“We’re now starting the process of clearing out the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, adding that “all 28” of Iran’s “mine dropper boats are also lying at the bottom of the sea.”

Minutes before Trump’s post, reports started to emerge about the presence of U.S. Navy ships in the strait.

An Axios journalist, citing an unnamed U.S. official, posted that “several” U.S. ships had crossed the strait on Saturday, though Iranian state TV soon after reported a denial from an official with Iran’s military.

Trump has repeatedly said that American forces have destroyed Iran’s navy and air force while crippling its ballistic missile and nuclear programs.

But fear of Iranian attacks on shipping over the past several weeks has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a critical conduit for global oil supplies. Throttling the strait has disrupted global energy markets.

U.S. gasoline prices have spiked even though most of the oil that flows through the waterway does not go to the United States.

Representatives from the U.S. and Iran began talks hosted by Pakistan in Islamabad on Saturday amid a fragile ceasefire in the conflict.

Marvin Glen Shields was born in Port Townsend, Washington, on Dec. 30, 1939. After high school his family moved in 1958 to Hyder, Alaska, where he worked in a gold mining project for the Mineral Basin Mining Company.

On Jan. 8, 1962, he enlisted in the Navy, choosing the multi-training of a construction battalion member, or Seabee. After training at Naval Air Station Glynco, Georgia, and Port Hueneme, California, he graduated as a naval construction mechanic in May 1963, and served his first assignment at Okinawa from Nov. 18 to Sept. 1964.

On Nov. 1, 1964, Construction Mechanic 3rd Class Shields swerved into harm’s way when he was assigned to Seabee Team 1104 of Naval Construction Battalion 11.

After final training, on Jan. 22, 1965, he and his nine-man unit transferred to Saigon, Vietnam, just 10 days later. From there, Team 1104 was transported 55 miles north to Dong Xoai, where it joined the 11 members of Army Special Forces Team, A-342, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces, in constructing a fortified Special Forces camp.

Further reinforcing the area were 200 local anti-communist Montagnards and 200 soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).

The area was also crawling with enemy troops, ranging from local guerrillas to full-fledged infantry units trained and organized in North Vietnam before returning south. The latter included the reinforced 272nd Regiment, about 2,000 strong, which on the night of June 9, 1965, set out to eliminate the compound at Dong Xoai.

Soon, every defender at Dong Xoai was fighting for his life.

As described in his citation, that included Shields, who was wounded early in the fighting as was the commander of Team 1104. In spite of that: “Shields continued to resupply his fellow Americans who needed ammunition and to return the enemy fire for a period of approximately three hours, at which time the Viet Cong launched a massive attack at close-range with flame throwers, hand grenades and small-arms fire.”

Though wounded a second time during this attack, Shields assisted in carrying a more critically wounded man to safety, then rejoined the fighting for another four hours.

Then a call came up from 2nd Lt. Charles Quincy Williams who, with the wounding of his commander, had taken charge of the Special Forces troops. He needed a volunteer to join him in a sally to eliminate a well-placed Viet Cong machine gunner whose accuracy was endangering the lives of all personnel in the compound.

Without hesitation, Shields volunteered for this hazardous mission. Proceeding toward their objective with a 3.5-inch rocket launcher, Williams and Shields closed to approximately 500 feet and Williams succeeded in destroying the machine gun emplacement.

As the Green Beret and the Seabee made their way back to their defensive positions, however, Shields was hit a third time and Williams twice more.

After a grueling 14-hour siege, Dong Xoai’s defenders were finally evacuated. In the process, Williams eventually recovered from his injuries. Shields was not so fortunate, dying before he reached Saigon. On June 19, he was buried in the presence of a Marine honor guard in Gardiner Cemetery, Washington.

Although the 272nd Regiment finally overran Dong Xoai, the VC knew enough not to hold it long against an enemy with complete air superiority. As far as casualties went, postwar statistics testify to the overnight siege’s butcher bill.

The Americans claimed to have killed 300 VC and captured 104 weapons, while Vietnamese records claimed the loss of 134 men killed and 290 wounded. On the South Vietnamese side, 416 of the ARVN and Montagnards stationed in and around the compound were killed and 176 wounded and 233 missing.

Of the Americans, nine Special Forces troops were killed and of the Seabees, besides Shields, Petty Officer 2nd Class William C. Hoover was killed in the VC’s opening mortar attack. All seven surviving Seabees were wounded.

On Sept. 13, 1966, Shields’ family traveled to the White House, where President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him a posthumous Medal of Honor. Later, on June 5, 1966, Charles Q. Williams was alive to receive his Medal of Honor. Shields’ name was later christened to the guided missile frigate USS Marvin Shields (FF-1066), as was Camp Marvin Shields Construction Battalion Support Base in Okinawa.

He promised to bomb every bridge and power plant in the country. Not as a warning. As an ultimatum, with a countdown, posted for the world to read along with the 93 million people he profanely threatened to annihilate.

The next day, civilians in Tehran were standing on the infrastructure he had threatened to destroy. Mothers, students, old men — they linked arms across overpasses, formed human chains around bridges and power plants, shielding them with their bodies, an NBC News video showed.

Asked whether he was concerned about war crimes, Trump told reporters he was “not at all.”

Retired American military officers said the threats themselves were likely war crimes — and that Trump had handed prosecutors a ready-made record. “He’s essentially self-incriminating,” one retired senior officer told reporters, per The Guardian.

Legal experts noted that threatening to systematically destroy civilian power plants and bridges, regardless of whether the strikes occur, can itself constitute evidence of criminal intent under the laws of armed conflict, according to The New York Times.

At the same time, White House envoys, billionaire Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were supposed to fly to Ukraine after Orthodox Easter this weekend carrying new security guarantees but were rerouted to Pakistan instead, for talks in Islamabad the same weekend the Kyiv visit was planned.

The administration was starting a war with one hand and promising to end one with the other. The same president who threatened to destroy civilian infrastructure in Iran on Tuesday is supposed to guarantee that no one destroys Ukrainian civilian infrastructure ever again.

“Is the U.S. going to provide Ukraine something like mutual security assistance? I don’t think so,” Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a former British military officer, told Military Times.

“And even if they did, do the Ukrainians believe in it? And pretty critically — does Putin believe in it?”

Moscow already had an answer.

“The Americans have a lot of other things to deal with, if you know what I mean,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the Kyiv Independent.

“The primary movers in these so-called peace talks — the Americans — are now busy with other things,” a senior European diplomat told Military Times, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security assessments.

And they took the interceptors with them. The U.S. military burned through more than 800 Patriot missiles in the Middle East in three days — more than Ukraine has received in the entire war — while the production line makes roughly 600 a year.

The White House has since suspended Patriot export sales globally because of supply constraints, according to The Atlantic.

Meanwhile, the administration rolled back Russian oil sanctions — the same restrictions that had been slowly strangling Moscow’s ability to finance the war — just as the Iran conflict sent crude past $100 a barrel, opening a window for Russia to sell at wartime prices with no cap and no consequences.

“Just this easing by America could provide Russia with around $10 billion for the war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said alongside French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris. “This certainly does not help peace,” according to Al Jazeera.

The sanctions rollback did not just weaken Ukraine’s position at the table — it actively financed the war Ukraine was supposed to be negotiating its way out of.

“This is throwing a massive lifeline to Putin,” the senior diplomat said.

Kyiv has fought harder anyway.

Its forces have recaptured more than 480 square kilometers in the southeast since January, pushing the ballistic missile interception rate toward 95%, and sent long-range strikes deeper inside Russia than at any point in the war — and for every short- to medium-range missile Russia fired in, Ukraine was sending more out.

Its forces achieved a drone advantage over Russia in what the Institute for the Study of War called a possible first in combat history, striking oil ports from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

But the Iran war has made those capabilities impossible to ignore. As Tehran launched waves of drones and missiles across the Middle East, nations scrambling to respond found themselves watching Ukrainian-developed systems do what their own could not — handing Zelenskyy leverage overnight that years of diplomacy never had.

Ukraine’s long-range drones have knocked out an estimated 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity, around 2 million barrels per day offline, in one of the most severe oil supply disruptions in the modern history of Russia, according to Reuters.

Washington did not celebrate any of it. The administration told Kyiv to stop striking, and the same week, Vice President JD Vance flew to Budapest to campaign for Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán — Putin’s closest partner in the EU — while accusing European allies of election interference.

Zelenskyy confirmed that allies had sent Ukraine “signals” about scaling back strikes on Russia’s oil sector, per Reuters. The State Department formally warned Kyiv’s ambassador to quit the attacks.

“Having severed most support to Ukraine, undermined the trust of its allies and made clear that it will avoid applying any serious pressure on Russia, Washington is rapidly bleeding leverage,” Arnold wrote in a recent RUSI analysis.

But the Iran war may have had the opposite effect on Ukraine’s standing, Arnold told Military Times. The country Washington is pressuring to stop fighting has just demonstrated that its technology works and America’s deterrence does not.

In the space of weeks, Washington has eased the sanctions squeezing Russia’s war budget, told Kyiv to stop the strikes crippling its oil exports and conditioned security guarantees on surrendering territory Ukrainian soldiers are still holding — a sequence that, to the allies watching it unfold, has looked less like negotiation than an attempt to dismantle Ukraine’s leverage piece by piece.

The war in Iran, the peace deal in Ukraine, stability in the Far East — all of it seems to run through one man in the White House, the senior diplomat said, who does not seem to worry about the long-term consequences of his global actions.

“You’ve pushed a domino in the dark,” he said.

“You have no idea which other dominos are lined up, who’s in the line of fall, what you’re going to face as a consequence — because you looked at this problem in complete isolation.”

The Army Data Operations Center’s April 3 debut is part of an enormous push to further integrate data and machine learning into military operations, according to a Pentagon release.

The armed forces have used data from military, intelligence and business sources for the past several years.

Historically, that has been a somewhat cumbersome process, as different datasets are often separated from one another, necessitating different security clearances, or housed on different systems. The ADOC is meant to mitigate those issues, functioning as a kind of information hub.

“We don’t have a data problem. We have a data management problem, and data becomes the ammunition that we need to provide to our senior leaders in order for them to make quick and informed decisions and gain decision dominance,” Lt. Gen. Jeth Rey, deputy chief of staff for the Army G-6, said in the release.

The office will be housed under Army Cyber Command, the release states. It is scheduled to run as a pilot for six months, with the Pentagon potentially adopting it as a model, DefenseScoop reported.

Although data could have many military uses, the Army is emphasizing its use in battlefield decision-making, such as targeting.

That’s not new, but there should be a broader focus on artificial intelligence integration into other areas, experts told Military Times.

“Most of the AI development had all been toward enemy-centric targeting, looking for and refining that enemy target and helping us basically build out target sets and hit more faster, essentially target more faster in one way or another,” Wes Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force joint terminal attack controller and Pentagon whistleblower, told Military Times.

“But you didn’t really have much of anything related to the civilian environment,” Bryant continued. “That was one thing we were working on at the [Pentagon’s Civilian Protection] Center of Excellence — looking at ideas for AI integration in civilian environment mapping, in updating no strike lists in given areas.”

Jon Lindsay, associate professor at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said that AI is best suited to more mundane organizational tasks, such as “planning, intelligence, logistics administration.”

The Department of Defense has also put out contracting opportunities for commercial data centers on four U.S. military bases.

Two bases, Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and Fort Bliss, Texas, have entered into agreements already, according to a March 2026 release.

Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, are also listed as potential sites for the data centers, which provide the computing power and hardware for AI models and cloud services.

Under the agreements, the data centers would be operated by civilian firms but would provide computing power for the military’s use, according to Task & Purpose.

Those data centers are part of a government-wide effort to pursue “a golden age for American manufacturing and technological dominance,” per a July 2025 executive order.

The effort to achieve artificial general intelligence is a “race that has a very short-term horizon,” Ismael Arciniegas Rueda, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, told Military Times.

Housing the data centers on Army bases could provide an extra level of security for the centers, which are vulnerable to cyber and kinetic attacks.

But they also present potential downsides to the communities where they are built, like tremendous energy consumption.

That, combined with an aging power grid, is likely to drive up energy costs in the surrounding areas.

The agreement came after the FAA conducted testing in New Mexico on the laser system used by the Pentagon and Homeland Security Department and validated that proper safety controls are in place and do not pose undue risks to passenger aircraft.

Two earlier incidents posed serious concerns.

The U.S. military errantly shot down a government drone with the ​laser-based system on Feb. 25, leading the FAA to expand an area in which flights are ​barred around Fort Hancock, Texas.

The incident followed the Feb. 18 decision by the FAA to halt all flights for 10 days at the nearby El Paso airport because of the use of ​the Pentagon laser system by a Homeland Security agency without completion of an FAA safety review. The ​El Paso shutdown order was lifted by the FAA after about eight hours following ‌the ⁠White House’s intervention.

“Following a thorough, data-informed Safety Risk Assessment, we determined that these systems do not present an increased risk to the flying public,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said on Friday.

The Pentagon has said there are more than 1,000 drone incursions along the U.S.-Mexico border each month. ​U.S. security officials have increasingly ​expressed alarm about ⁠the use of drones by Mexican cartels to drop drug packages or surveil trafficking routes.

Several media outlets reported last month drones were seen over Fort McNair in Washington where Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth live.

There is no indication the Pentagon plans to deploy the laser at the base, which is close to Reagan Washington National Airport.

Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth last month called on federal watchdogs to review the ​decision-making process leading to the use of the systems and the ​FAA’s decision ⁠to close airspace.

The VA Detroit Healthcare System, VA Saginaw Healthcare System, VA Ann Arbor and Battle Creek Healthcare Systems will flip the switch from the VA’s legacy digital medical record to the new Federal Electronic Health Record, currently used by six sites across the VA.

The department’s adoption of the Oracle Health’s FEHR was halted in 2023 following a year-long pause over safety and functionality concerns. The program, which was introduced to medical centers in Washington, Oregon and Ohio between 2020 and 2022, experienced numerous setbacks, including incidences of harm to at least 149 patients, according to the VA inspector general.

The safety problems were tied to a system feature that caused some specialty-care referrals, follow-on appointments and lab orders to disappear from view.

VA officials announced in late 2024 that they planned to restart the project in Michigan in 2026, and in March 2025, announced they would accelerate adoption by adding nine more sites this year.

Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence said during an event Friday at the John D. Dingell VA Medical Center in Detroit that the VA expects to roll out the system to 26 additional sites next year.

“But already, folks in the VA system are knowing how well this is going to go. They’re asking to be moved up,” Lawrence said, according to the Detroit News.

Joining Lawrence at the Detroit event marking the “go-live,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said the department’s inspector general would monitor the system to ensure it was functioning.

“Our IG office is a wonderful group that helps us do better in what we do,” Collins said, according to the Detroit News.

The VA selected the system, made by Cerner, in 2017 after it was chosen by the Department of Defense for the military health system patients. The VA system originally was expected to take 10 years to adopt and cost $10 billion. That estimate was soon revised to $16 billion and now stands at $37.2 billion across the program’s lifecycle, according to Lawrence.

During the pause, the VA and Defense Department worked jointly to adopt the system at the James Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago. Between the lessons learned during that rollout and revisions, VA officials have seen vast improvements in performance where it is used, according to Lawrence.

The deputy secretary wrote in a blog post in March that Oracle Health had “improved system performance, reliability and usability,” running it without any outages 87% of the time between June 2023 and December 2025. The system also attained “incident free time” for nearly two years from March 2024 to December 2025, Lawrence wrote.

“The Federal EHR is now reliably available to end users without system-wide outages. We have reduced disruptions, prevented lost productivity and ensured critical workflows continue without delay,” Lawrence said.

Over the last several weeks, the Michigan facilities told patients to expect fewer available appointments and anticipate pharmacy delays in the ramp-up to the switchover.

In a message posted on the VA Detroit Medical Center X social media page, officials told veterans they also may see different prescription numbers on medications until they refill their prescriptions in the new system and could expect to see trainers helping staff learn the system.

“What is not changing is the same high-quality health care you have come to expect at Detroit VA Healthcare System,” they wrote on X.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress have told VA officials they are watching the restart closely and still have concerns about the system’s potential impact on veterans’ medical care and employee burnout.

Rep. Tom Barrett, R-Mich, chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Technology Modernization Subcommittee, said in a hearing in December, that VA physicians and pharmacists continue to have concerns over reliability and safety backstops.

“The only acceptable result is a flawless go live because our veterans cannot accept failure,” Barrett said.

Rep. Nikki Budzinski, D-Ill., said she was concerned that the VA had not completed all recommendations from the Government Accountability Office. The GAO had made several recommendations on improving and implementing the system and the VA had not fulfilled them.

“We need to have the difficult conversations to make sure that both Oracle and VA are accountable to Congress, to VA employees, and most importantly to veterans,” Budzinski said.

Dr. Neil Evans, acting program executive director, said the VA is “ready to roll.”

“VA remains committed to successfully implementing a modern, interoperable Electronic Health Record system, which we refer to as the federal EHR, and we intend to implement that across the entire VA enterprise. As was mentioned, since our last hearing in February, VA has made significant progress towards meeting that goal,” Evans said the hearing.

Just a little over a decade after World War I ended, Erich Maria Remarque’s readers found themselves behind the German front lines, empathizing with German soldiers who had once been mortal enemies to the Americans, British and the French.

Like the outcropping of surrealism after WWI, “All Quiet on the Western Front” opened up a new genre of books for veterans to process what they had gone through.

“The novel attracted global audiences in its own time — and continues to do so nearly a century later — because it lays bare features identifiable in virtually any war: deprivation, terror, trauma, kinship, black humor, alienation from society, and (usually) some questioning of the cause,” Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., writes in the forward of the book’s most recent translation.

However, while it is one of the most famous books to come out of WWI — or any war for that matter — “All Quiet on the Western Front” — until recently — had only been translated twice from German to English. Once in 1929 by an Australian; the second translation, from 1993, is available only in the United Kingdom.

Arthur Wesley Wheen’s 1929 edition, despite its numerous mistranslations and stylistic flaws, is the dominant one today, having been the only one available in the U.S. for almost one hundred years.

Maria Tatar, the John L. Loeb professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures & Folklore and Mythology Emerita, saw a gap in the literature and painstakingly restored the novel with contemporary prose while remaining faithful to Remarque’s voice.

With “All Quiet on the Western Front” now in the public domain, she writes in her foreword, “we have the opportunity to try to convey its power in a new translation, and to introduce it to a new generation.”

“I think my real mission was to bring back the voice of [protagonist] Paul Bäumer. To let him speak,” Tatar told Military Times. “In a way, this is a talking book. I’d like to think of it as a book that speaks to us, that gives somebody who is muted by the war, really, a voice.”

“We get to process the violence of war through Paul,” Tatar continued. “And the interesting thing is that, of course, war is this world-shattering experience. Not just world shattering, but also word shattering. So there’s a strange paradox embedded in the book — we’re getting these sorts of unmediated thoughts of the soldier as he’s experiencing combat. I really did see my mission as trying to capture the register of Bäumer’s voice in English, which is, I have to say, not as easy as I thought it would be.”

Calling the translation a “labor of love” and a “struggle,” Tatar strove to bring back, or rather preserve, the Germanness of “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

“Translation means carrying over, carrying across,” said Tatar. “And I felt as I was translating that I was rowing across the River Styx, bringing back a dead man, giving him a voice and channeling Remarque as well.”

Wheen’s 1929 translation has become the definitive translation of Remarque’s work, but according to Tatar, Wheen himself “admitted that his German was not very good.”

“The manuscript was sent to me,” Wheen later reported, “as being one able to understand it, and on reading I found that I understood it less by reason of my knowledge of German, which I have but imperfectly, than by virtue of having made the experience recorded in it.”

In some instances, Wheen includes the word “mate” in his translation — something no German on the Western Front would conceivably call his fellow soldiers. In another, Remarque writes about a guy “getting lucky,” which translates into English literally as “he had a pig.” According to Tatar, Wheen subsequently took that to mean the soldier had pork for dinner.

While Brian Murdoch’s 1993 version comes closer to a true rendering of “All Quiet,” Tatar notes that there were “places where I felt uncomfortable, where the dialog is so difficult to capture in the right way, to get the right tone. And although Murdoch is successful in many ways that’s where I think he fell short, in not working hard enough to get the dialog close to something like a Hemingway style.”

Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” serves as a semiautobiographical account of the author’s war. Conscripted in the German Army in 1917 at the age of 18, Remarque was hit by shrapnel in the leg, arm and neck and sent to a hospital to convalesce before returning once again to the front. Remarque’s unvarnished account of the war is evident in “All Quiet.”

“It is written from the heart, not from the head,” Tatar noted.

“Tim O’Brien describes in ‘The Things They Carried’ the majesty of combat,” said Tatar. “I think he calls it the ‘aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference.’ But what I find in Remarque’s work is more of a grotesque aesthetic. It’s not the majesty of combat. You get this fragmentation, destructive violence, disintegration, dissolution. And yet, in the face of all of that, there’s a subtext that endorses affective engagement, emotional engagement, sympathetic identification, almost as if to compensate for the unspeakable, physical injuries of war. So in the midst of all of this violence, we’re seeing what Paul sees. We’re feeling what he feels. You feel his pain in an extraordinary way.

“As I was translating the novel, I was so often on the edge of tears,” Tatar continued. “And part of it is that Remarque is so skillful as a narrator, in drawing you into combat. First you get all these acoustical effects — the roar of cannon, the explosions. And then he gives you all these sensory, visual details. You’re really drawn into this explosive, terrifying scene of time.”

The novel has endured for almost a century because while the tools for killing have evolved, much of warfare remains the same. There are and will always be soldiers seeking solace in the camaraderie of their peers and “wondering what the hell it achieves to kill and be killed for causes defined by others,” Powers writes.

It also details the painful, deep disconnect of soldiers returning home from war.

“They’re people I don’t understand,” Paul reflects. “And I both envy and loathe them.”

Human nature almost ensures that there will be more generations who empathize with Paul, but Tatar hopes that her translation has “found the words for a story that we must keep reading to keep from repeating it.”

The submarine, which had been sidelined since 2015, began a $1.2 billion overhaul at Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding, Virginia, in 2024.

“After a rigorous, data-driven analysis, we’ve made the tough but necessary decision to inactivate the USS Boise,” said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle. “This strategic move allows us to reallocate America’s highly-skilled workforce to our highest priorities: delivering new Virginia and Columbia-class submarines and improving the readiness of the current fleet.”

The U.S. Navy is currently working to deliver the Columbia-class submarine by 2028, according to a 2025 report from Congress.

US Navy commissions fast-attack submarine USS Massachusetts

The Navy recently commissioned its newest Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine, the USS Massachusetts, on March 28, making it the 12th Virginia-class submarine in service.

Navy Secretary John Phelan said in an interview with Fox News Friday that the submarine had already cost the service $800 million and would require another $1.9 billion to finish repairs.

It was time for the Navy to cut its losses, Phelan told the outlet.

President Donald Trump recently released his fiscal 2027 defense budget, asking Congress for $65 billion for shipbuilding that would include the production of two new Virginia-class submarines and one new Columbia-class submarine.

The Trump administration is requesting 34 ships, including the manufacturing of 18 battle force ships and 16 non-battle force ships, which doubles the amount requested in fiscal 2026.

Attempting to achieve energy levels considered necessary to unleash the beast, John Witt, 29, instead discovered an actual rotting beast after finishing the drink, according to local CBS affiliate WTKR News.

Witt, who said he purchased a pack of the drinks from a 7-Eleven in Norfolk, Virginia, promptly vomited several times, “naturally,” he told WTKR, which shared video of the canned corpse.

“It’s a full-size rat,” he said, “and it’s a big rat.”

The sailor first brought the issue to the attention of his chain of command, one member of which responded, correctly, “Go the ER, bro.”

Witt then checked into Portsmouth Naval Hospital, where he said medical personnel informed him that it was more than likely, “with the chemicals that are in Monster, that it should be OK.”

Unleash the embalming fluid.

“My antibodies should be able to fight it off,” Witt said, adding that medical staff wanted to closely monitor the situation for the next 48 hours.

Witt, a longtime beast unleasher, told WTKR that he has no plans to ever consume another Monster — or even closed-can beverages, for that matter.

“I’m never going to be able to drink anything that I can’t see again,” the new open-container advocate told the outlet.

Witt intends to file a report with the Food and Drug Administration, according to WTKR.

Select reports, meanwhile, suggest Master Splinter, having gotten on in years, may have confused the Monster can for mutagen, the chemical colloquially known as “Ooze.”

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could not be reached for comment.

The first face that the four-person crew will see when they return to Earth will be Senior Chief Hospital Corpsman Laddy Aldridge, who will be the first of his team to open the Artemis II capsule, enter it and begin medical assessments, according to a Thursday release.

Aldridge, who comes from three generations of military service and is assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Expeditionary Support Unit 1, will be among a four-person Navy dive medical team that will greet the astronauts and their Orion capsule to make initial medical assessments and safely escort them out of the capsule, per the release.

“This effort is the culmination of both our training to bring world class care to the Artemis II crew and countless dedicated years of Navy diving and Navy medicine,” Aldridge said in the statement.

The dive team that will assess the NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover consists of Aldridge, Lt. Cmdr. Jesse Wang, Chief Hospital Corpsman Vlad Link and Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Steve Kapala.

Navy dive medical personnel often work in expeditionary warfare communities, according to the release, and they are certified divers that undergo specialized training to make them experts in undersea medical issues, such as decompression illnesses.

Once Orion splashes down after reentering Earth’s atmosphere, the medical team will enter the capsule and perform initial exams on the Artemis II crew, give triage care if necessary and assist the astronauts in leaving the capsule onto the inflatable raft set up by Navy divers, the statement says.

After they are out of the capsule, first-contact medical providers will arrange the team to be airlifted by Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 23 back to the amphibious transport dock ship USS John P. Murtha for further evaluations.

The Navy team will be led by Wang, a board-certified emergency medicine doctor assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 1, who joined the Navy in 2021 and became an undersea medical officer in 2024, according to the release.

“As a proud member of the undersea medical community, I am particularly humbled to play a part in this mission,” Wang said in the release. “It is the honor of a lifetime to stand here today, ready to provide the absolute best care to the Artemis II crew.”

Alongside Wang, Aldridge, Link and Kapala are dive independent duty corpsmen who are trained in dive medicine, per the release.

Link is part of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 1 and has 18 years of dive medicine experience but believes this mission is “already a highlight of his career,” the statement reads.

“I have been exposed to the Navy since I was a young teenager, and I’m proud to represent both my family and hometown,” Link said in the release. “Contributing our efforts to NASA and the Artemis II mission is something we take great pride in as part of that legacy.”

Kapala, assigned to EODMU-11, has worked in dive medicine since 2018 and said in the release that the historic mission is a “unified effort.”

“I grew up reading sci-fi novels and watching space movies, never thinking that I would play a part in a recovery mission like this,” Kapala said in the statement.

“It is surreal to play a part in safely recovering the astronauts from the capsule to get them home safe to their families, an effort that really makes you realize this team is bigger than just the four of us,” Kapala continued.

In the early aughts of the 1990s, the Pentagon was working on developing a whole host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would render an enemy force incapable of being anything other than ... amorous or annoyed.

Within a three-page declassified document came a blink-and-you-miss-it line positing using “Chemicals that effect human behavior so that morale and discipline in enemy units is adversely affected.”

“One distasteful but completely non-lethal example,” it continued, “would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

In a word, a chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to one another — striking a blow to morale.

The randy chemical, later dubbed “gay bomb,” was just one of the many that the Wright Laboratory explored in its proposal dubbed “Project Sunshine.”

Among others, Project Sunshine contained a litany of ideas ranging from the absurd to impractical, including: making a “chemical that made personnel very sensitive to sunlight”; making a weapon that would attract swarms of enraged wasps or rats to an enemy position; and the development of a chemical that caused “severe and lasting halitosis.”

The lab requested $7.5 millions dollars over a five-year period to make their hair-brained ideas reality. The funding was not forthcoming. It did, however, eventually make its way to the mind of Tina Fey and 30 Rock.

As the saying goes, there are no bad ideas — only great ideas that go horribly wrong — but perhaps the Wright Laboratory is an exception that that rule.

No decision has been made, and the White House has not directed the Pentagon to draw up concrete plans for a troop reduction on the continent, said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

But the discussions alone underscore how sharply relations between Washington and its European NATO allies have deteriorated in recent months. They also suggest that a visit to the White House on Wednesday by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte failed to significantly improve transatlantic relations, which are arguably at their lowest point since NATO’s 1949 founding.

The White House has publicly said that Trump has considered withdrawing from the alliance altogether. Removing troops from Europe would allow Trump to dramatically lessen Washington’s security commitments on the continent, without formally withdrawing, a move that would test constitutional law.

The U.S. currently has more than 80,000 troops in Europe and has played a central role in Europe’s security architecture since World War Two. More than 30,000 of those troops are located in Germany, with sizeable numbers also stationed in Italy, the United Kingdom and Spain.

The official did not say which countries could be affected or how many troops might ultimately be withdrawn if Trump decides to move forward with the idea.

Asked for comment, a NATO spokesperson referred Reuters to Rutte’s interview with CNN on Wednesday.

In that interview, Rutte said that he understood Trump’s frustrations with the alliance, but that the “large majority of European nations” had been helpful to Washington’s war effort in Iran.

Following Rutte’s meeting with Trump, the secretary general told European governments that Trump wants concrete commitments to help secure the Strait of Hormuz within days, Reuters reported earlier on Thursday.

Alliance in crisis

While Trump has long had a tumultuous relationship with NATO — for years accusing European capitals of skimping on defense spending — the last three months have been particularly rocky.

In January, Trump provoked a transatlantic crisis when he renewed longstanding threats to annex Greenland, an overseas territory of Denmark. Since the war with Iran broke out on Feb. 28, he has expressed deep frustration that NATO allies have not offered to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital route for global energy supplies that has remained largely closed despite a fragile ceasefire announced this week.

NATO diplomats have previously said the U.S. has not made clear if it expects any mission in the Strait of Hormuz to start during or after the conflict, and they have also said the U.S. has not specified what particular capabilities it expects of each NATO country.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that senior administration officials were discussing moving troops stationed in Europe out of countries whose leaders had been critical of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and into European countries whose leaders had been more supportive.

The White House official told Reuters that Trump was specifically discussing bringing troops back to the U.S., rather than moving them to different foreign countries.

The official said Trump was particularly irked about what he perceives as Europe’s attempts to brush off his attempts to acquire Greenland.

After meeting with Rutte in Switzerland in January, Trump had suggested a deal was in sight to end the dispute over the Danish territory. No such agreement has come to fruition.

“He asked NATO specifically to come up with a plan when we were in Davos, and they’re sort of not taking it seriously,” the official said.

The fiscal year 2026 Capt. Edward F. Ney Memorial Award was given to eight afloat and three ashore mess hall teams on Monday, according to an ALNAV administrative message.

“These annual awards encourage excellence in Navy food service programs with the objective of improving the quality of life for our Navy personnel,” said an administrative message issued by Navy Secretary John Phelan.

The service has made its troops’ nutrition a main priority over the last decade, specifically with the introduction of the military-wide Go for Green program in 2016.

The program assists service members searching for healthier food options, providing color coding to help sailors assess which meals provide the most nourishment.

More troops may soon get access to expanded food options

As of 2024, the Navy is working hard to address the specific dietary needs of sailors and “warfighters,” which include the absence of any fried foods and plenty of vegetable options, according to Chief Warrant Officer Jeffrey Walker, the regional food service officer for Navy Region Mid-Atlantic.

Beginning in Nov. 2025, the Navy began to test new technology to help streamline culinary practices aboard ships to ensure sailors had access to plenty of appetizing food: flavor-injection systems for ice cream flavors and an automated invention called the Breadbot that churns out 10 loaves an hour.

The winners of the fiscal 2026 Capt. Edward F. Ney Memorial Award include:

• USS Iowa for the East Coast submarine category
• USS Mississippi for the West Coast submarine category
• USS Nitze for the small East Coast afloat category
• USS Decatur for the small West Coast afloat category
• USS Fort Lauderdale for the medium East Coast afloat category
• USS San Diego for the medium West Coast afloat category
• USS Makin Island for the large afloat category
• USS George H.W. Bush for the aircraft carrier category
• Naval Station Newport, Rhode Island, for the East Coast general mess category
• Naval Air Station North Island, San Diego, California, for the West Coast general mess category
• Commander, Fleet Activities, Yokosuka, Japan for the outside the contiguous United States general mess category

Rutte travelled to Washington to mollify the president, who remains incensed at the alliance for refusing to intervene in the de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical artery that typically carries a quarter of the world’s oil and gas. The strait’s near-closure has prevented roughly ten million barrels of crude oil daily from reaching global markets.

But Trump, following the face-to-face talks, was far from conciliatory. He wrote on social media Wednesday that “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!”

In a subsequent post Thursday, he dismissed the response from the bloc as “very disappointing.”

Rutte acknowledged the discord with Trump, yet characterized Europe’s initial reticence to get involved in the war in Iran as a consequence of the president’s decision not to consult allies before the launch of Operation Epic Fury. He said the other member nations were taken by surprise by the joint U.S.-Israeli assault against Iran, and slower to respond as a result.

“To maintain the element of surprise for the initial strikes, President Trump opted not to inform allies ahead of time. And I understand that,” Rutte said during his remarks at the Reagan Institute’s Center for Peace Through Strength in Washington on Thursday.

“But what I see when I look across Europe today, is allies providing a massive amount of support —basing, logistics, and other measures — to ensure the powerful U.S. military succeeds in denying Iran a nuclear weapon and degrading its capacity to export chaos," Rutte said.

The NATO secretary general also underscored international efforts, spearheaded by Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, to find a workable plan for a full reopening of the strait as hostilities wind down.

“The United Kingdom is leading a coalition of countries that are aligning the military, the political, and the economic tools that will be required to ensure free passage through the Strait of Hormuz. This is evidence of a mindset shift,” he said.

The Trump administration has asserted it will reassess its relationship with NATO once the war with Iran concludes, a review that officials say could include relocating American forces away from allies deemed unhelpful. The president has also weighed the possibility of withdrawing the United States from the alliance altogether.

At a White House press conference earlier this week, Trump traced the start of the icy relations back to Greenland.

The president, around the start of the year, began talking with increasing seriousness about annexing Greenland, the huge, semiautonomous territory under Danish sovereignty. At the apex of the crisis, Trump refused to rule out using military force. He ultimately backed down but the tremors from the episode are still being felt on both sides of the Atlantic.

“It all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland,” Trump told reporters on Monday, adding, “We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said, ‘bye, bye.’”

On a serene Saturday afternoon, thousands of miles from conflict, soldiers with the California Air National Guard are scattered among stations, hunched over a buddy. Some apply tourniquets. Others practice life-saving skills, checking for breathing, tilting chins to clear airways, searching for blood loss and hidden wounds.

This is how they learn to keep a soldier alive.

“They’re getting ready to deploy,” said Dr. Dean Winslow, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and an instructor at the Tactical Combat Casualty Care classes.

“This is very real.”

Drone warfare requires new age of battlefield medicine

To help them prepare for what they may encounter in the war with Iran, an update was added to the standard curriculum. Its title: Modern Warfare Concepts, POV Unmanned Aircraft System Explosives. Its focus: the risk of air attack and the importance of high-quality burn care.

As the U.S. confronts a changed character of combat, the trauma training for the 50 airmen at Moffett Federal Airfield, about 35 miles south of San Francisco, is urgent and essential. But is it enough?

Several new trends are driving concerns that military medical care needs to adapt to drone warfare, a defining feature of 21st-century conflicts.

“With injuries, it’s a new world now,” Winslow told The War Horse.

Wars have been inflicting explosive wounds ever since China’s early Ming Dynasty used “fire-weapons,” including a cast-iron grade bomb with gunpowder, in the 14th century. Sky-borne casualties are nothing new — Nazi Germany inflicted V-1 flying bombs on London residents during World War II. Improvised explosive devices were responsible for a surge of explosive injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, causing 74.4% of casualties; only 19.9% of casualties were caused by gunshot wounds.

But an analysis of injuries in Ukraine shows that drone-delivered explosives are more destructive and lead to a wider range and higher severity of traumatic injury, according to research by a team led by the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. The drones Russia has been launching on Ukraine are similar to the weapons used by Iran.

Ukrainian soldiers are suffering from a far higher range and severity of devastating wounds than U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, researchers found. The high-energy explosives, deployed in swarms, have the potential to create large clusters of casualties in relatively short periods of time.

The signature wound of the Russian drones is limb amputation, followed by multiple-limb injuries and severe burns. Detonating at close range, a drone can inflict a complicated constellation of upper-body, neck and head injuries, according to a report by the aid group MedGlobal.

“Drone warfare has drastically changed the complexity of the traumatized patient that we see,” said Dr. Michael Samotowka, a volunteer trauma surgeon with MedGlobal who frequently travels to Ukraine to treat soldiers injured by Russian drones.

“It has drastically changed the volume of injuries that require surgical intervention,” he told The War Horse. “It’s changed our whole mentality.”

Mounting medical challenges

Drones also mean that we can no longer rely on an old axiom of combat: Distance from the front is protective, and the place for life-saving care. Small and cheap, drones can fly for miles, linger in the air for hours and descend in swarms, evading air defenses.

If the skies aren’t safe to evacuate injured soldiers, prolonged casualty care will become the collective effort by close combat forces at the brigade-and-below levels, according to research led by Army trauma surgeon Col. Jennifer Gurney, chief of the Joint Trauma System at the Department of Defense’s Center of Excellence for Trauma.

The new threat also comes at a precarious time: The U.S. Department of Defense has downsized its hospitals, so military physicians aren’t getting enough experience with trauma patients to be ready for major casualties.

“Because Army and Navy medical personnel are not consistently assigned where they can sustain their wartime readiness skills, they may not provide high-quality, point-of-injury care to service members during deployments,” concluded a 2025 Department of Defense Inspector General report.

Iran most commonly uses a drone called the Shahed 136, according to the munitions tracking project Open Source Munitions Portal. Preprogrammed to fly up to 1,200 miles and carry warheads guided by a satellite navigation system, it can target embassies, hotels and other places where American troops are dispersed.

Shortly after the U.S. and Israel launched their surprise air assault to start the war, an Iranian drone strike on March 1 triggered an explosion in Kuwait at a U.S supply and logistics unit that killed six U.S. service members, injured about 30 others and set off a fire and frantic search for survivors in the rubble.

The unit had relocated to the civilian Port of Shuaiba from U.S. Army base Camp Arifjan in an effort to evade incoming strikes from Tehran. “They were dispersing because they were in fear that the base they were on was going to get attacked, and they felt it was safer in smaller groups in separated places,” Joey Amor — the husband of Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, who died in the attack — told The Associated Press.

It wasn’t the only drone attack to injure U.S. forces. About 29 drones and six ballistic missiles were blamed for a March 27 assault at Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan air base that injured at least 15 U.S. troops, including five seriously, according to The Associated Press.

That was one of the most significant breaches of U.S. air defenses since the conflict started. With President Trump threatening a major escalation of attacks, Iran and the U.S. on Tuesday agreed to a two-week ceasefire. As of March 31, at least 348 U.S. military personnel had been wounded, reported U.S. Central Command’s spokesperson Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, but reports are surfacing about whether this is an undercount.

Iraq and Afghanistan vs. Ukraine

Military combat care evolved to meet the needs of the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters. But this support — an agile and efficient network that quickly stabilized, treated and evacuated wounded service members — was based on relatively light patient loads in places where U.S. forces could safely evacuate injured service members to higher echelons of care.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, wounded soldiers and Marines could be evacuated from the field to an operating room within an hour, said Dan Elinoff, a combat medic in Iraq and Afghanistan and a former senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation. That helped reduce the case fatality rate from 36% in Vietnam to 10% in Iraq and Afghanistan — a saving of an estimated 1,000 lives.

But when drones are overhead, evacuation can be delayed. Surgical treatment within “the golden hour” — the critical 60-minute window when most lives are saved or lost — will become a goal, not an expectation.

“The main issue that I can see for drone warfare, compared to IEDs, is a real compromise of ‘the golden hour,’” Elinoff told The War Horse. In previous wars, “your main threat was on the front line. The rear area is a lot more secure. You can get people back there, and you can probably keep them a lot safer.

“With the abundance of drones, it’s much easier to hit those rear areas,” said Elinoff. “Your evacuation routes are a lot more compromised.”

In Ukraine, drone warfare has demanded a dramatic shift toward a more decentralized model of care, bringing more advanced care closer to hard-to-reach people on the front lines.

This decentralized model echoes patterns of treatment created in Syria and Yemen, where air bombardment and targeting of health sites forced medical care to move underground, onto mobile platforms or across dispersed community sites, according to the MedGlobal report.

Anticipating that it may take two to three days to evacuate an injured soldier in future conflicts, Fort Benning launched in 2022 a pilot Delayed Evacuation Casualty Management Course to train medics how to provide advanced care on the front lines.

The type of injuries may shift. In Iraq and Afghanistan between 50% and 60% of deaths and injuries were caused by roadside improvised explosive devices, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Manpower Data Center. Because these devices often exploded under vehicles, the lower torso and abdomen were common sites of wounds, particularly by blasts that forced damage upward.

Drones, by contrast, cause significant damage both on the ground and overhead. Data from Ukraine shows that they frequently attack from above, targeting the top of buildings, tanks and trucks. Or they explode in the air, showering metal fragments. Some precision-guided drones enter buildings. As a result, the most frequent injuries in Ukrainian soldiers occur in the head and neck, followed by lower extremities, upper extremities and chest and upper back.

Drone injuries also are typically more complex. One study found that nearly half of Ukrainian casualties involved “multisite trauma,” involving more than two regions of the body from blasts, high-temperature burns from thermobaric and incendiary munitions and traumatic brain injuries. About one in five had injuries in three or more body regions.

A drone “either showers down at a high energy, in small fragments, head down to toes, or it drops in front of the soldier and it blows up,” said Samotowka.

“If there’s 100 drones flying around you, looking for you, you can’t be evacuated.”

Too few trauma experts, too little practice

In future U.S. conflicts, even if evacuation is successful, there is an insufficient supply of highly skilled military surgeons and other experts to meet the demand.

That’s because after every war, the military loses resources and expertise, said Rear Adm. Dr. David Lane, a former commanding officer of Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune and former director of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

“Budget wonks in both Republican and Democratic administrations always look for a so-called peace dividend whenever we scale back from major combat operations,” he told The War Horse.

“During peacetime, there is a ying and a yang between the efficiency needed to run military hospitals and clinics on par with the best of the best civilian health care organizations,” he said. “Staying ready for combat trauma and diseases and nonbattle injuries requires time away [from military treatment facilities], disrupts continuity, and adds to the cost of care.”

In recent years, the Army Medical Corps’ rate of recruitment has not been able to keep up with the pace of separations, according to a RAND Corporation report. And retention is down. So positions at military treatment facilities and other units go empty.

At military hospitals, there is less exposure to complex trauma, said Elinoff. On bases, “people are pretty young and healthy. … It’s really hard to keep those skill sets up when you’re not seeing a lot.”

Opportunities for hands-on work are limited. The Army and Navy do not effectively assign medical personnel to locations where they could maintain their required wartime medical readiness skills, the Department of Defense Inspector General found.

It’s too hard and time-consuming to get military health care providers credentialed and integrated into community settings, Elinoff said. While several of the nation’s top trauma hospitals — including the University of Maryland and the University of Cincinnati — have partnered with the military to share their trauma cases, the rotations at trauma centers tend to be too brief.

Even at a busy civilian hospital, there are relatively few trauma patients. That’s because seat belts, air bags, smoke alarms and flame-retardant children’s sleepwear have reduced the number of severe injuries that require complex life-saving surgery. Gunshot injuries are increasing, but they typically involve one part of the body, not general trauma, said doctors.

And trauma patients are increasingly unlikely to be rushed to the operating table. Due to high-tech innovations in interventional radiology, for example, damaged blood vessels can be sealed to stop internal bleeding.

Many young surgeons may graduate after operating on only one or two liver injuries, said Samotowka.

Practice is essential in medicine, said Stefani Diedrich, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who served as an anesthesiologist for 24 years with deployments to Afghanistan and Niger.

“Any procedural skill needs to be practiced regularly or else it is lost,” she said. “Doing knee arthroscopy does not prepare you for a traumatic amputation. Doing a robotic hernia repair does not prepare you for an exploratory laparotomy for trauma.”

“You can’t ‘refresh’ trauma surgery skills. … You need to do it on a regular basis to not suck,” she said.

Stanford’s Winslow agreed. As the White House considers its next steps in the ongoing tensions with Iran, with thousands of additional U.S. troops heading to the Middle East theater, the challenge is no longer theoretical. There are now 50,000 American troops in the Middle East.

If there is a huge operation, Winslow said, “there’s no way that the active duty surgeons, or at least the majority of them, will have the recency of experience with handling major trauma.”

This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

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

For fiscal year 2026’s aviation bonus program, the force is offering the monetary incentive to select aviators in exchange for an active-duty service commitment, according to a Wednesday Air Force release.

The statement lists specific eligible pilots: remotely piloted aircraft pilots, air battle managers and combat systems officers among those the service wishes to “decisively shape and retain” with the bonus opportunity.

“The aviation bonus is an incentive that helps us retain expertise and ensures we have the right mix of experienced aviators to meet warfighting demands today and into the future,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach said in the release.

The fiscal 2026 aviation bonus program allows for the increase in monetary compensation to align with shorter contract lengths, especially within the fighter, bomber and U-2 groups, according to the statement.

The bonus rates depend on the aviator’s career field and experience level, but they can receive up to $50,000 a year with a minimum contract of three years and maximum of 12 years, the release reads, making a total of up to $600,000 under the maximum.

To be eligible for this bonus program, airmen need to be ranked as lieutenant colonels and below, be qualified for operational flying duty and be entitled to monthly aviation incentive pay, per the release.

The program is designated for active-duty airmen and Air Reserve Component Airmen that are serving in the Voluntary Limited Period of Active Duty Program.

“Airmen applying for these bonus programs should expect to see payments within three weeks after final approval of their application and processing by the Defense Finance Accounting Service,” according to the statement.

Eligible airmen were able to begin applying for the bonus on April 1 and have until May 31 to submit their application.

The Defense Department announced a free Wi-fi initiative in September 2024 as part of a broader objective to improve troops’ quality of life.

“This initiative is a direct reflection of our unwavering commitment to the well-being of our sailors,” said Vice Adm. Scott Gray, commander of Navy Installations Command. “Providing free, high-speed Wi-Fi is a fundamental step in improving their quality of life, ensuring they have the connectivity they need for personal and professional growth.”

Troops in remote barracks lack free Wi-Fi. That’s about to change.

The need for free Wi-Fi was deemed “mission essential” in 2024 by Brendan Owens, who was then serving as assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment.

The free Wi-Fi initiative has reached 86% completion, with the service available in 827 of 952 total buildings since officially launching in November 2025, a Navy release said.

Naval Support Activity Naples and Naval Air Station Sigonella in Italy, along with Naval Support Activity Souda Bay in Greece, saw the most recent updates go live on April 1.

About 71% of individuals living in available buildings signed up for the free Wi-Fi service as of February, the service said, and 84% of those that live in the eligible buildings have expressed satisfaction with the program.

Those that sign up for the service also have the option of opting in for subsidized speed upgrades.

The Army on April 7 preferred more charges against Maj. Blaine McGraw, an obstetrician-gynocologist assigned to the Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, according to a Wednesday statement from the Army Office of Special Trial Counsel. He is now facing six charges and 146 specifications related to sexual misconduct that the Army alleges occurred between October 2023 and December 2025.

McGraw remains innocent until proven guilty, the office said.

The charges include dozens of specifications of sexual assault and abuse, as well as allegations of indecent recording, conduct unbecoming of an officer and disobeying a superior officer. All but one of the alleged victims were patients treated during medical examinations at the Fort Hood facility. The other victim was allegedly recorded without consent at an off-post residence.

The new charges build upon an earlier case filed in December 2025. McGraw waived a preliminary hearing on the original charges, but now that more charges have been added, a new hearing will be required before the case can proceed to a general court-martial.

“As this case remains an open investigation, OSTC prosecutors will continue to coordinate with the Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division as the case progresses to determine if additional charges are warranted,” Michelle McCaskill, the communications director for the Office of Special Trial Counsel, said in a statement.

The investigation began in October 2025 after a patient reported being secretly recorded during an exam. MacGraw was previously stationed at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii before being assigned to Fort Hood. Tripler said in November 2025 that it was planning to notify the doctor’s former patients about the investigation.

McGraw is also accused of sexual misconduct, including the secret filming of a breast and pelvic exam in a lawsuit filed last November in Bell County, Texas.

Some aviators are hopeful about the change.

Bell and M1 Support Services this week announced advancement in the Army’s Flight School Next program, an initiative that would shift key parts of rotary-wing pilot training — including aircraft maintenance and both academic and flight instruction — to a contractor-owned, contractor-operated schoolhouse. The change would also include a new training aircraft.

Under the plan, contractors would provide a full training curriculum to produce 900 to 1,500 pilots annually, replacing the Army’s current initial entry rotary-wing training program. The change would mark the first time the Army has relied on a commercial system to train new aviators.

Congress has placed restrictions on the effort, requiring the Army to justify the new training model and demonstrate its effectiveness before funds can be used to move forward, according to provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2026.

The Army has not publicly said how many companies remain in the competition.

The contractors have centered their plans on different training aircraft; Bell has proposed training on its Bell 505 helicopter, while the M1 bid would use Robinson Helicopters’ R66.

The Army currently trains rotary-wing pilots on the UH-72A Lakota helicopter, which some aviators say has advanced systems that are too forgiving and allow trainees to rely on technology while learning.

Kurt Rosell is a former signal soldier who left the service in 2016. He now works as a civilian helicopter flight instructor and has trained many military pilots as they transition to the civilian sector.

Rosell said he sees promise in possibility of a new training aircraft.

“For somebody that’s learning, you’ve got to have the foundation set before you add highly complex systems. With the R66 and the Bell — they are stripped trainers — you will get skills and a fuller understanding of the real discipline of flying before you rely on systems,” he said.

The Army’s overhaul comes as the military faces a broader rise in aviation accidents. Pentagon data released in 2025 showed a roughly 55% increase in severe accidents during the 2024 budget year compared to four years earlier.

Army aviation has faced safety challenges in recent years. In the first half of fiscal year 2023, over a dozen Army aviators died in helicopter crashes, prompting an aviation-wide stand down in April of that year. During the stand-down, the service discovered that its pilots were significantly less experienced than pilots were during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The issue has drawn sharper attention since a January 2025 midair collision between an Army Black Hawk and a passenger jet near Washington, D.C., killed 67 people. A federal investigation found that the crash was the result of “systemic failures” across multiple agencies, including the Army and Federal Aviation Administration.

Carrier landings no longer required for Navy pilots’ Wings of Gold

Some former Army aviators are optimistic about the new proposal and say contractors are already widely used within the schoolhouse.

Jason Welch, a former Army officer and Chinook pilot who finished flight school in 2017, said the new model might place more focus on civilian flight requirements.

“A civilian owned and operated company is going to conduct their initial training like civilians would receive,” Welch said, adding, “this would likely contain more attention to federal flight regulations and other details that are often overlooked or skimmed over since the Army tends to focus on training its pilots to be Army pilots.”

Yamil Sanchez Padilla was serving as captain of the USNS Carson City in December 2021, when engineer Elsie Dominguez accused him of forcing his way into her cabin while she was intoxicated and raping her. Padilla voluntarily surrendered his merchant mariner credential to the Coast Guard on March 14, according to a document posted by the nonprofit organization Maritime Legal Aid and Advocacy.

He relinquished the credential due to “being advised that I am currently under investigation for sexual assault,” the document states.

A Coast Guard case concerning the investigation was withdrawn and closed March 19, according to a service administrative law judge docket also first reported on by Maritime Legal Aid.

A lawyer for Dominguez says he will continue to pursue criminal accountability for Sanchez Padilla, with hopes for success bolstered by investigative findings that include the former skipper’s voluntary admission that he did have intercourse with Dominguez on the night in question.

Dominguez first filed a complaint against Military Sealift Command in November 2023, alleging the command had failed to adequately protect her and that the victims’ advocates she’d sought out had warned her that she risked losing her job if she reported the alleged rape. Dominguez made the unusual choice of identifying herself, but not Padilla, in her complaint.

She told Military Times in an exclusive 2024 interview that the issue was bigger than one assailant, and that she wanted to empower others by going public with her story.

“I want people to feel comfortable coming up to me and talking about this, and the more that we normalize speaking about things like this and not keeping it taboo, I think it will really help the industry as a whole in eliminating cases like this,” she said at the time.

Since she made her complaint, Dominguez has fought a complex administrative battle with multiple setbacks, taking on arcane policy that resulted in her complaint being ruled a worker’s compensation matter for the U.S. Department of Labor to adjudicate.

Her attorneys have called the notion that alleged rape by a superior is a shipboard job hazard “astonishing” and “offensive.”

Meanwhile, Padilla remained employed by Military Sealift Command as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigated Dominguez’s complaint. He was removed from federal service on March 8, 2025, according to Jillian Morris, an MSC spokeswoman.

“Upon learning of the alleged incident, MSC removed Mr. Sanchez Padilla from the vessel and offered victim advocate services to the female crew member,” Morris said in a statement to Military Times. “An NCIS investigation was promptly initiated into the allegations. MSC obtained the final NCIS investigation report in October 2024. Mr. Sanchez Padilla was notified of his proposed removal from Federal service and was provided an opportunity to respond.”

An attorney for Sanchez Padilla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reached for comment, Dominguez told Military Times in an email that she felt “relief, exhaustion and grief over what [Sanchez Padilla] took from me.”

“A firing doesn’t give back what I lost. I had a career I was proud of and a goal I was working toward. He took that from me, and the joy is gone, too,” she said. “I still show up because I won’t let him take away my career as well, but it’s not the same work it was.”

She said she was glad Sanchez Padilla’s name was now public, but said it had taken “far too long” to come to light.

“His name staying private while mine was out there was its own kind of injustice. Women who might have sailed under him deserved to know,” she said. “The Navy protected him in ways it never protected me.”

Dominguez currently serves as a first assistant engineer within MSC and continues to pursue a goal of becoming a chief engineer.

Ryan Melogy, an attorney who has represented other alleged sexual assault survivors in the merchant mariner community and is among those representing Dominguez, said seeing Sanchez Padilla forced out of the community – while Dominguez continued to advance in her career – was " a real achievement."

“This is a really difficult thing to do, to hold a captain accountable,” he said. “I don’t think it’s ever happened. … I’ve never seen one publicly taken down before in this way.”

In a February 2025 letter proposing to remove Sanchez Padilla from his job, MSC Executive Director Steven Cade cited NCIS findings and called the skipper’s alleged behavior “egregious” and “inappropriate,” adding that it “causes me to question your judgment and ability to work with your subordinates and fellow crew members.”

Cade further noted that Sanchez Padilla had reportedly admitted to the December 2021 sexual encounter while he and Dominguez had been under the influence of alcohol, although he maintained it was consensual.

In light of those admissions, Melogy said he planned to pursue further conversations with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding criminal accountability, despite the closure of the Coast Guard’s administrative case.

“We’re not going to let it just go away. And [Dominguez] certainly doesn’t want it to go away,” he said. “I hope that [this case] … serves as a warning to people who are thinking about doing this kind of thing; that people know that there is accountability.”

In the weeks since the Department of Defense’s troubled relationship with Anthropic burst into public view and led to the company being kicked out of the U.S. military, new defense-focused AI companies like Smack Technologies and EdgeRunner AI say they have experienced a shift in interest that would have been unimaginable just months ago. They have received a surge of overtures about possible contracts and meeting requests and been approached by investors who previously showed no interest.

The Pentagon’s growing animosity toward its top AI provider, Anthropic, has opened up opportunities for smaller rivals, who have long sought a foot in the door to the most lucrative government contractor in the world. A defense contract can lead to more business with other branches of the U.S. government, and is a useful signal of trust and safety for potential commercial clients.

“We’ve seen a massive increase in demand from customers and the government to get AI solutions fielded since Anthropic was declared a supply-chain risk,” said Tyler Sweatt, CEO of Second Front, a company that helps technology firms meet the requirements needed to operate on secure Pentagon networks. “Our customers are turning to us as the Pentagon turns to them to deploy quickly in the wake of the Anthropic blowup.”

Since the Pentagon deemed Anthropic’s products a “supply-chain risk” in March and the two sides became embroiled in a lawsuit, the military has expressed increasing interest in AI startups like Smack Technologies, saying, “We want more, we want demos, let’s talk about how we can move faster,” said Andrew Markoff, co-founder and chief executive of the 19-person startup based in El Segundo, California. In late March, a judge temporarily blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic.

Tyler Saltsman, co-founder and chief executive of EdgeRunner AI, described a similar experience. His company had been waiting more than a year for a Space Force contract to clear the Pentagon’s procurement machinery. It was signed within weeks of the Anthropic situation breaking into the open. “I can’t prove that the Anthropic drama sped this up,” Saltsman said, “but I have a sneaky suspicion it did.”

“The Pentagon will continue to rapidly deploy frontier AI capabilities to the warfighter through strong industry partnerships across all classification levels,” a Pentagon official said.

One Pentagon technologist has previously told Reuters that the falling-out with Anthropic, and the realization that the Defense Department was heavily dependent on one AI provider, forced the department to diversify AI providers.

Smack’s Marine Corps contract speeds up

For Smack, the clearest example of the post-Anthropic acceleration involves the Marine Corps. The company won a contract with the Marine Corps in March 2025 and delivered a successful prototype by October — software that compresses what is normally a months-long operational planning process into roughly 15 minutes.

Despite the successful prototype, momentum stalled. Full production had been budgeted for fiscal year 2027 — meaning October 2027 at the earliest. Through the 2025 holiday period and into early 2026, there was no clear direction.

Hegseth wants Pentagon to dump Claude, but military users say it’s not so easy

Then the Anthropic uproar occurred. Within weeks, Smack was invited to multiple meetings with the Marine Corps focused on a single question: how fast can this move into production this year? Markoff said there was “very specific guidance and movement and energy” toward getting the prototype ready for combat operations in 2026 — an acceleration of more than a year.

The shift extended beyond the Marines. Smack holds contracts with the Navy and Air Force, and Markoff said interest came in nearly immediately from U.S. Special Operations Command, and others.

EdgeRunner, which is deploying with the Army Special Forces groups and has received a contract with the Space Force, said the Navy has also dramatically sped up engagement. Meetings that had been biweekly or monthly are now happening multiple times a week.

Both EdgeRunner and Smack are now racing to get their systems operating at higher security classification levels — the gateway to the most operationally significant use cases and the largest military contracts.

EdgeRunner said the military has told the company it can get to IL-6, a security designation enabling access to secret and top-secret data, within three months — a timeline Saltsman described as remarkable, given that the process normally takes 18 months or longer. The acceleration, he said, is being driven partly by pressure from Pentagon leadership to cut through procurement bureaucracy, and partly by the urgency the Anthropic situation has injected into the department’s AI strategy.

A federal grand jury today charged Courtney Williams, 40, of Wagram, North Carolina, on a charge of willful transmission of national defense information, a violation of the Espionage Act. She was arrested on Tuesday and the FBI Charlotte Field Office is investigating the case.

From 2010 to 2016, Williams worked as an operational support specialist assigned to a Special Military Unit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the statement said, and she had daily access to classified information.

Between 2022 and 2025, Williams is alleged to have repeatedly communicated with a journalist who identified themselves as such and said they were seeking information about the unit for an article and book. The journalist then published statements naming Williams as a source, attributing classified information to her statements.

Williams also shared national defense information on her social media accounts, the department said.

In messages between Williams and the journalist, Williams confided that she was “concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed.” In another message to a different person, Williams admitted that she could be arrested for her classified disclosures.

The journalist was not named by the department, but in 2025 a reporter named Seth Harp published an article and a book detailing sexism, racism and cultural issues in one of the Army’s most elite units.

In his reporting, Harp features the experience of a woman named Courtney Williams who worked for Delta Force at Fort Bragg beginning in 2010.

“This indictment should serve as a stark warning to all current and former clearance holders thinking of violating their positions of trust,” said Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, adding “if you jeopardize our national security by disclosing classified information without authorization, the FBI will hold you accountable for your crimes.”

If convicted, Williams could face time in prison.

Over the course of a week-plus in February, personnel with 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), assigned to U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, conducted Exercise Deep Strike at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany.

The exercise tested operator teams of eight or more personnel in areas of infiltration, drone operations and survival amid harsh winter conditions, according to a service release published Wednesday.

Tasked with traversing over 90 miles of simulated enemy territory, teams had to move, undetected, infiltrate beyond a simulated conventional enemy and launch a strike drone at a mock high-value target.

Throughout the exercise, teams relied solely on mission-specific gear, without weapons, and restricted movements to night to reduce chances of detection by radar or civilians.

“This is no simple walk in the woods,” a team sergeant said in the release.

The training, which concluded with team members being extracted by helicopters, reflects the rapidly evolving challenge of drone operations encountered by boots on the ground.

In places like Ukraine, some drones are equipped with thermal sensors, making concealment increasingly difficult.

Recently, the U.S. Marine Corps began testing new camouflage systems, including full-body overgarments, designed to mask heat signatures and reduce detection by both ground- and aerial-based sensors.

“This exercise is designed to prepare our forces for the realities of modern warfare,” a planner with 10th SFG (A) said. “It closely replicates real-world battlefield conditions, including the complex electronic warfare environment. It’s about pushing our teams to the limit and testing their ability to adapt to changing circumstances.”

Future versions of Deep Strike are expected to broaden the training and include special operations forces from NATO.

While celebrating a recent birthday, Rackley, an information technology specialist, and other team members assigned to Headquarters Battery, 1st Battalion, 178th Field Artillery, were distributing food to local individuals experiencing homelessness in the area.

During the assignment, a local bystander alerted the team that a male nearby was experiencing a medical emergency, noting the man was unresponsive.

Rackley arrived first on the scene and identified the situation as a drug overdose. He subsequently administered Narcan and performed CPR, ultimately resulting in the individual’s resuscitation.

Five days later, Rackley was patrolling the same area of the city when he responded to another overdose by the same individual. Once again he saved the person’s life.

Since arriving in the nation’s capital, Rackley has been an active participant in patrols throughout the area. He recently declined an offer from leadership to take time off after the incidents.

“I don’t like not being on the mission,” Rackley said. ”It makes me feel like I could be doing something more.”

National Guardsmen assigned to the Joint Task Force-District of Columbia have administered naloxone to more than 100 individuals experiencing drug-related emergencies since August 2025, according to a March release.

In response to an increase of drug-related overdoses in nation’s capital, JTF-DC integrated the administration of naloxone, commonly referred to by its brand name Narcan, into the required training criteria for patrol personnel.

“The D.C. Safe and Beautiful mission is fundamentally about safeguarding the community,” Lt. Austin Coomes, a medical operations officer with the South Carolina National Guard, said in a recent release. “Equipping our personnel with naloxone provides them with a crucial, life-saving capability to intervene effectively in overdose situations, thereby enhancing the safety and well-being of the District’s residents.”

Lillian Juarez contributed to this report.

In the 40 days since the start of Operation Epic Fury against Iran, 13 U.S. service members have been killed and 381 have been wounded, according to data provided Wednesday by U.S. Central Command.

The Defense Department has added the war on Iran to its Defense Casualty Analysis System, a database that catalogues combat casualties dating to World War I.

As of Tuesday, the department listed seven service members as having been killed by enemy fire during the operation, presumably the Army soldiers who died March 1 in Saudi Arabia during an Iranian airstrike.

It also classified six Air Force deaths as “non-hostile,” the crew of a KC-135 refueling aircraft who died while supporting air operations.

And it said that 346 were wounded in action: 231 soldiers, 63 sailors, 33 airmen and 19 Marines.

But U.S. Central Command told Military Times Wednesday that the number of wounded now stands at 381. They did not provide any details on the extent or types of injuries.

In mid-March, CBS News reported that roughly 25 troops were being treated at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, a dozen were evacuated to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and one had been transported to Brooke Army Medical Center, DOD’s only Level I trauma center and home to the department’s top burn unit.

The United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire late Tuesday. Under the terms, the U.S. agreed to stop military strikes while Iran said it would immediately open the Strait of Hormuz, the key body of water through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas ships.

Iran has offered a 10-point proposal for ending the conflict, which President Donald Trump described as a “workable basis on which to negotiate.”

Attacks continued in the early hours of the temporary truce in Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. During a press conference Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iran would be wise to “find a way to get the carrier pigeon” to their troops to stop shooting.

“We’ll be hanging around. We’re not going anywhere. We will make sure that Iran complies with the ceasefire and ultimately comes to the table and makes a deal. … Our troops are prepared to restart at a moment’s notice,” Hegseth said.

As of midday Wednesday, just a handful of cargo vessels had traversed the strait and several oil tankers were heading to the passage, according to apps that track the maritime shipping industry.

“We have seen an uptick in the traffic in the strait today and I will reiterate the president’s expectation and demand that the Strait of Hormuz is reopened immediately and quickly and safely,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press conference Wednesday.

The U.S. military has more than 50,000 personnel in the region. According to U.S. Central Command, they have supported more than 13,000 strikes on targets and destroyed at least 155 Iranian vessels.

Iran’s health ministry has reported that more than 2,000 people have been killed and 20,000 wounded since the operation began.

A CENTCOM official declined to discuss the number of troops evacuated from theater, saying that the unit will not discuss locations or movements “to protect privacy and security of our service members.”

According to the official, 344 of the injured personnel have returned to duty. The official declined to describe the nature of the injuries, including wounds or head injuries.

“We have no additional information to provide,” the official said.

Walter Reed issued a press release Wednesday detailing how its medical evacuation team supports the transport of injured personnel from the battlefield to the facility, but it included no details on the number of personnel that have been evacuated from Operation Epic Fury.

According to the release, Walter Reed supports a 14-member team of Army, Navy and Air Force personnel who coordinate transport across U.S. Transportation Command, U.S. European Command, the Deployed Warrior Medical Management Center at Landstuhl and Air Force aeromedical staging facilities.

During the press conference Wednesday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged the sacrifices U.S. military personnel have made during the operation.

“I’m humbled by the service and sacrifice each and every day that I am lucky enough to see,” Caine said. “I ask that we never forget our fallen and their families — especially the 13 fallen from Operation Epic Fury. May we always be worthy of their sacrifice and honor their legacy,” Caine said.