The Space Force identified the airman Friday as 1st Class Cedric Eneluna, 23, a member of the 30th Civil Engineer Squadron’s Pavements and Equipment Flight.

No other personnel were injured in the incident, according to a Space Force release. A Safety Board Investigation was launched, and details will not be released until the completion of the investigation.

The Santa Barbara Coroner’s office had not determined the official cause of death as of Friday.

Eneluna joined the military in 2024, and he arrived to his first duty assignment at Vandenberg in August of that year, the release reads.

“Eneluna served with professionalism, humility, and an unwavering commitment to his teammates and the mission,” the release says. “During his assignment at Vandenberg, he earned the respect and admiration of those around him through his positive attitude, tireless work ethic, and willingness to help others.”

Eneluna spent his childhood in the Philippines and referred to Fayetteville, North Carolina, as his hometown.

The 30th Pavements and Equipment Flight unit are known as the “Dirt Boyz” and are tasked with maintaining the base’s roads, airfield and infrastructure in support of the base’s launch, test and range operations.

The “Dirt Boyz” remember Eneluna as a positive influence who made everyone feel welcome, the release says, and he never hesitated to lend a helping hand.

“He brought out the best in everyone,” said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Seth Poulsen, 30th CES commander. “He was always ready to work, always willing to help, and always had a positive attitude. He truly represented what it means to be an Airman.”

The base will share details surrounding any upcoming memorial services or recognition on the Central Coast at a later date.

The agents are able to fly the F-16s in the Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model, or VENOM, program through the aircraft’s additional hardware, software and instrumentation installed, according to a release.

A F-16 Fighting Falcon equipped with the technology completed a sortie recently at the Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, for the 96th Test Wing, per the announcement.

The modified aircraft began flights in June to verify that the aircraft worked properly with all the technology involved. A month later, the unit began in-air-testing using an agent to autonomously control the flight.

The pilots, located in the cockpit during the flights, monitored the AI agents to ensure the flight and mission systems tests objectives were met, the release reads.

“Getting the aircraft into the air is always a monumental milestone for a complex test program,” Tim Stevens, a VENOM test pilot with the 40th Flight Test Squadron, said in the release.

“It represents years of design, modification and test planning poured into this project by a dedicated team of hundreds,” he continued.

VENOM, which is a joint effort between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the Air Force was initiated under the Air Combat Evolution program. The aircraft in the program are meant to serve in the next phase of AI development in DARPA’s Artificial Intelligence Reinforcements program.

The aircraft underwent months of ground testing of its engines and systems to ensure the functionality of the technology, and also completed many simulation hours dating back to 2024, according to the release.

The 53rd Wing and 96th Test Wing joined together in the VENOM program, but the early tests have been conducted by developmental testers in the 40th Flight Test Squadron.

U.S. Army Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, and 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, from Ewa Beach, Hawaii, died July 17 and July 18, respectively, according to a Department of Defense release.

The active-duty soldiers were killed during an enemy attack at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, Jordan.

Gonzales was stationed at Ansbach, Germany, assigned to 1st Battalion, 57th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 52nd Air Defense Artillery Brigade, 10th Army Air Missile Defense Command.

Feehan was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 55th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 32nd Army Air Missile Defense Command.

The incident is currently under investigation, the release states.

On Saturday, U.S. Central Command announced that another U.S. service member is missing following the attack, while four troops, who have since been discharged, were medically evacuated to hospitals in Jordan.

For the ninth consecutive night, the U.S. “hit [Iran] very hard again tonight,” President Donald Trump said on Sunday. The strikes, he said, were in honor of the soldiers who were killed.

“The strikes will continue degrading Iranian military capabilities used to attack commercial vessels and civilian mariners transiting the Strait of Hormuz,” a CENTCOM post from Sunday reads.

Trump said that “probably” three service members were killed in action, as opposed to two.

As of Monday morning, the Pentagon had not clarified whether a third service member was killed in action.

The command said in a social media post Sunday that U.S. military personnel found unidentified remains at the location of the attack. CENTCOM said that an examination process to verify the remains is ongoing.

The deaths of Gonzales and Feehan bring the toll of American troops killed in the war with Iran to 16. More than 400 U.S. troops have been wounded in the campaign, which began Feb. 28.

Separately, on July 18, a U.S. service member was killed in action in northern Iraq during a controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian one-way attack drone.

“A second service member was wounded and continues to receive medical treatment for a minor injury,” CENTCOM said in a statement.

CENTCOM had not yet provided additional information Monday, such as the identities of those service members killed or missing.

Trump started flying aboard the jumbo jet on July 1 after accepting the plane as a gift last year, when an accelerated effort to renovate the Boeing 747 for presidential use began.

But Trump unexpectedly ditched the plane on a flight from Turkey to the United Kingdom amid rising hostility with Iran on July 8. He flew aboard an older Air Force One to London in what he described as a move “for old time’s sake”, but later boarded the new plane to return to the U.S.

Trump was asked about whether the newly renovated airplane lacked missile-defense capabilities as he returned home from a trip to the FIFA World Cup final in New Jersey on Sunday.

“It has a lot of capability,” Trump said of the plane. “But as I understand it, in about a month or so, they’re gonna send it to have it be maxed out ... It’ll take about a month.”

The U.S. Air Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The new plane, with red, white, dark blue and gold livery chosen by Trump, was refitted by defense contractor L3Harris Technologies.

It’s meant to serve as a temporary replacement as Boeing has struggled to deliver long-delayed next-generation Air Force One planes. Boeing is working to deliver two purpose-built 747-8s under a $3.9 billion fixed-price contract signed in 2018 that’s now four years behind schedule and over budget. Delivery of the new planes is expected in mid-2028.

The upgrades to the jet from Qatar were completed so quickly that some experts expressed concern that the plane may not be as secure as the baby blue Air Force One that preceded it. Critics also questioned the cost and propriety of accepting the gift.

The New York Times journalists who had reported on the security features of the new aircraft were subpoenaed earlier this month. The Times has asked a court to block those orders to appear before a grand jury panel in Manhattan federal court.

“I just broke down,” Richards said.

In a few minutes, she would wipe away the tears, drive back to the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital where she worked as a nurse and finish caring for veterans.

At the time, she couldn’t explain why an ordinary Tuesday afternoon had become the moment everything surfaced. Looking back, she doesn’t think it was about that day at all.

Richards became a nurse because she wanted to care for veterans. She loved listening to stories about their coffee mugs no one dared wash because years of coffee had seasoned them just right. Albert, a Vietnam War veteran, actually got her to drink from his mug one morning after repeatedly assuring her the taste was like no other.

She listened to their sea stories, anecdotes about deployments, friendships and losses that still lingered decades after the uniforms came off.

More recently, the moments that stick in her memory look different.

She thinks about the veteran who apologized for asking again for pain medication that hadn’t arrived long after it should have. The patient left staring at the ceiling while a call light continued to flash. The conversation that ended before she wanted it to because another veteran couldn’t wait any longer.

None of those moments would make a government report. Taken together, Richards says, they have changed what it feels like to care for veterans inside the VA.

For many of the 9 million veterans enrolled in VA health care, those moments are largely invisible. Patients may notice a delayed medication, a longer wait for help or a hurried bedside conversation. What they don’t see are the decisions nurses say happen behind the scenes when there isn’t enough time to do everything they believe their patients need.

Richards’ experience is unfolding against a backdrop of persistent staffing challenges across the Veterans Health Administration.

In its fiscal 2025 workforce assessment, the VA Office of Inspector General found that all 139 VA medical centers reported at least one severe occupational staffing shortage. Nearly four in five facilities identified nursing among those shortages, and facilities collectively reported 4,434 severe occupational staffing shortages across clinical and nonclinical occupations, a 50% increase from the previous year.

VA hospitals are finding it harder to fill jobs, watchdog says

The report does not measure nurse vacancy rates. Instead, it asks each VA medical center to identify occupations where recruiting or retaining staff has become difficult enough to affect operations or patient care. While vacancy reports estimate open positions.

The Inspector General’s review measures where facilities say staffing shortages are severe enough to interfere with their mission.

A series of tradeoffs

Richards says the hardest part of working inside the VA isn’t the pace; it’s knowing that no matter how quickly she moves, there are moments when she cannot be everywhere veterans need her to be.

A medication is due in one room while another veteran presses the call light for help getting to the bathroom. A family member has questions about a discharge plan. Another patient needs wound care.

The work itself isn’t unusual. What changes, Richards says, is the constant calculation of what can wait.

“You prioritize the sickest patient first,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean everyone else stops needing you.”

Those are the moments she carries home.

“You replay your day,” Richards said. “You think about the things you couldn’t do, not because you didn’t want to, but because there wasn’t enough time.”

VA leader’s policies delaying care, destroying work force, report says

Richards is careful to separate those experiences from the quality of care veterans ultimately receive. She says nurses continue to work together, adjust priorities and step in for one another to make sure patients remain safe. But safety and the kind of care nurses aspire to provide are not always the same thing.

Moral distress

For decades, nursing ethicists have studied the consequences of caring for patients when clinicians believe they know the appropriate course of action but lack the time, staffing or resources to carry it out.

In 1984, philosopher and nursing scholar Andrew Jameton introduced the term moral distress to describe that experience. Since then, researchers have expanded the concept beyond individual ethical dilemmas to include the organizational conditions that repeatedly force clinicians to compromise the care they believe patients deserve.

Ann Hamric, leading moral distress researcher, has argued that the problem is not simply exposure to difficult situations. It arises when institutional constraints prevent clinicians from acting in accordance with their professional judgment.

Repeated over time, she and other researchers have found, those experiences can leave a lasting psychological burden, sometimes referred to as “moral residue.”

More recently, nursing ethicist Cynda Rushton has described moral distress as a signal that something within the care environment is preventing clinicians from practicing in ways that align with their professional and ethical commitments.

Rather than viewing it as an individual failing, her work frames it as evidence of tension between the demands of the health care system and the standards clinicians strive to uphold.

Richards had never heard the term when she began questioning whether she was providing veterans the care they deserved. But she immediately recognized the experience it describes.

Richards still thinks about sobbing in that Wendy’s drive-thru. She recalls wishing someone would notice and offer her some kind of relief.

At the time, she couldn’t explain why she had broken down in the middle of an ordinary lunch break. Now she can.

Hailey says there was no single shift that convinced her something had changed. It happened gradually, one decision at a time.

She began replaying her days after she got home, wondering whether she had missed something, whether she could have spent another five minutes with a veteran who seemed anxious or answered one more question before leaving the room.

“I love taking care of veterans,” Richards said. “That’s what makes it so hard to deal with being short staffed, we know our veterans deserve better.”

The veteran-led organization AfghanEvac hopes a new AI-powered tool will benefit from the extensive data it’s gathered about the tortuous visa and asylum application process to help new applicants find the most promising pathways to help.

The Visa Pathways and Relocation Information Center, or V-PRIC, launched earlier this month and has seen more than 30,000 visits in its first week live, said Shawn VanDiver, the Navy veteran who founded and leads the organization. While the tool requires users to verify that they understand it won’t provide vetted legal advice, it aims to simplify daunting and confusing options and find the pathway most aligned with their circumstances.

When users select “find my pathway,” they’re prompted to enter information about their current location, their eligibility as an Afghan who worked for the U.S. and whether they’re in danger now. They’re also asked to write a brief statement in their own words describing their story and situation.

Then, the tool uses its database of 124 U.S. visa and status classifications — 16 of them relevant to Afghan applicants — and detailed information on global pathways around the world to link users up with the options that best match their needs and qualifications.

VanDiver is clear: there aren’t many promising pathways available to anyone right now. The Trump administration last year issued an indefinite suspension on processing of Afghans’ request to immigrate to the U.S., and terminated temporary protected status for asylum-seeking Afghans, leaving about 11,000 already in the States unable to work and at risk of deportation.

About 1,100 Afghan allies and their family members are stuck in grim conditions at the Camp As Sayliyah processing facility in Doha, Qatar, unable to leave due to the travel ban even though many had already secured approval to enter the U.S.

This spring, the Trump administration proposed forcing those at the camp to choose between returning to Afghanistan or being relocated to the war-torn and desperately impoverished Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some 400 of those camp residents are children, according to VanDiver.

Despite the barriers, VanDiver believes V-PRIC will help prospective applicants avoid wasting time at closed doors, stay abreast of rapidly changing policy and figure out the most promising options.

“It … tells you where the blocker is,” he said. “If it’s a matter of policy or a matter of law, if it’s a choice that can be unmade, and who can approve exceptions to it.”

The tool has been trained on legal decisions and executive orders and policy statements, but also surveys AfghanEvac has run and plain-language explainers they’ve developed, VanDiver said. Organization staff continue to update it to remove inaccuracies and reflect changing conditions. It might provide context that the U.S. State Department does not.

VanDiver gave the example of an Afghan special immigrant visa applicant who has received a notice from State that they can schedule a visa interview — not noting that the visa approval pipeline remains closed. V-PRIC can flag that, he said.

“It says, ‘Hey, hold up, don’t necessarily schedule your interview yet. They’re all going to be denied, and having that denial on your record can create problems down the line,’” VanDiver said.

For AfghanEvac, the work to secure safety for those who helped the U.S. at war continues indefinitely. A survey of more than 1,100 Afghans run between Jan. 31, 2025 and July 7 found, of the 427 respondents still in Afghanistan, nearly half face a direct threat from the Taliban. Another 427 respondents reported being in Pakistan, awaiting a pathway to safety there. Of that group, 44% said they feared deportation, and 45% reported experiencing a health crisis. Thirty-nine of the respondents were at Camp As Sayliyah, awaiting a pathway out.

“It feels like we’re in jail, punished like criminals — even though we stood with the U.S.,” one respondent who’d spent 282 days at the camp, said in the survey, according to information provided by AfghanEvac.

VanDiver stresses that the V-PRIC tool doesn’t replace legal expertise, but he hopes it will offer a starting point to help people who may be at a loss to understand their first or next steps toward reaching safety.

“Get a lawyer, open a congressional case; here are the warnings about your particular type of case,” he said. “[V-PRIC] can help people understand, based on their specific situation, what their options are.”

Frank Kendall, the Air Force’s 26th secretary who served under former President Joe Biden, said in a Thursday roundtable hosted by Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies that gathering experience in the field and through simulations help operators establish trust with autonomous systems, like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft.

“You have to accumulate a basis for trust over time, and so I think we just need to think carefully about how we structure things in order to make that opportunity,” Kendall said during the roundtable.

Earlier this week, the Air Force announced that it conducted the first-ever live-fire test of an inert AIM-120 from an Anduril-made YFQ-44A. The CCA recently completed an end-to-end, beyond-line-of-sight strike against a simulated target, the service announced, but did not specify when the exercise occurred.

The Air Force is scheduled to continue live-fire testing with General Atomics’ YFQ-42A this fall.

Kendall said that using the aircraft in Red Flag, the service’s leading large-force aerial combat training simulation held at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, will be “fascinating,” but he worries about the force using initial setbacks as an excuse to “retreat” instead of pushing ahead.

The former secretary was optimistic that institutional support will be enough to overcome those setbacks, saying that enthusiastic operators want to see the aircraft’s full potential realized.

Kendall recalled when he once asked an Air Combat Command crew who were developing CCA tactics why there wasn’t more resistance.

“[A young fighter pilot’s] answer was, ‘Sir, these things are going to save our lives.’” Kendall recalled.

The simulations define the exercises, he added, saying that it showcases how the aircraft protects crew fighters effectively right now even as the force needs to develop more sophisticated tactics.

“The guys with the CCAs are beating the crap out of the guys without them, and not losing any manned fighters,” he said.

AI-controlled fighter jet takes Air Force secretary on historic ride

Kendall said that computerized, man-in-the-loop simulations are the best tool to assist operators in learning how to use the aircraft effectively since more trials can be completed. Integrated simulations have been used by the Air Force for roughly 30 years.

“In simulators with cockpits their sensors are showing them simulated threats as well as their friends, and then they basically fight a battle together,” he explained.

Kendall referred to a time when he took a flight in an F-16 modified by artificial intelligence. In flight, the aircraft’s testers would collect data points, he said, and run a million simulations to adjust the software overnight to complete the flight again the following day.

The first increment CCA aircraft in the program are “all the same” as weapons carriers, but in Increment II, Kendall stipulates that the force can begin equipping them with sensors and possibly distributed electronic warfare capabilities.

China is working on this autonomous system capability as well, he added, stating that air battles could soon be CCA versus CCA. Intelligence is going to play a significant role in how well the U.S. understands their systems, tactics and vulnerabilities, he said, noting that it’s a “hard game” to play.

In Increment I, the Air Force showed interest in obtaining 100 to 150 aircraft, the first phase of a longer-term goal of eventually fielding 1,000 CCAs.

At Farnborough Airshow this week in London, BAE Systems unveiled a helmet-mounted prototype it says is intended to explore how future pilots may be able to operate under battlefield conditions they anticipate to be saturated with unprecedented amounts of data.

Called Project Intuity, the demonstrator is intended to help pilots manage input from multiple sources by projecting information onto the helmet’s visor.

“As allies move towards aircraft that act as combat command centers, future operations will demand that pilots process more information from more sources than ever before,” Andrew Macklin-Smith, the company’s product line director for helmet-mounted displays, said in a release.

“Through Project Intuity, we’re addressing that challenge by integrating the technologies to allow pilots to command fleets of drones in the skies,” he added. “This system will achieve that by filtering and presenting the most important information clearly and within the pilot’s natural field of view.”

BAE did not yet say whether the demonstrator is tied to a specific program or provide a timeline for when this technology could enter service but the project comes as the U.S. is experimenting with having pilots command drone wingmen.

During an exercise last summer, Air Force pilots controlled Valkyrie drones during flight and in January, the Navy announced that F-35 pilots had used touchscreen tablets to control uncrewed autonomous drones during training.

“Modern warfare is demanding more from our aviators,” Rear Adm. Todd Evans, commander of the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, said in a release about the Navy’s human-machine teaming milestone. The exercise, he added, gave pilots “the advanced tactics they need to win future battles.”

The U.S. Air Force has for years broached the possibility of integrating drone wingmen — used for reconnaissance, electronic warfare and attacks — alongside fighter jets. The teaming, experts have said, would make the difference in between winning or losing wars against advanced adversaries like China.

In a first this year, the Air Force asked Congress for nearly $1 billion to start procuring Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA, a fleet of jet-powered, semi-autonomous drones fly alongside crewed aircraft like the F-35 and F-22.

The service’s national plan pairs two CCA with each fighter jet, but testing suggests pilots may be able to command higher numbers.

The Air Force logged another CCA milestone recently when it conducted its first-ever live-fire test using the Anduril-made YFQ-44A.

BAE says its prototype is designed with flexible architecture so that novel and emerging components — such as eye tracking capabilities and new optics — can be added or replaced over time. Currently, it combines head tracking and 3D audio cueing.

According to the company, the demonstrator’s visor has twice the display area of current helmet-mounted systems and what it describes as “quad high-definition resolution.” The bigger display is aimed at keeping pilots’ eyes directed at the skies, with information within their field of view, and thus reducing their need to look down at cockpit instruments during flight.

The company said it already has more than 1,000 helmet-mounted displays in use in 10 different countries, but that this is lighter than other models. BAE did not give design specifications, but attributed the drop in heaviness to new materials and better microelectronics, among other things.

Technology tested through prototypes could eventually be integrated into new helmet-mounted systems or added to existing ones.

The goal is to “identify industry partners capable of providing a Ground-Based Launcher solution to protect United States Air Force assets,” according to a Request for Information submitted by the service. The request has a response deadline of Aug. 6.

The RFI lists requirements that suggest an air defense system that can handle a variety of threats. In addition to intercepting cruise missiles, the Air Force wants missiles that can destroy drones ranging in size from Group 1 (maximum gross takeoff weight of less than 21 pounds) to Group 5 (maximum weight of more than 1,320 pounds).

This would mean a single system that could stop everything from a small kamikaze drone to a giant Global Hawk-sized UAV.

The query comes as U.S. and allied military bases in the Middle East have been struck hard by Iranian drones and missiles.

Iranian weapons destroyed a valuable U.S. E-3 Sentry AWACS, damaged at least five KC-135 tankers at Saudi airbases and devastated multiple air defense radars.

Likewise, Russia and Ukraine have been hammering each other with waves of drones and missiles that overwhelm air defenses and deplete stockpiles of interceptors.

Not surprisingly, the Air Force wants a defense system with plenty of ammunition. Contractors are asked to “outline operational performance metrics, specifically the firing rate across all magazines and the total magazine depth, while demonstrating seamless command and control (C2) system integration for rapid sensor data dissemination and weapons cueing.”

The RFI suggests a desire for a self-contained system that is easily transportable, uses a laser illuminator for fire control and possesses integrated sensing capabilities. The RFI lists 11 “critical baseline attributes” for the Ground-Based Launcher, including cost, transportability, manpower requirements and built-in testing diagnostics for maintenance and safety.

As background, contractors are asked to refer to the 2012 Joint Staff publication JP 3-01, “Countering Air and Missile Threats.”

Even before the Iran War, the defense of Air Force bases spurred debate. Last year, a strategist on the Air Staff argued that the Air Force should stop relying on the Army for primary air defense of airfields.

He warned that expeditionary airbases lack sophisticated systems like the Patriot, and that the Air Force’s own security forces are poorly equipped for air defense.

The unexploded ordnance was from a “downed Iranian one-way attack drone,” Central Command said in a statement released Sunday.

The death of the U.S. service member in Iraq follows in the wake of two U.S. service members killed in action on Friday in an Iranian ballistic missile and drone attack on U.S. and partner forces in Jordan, U.S. Central Command announced.

Four more troops had to be medically evacuated to hospitals in Jordan.

Those four service members have since been discharged, the command added.

“Other personnel who were evaluated for minor injuries have returned to duty,” the release stated.

U.S. Central Command originally noted that a third U.S. service member was missing, however, CENTCOM announced today that “After a thorough search, U.S. military personnel found unidentified remains at the location earlier today. An examination process to verify the remains is ongoing.”

U.S. Central Command is withholding the identities of the dead until 24 hours after the service members’ next of kin have been notified.

Additional information about the exact location of the attack had not been provided as of publication.

The latest casualties bring the toll of American troops killed in the war with Iran to 18.

Most recently, the commanding officer of the Navy’s Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 5, Cmdr. Gabriel Edwards, was killed on July 1 when the MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter he was aboard went down in the Arabian Sea. Three other sailors were rescued following the emergency landing.

More than 400 U.S. troops have been wounded in the campaign, which began Feb. 28.

But many medical professionals warn it might do nothing of the sort and instead could increase service members’ risk of infertility or other consequences if testosterone is prescribed inappropriately.

The mandate is one of several recent healthcare policy changes implemented by Hegseth and other Trump administration cabinet officers that have sparked debate among experts and raised questions about what scientific basis, if any, supports them.

Hegseth has also reversed the military’s long-standing flu vaccine mandate, a decision that was walked back after a flu outbreak, while the Department of Health and Human Services removed 17 members from its vaccine advisory panel and altered its vaccine recommendations.

Five of six men’s health experts contacted by Reuters for this story said they were puzzled by the announcement on testosterone testing and concerned it may lead to unnecessary — or even harmful — treatment.

Hegseth said testing would be accompanied by advice to help soldiers make decisions about treatment, which would be voluntary.

The goals, he added, are to ensure troops have the right testosterone levels to operate at their absolute best and to improve their resilience, longevity and performance, so as to ensure the military’s combat readiness.

Four of the six doctors said there was no solid evidence suggesting that screening for low testosterone in all military personnel aged 30 and older would optimize U.S. readiness for combat.

“We hear from patients that when you treat low T, things like cognitive alertness and stamina improve. But the evidence is not concrete, and it comes from patients who were treated because they were symptomatic,” said Dr. Kevin McVary, a urologist on the medical advisory board of Rugiet, a telehealth platform that provides testosterone supplements.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the matter beyond its brief official statement.

TESTING RECOMMENDED FOR SYMPTOMS

The American Urological Association and the Endocrine Society advise testosterone supplementation only for patients with confirmed testosterone deficiency and symptoms such as reduced libido, erectile dysfunction, fatigue, decreased muscle mass and low bone density.

Giving testosterone without medical symptoms leads to overtreatment, McVary said, which can have its own adverse consequences.

Levels naturally decline with age, starting around age 30. But age 30 itself is not an appropriate point for screening, said Dr. Haleem Mohammed, chief medical officer of men’s wellness and medical clinic network Gameday Health.

“There is a population-level decline of 1% per year after ages 30-40 that accelerates as you get older,” but the patterns are not the same for all, Mohammed said.

Most studies of testosterone replacement have been done in older men, noted Dr. Ugis Gruntmanis, an endocrinologist at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, who said the new mandate provides an opportunity to collect data on younger men.

He added, however, that widespread implementation of screening without preliminary study data would be putting the carriage before the horse.

FDA LIFTED WARNING

Based partly on a study led by Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic, involving more than 5,200 men aged 45 to 80 with low testosterone and high risk of heart disease, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration revised testosterone labels to remove a warning of increased risks of heart attack or stroke.

The participants, however, showed higher rates of atrial arrhythmia — an abnormal heart rhythm — and bone fractures, a finding that may have implications for the military, Nissen said.

All of the experts contacted by Reuters also mentioned the severe impact of testosterone therapy on male fertility.

“Many in our armed forces are young men who are not done having their families,” McVary said. “If you just dole out the testosterone, the testes will shrink. And you can’t reliably count on them coming back.”

Other risks include blood thickening, prostate issues, acne, hair loss, breast tissue growth and mood volatility.

In his announcement, Hegseth said one objective for the new screening mandate is to comprehensively address Operator Syndrome, which afflicts special forces warriors such as Delta Force members and Navy SEALs and includes low testosterone along with traumatic brain injury, hormonal and metabolic dysregulation, sleep dysregulation and other maladies.

But special forces operators are not representative of all active duty and reserve members, said Dr. B. Christopher Frueh of the University of Hawaii, whose team first described the syndrome in 2020.

“These operators are at an extreme end of a spectrum,” Frueh said. “They have much higher exposures to blasts, airplane jumps, firing all kinds of different weapons, shoulder-fired rockets, machine guns.”

Other soldiers might have elements of the syndrome, he said, “but should we be screening 100% of everybody? Maybe. I don’t know.”

He believes many younger soldiers could regulate hormones through sleep, rest and diet to bring testosterone levels back up, rather than turning to replacement therapy.

WEIGHT AND LOW TESTOSTERONE

Still, medical professionals emphasize potential benefits from appropriate testosterone testing, as with other forms of medical tests.

Gameday Health’s Mohammed said military reservists in the general population may be overweight, another correctable factor that can contribute to low testosterone.

“Testosterone is one of the most useful blood tests we have to gauge health in men,” Mohammed said. “Broader screening would identify many men with reversible causes and some with true deficiency. Both groups would benefit from clinician-guided care, whether that means correcting reversible causes or starting treatment when it is truly warranted.”

The Pentagon has not provided detailed guidance on how abnormal test results will be evaluated or whether screenings will apply equally to males and females.

Frueh of the University of Hawaii said broad screening could also reveal new information about female soldiers’ hormones.

“Females aren’t going to need testosterone replacement in all likelihood, but they may need other hormonal interventions,” he said.

A third U.S. service member is missing, the command release added, while four more troops had to be medically evacuated to hospitals in Jordan.

Those four service members have since been discharged, the command added.

“Other personnel who were evaluated for minor injuries have returned to duty,” the release stated.

U.S. Central Command is withholding the identities of the dead until 24 hours after the service members’ next of kin have been notified.

Additional information about the exact location of the attack had not been provided as of publication.

The casualties in Friday’s attack bring the toll of American troops killed in the war with Iran to 16.

Most recently, the commanding officer of the Navy’s Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 5, Cmdr. Gabriel Edwards, was killed on July 1 when the MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter he was aboard went down in the Arabian Sea. Three other sailors were rescued following the emergency landing.

More than 400 U.S. troops have been wounded in the campaign, which began Feb. 28.

At a Thursday roundtable discussion hosted by Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Frank Kendall, the 26th Secretary of the Air Force, claimed there are some instances when machines can outperform human operators, since the latter aren’t “perfect.”

“When you get to the point where the AI is doing a better job of deciding who to kill than the person, let the AI do it,” Kendall said during the roundtable. “But you got to be confident of that.”

To ensure that AI capabilities aren’t outpacing the human operator in the loop, the service needs to verify and test that the tool has been designed to do exactly what it’s meant to, with specific rules it should perform with, Kendall said.

The former secretary — who served in the role from 2021 to 2025 during former President Joe Biden’s administration — highlighted that the service needs to train the human operator to use the tool in the way it was intended and allow them to have many opportunities for practice.

Intensive simulation can be used to monitor the human operators during continuous machine learning to evaluate how well they are using the tools, what decisions are being made and if the interventions made are necessary or not, he said.

For example, Kendall said that in an Army range when a rifleman is going against pop-up targets and deciding whether to shoot, “It is easy to imagine AI shall be perfect at that.”

“Operators are not perfect, and so I think when you get to that, let the AI do it,” he said.

Kendall said AI would never be afraid nor tired, unlike a human operator. The machine, he added, needs to start out better than the human, even when the human is at their best.

“When you send armed people out to do something, you run some risk because of human emotions and so forth,” he said.

The former secretary used the example of a cop pulling over a citizen. He said there’s an “awful lot” of people in America that would rather be stopped by a robot than a cop in traffic because you can program the robot to not shoot at all — or only if a certain event happens.

Kendall highlighted that versions of AI have been used in the military for years. He relayed an experience during which he boarded an F-16 fighter jet modified with AI. With the touch of a button, the aircraft flew itself, he said.

AI-controlled fighter jet takes Air Force secretary on historic ride

The AI controlling the F-16 he flew in was as good as the experienced pilot in another aircraft, he insisted. As both pilots are pulling RGs and losing altitude as a result, their 10,000 foot-floor would be hit.

“As soon as we hit the floor, the AI would pop the airplane back up and go back into the maneuver,” Kendall said. “It did it really well.”

“My lesson from that, if you will, was this is already as good as our best pilots at this at least, and if the other pilot is inexperienced or tired or whatever, the AI’s gonna win,” Kendall concluded.

A Pentagon official said Thursday that the Defense Department has “welcomed back more than 230 warfighters,” and the Departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force continue to work with more than 600 service members who have expressed interest.

The official did not provide a breakdown of the returnees by service.

According to the Defense Department’s web site on COVID-19 reinstatement, more than 8,700 service members were involuntarily separated for refusing the immunization after they were ordered in 2021 to get the vaccine.

Data compiled by the services in December 2022 — days before the mandate was lifted by law — showed the figure was closer to 8,400 and included 3,717 Marines, 2,041 Navy sailors, 1,841 Army soldiers and 834 Air Force and Space Force members.

Eligible service members have been allowed to rejoin the service since 2023. In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing them to come back with “full back pay and benefits.”

Under Pentagon policy, those eligible receive back pay, allowances and any bonuses they would have earned had they stayed in the military, minus income, VA benefits and separation payments they received in the interim.

Hegseth ordered the services in December to review all the discharge cases to determine whether members were entitled for upgrades of their discharge characterizations from General (Under Honorable Conditions) to Honorable.

In March, the department extended the deadline to those interested in rejoining the service by a year, until April 1, 2027, and it cut the active-duty return to service obligation from four years to two.

“Maybe, for some, four years felt like too much given what had been done to them. We hope two entices warriors of conscience to come back,” Hegseth said in a video posted on the social media platform X.

The Defense Department announced Wednesday that it planned to convene a panel to study the decision to require the COVID-19 vaccine and will declassify and release materials related to the mandate.

The National Academy of Public Administration, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that studies management and organization, is conducting an after-action review at the request of the Pentagon, with a report expected by the end of the year.

No surveys have been conducted of the personnel who were involuntarily separated regarding why they have not returned to service. Officials told the Associated Press last year that many troops “have moved on with their lives.”

About 14% of the service’s civilian workforce, roughly 780 employees, got cut last year in what Senate Armed Services Committee member Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, called “mindless.” The cuts have left senators questioning how the Space Force can rebuild the loss of personnel.

“I worry that a lot of expertise walked out the door during that period,” King said during Thursday’s hearing to discuss the nomination of Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Schiess to become the third-ever Space Force Chief of Space Operations.

Committee members argued that space is increasingly becoming a warfighting domain, accelerating the need to increase resources for the service, which includes an “agile workforce.”

Schiess said that a lot of civilian personnel took the Deferred Resignation Program, or DRP, and other voluntary separation initiatives, which was a “significant cut” to the force. He said that Space Systems Command is looking to hire 100 civilians a month to mitigate that loss.

“The Space Force doesn’t have a problem with people wanting to join it,” Schiess said in the hearing when asked if the service is able to find that amount of civilians each month. “It’s just finding the right spot for them.”

The Space Force requested an additional 2,800 civilian employees in their fiscal year 2027 budget request, according to budget documents, for a total of 7,200 civilian jobs.

The Space Force is the smallest military service with a total workforce of 9,400 guardians, with civilians making up roughly half of the force.

A Government Accountability Office report released on July 14 found that the Space Force has not consistently and accurately determined its personnel requirements to meet its mission needs or accurately tracked the number of contractor personnel and the work they perform.

The report states that the Space Force continues to rely on Air Force processes and guidance that may not effectively suit their needs of a smaller service with evolving missions.

“The Space Force’s reliance on potentially outdated legacy requirements, Air Force-assessed requirements, and unit-assessed requirements that have been determined through different methods means that the service is likely operating with an inconsistent and potentially inaccurate measure of its personnel needs,” the report says.

The report recommends that the Space Force chief develop service-specific guidance to accurately determine personnel requirements; track the number of contractor personnel across the service; create a strategic workforce plan tailored to address competency gaps; and reevaluate the effectiveness of the current arrangement of Air Force-provided functions.

In the hearing, Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., pointed toward how Congress has strived to help the service boost their personnel through the Personnel Management Act, which allows the service to utilize full-time and part-time workers to attract more specialized talent.

“The ability for our folks to be part time or full time is a kind of a novel thing that the Space Force is doing,” Schiess said.

Schiess highlighted how the ability for workers to be either part or full time allows the influx of guardians that want to serve while also having a job elsewhere, whether it is in the industry or government, and bring that expertise back to the force. If needed, it also gives guardians the flexibility to be able to take care of family.

Wicker said that the Space Force’s workforce is needed to counter evolving threats and to deliver operational advantage.

“Our competitors are rapidly expanding their forces and fielding new capabilities,” Wicker said. “The United States cannot afford to respond with incremental growth while the threat accelerates.”

She left behind a teaching career she loved in San Antonio, Texas. Since arriving in California, Pasco has spent months navigating state credentialing requirements including additional coursework, English learner authorization and California-specific licensing before she can return to the classroom.

“The fastest way to get ghosted after a job interview is by telling them you’re a military spouse,” Pasco said. “They’ll say, ‘You’ve lived in a lot of places,’ and then comes the awkward, ‘Yeah ... I’m a military spouse.’ That’s why I’ve had jobs in different states. After that, I usually don’t hear from them again.”

Repeated rejection has taken a toll.

“I had a full breakdown today because it’s never been this hard,” she said. “I have three degrees and more than 10 years of experience, and people look at me like I have nothing to offer.”

Pasco isn’t alone. Military spouse employment has become a recurring concern for military leaders, lawmakers and military family organizations, which have increasingly linked spouse employment to family financial stability, quality of life and retention.

In efforts to address the issue, Congress has advanced bipartisan legislation, the Defense Department has expanded employment programs and nonprofit organizations and private employers have invested heavily in helping military spouses enter the workforce.

Even so, the Military Family Advisory Network’s 2025 Military Family 360 Report, released in June, found unemployment among active-duty spouses actively seeking work climbed to 29.9% in 2025, up from 21.8% in 2023.

A decade of attention

Congress has spent more than a decade trying to reduce the employment barriers military spouses face.

Lawmakers expanded federal hiring preferences, supported interstate occupational licensing reforms and backed Defense Department programs intended to ease employment transitions after permanent change-of-station moves.

More recently, bipartisan lawmakers introduced the Military Spouse Hiring Act, which would add military spouses to the federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit and offer employers a tax incentive to hire them.

The legislation has not become law, but Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., said his office is now pursuing the proposal through broader legislation to reauthorize and expand the Work Opportunity Tax Credit.

“The problem of military spouse unemployment and underemployment is a difficult one to easily solve,” Beyer told Military Times.

Frequent relocations, assignments to rural or economically depressed communities, deployments and unpredictable military schedules continue to disrupt careers in ways most civilian families never experience, he said.

Beyer said Congress has made progress, pointing to expanded hiring preferences and growing employer engagement, while acknowledging that legislation alone has not consistently translated into better outcomes.

“A consistent challenge has been in the implementation of various well-meaning federal initiatives,” he said.

Federal hiring preferences have created opportunities, Beyer said, but lengthy hiring timelines, limited awareness of available programs and complicated eligibility requirements often reduce their impact for military spouses who may relocate again within a few years.

“We can and should do better in holding ourselves accountable in measuring progress and changing course if a specific program is falling short,” he said.

Barriers remain

MFAN’s 2025 Military Family 360 Report found unemployment among active-duty spouses actively seeking work increased sharply over the past two years, while 55.9% reported being underemployed, meaning they earned less than they needed, worked fewer hours than they wanted or held positions below their education or level of experience.

Shannon Razsadin, chief executive officer of the Military Family Advisory Network said, “What’s remained consistent is the structural nature of the challenge itself.”

Blue Star Families reached a similar conclusion through a three-year longitudinal study conducted with Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families. Despite being a highly educated population, only 22% of participating military spouses maintained full-time employment throughout the study, even though 43% held advanced degrees.

Researchers found that repeated PCS moves, child care challenges, occupational licensing requirements and the demands of military life continued to interrupt careers long after spouses entered the workforce.

“One of the biggest misunderstandings is that military spouse employment is primarily a job-search problem,” said Lindsay Knight, chief impact officer at Blue Star Families. “It is more accurately a career-continuity problem.”

The organization’s research also found that military spouses often accepted positions below their qualifications because those jobs offered greater flexibility or were easier to leave when military orders arrived. Child care repeatedly emerged as a deciding factor in whether spouses accepted promotions, reduced their hours or left the workforce altogether.

Beyond getting hired

As senior vice president of programs and events at Hiring Our Heroes, Elizabeth O’Brien has spent more than a decade helping military spouses connect with employers. During that time, she has watched opportunities expand in ways that were difficult to imagine when she entered the field.

“If there has been a time to be a military spouse that wants to enter the workforce, there’s better opportunity now than there has ever been,” she said.

Remote work has expanded. Employer partnerships have grown. Programs such as the Department of Defense’s SpouseWorks program (formerly SECO), have broadened access to fellowships and career services.

Still, O’Brien cautioned against expecting legislation alone to solve the problem.

“I don’t know that Congress can legislate everything that needs to happen,” she said.

Military spouses often navigate challenges that extend well beyond the hiring process. Frequent moves interrupt professional networks. Occupational licensing requirements differ from state to state. Child care availability can determine whether a spouse is able to accept or keep a job. Even resume screening systems can struggle to interpret employment histories shaped by repeated relocations.

O’Brien agreed with researchers who argue that maintaining a career has become as important as finding the next job.

“I agree with the goal of career continuity,” she said. “But we have to start at the very beginning before we can get there”

O’Brien believes employers also have an opportunity to think differently about retention. Rather than measuring success solely by whether a military spouse remains with one company, O’Brien said industries should work together to retain talent across employers when military families relocate.

A financial professional who moves from one institution to another after a PCS, for example, has continued building a career even if the employer changes.

“If the industry is working together,” she said, “the military spouse has a better opportunity for career continuity.”

The stakes extend beyond professional fulfillment. Blue Star Families found 77% of military families now rely on two incomes to meet their financial needs, up from 63% in 2019.

Interrupted careers can delay promotions, reduce earning potential and make it more difficult for families to regain financial footing after each move.

For Pasco, those realities are measured one application at a time.

Every PCS has meant rebuilding professional relationships, learning another state’s requirements and explaining why her resume spans multiple duty stations instead of a single community.

“I’m not asking for special treatment,” she said. “I just want someone to look at my experience and see what I can actually do.”

Two months before Pete Hegseth appeared in front of Congress to testify in his confirmation to be secretary of defense, he sat across from the podcaster Shawn Ryan, talking about the Pentagon’s 2015 decision to open ground combat roles to women.

“It hasn’t made us more effective. It hasn’t made us more lethal,” Hegseth said. “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles.”

By the time of Hegseth’s appearance on the show in late 2024, women had been serving in combat positions for nearly a decade across the military. The decision to integrate women had been thoroughly studied — before, during, and after the process — and thousands of women had served in roles ranging from infantry to combat engineers to special operations. The debate over women in combat was largely considered to be over.

But Hegseth was looking to reignite that debate. His book, “The War on Warriors,” which he was on the show to promote, dedicated a full chapter to the idea.

“Dads take us to push risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes,” he wrote in the book. “We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.”

Hegseth softened his rhetoric during his January 2025 confirmation hearing, telling senators that women service members deserved the opportunity to serve in any role they qualified for.

“Women in our military, as I’ve said publicly, have and continue to make amazing contributions across all aspects of our battlefield,” he said.

Yet barely two months into his tenure at the Pentagon, Hegseth was already laying the groundwork to call into question those contributions. In March, he created a task force to review standards. Then, in December, the Pentagon’s personnel chief, Anthony Tata, announced a “review of the operational effectiveness” of ground combat units in the Army and Marine Corps, according to an internal memo obtained by The War Horse.

Now, that study is raising fears among military researchers and advocates for service women.

“We’re all concerned that this study is going to be used as a pretext to remove women from combat arms,” said Sue Fulton, the executive director of the Women in the Service Coalition, which advocates for women in the military.

Advocates have reason to worry: The researcher leading the current study on the issue, Jane Pinelis, helped lead a controversial review for the Marine Corps in 2015 that found mixed-gender units did not perform as well as all-male units. In his book, Hegseth drew heavily on that study to support the argument that women should not serve in combat arms.

“It was a flawed design from the get-go,” retired Army Col. Ellen Haring told NPR in 2015.

Defense officials initially assigned the current study to the Institute for Defense Analyses in December—only to change course and move the study to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where Pinelis works, in April.

The highly unusual decision raises questions about the study’s independence, according to advocates and defense analysts.

“Why was this removed from IDA, where this kind of research is in their wheelhouse, and given to [the Applied Physics Lab], where this is clearly outside their expertise?” Fulton asked.

‘What is the problem we’re trying to solve?’

At his confirmation hearings, Hegseth told lawmakers that his concerns were not about women in combat, but rather, that standards had fallen to facilitate the integration of women in those units.

This February, after the Pentagon began its review, Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, asked the senior enlisted leaders from each military branch to testify on whether standards had been lowered. All of them said no.

“I’ve seen no data that supports that there’s been any lowering of standards or that there’s lowering of the readiness of units with those females in those units,” Navy Master Chief David Isom, a SEAL serving as the senior enlisted advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified.

Women who have served in combat roles agree.

“It becomes abundantly apparent very quickly if you are contributing to the team or detracting from the team when you have to move 40 ammo cans from point A to point B,” a female officer who served in the 75th Ranger Regiment told the military news website Task & Purpose earlier this year.

Even before combat units were integrated, women guarded convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan, accompanied special operations soldiers on missions, and frequently came under enemy fire.

“Women were already serving in combat,” said Rita Graham, the policy director at Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group for women in the military. The decision to open all combat roles to women came in part because four women service members, along with SWAN, sued the military for sex discrimination.

“They were being denied the recognition, the training, the medals, leadership opportunities, but most importantly, the career advancement,” Graham said.

Yet almost since he assumed office, Hegseth has been searching for evidence that standards have slipped.

Early on, Hegseth convened a team of advisors to evaluate standards at the Army’s Ranger School and special operations training programs. Hegseth served in Iraq with the team’s leader, Eric Geressy, who retired from the Army as a sergeant major. In “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth notes that Geressy was critical of women moving into frontline positions, which he called “chicken shit.”

The team quickly moved to lay the groundwork for a new study of women in combat, beginning with visits to Ranger School in March 2025 to “review and restore” standards, according to documents reviewed by The War Horse. Tata announced the study internally nine months later.

“Service members want a challenge[,] they do not want to be part of a loosing [sic] team and want to serve alongside the best,” a briefing document from the team’s visit to Ranger School said.

Laura Junor Pulzone, who served as the Pentagon’s principal deputy undersecretary for personnel and readiness as the military prepared for full gender integration in 2014, questioned whether a new study was even necessary.

“I was the readiness person,” said Junor Pulzone. “The only thing that mattered to me was making sure that we had a predictably ready force that was capable of executing the national defense strategy, full stop.”

“What I saw was an analytically based, sound way of doing this,” she said, noting that she would have raised red flags if she felt the military had not fully studied and prepared for the transition to gender-integrated combat units.

Gender-neutral standards for jobs open to men and women in the military were first required more than 30 years ago, as the military began training women to fly fighter jets. The same requirement held true for combat roles as they opened to women, and there is scant evidence that standards for those positions have declined in the past decade.

“This study has already been done,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Penn., an Air Force veteran, told The War Horse. “We know that women who serve continue to perform and meet the same standards in ground combat as their male colleagues.”

Since 2015, thousands of women have served in Army ground combat units, and hundreds more have served in similar Marine units. Multiple women have completed Army Special Forces training and the Air Force’s special warfare training pipeline. More than 180 women have graduated from the Army’s Ranger School, one of the military’s most demanding combat leadership courses. And a recent Army study found that women who completed the course showed fewer signs of physiological stress at the end of training than men.

Researchers who spoke with The War Horse said a new study makes sense if at least some anecdotal evidence found problems in mixed-gender combat units. But that has not been the case, they said.

“What is the evidence of the problem?” Junor Pulzone said. “What is the problem we’re trying to solve?”

Researchers also told The War Horse the timeframe of the study — initially six months, though extended to a year when it was transferred to Johns Hopkins — was unusually compressed.

“If I were to set up doing a study like this, it would be a large mixed-methods [study]. There would be a lot of data from the past. There’d also be a lot of conversations that would have to happen—interviews, focus groups, which are going to require some pretty significant institutional review board proposals, as well as data-sharing agreements,” said another researcher who has studied women in the military extensively and who declined to be named over potential career impacts.

“It’s a very short time for a study like this.”

A controversial study

On its website, the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins lists 39 areas of expertise, ranging from “space technology” to “tactical and ballistic missile defense systems” to “cyber-physical security.” It does not list anything related to military readiness, personnel, or ground combat.

That has raised suspicions among military researchers, who told The War Horse they were surprised the Pentagon moved the study from the Institute for Defense Analyses to Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory. It’s unusual for the Pentagon to change the institution conducting a study, particularly in the middle of it, they said.

“Shopping around for researchers is not a good look,” Junor Pulzone said.

And the choice of the Applied Physics Laboratory struck researchers as especially unusual.

“They have robotics people, AI people, chemists. I don’t understand why they have [the study]. I really don’t. It doesn’t make any sense,” said one researcher, who spoke on condition of anonymity over fears of potential career impacts.

A Pentagon spokesperson declined to answer The War Horse’s questions on the record. But in a response provided on background, a Pentagon official said that after the study was assigned to the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Defense Department “recognized the need to incorporate combat-relevant field tests” into the assessment.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory “has the capability to examine existing personnel and operational data, as well as conduct the field tests,” the official said.

The Applied Physics Laboratory did not respond to requests for comment.

“The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is a world-renowned research institution focused on artificial intelligence, robotics, and emerging scientific discoveries — no doubt vital and urgent work,” Houlahan said. “However, the Applied Physics Lab is not the first place that comes to mind when examining the role of women in ground combat.”

On Pinelis’ LinkedIn profile, the study’s lead researcher describes her current role as chief AI engineer at the Applied Physics Lab. She also lists work as the chief scientist for special operations. Years before, in 2015, as a statistician, she led the design and analysis of the Marine Corps study into gender-integrated units.

That study concluded that all-male units outperformed mixed-gender units on 69% of tasks. At its conclusion, the Marine Corps requested an exemption from the Pentagon’s directive to open all combat roles to women.

“This was a very politically unpopular conclusion,” Pinelis told an interviewer from Forbes in 2022. “There’s no room for compromise when it comes to scientific rigor.”

Pinelis did not respond to a request for comment from The War Horse.

The methodology behind the 2015 study drew sharp critiques. Critics pointed out that the units drew experienced male Marines, while female Marine volunteers had just gone through the Marine Corps’ initial nine-week infantry training course and only had to meet the minimum male physical fitness score to participate. It also evaluated women based on average scores, rather than assessing how capable individual female Marines were of meeting a standard.

“The fear is that something similar could happen,” said SWAN’s Graham, who previously served as an Army field artillery officer after the specialty was opened to women. “We’re really not opposed to an evidence-based review, if it’s done legitimately, if it’s done with the proper research questions, if it’s done with the proper sample sizes.”

In “The War on Warriors,” subtitled “Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” Hegseth cites the study’s finding that female Marines were injured at a higher rate than male Marines as evidence that women should not serve in combat. But Marine Corps briefing materials on the study found that better screening for physical fitness would have eliminated that issue.

Critics also note that the Marine Corps’ summary of the study omitted findings favorable to mixed-gender units, which had better problem-solving skills, higher morale, and fewer disciplinary issues than all-male units.

Advocates for women in combat argue that Hegseth’s fixation on standards — which he often ties to physical fitness —reflects a limited understanding of the reality of modern combat, which requires soldiers to be flexible, solve complex problems, and increasingly demonstrate technical proficiency.

Designing a study to clearly answer the question of whether women should be in combat units is exceptionally difficult, said Michael McGurk, the former director of research and analysis at the Army’s Center for Initial Military Training, because so many issues come into play.

“How do you determine that women are the factor that’s causing the difference, and not the company commander’s leadership, the sergeant’s leadership?” he said. “You can always find the tactical reason why we shouldn’t do this.”

The future of combat

This March, Houlahan introduced a bill addressing the Pentagon’s decision to reexamine women in combat.

“Now more than ever, we should be supporting each and every servicemember willing to wear the uniform, not scrutinizing and pushing out qualified women simply because they are women,” Houlahan said in a statement.

The bill, called the WARRIOR Act, would prohibit gender-based exclusion in the military and ensure that positions have clear standards reflecting the needs of the job—not only physical requirements, but tactical, technical, and cognitive demands.

Advocates who spoke to The War Horse agree that not every woman is up to the task of serving in combat roles. But if the military is to operate as a true meritocracy, they argue, then everyone — men and women — should be given an opportunity to serve as long as they meet the high standards those jobs require.

“We can’t claim something as the Army’s premier leadership school, and say, well, you know, it’s only for leaders that are male,” said Thomas Stone, a former Army Ranger who oversaw training given to soldiers prior to Ranger School when women were first permitted to attend the course.

And as the nature of combat evolves, so do the skills required of a soldier to excel in it.

Stone pointed out that fitness standards — like the Army Ranger requirement to hike 12 miles with a 35-pound pack — are rooted in earlier conflicts, from a different time. He argued that focusing so much attention on a question of standards developed for older conflicts risks misunderstanding the requirements of a future conflict. The Pentagon, Stone noted, recently earmarked $54 billion for autonomous warfare in its upcoming budget.

“What does the future of war look like?” he said. “Don’t you want the best human being, regardless of gender, piloting that humanoid robot?”

It isn’t a deployment. For the Thomas family, it’s simply military life. For generations, military families were expected to pack up together every time orders arrived. Today, some families are making a different calculation.

Rather than uprooting children’s schools, abandoning established careers, leaving specialized medical care or disrupting custody arrangements, they are maintaining separate households while remaining married, a practice military families often call “geo-baching,” short for geographic bachelorhood.

“Well, you made this choice”

Thomas never imagined living hundreds of miles from her husband. Friends often assume deployments are the hardest part of military life. She disagrees. “To the outside world, you’re still married, your spouse is safe and life appears normal,” Thomas said. “For most we hear, ‘Well, you made this choice,’ but normal is not the word I would use to describe raising children, maintaining a home, nurturing a marriage and carrying the weight of everyday life from different states.”

For Thomas, remaining in Florida preserved two careers, her children’s routines and the support system the family had built.

As Thomas began sharing her family’s experience, military spouses from every service branch reached out with similar stories. Some remained behind to preserve careers or children’s educational stability. Others stayed because of specialized medical care, or support networks.

Those conversations led Thomas to found Family in Flight, a nonprofit that provides peer support, resources and travel assistance to geographically separated military families. She said the organization has connected with hundreds of spouses navigating long-distance marriages shaped not by deployment, but by military life itself.

Jeanne Caruso wanted nothing more than to accompany her husband to his assignment in Okinawa. Instead, she remained in the United States because the specialized care she relies on to manage epilepsy would not be available there. Moving overseas, she said, could place her health at significant risk.

For Navy spouse Tiffany Nguyen, the decision centered on her son. The family was preparing for an overseas move when they learned their child had been deemed unsuitable for permanent change of station by DoDEA based on his Individualized Education Program. Nguyen said she is challenging the determination, arguing that it contains significant discrepancies. She said the family was told schools overseas would be unable to meet her son’s educational needs.

The circumstances differ. The outcome does not. Each family found itself weighing military orders against another responsibility they were unwilling or unable to leave behind.

Although the Defense Department does not track voluntary geographic separation among married service members, Blue Star Families has documented the practice before. In its 2015 Military Family Lifestyle Survey, one in five active-duty family respondents reported choosing geographic bachelorhood at least once during their military career. The most common reasons were a spouse’s career, short military assignments and children’s education.

More recent Blue Star Families research no longer measures geographic bachelorhood specifically, but many of the pressures remain. The organization’s 2025 Military Family Lifestyle Survey identified military spouse employment, military pay, time away from family and dependent children’s education among the leading quality-of-life concerns for active-duty families. Nearly seven in 10 respondents said two incomes were essential to their family’s financial well-being.

A different kind of separation

From the outside, geographic separation can look manageable. Children still go to school. Service members remain stateside. There are no deployment ceremonies or homecomings marking the separation on the immediate calendar.

Inside those households, spouses describe something very different. Thomas handled school pickups, doctor’s appointments, home repairs, sports schedules and sick days without her husband physically present. Parenting conversations happened by phone. Milestones unfolded over video calls.

“It looked like sitting alone at night after the kids were in bed and realizing there was no one else in the house to share the day with,” she said.

Deployment brings family readiness groups, organized community support and a shared understanding that the separation is temporary. Geographic separation often does not.

“When a service member deploys, people understand the sacrifice,” Thomas said. “There are support groups, resources and conversations surrounding that experience. Geo-baching often exists in the shadows.”

A category that doesn’t officially exist

Military families have long navigated involuntary separations through deployments and unaccompanied overseas tours, where the Defense Department determines a service member cannot bring dependents because of mission requirements or host-nation restrictions.

Geographic bachelorhood is different.

Because the arrangement is generally voluntary, the Defense Department does not recognize “geo-bachelor” as an official personnel status or maintain department-wide data on how many families live this way. Married service members who voluntarily relocate without their dependents are generally governed by existing housing and installation policies rather than a separate geo-bachelor program.

Thomas said she still believes her family made the right decision, even though it came at a cost. “We were grateful for the opportunity, the career and that we still had each other through all of that,” she said. “Both realities can exist at once and that is OK.”

Military conflicts, especially the war in Iran, have “tested” the Space Force substantially for the past five months, Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Sen. Jack Reed, D-RI, said Thursday in a hearing to discuss the nomination of Schiess to be the third-ever chief of space operations for the Space Force.

“Space Force assets were among the first to be deployed in Operation Epic Fury and among the first to be targeted,” Reed said in the hearing. “Iran has specifically targeted Space Force command and control nodes and weapon systems throughout this conflict.”

In an Air Force statement announcing Schiess’ nomination, it said that operations such as Iran and Venezuela have “underscored guardians’ ability to deliver combat-ready, asymmetric advantages from space.”

Iran has claimed to have the ability to effectively use the space domain for satellite intelligence and reconnaissance and space launch vehicles with assistance from partners, such as Russia, which could interfere with U.S. or allied assets.

Reed said that Space Force officials before Schiess spent the past seven years since its creation building the organization from scratch through focusing on issues like personnel, infrastructure and base operations.

“That was appropriate for a new service finding its footing, but the Space Force is quickly becoming a mature warfighting entity,” Reed said.

Schiess argued that American space capabilities are crucial to deterring adversaries, like China and Russia, as the countries continue to boost their own capabilities in an effort to exploit space for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance purposes as well as fielding systems that can threaten the U.S. link to American forces.

“The United States no longer has the luxury of viewing space as a permissive environment,” Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said in the hearing. “China and Russia have made clear that they see space as a critical warfighting domain.”

In particular, Schiess said that China’s anti-satellite tests and electronic jamming capabilities are “worrisome” as they use their efforts to target American forces farther than in the past.

“[China] built a kill chain to be able to see our carrier strike groups, our bombers, at much farther pace, speed and distances, and they’ve also developed missiles and weapon systems to go after that,” Schiess said. “So the Space Force needs to be able to bring capability to deny, degrade that kill web to be able to protect the joint force.”

When asked if the fight of the next major conflict would be in space, Schiess said it’s a possibility. He said that if not, space would be at the very forefront of a conflict, especially with China and Russia.

“I think about China every day,” Schiess said.

Schiess was first nominated by President Donald Trump to be the force’s highest-ranking officer in May. If confirmed, he would take over the role from Gen. Chance Saltzman, who is scheduled to retire this year after serving in the role for four years.

In a surprising moment that followed more than an hour of heated debate over the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act on the House floor, Rep. Chris DeLuzio, D-Pa., offered a motion to return the bill to the House Veterans Affairs Committee for review.

The vote on DeLuzio’s proposal was to precede a final vote on the legislation, which has divided veterans groups, and the chamber rejected the effort in a 210-211 vote, with one of four Republicans who initially supported it, Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., changing her vote at the last minute.

But instead of proceeding with the final vote as planned, House leadership pulled the bill, with Johnson saying a decision on the measure now will be delayed for several weeks.

Punchbowl News reported that Johnson blamed “misinformation” over the bill for his reasons to hold the vote.

“Our Veterans Affairs Committee has done a great job engaging with veterans … There still remains, though, a lot of misinformation out there, so instead of putting the bill on the floor this afternoon, we’re gonna delay it just a bit. We’re gonna have several more weeks ahead of us before we get back here in September would be my guess when we process all this again,” Johnson told reporters.

The Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, H.R. 9237, encompasses more than 60 pieces of legislation, many of which have widespread support among veterans and advocates, such as the Major Richard Star Act, which would give retired, combat-injured veterans their full Veterans Affairs disability compensation and military retirement, and the Love Lives On Act, which would continue benefits for surviving spouses of the fallen if they remarry before age 55.

But the proposal for covering the cost — enacting a planned rule that would change the requirements for disability compensation for two conditions that commonly affect veterans, sleep apnea and tinnitus, has split the veterans community and lawmakers.

Supporters say the payment proposal is vital to getting the legislation made into law while critics argue that future benefits for veterans should not be used to pay for current needs.

At least 22 veterans organizations support the bill. During a press conference Tuesday, Mario Marquez, the executive director of government affairs for the American Legion, said the proposal represents the best way forward for getting top priorities accomplished.

“Leadership is about carefully evaluating the facts making difficult decisions and accepting responsibility for those actions and those decisions,” Marquez said. “Progress only happens when leaders are willing to tackle difficult issues and keep veterans at the center of the conversation.”

But other groups vociferously oppose it, with the VFW and Disabled American Veterans leading the charge. Their representatives joined Democrat lawmakers in a press conference Wednesday to push lawmakers to vote against the bill.

Past VFW National Legislative Service Director Pat Murray said as an amputee who lost his leg in Iraq and medically retired, he would receive increased compensation as a result of the bill. But, he added, he didn’t want to “get those benefits at the expense of others.”

“We support the provisions of the Major Richard Star Act and we want the full act passed because that is what veterans deserve,” Murray said.

Prior to the planned vote Thursday, lawmakers engaged in heated debate that pitted the chairman and ranking member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee against one another. Chairman Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., said he had taken a lot of heat over the proposal but believed the bill helps “the greatest number of veterans.”

“This bill includes long-standing priorities for veterans, and importantly, it does so in a way that is paid for and capable of actually moving from here to the Senate and to the President’s desk,” Bost said. “At some point, we have to decide whether we’re going to keep talking about these promises or actually move a package that can become law.”

Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., the committee’s ranking member, has proposed pulling apart the legislation and voting separately on the provisions. Takano said that while he supports many of the legislation’s provisions, he disagrees with a proposal to raise VA home loan fees, several GI Bill initiatives, some health proposals and the payment structure.

“Let’s be crystal clear about what this bill does. It says to troops downrange right now who are in harm’s way that they have to have worse benefits than veterans have today to pay for benefits and care that other veterans have earned. That’s ridiculous,” Takano said.

VA officials confirmed to Military Times that they intend to follow through on the audiology portion of the proposed rule, which would mean that tinnitus, which currently receives a 10% disability rating, would be treated as a symptom of another condition, such as hearing loss or a traumatic brain injury, and would no longer get a standalone rating.

The officials did not address the sleep apnea portion of the rule, but a Politico reporter posted a message on X saying administration officials told her the VA has “made no move to withdraw the proposed sleep apnea rule and will be moving forward with the rule change that appeared on the regulatory agenda.”

Under the proposed rule, veterans with asymptomatic sleep apnea or a mild case controlled by treatment could receive a 0% disability rating.

Bost said that if the VA moves ahead with the 2022 proposed rule, without his legislation, the savings would return to the Treasury Department and not be allocated specifically to veterans.

The estimated savings of enacting the rule could be $57 billion over 10 years.

“New Mexicans who have been affected by these exposures deserve compensation and they deserve to get that compensation free from bad actors attempting to take advantage of them,” Lopez said in a release shortly after a major expansion and extension of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) was signed into law on July 4, 2025.

The measure finally included the New Mexico “Downwinders” from the Trinity blast and their surviving families who were excluded from coverage when RECA initially passed in 1990. Previously, it covered only specific counties in Nevada, Arizona and Utah, which had been exposed to fallout from the more than 900 atomic tests, including 100 above ground, at the Nevada test range between January 1951 and September 1992.

The government at the time claimed there was insufficient data on the impacts of the fallout from the Trinity test to include New Mexico in the coverage.

When the new RECA bill passed last year as part of President Donald Trump’s “one big beautiful” tax-cutting bill, it was the first time in 80 years since the Trinity blast that the government acknowledged New Mexicans were entitled to federal assistance.

At a virtual news conference Tuesday, two days before the 81^st anniversary of the Trinity blast, advocates for expanding and extending the current RECA Act, which is set to sunset in 2028, also warned again of the continuing attempts by scam artists to steal compensation from the victims.

Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., said the long-awaited compensation for the Downwinders had also “opened the door to rampant fraud,” and he urged those eligible for the $100,000 to guard against “bad actors in our community.”

Vasquez also called for the current RECA act to be extended for another 15 years past the 2028 deadline to ensure all victims are compensated.

He urged that the compensation be increased from $100,000 to $150,000.

Even before claims under the new RECA Act could be filed, scammers allegedly were at work last July at a booth at the Eastern Navajo Fair in Crown Point, New Mexico. The booth boasted of assistance in filing claims, according to Maggie Billman, a member of the Sawmill Warriors group advocating for radiation survivors of the Navajo nation.

Billman told Native News Online that she was alarmed by the supposedly official claims forms attendants at the booth were handing out. The forms asked for Social Security Numbers, phone numbers and the hospital where treatment was given.

“I looked at the woman and I said, ‘This is not RECA. Why don’t you give me your business card, and I’ll be in touch? I know a lot about this bill.’ That’s when they stopped talking to me, and I walked away,” Billman said.

Tina Cordova, a co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium advocacy group and a cancer survivor herself, was not surprised at Billman’s experience with the scammers. She added that she would continue to advocate for New Mexicans with illnesses that do not qualify for compensation under RECA.

“I think that it’s high time our government realizes that we are not going to stand for justice for some,” Cordova said. “We are in favor of justice for not just a few, but justice for the many, and we will continue to fight until we receive justice for all.”

Since RECA was enacted in 1990, the program has approved over 41,000 claims, totaling more than $2.6 billion to Downwinders, according to the Justice Department, which administers the program.

The virtual news conference came two days before the 81^st anniversary of the Trinity blast. In 1945, an eclectic group of scientists enrolled by physicist Robert Oppenheilmer to develop and detonate an atomic bomb gathered in the New Mexico desert to watch whether the thing they called “the gadget” would actually work and usher the world into the atomic age.

Hegseth mulls benefits fix for veterans exposed to radiation at A-bomb test site

The plutonium bomb of about 19-21 kilotons went off at what was then called 5:59 a.m. Mountain War Time with a blinding light visible over a 160-mile radius. It sent up a fiery mushroom cloud hotter than the core of the sun, according to numerous accounts of that morning by the participants and others.

New Mexicans were told nothing. They were not warned before nor after the blast. The public was not told of the Trinity blast until the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war with Japan.

In the interim, the U.S. Army put out a not-to-worry release attributing the colossal blast and fallout to an ammo dump explosion: “Explosion of an ammunition magazine on the Alamogordo Air Base reservation this morning, heard and seen for many miles, was reported today by William O. Eareckson, commanding officer of the air base. There was no loss of life or injuries of persons, Earekson said.”

The Trinity site is now part of the Army’s White Sands Missile Range, which planned no ceremonies nor open house events to mark the anniversary.

The site is opened to the public only once a year in October, and visitors are warned against picking up any of the strange so-called “Trinitite” green and red rocks that were formed when desert sand was sucked up into the mushroom cloud and heated to a glass-like substance before falling back to earth.

The Trinitite still contains tiny traces of radiation. It’s against the law for visitors to try to take the rocks home as souvenirs.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., raised concerns about anti-competitive tactics, questioning the practice of allowing Express Scripts — the largest pharmacy benefit manager in the United States — to have the contract as exclusive administrator of the Tricare pharmacy program, while owning and operating two mail-order pharmacies, Express Scripts Pharmacy and Accredo Specialty Pharmacy.

She questioned whether Express Scripts drives more business to itself, pushing local pharmacies out of the Tricare network and limiting beneficiaries’ access to more personalized local care.

“That is a clear conflict of interest,” Warren said during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services’ personnel subcommittee. It’s “an open invitation for Express Scripts to milk the federal government, kick out competitors, and steer big bucks to itself.”

Warren, ranking member of that subcommittee, said DoD requires the Tricare pharmacy contractor to own both a pharmacy benefit manager and a pharmacy.

The contractor, Express Scripts, receives a fixed administrative fee per prescription filled at retail pharmacies or the mail order pharmacy, said Dr. David J. Smith, a retired Navy rear admiral who is deputy director of the Defense Health Agency. The contractor can’t generate revenue from the prices of drugs, he said, and the DoD model eliminates common commercial industry profit mechanisms.

Under the mail-order program, the government buys the drugs, and Express Scripts dispenses the drugs and are paid that administrative fee. The amount of that fee, or other information about the contract, is not public knowledge, as DoD and Express Scripts consider it proprietary information.

Beneficiaries pay $14 per prescription filled through the mail order pharmacy and $16 at network retail pharmacies. That money isn’t kept by Express Scripts; it goes to the Defense Health Agency, said Adam Kautzner, president of Express Scripts and Evernorth Care Management. Beneficiaries can get their prescriptions filled at military treatment facilities at no charge.

In general, DoD has been trying to move to mail order because it’s cheaper, Smith said, and because of the convenience for beneficiaries.

DoD continues to find ways to deliver the benefit to make sure beneficiaries have access to their medication, in a “fiscally responsible way,” he said, adding that they’re also working on ways to shore up the supply chain for medications.

But as the government contractor, Express Scripts decides which pharmacies are in the Tricare retail pharmacy network and how much they are reimbursed.

Since 2022, more than 13,000 local pharmacies have left the network, leaving nearly 400,000 military families scrambling to find a new pharmacy in network, Warren said.

Currently, there are 46,000 retail pharmacies across the country that voluntarily participate in the Tricare retail pharmacy network, Kautzner said. As a result, 98% of beneficiaries have a retail option within 15 minutes of their home, he said, which exceeds the contract requirements.

Of the 46,000 pharmacies in the network, 16,000 are independent pharmacies.

Among those pharmacies that left the network was Roden-Smith Pharmacy in Clovis, N.M. Its owner, Micah Lansford, testified that the terms of the contract Express Scripts offered his pharmacy forced them out of the program in 2023.

Under the previous contract, the pharmacy had been reimbursed an average of about $0.37 below their actual cost for the 6,750 prescriptions they filled, causing the pharmacy to lose nearly $2,500 in 2022.

Under the terms of the contract Express Scripts proposed for 2023, Roden-Smith would have lost nearly $9 on average for each prescription and $60,000 for the same volume in 2023.

Lansford described the real-life consequences for the military community of. having fewer local pharmacies.

“Community pharmacies like mine provide a higher level of personal care, easier access,” he said.

He gave the example of a disabled U.S. Air Force retiree, whose caregiver relied on Lansford to review each monthly fill of medications, reconciling any changes and making sure his medications still made sense.

He also spoke of young active duty spouses who could no longer use his pharmacy drive-thru to pick up an antibiotic for their child, but are instead waiting in long lines to get onto base, hoping the antibiotic is in stock at the military pharmacy.

Greg Reybold, vice president of the American Pharmacy Cooperative, which includes about 1,500 independent pharmacies, said while Express Scripts touts the savings of the mail order pharmacy, it’s cheaper to fill prescriptions at the retail pharmacies than through Express Scripts mail order.

Filling generic drugs at Tricare retail pharmacies is cheaper for beneficiaries, and for the Defense Health Agency, he said. If for example, the drug costs the pharmacy $3, the beneficiary pays that instead of the usual $16 Tricare copay.

When 13,000 retail pharmacies left the network, he said, “the only winner was the Express Scripts mail order pharmacy,” because beneficiaries were forced to use that pharmacy.

Reybold and Lansford both called for an independent audit of the pharmacy program.

“We have a strong desire to serve these people, and want to be there for them,” Lansford said. “And we want a fair deal to provide service.”

The Anduril-made YFQ-44A executed an end-to-end, beyond-line-of-sight strike against a simulated target during a live-fire test at Edwards Air Force Base, California, according to a company social media post Wednesday.

The YFQ-44A opened fire on a digital target using an inert AIM-120, which is an advanced medium-range air-to-air missile, an Air Force spokesperson told Military Times.

“We’re one step closer to getting [collaborative combat aircraft] to the warfighter with this live fire test!” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach said in a Wednesday social media post.

The Air Force conducted hands-on testing with the YFQ-44A over a series of sorties in April. The aircraft first began its flight testing in October 2025. The CCAs are jet-powered, semi-autonomous aircraft meant to fly alongside crewed fighter jets, such as the F-35 and F-47.

The weapon was fired in a secluded airspace over the Mojave Desert with the 412th Test Wing’s Air Dominance Combined Test Force as part of a phased test progression that began with inert carriage evaluations earlier this year, according to a release.

Even though the aircraft are semi-autonomous and unmanned, the CCA will not autonomously deploy weapons, as the decision to release any remains with a human operator who has command and control of the platform at all times, per the statement.

To verify the aircraft’s handling, the previous inert weapons captive carry flights concentrated on collecting in-flight data, while following evaluations confirmed the data link integration between the aircraft and weapon system.

“Moving from inert carriage earlier in the year to this weapon release demonstrates program maturity, allowing us to validate our digital integration models with actual data,” Gen. Dale White, Department of Defense direct reporting portfolio manager for Critical Major Weapon Systems, said in the release.

The Air Force awarded the first CCA production contracts to Anduril and General Atomics last month for their YFQ-44A and YFQ-42A, respectively.

General Atomics’ YFQ-42A live-fire testing is slated for this fall, an Air Force spokesperson said. The YFQ-42A began its flight testing in August 2025.

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

The Pentagon announced Wednesday that Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata will draw from military personnel and civilian employees to create the panel, which is tasked with reviewing “the official decisions, coordination, planning, and execution of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate from January 2020 through January 2023.”

In a statement, Tata said the effort will help “establish permanent safeguards against future mandates.”

“By having members of the affected community lead the internal after-action review and further analyze how the COVID-19 vaccine mandate influenced decision-making and readiness — and making the findings public — we will ensure that the Department learns from the past and does not repeat these mistakes in the future,” Tata said.

In addition to Tata’s announcement, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pledged to declassify and release materials related to the mandate, which he said were “essential to learn the lessons of this national security event to ensure we do not make the mistakes of the past.”

The National Academy of Public Administration, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that studies management and organization, is responsible for conducting the after-action review.

According to NAPA, its report is expected to be completed by the end of the year. Hegseth said he would publish the organization’s findings by February 2027.

The COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, spreading globally across the world in a manner of months, infecting more than 779 million people in the years since and killing 7.1 million worldwide.

In the U.S., 103 million individuals have been infected and 1.2 million have died. Within the Department of Defense, 704,000 contracted COVID from March 2020 until December 2022, when the DoD stopped posting updated numbers.

Nearly 700 DoD-affiliated people, including 96 service members, 36 dependents, 417 civilian employees and 141 contractors, died.

To stop the spread of the evolving virus, the first Trump administration worked with private industry to develop a vaccine for the illness. The effort, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, fielded a vaccine within seven months, and over the course of the following year, 2 million U.S. service members were vaccinated.

But some personnel refused to get the vaccine, citing personal or religions reasons. Some felt that since they already contracted the virus, they didn’t need the vaccine, while others took issue with the relatively new technology behind the vaccines. The vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer both use messenger RNA to instruct the body to produce a piece of the virus protein to provoke an immune response.

Still others said they objected to the vaccines because they were created using cell lines developed from fetal tissue obtained in the 1970s and 1980s, although the vaccines themselves contain no aborted fetal tissue.

More than 53,000 filed for exemptions and at least 8,400 were discharged.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that allowed service members who refused the mandate to rejoin the military. From early 2023 through June 2025, 126 service members who had refused to receive the shot had returned to service.

At least 56 members of the U.S. Coast Guard who left service as a result of the mandate have returned to duty, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Although the Trump administration was at the forefront of developing a vaccine to stop the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the second Trump administration has taken steps to alter the long-accepted vaccine schedules for children and adults.

The Department of Health and Human Services has crafted a new vaccine recommendation for children that removes flu and COVID vaccines from the regular schedule as well as rotavirus, meningitis and hepatitis A and B.

In April, Hegseth canceled the Defense Department’s mandatory flu vaccine program for service members, saying it was “just overly broad and not rational.”

The military services began drafting requests for exceptions to the liberal policy, with Tata telling members of Congress in May that the services wanted the requirement to remain in place for personnel in close quarters, including basic training, ships, submarines and training schools.

In June, influenza swept through Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, infecting 285 airmen and hospitalizing six. One recruit, Keon McDaniel, died. The Air Force has not publicly stated his cause of death.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, and seven other Democrat lawmakers wrote Hegseth Tuesday demanding answers regarding McDaniel’s death.

Castro said earlier this month the Air Force told him McDaniel’s death was a result of the outbreak.

“Politicizing the administration of lifesaving vaccines has led to the death of a service member, the hospitalization of numerous trainees, and an expensive race to retroactively provide our service members the health care they need and deserve,” the group wrote.

The Defense Department did not respond by publication regarding questions on the cost of convening a panel to review the mandate.

The deals fall under the U.S. Air Force’s Family of Affordable Mass Missiles program, or FAMM. The Defense Department said it reached agreements with Anduril for its Barracuda-500, CoAspire for its Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile and Zone 5 Technologies for its Rusty Dagger.

The move boils down to cost-effectiveness. The Air Force is betting that low-cost weapons can do the work the service once reserved for far more expensive munitions.

Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, designed to be fired at heavily defended targets from a safe distance, cost more than $1.3 million apiece. The service wants its new missiles for a fraction of that, closer to $218,000 per round, cheap enough to shoot many for less than it once cost to shoot one.

The FAMM program splits into a lugged variant carried by fighters and bombers (FAMM-L) and a palletized variant dropped from airlifters (FAMM-P), both with ranges of 250 to 500 miles.

Anduril said its framework agreement runs seven years, with deliveries starting in 2027. According to the company, the Air Force intends to buy up to 8,000 FAMM rounds a year across both variants and all the competing vendors.

The deals are framework agreements, not orders for missiles. They set the terms and promise the companies steady business, giving them a reason to invest in bigger production lines.

The Defense Department said the missiles still have to complete testing and qualification, and that the actual buys depend on Congress approving the multiyear deals the Pentagon is seeking.

Anduril pitched its missile as proof that cheaper weapons can be built at volume.

“Barracuda-500 is specifically designed to expand the United States’ stand-off strike capability,” Anduril said in its release. “By augmenting existing critical munitions inventories with a more affordable, producible, and flexible option, Anduril is enhancing America’s arsenal of munitions, ensuring that we have the capability required to deter our adversaries.”

To keep the vendors competing, the Pentagon is splitting the work among all qualified suppliers under firm fixed-price terms with a minimum order floor, and companies that beat their production schedules become eligible for additional orders.

Budget projections call for 28,000 missiles across all vendors over five years for $12.6 billion, reaching 7,990 rounds in the final year.

The agreements stem from the Acquisition Transformation Strategy, the Pentagon’s push under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to buy weapons faster and from nontraditional suppliers.

Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Michael P. Duffey said the FAMM deals showed the department “expanding the defense industrial base, fielding capabilities faster, and attracting private investment.”

Zone 5 runs its U.S. operation from California but was acquired in June by Kongsberg, a Norwegian defense company. Anduril and CoAspire are based in California and Virginia, respectively.

The agreement comes on the heels of a May announcement that tapped the same three companies, along with Leidos, for the Army-led Low-Cost Containerized Missiles program, a parallel push for ground-launched affordable missiles.