Among the nations that have received messages urging them to keep public statements in check are Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. It was not clear if the messages, which were delivered in bilateral meetings, were conveyed to other European governments.

The U.S. requests come as the Trump administration restarts an effort to press for a negotiated end to the full-scale war in Ukraine, now well into its fifth year. The latest push has blended incentives for Russia – including sanctions relief – with pressure on Ukraine to halt its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure.

Asked for comment, a Pentagon official said: “Private conversations among allies are just that, so we will not comment on these allegations.”

Among the comments that have drawn U.S. officials’ attention are suggestions by European leaders that Russia is cornered and resorting to increasingly desperate measures as its invasion of Ukraine slows to a crawl, one of the people said.

Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, a key figure in an ongoing review of U.S. troop levels in Europe, was one of the U.S. officials delivering the message, the people said. Reuters could not determine what other officials were involved.

None of the people, who include three European officials and a U.S. official, suggested the advice was communicated in a confrontational manner.

Avoid ‘poking’ Russia

The U.S. messages reflect a debate within NATO regarding how to publicly address the threat of an increasingly assertive Russia.

Some Western officials have argued that emphasizing the threat posed by Moscow could play into the hands of the Kremlin, which they say seeks to sow fear and undermine support for Ukraine.

Others argue European governments must be transparent to show their electorates that sacrifice and resources are needed to keep Moscow at bay. That is especially true as Russia appears to accelerate a covert campaign of sabotage throughout the continent.

Russia has denied that it is pursuing such a campaign.

One of the people familiar told Reuters that Colby told a Baltic official recently that there should be no “poking” directed at the Russians.

The person said Colby pointed to Europeans publicly suggesting that Russia was “cornered like a rat” as an example of unhelpful rhetoric.

It was not clear what specific statement Colby was referring to. However, Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal referred to Putin as a “rat in a corner” in late September, suggesting the Russian leader was resorting to sabotage efforts in Europe as Russia had become increasingly bogged down in Ukraine.

“We are helping you. The Americans are there,” said a separate European official, describing the Pentagon’s recent private messaging. “Just don’t be loud. Don’t make noise.”

In a separate recent meeting, the Pentagon urged an Estonian delegation to be “measured” in its communications, according to a person briefed on the encounter, though the person did not say Pentagon officials complained about any specific statement.

The defense ministries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia did not respond to requests for comment, while NATO declined to comment.

Moscow tests Europe’s resolve

One of the European officials said that the Pentagon’s advice, while cordial, was baffling, given that intelligence services in the Baltic states have in recent months consistently played down the probability of Russia testing NATO’s mutual defense provisions.

Other NATO intelligence services, by contrast, have publicly warned that Russia could dramatically ramp up its sabotage campaign in the near future.

The Pentagon messages to NATO officials come at a fraught time for European security.

Moscow has recently intensified its campaign of deniable attacks on NATO countries, Western intelligence officials have said.

On Wednesday, German prosecutors said two Belarusians were arrested for allegedly planning to set fire to a building or critical infrastructure facility in the Nuremberg area. In September, the German government blamed Russia for an attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport, allegations Moscow has denied.

At the same time, U.S. officials have been discussing potential business deals with Russia as part of the Trump administration’s push for peace in Ukraine. Those efforts have drawn mixed reactions from European officials, many of whom are pushing for the Kremlin’s continued economic isolation.

Pentagon planners, meanwhile, are reviewing Washington’s force posture in Europe, a process that could see a sharp drawdown in America’s troop presence on the continent.

US officials have said European NATO members need to assume more responsibility for their own defense, particularly as the US focuses on threats in the Middle East, Latin America and East Asia.

RAND released the report, “Anticipating Allies’ Responses to U.S. Retrenchment from Europe,” on Wednesday. It examines how France, Germany, Poland and the U.K. would likely respond to different versions of what RAND calls limited retrenchment: cuts to American commitments and forces in Europe that stop short of leaving NATO altogether.

The study draws on Cold War precedents, allied government documents and public debate, and interviews with 51 officials and experts in the four countries, most conducted between April and November 2025.

The authors caution that their findings apply only to those four allies.

The report’s main finding is that how the U.S. withdraws will shape how allies respond. The four allies “see a stark difference between a coordinated, orderly U.S. withdrawal, which they feel they could handle, and a rapid, uncoordinated one, which they see as creating major capability gaps and potentially emboldening Russia to attack a NATO member,” the authors wrote.

The authors recommend the U.S. follow through with larger force cuts on a long-term timeline worked out with allies, which they say may help keep allies’ defense spending on track even as it gets harder to sell at home.

RAND weighs those choices against NATO 3.0, the alliance concept Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby presented in February. It calls for Europe to take primary responsibility for its own non-nuclear defense while the U.S. shifts resources to the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific.

The Pentagon has already begun reducing its footprint in Europe. About 80,000 U.S. troops were stationed there across roughly 30 bases as of 2025, according to congressional testimony from the head of U.S. European Command cited in the report.

In May, the Pentagon announced it would pull about 5,000 troops out of Germany. Then in June, the U.S. cut the forces it would make available to NATO in a crisis. A review of U.S. forces in Europe is underway.

Defense ministers from France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the U.K. said Monday in a joint statement that Europe “must assume greater responsibility for its own security.” They also called the U.S. “an indispensable Ally.”

Arms sales at risk

A sudden pullout would put allies in a bind, U.K. interviewees told RAND. In the short term, they would have little choice but to buy off-the-shelf equipment, often from U.S. suppliers, to fill gaps. Over the long term, broken trust would push allies toward European or homegrown alternatives, the authors concluded.

In Britain’s case, a sudden withdrawal would “accelerate the UK’s reorientation away from U.S. defense equipment toward sovereign or European alternatives,” those interviewees said. The authors expect Germany, and possibly Poland, to reach a similar conclusion.

Germany has bought U.S. arms partly to keep Washington committed to Europe. A rapid, uncoordinated withdrawal would suggest that approach had failed, and Berlin “may not see a benefit to continuing to privilege U.S. firms for arms sales or other deals,” the authors write.

“Such a shift would be detrimental to the U.S. defense industrial base, which benefits from exports that help create economies of scale,” the report said. “The main cause of this shift would be perceptions of U.S. reliability as an ally rather than the loss of any specific U.S. military capabilities.”

The U.S. supplied 58% of the major weapons European NATO members imported from 2021 to 2025, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, down from 64% in the institute’s previous five-year count.

In Monday’s statement, the five ministers also committed to “closer defence-industrial cooperation.” But British Defense Secretary Wes Streeting said Oct. 15 that buying European or American equipment “should not be an either/or choice.” British industry produces about 15% of each F-35, he told the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

A sudden U.S. pullout would likely have little impact on how much France buys from U.S. defense companies, as Paris is already “the most committed of the four allies to reducing reliance on the United States,” the study said.

During wartime, however, French officials told RAND their military would still count on U.S. forces for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; long-range precision strike; fighter jets; air and missile defense; command and control, the systems used to direct forces in combat; and logistics.

Until France can fill those gaps itself, Paris would see a sudden U.S. pullout as a sign Washington cares little about its allies’ security, the authors wrote. That could make the two countries less likely to agree on military plans or diplomatic initiatives.

Intelligence sharing

The authors also looked at what would happen if the U.S. moved to normalize relations with Russia while the war in Ukraine continued, without addressing Europe’s security concerns. In that case, allies might limit intelligence sharing and joint military planning, fearing leaks to Moscow.

Some allies have already begun limiting intelligence sharing over other disagreements with Washington, albeit modestly, the report said. It cites U.K. concerns about U.S. military operations in the Caribbean, and Dutch concerns about U.S. policy toward Russia, which led both countries to reduce some intelligence sharing.

Still, none of the four allies would side with Russia or China on security under any scenario RAND examined, the authors concluded.

“Some strategists’ fears about allies aligning with Russia as the United States draws down are overblown,” the authors wrote. The four countries and Italy called Russia “the most acute and long-term threat to Euro-Atlantic security and stability” in Monday’s statement.

Spending gap

A limited pullback is more likely to spur allies to spend more and work more closely together, the authors found. All four have committed to NATO’s target of at least 3.5% of gross domestic product, or GDP, for core defense spending by 2035, according to the alliance’s 2025 summit declaration.

Poland has more than doubled defense spending as a share of GDP since 2014 and is aiming for 5% this year, the report said. Germany plans to spend €649 billion on its military over five years, raising spending from 2.4% of GDP in 2025 to 3.5% by 2029, Defense News reported.

France and the U.K. will struggle to meet NATO’s target because of high debt and slow growth, the report said. French public debt rose from 98% of GDP in 2019 to an average of 112% from 2020 to 2024. One interviewee called the budget problem France’s “Achilles’ heel” in rearming.

The U.K. Ministry of Defence asked for an extra £28 billion to cover a shortfall through 2030 and received £15 billion, the report said. The British government said Oct. 28 it would fully fund its Defence Investment Plan, Reuters reported.

Troops as leverage

The authors also warn against using troop levels to reward or punish individual allies. Questionnaires the Pentagon sent allies as part of the review asked about their defense spending and support for U.S. foreign policy priorities. Some allies read that as a sign troop decisions would hinge on political alignment, the report said.

Poland has already seen how quickly U.S. troop decisions can change. In May, the Pentagon abruptly canceled a planned deployment of about 4,000 soldiers to Poland. President Donald Trump later pledged to send 5,000 troops at an unspecified date. Warsaw credited the reversal partly to reminding Washington that Poland is a “model ally” that buys U.S. systems.

The authors said the episode demonstrates both the payoff Poland expects and the weakness of its approach: U.S. troop levels and commitments rest on “abrupt, easily reversible decisions.”

Call for a plan

“NATO 3.0 is a vision for a reduced U.S. role and reallocation of resources. But there is no concrete, long-term plan,” the report said.

The authors urge the administration to work with allies to set how many U.S. troops stay in Europe in peacetime and how many the U.S. would send in a war, along with a timeline to get there.

It is unclear whether the Europe review will produce such a plan. Under a Pentagon document seen by Reuters in August, the review is due to give Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at least four sets of troop options by Nov. 6. The full review is due in December.

Predictable long-term plans that give allies a say “could sustain a continued, if reimagined, transatlantic partnership,” the authors wrote. Adding that treating troops and commitments as bargaining chips, by contrast, “could undercut regional cooperation and, in turn, NATO 3.0’s goal of European strength.”

The ship left Naval Base San Diego on Nov. 21, 2025, as part of the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group. It remained at sea even after the carrier group moved on and the Lincoln returned to its home port.

As of Oct. 29, the ship has been deployed for 342 days, a time period that far exceeds the Navy’s commonly cited seven-month deployment benchmark for ships based in the United States. It also comes as the service contends with a persistent surface-ship maintenance backlog, delays at private shipyards and warnings from senior Navy leaders that extended operations could create years of additional pressure on the fleet.

For families waiting at home, the uncertainty has become its own burden.

Marie Bailey, whose husband serves aboard Spruance, told Military Times that families have repeatedly been told the ship would return soon, only to see that expectation pushed back.

“We are hearing they’re supposed to come home sometime next month, but we’ve been hearing about ‘next month’ for several months,” Bailey said.

Extended deployments are not new to the Navy, but that offers little comfort to families counting down the days until a homecoming that continues to appear just out of reach. For them, another extension is not simply a change to an operational schedule, but yet another period of uncertainty.

“We don’t know what to expect anymore, but it’s hard getting your hopes up time and time again,” Bailey added. “Most of the families are just worried about their sailors, knowing how long they’ve been gone.”

Some Spruance sailors also say they feel their experience has been overlooked compared with the sweeping national attention given to the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Two of those sailors, who were granted anonymity due to fear of reprisal, noted that life aboard a destroyer brings its own challenges, even when the ship receives less public attention.

“It’s tight, cramped and just as challenging on the destroyers, if not more than bigger ships,” one sailor said.

The other sailor pointed to the families waiting at home, arguing that the size of a ship should not determine how much attention its crew receives.

“Our boat isn’t as big as an aircraft carrier, but our 300+ families matter to us just as much as anyone else’s,” the sailor said.

The frustration reflects a basic reality of carrier strike groups: Destroyers may operate in the shadow of the aircraft carriers they accompany, but their crews endure the same prolonged separation from home.

For families waiting on a return date, the distinction between a carrier and a smaller warship offers little consolation.

Spruance is not the only Navy destroyer facing an unusually long deployment. The USS John Finn, USS Mustin and USS Rafael Peralta have also had expected return dates pushed from 2026 into 2027, with some planned to stretch over 14 months, according to Defense One.

The extensions illustrate the demands facing the surface fleet, although the Navy has not publicly provided a comprehensive count of destroyers that have had deployments extended.

A fleet under sustained pressure

The Navy’s Optimized Fleet Response Plan organizes a 36-month cycle for ships homeported in the United States. The Government Accountability Office describes the cycle as allocating eight months to depot-level maintenance, 10 months to training and 18 months to deployment and sustainment operations.

Extended deployments can disrupt that sequence, pushing scheduled maintenance later and compressing the time available for repairs, training and preparation before a ship is needed again.

GAO has documented longstanding maintenance challenges across the Navy’s surface fleet. Private ship repair companies took nearly 10,000 days longer than planned, cumulatively, to repair destroyers between fiscal years 2015 and 2022, according to a February 2025 GAO report. The Navy’s surface-ship maintenance backlog reached $2.3 billion in deferred work by August 2022, GAO reported.

In a May 2022 report, GAO found a nearly $1.8 billion backlog in depot-level maintenance for Navy ships, including approximately $1.7 billion for surface ships. About $1.2 billion of the backlog was associated with ships the Navy had proposed for early decommissioning. GAO found that maintenance backlogs contributed to decisions to retire nine ships.

A separate GAO analysis of 10 surface-ship classes between fiscal years 2011 and 2021 found increases in maintenance cannibalizations, casualty reports and delays in depot-level maintenance. Steaming hours declined and costs per steaming hour rose for most of the classes examined.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle warned Oct. 26 that the effects of extended deployments could reverberate through the fleet’s maintenance schedule for years. Speaking at the United States Navy Memorial, Caudle said maintenance availabilities, particularly for destroyers, could snowball as ships return from deployments exceeding 300 days.

“You’re talking hundreds of availabilities and millions of dollars. Hundreds of millions of dollars have to be applied to that problem as we start retrograding these destroyers back into their maintenance period,” Caudle said.

“But this is a years-long recovery,” he added. “There is no workaround on that.”

Rear Adm. Kavon Hakimzadeh, commander of Norfolk Naval Shipyard, also warned of capacity constraints as destroyers return from the Middle East. Speaking at a September roundtable hosted by the Center for Maritime Strategy, Hakimzadeh said shipyards would have to manage the volume of returning ships.

“There’s some choke points just based on capacity out there for all the destroyers that are going to be coming back,” Hakimzadeh said. “We’re running the destroyers really hard out there, and I suspect they’re all going to need to go into the same dry dock, and we’re going to have to sequence them in.”

The remarks highlight a constraint beyond identifying the repairs each ship needs: Shipyards must also have the capacity and workforce to complete the work.

The Navy’s maintenance challenges have persisted despite billions of dollars in repair funding.

A December 2025 Congressional Budget Office analysis found that maintenance for Navy destroyers and amphibious ships takes 20% to 100% longer than the service plans for. The cumulative burden for destroyers is substantial: Roughly nine years of a ship’s planned service life is expected to be spent in maintenance, or about one year out of every four.

GAO found that the Navy received nearly $25.9 billion for combat surface-ship maintenance from fiscal years 2020 through 2023, roughly $1 billion more than it had requested. The service reported obligating 99.7% of those funds by the end of fiscal 2023.

GAO has also identified shortages of spare parts and qualified maintenance personnel, along with deferred work, among the constraints affecting maintenance schedules.

What Spruance’s schedule shows

Navy budget documents show that the planned timing of Spruance’s next maintenance period has shifted.

The Navy’s fiscal 2025 operations and maintenance budget listed a scheduled restricted availability for the destroyer from July 3, 2026, through Feb. 21, 2027. A restricted availability is a period when a ship is taken out of normal operations for maintenance and repairs.

In the fiscal 2027 budget, the planned period had shifted to Jan. 19 through April 28, 2027. Based on those dates, the scheduled start moved 200 days later, while the planned completion was bumped to 66 days later.

The availability of sailors to perform maintenance at sea is another factor in the Navy’s efforts to keep ships ready for operations.

In a September 2024 report, GAO surveyed personnel aboard 232 Navy ships about their ability to carry out maintenance while underway. The survey received a 91% response rate.

Sixty-three percent of responding executive officers said it was moderately to extremely difficult for their crews to complete repairs underway with their assigned sailors; 64% said it was similarly difficult to conduct sailor-led maintenance while also meeting classroom training requirements; and 75% reported that it was moderately to extremely difficult for sailors to complete repairs.

GAO also found that the Navy did not track how many sailors assigned to ships were unavailable for duty.

What comes next for Spruance

GAO has recommended that the Navy compare planned depot-maintenance durations with typical availabilities for ships of the same type, while accounting for factors such as age, condition and maintenance requirements.

Such comparisons, according to GAO, could help establish whether a ship’s maintenance period is unusually long.

Spruance’s post-deployment assessment and actual maintenance schedule will show what work the Navy identifies as necessary and how long the destroyer remains unavailable for operations.

Until those details are established, the effect of its record deployment on its future readiness remains uncertain.

The Navy did not respond to Navy Times’ request for comment by publication.

Sylvia’s firing is one of the highest-profile consequences to date from Hegseth’s sweeping hunt for officials suspected of leaking information to the news media as the unpopular Iran war enters its ninth month. 

Hegseth’s effort includes a Pentagon task force to identify the source of leaks and the widespread use of polygraph exams on senior officials as part of these investigations. 

Last year, he introduced a media policy that raised legal concerns among press organizations, and revoked the press credentials of journalists who refused to sign it. 

A senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, accused Sylvia of failing three polygraphs questioning him about leaking classified information. 

“The extent of his leaking became so critical that Secretary Hegseth took immediate action and fired Sylvia in order to protect national security. Urgent action was needed and could not wait another second,” the official said.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who misidentified Sylvia as a woman, said the senior US general has “got problems.”

“We’re very much looking for leakers, and she’s going to have big problems, long-term problems,” Trump told reporters. 

Sylvia could not be immediately reached for comment.

Key position

Sylvia led the Directorate for Strategy, Plans, and Policy at the Joint Staff, known inside the military as the J5, a key position that helps advise the top US military official, General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He previously led the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division. His dismissal was first reported by The Atlantic magazine.

His removal comes as the US military plans for a potential resumption of intensive bombings in Iran, something Trump has called “another little Epic Fury.” The Pentagon has fumed about leaks during the Iran war, including about its planning and the expenditure of munitions. 

Reuters reported on Wednesday that an internal US military analysis estimates it would cost more than $29 billion in munitions alone to restock weapons used against Iran so far. That’s the bulk of the more than $47 billion spent on operations in the war.

Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, said the decision followed an extensive investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

“This matter, along with others, have been referred to the Justice Department for potential further legal action,” Parnell said, without identifying other officials who may also be targeted.

Parnell added: “Our commitment was not an empty promise. We vowed to find you, and we meant it.”

A spokesperson for the Joint Staff withdrew an initial statement expressing gratitude for Sylvia’s 32 years of service, saying “we determined the statement did not appropriately reflect the full circumstances.”

“Out of respect for the service member and the ongoing personnel process, we will not comment further,” the spokesperson said.

The flu vaccine is a requirement for all active duty, reserve components and civilian personnel of the Department of the Air Force that fall under certain designated categories, according to a memo signed last week by the Assistant Secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs Richard Anderson.

For those required to vaccinate, the department lists recruits, training populations and congregate living; rapid deployment forces and “no-fail” missions; deployed forces; healthcare personnel; civilian personnel in child services programs; and Air Mobility Command aircrew in support of transportation taskings and en route care as well as executive airlift personnel. 

“While the influenza vaccination is voluntary for the broader military and civilian populations, the annual vaccination remains a readiness requirement for Airmen and Guardians, as well as designated civilian personnel, within the following six specific categories,” an attachment to the memo reads.

Failure to comply with the requirement as a service member within the designated populations can result in administrative or disciplinary action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the memo says.

Effective immediately, recruits, healthcare and child center personnel are required to be vaccinated, while deploying forces will adhere to pre-deployment timelines, per the guidance. Other personnel included in the policy must be vaccinated no later than Dec. 15 annually.

The memo first circulated on social media on the unofficial Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page. An Air Force spokesperson confirmed its authenticity to Military Times.

Both military and civilian personnel can submit religious accommodation and medical exemption requests. If requests are denied, personnel have an opportunity to comply with the vaccination requirements. 

The updated guidance comes six months after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth scrapped the flu vaccine requirement, calling it “overly broad and not rational,” and instead opted to make it optional. Two months later, nearly 300 trainees at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, contracted the flu, resulting in four hospitalizations and one death.

Following the Pentagon’s optional policy, military services expressed the desire for exemptions. The Under Secretary of Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata granted the exceptions to policy, or ETPs, to the Department of the Army, Department of the Navy, Department of the Air Force, National Security Agency and Defense Health Agency.

Since the Marine Corps and Space Force are under the Department of the Navy and Department of the Air Force, respectively, they are also included in the policy exceptions.

Although the Air Force initially declined to say when the ETP was granted, the recent memo lists June 11, during the time there was the localized outbreak at Lackland.

“The DAF requested an exemption to the voluntary policy to protect mission-critical and high-risk populations,” the memo’s attachment says. “The mandatory vaccination for these select groups [is] deemed essential to preserve force readiness, prevent illness, minimize lost duty days, and ensure the successful execution of DAF missions.”

Service members and civilian personnel who are deployed for longer than 30 consecutive days to the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility are required to get the annual flu vaccine as well, according to a separate memo circulating on the unofficial Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page, signed by Tata late last month.

Viewers are perfectly safe, perched atop the woven synthetic fibers of a movie theater chair, but that’s how director Peter Berg intended the upcoming film The Mosquito Bowl to feel. The intimate violence thrusts the Marines from the 4th and 29th regiments, 6th Marine Division, as well as moviegoers, into “this barbaric madness,” said Berg.

The film, based on Buzz Bissinger’s 2022 book The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II, follows four of America’s top college football stars who traded a pigskin for an M1 Garand and who subsequently faced off on the “gridiron” of Guadalcanal before being shipped off to Okinawa. Yet the actual football game, dubbed the Mosquito Bowl, occupies just a small portion of the movie. That too, according to Berg, was intentional.

“This is not a football movie. It’s a war movie that happens to have football players in the middle of the war,” he said in a release.

“These young men — who are just sort of blazing in the apex of their youth and their vitality and their joy — you meet them as college football stars. Then you introduce them to a hell, a flavor of which they had no idea even existed.”

“I think it would have been a tragedy if you said, ‘Oh God, it’s Hollywood. … Let’s sugarcoat it a little,” Bissinger told Military Times. “People have to know what war is. They have to know. We sanitize too much, and it’s just not the way it is. Maybe they’ll watch, and they’ll say, ‘No more wars.’ I know that’s naive, but at least you know what we’re sending our men and women into, and I think that’s really important.”

“So many people were killed in World War II. This is just a story of four of those people, and my feeling was to make it as intense and experiential as I could around those four guys,” Berg said in a release.

“Make the audience feel as though they’re actually in it and they can’t escape it and they’re not even sure what’s happening at times, which I think is very true to the experience that so many of these guys went through. … That was our strategy as we approached filming it and editing it and scoring it and sound-designing it,” he continued. “I’ve had many people who watch the film now say afterward that they literally felt like they went through something, and that was kind of what we were trying to achieve.”

Berg and Bissinger, who happen to be cousins, collaborated on Bissinger’s bestselling book Friday Night Lights over two decades ago and have once again teamed up to deliver this gut-punch of a film.

“Pete has this ability to read a 400-page book and crystallize and seize on what he thought the emotional heart was. I’ve always admired that,” Bissinger said. “He wrote the script. There were several scripts written, but Pete just hit it. When I read the script, his ability to incorporate everything into a two-hour movie was phenomenal.”

For both men, the filming of The Mosquito Bowl was personal, as both their fathers were Marines. Berg’s father served in Korea, and Bissinger’s was a Marine in the Pacific — including Okinawa.

“I knew nothing about what he did,” said Bissinger. “He wouldn’t talk about it. He would joke about it sometimes, but it was pretty clear he had put up a wall. As his son, that was his privacy. I didn’t want to violate that. But as I was doing preliminary research for the book. I finally said, ‘Well, might as well figure out what the hell he did.’

“And I’m looking up the records, and there he is. Not only was he a rifleman on the line, but he was also in one of the regiments, the Fourth Regiment that is depicted in the book. It wasn’t like I wanted to write this book as a pay-on to my father, but he was there for every scene, particularly on Okinawa.

“I just wish I had said, ‘Dad, I’m really proud of you.’ But he died 20 years ago, and maybe he’s … I don’t know where the hell he is, heaven or hell. But I hope he’s listening, and I hope he’s watching because I did want to honor not just him, but all the men who served back then.”

The film is set to hit theaters on Oct. 30 and premiere on Netflix on Nov. 25. It features Nicholas Galitzine (The Idea of You) as John McLaughry; Bill Skarsgård (It) as Bob Bauman; Ray Nicholson (Smile 2) as Tony Butkovich; and Tom Francis (Broadway’s Sunset Boulevard) as Dave Schreiner.

Berg, who penned the adaptation alongside Mark L. Smith, produced the film with Alex Gayner and Brian Grazer for Imagine Entertainment. Grazer and Imagine Entertainment previously collaborated with Berg on Friday Night Lights. Ezra Emanuel is the executive producer.

That concept was one of the key testing lines of effort in an Army Corps of Engineers and Army Research Laboratory experiment in Pituffik, Greenland, earlier this year. The whole endeavor was part of a broader testing series organized by the International Cooperative Engagement Program for Polar Research (ICE-PPR) and the Office of Naval Research, a multi-national endeavor that underscores the ever-increasing importance of the Arctic as a warfighting domain.

It is also a domain that presents unique challenges for camouflage, said Dr. Tom Douglas, a research chemist and senior scientific technical manager of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory Alaska Research Office in Fairbanks, Alaska.

“It’s dark for some periods; it’s light for other periods,” Douglas told Military Times in an interview. “Everything can look kind of yellow or orange when the sun’s setting … you’ve got sea ice, which can look kind of gray … You can stand out pretty blatantly in a vast open white field where there’s no vegetation, right? So there’s that, and then thinking about coatings or snow covering things, and maybe making it worse now that your camo doesn’t work.”

Anthony Fragoso, a cold regions artificial intelligence lead at CRREL, said that his lab worked with ARL staff during ship-to-shore operations to test “a number of novel coatings,” using sensors to assess the effectiveness of concealment.

“If you go beyond the visible, which our adversaries can do, snow in certain wavelengths looks black. But it’s white in visible,” Fragoso told Military Times in a separate interview. “So trying to match that is a challenge.”

Researchers, Fragoso said, were inspired by Arctic foxes in Pituffik, which change colors over the course of the year – from white in the winter to brown in the summer. 

“Things that are reversible, flexible is kind of what we’re after,” he said, adding that researchers considered units like the Alaska-based 11th Airborne Division, which also regularly deploys to the Pacific.

“They’re the Arctic Angels, but they are also worried about fighting in the jungle,” he said. “So they don’t want to paint stuff white, and then it has to go to Taiwan.”

While still at the scientific research and development level, the work is making its way to operational units already, with upcoming plans to test a rapidly deployable coating system on the Army’s Cold Weather All-Terrain Vehicles in Alaska.

“The Alaska National Guard is going to fly over it with helicopters, film it with thermal, all that stuff,” Fragoso said. “Everything now is counter-[unmanned aerial systems], so it’s making sure stuff isn’t being spotted from above by a $1,000 drone.”

Mike Parker, the cold regions mobility lead for CRREL, emphasized that this effort to test flexible camouflage extends beyond the Arctic.

With surveillance from above essentially a given in contemporary warfare, additional layers of concealment, particularly those that can be easily altered to fit changing environments, are in unprecedented demand.

“It has to remain flexible, and all aspects of it are on the table,” Parker said. “It doesn’t have to be just a coating; it could be a fabric … anything that can give us the tactical advantage is being evaluated.”

One of the officials said the military investigators were in touch with their French counterparts about a similar cyberattack on commercial freezers that disrupted supermarkets there earlier this month.

Reuters was not able to ascertain how far along the Pentagon’s investigation was or whether it had reached any conclusions about what happened or who might be responsible. When asked about the investigation, the Pentagon said that a unit of Cyber Command — the military’s cyber force — was “working in close coordination with interagency and law enforcement partners.” It did not elaborate. 

The US Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division said its Cyber Field Office was involved in the investigation and that it was working with French law enforcement to better understand “the refrigeration outages in Europe.”

The late August malfunctions in the United States affected at least six commissaries — on-base stores where military personnel buy their food — according to a Reuters review of the military bases’ contemporaneous Facebook posts and website updates. In at least one of the cases, the freezers did not simply stop working; the cooling units’ temperatures were cranked up overnight, yielding mounds of wilted or melted food in the morning. 

The Fort Huachuca, Arizona, Facebook account explained on August 26 that its freezer “went into defrost mode where it heated up all the food. Trust us when we say it was ‘spoiled.'”

The spate of rogue freezer behavior and the possibility of cybersabotage were first reported on August 28 by a recently created blog called Signal and Silence. The involvement of military investigators and their contacts with the French were reported by the newspaper Stars and Stripes and Britain’s Daily Telegraph, respectively. The news that the investigators were treating the incident as a suspected hack is being reported here for the first time.

The French Embassy in Washington said it would have no comment.

French freezers fried

If confirmed to be a cyberattack, the refrigerator malfunctions would be another illustration of how vulnerable critical infrastructure — in this case cold storage — can be to hackers.

The French freezer cyberattack overrode the temperature controls on commercial cooling units in more than 350 establishments, leading to dramatic scenes as supermarkets’ frozen food aisles were cleared of spoiled merchandise.

The French hack involved cranking the temperature inside the units up rather than merely knocking them offline, similar to what happened in Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Some French refrigeration units had the temperature turned up so high they caught fire. The French attack’s total costs could add up to tens of millions of euros nationwide, one supermarket owner estimated earlier this month. 

The French cyberattack appeared to have ​been easy to pull off, experts previously told Reuters. The Danish firm Danfoss, whose controllers ran many of the stricken units, said that many of the devices were obsolete or were running outdated firmware, which could have made it easy for hackers to break in. Reuters could not establish whether Danfoss or any other brand of freezer controller were in use at the affected US bases. Danfoss did not return messages seeking comment.

Chilling hacks

Refrigeration plays a critical role in the distribution of fresh food and the sabotage of cold storage facilities over the internet has long been seen as a nightmare scenario, alongside the loss of electricity or water plants. 

Earlier this year, the Global Food Safety Initiative, an industry body, called on food safety professionals and IT leaders to work together to ensure “robust cybersecurity” for refrigeration technology, noting that “a hacked cooling system is just as dangerous as a broken one.”

Hackers have previously sabotaged fridges and freezers both in the United States and elsewhere.

Danfoss has said that, in 2022, hackers either targeted or broke into supermarkets in Russia and Israel that were using obsolete versions of its cold storage controllers. In December of last year, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles accused a Ukrainian woman of being part of a hacker group that knocked out the refrigeration at a meatpacking facility in 2024, ruining more than 2,000 pounds of meat.

The root problem was that controllers that were initially conceived as isolated interfaces that would be serviced by an in-person technician were increasingly being connected to the internet, said Bill Moore, the chief executive of industrial cybersecurity firm Xona Systems. Concerns about online exposure were not unique to cooling systems, he said, but they could have particularly serious consequences there.

“It can definitely disrupt the supply chain for food,” he said.

But in testimony before a congressionally authorized panel earlier this month, the Navy’s No. 2 officer shed new light on the value that medium unmanned surface vessels, or MUSVs, could bring to the fleet, particularly as persistently forward-stationed assets and part of tailorable mission packages available to commanders. 

Adm. James Kilby, the vice chief of naval operations, cited the recent deployment of an MUSV to the Pacific with the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group — the first operational deployment for the platform — as an example of how the Navy is working to normalize the presence of unmanned assets in operations.

“I see a world where it’s part of your certification exercise,” Kilby told the National Commission on the Future of the Navy in an Oct. 8 hearing, referring to the proficiency tests Navy ships must complete to demonstrate that they’re qualified for various warfighting operations and mission areas. “You know, there’s elements that we introduce in that exercise where you’ve got to demonstrate that capability, because it’s probably not going to go over with you. You’re going to pick it up over there, and you’ve got to be certified to use it.”

The Navy is expected to receive its first formal delivery of 30 MUSVs by the end of fiscal 2027. Earlier this month, Navy Secretary Hung Cao confirmed the deployment of a drone boat with the Roosevelt Strike Group, calling it a “force multiplier.”

“Imagine having more guns out there,” he said, according to a Defense Scoop report.

The Navy now operates four MUSVs, originally built as test beds and later transferred to the service. It announced last month that it had selected three companies to build a total of 30 of the vessels. The news came about six months after the Navy pivoted on its MUSV program to accelerate drone boat development, citing a desire for the vessels to become an integral part of its new “Golden Fleet” concept.

Kilby noted that the Navy had also recently created a Robotic and Autonomous Systems Warfighting Development Center (RASWDC) at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story in Virginia Beach, which he said was based on Navy Fighter Weapons School, also known as Top Gun, in Fallon, Nevada.

“The idea, in the case of MUSVs is, the surface community would certify an element to go forward and operate with the fleet. If they work with other [robotic and autonomous systems] entities, the commander of RASWDC will create that total tailored force package,” Kilby said.

“The Secretary of War is developing capability very fast, from an unmanned perspective, and the Navy needs to do a better job of integrating with that capability, so we know what we’re receiving. Because we will have a manning, training and equipping responsibility for those things,” he continued.

He added that he was “not satisfied” with where the Navy was in preparation to receive the soon-to-arrive MUSVs, but believed the service had what it required to “provide the governance and structure you need moving forward.”

The Navy has cited a broad range of potential roles and uses for the MUSV, from reconnaissance and surveillance platforms to controllable weapons carriers, thanks to modular payloads. 

Speaking about unmanned systems more generally, Kilby said the Navy, while making progress on training, had ground to cover to make the systems an integrated part of the fleet.

“It is the force development, the employment, the development beyond the [concept of operations] that we need help with,” Kilby said, “And [having] a sustainable plan so that we can bring that force to bear when we need it.”