability, capacity cost and the adaptability to produce at the speed and scale for future conflicts.”

Citing the conflict in Ukraine, where battlefield adaptations can come within hours and minutes, not months and years, panelist Bryon Kroger, founder and CEO of Rise8, noted that “when it comes to software, we’ve just historically been really bad. Like, in some cases, we’re building software slower than hardware. It’s wild.”

“You wouldn’t think about not establishing a refueling apparatus for aircraft that need to get across long distances,” said Kroger. “But we haven’t really thought about, from an enterprise IT perspective, how to create a similar refueling apparatus or the ability to continuously deliver software to the field in the way that you should. It’s not getting nearly enough attention and we need to start.

“We really have to decouple the software cycles from the hardware cycles. … We [need to be] deploying multiple times a day, where we can get an update to the field on demand. As soon as we need it.”

Ryan Hartman, chief executive officer of Ondas Sentinel, agreed.

“Inventory on the first day of the conflict is one important equation. But it is the ability for that inventory to evolve with the conflict. In my 27 years in the industry, I haven’t seen an adversary comply with our acquisition system yet. And therefore, we have to make sure that our acquisition system enables us to keep up with the pace of the conflict and the adaptability necessary to stay relevant in the conflict.”

When addressing how the government and industry can work together to address stockpile bottlenecks, both Hartman and Kroger offered simple, if possibly difficult to enact, solutions.

For Kroger, the biggest bottleneck Rise8 faces is something simple: a calendar.

According to him, “80-85%” of his company’s time is spent waiting on government authorization to operate — time spent “waiting in the queue” to get on the ”authorizing official’s calendar… if it takes six months to get on the ATO’s calendar, right there you’re at a minimum of six months to fill the system, but they’re going to find something because we always find things during test and evaluation. And now we go back, redevelop, and wait another six months to get on that calendar. This is how you get 12–18-month ATO cycles,” he noted.

For Hartman, the bottleneck within U.S. industry is clear: “The first is the supply chain, the second is the supply chain, the third is the supply chain and the fourth is testing.”

With technological advancements unfolding at breakneck speed amid conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, time is not a luxury the U.S. Air Force and its industry partners have much of.

That has been a boon to people like Kroger, who notes that a government that unleashes performance-based outcomes means that the defense industry is not an insider game anymore. Rather, contracts go to companies that offer solutions-based, scalable products.

As for the most important action the government and industries must take to be better positioned in the next few years, Hartman was blunt:

“Make sure we have capacity prior to a conflict.”

A full-scale Vectis model was publicly displayed for the first time on Monday at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, according to Lockheed. The announcement brings the total Vectis prototypes to five.

“Domestic and international customer conversations, coupled with our internal analysis, continue to reinforce the urgent need for a survivable, autonomous and multi-mission capability,” Ron Fehlen, vice president and general manager of Skunk Works, said in a statement. “We’re leaning into that demand, making a strategic investment to accelerate Vectis’ progress and maturity through an additional four vehicles.”

Vectis is a Group 5 collaborative combat aircraft designed to fly solo or alongside crewed fighters such as the F-35. The company, which says it is funding the project itself, unveiled the aircraft in September 2025, pitching it to U.S. and allied militaries for precision strike, ISR targeting, electronic warfare and counter-air missions.

Lockheed was not picked to build aircraft for the first increment of the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, or CCA, and has not tied Vectis to a specific competition.

The service cleared CCA Increment 1 for production in June, awarding contracts to General Atomics and Anduril. Lockheed did win one of six spots in the pool of vendors eligible to compete to build the autonomy software that will fly the Increment 1 aircraft.

According to Lockheed, the team went from the first Vectis drawing to wind tunnel testing in less than two months and completed an initial digital build in six months.

The company said in December that the Vectis prototype will fly with a Williams International FJ44-4, a commercial turbofan that produces more than 3,600 pounds of thrust. Lockheed said it picked a proven engine to speed up the development timeline.

The Air Force is still finalizing requirements for CCA Increment 2.

Col. Timothy Helfrich, the service’s portfolio acquisition executive for fighters and advanced aircraft, told reporters at the Air Force Life Cycle Industry Days in July that the concept refinement phase with nine unnamed vendors had about 10 months left to run, and that the service could carry as many as six designs into prototyping afterward. He also said companies currently left out of the concept refinement phase could enter later.

Asked whether Lockheed was among the nine companies, Skunk Works spokesman Shane Nicholson said that Lockheed Martin Vectis is an internally funded effort aimed at opportunities in the domestic and international markets, and that “specific questions about CCA Increment 2 are best addressed by the U.S. Air Force.”

Lockheed has not announced a customer, a contract or a unit price for Vectis.

The company started a series of promotional videos about building the HICAR since announcing the weapon early last month, saying it wants to highlight the design’s performance and show what “high-speed product development” looks like.

The Naval Surface Warfare Center, which issued the solicitation in May, had a 21-day response period that has ended. The solicitation asked for an M4-style platform capable of firing “future hypervelocity” 5.56mm ammo, which would increase the weapon’s effective range from 300 to 600 meters.

Bill Geissele, the founder and president of Geissele Automatics, explained in an interview with Military Times that they were able to respond to the solicitation so quickly because they were “already well familiar” with the technology.

He said they had been working on other government and commercial projects involving high-pressure ammunition for about three years before the solicitation. The company is currently contracted to make sniper rifles for SOCOM.

Details about the U.S. military’s hypervelocity 5.56mm, designated M855A1+, are non-existent. SOCOM referred Military Times to the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, which described the cartridge in an email as a “conceptual approach for achieving increased range and performance within existing calibers.”

For internal testing and demonstrations, Geissele said they created their own hypervelocity cartridge using commercial products that replicates the military ammunition.

He explained that the major difference between legacy 5.56mm ammo and the hypervelocity round is that the hypervelocity case is loaded to 82,000 PSI, or about 20,000 PSI higher.

However, because of the project’s sensitive nature, Geissele said they won’t sell the civilian variant of the HICAR until the ammo becomes commercially available.

In the promotional videos, Geissele engineers equip the HICAR with a long-range scope to demonstrate the weapon’s range while also measuring the velocity with a chronograph. The company said the HICAR, equipped with an 11.5-inch barrel and shooting pressurized ammo with a 77-grain bullet, will consistently deliver a muzzle velocity of 2,700 feet per second and is accurate out ot 800 meters.

“When you put a high-performance engine into a vehicle that’s not designed for it, other things in the vehicle have to be beefed up in order to handle the horsepower,” he said. “And it’s the same thing with high-pressure ammunition.”

Geissele explained that one challenge with high-pressure ammunition is the stress it puts on the barrel. To address this concern, they used a higher-quality steel — the kind typically reserved for artillery barrels — for the HICAR.

Yet, some unknowns remain about the longevity of a firearm running high-pressure ammunition. “That’s why we’re making the ammunition and testing it,” he said. “We haven’t shot as many rounds through to find a limit of it. We are shooting our first iteration of the barrel now.”

He called the testing process “actually extremely difficult” because they have to fire thousands of rounds and closely monitor not just the performance, but the wear on the materials as well.

Because they haven’t completed testing, the Geissele HICAR has not yet reached its final iteration. Geissele explained that the company is close, but it just has not had an extremely high round count yet.

But that’s also why the company started releasing the videos. “I think it’s interesting to see it. I think it’s very interesting for people to see product development and how Geissele does it. You know, people want to understand what exactly is going on so it’s not a mystery.”

He called their HICAR design a “production-ready weapon” and beyond the prototype phase. “We could, you know, if we got an order for 5,000 guns tomorrow, we could turn the machines on and start making them,” he added.

The $100 million Pentagon 9/11 Memorial Visitor Education Center, located across a busy parkway from the Pentagon and its adjacent memorial in Arlington, Virginia, will contain exhibits and host programs about the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The facility, expected to open in 2029, will also include event spaces, a cafe and bookstore.

The Pentagon Memorial first opened to the public on Sept. 11, 2008, the first of the three attack sites to have a monument. It will be the last, however, to have a museum or visitor center explaining its importance and impact on American history.

“We want people to remember what happened here. We want people to remember our loved ones. We want people to remember that feeling that swept through our country after 9/11 — that feeling of taking care of others who were in such pain,” said Jim Laychak, the Pentagon Memorial Fund board chairman and the brother of David Laychak, a U.S. Army budget executive who died in the building.

At 9:37 a.m. EST on Sept. 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 was deliberately crashed into the western facade of the Pentagon. Fifty-nine passengers and crew members on the aircraft that was originally bound for Los Angeles died, as did 184 people in the building.

In New York City, 2,753 people died in similar attacks on the World Trade Center, including civilians in the buildings and on the ground, 343 firefighters and 60 police officers. In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field following a struggle between passengers and hijackers, killing 44 passengers and crew members.

The Pentagon Memorial features 184 cantilevered, stainless steel and granite benches, each with a lighted water feature and memorial tree. The benches are arranged by age of the victims and positioned so that visitors viewing the names of those on the aircraft face the direction of the plane’s approach, while those viewing the Pentagon victims’ names see the building in the background.

The visitor center will explain the events of the day, the significance of the memorial and the aftermath of 9/11, including the reconstruction of the affected portion of the Pentagon. The fund began raising money in 2015 to support the project and has collected roughly 25% of the funding needed, including $12 million in federal dollars and $1 million from the state of Virginia.

Organizers have requested another $35 million from Congress in fiscal 2027 and hope to cover additional expenses from private funds and corporate sponsors, including American Airlines, Amazon, Lockheed Martin and others.

The National Park Service announced Wednesday that the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial is now an area affiliated with the national park system, although the memorial will continue to remain under the care of the Department of Defense, supported by the Pentagon Memorial Fund.

The NPS also announced a $2 million grant last week to support the memorial’s operation and maintenance.

During the groundbreaking ceremony Saturday, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said the visitor center will make sure the story is “told in a way that people understand it.”

“It may have been the worst day in American history, but my hope is we can learn from that, remember that — that we can remember those that ran into burning buildings but that we can also remember the nation states around the world that stood with us,” Warner said.

On Friday, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth joined with Pentagon leadership to mark the 25^th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Trump said in the aftermath of the violence, the United States “saw the authentic spirit of our nation.”

“The enemy might destroy what American hands had built, but they could not touch the fight and fire and the love in our great American hearts,” Trump said.

More information on the fundraising and construction effort can be found on the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial Fund website.

Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Ken Wilsbach announced Monday at the Air and Space Cyber Conference that the service is advancing two initiatives in the wake of devastating Iranian attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East in recent months.

“First,” said Wilsbach, “we will establish the point defense weapons system, bringing together kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities to secure our air bases.”

“Second,” he continued, “we established a new career field of point defense airmen. This new career field will be operational in two years.”

Two airmen, Senior Master Sgt. Andrew Lewis and Senior Master Sgt. Brandon Spears, are the first field managers within that career track, Wilsbach added.

While details regarding the new career field are sparse, a June 2026 release notes that these specialized units will include units drawn from multiple career fields operating at select Air Force installations.

The need for base defenses in light of the Iran war has become imperative.

The US military’s next significant challenge: Hiding

Far from isolated, America’s sprawling — and easy-to-find — Middle East footprint has been repeatedly subjected to assault since the start of the Iran war. In July, three U.S. soldiers were killed when an Iranian ballistic missile and drone attack penetrated air defenses around Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. Six U.S. soldiers were killed in March when an Iranian drone struck a tactical operations center at Port Shuaiba, Kuwait.

“For 20 years we didn’t have to worry about anything coming out of the sky, and we lost proficiency that I think we had trained in the Cold War era — through the ’80s and ’90s — where we were worried about adversaries who had fixed-wing aircraft and the capability to send long-range precision fires at us,” Lt. Gen. James P. Isenhower, the commanding general of CAC, told reporters during a Pentagon briefing last Thursday. “That wasn’t the case in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Now, with precise, long-range missile and drone assaults blowing “the hell” out of bases like Bahrain, with its latest initiatives, the U.S. Air Force is rapidly seeking to contend with the ever-evolving threats from the enemy.

Eve Sampson contributed to this report.

Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink used the names for the first time during a Monday keynote address at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference while announcing that the Air Force intends to have at least 500 autonomous aircraft in service by 2032. The CCAs are expected to perform many of the same missions manned fighters complete currently.

“Because of the steps we are taking today, we will have a significantly different force by 2032,” Meink said at the conference. “By then, our special operators will have the ability to employ thousands of autonomous one-way attack systems, and we will have autonomous fighters like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft.”

Meink highlighted that the aircraft went from contract award to first flight in fewer than 18 months, “almost unheard of in aircraft development.”

General Atomics’ FQ-42A took its first test flight in August 2025 — over a year after its contract was awarded. Anduril, the second defense company tasked with production of the FQ-44A, rolled its first aircraft off the assembly line in July after flight testing in October 2025.

Recently, the force completed its first-ever live-fire test with Anduril’s FQ-44A, executing an end-to-end, beyond-line-of-sight strike against a simulated target using an inert AIM-120.

The CCAs are not the only class of autonomous aircraft the service is “aggressively” pursuing, Meink said, spotlighting how the ISR strike platforms have been essential during Operation Epic Fury and how the MQ-9 Reaper and the Unmanned Long-endurance Tactical Reconnaissance Aircraft, or ULTRA, have both been utilized by the service.

The Air Force is furthering the development of Massed Modular Aircraft, or MMAs, a family of low-cost, multi-role strike platforms meant to succeed the MQ-9 Reaper. Meink asserted that the service intends to field 100 in 2029 at a lower cost than the CCAs and a fraction of the cost of manned aircraft being built today.

“MMAs will provide affordable, attributable, long-range strike, and we will be able to field them at scale,” Meink said. “We expect to have tens of thousands in the inventory by 2030. Matter of fact, they’re already being used today.”

Meink said that for his goal to become a reality, Congress and industry partners need to provide more resources to generate prototypes and production at scale.

For the CCA program, the service’s fiscal 2027 budget request included $996.5 million in procurement funding, as well as $150 million in advanced procurement for the following fiscal year and $1.37 billion in continued research and development, for a total program request of $2.37 billion.

The new UAS, dubbed Gamera, comes as the Air Force searches for risk-tolerant aircraft that can be produced cheaply and in large numbers as part of its new Massed Modular Aircraft, or MMA, program.

The company revealed the platform at the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual conference near Washington.

In a press release, the company said Gamera is the first UAS designed to carry bomber-class strike munitions such as the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, or LRASM, and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range, or JASSM-ER, as well as other cruise and hypersonic missiles.

The company added that it “will be able to deliver all of the capabilities of the MQ-9, as well as employ payloads that the MQ-9 cannot, at a fraction of the price.”

Although Swarm did not give a specific price point, the company said comparable strike effects would cost 10 times less than existing platforms. The company also cited recent Defense Innovation Unit statements, calling existing systems “unsustainable.” The MQ-9 Reaper purportedly costs more than $30 million apiece.

Oliver Palmer, Swarm’s chief revenue officer and co-founder, explained that the design’s lower cost will enable the U.S. and partner nations to find other civil and commercial applications for the new UAS.

“The next few decades will see a continuous contest with China over global power projection, first focused near China over Taiwan, over time extending globally,” he said. “The [People’s Liberation Army] has built asymmetric ways to challenge our legacy force structure.”

Palmer added that “we cannot continue to pursue incremental improvements in legacy approaches and hope to protect U.S. interests and deter [the People’s Republic of China] coercion of our allies and partners.”

The Gamera is classified as a Group 5 UAS, the largest category of unmanned aircraft under the Defense Department’s classification system. The company said it has a roughly 72-foot wingspan and can fly 9,000 nautical miles before needing to refuel.

Swarm said it has invested tens of millions of dollars into Gamera’s design since it launched in 2022. Over the past four years, the company has been awarded millions in Defense Department contracts and raised more in investments.

The company described Gamera as “well positioned to support the generational transformation the Air Force is advancing with MMA.”

And its militarily less endowed neighbors such as Taiwan and the Philippines would bear the brunt of a fully kitted People’s Liberation Army, which the updated National Defense Mobilization Law says may draw from deep within the civilian population for resources, analysts say.

Australia, Japan and the United States also would note Beijing’s revised law as they’re most likely to become involved in any Taiwan “contingency” or conflict in the South China Sea, said Carl Thayer, an Asia specialist and emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Australia, India and the United States have their own issues with Beijing, he added.

“In sum, in a future conflict, China will have immediate unfettered access to relevant civilian physical and human resources,” Thayer said. “This should be a clear wake-up call to defense planners in the Pentagon and (U.S.) Pacific Command.”

The 2010 law that had not been changed over the past six years was updated to give a legal definition of “national defense mobilization,” the Chinese state-controlled Global Times news outlet said on Sept. 8.

Per that definition, the term means that when national sovereignty, national unity, territorial integrity or development interests are “threatened,” Chinese “economic and social resources” can be shifted entirely toward defense, the Global Times said.

Chinese military analysts can’t wait for the US Navy’s battleship era

“This ensures that mobilization can be carried out in accordance with the law and established procedures, avoiding hasty, improvised responses in times of crisis,” it said.

China, backed by the legal revision, will be able to mobilize men and women over age 18 and take over commercial and private assets and infrastructure including planes, ships and private land, Thayer projected. He said satellite communications, cyber-security systems and drone production could go into PLA hands too.

Scholars say the legal revision, announced in late August and due to take effect on Oct. 1, may address a particular scenario, most likely in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea.

China sees self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military drills nearby since 2022, as Washington sells arms to the island in case of any conflict. Japan, a U.S. treaty ally, contests with China a chain of uninhabited islets.

Beijing separately disputes parts of the resource-rich South China Sea with five other governments. Beijing has expanded artificial islands and carried out military drills to bolster its maritime claims against a particularly assertive Philippines.

Japan and the Philippines, both U.S. treaty allies, are tightening security relations “to safeguard all eventualities” as they see China as a joint threat, De La Salle University international studies lecturer Don McLain Gill wrote for ThinkChina in June.

The South China Sea has kept relatively calm over the past two months, though Chinese naval presence has reached “large numbers” and grown “quite widespread”, said Jay Batongbacal, associate professor and director of the Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea at the University of the Philippines.

“You don’t know why they do these things,” Batongbacal said of the Chinese law revision. “The timing is of course problematic and that raises concern. If it’s the South China Sea situation, they’re pretty confident they already have control over the area, so no need to mobilize.”

Taiwan and any of its supporters would feel more fear, said Denny Roy, a ­senior fellow at the East-West Center think tank in Hawaii.

“Taiwan, Japan and the U.S. reasonably see this as another signal that the Chinese are marching toward a war over Taiwan and thinking through the practical issues, and therefore this is another warning to stop supporting Taipei before it’s too late to avoid suffering along with Taiwan,” Roy said.

Foreign defense attaches have noted previously that China carried out a large-scale mobilization exercise in Guangdong province in 2022 as a blueprint for future mobilization.

“This could also be the result of the internal mandate to obey (Chinese President Xi Jinping’s) order to get the PLA ready for war, even if there is no decision yet to go to war.” Roy said.

For Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, the 10 years of wanderings on a perilous sea as Odysseus took the really, really long way home could be seen as an “allegory for the real problems of combat veterans returning to civilian society.”

Shay, a psychiatrist at the Boston VA Medical Center, wrote that “Time and again, Odysseus shows himself as a man who does not trust anyone, a man whose capacity for social trust has been destroyed. This is the central problem facing the most severely injured Vietnam veterans.”

Shay connected the trials of Odysseus in returning to Ithaca to the recurring patterns he observed in his clinical practice with combat veterans — patterns of homelessness, explosive violence, mistrust of anyone other than combat veterans, substance abuse, a fixation on grievances and a “deep suspicion of others’ motives.”

“Odysseus stands for the veterans but as a deeply flawed military leader himself, he also stands for the destroyers of trust. Homer’s Odysseus sheds light, not always flattering light, on today’s veterans and military leaders,” Shay wrote.

For 10 years, Odysseus would remain the artful dodger through the harrowing journey back to Ithaca, where the conflicting traits of Odysseus’ character — war hero and war criminal, master strategist and liar only contribute to his charisma as the “master of cool,” according to Elizabeth Samet, the West Point literature professor and author of No Man’s Land.

Samet draws a similar parallel for modern-day veterans and the difficult journey home.

In a 2007 Book Browse Author interview, Samet called Odysseus her favorite hero in all literature — “He never bores you with his twists and turns, and he outfoxes everyone. Odysseus has restraint, but he can also lose his composure on occasion. He is an epic hero yet somehow a recognizably human creature.”

For Shay, the parallels between Odysseus and modern-day veterans are all too clear.

“I see the adventure with the Cyclops as an emblem for combat veterans’ attraction to danger, an attraction that has cost so many of them their lives after returning home, and tortured those who love them with untold hours of fear for their safety,” Shay wrote.

The Odyssey has survived and endured while so many other oral epics were lost “in no small part because it was — and still remains — the work of literature most seriously engaged with the question of how to reintegrate a damaged, troubled soldier back into civilian life,” according to Shay.

Shay has been credited with introducing the concept of “moral injury” that has been experienced by combat veterans. Shay described moral injury as “the profound psychological and spiritual damage experienced by combat veterans when fundamental moral codes are violated.”

Perhaps Shay’s most crucial insight stems from his conviction that psychologically wounded soldiers can be best healed by sharing their stories with other veterans. “For veterans, recovery from their psychological injuries best happens in the community of other veterans,” he said in an August 2009 interview with Metro West Daily News.

As a result of his work and that of others, moral injury has increasingly been recognized as a signature wound of service members who fought in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom following the 9/11 attacks.

In response to the work of Shay and others on PTSD, Military.com reported in 2023 that the Department of Veterans Affairs had begun “the first-ever large-scale population study of moral injury to be conducted among veterans of the post-9/11 wars.”

The main result of the study was the development of the “Moral Injury and Distress Scale (MIDS),” which the VA called “the first measure to assess moral injury symptoms indexed to a specific event and validated across several high-risk populations.”

MIDS was “being adopted throughout VA as a tool for identifying veterans with moral injury,” described as “the distressing psychological, behavioral, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of witnessing, failing to prevent, or participating in events that contradict one’s deeply held values and beliefs,” according to a March 2025 release from VA Health Systems Research.

In his chapter of the book titled Among the Dead: Memory and Guilt, Shay dealt with the concept of “survivors’ guilt” and contrasted Odysseus’s haunted memories with the profound “survivor’s guilt” experienced by modern soldiers over the loss of comrades as they second-guess choices that led to the deaths of their friends.

But the poet of the Odyssey, perhaps, put it best in describing the grief of Odysseus’ crew following their losses in the battle of Ismarus:

“Six benches were left empty in every ship that evening when we pulled away from death. And this new grief we bore with us to sea: our previous lives we had but not our friends. No ship made sail next day until some shipmate had raised a cry, three times, for each poor ghost unfleshed. Then two long days and nights we lay offshore worn out and sick at heart, tasting our grief.”

For combat readiness, the average fighter pilot needs about nine or 10 sorties a month to be considered combat mission ready, according to past service statements.

But based on conversations with commanders and line pilots, John Venable, a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute, said pilots are being afforded the opportunity to fly only one sortie a month for nondeployed jets in the country and “other locations,” a possible consequence of the number of deployed jets in support of Operation Epic Fury.

Even as the number of training sorties is reduced below historic norms and anecdotes show current operations, such as Epic Fury, cause nondeployed forces to fly less, there is variation at different unit levels.

During a Friday Mitchell Institute roundtable event, Venable said that the last time the Air Force released data on sortie rates was in fiscal 2023, when pilots flew around five and a half sorties a month, roughly 60% of what they needed.

“That has withered again in the last couple of years, and the Air Force has stopped reporting it,” he said.

Venable noted that the official pilot shortage number is 2,000, but anecdotally, it has risen to about 2,400.

Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who served under the Biden administration, reallocated funding from 6,000 aviation-related maintenance positions to other priorities in fiscal 2025, which Venable says “exacerbated itself into the readiness scheme.”

During Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer — military operations conducted by Israel and the U.S. in June 2025 against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure — U.S. air superiority “came on the backs” of the Israelis because their pilots were flying significantly more sorties.

Venable said that Israelis are flying 20 sorties a month, with line pilots getting 25 to 30 hours.

In Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. has 25 squadrons, comprising of about 325 aircraft, Mitchell Institute data provided at the roundtable showed. That is out of the total active inventory of 1,084 aircraft with 634 mission capable jets as seen in fiscal 2024.

Venable compared that figure to Desert Storm, saying the number of aircraft is about half of what the Air Force alone used in the Gulf War operation.

“If you look schematically at the whole picture, 325 aircraft, combat-coded fighter aircraft, is half of what we had in Desert Storm, and it’s about all we can muster today,” Venable said.

By the time an April White House release was published, more than 10,200 total air sorties had been flown in Epic Fury overall, with more than 13,000 combat flights.

Flying hours have been a topic for Air Force officials for years, with pilots previously getting around 17 hours a month in fiscal 2017. More recently, in the Department of the Air Force’s fiscal 2027 budget request, the service allotted funding for 1.1 million flying hours in the Flying Hours Program, which is the “maximum executable level for the total force.”

Gone are the days when America fought from sprawling command posts with overwhelming air superiority. Now faced with adversaries toting long-range fires and drones, the U.S. military is relearning a basic principle: how to hide.

As services adopt new strategies, the Army’s Combined Arms Command, or CAC, an outfit responsible for overseeing the service’s leadership and doctrine development, is changing how it teaches troops about concealment.

“Hiding in plain sight has become an imperative on the modern battlefield,” Lt. Gen. James P. Isenhower, the commanding general of CAC, told reporters during a Pentagon briefing on Thursday.

“We think very differently about how we employ ourselves [and] how we remain dispersed” compared to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, he explained, pointing, in particular, to the size of command posts. “We have to work really hard to look like that which we are not.”

Isenhower’s remarks come as details begin to emerge about the true scale of destruction wrought by an Iranian strike on a major forward base in the Middle East.

On Feb. 28, the Islamic Republic struck Naval Support Activity, or NSA, Bahrain with missiles and one-way attack drones following U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. Initially, the Pentagon reported no major impacts to military operations. However, the Wall Street Journal later reported that damages amounted to approximately $400 million.

In one of the most stark official disclosures about the war thus far, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told an Epoch Times reporter that Iran “blew the hell out of Bahrain.”

Far from isolated, America’s sprawling — and easy-to-find — Middle East footprint has been repeatedly subjected to assault since the start of the Iran war. In July, three U.S. soldiers were killed when an Iranian ballistic missile and drone attack penetrated air defenses around Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. Six U.S. soldiers were killed in March when an Iranian drone struck a tactical operations center at Port Shuaiba, Kuwait.

While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan saw bases attacked with mortars and rockets, U.S. forces did not have to contend with precise, long-range missile and drone assaults.

“For 20 years we didn’t have to worry about anything coming out of the sky, and we lost proficiency that I think we had trained in the Cold War era — through the 80s and 90s — where we were worried about adversaries who had fixed-wing aircraft and the capability to send long-range precision fires at us,” Isenhower said during the briefing. “That wasn’t the case in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Over the course of the Global War on Terror, air dominance allowed American bases to be havens, according to Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, where the U.S. could concentrate supplies, personnel and command centers without facing constant surveillance and threats from above.

“These bases were sanctuaries,” she told Military Times, calling the installations “an aberration, historically.”

The U.S. is now returning to a “period of warfare where the base itself is a vulnerability and something an adversary can attack,” she said, which can lead to the scattering of resources.

Exacerbating that susceptibility has been the U.S. military’s reliance on costly interceptor munitions to combat Iranian ballistic missiles and cheap, one-way attack drones, actions that have significantly depleted interceptor stocks.

A recent CSIS report estimated that between February and July, the U.S. had expended approximately 65% of its Patriot interceptor inventory. The number of THAAD ballistic missile interceptors, meanwhile, decreased by 38% since the start of the war, according to the report.

Grieco said that dispersing troops to account for these new vulnerabilities comes at a cost. Instead of funneling fuel, ammunition, food and other supplies through large hubs, the military must spread across more locations, potentially further apart.

“We’re now trading efficiency for survivability,” she said.

After the damage to NSA Bahrain, U.S. ships were forced to rely on a logistics hub at Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that sits more than 2,000 miles away from the service’s carrier strike groups in the Middle East.

The distance required personnel to place food orders 30 days in advance, which proved challenging due to the unpredictability of frenzied military operations.

Isenhower noted that as a division commander, meanwhile, he watched command posts shrink smaller and smaller during training because opposing forces — soldiers meant to act as the enemy during exercises — kept finding and precisely attacking them by using electronic signatures.

Units responded by dispersing and employing deceptive tactics to make it harder for the enemy to determine what they were seeing.

“We’ve got to create the benefits of mass without presenting the vulnerabilities of concentration,” he said. “It affects the squad differently than it affects a battalion, but we’ve seen in current combat operations: the vulnerabilities of a large, distinct signature, whether it’s physical, visual or something on the electromagnetic spectrum.

“It fundamentally changes how we operate.”

That vulnerability extends from command posts to moving equipment and aircraft.

In April, Iran downed a U.S. fighter jet after deploying a swarm of drones that were able to identify the aircraft’s GPS location, speed and direction, then feed that data to Iranian commanders, The New York Times reported.

Education about electromagnetic and drone warfare has been incorporated into all levels of the Army, Isenhower said.

Soldiers are learning to use electromagnetic data “to try to get a bearing or pinpoint a fix on the enemy,” he said, while learning “how to operate in that environment so they don’t do the same to us.”

The Pentagon now wants artificial intelligence that can cut through the confusion.

It’s seeking “AI-based software tools to turn fragmented sensor data into a continuously updated understanding of space and missile threats fast enough to drive operational decisions,” according to the Defense Innovation Unit solicitation, which is due Sept. 24. “Existing tools struggle to distinguish closely spaced objects, track emerging threats, and keep threat models current.”

The project, known as the “Space Threat Intelligence Synthesis Engine,” will leverage AI’s greatest strength: the ability to quickly analyze reams of data. The software will fuse “massive streams of multi-source data, including live video, satellite imagery, radar and sensor feeds, geospatial data, and classified intelligence reports.”

“By automating advanced cross-data correlation, the architecture aims to uncover hidden patterns, complex operational relationships, and predictive threat behaviors far beyond the capabilities of human analysis alone.”

Ultimately, the system should “generate actionable, confidence-scored alerts supporting analyst-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop, or automated workflows.”

The AI will help human operators — and other machines.

It will provide “intuitive, human-readable visualizations for frontline operators and low-latency, machine-to-machine APIs to drive automated command-and-control (C2) workflows.”

DIU is aiming for an open-source system with a latency delay of no more than five seconds — and preferably no more than two seconds — between the arrival of data and the results being displayed. Throughput should be 20 to 30 megabytes per minute, with bursts of up to five gigabytes.

Contractors should demonstrate that their products show “significant speed and accuracy improvements in event detection, characterization, and attribution compared to existing baseline systems.”

As skies fill with missiles and drones in conflicts like the ones with Ukraine and Iran, AI is increasingly being seen as an indispensable partner to overworked human operators. In particular, with a perpetual shortage of expensive interceptors, such as the Patriot air-defense system, operators must quickly decide when and where to allocate them.

Defense contractors and AI firms are teaming up to incorporate AI into missile defense.

For example, Northrop Grumman announced in July that it was partnering with AI firm Camgian to incorporate artificial intelligence into integrated air and missile defense systems. BAE and Scale AI have also teamed up for AI-enhanced missile defense.

The Thursday Anthropic report covers the time period between December 2025 and August 2026 and highlights the misuse of its large language model Claude, which it says the threat actor used to make targeting recommendations against U.S. Navy forces in the region.

“The threat actor used Claude to compile targeting handbooks…to identify and track naval positions based on open-source information,” the report said.

The bad actor used the AI software to collect information that included a list of U.S. service members it had sourced from public military photographs, ship and aircraft transponders — which broadcast a specific code that identifies them — commercial satellite-imagery query scripts that help locate exact geographic visuals, and a breakdown of public websites that track U.S. Navy movements.

The Iranian threat also used Claude to learn more about weaknesses in U.S. Navy shipboard systems that could be exploited.

Anthropic said it banned the account after it learned what it was doing, created safeguards to prevent similar activity in the future and shared the information with the appropriate government agencies to address the problem.

The report detailed a litany of other misuses of its Claude program, including a cell of Yemeni bad actors that used the program to develop targeting software for guided missiles.

The concerns over inappropriate misconduct involving Anthropic have grown to include individuals within the company too.

A researcher named Jacob Coxon from Anthropic and OpenAI resigned Tuesday, calling into question the ethics of the company in a lengthy X post.

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” said Coxon. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

The U.S. military previously used Anthropic but severed ties with the AI platform after it refused to agree to Pentagon terms that it said would open up Claude’s use for mass surveillance or use in fully autonomous weapons.

In New York, family members of the victims, many carrying pictures of their loved ones, joined Vice President JD Vance and four former U.S. presidents at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. The ceremony began, as always, at 8:46 a.m. Eastern Standard Time with a moment of silence to remember the shocking instant when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

Shortly after, victims’ family members began reading aloud the names of all 2,977 people who died on September 11, as well as the six people killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a somber recitation that lasts for hours. In a reminder of the time that has passed, some readers were children who had never met the relatives they lost in 2001.

Other moments of silence followed, marking when the other three airplanes crashed and the two towers collapsed. For the first time, a seventh moment of silence was set to honor the thousands who have died since 2001 from illnesses tied to the toxic dust that poisoned the air for months afterward.

Gregory Carafello attended the ceremony to honor the memory of his lifelong friend James Martello, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm that lost more than 650 employees in the attacks. Carafello was on the 18th floor of the South Tower but managed to evacuate.

“Everyone should realize that it was a very bad, catastrophic day for many families,” he said. “These were not warriors. These were people like you and me going to work.”

At the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, where American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building’s west flank, killing 184, President Donald Trump chronicled some of the stories of those aboard who perished in the crash: a woman pregnant with her first child, a family of four headed to Australia, three sixth-graders on a field trip.

The president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who also delivered remarks, both used their speeches to make the case for the Iran war, which they have defended as necessary to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

“We salute our first responders and law enforcement, and we love them,” Trump said. “And we salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon.”

Mourners were also gathering in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at the crash site where passengers brought down one of the four hijacked jetliners, United Airlines Flight 93, that had been headed for Washington.

Generational pain

The attacks shaped generations of Americans who lived through the day or grew up in its aftermath, influencing U.S. foreign policy, domestic politics and public attitudes toward security.

But for many whom the attacks directly affected — the victims’ families and friends, first responders and rescue workers — the anniversary is a tribute to the lives lost on a clear blue day a quarter century ago and the heartbreak that followed.

Caroline Ogonowski’s father, John, was the captain of Flight 11, which took off from Boston 47 minutes before striking the North Tower.

Ogonowski, now 39, had her first baby this year and named him after her father. She brought him to her father’s grave last week and attended a memorial ceremony in Boston on Friday.

“This year, there’s this new sadness in knowing that they won’t ever get to know each other,” Ogonowski, who has worked in disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, said in a phone interview. “My father will never know his grandson. And my son will never know his grandfather.

“We owe it to my father and all the others that we lost on that day to make sure that we continue to teach future generations about what happened, about who these people were, who these heroes were, how our country came together and became stronger because of it,” she added.

Lasting legacy

A generation of Americans has grown up since 2001 who are too young to remember the attacks but whose lives were fundamentally altered by them.

The attacks initiated the War on Terror, which led to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that lasted years. The resulting public backlash helped fuel Trump’s rise a decade ago, when he vowed not to start new foreign entanglements — a promise being tested by the Iran war.

At home, Americans expressed deep solidarity and patriotism, as well as sorrow, in the immediate wake of the attacks.

At the same time, however, Muslim Americans and immigrants from Muslim-majority countries faced a rise in prejudice and hate crimes. Public polls have found 9/11 colors Americans’ perceptions of Muslims to this day. Zohran Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor, faced calls from some Republicans to skip Friday’s ceremony, which he rejected.

Casualties were not limited to those who perished on September 11. Many rescue workers who spent weeks or months at the site afterward, as well as nearby residents and others, were sickened by toxins in the air and eventually died.

The New York City Fire Department lost 343 members on September 11. More than 600 additional firefighters, including some retired members who took part in the rescue effort, have died of 9/11-related illnesses since then, department figures show.

Twenty-six have died this year alone.

Trump held at least two phone conversations with the Saudi leader on Thursday, sources said. In the end, Washington told Riyadh that it was not willing to take direct military action for now but would help with intelligence sharing and targeting, the two sources said.

The White House did not address a Reuters question on any phone calls between the two leaders, but a senior administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity said Washington was in continuous dialogue with Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni government.

“The United States is focused on protecting our core national security interests — such as ensuring freedom of navigation in the Red Sea — while empowering our regional partners to take the lead in managing and resolving regional security challenges,” the official said.

The Saudi government media office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the phone calls and conversations between the two leaders.

Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, traveled to Saudi Arabia on Thursday for talks, two sources said.

News of the request to Trump was first reported by Axios.

SAUDI APPEAL MARKS CHANGE OF APPROACH

The U.S. war with Iran has entered its seventh month with no immediate end in sight. The war has driven up prices of global oil and U.S. gasoline, sending Trump’s approval ratings to a record low before the November midterm elections.

Houthi control of the Red Sea’s Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which is on the opposite side of the Arabian Peninsula from the Strait of Hormuz, could give their backer Iran a critical advantage in its war with the U.S., reducing supplies through a second major transit corridor and sending oil prices surging.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, has relied on the Red Sea route since the Iran conflict effectively closed Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil used to flow.

The escalation dates back to early July, when the Houthis ⁠said ​their forces confronted Saudi “warplanes” that were attempting ​to prevent an Iranian civilian aircraft from landing at Sanaa International Airport.

But back then, Saudi Arabia told the United States that it could fight the Houthis on its own and emphasized to Washington that the war should not escalate. Saudi officials urged their U.S. counterparts to increase economic pressure on Iran.

The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. ​28, and Iran responded with its own strikes on ​Israel and ⁠Gulf states that host U.S. bases. U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed thousands and displaced millions.

The wing said the deployment, in support of the Air Force Weapons Instructor Course, produced “a historical milestone, dropping live bombs from operational F-15EXs for the first time.”

The images show jets on the ramp and in the air on Aug. 27, some carrying a live 500-pound Mk-82 on the centerline station and others carrying an AN/AAQ-33 Sniper targeting pod. The Air Force has not said how many bombs were dropped.

The unit first dropped inert bombs in May at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho. The wing announced in July it dropped 24 BDU-50s in the 500-pound class and 12 BDU-56s in the 2,000-pound class, all concrete-filled practice bombs, across 10 missions.

The Mountain Home drops were the first of any kind by an operational F-15EX unit.

The 142nd flew the F-15C, an air-superiority fighter, before receiving the Air Force’s first operational F-15EX in June 2024. Three of the unit’s pilots already had air-to-ground experience and built a compressed syllabus for the rest of the wing’s pilots.

A small group of loaders with prior bomb-loading experience became certified to load bombs on F-15Es at Nellis earlier this year, then trained the loaders who went to Mountain Home.

The wing’s July statement said live-bombing at Nellis would follow as the next step toward the unit becoming air-to-ground mission capable.

“It’s about building a dynamic and versatile organization, and we are just getting started,” Col. Joshua Hovanas, commander of the 142nd Operations Group, said in a statement.

The Eagle II is rated for a 29,500-pound payload and can carry up to a dozen air-to-air missiles. The jets photographed at Nellis flew without conformal fuel tanks, which carry additional weapons stations.

The planned F-15EX fleet has grown since a fiscal 2023 budget request proposed capping the buy at 80 aircraft. In April, the service said it now plans a fleet of 267.

Born, an instructor pilot assigned to the 23rd Flying Training Squadron at Fort Rucker, Alabama, has a personal connection to that day, propelling her to join military service and begin Run to Remember, her journey to share on social media a mile for every life lost, she told Military Times.

Just before Born turned three years old, she and her four-month-old sister were inside the Pentagon’s Child Development Center when American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building on Sept. 11, 2001.

Born remembers that day through five-second intervals of vivid memories. She remembers “overwhelming confusion” and misunderstanding what was happening around her until her parents shed light on her memories as she grew older.

“As soon as we stepped foot outside, starting to see and hear and smell everything that was so different, just confusion through and through,” she said. “And then I remember my dad coming to pick us up, and like finally just having some sense of comfort.”

Born later returned to the Pentagon with her father and sister a couple of days after the attack to help reframe what happened by watching all the people who came to help. Born said it was on that day her father learned how the daycare workers were able to evacuate the children into a space that “felt like a sanctuary.”

Born and her sister were among the around 140 children in the center who made it out safely, which she attributes to the “unsung heroes” of that day, the daycare workers and those who showed up to offer their assistance.

A group of people walked children out and loaded babies into cribs that they carried about a half mile toward the Potomac River, setting them up in a circle and forming a perimeter around them all to wait until their parents arrived. To this day, no one knows the identities of the individuals who stepped up.

No child inside the Pentagon daycare was killed that day.

“We just know that when the moment called for it, they had the presence of mind to realize that there were people there that needed help,” Born said. “Instead of just getting themselves to safety, they came back for us.”

“I think that’s just credit to the character and the ingenuity of the people that worked at the Pentagon that day, both in uniform and out of uniform, to be able to come up with a plan when the moment called for it,” she continued. “I mean, none of them woke up that morning expecting to need to do anything like that, but it was just innate inside of them that that’s how they responded in that situation.”

Last year, Born realized that the 25th anniversary of the attacks was coming up, causing her to rewind the past 25 years and the promise to never forget.

One anniversary morning in high school, she saw the school’s flag flying at full mast instead of half in respect for the nearly 3,000 Americans who died.

“I missed the first couple classes that day, just trying to track down a janitor and talk with the principal and have that amended so that they would lower the flag in respect, and they did,” she said. “I think that year was kind of the first spot where I thought, are we still continuing this promise that we made to never forget?”

Since then, she felt like more anniversaries went unacknowledged, urging her to find something to incorporate daily into her life, and thus Run to Remember was born. She decided to read the names and build a community where the stories of 9/11 can be shared.

Running aside, Born noted that the biggest demand comes from the emotional toll — learning about the individual stories of the people she runs for.

After starting last year, Born is 1,000 miles in. Initially, she wanted to complete all 2,977 before the 25th anniversary, but it is more rewarding to focus on the purpose, not the pace, she said.

“We might hear stories about specific people that have been more publicized over the past 25 years, but this is a mile for every person, a mile for every name,” she said. “It’s a name you may not have heard a story about yet.”

The Run to Remember account has garnered nearly 42,000 followers, and the community can get involved through running their own miles for someone.

“Send me a message. I’ll send you a name to run for,” she said. “This doesn’t have to be my project. This is everybody’s effort, so that we can continue to honor them.“

U.S. officials disputed that claim.

“All of our Saildrones are accounted for and fully operational,” an official told Military Times.

The IRGC has released footage of its forces attacking an American Saildrone USV in/near the Strait of Hormuz today.

The unmanned Saildrone can be seen burning. pic.twitter.com/hALY030MOe

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) September 10, 2026

The video comes on the heels of another incident in which an Anduril Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicle — designed for long-range surveillance and other undersea missions — was captured on Sept. 8.

U.S. Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins of U.S. Central Command told Reuters that the “defective drone was an older model that neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment.”

“Of course Iran will take every opportunity as a propaganda win,” Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the outlet. “It can help the (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) make better versions of their own designs.”

The Navy recently awarded Saildrone Voyager a $16.3 million task order to extend operations of the Voyager fleet in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, according to an August release.

Since 2023, Saildrone’s USVs have worked in coordination with the U.S. Navy, supporting the Joint Interagency Task Force South, or JIATF-S, and U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command/U.S. Navy Fourth Fleet, per the release.

The 33-foot-long Voyager is designed for persistent surface and subsurface surveillance and can also conduct nearshore mapping missions and seafloor characterization.

Able to remain “on mission and on station” for months at a time, the USVs are “both a deterrent and an alarm” along the U.S.’s expansive southern maritime border, according to the company.

“Everyone knows exactly what they were doing on that day, or where they were, but it’s weird too, because we don’t know what life was like before that,” the high school senior from Bradenton, Florida, explained.

She was born into a country already at war. By the time she was old enough to understand what war meant, American troops had been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq for years.

“I almost feel numb to all of the violence of it, because we were told about it so much when we were little … but we were too little to understand,” Cline said.

That distance is one of the defining legacies of 25 years of war. Millions of Americans came of age surrounded by its consequences without ever experiencing the wars themselves.

Now that generation is entering adulthood as the Pentagon confronts a different challenge: What happens when a generation comes of age during an era of war without being asked to participate in it? For most Americans who grew up after 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a constant presence, but military service was not. They inherited the consequences of those wars without necessarily inheriting a personal connection to the people who fought them.

A growing divide

The Defense Department has linked the growing divide to the military’s smaller footprint and declining numbers of Americans with family or personal connections to service.

In 1995, 40% of young people had a parent who had served in the military. By 2022, that figure had fallen to 12%, according to the Defense Department.

The change happened alongside the all-volunteer force and two decades of sustained military operations.

The Defense Department has also found that military service increasingly falls outside the range of careers young people consider. About 20 years ago, just over 25% of young people had never thought about serving. In recent years, more than half had never considered it.

A 2025 ThinkNow survey found that among Gen Z adults who had not served, 28% said they were very or somewhat likely to consider joining. Nearly half, 49%, said they were not very or not at all likely, while 23% were unsure.

For those who said they would consider joining, career opportunities were the leading motivation, followed by financial security and educational benefits. Family tradition ranked much lower.

Among those unlikely to join, about half cited a lack of interest in military service and cited concerns about physical or mental health risks. Others cited fear of combat or deployment.

Sherald Winans, a college freshman at Miami University of Ohio, said that when he pictures someone his age joining the military, he imagines boot camp, followed by deployment “somewhere in the desert to go to war.”

“I don’t know anyone who serves,” he said. “But I think that there’s more danger now than ever when going to fight in the military.”

Choosing to serve

Tiana Ramirez is an example of what that choice can look like today.

A recent high school graduate preparing to join the Marine Corps, Ramirez said she wanted purpose and the benefits that come with military service. She did not want to go to college immediately after high school and had heard positive things about the opportunities available to veterans.

Her grandfather served in Vietnam, and her older cousin serves in the Navy aboard the Freedom-class littoral combat ship USS Billings.

But 9/11 is not part of her personal history. She was not alive when the attacks occurred and has no direct memory of the wars that followed.

Ramirez said she thinks about Iraq and Afghanistan but does not spend much time worrying about whether she could experience a similar deployment. She wants to begin her military career with an open mind and see what comes next.

For her, the appeal is practical as well as personal: steady income, a career path, health care and education benefits.

She also described military service as a way to find her purpose and determine what she is meant to do.

What young Americans know about war

For young Americans who did not live through 9/11, the attacks are history, rather than memory.

Teachers who have watched those students encounter the subject in classrooms describe that difference.

Sarah Boyles, a Florida history teacher, said that during her first years teaching, she focused less on the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and more on their causes and consequences. At the time, the attacks were too emotional for some students to discuss.

Randall Faulks, a social studies teacher in Louisiana, said students do not always have an emotional response because they have no personal memory of the day.

For some students, the experience is more like learning about another major historical event.

Jerrica Santos, a junior in high school and daughter of an Army command sergeant major, said she does not believe people who did not experience 9/11 can feel the same pain as those who did.

“But we can understand their point of view,” she said.

Izzy Williams, another high school senior, compared that inherited experience with another event her generation did experience directly: the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We definitely understand how all of a sudden the world changed, just like how COVID changed everything we knew,” Williams said. “We started doing things differently and getting used to different ways.”

The civil-military gap persists

The Pentagon’s recruiting numbers have improved after several years of shortfalls.

By the end of fiscal 2025, all five active-duty services had met or exceeded their enlisted accession goals. The Army reached 101.72% of its goal; the Navy 108.61%; the Marine Corps 100%; the Air Force 100.22%; and the Space Force 102.89%.

Despite this, the DoD has cited a shrinking eligible population, declining birth rates, fewer family connections and lower willingness to serve among the challenges facing military recruiting and retention.

That disparity matters beyond who chooses to enlist. It also creates a widening gap between the generation that fought the post-9/11 wars and the generation now entering adulthood without a personal connection to them.

As the post-9/11 generation transitions out of the service, military historian Ben Connable shared his concerns about how much knowledge from Iraq and Afghanistan will carry forward.

Connable said the military has previously had to relearn lessons that were not successfully passed from one generation to the next — citing Vietnam as an example.

He said recent cases have often been poorly transmitted into modern military knowledge and warned that knowledge that was developed during years of counterinsurgency might not be passed down.

That transition is occurring alongside significant turnover among the Pentagon’s senior leadership.

At least 20 generals, admirals and civilian defense leaders have been fired or departed their positions since Hegseth became defense secretary, according to a Sept. 2 CBS News tally.

Hegseth directed a restructuring of the senior officer ranks in May 2025. His memorandum called for a minimum 20% reduction in four-star positions across the active component, a minimum 20% reduction in National Guard general officers and an additional minimum 10% reduction in general and flag officers tied to a realignment of the Unified Command Plan.

Inheriting a different military

The young Americans coming of age now are not the same young Americans who enlisted after Sept. 11.

They grew up watching the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down. They experienced a pandemic that disrupted daily life.

John Spencer, a military researcher and author who studies combat and military cohesion, cautioned against assuming that younger service members are inherently less capable than the generations before them.

Every generation, he said, has been told that it might not perform as well as the one before it when tested in war.

That is a recurring concern, not a judgment unique to today’s young troops.

What matters in combat, Spencer said, is not simply technology or individual ability.

“Cohesion remains critical to how units perform under pressure,” he said.

Ramirez is about to become part of the institution that shaped the world she grew up in, even though she has no memory of the event that set those wars in motion.

She leaves for boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina, later this month, without knowing what her military career will bring, or whether the wars she learned about in school will ever become a larger part of her own life.

“I signed up to serve because I want to do something different,” Ramirez says. “And something that makes a difference, too.”

On Aug. 20, SBA proposed replacing nearly 1,000 industry-specific size standards and exceptions with 338 broader ones.

In common IT services categories, the threshold would rise from $34 million in average annual receipts to $531 million. SBA estimates 37,002 firms already in the federal market would newly qualify, holding more than 105,000 contracts worth about $71 billion in fiscal 2025.

SBA has legitimate reasons to act. The system is complicated, inflation has eroded the thresholds and businesses need room to grow. But that raises a narrower question: Should a $10 million SDVOSB compete for the same set-asides as an SDVOSB approaching $500 million?

An SDVOSB must be small under the standard assigned to a contract, in addition to being veteran-owned and controlled. If these thresholds hold, veteran-owned companies at dramatically different stages will compete head-to-head, and they are not similarly situated.

A firm with hundreds of millions in revenue has more capital, deeper past performance, bigger proposal teams and more room to absorb delayed payments, protests and lost bids. Most newly eligible firms will be $40 million to $200 million companies, and the advantage is the same.

We should want veterans to build $500 million companies. But a program built for veteran entrepreneurs should not pretend that gap does not exist.

Nowhere is this more consequential than at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which by statute must set work aside for veteran-owned small businesses whenever two can perform it, and which awarded roughly a quarter of its prime dollars to SDVOSBs last year.

The veteran-owned IT firms that outgrew that program would walk back through the door and compete against the firm that won its first VA contract last year.

SBA acknowledges that a larger pool may reduce existing small businesses’ chances of winning, and says the greatest effect will fall on firms most similar in size to the new entrants.

In a set-aside decided on past performance, staffing depth and price, the firm most likely to lose is the one with the least of each: the emerging veteran-owned business the program exists to serve.

SBA also states it is “not possible for SBA to accurately predict which newly classified firms would be eligible for certification,” and expects firms near the threshold not to certify.

That may be true elsewhere. It is not true where certification is free, takes weeks and unlocks a category one agency funds at roughly $10 billion a year. And the data to test it already sit in SBA’s own systems: VetCert, SAM.gov and FPDS show every firm that has held or lost SDVOSB certification, its size and its awards.

Before finalizing, SBA should publish an analysis. How many larger firms would qualify on both size and ownership, what they already receive and where smaller SDVOSBs would face the most new competition?

Depending on the data, SBA should adopt an SDVOSB-specific safeguard. SBA already uses program-specific size definitions elsewhere, and Congress can settle any doubt about authority.

One option is a separate upper threshold for SDVOSB set-asides where the general standard would otherwise rise into the hundreds of millions. Something like $75 million, roughly twice today’s standard, would let a firm double before graduating. The principle matters more than the number.

Congress has a vehicle ready. The bipartisan Contract Our Veterans Act of 2026 would set a 5% government-wide goal for veteran-owned small business contracting. A goal is only as meaningful as the field it is measured against, and the same bill could define that field so the goal is met by veterans building companies, rather than by a few already large ones.

No soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, guardian or Coast Guardsman leaves the service and builds a $500 million company on day one. The SDVOSB program should be a working ladder to the open marketplace, not permanent shelter from competition. SBA can modernize and keep that ladder standing.

Comments are due Sept. 21, 2026, at regulations.gov, Docket SBA-2026-0199, and SBA must answer substantive comments in the final rule. If you own a veteran-owned business, tell SBA what this change would mean for you.

Justin Brown is CEO of The Nimitz Group, a Washington, D.C.-based government relations firm focused on veterans policy and federal procurement.

The U.S. military, the highest-funded in the world, suffered material damage even before Iran’s strikes on Tuesday. This includes the destruction of more than two dozen drones, Iran striking fighter jets, and aircraft being lost to accidents.

According to a May report from the Congressional Research Service, 42 U.S. military aircraft had already been lost or damaged in the conflict.

Since the Iran war started in February, 18 U.S. service members have been killed and over 800 injured.

A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Iran’s attack hit one A-10 Thunderbolt II, known as the Warthog, leaving it with a missing wing, while roughly eight F-15s sustained light damage and were returned to service.

Iran’s strike on the U.S. base in Jordan came after U.S. forces said they destroyed five Iranian crude oil carriers. The U.S. said its strikes were in response to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeting a U.S. Navy warship with ballistic ​missiles twice over the previous two days.

The Iranian attack required U.S. forces to fire roughly 30 Patriot interceptors to counter the missiles, the U.S. official said, amid increasing concern about the inventory of U.S. air defense interceptors and other missiles.

While specific inventory numbers are classified, the Center for Strategic ​and International Studies has estimated that about 65% of U.S. Patriot interceptors were expended between February and July, with fewer than 850 left on hand, down from 2,330 before the Iran war began.

The reactor’s deployment helps carry out President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order calling for the swift integration of nuclear power within the military, with a goal of having at least one working reactor on a military base by Sept. 30, 2028.

“The MMR installation will provide reliable, around-the-clock power independent of the commercial electric grid, capable of sustaining critical operations under the most demanding conditions,” a Pentagon release said.

The reactor will help create American jobs, bolster the nuclear supply chain, provide nonstop power outside of the civilian electric grid and help support national security.

It will also be the first power-producing reactor installed in Indiana.

The reactor installation will be implemented by the Army’s Janus Program, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations and Environment, the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, and state of Indiana.

The Janus program was created to install nuclear power on military bases that can operate independently of the surrounding city’s electrical grid.

The Pentagon said it will work hand-in-hand with federal, state and local partners to ensure the reactor is installed in a way that complies with environmental and safety regulations.

Testifying before the National Commission on the Future of the Navy Wednesday, DIU’s principal deputy director and chief commercial officer, Matthew Shortal, said dollars are not following rhetoric when it comes to building out the unmanned fleet.

“I’ve seen reports that it’s 96% manned, 4% unmanned,” Shortal said. “My personal view is that it’s not even close, and we need to move quicker.”

He added that, in meetings with Navy and Marine Corps leadership, it was easy to secure agreement around the importance of manned vessels and platforms in the fight.

But “when it comes time for budget, moving things, it just doesn’t happen, and we need to move out quickly,” he said. “It’s 96-4; it’s not moving to 10%, and I’ve seen the budget for this year. You know, a couple more billion for unmanned. It’s not enough. We need to start killing manned programs.”

Shortal gave his testimony before the congressionally established panel at its third public hearing, taking place at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Established in 2022, the commission has eight members and kicked off its series of hearings in March. It’s set to deliver initial findings in early 2027 that will include “concrete choices for force design, industrial base reform, and the policies that enable a Navy and Marine Corps team capable of sustained operations and rapid surge when required,” according to the commission.

Shortal’s testimony emphasized the way both the ongoing Ukraine conflict and Operation Epic Fury — the United States’ war on Iran — have shifted the paradigm and emphasized unmanned vessels as “the way into the future.”

He cited in particular the Navy’s deployment of a Saronic-made Corsair unmanned surface vessel into the Strait of Hormuz to conduct an at-sea rescue of two Army AH-64 Apache pilots after their helicopter went down in the Strait in June.

“Then, not long after, three explosive-laden Corsair autonomous surface vessels conducted one-way attacks against maritime infrastructure at the Bandar Abbas naval base,” Shortal said, referring to Iran’s largest naval facility, which abuts the Strait.

DIU, he said, had funded early prototyping and acquisition channels for Saronic-made USVs, leading to the award of a $392 million production contract for Corsairs last December.

“At DIU, we don’t spend years gazing at the problem,” Shortal said. “In the face of generational technological change on the battlefield, resource allocation towards new entrants and new capabilities like unmanned autonomous vehicles in all domains is a critical directive in the face of a new war.”

Shortal did not expand, however, on which manned platforms and capabilities the Navy should divest or reduce to achieve a greater proportion of unmanned platforms in the fleet.

Operation Epic Fury has also emphasized the limitations of the Navy’s manned fleet, particularly the finite number of carriers and support vessels it has to maintain and sustain presence in the Middle East.

The retasking of the carrier George Washington to the region in order to relieve the Abraham Lincoln following a marathon deployment left a temporary carrier gap in the Pacific, where China threatens allied nations.

The Navy’s shipbuilding plan, released in May, requests funding for five unmanned and 34 manned vessels in Fiscal Year 2027. Over the next five years, it asks for 63 unmanned platforms and 122 manned ships, for a total of 299 manned battle-force ships and 83 unmanned vessels by FY 2031. It was the first time the Navy had included unmanned vessels in its future fleet projections.

“This inclusion is driven by the level of maturity in unmanned vessels,” the plan noted, “Which are now projected to be able to perform [chief of Naval Operations]-approved operational requirements.”