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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, just months later, everything changed.

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

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

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

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

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

But for my mother, that future never came.

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

She chose us every time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hero Myth

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

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

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

The 400-Patrol Chasm

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

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

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

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

The Shame of the Living

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Stranger’s Love

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

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

The Price of Your Peace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rules of engagement exist in war for a reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is why rank matters.

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

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

This is especially misguided in the chaplaincy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tehran’s goal is to impose persistent economic and political costs until Washington concludes that continuing the war is not worth it. To achieve that, Iran is exploiting a gap in U.S. Air Force doctrine — the distinction between air superiority and air denial, and between the blue skies and the air littoral. So far, it is working.

Air superiority — the control that permits operations at a “given time and place without prohibitive interference from air and missile threats” — is what the United States has achieved over southern and western Iran and is now working to extend eastward. That control allows large-scale strikes and freedom of maneuver at medium and high altitudes. As Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted on Tuesday, “Given the increase in air superiority, we’ve successfully started to conduct the first overland B-52 missions.”

By that measure, the campaign has been a success. But the strait is still closed.

Hegseth reveals secret trip to Middle East amid escalating Iran war

Air superiority is meant to assure freedom of action not just in the air, but across all domains for the entire joint force.

Air Force Doctrine Publication 3-0 is explicit on this point: air superiority “prevents enemy air and missile threats from effectively interfering with operations of friendly air, land, maritime, space, cyberspace, and special operations forces.” That includes the Navy’s ability to escort commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.

By that measure, the United States does not have air superiority where it counts.

Iran’s drone and missile campaign has already forced American forces back. In 2003, the bulk of U.S. combat and support aircraft operated from forward positions in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia while carriers patrolled the Persian Gulf. Today, carriers increasingly operate from the Red and Arabian Seas while land-based airpower has shifted toward bases farther from the strait, leaving U.S. forces positioned for the high-altitude fight over Iran, not the persistent-close-in coverage the strait requires to keep shipping lanes open under continuous drone and missile threat.

Iran’s strategy of air denial is why.

Air denial is a strategy of contesting control of the air without achieving air superiority outright. It leverages the advantages of large numbers of low-cost and mobile systems employed in a distributed way to keep the air domain too dangerous, too costly and too uncertain for joint forces to operate. Critically, the barriers to achieving air denial are considerably lower than those required to gain and sustain air superiority, yet it can impose disproportionate costs.

In the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is putting this strategy into practice. Tehran is exploiting the air littoral above the strait, employing drones and missiles capable of reaching oil tankers and naval vessels in minutes. Iran has struck more than 20 commercial vessels in and around the strait since the war began, killing at least seven sailors. This action has effectively halted traffic through the strait, except for a handful of ships that Iran has let pass — in many cases, for a hefty fee. The U.S. Navy has reportedly declined requests from the shipping industry for military escorts, citing the ongoing threat.

Iran’s strategy appears to be working. Gas prices have risen a dollar a gallon in a month, U.S. stock markets have entered correction territory, and the White House is under growing pressure to wind down the conflict. Iran planned for exactly this.

Tehran built this playbook, funded it, and watched it succeed. The lessons come straight from the Red Sea, where Houthi proxies used cheap, distributed drones and missiles to impose costs that more than 800 U.S. airstrikes between 2024 and 2025 could not eliminate. Now, Iran is running the same playbook over the Strait of Hormuz.

The United States has no ready answer. Achieving and maintaining air superiority in the air littoral above the strait demands the very layered defense capabilities in which the Pentagon has systematically underinvested: large numbers of low-cost, attritable systems to continuously attack launch locations and dispersed manufacturing; mobile air defenses rapidly and persistently deployable near threatened waterways; low cost persistent airborne platforms capable of detecting and destroying waves of drones; and interceptors capable of sustaining high engagement rates without exhausting inventories.

These are precisely the capabilities decades of procurement choices never built at scale, in favor of the small number of exquisite platforms that have performed so well in the blue skies above Tehran. The gap is not an accident. It is the result of choices. The Strait of Hormuz is one of their consequences.

Addressing this gap requires building low-cost, attritable systems at scale to contest and control the air littoral — not in small numbers as an afterthought, after the high-end aircraft are bought and paid for, but as a core mission — which inevitably means scaling back legacy platforms. The window to absorb that lesson is open now, while the cost is measured in closed shipping lanes and rising gas prices.

Maximilian K. Bremer is a nonresident fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and head of Mission Engineering and Strategy for Atropos Group.

Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and adjunct professor in the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University.

It is an early glimpse of a broader problem that many organizations would prefer not to acknowledge: As AI is rushed into critical systems, it is introducing new failure modes faster than they can understand or control them.

For defense organizations increasingly integrating AI into mission-critical systems, the implications are far more consequential.

When organizations pause to consider these risks at all, they often reach for a familiar reassurance: there will be a “human in the loop.” The idea is that even if the system is complex or unreliable, a person will catch mistakes before they matter.

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This reassurance is dangerously misleading. A “human in the loop” whose sole function is to approve a machine’s actions is not a safeguard but a design failure. Attention wanes because nobody can concentrate on a job that is mostly doing nothing, and over time the operator’s skills atrophy to the point that they cannot meaningfully supervise the system. What remains is the appearance of oversight rather than the reality.

In military contexts, this kind of degraded human involvement is not just inefficient but operationally dangerous.

This pattern is not new. Engineers have seen it before, most famously in the Therac-25, a radiation therapy machine introduced in 1982. It combined the functions of two predecessor systems in a smaller, more convenient package, and its improved automation made it faster and easier to operate. Safety was “guaranteed” by the presence of a human operator who had to confirm actions – in effect, a “human in the loop.”

The system failed anyway. Patients began developing severe radiation burns. Hospitals dismissed the possibility of machine error, and the manufacturer insisted overdoses were impossible. Only after sustained investigation was it discovered that the machine contained multiple safety-critical software flaws. By then, six overdose accidents had occurred, three of them fatal.

The deeper problem was not just faulty code but faulty design. The machine frequently halted with poorly explained error messages, requiring operators to “press P to proceed” to continue treatment. Because these errors were common and rarely meaningful, operators became habituated to restarting the system dozens or hundreds of times a day. When real malfunctions occurred, the act of “operator confirmation” had already lost its meaning. In one case, an operator restarted the machine multiple times, unknowingly delivering repeated overdoses. The presence of a human operator did not prevent the failure; it normalized it.

Today, we are repeating this mistake. Computer scientists are rushing to incorporate poorly understood AI systems into safety-critical environments, and when concerns are raised they are often waved away with the same phrase: there will be a human in the loop. This assumption is now appearing in discussions of defense systems, from decision support to autonomous operations.

People will argue that AI is fundamentally different, and in one sense they are right. We have never before deployed systems whose behavior is explicitly probabilistic and nondeterministic in high-stakes environments. In defense contexts, where uncertainty compounds quickly and errors can cascade across systems, this is especially concerning. But AI is also not different in the ways that matter most. It is still software, embedded in larger systems composed of people, processes, and machines. It cannot act in the real world without that surrounding system, and those systems fail in ways that are already well understood. Engineers and operators have spent decades studying how complex, tightly coupled systems behave under pressure.

What we are seeing now is not a new class of failure but a familiar one, accelerated. The software industry is once again demonstrating an inability to learn from its own history. That would be unfortunate if we were only talking about Spotify recommendation algorithms. It becomes dangerous when these same patterns are introduced into the systems that organizations — and nations — depend on.

Recent Pentagon leaks suggest that AI systems may already be influencing where bombs land. In such environments, the illusion of human oversight is worse than no oversight at all. It creates confidence without control.

If we spend the next decade hiding unsafe systems behind the fig leaf of the “human in the loop,” the consequences will not be theoretical.

Mikey Dickerson was the founding administrator of the U.S. Digital Service and is a crisis engineer at Layer Aleph. He is a co-author of the forthcoming book Crisis Engineering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radar to detect and track missiles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why drones are harder to catch

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

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

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

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

Multiple methods

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

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

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

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

And that is precisely what the fellowship provided.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Armored vehicles are quickly spotted and destroyed with either drones or artillery. Soldiers on foot seldom fare any better. Negating the other side’s drone capabilities would be a tremendous advantage, but conventional air defense isn’t good enough.

Fortunately, the U.S. has developed a solution: 30mm chain guns — traditionally mounted on Apache attack helicopters — bolted to civilian pickup trucks and connected to a portable sensor called Mobile–Acquisition, Cueing and Effector, or M-ACE.

After detecting drones, the Northrop Grumman-made system calibrates programmable shells to detonate mid-air, meaning the system, which is cost-friendly compared to other solutions, can destroy quadcopters and dismantle swarms without hitting them directly.

Such an answer to some of the evolving drone challenges seems too good to be true, but its viability has been vetted in recent years.

Ukraine has already deployed M-ACE on the battlefield in small quantities, along with Australian “Slinger” systems, which use the same chain gun. Taiwan has also expressed interest in the system, iterations of which have recently been fielded by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.

A key shortcoming with these systems, however, is driving nonmilitary vehicles in war zones. While the mounted gun may be able to stop drones, the vehicle’s crew would have effectively no protection from landmines, artillery or gunfire.

To make these counter-drone platforms truly effective, systems should be mounted on remotely operated vehicles. Enter the Tesla Cybertruck.

The Cybertruck’s usefulness for Ukraine cannot be unpacked without acknowledging its failure on the civilian market. Elon Musk promised hundreds of thousands of sales each year; Tesla fell short by 92% in 2025, barely selling 20,000 of the widely mocked pickups.

Consumers have a slew of reasons to avoid Cybertrucks. In addition to political controversy surrounding Tesla’s CEO, the truck’s design has been slammed for poor visibility, accelerator pedals that get stuck, warranties voided by car washes, dysfunctional windshield wipers and trunk doors that have gone viral for safety concerns.

Such issues, however, would be mostly irrelevant should the vehicle be used to aid the Ukrainian military.

Low demand, meanwhile, has left over 10,000 Cybertrucks sitting unsold in dealership lots. With Tesla modifying its “Gigafactory” in Austin to build a quarter-million units each year, Cybertrucks could, in theory, be delivered quickly to Ukraine — and in large quantities.

Availability isn’t the only factor that makes Tesla’s pickup a good choice. With systems like M-ACE limited by the vulnerability of crew members, Tesla could bypass the supervision requirement of the vehicle’s self-driving capability.

With remote operation, Cybertrucks on the battlefield would add a layer of safety other M-ACE-equipped pickups can’t provide. These vehicles are also easier to mass produce than any purpose-built unmanned ground vehicle rated to handle 30mm autocannons.

Today, two UGVs fit this role — the Estonian-made THeMIS and the U.S.-made Textron Ripsaw M5. Per-unit prices are not publicly available, but it’s safe to assume that these systems cost hundreds of thousands: THeMIS has sold for several million dollars, and the Ripsaw M5’s civilian variant has a starting price of $295,000.

If the Cybertruck is a viable substitute for these UGVs, an $80,000 price tag seems like a bargain. Beyond its availability and self-driving mode, the Cybertruck also offers the benefit of electrical power.

EVs have several logistical and functional advantages over fuel-powered trucks. The lack of moving parts and fuel requirements make them easier to maintain and cheaper to operate. They also create less noise and less heat, key for avoiding attention from Russian forces — especially those with thermal cameras.

A fleet of Cybertrucks equipped with chain guns and sensors to clear the skies of small drones could significantly affect the war and tilt certain battlefields in Ukraine’s favor.

Defanging enemy drones would, at worst, make the war effort more sustainable by reducing casualties and buying time for Europe to supplement Ukraine’s efforts.

More optimistically, these systems could give Ukraine’s ground forces more flexibility to move on drone-saturated front lines.

There’s no sign that an end to the war, or an improvement in Cybertruck sales, will come any time soon. Ukraine could be the best backup plan for Tesla’s misplaced investment.

Alex Lee is a recent graduate from Washington University in St. Louis, where he majored in political science and minored in writing.

A January 2026 report by researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies indicates that this war has now claimed 325,000 Russian lives and 875,000 wounded (or missing). For context, roughly 15,000 Soviet military personnel were killed in the ten-year Afghan war.

How do economists place a value on fatalities and wounded people? We typically do so by using the value of a statistical life (VSL). Economists derive VSL estimates by analyzing everyday tradeoffs people make between income and small changes in their probability of death. For example, numerous studies have analyzed how much people are willing to pay in the product safety market (air bags and seat belts) for reductions in fatality risk. In other studies, researchers have analyzed the connection between labor market fatality rates and wages.

Decades of research by economists have found that Americans, on average, are willing to pay about $140 for every one per 100,000 reduction in fatality risk. This equates to a $14 million (in 2026 dollars) VSL. But that’s for Americans. What are the values for Russians?

VSL estimates across countries track directly with per capita income. For example, a 10% rise in income adjusts the VSL upward by 10%, with the opposite being the case for decreases. Russia’s per capita income is 18.3% that of the United States. This suggests that Russian lives should be valued at approximately $2.6 million. Therefore, the total loss from Russian military fatalities is: 325,000 x $2.6 million = $845 billion.

As for valuing the losses to 875,000 wounded Russians, economists apply similar methods to estimate injury valuations. The Department of Transportation recommends using a value of 10.5% of the VSL for “serious” injuries. That would translate to about $270,000 per wounded Russian. Therefore, the total loss from Russian wounded soldiers is: 875,000 x $270,000 = $236 billion.

Besides casualties, other direct Russian military costs include equipment losses and funding for military operations (such as fuel and munitions). MinFin, which reports official government statistics, documents the following Russian losses: 12,000 tanks, 24,000 armored fighting vehicles and 400 planes, among others. Total Russian equipment losses are estimated to be $125 billion.

In a December 2023 RAND report, researchers estimated Russian operational costs in Ukraine at $3.1 billion per month. Extrapolating this value over four years of war yields an estimate of $149 billion for Russian operating costs.

What is the war’s overall impact on Russia’s economy? Since the invasion, many economic headwinds have battered Russia. International sanctions and an exodus of 650,000 Russians moving abroad have exacerbated the economic difficulties. In addition, various international organizations have frozen $340 billion worth of financial assets. Furthermore, an October 2025 report from the World Bank documents serious pressures on the current Russian economy, including year-over-year inflation running at 9.5% and interest rates at 20%.

Given the amount of negative economic information, it is difficult for analysts to obtain a specific value on economic losses. To simplify matters, we focus on a July 2025 study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley. That study uses pre- and post-invasion professional forecasts for GDP rates in the Russian Federation to approximate the economic impact of the war. Their estimates suggest post-invasion Russian GDP losses of $281 billion per year on average. Using these values yields a cumulative GDP loss of $1.124 trillion since the invasion.

Combining casualty figures, equipment and operational costs, and GDP losses indicates a total cost of approximately $2.5 trillion for the Russian Federation. To put that number in perspective, we note that it exceeds Russia’s $2.2 trillion GDP.

How do these costs compare to the benefits? We measure “benefits” as the land grab by Putin. Estimates based on data from the Institute for the Study of War show that Russia has gained approximately 28,000 square miles since the start of the war — a territory equivalent to about 10% of the size of Texas. Conquering a territory of this size has come at a cost of approximately $90 million per square mile in blood and treasure.

Of course, these costs, while borne by Russian society largely through conscription and lower living standards, are not borne in the same way by Putin himself. Napoleon, the inventor of modern conscription, was once told that a planned operation would cost too many men. He replied, “That is nothing. The women produce more of them than I can use.” Possibly Putin has a similar attitude.

David R. Henderson is a research fellow with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Ryan Sullivan is an associate professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School.

The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense, the U.S. government or any other institution with which the authors are affiliated.

Active-duty service members and veterans thinking of harming themselves can get free crisis care. Contact the Military Crisis Line at 988, then press 1, or access online chat by texting 838255. People who are not in the military can also call 988.

I started calmly. Politely, even. The first recording asked me to select from a list of options. I listened to all of them. Pressed the numbers that seemed closest to what I needed.

Thank you. Please hold while we transfer your call.

Vivaldi played for a few minutes.

The next recording asked me to describe my reason for calling. I kept it brief, like it asked me to. “I’m having thoughts of suicide and need to schedule an appointment.”

Thank you. For substance abuse, press 1. For mental health services, press 2. For—

I pressed 2.

Thank you. Please hold while we connect you to the next available representative.

More elevator music. Then a new voice, recorded but cheerful, asked me to verify my insurance information. I recited it from memory. And once more, when an actual person finally answered. She said she’d need to transfer me to scheduling.

Eight minutes of waiting later, another recording asked me to select from the following options.

“Representative,” I said, louder than necessary.

I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please select from—

“Mental health appointment.”

I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please select from the following…

The recording gave me the same options I’d already heard twice, then repeated itself because I couldn’t unlock the phone fast enough with facial recognition to press anything. It transferred me to a voicemail box.

This mailbox is full and cannot accept messages at this time.

The line went dead.

I pulled over. My hands tightened on the steering wheel. I’d been on the phone for 35 minutes with the local mental health clinic where I had previously been a patient and had spoken to exactly one human being, who’d transferred me to a recording. No help yet.

I called another number for a random place I found on Google. More menus, more transfers, and another clerk’s recording telling me the clinic no longer took walk-ins. Would I like the scheduling number?

“Representative!” I yelled.

I’m sorry, I didn’t understand—

“Then fucking listen!”

The system transferred me. The phone rang four times.

This mailbox is full and cannot—

I hung up.

Forty-seven minutes. I’d yelled at a machine, and the only person who’d heard me was my mother, because I finally gave up and called her.

I could tell I worried her. I curse, but not like that. Not so much, not so fast. The words came out in a rush. I loudly explained what I’d been trying to do, what kept happening, how nobody would listen to me and then I stopped myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be making this your problem.”

She said something kind. She told me she wanted to help, but all I could hear was the helplessness in her voice.

I told her I’d figure it out. I hung up. I tried a new number.

I called Tricare this time, my insurance. They were helpful in the way that organizations are when they want to appear helpful without actually helping. A recording thanked me for my service and asked me to hold.

A person eventually answered. I explained, as calmly as I could, what I needed.

She gave me a list of providers “in network.” Forty phone numbers. Maybe one of them would answer.

The first three went to voicemail. The seventh connected me to an automated system.

More music.

When someone finally answered, they told me the earliest available appointment was in six weeks. I could be placed on a cancellation list. Would I like that?

“Sure,” I said.

“Great,” the voice said. “You should receive a call tomorrow to confirm.”

“What do you mean a call tomorrow—”

The call ended.

I sat in my truck in the parking lot where I’d pulled over to make these calls. My phone battery was at 8%. Ninety minutes gone.

I had screamed at five automated systems, apologized to my mother, given my credit card information to a machine, and been promised a call tomorrow.

But tomorrow felt very far away.

I picked up my phone again, with more desperation than before. I dialed 988, the suicide hotline, the first time I had ever done so. I hadn’t needed it an hour ago, but this — the system designed to help me and others like me — made me feel worthless.

A real person answered. She was sweet. She talked me down. Told me all the things you say to someone who is on the verge of formalizing his suicide note. I was one of the lucky ones. Thousands of calls have gone unanswered.

It was only a few weeks before that I had walked into an inpatient mental health clinic, separate from the regular clinics I had fruitlessly tried calling.

It was 5:30 p.m. on a Friday. The sunset was beautiful from the waiting room chair. Orange and pink bleeding across the sky through windows that didn’t open. Maybe they weren’t even glass. I watched it fade while I filled out forms. Rate your depression on a scale of 1 to 10. Have you experienced a loss of interest in activities? Changes in appetite? Thoughts of death?

Yes or no. Check the box.

With the paperwork done, I waited several hours. Sitting. Pacing. Sitting again. Staring at people who I thought belonged there more than I did. Long enough to watch the sky go from orange to purple to black. Long enough to see others come and go. Long enough to wonder if anyone had noticed I wasn’t home.

When it was finally my turn, a nurse took my vitals without making eye contact. Blood pressure, weight, temperature. The machine beeped. She wrote something down. In another room with no windows, I waited two more hours before a doctor appeared in the doorway, clipboard in hand.

“So, you’re depressed?” she said. “Why?”

I looked at her. She was looking at the tablet. I understood, at that moment, eye contact was out of the question.

Her casualness, leaning against the door frame, suggested I wasn’t her first depressed patient today. And that perhaps she and the prior ones had not been on good terms.

“I don’t know,” I said.

It was the least resentful answer I could give. It was also true, in the way that true things are often insufficient when you’re trying to explain why you don’t want to be alive anymore.

She shook her head. Told me to put my clothes in a bag.

The gown they gave me was made of paper. Two pieces, thin as the material a dentist uses to catch blood before it hits your clothes. This seemed fitting. I was told not to open doors myself, that I would be escorted. Corners and sharp edges were dangerous. I was being protected from furniture.

There were several rooms. I was ushered to the dining hall. Nothing more than a feeding station, utilitarian and bare. It was designed for moving things through — not people but things. It made me want to smash my head into the walls, but somehow I resisted.

I noticed a dozen or so other people dressed like me. Some were talking, some were laughing. They’d formed a kind of community in this place, a society of the fenced-off. They didn’t seem to notice we were being treated like livestock. Corralled and isolated. Safe from ourselves. Dehumanized for the sake of survival. Apparently, they’d locked our dignity in a separate room.

I hated it. I hated that I was here, in a place like this. It was as if they’d finally shown me who I deserved to be. I felt my stomach turn. Because the thing you need most when you’re trying not to kill yourself — connection, compassion, someone who sees you as more than a liability — is the first thing that gets processed out in these places. Not maliciously. Not even deliberately. It just happens. Checkbox by checkbox. Door by door. Doctor by doctor.

Press 1 if you’re experiencing thoughts of suicide. Press 2 if you’re depressed.

But there’s no button for “I need someone to care that I exist.” No option for “I feel like a burden, and you’re treating me exactly like one.” No form that captures what it’s like to sit in a paper gown under fluorescent lights, forbidden from opening doors, while someone with a clipboard decides whether you’re stable enough to return to the place that made you feel unstable to begin with.

The system is callous. It’s cold. It’s designed to manage risk, process people, and keep you alive long enough to discharge you with a safety plan and a list of outpatient referrals.

What it isn’t designed to do is give you a reason to want tomorrow to come.

Evan Slusser is a former Marine Corps pilot and current doctoral student in political geography. He has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Virginia Tech and the University of Arizona, as well as time attending the Marine Corps University. After a decade of service, he now resides in North Carolina and spends his free time gardening and birdwatching. Neither at which he is remotely successful.

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

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

Two carrier strike groups are converging on the region. Fighter squadrons are flowing into bases from Jordan to Qatar, bridged across the Atlantic by aerial refueling. Submarines and destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles patrol nearby waters. Patriot and THAAD batteries have been rushed forward. B-2 stealth bombers stand ready in Missouri.

Now consider how long it has taken to assemble.

The buildup began in late January. The full force will not be in place until mid-March. This is six to seven weeks to assemble a force capable of imposing meaningful costs on Iran. The reason is simple: aircraft fly, but mass sails. When commanders needed more airpower, they drew on the joint force — two carrier air wings, surface ships, Army interceptors, and sixty-plus land-based strike aircraft sent to Jordan — proving that airpower is bigger than the Air Force.

US military assets flock to Middle East amid Iran standoff

Some analysts will see this surge as proof the United States needs a larger Air Force. They misdiagnose the problem. Airpower is not the same as the Air Force, and the pursuit of ever more exquisite aircraft has left the service less relevant to the airpower mission it claims to own. Air denial increasingly falls to the Army, electronic warfare to the Navy, and persistent strike capacity to ships and submarines.

Consider each service’s contribution. Air control remains the Air Force’s core mission — but it is increasingly a joint effort. In the event of Iranian retaliation, air control means air denial, defeating the ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and long-range drones Iran is most likely to fire. That mission runs primarily through Army Patriot and THAAD batteries, backed by Navy destroyers. Air Force fighters play a supporting role, intercepting drones and slower missiles first, reducing the volume that surface-based interceptors must engage. That is not the offense-first, air-superiority mission the Air Force prizes. It is a layered defensive fight in which the Air Force is one layer among several — and not necessarily the most important one.

Electronic warfare (EW) tells a similar story. The most capable tactical EW platform in the joint inventory is the Navy’s EA-18G Growler. Six of them operate from Jordan alongside Air Force Wild Weasel F-16CJs armed with high-speed anti-radiation (HARM) missiles and Angry Kitten jamming pods. The F-35 still lacks a fully integrated anti-radiation missile like the AGM-88 HARM or its successor. If Washington strikes Iran, destroying Iranian radar sites depends on a Navy platform. Electronic warfare was once an Air Force strength. The Navy now leads its most critical element.

Exquisite platforms buy exquisite capability for a narrow target set. They do not buy persistence — and persistence is what strategically effective airpower requires. Punishment, as Thomas Schelling argued, depends on the credible threat of continuing pain. What compels an adversary is not a single devastating blow, but the belief that costs will keep coming. Denial aims to degrade capabilities and foreclose retaliation. Both require sustained presence over time, which in turn demands mass.

Washington should have learned this lesson from the last strike on Iran. After a long planning and buildup period, the single night of B-2 strikes last June damaged facilities Iran had spent years building. Months later, however, the United States is assembling its largest regional military force since 2003 to re-engage. The parallel to the no-fly zone over Iraq in the 1990s is hard to ignore: Episodic airpower, while tactically impressive, is strategically inconclusive. Strategic effects require sustained pressure, persistent presence, and continuous operations that force an adversary to make acute choices rather than simply absorb a blow and wait.

The gaps this buildup exposes are not in Air Force strike capabilities. They are in the Army’s ability to sustain air denial at scale, in the munition inventories required for persistence, and in the tanker fleet that keeps U.S. warplanes airborne. More B-21s and F-47s address none of these shortfalls. No procurement strategy centered on $700 million bombers or $300 million fighters can generate sustained presence at scale.

The Air Force does need more airpower—but not the kind it is buying. Persistent presence requires large numbers of lower-cost drones that can absorb losses, deep stockpiles of low-cost munitions that can sustain fires over time, and uncrewed aerial refuelers that can keep fighters and bombers over target areas. These are the capabilities that generate sustained effects at affordable cost—and they are consistently deprioritized in favor of the next exquisite crewed platform.

The deeper problem runs beneath procurement. Washington has long treated “airpower” and “Air Force” as synonymous. They are not. Air control — the ability to deny an adversary the use of the domain while preserving one’s own — is increasingly accomplished by Army interceptors, Navy strike platforms, drones, and munitions fired from ships and submarines. The Air Force’s preferred model — manned fighters striving for air superiority so manned bombers can reach their targets — has yet to demonstrate the scale and stamina needed to bring a conflict to an end.

Until budget priorities reflect that reality, the United States will keep buying the Air Force it prizes and underinvesting in the airpower it needs.

Maximilian K. Bremer is a nonresident fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and head of Mission Engineering and Strategy for Atropos Group.

Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and adjunct professor in the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University.

Then they get elected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The latest rounds of nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran are going well enough for now, according to the steady drip of public statements from the main parties involved.

“I think they want to make a deal,” said U.S. President Donald Trump on the eve of the latest round of discussions held in Geneva on Feb. 17, 2026. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, noted progress over the “guiding principles” of the talks.

Such optimism was similarly on display during initial talks in Oman earlier in the month.

Negotiators push for more talks after US and Iran convene in Oman

But as someone who has researched nonproliferation and U.S. national security for two decades and was involved in State Department nuclear diplomacy, I know we have been here before.

Optimism also existed in spring 2025, during five rounds of indirect talks that preceded the United States bombing of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure as part of a broader Israeli attack. Pointedly, Iran noted in February that a climate of mistrust created by that attack hangs over the efforts for a negotiated deal now.

And underpinning any pessimism over a deal now is the fact that talks are taking place with a backdrop of U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf region and counteraction from Iran, including the closure of the Strait of Hormuz for a live-fire drill.

Red lines

But it is more than mistrust that will need to be overcome. The positions of both the U.S. government and Iran have ossified since May 8, 2018 — the date when the first Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal.

Iran continues to be unwilling to even discuss its ballistic missile program. This is a red line for them.

Yet the United States continues to demand limits to Iran’s ballistic missiles and the ending of Iran’s support of proxy fighters in the region be included in the nuclear talks, in addition to having Iran fully abandon enriching uranium — including at the low civilian-use level agreed on under the 2015 nuclear deal.

The talks are taking place amid a wider trend toward the end of what can be called the “arms control era.” The expiration of New START — which until Feb. 5, 2026, limited both the size and status of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons and maintained robust verification mechanisms — together with the increasing willingness to engage in military actions to achieve political goals heightens the challenges for diplomacy.

Military brinkmanship

So why the apparent public optimism from the U.S. government?

Trump believes that Iran is in a weaker position than during his first term, following the largely successful Israeli attacks on Iran’s regional proxies as well as on Iran itself. The strategic capabilities of Tehran’s two main sponsored groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, are clearly diminished as a result of Israeli action.

The U.S. may also still feel it has the upper hand following the June 2025 Operation Rising Lion, in which Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was attacked in response to an International Atomic Energy Agency’s report that Iran’s stockpile of near-weapons grade enriched uranium surged by over 50% in the spring.

The reopening of talks now also comes in the immediate aftermath of Iran’s bloody crackdown on anti-government protests, leaving thousands of protesters dead.

The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group was deployed near Iranian waters in January as a signal to the protesters of U.S support. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that successful talks must include topics beyond Iran’s nuclear program, including the “treatment of (its) own people.”

Trump continues to consider military options against Iran, warning that “if they don’t make a deal, the consequences are very steep.”

Yet there is a danger that Washington may be overestimating its position.

While the United States maintains that Iranian nuclear sites were “obliterated” in the June attack, satellite imagery indicates that Iran is working to restore its nuclear program. And while Tehran’s proxies in Gaza and Lebanon are severely degraded, Iranian-supported militias in Iraq, including the Kataib Hezbollah, have renewed urgent preparations for war — potentially against the U.S. — and the Houthi rebels have threatened to withdraw from a ceasefire deal with the United States.

Moreover, Iran’s commitment to its ballistic missile program is stronger than ever before, with much of the infrastructure already rebuilt from Operation Rising Lion.

No returning to the 2015 deal

Iran maintains that the talks must be confined only to guarantees about the civilian purpose of its nuclear program, not its missile program, its support of regional proxy groups or its own human rights abuses.

And that is incompatible with the U.S.’s long-held position.

This disagreement ultimately prevented the U.S. and Iran from renewing the now-defunct 2015 political deal during the Biden administration. Signed by China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., the United States and Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) halted Iran’s development of nuclear technology and stockpiling of nuclear material in exchange for lifting multiple international economic sanctions placed on Iran. Ballistic missile technology and Iran’s proxy support for regional militias were not included in the original agreement due to Iran’s unwillingness to include those measures.

The parties to the Iran deal ultimately decided that a nuclear deal was better than the alternative of no deal at all.

There was a window for such a deal to be resumed in between the two Trump administrations. And the Biden administration publicly pledged to strengthen and renew the Obama-era nuclear deal in 2021.

But by then, Iran had significantly increased its nuclear technical capability during the four years that has passed since the JCPOA collapsed.

That increased the difficulty: Just to return to the previous deal would have required Iran to give up the new technical capability it had achieved for no new benefits.

The window closed in 2022 after Iran removed all of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s surveillance and monitoring under the deal and started enriching uranium to near weapons levels and stockpiling sufficient amounts for several nuclear weapons.

The IAEA, the U.N’s nuclear watchdog, currently maintains only normal safeguards Iran had agreed to before the JCPOA.

Even with the 2025 U.S. strikes, Iran currently has the ability to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb within weeks to several months. This is up from over a year under the 2015 deal.

US and Iran talks today

Although most analysts doubt that Iran has developed the weaponization knowledge necessary to build a nuclear bomb — estimates vary from several months to about two years due to the lack of access to and evidence on Iran’s weaponization research — Iran’s technical advances reduce the value for the U.S. government of returning to the 2015 deal. Iran’s knowledge cannot be put back into Pandora’s box.

But talks do not necessarily need an end point — in the shape of a deal — for them to have purpose.

With the increased military brinkmanship, talks could help the U.S. and Iran step back from the edge, build trust and perhaps develop better political relations. Both sides would benefit from this stabilization: Iran economically, from being reintegrated into the international system, and the U.S. from a verifiable lengthening of the time it would take Iran to break out.

None of this is guaranteed.

When I worked in multilateral nuclear diplomacy for the U.S. State Department, we saw talks fail in 2009 regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, after six years of on-and-off progress. The consequence of that failure is a more unstable East Asia and renewed interest by South Korea in developing nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the same dynamic appears here. The shape of a potential new deal is unclear. As time passes with no deal, both sides harden their negotiating starting points, making a deal less likely.

Military escalations may lead to a new willingness to compromise on the part of Iran or precipitate its decision to build nuclear weapons.

But even should the talks prove a failure, the effort to dampen the confrontational responses and heightening tensions would still be valuable in reducing the possibility of regional conflict.

Nina Srinivasan Rathbun is a professor of international relations at Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto and USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first: Sea kayaking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiking and climbing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tools, feats and brotherhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An application to discovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have searched for hope. My hunt continues.

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

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

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

I just don’t believe the answer.

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

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

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

My father has been running longer than I’ve been alive. As his son, without understanding or explanation, he expected me to run with him. He was a Marine, but he’d been running long before he enlisted. He escaped from an abusive, alcoholic home in North Carolina at age 16. He eventually found safety and structure at Camp Pendleton.

He was too young for Vietnam and separated before Desert Storm. He couldn’t fulfill the reasons why he joined the Marine Corps, but he still rigidly threw his identity into the military. Purpose was scheduled, designed and predictable.

My father refocused on me when he missed the opportunity to fulfill a purpose overseas. After six years in the Marine Corps, he was convinced life would start outside of the military, outside California, with clean air and open spaces in Colorado. So he trekked us to Denver.

His father never went to college, so it was important that he did. He reminded me daily that his father was lazy and a drunk, so it was important for him to evolve. He traded morning PT for early morning study sessions.

He never saw his father work, so he proved himself different by clocking into two full-time jobs. He thought his father was corrosive, irrational and unpredictable. And so I think that’s why my father never wept, never faltered and was always reliable. He was a stone bridge over the Colorado rapids.

My father ran every Saturday morning. He thought it was important that I did too.

He was a machine, I thought. Always on. Some weekends, I’d wake predawn, too early for cartoons. I’d find him, already awake, staring at the bedroom wall of our apartment. The sun never touched his north-facing window. The blue hour seeped into everything and washed over his walls, his posture. His silence always made that place too quiet. When I asked if he was okay, he’d only rise and tell me he was waiting on me.

The running trail at Washington Park felt infinite when I was 15. It’s hidden in a Denver neighborhood where bars don’t cover every window; a 2-mile oasis bookended by man-made north and south lakes.

My father had only two kinds of conversations: long and too long — always about purpose, always asking for my opinion, always ending abruptly with grunts and a single head nod when I gave it. His purpose was teaching, and he knew it’d be fulfilled if he got his doctorate. His father hated teachers so he thought it was important that he become one.

But he struggled finding tenure. This security would have justified his suffering. Just a few more years, he’d persuade my mother. After the Marines and me, reaching tenure would be his new finish line.

Weekend runs with dad always felt reasonable at first. The first 17 seconds were always the easiest. I’d leap start. Forward. Exploding. Full stride. Everything blurred. He’s gone, pacing behind. Temporarily. Soon he’s upon me. Steadied and practiced. My lungs burn and my rabbit heart pounds, desperate and frustrated, while my legs fail me.

Without looking back, he’d bark for me to keep moving.

Clouds of hardwood pine pollen floated at shoulder height as he led me around the lake. He’d burst through them effortlessly; I’d follow through the aftermath as he counted intermittent cadence. I’d inhale everything and suffocate.

It’ll all soon be downhill, he said.

But the asphalt was level, hard and weathered. Each foot strike sent lightning up my calves and burned my gut.

Hurt the pain, he’d say. And I’d wrench my love handle, denying any cramp from forming.

Soon I’d walk. His head would snap back just as I kicked my leg into a half-skip and jog before he could catch me slacking. I could hear him grind his teeth as he barked out another order: Keep your feet moving. One foot after another and it’ll be over.

Marines exist in the present tense; they always are, never were. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.” But my father was an NCO in his physical prime, trained to motivate kids a few years older than me. I’m slowing down and he’s staring. He lets me walk and I know he wants to say something.

I keep looking at the sky. Pilots don’t have to jog endless miles, I think. Still, I’m larger than him and I can’t sprint more than 17 seconds. We’ll try again tomorrow, he says. One foot after another.

But 2 miles is infinite to me.

And all I want is to keep up with my father.

War Horse reader Jim Carden was inspired to write a song based on Michael's Reflection.

Expelling weakness

Pain is weakness leaving the body. That concept was buried in me and in every late-’80s millennial. He assumed that pain — mental, physical and existential — was equal and expected. Discomfort was required to become stronger, faster, resilient.

You want to believe this when you’re 15. Expelling something weak inside yourself inspires you when you’re 20. You echo it when you’re 30 and parrot it mindlessly when you’re 40 with a family. Pain is as necessary a part of life as breathing. Existing is pain. There is an expectation that it will eventually leave the body. Soon, you won’t feel. And not feeling this is a metric for growing stronger.

My father was faithful to this and enlisted with few options into the Marine Corps: nothing but the clothes on my back.

I was born on Camp Pendleton, and I felt that I carried his purpose.

But this responsibility was too heavy, especially when I floundered to find my own purpose and stumbled with the realization I wasn’t the son he hoped people would see.

At 15, I had no language for any of this. Keeping up with my father left me short of breath and embarrassed. My legs always shook nervously and my lungs felt like they were collapsing even on days off, outside of the park. Soon all I could feel and spit out to him was resentment and exhaustion: “I’m going to kill myself.”

No. You don’t know real pain, he’d say.

I hadn’t earned these feelings.

My father believed pain was a symptom of growth. Trauma and discipline would result in success and a stronger livelihood. And so he enlisted. And I convinced myself that I also needed to earn my own place. So later I enlisted, too.

But I joined the Air Force. Because they don’t make you run as much.

Chasing purpose

As soon as I left his sight, purpose in the military felt superficial for me; belonging was somewhere else. When I separated, he acknowledged this disillusionment was expected, as if finally earned. My father searched for purpose anywhere but where he was, and freshly separated, so did I. New relationships, new city, new career. Stillness was a failure.

I moved from maintaining bombers in the Air Force to managing project assets in civilian call centers, from racking milestones in manufacturing to high-profile sales and acquisitions.

My father never got his terminal graduate degree. I thought it was important that I did. He had only known poverty in his mid-30s; I made sure I knew more. Purpose became outpacing my father.

He’s behind me now. My strides are wider. My successes are more extensive, albeit because of his push for me to succeed.

But because my only purpose was being where he wasn’t, I lamented to him: “I can’t do this anymore.”

But at middle age, he carried his own weight, searching for a grand coronation for crossing a finish line always out of reach. He would remind me: You’re not exhausted. Not yet.

So I caught control of my breathing, hurt my pain and kept sprinting forward.

Years later, as I settled into middle age, in the predawn, my wingtips scraped against the linoleum of the office floor in West Hollywood. It’s the only hour of silence before the assistants scramble to prep the day. The blue hour washed the hallways to my office and I stewed at my desk, staring at the corner where the floor met the wall, thoughtless, grinding my teeth.

Eric, one of the new hires, fidgeted with the handle to my door and said, “Are you okay?”

What is it? is all I barked.

He apologized twice as he invited himself inside. He chewed his bottom lip. He was 30 and about to become a father. He hadn’t figured out his life and worried he wouldn’t before his son arrived. How can he determine a future for his son when he hadn’t found meaning? I gripped the face of my watch, and the scent of the janitor’s hardwood pine filled from the hallway. He wondered if he was worth more dead than alive.

Probably, I said.

Eric fidgeted with his hands and mumbled with nervous laughter, not knowing if I was joking. My silence was stark and borrowed from my father. His eyes were pensive. I couldn’t stay still this long, so I decided to end the conversation as cruelly as possible.

Life is indifferent. It carries on whether we decide to stay or not.

I told him to endure and to keep moving forward. I believed this because I’m sure my father would agree.

I stopped midstep.

I apologized.

But it was too late, and he nodded the same nod I’d given hundreds of times before. And I wondered if my father had sought the same guidance from someone like me only to hear: You’re not allowed to stop. Keep moving forward.

And if one day Eric may sit in his bedroom and stare at the wall while his son gathers his shoes.

The finish line

My father can never retire. He’s 70, working, pushing forward to an ever-shifting finish line. The pain in his knees and the exhaustion that once stopped his heart were the only weaknesses that ever left his body.

He endured — as a Marine in the present tense, forced to live the same endurance demanded by him and for me. Motion is survival and purpose.

I run alone now.

The sound of footsteps fading, steady, sometimes scraping, but always.

Persevere, son, he says. I know it feels hopeless. I’ve felt the same.

His discipline, passed down as love, is his legacy and burden. My father never knew when to stop. I don’t think he knew he could. It’s been a long time since I’ve been 15.

I know I shouldn’t run through the world as he did.

But I can almost see the finish line.

Michael Hyon Johnson is a writer and filmmaker whose work explores identity, discipline and belonging through stories rooted in military life and youth culture. An Air Force veteran and former B-1B ground crew chief, he draws on his service to examine how structure, ambition and memory shape who we become. Based in Los Angeles, Johnson also leads operations in film and digital media. Johnson bridges his experience in technology and storytelling to champion authentic, character-driven narratives. He is a 2025 War Horse fellow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not an accident or a failure of planning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The United States is seemingly moving toward a potential strike on Iran.

On Jan. 28, 2026, President Donald Trump sharply intensified his threats to the Islamic Republic, suggesting that if Tehran did not agree to a set of demands, he could mount an attack “with speed and violence.” To underline the threat, the Pentagon moved aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln — along with destroyers, bombers and fighter jets — to positions within striking distance of the country.

Foremost among the various demands the U.S. administration has put before Iran’s leader is a permanent end to the country’s uranium enrichment program. It has also called for limits to the development of ballistic missiles and a cutting off of Tehran’s support for proxy groups in the Middle East, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Iran puts ‘fingers on trigger’ as US armada arrives in Middle East

Trump apparently sees in this moment an opportunity to squeeze an Iran weakened by a poor economy and massive protests that swept through the country in early January.

But as a scholar of Middle Eastern security politics and proliferation, I have concerns. Any U.S. military action now could have widespread unintended consequences later. And that includes the potential for accelerated global nuclear proliferation – regardless of whether the Iranian government is able to survive its current moment of crisis.

Iran’s threshold lesson

The fall of the Islamic Republic is far from certain, even if the U.S. uses military force. Iran is not a fragile state susceptible to quick collapse. With a population of 93 million and substantial state capacity, it has a layered coercive apparatus and security institutions built to survive crises. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s military wing, is commonly estimated in the low-to-high hundreds of thousands, and it commands or can mobilize auxiliary forces.

After 47 years of rule, the Islamic Republic’s institutions are deeply embedded in Iranian society. Moreover, any change in leadership would not likely produce a clean slate. Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged as much, telling lawmakers on Jan. 28 that there was “no simple answer” to what would happen if the government fell. “No one knows who would take over,” he said. The exiled opposition is fragmented, disconnected from domestic realities and lacks the organizational capacity to govern such a large and divided country.

And in this uncertainty lies the danger. Iran is a “threshold state” — a country with the technical capacity to produce nuclear weapons but that has not crossed the final line of production.

A destabilized threshold state poses three risks: loss of centralized command over nuclear material and scientists, incentives for factions to monetize or export expertise, and acceleration logic — actors racing to secure deterrence before collapse.

History offers warnings. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s produced near-misses and concern over the whereabouts of missing nuclear material. Meanwhile, the activities of the A.Q. Khan network, centered around the so-called father of Pakistan’s atomic program, proved that expertise travels – in Khan’s case to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

What strikes teach

Whether or not regime change might follow, any U.S. military action carries profound implications for global proliferation.

Iran’s status as a threshold state has been a choice of strategic restraint. But when, in June 2025, Israel and the U.S struck Iran’s nuclear facilities, that attack — and the latest Trump threats — sent a clear message that threshold status provides no reliable security.

The message to other nations with nuclear aspirations is stark and builds on a number of hard nonproliferation lessons over the past three decades. Libya abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 in exchange for normalized relations with the West. Yet just eight years later, NATO airstrikes in support of Libyan rebels led to the capture and killing of longtime strongman Moammar Gaddafi.

Ukraine relinquished its nuclear arsenal in 1994 for security assurances from Russia, the U.S. and Britain. Yet 20 years later, in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, before launching an outright invasion in 2022.

Now we can add Iran to the list: The country exercised restraint at the threshold level, and yet it was attacked by U.S. bombs in 2025 and now faces a potential follow-up strike.

The lesson is not lost on Mehdi Mohammadi, a senior Iranian adviser. Speaking on state TV on Jan. 27, he said Washington’s demands “translate into disarming yourself so we could strike you when we want.”

If abandoning a nuclear program leads to regime change, relinquishing weapons results in invasion, and remaining at the threshold invites military strikes, the logic goes, then security is only truly achieved through the possession of nuclear weapons — and not by negotiating them away or halting development before completion.

If Iranian leadership survives any U.S. attack, they will, I believe, almost certainly double down on Iran’s weapons program.

IAEA credibility

U.S. military threats or strikes in the pursuit of destroying a nation’s nuclear program also undermine the international architecture designed to prevent proliferation.

The International Atomic Energy Agency was, until the earlier Israel and U.S. strikes, functioning as designed — detecting, flagging and verifying. Its monitoring of Iran was proof that the inspection regime worked.

Military strikes — or the credible threat of them — remove inspectors, disrupt monitoring continuity and signal that compliance does not guarantee safety.

If following the rules offers no protection, why follow the rules? At stake is the credibility of the IAEA and faith in the whole system of international diplomacy and monitoring to tamp down nuclear concerns.

The domino effect

Every nation weighing its nuclear options is watching to see how this latest standoff between the U.S. and Iran plays out.

Iran’s regional rival, Saudi Arabia, has made no secret of its own nuclear ambitions, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman publicly declaring that the kingdom would pursue nuclear weapons if Iran did.

Yet a U.S. strike on Iran would not reassure Washington’s Gulf allies. Rather, it could unsettle them. The June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran were conducted to protect Israel, not Saudi Arabia or Iran. Gulf leaders may conclude that American military action flows to preferred partners, not necessarily to them. And if U.S. protection is selective rather than universal, a rational response could be to hedge independently.

Saudi Arabia’s deepening defense cooperation with nuclear power Pakistan, for example, represents a hedge against American unreliability and regional instability. The Gulf kingdom has invested heavily in Pakistani military capabilities and maintains what many analysts believe are understandings regarding Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Turkey, meanwhile, has chafed under NATO’s nuclear arrangements and has periodically signaled interest in an independent capability. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan questioned in 2019 why Turkey should not possess nuclear weapons when others in the region do. An attack on Iran, particularly one that Turkey opposes, could well accelerate Turkish hedging and potentially trigger a serious indigenous weapons program.

And the nuclear cascade would not likely stop at the Middle East. South Korea and Japan have remained non-nuclear largely because of confidence in American extended deterrence. Regional proliferation and the risk of a destabilized Iran exporting its know-how, scientists and technology would raise questions in Seoul and Tokyo about whether American guarantees can be trusted.

An emerging counter-order?

Arab Gulf monarchies certainly understand these risks, which goes some way toward explaining why they have lobbied the Trump administration against military action against Iran — despite Tehran being a major antagonist to Gulf states’ desire to “de-risk” the region.

The American-led regional security architecture is already under strain. It risks fraying further if Gulf partners diversify their security ties and hedge against U.S. unpredictability.

As a result, the Trump administration’s threats and potential strikes against Iran may, conversely, result not in increased American influence, but in diminished relevance as the region divides into competing spheres of influence.

And perhaps most alarming of all, I fear that it could teach every aspiring nuclear state that security is attainable only through the possession of the bomb.

Farah N. Jan is a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Pennsylvania.

This gap between tactical brilliance and strategic stalemate reveals the central flaw in the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy: America can project overwhelming force anywhere on Earth, but increasingly lacks the sustained presence to turn military victories into enduring outcomes.

The Jan. 24 National Defense Strategy, or NDS for short, confronts a hard reality: the United States cannot simultaneously deter China in the Taiwan Strait, defend the Panama Canal, guarantee European security, and extend nuclear deterrence over South Korea with current force levels.

The Pentagon’s answer is to prioritize homeland defense and Western Hemisphere dominance while maintaining First Island Chain denial and providing “critical but more limited” support to Europe and Korea.

The problem isn’t the diagnosis — it’s that the cure may be worse than the disease.

When priorities collide with physics

The math simply doesn’t work. Taiwan contingency planning alone would consume most available naval and air defense forces before accounting for Western Hemisphere or European commitments. Western Hemisphere defense requires separate force packages: airlift, amphibious platforms, intelligence systems, special operations units, and surface combatants. Current force levels were designed for sustained global commitments, not for simultaneous hemispheric dominance and Indo-Pacific denial while maintaining credible deterrence elsewhere.

The Venezuela operation proves this constraint. America demonstrated it can strike anywhere, but the strategic outcome remains unresolved precisely because the new strategy deprioritizes sustained commitments outside priority theaters.

But the force structure gap is only half the problem. The transition period while allies build capacity creates its own dangers.

The transition window problem

The strategy assumes NATO and South Korea can take “primary responsibility” for regional defense within acceptable timeframes. But Europe faces daunting barriers: aggregate debt at 90% of GDP limits defense spending increases, limited indigenous production of precision munitions and advanced air defense creates capability gaps, and untested casualty tolerance raises questions about political sustainability. This creates a 3-5-year vulnerability window. Europe cannot operate independently while U.S. support is reduced.

South Korea’s challenge is even more acute. The claim that Seoul can take “primary responsibility for deterring North Korea” with “critical but more limited U.S. support” assumes conventional superiority can replace a nuclear guarantee. It cannot. North Korea’s growing arsenal creates advantages in any escalation scenario that conventional forces cannot counter. “Critical but more limited” support undermines confidence in the fundamental question: Would Washington trade Los Angeles for Seoul? This ambiguity could prompt Seoul to reconsider its nuclear stance, triggering exactly the proliferation cascade nonproliferation policy seeks to prevent.

When strategy becomes personal

Perhaps most troubling, the NDS ties its framework explicitly to “President Trump’s vision,” mentioning him 47 times across 24 pages. Enduring strategies frame objectives around persistent national interests, not individual leadership. Containment — articulated in George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and NSC-68, two pivotal documents of the early Cold War era —survived nearly 50 years across nine administrations because it addressed Soviet threats to American interests.

When strategy becomes synonymous with a single leader, it becomes vulnerable to reversal. If allies and adversaries believe this framework expires in 2029 or 2033, they adjust behavior accordingly: allies delay defense investments awaiting policy reversals; adversaries simply wait us out.

The adversary gets a vote

The strategy’s viability depends on adversaries accommodating American repositioning rather than exploiting vulnerabilities during the transition. History offers little comfort. Britain’s 1937 Imperial Defence White Paper articulated clear priorities, but this didn’t prevent Germany from exploiting the transition period before Allied rearmament.

By designating certain theaters as lower priorities during allied capacity-building, the NDS creates a 3-5-year window for adversaries to test resolve.

The 2026 NDS offers overdue strategic clarity in diagnosing resource constraints. But it fails to show how America bridges the gap between current commitments and future capabilities without creating exploitable vulnerabilities.

The Venezuela operation crystallizes the dilemma: overwhelming tactical capability without strategic staying power. Until the Pentagon shows how it protects allies during the transition — or candidly acknowledges the risks they must accept — this strategy raises more questions than it answers.

Strategy documents set intentions; adversary responses determine outcomes. On current evidence, significant gaps remain.

Richard Berry is a national security strategist who served as senior advisor to six U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and U.S. Special Operations Command (2010-2025).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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