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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, just months later, everything changed.

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

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

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

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

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

But for my mother, that future never came.

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

She chose us every time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hero Myth

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

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

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

The 400-Patrol Chasm

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

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

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

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

The Shame of the Living

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Stranger’s Love

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

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

The Price of Your Peace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rules of engagement exist in war for a reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is why rank matters.

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

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

This is especially misguided in the chaplaincy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hegseth reveals secret trip to Middle East amid escalating Iran war

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

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

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

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

Iran’s strategy of air denial is why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radar to detect and track missiles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why drones are harder to catch

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

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

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

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

Multiple methods

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

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

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

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

And that is precisely what the fellowship provided.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now consider how long it has taken to assemble.

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

US military assets flock to Middle East amid Iran standoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then they get elected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first: Sea kayaking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiking and climbing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tools, feats and brotherhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An application to discovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have searched for hope. My hunt continues.

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

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

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

I just don’t believe the answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’ll all soon be downhill, he said.

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

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

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

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

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

But 2 miles is infinite to me.

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

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

Expelling weakness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hadn’t earned these feelings.

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

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

Chasing purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it? is all I barked.

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

Probably, I said.

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

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

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

I stopped midstep.

I apologized.

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

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

The finish line

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

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

I run alone now.

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

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

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

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

But I can almost see the finish line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not an accident or a failure of planning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was something I had done a dozen times before, but in a flash I was on my back, ears ringing, lungs full of dust.

The blast knocked me out cold. When I came to, nothing was where it had been. The explosion left me with a traumatic brain injury and partial deafness in my right ear, with tinnitus that still rings to this day. I deal with memory loss, light sensitivity and sudden moments of confusion or panic that attack without warning.

So, when the possibility to test a virtual reality therapy program developed by Neurova Labs became available, I took it — not as a paid endorsement or promotional experiment, but as a disabled veteran looking for something that might actually help. I went into the process cautiously. PTSD and traumatic brain injuries do not present the same way for everyone, and there is no universal solution.

I am not a medical professional nor can I explain the underlying science in clinical terms. What I can offer here is a firsthand account of what this three week experience looked like and what, if anything, changed.

The therapy, first launched in 2024, follows a structured but approachable format. The program is designed as a three-week regimen, with two active weeks of VR sessions conducted four days per week.

Each session lasts between 45 minutes to an hour. Every session begins with a warm-up using a commercially available application that emphasizes fast-paced interaction with a virtual pistol. It is engaging and requires focus, coordination and quick reactions.

That warm-up is followed by the core Neurova Labs environment, which centers on a target practice-style scenario. Each session includes five rounds, roughly lasting five minutes apiece. The pace is steady and immersive, requiring sustained attention without becoming overwhelming.

The session ends with a cooldown phase that is intentionally slower and more abstract. This final segment uses calming sounds, soft music and shifting colors, with only limited interaction. The goal is clearly to bring the body down from heightened alertness into a calmer state.

I was skeptical going in, particularly about whether something so technology-driven could meaningfully impact symptoms rooted in trauma. What surprised me most was how quickly I noticed the changes, starting with my sleep regimen.

Before starting the program, I routinely woke up very early in the morning, often around 4 or 4:30 a.m., and struggled to fall back asleep. By the second week of therapy, I was sleeping later and more consistently, often until around 8:30 a.m.

The time it took me to fall asleep also shortened. That alone had a noticeable effect on my mood and energy throughout the day.

Sleep was not the only area where I saw improvement. Over the course of the three weeks, I noticed a shift in how I reacted to stress. As a freelance writer and creative, my work involves deadlines, travel and uncertainty. Combined with the broader stress of daily life, it is easy to slip into a constant state of anxiety.

During this period, I found that my fight or flight response did not take over as quickly, and when it did, I was able to step out of it faster than before. The stress was still there, but it felt more manageable.

That distinction matters.

For many people with PTSD, the challenge is not avoiding stress altogether, but shortening the amount of time the body stays stuck in a heightened state. Being able to regroup more quickly can change the course of an entire day.

Another encouraging aspect of the experience was seeing how actively the software is being developed. The program is still in its testing phase, and during my three weeks of use the program received multiple updates. That signaled an ongoing effort to refine and improve the product rather than treating it as a finished, static solution, which happens with a lot of the treatment programs offered to veterans today.

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Accessibility may be the most significant strength of the Neurova Labs approach. Traditional treatment pathways, particularly within the Department of Veterans Affairs, can be difficult to navigate. Appointments, long waits, unfamiliar clinical environments and administrative hurdles can themselves become sources of stress. For many veterans, that friction leads to disengagement from treatment entirely.

This model removes many of those barriers. As long as you have the headset, therapy can be done at home, on your schedule and in an environment you control. Morning sessions with coffee, afternoon sessions between work obligations or evening sessions after a difficult day are all possible. That level of autonomy changes how treatment feels. It becomes something you opt into rather than something you endure.

I spoke with other users who approach the program differently. One former Marine described using the therapy as a situational tool — logging sessions before or after known stressors rather than following a strict schedule. That flexibility suggests a broader range of use beyond structured programs, which may be especially helpful for veterans balancing work, family and ongoing care.

It is also important to be clear about what this is not. This is not a cure-all, and it is not a replacement for counseling, psychiatric care, or other evidence-based treatments. Neurova Labs does not present it that way.

What it offered me was an entry point. Feeling tangible improvement in one area made me more open to continuing therapy elsewhere, including reengaging with the VA and seeking additional counseling when needed.

Over the last three weeks my quality of life improved. I slept better. My mood was steadier. Social interaction felt less overwhelming.

As the company continues to refine its product and explore wider availability, accessibility may ultimately be its most meaningful contribution: Treatment that meets veterans where they are, rather than forcing them into systems they distrust.

That alone has the potential to keep more people engaged in care. For me, the biggest takeaway was simple. For the first time in a long time, I felt hopeful. That alone made it easier to keep going.

Camouflage patterns were designed to break up a human silhouette in various environments. Load-bearing vests, cargo pockets, reinforced boots and standardized cuts were functional necessities — solutions to problems that involved weight, heat, concealment and survival.

Over the last two decades, however, those solutions have been pulled into civilian fashion, stripped of context and resold as style.

Camo pants appear on runways. Tactical vests are worn to music festivals. Combat boots become seasonal staples. What was once functional equipment tied to service, sacrifice and sometimes trauma is now treated as visual shorthand for toughness or rebellion.

Ralph Lauren can’t stop ripping off military clothing

Camouflage is the clearest example. The pattern is now everywhere, from luxury collections to fast-fashion racks, often marketed as edgy or ironic. A 2025 Cosmopolitan article on camo’s resurgence outlined how patterns originally designed for concealment are now used to attract attention, often paired with bright colors, exaggerated cuts or intentionally impractical silhouettes.

That shift matters because camouflage was never neutral. Patterns were developed through research, testing and real-world application. They were worn by people operating in environments where being seen could mean death. When those patterns are removed from that context, they become abstract. The issue is not that civilians wear camo, but that camo becomes detached from the reality that produced it.

The same applies to tactical silhouettes. Plate carrier-style vests, MOLLE-inspired straps and oversized cargo pockets have become common in streetwear, especially among younger consumers. A New York Post article last year highlighted backlash aimed at Gen Z influencers who have embraced what critics called “World War III cosplay,” featuring combat-themed outfits worn purely for aesthetic effect. The criticism was less about age or taste and more about tone. To veterans and military families, those silhouettes are associated with training cycles, deployments and loss, not vibes.

The politics of military fashion are also difficult to separate from the visuals.

A New York Times piece published earlier this year examined how camo clothing exists at the intersection of military history, political identity and consumer culture, noting that what was once a government-issued pattern now signals everything from protest to patriotism depending on who is wearing it and why. The same jacket can read as anti-establishment, pro authority or simply trendy, depending on the context that is often flattened in mass marketing.

For veterans, this flattening can feel jarring. Military uniforms are not costumes. Even after leaving service, many veterans are conscious of what they wear and when. There is an unspoken rule about earned symbols, especially patches, unit identifiers and medals.

While most service members understand that camo pants or boots are not stolen valor, the casual use of tactical gear can still land strangely.

As an Army veteran, I spent years wearing uniforms that were issued, inspected and worn for specific reasons. Every pocket had a purpose. Every strap was adjusted for weight distribution. When I see a tactical vest worn over a mesh shirt at a festival, my first instinct is not offense but confusion.

That disconnect is where frustration often lives for veterans. It is not about ownership of style. It is about meaning. Military gear is designed through lessons learned, often the hard way. Removing that function turns hard experience into aesthetic shorthand, and that shorthand rarely tells the full story.

There is also a difference between influence and imitation. Military surplus has long been part of civilian wardrobes, especially after major wars. Field jackets, peacoats and boots entered mainstream fashion because they were durable and practical. The adoption was organic. What feels different now is the deliberate styling of combat as an accessory, divorced from utility and marketed at scale.

None of this means civilians should avoid military-inspired clothing. Fashion has always borrowed from institutions, subcultures and history — the issue is awareness. Wearing camo is not inherently disrespectful, but pretending it has no origin is dismissive.

Some brands have begun to acknowledge this gap by working with veterans, donating proceeds to service organizations or providing educational context alongside collections. Those efforts do not solve everything, but they show an understanding that aesthetics do not exist in a vacuum.

Veterans are not a monolith in how they respond to these trends. Some shrug it off. Others avoid military aesthetics entirely after leaving service. Some embrace the irony. What unites most responses is a desire for honesty.

Fashion will continue to cycle military aesthetics in and out of relevance. That is inevitable. What is not inevitable is forgetting where those aesthetics came from. Remembering the function behind the form does not ruin the look. It deepens it.

President Donald Trump’s insistence that the U.S. will acquire Greenland “whether they like it or not” is just the latest chapter in a co-dependent and often complicated relationship between America and the Arctic’s largest island — one that stretches back more than a century.

Americans have long pursued policies in Greenland that U.S. leaders considered strategic and economic imperatives. As I recounted in my 2024 book, “When the Ice is Gone,” about Greenland’s environmental, military and scientific history, some of these ideas were little more than engineering fantasies, while others reflected unfettered military bravado.

Why the US military has cared about climate change since the Cold War

But today’s world isn’t the same as when the United States last had a significant presence in Greenland, decades ago during the Cold War.

Before charging headlong into this icy island again, the U.S. would be remiss not to learn from past failures and consider how Earth’s rapidly changing climate is fundamentally altering the region.

Early US plundering of Greenland’s metals

In 1909, Robert Peary, a U.S. Navy officer, announced that he had won the race to the North Pole — a spectacular claim debated fiercely at the time. Before that, Peary had spent years exploring Greenland by dogsled, often taking what he found.

In 1894, he convinced six Greenlanders to come with him to New York, reportedly promising them tools and weapons in return. Within a few months, all but two of the Inuit had died from diseases.

Peary also took three huge fragments of the Cape York iron meteorite, known to Greenlanders as Saviksoah. It was a unique source of metal that Greenlandic Inuit had used for centuries to make tools. The largest piece of the meteorite, Ahnighito, weighed 34 tons. Today, it sits in the American Museum of Natural History, which reportedly paid Peary U.S. $40,000 for the space rocks.

World War II: Strategic location and minerals

World War II put Greenland on the map strategically for the U.S. military. In spring 1941, Denmark’s ambassador signed a treaty giving the U.S. military access to Greenland to help protect the island from Nazi Germany and contribute to the war effort in Europe. That treaty remains in effect today.

New American bases in western and southern Greenland became crucial refueling stops for planes flying from America to Europe.

Hundreds of American soldiers were garrisoned at Ivittuut, a remote town on the southern Greenland coast where they protected the world’s largest cryolite mine. The rare mineral was used for smelting aluminum, critical for building airplanes during the war.

And because Greenland is upwind from Europe, weather data collected on the island proved essential for battlefield forecasts as officers planned their moves during World War II.

Both the Americans and Germans built weather stations on Greenland, starting what historians refer to as the weather war. There was little combat, though allied patrols routinely scoured the east coast of the island for Nazi encampments. The weather war ended in 1944 when the U.S. Coast Guard, and its East Greenland dogsled patrol, found the last of four German weather stations and captured their meteorologists.

Cold War: Fanciful engineering ideas vs. the ice

The heyday of U.S. military engineering dreams in Greenland arrived during the Cold War in the 1950s.

To counter the risk of Soviet missiles and bombers coming over the Arctic, the U.S. military transported about 5,000 men, 280,000 tons of supplies, 500 trucks and 129 bulldozers, according to The New York Times, to a barren, northwest Greenland beach — 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) from the North Pole and 2,752 miles (4,430 kilometers) from Moscow.

There, in one top-secret summer, they built the sprawling American air base at Thule. It housed bombers, fighters, nuclear missiles and more than 10,000 soldiers. The whole operation was revealed to the world the following year, on a September 1952 cover of LIFE magazine and by the U.S. Army in its weekly television show, “The Big Picture.”

But in the realm of ideas born out of paranoia, Camp Century and Project Iceworm were the pinnacle.

The U.S. Army built Camp Century, a nuclear-powered base, inside the ice sheet by digging deep trenches and then covering them with snow. The base held 200 men in bunkrooms heated to 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius). It was the center of U.S. Army research on snow and ice and became a reminder to the USSR that the American military could operate at will in the Arctic.

The Army also imagined hundreds of miles of rail lines buried inside Greenland’s ice sheet. On Project Iceworm’s tracks, atomic-powered trains would move nuclear-tipped missiles in snow tunnels between hidden launch stations — a shell game covering an area about the size of Alabama.

In the end, Project Iceworm never got beyond a 1,300-foot (400-meter) tunnel the Army excavated at Camp Century. The soft snow and ice, constantly moving, buckled that track as the tunnel walls closed in. In the early 1960s, first the White House, and then NATO, rejected Project Iceworm.

In 1966, the Army abandoned Camp Century, leaving hundreds of tons of waste inside the ice sheet. Today, the crushed and abandoned camp lies more than 100 feet (30 meters) below the ice sheet surface. But as the climate warms and the ice melts, that waste will resurface: millions of gallons of frozen sewage, asbestos-wrapped pipes, toxic lead paint and carcinogenic PCBs.

Who will clean up the mess and at what cost is an open question.

Greenland remains a tough place to turn a profit

In the past, the American focus in Greenland was on short-term gains with little regard for the future. Abandoned bases, scattered around the island today and in need of cleanup, are one example. Peary’s disregard of the lives of local Greenlanders is another.

History shows that many of the fanciful ideas for Greenland failed because they showed little consideration of the island’s isolation, harsh climate and dynamic ice sheet.

Trump’s demands for American control of the island as a source of wealth and U.S. security are similarly shortsighted. In today’s rapidly warming climate, disregarding the dramatic effects of climate change in Greenland can doom projects to failure as Arctic temperatures climb.

Recent floods, fed by Greenland’s melting ice sheet, have swept away bridges that had stood for half a century. The permafrost that underlies the island is rapidly thawing and destabilizing infrastructure, including the critical radar installation and runway at Thule, renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2022. The island’s mountain sides are crashing into the sea as the ice holding them together melts.

The U.S. and Denmark have conducted geological surveys in Greenland and pinpointed deposits of critical minerals along the rocky, exposed coasts. However, most of the mining so far has been limited to cryolite and some small-scale extraction of lead, iron, copper and zinc. Today, only one small mine extracting the mineral anorthosite, which is useful for its aluminum and silica, is running.

It’s the ice that matters

The greatest value of Greenland for humanity is not its strategic location or potential mineral resources, but its ice.

If human activities continue to heat the planet, melting Greenland’s ice sheet, sea level will rise until the ice is gone. Losing even part of the ice sheet, which holds enough water to raise global sea level 24 feet in all, would have disastrous effects for coastal cities and island nations around the world.

That’s big-time global insecurity. The most forward-looking strategy is to protect Greenland’s ice sheet rather than plundering a remote Arctic island while ramping up fossil fuel production and accelerating climate change around the world.

Paul Bierman is a professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Vermont.

There is training, often portrayed as brutal, transformative and loud in films like “Full Metal Jacket,” which has become shorthand for how civilians imagine the making of a service member. Then there is combat, depicted as chaotic and decisive in movies such as “Black Hawk Down” or “American Sniper.”

These stories dominate popular culture, but they leave out where most of military life actually happens. Between training and combat exists a long stretch of routine, waiting, repetition and administrative work that defines daily service for millions of troops.

That routine majority of military life remains largely absent from how the military is portrayed, and its absence shapes how civilians view service and how veterans understand their own experience.

For most of my time in uniform as a public affairs noncommissioned officer and a National Guard soldier, my days were not filled with action or drama. They were filled with calendars, schedules, briefings and forms. I coordinated media visits that ultimately did not result in coverage. I stood in formation in weather that never made a movie montage. I wrote releases about training events that looked impressive on paper but felt painfully ordinary in reality.

I spent hours waiting for vehicles to move, for radios to work, for someone higher ranking to make a decision.

None of that fits neatly into a two-hour runtime, yet it is how a majority of service members spend their service.

Popular culture tends to avoid this middle ground because it resists clean storytelling. Training has a clear beginning and end. Combat has obvious stakes. Routine does not. It is ongoing and unresolved by design. That does not mean it lacks meaning; it means meaning is built slowly through shared experience rather than singular moments.

Some works have tried to capture this. The HBO miniseries “Generation Kill” is often cited by veterans because it shows long stretches of confusion, boredom, gallows humor and frustration during the early days of the Iraq War. Much of the series focuses not on firefights but on broken vehicles, unclear orders and young Marines arguing about music and leadership.

That depiction felt honest because it reflected how military operations actually unfold for those living them.

Even films that attempt to address boredom are often misunderstood. “Jarhead” tried to show the frustration of a generation of Marines trained for combat and then denied it during the Gulf War. Much of the film is about waiting, sexual tension, resentment and the psychological strain of being prepared for violence that never comes.

When it was released, some audiences criticized it for lacking action, which only reinforced the idea that military stories are expected to deliver combat or risk being dismissed.

Failure to portray what most troops actually experience day to day has real consequences.

Civilians often struggle to understand why service members describe their time in uniform as exhausting, even if they never saw combat. Families sometimes expect a clear narrative of trauma or triumph when what their loved one experienced was years of disrupted routines, missed holidays and constant low-level stress.

Veterans themselves can feel disconnected from public recognition when their service does not match the narrow stories society celebrates.

In the National Guard, this gap is even more pronounced. Much of Guard service happens far from public view. Drill weekends are spent conducting inventory, updating training requirements and preparing for contingencies that may never occur. Annual training often feels anticlimactic to outsiders despite being physically and mentally demanding.

These experiences rarely make headlines, yet they represent the bulk of how the Guard contributes to readiness and domestic response. When pop culture ignores this reality, it also ignores the legitimacy of that service.

Some documentaries have come closer to capturing this truth. “Restrepo,” which follows a platoon deployed to Afghanistan, is often remembered for its intensity. What stands out to veterans, however, are the quiet moments. Soldiers smoking, cleaning weapons, talking about home and waiting for something to happen. Those scenes communicate more about military life than any explosion.

The dominance of combat-focused narratives also shapes policy conversations. Discussions about veteran mental health often center on combat trauma alone. While combat exposure is a critical factor, it is not the only one. Years of sustained stress, lack of control over daily life and the constant postponement of normal milestones all take a toll. Those pressures are harder to explain when popular culture does not give them language or visibility.

I remember sitting through safety briefs that lasted longer than the training they preceded. I remember writing press releases late at night because someone deserved recognition, even if no one outside the unit would ever know. I remember the pride of seeing a plan executed smoothly, precisely because nothing dramatic happened.

Those moments taught me responsibility and patience. They taught me how institutions function and how people carry weight quietly. They are not lesser experiences because they lack spectacle. They are foundational.

There is room in American culture to tell these stories.

Audiences have embraced shows and films in other genres that focus on the ordinary rather than the extraordinary. Military storytelling does not need to abandon combat narratives to evolve. It needs to widen the lens. By acknowledging everyday military life, storytellers can present a more accurate and humane picture of service. Civilians gain understanding. Veterans see themselves reflected honestly. The military is no longer reduced to a highlight reel.

The new NATO expenditure targets are driven by a threat environment that is both severely challenging and dynamic, broadly speaking, and related to biological threats specifically. Russia is bending many norms in its war against Ukraine, including regular use of chemical agents that NATO nations now believe indicates a serious lack of restraint in their willingness to conduct illegal chemical and biological attacks.

Beyond looming Russian threats, artificial intelligence, robotics and other technologies are transforming the landscape of who is capable of developing and engineering biological weapons for a broader range of distinct purposes.

While it is clear that this threat environment will require concerted biodefense investments, active, ongoing discussions focus on what to count as core defense spending — the focus of NATO’s new target of 3.5% of GDP annually — and what should count as the non-military portion of societal resilience, for which NATO nations have pledged to spend 1.5% annually of GDP by 2035. This question has arisen in part because most countries have rarely (if ever) quantified their biodefense spending, and because many of the tools for addressing biological threats can be used for both military purposes and civilian functions. This includes resilience to pandemics and general emergency response.

As such, let’s focus on the 3.5% for core defense spending. Generally, this includes funds to man, train, equip and command military forces, or others, such as the coast guard or national police, when used for military purposes. It can also cover the stockpiling of equipment and supplies for wartime reserves, research and development for military purposes and common infrastructure, such as command-and-control networks and surveillance systems, along with personnel costs.

Military biodefense capabilities fall into this category in a clear-cut way.

Many NATO nations have laboratories operated by defense agencies that are central to detecting, characterizing and defending against biological threats (in addition to chemical weapons and other militarily significant threats). These include the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in the United States, the Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology in Germany, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in the United Kingdom and others.

These labs are essential for addressing biological weapons threats and deterring the development and use of prohibited biological weapons.

Likewise, investments in biological threat detection and characterization equipment, personal protective equipment and medical countermeasures for military forces fall squarely within the 3.5% as part of equipment and supplies under operations and maintenance. Because these types of items are often stockpiled, they are easily quantifiable. For example, the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile contains enough doses of smallpox vaccine for the adult population, and many nations subscribe to the 100 Days Mission goal of developing diagnostics and countermeasures for a newly emergent pathogen within 100 days. Such goals can be easily tailored for military requirements and what is needed to support them directly.

Similar to how NATO maintains situational awareness for space and cyber, a biodefense capability target should focus on ensuring that every NATO nation’s military base has biological threat detection and early warning assets in place, as soon as possible. Basic capacity should be cost-effective to set up. For example, wastewater sequencing and other approaches have scaled incredibly in recent years. For wastewater and environmental monitoring, as well as other early warning tools, the analytical approaches used to characterize pathogen threats are rapidly growing more powerful and cost effective.

The capability targets set by NATO in this space should also ratchet up over time. Examples could include plans to scale the number of sites with metagenomic sequencing-based early warning systems; and decreasing the time to detect and characterize a novel, engineered pathogen to hours rather than days.

Additionally, investments that aim at biological weapons attribution and verification of noncompliance by adversaries with the Biological Weapons Convention clearly apply to core defense and deterrence. Russia’s sustained, flagrant treaty violations need to be monitored and called out.

Yet another biodefense expenditure category is military training and exercises, for both responding to a biological weapons attack and preparing to maintain operational force readiness during outbreaks, even if the source of the causative pathogen has not yet been determined. Indeed, such exercises should also be used to incorporate evolving technological developments so capability targets can be refined to ensure NATO force readiness against biological threats. Exercises and related public affairs activities aimed at increasing awareness of biodefense efforts, both for deterrence and to pre-bunk information threats, are a crucial part of core defense spending.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it demonstrates that NATO countries have many clear starting points for detailing a full suite of biodefense capability targets and quantifying investments in those capabilities. This will help ensure that NATO meets core biological defense and deterrence needs effectively, in the face of rising biological threats.

Hon. Andy Weber is a senior fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks and previously served as assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs.

Christine Parthemore is the CEO of the Council on Strategic Risks and previously served at the Pentagon.

An image circulated over media the weekend of Jan. 3 and 4 was meant to convey dominance: Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, blindfolded and handcuffed aboard a U.S. naval vessel. Shortly after the operation that seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would now “run” Venezuela until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” could be arranged.

The Trump administration’s move is not an aberration; it reflects a broader trend in U.S. foreign policy I described here some six years ago as “America the Bully.”

Washington increasingly relies on coercion — military, economic and political — not only to deter adversaries but to compel compliance from weaker nations. This may deliver short-term obedience, but it is counterproductive as a strategy for building durable power, which depends on legitimacy and capacity. When coercion is applied to governance, it can harden resistance, narrow diplomatic options and transform local political failures into contests of national pride.

There is no dispute that Maduro’s dictatorship led to Venezuela’s catastrophic collapse. Under his rule, Venezuela’s economy imploded, democratic institutions were hollowed out, criminal networks fused with the state, and millions fled the country — many for the United States.

But removing a leader — even a brutal and incompetent one — is not the same as advancing a legitimate political order.

Nicolas Maduro on board the USS Iwo Jima. pic.twitter.com/omF2UpDJhA

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 3, 2026

Force doesn’t equal legitimacy

By declaring its intent to govern Venezuela, the United States is creating a governance trap of its own making — one in which external force is mistakenly treated as a substitute for domestic legitimacy.

I write as a scholar of international security, civil wars and U.S. foreign policy, and as author of “Dying by the Sword,” which examines why states repeatedly reach for military solutions, and why such interventions rarely produce durable peace.

The core finding of that research is straightforward: Force can topple rulers, but it cannot generate political authority.

When violence and what I have described elsewhere as “kinetic diplomacy” become a substitute for full spectrum action — which includes diplomacy, economics and what the late political scientist Joseph Nye called “soft power” — it tends to deepen instability rather than resolve it.

More force, less statecraft

The Venezuela episode reflects this broader shift in how the United States uses its power. My co-author Sidita Kushi and I document this by analyzing detailed data from the new Military Intervention Project. We show that since the end of the Cold War, the United States has sharply increased the frequency of military interventions while systematically underinvesting in diplomacy and other tools of statecraft.

One striking feature of the trends we uncover is that if Americans tended to justify excessive military intervention during the Cold War between 1945–1989 due to the perception that the Soviet Union was an existential threat, what we would expect is far fewer military interventions following the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse. That has not happened.

Even more striking, the mission profile has changed. Interventions that once aimed at short-term stabilization now routinely expand into prolonged governance and security management, as they did in both Iraq after 2003 and Afghanistan after 2001.

This pattern is reinforced by institutional imbalance. In 2026, for every single dollar the United States invests in the diplomatic “scalpel” of the State Department to prevent conflict, it allocates $28 to the military “hammer” of the Department of Defense, effectively ensuring that force becomes a first rather than last resort.

“Kinetic diplomacy” — in the Venezuela case, regime change by force — becomes the default not because it is more effective, but because it is the only tool of statecraft immediately available. On Jan. 4, Trump told The Atlantic magazine that if Delcy Rodríguez, the acting leader of Venezuela, “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Lessons from Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya

The consequences of this imbalance are visible across the past quarter-century.

In Afghanistan, the U.S.-led attempt to engineer authority built on external force alone proved brittle by its very nature. The U.S. had invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to topple the Taliban regime, deemed responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the subsequent two decades of foreign-backed state-building collapsed almost instantly once U.S. forces withdrew in 2021. No amount of reconstruction spending could compensate for the absence of a political order rooted in domestic consent.

Following the invasion by the U.S. and surrender of Iraq’s armed forces in 2003, both the U.S. Department of State and the Department of Defense proposed plans for Iraq’s transition to a stable democratic nation. President George W. Bush gave the nod to the Defense Department’s plan.

That plan, unlike the State Department’s, ignored key cultural, social and historical conditions. Instead, it proposed an approach that assumed a credible threat to use coercion, supplemented by private contractors, would prove sufficient to lead to a rapid and effective transition to a democratic Iraq. The United States became responsible not only for security, but also for electricity, water, jobs and political reconciliation — tasks no foreign power can perform without becoming, as the United States did, an object of resistance.

Libya demonstrated a different failure mode. There, intervention by a U.S.-backed NATO force in 2011 and removal of dictator Moammar Gadhafi and his regime were not followed by governance at all. The result was civil war, fragmentation, militia rule and a prolonged struggle over sovereignty and economic development that continues today.

The common thread across all three cases is hubris: the belief that American management — either limited or oppressive — could replace political legitimacy.

Venezuela’s infrastructure is already in ruins. If the United States assumes responsibility for governance, it will be blamed for every blackout, every food shortage and every bureaucratic failure. The liberator will quickly become the occupier.

Costs of ‘running’ a country

Taking on governance in Venezuela would also carry broader strategic costs, even if those costs are not the primary reason the strategy would fail.

A military attack followed by foreign administration is a combination that undermines the principles of sovereignty and nonintervention that underpin the international order the United States claims to support. It complicates alliance diplomacy by forcing partners to reconcile U.S. actions with the very rules they are trying to defend elsewhere.

The United States has historically been strongest when it anchored an open sphere built on collaboration with allies, shared rules and voluntary alignment. Launching a military operation and then assuming responsibility for governance shifts Washington toward a closed, coercive model of power — one that relies on force to establish authority and is prohibitively costly to sustain over time.

These signals are read not only in Berlin, London and Paris. They are watched closely in Taipei, Tokyo and Seoul — and just as carefully in Beijing and Moscow.

When the United States attacks a sovereign state and then claims the right to administer it, it weakens its ability to contest rival arguments that force alone, rather than legitimacy, determines political authority.

Beijing needs only to point to U.S. behavior to argue that great powers rule as they please where they can — an argument that can justify the takeover of Taiwan. Moscow, likewise, can cite such precedent to justify the use of force in its near abroad and not just in Ukraine.

This matters in practice, not theory. The more the United States normalizes unilateral governance, the easier it becomes for rivals to dismiss American appeals to sovereignty as selective and self-serving, and the more difficult it becomes for allies to justify their ties to the U.S.

That erosion of credibility does not produce dramatic rupture, but it steadily narrows the space for cooperation over time and the advancement of U.S. interests and capabilities.

Force is fast. Legitimacy is slow. But legitimacy is the only currency that buys durable peace and stability — both of which remain enduring U.S. interests.

If Washington governs by force in Venezuela, it will repeat the failures of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya: Power can topple regimes, but it cannot create political authority. Outside rule invites resistance, not stability.

Monica Duffy Toft is a professor of International Politics and director of the Center for Strategic Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University.

But such scuttlebutt, spread among the dense fog blanketing smoke pits and fanned by whispers of the E-4 Mafia and Lance Corporal Underground, is prone to sparking.

In mere moments, the falsehood became a conflagration of indisputable fact: Beloved pop icon Jennifer Lopez had passed away.

Marines deployed to far-flung theaters during the early years of the global war on terror were crushed.

Forget the anxiety of imminent combat, the heat, the intestinal issues stemming from MREs and the ammo crate toilets bearing the brunt of the fallout. To hell with the micromanagement of horseshoe haircut-adorned first sergeants or the indecisiveness of milquetoast officers who inexplicably outranked good brass.

Among a knuckle-dragging herd of testosterone-rich 20-somethings, J-Lo commanded attention. So indelible was the mark of her alleged demise that it made its way into “Generation Kill,” a seven-part HBO miniseries based on a book of the same name by Evan Wright, who accompanied the Marine Corps’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

At the center of that 2008 on-screen adaptation, crafted by “The Wire” creators David Simon and Ed Burns, was actor James Ransone, who managed, among a versatile two-decade career, to take a seven-episode run and churn out a character so relatable that most Marines would bat nary an eye if informed he had previously been one.

The Baltimore native, who also starred as Ziggy Sobotka in season two of “The Wire,” among numerous other roles, died by suicide Dec. 19. He was 46 years old.

Years had elapsed since the last time I’d watched Ransone’s masterful orchestration of Marine Cpl. Josh Ray Person, who had as much a penchant for combat — because “peace sucks a hairy asshole” — as he did for quoting the great warrior poet Ice Cube or belting Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag” during a convoy.

Starting the series once more this past weekend elicited renewed appreciation for his character — beginning with his concerns for J-Lo’s well-being — and its familial impression.

“Lieutenant, have you gotten any word?” Person asks Lt. Nathaniel Fick (Stark Sands) early in the series.

“I only get what’s passed on to me from Godfather, and the only word he gets is from the BBC,” Fick replies. “If we’re lucky, Saddam will back down, let the inspectors in and we can go home. The important thing is we are doing our jobs by being here. All of you should be proud.”

“Sir, that’s not the word I was asking about. I was — we wanted to know if you knew anything about J-Lo being killed.”

“Ray, the battalion commander offered no sitrep as to J-Lo’s status.”

The exchange was brief, but set a recognizable tone. Most Marines who deployed to combat will say they’ve known dozens of iterations of Ransone’s on-screen persona.

“We all sort of regressed into 11-year-old boys,” Ranson said about the filming process. “It’s very ‘Lord of the Flies’ at this point.”

Immense stressors are accordingly processed — and rationalized — through a lens of uniquely juvenile vulgarity that would result in instant termination in any civilian profession.

Every bystander within a 15-meter radius is subjected to scathing dismantling — about appearance, intelligence and, of course, the promiscuity of mothers.

Incessant comments about the dearth of first-world comforts — “the suck” — are articulated with such hateful eloquence as to warrant its own art category.

“If Marines could get what they needed — when they needed it — we would be happy and wouldn’t be ready to kill people all of the time,” Person says in one episode. “The Marine Corps is like America’s pitbull. They beat us, mistreat us and every once in awhile, they let us out to attack someone.”

Despite the absence of luxuries, few would trade experiences in the suck for anything. Combat aside, bonds are forged in the mundane. And few demographics enjoy more of a love-hate relationship with it than Marines.

Discussing his portrayal in an interview with HBO, the real Josh Ray Person commented, “I know I probably come off a little cynical about even the Marine Corps itself.

“Even though I may seem cynical to a lot of the other guys, I loved them like [brothers],” he added. “I could say things and make fun of them, but the very second that somebody else does it that’s not in our group, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

It’s far too easy, amid today’s deluge of divisive online vitriol and corresponding doom scrolling, to lose sight of those bonds that once enraptured us — when primary concerns among a gaggle of acne-riddled young men were relegated to porno mags, Jody and subsisting on a diet of Copenhagen and Rip Its.

Thanks to Ransone, this past weekend allowed for a return to that period of my life, now 20 years on.

I’m not sure Ransone was aware of how much his performance resonated with Marines. If he was, it’s unfortunate more of us will never be able to tell him how easily his character still tethers us to simpler times.

Fair winds and following seas.

It started as a rumor. But like war stories, rumors tend to grow with the telling, and as deployment dragged on, the number of packages we were expecting doubled and doubled again, eventually reaching delirious heights that surpassed all reason.

A hundred care packages?

Too high and too round a number, I thought. Clearly made up; a conversational exaggeration pulled out of someone’s ass.

These mythical parcels had supposedly been assembled by the very best of front porch America, real Norman Rockwell patriots of some down-home church group connected to one of the guys on my team through his wife’s cousin’s roommate or something. And when this church group heard that a team of Green Berets was deployed to the beige desolation of Iraq for six months, they put out a call for care packages, and the pious congregation had offered up a most goodly bounty.

Not that we were desperate for material salvation. Deployment to Iraq in 2018 was like a government-funded “Lawrence of Arabia” summer camp. We lived at the biggest base in the country, next to the Baghdad airport and far from anything going boom. We ate at chow hall with an omelet bar, slept in air-conditioned shipping containers converted into living spaces and shopped at a small PX selling drinks and snacks.

We even had a Green Beans coffee shop to supply us with mediocre lattes, and a rec center where I played Settlers of Catan every week with doctors and nurses from the hospital. It was austere, but for a combat zone, it was five-star luxury.

Besides the odd helicopter dropping off combat casualties, we felt distanced from the horrors and privations of war. Our biggest struggle was being away from our families and civilian careers (which, as reservists, we’d taken leave from).

Even a cush deployment means half a year away from birthdays, weddings, recitals, graduations and a normal life.

I’d paused my plans for graduate school to become a physician assistant, which would require at least a year of post-baccalaureate coursework. I couldn’t start from a combat zone with shaky Wi-Fi. My girlfriend and I abruptly ended our five years together over Skype, distance having made visible the irreparable cracks in our relationship.

Everything was the color of dirty sand: the T-walls, the housing units, the dust on our vehicles, the days themselves, which faded one into the next as we trained Iraqis who didn’t want to be trained and delivered them equipment they didn’t know how to maintain.

Our deployment felt like the war in miniature, a costly disruption with no clear intention and no end in sight.

Care packages broke up the monotony and sometimes provided us with useful things. Shortly before Christmas, my dad sent me a black, folding pocket knife. Utilitarian enough for everyday use but sporting a point mean enough to ruin someone’s day. Tucked in my right pocket, it went everywhere with me, whether I was flying on a helicopter or walking to the chow hall.

A teammate happened to know the owner of a company that made flat caps, like those worn by golfers and old-school cabbies. That company surprised our team with a box of army green flat caps that matched our camo fatigues. We looked cool as hell.

Exercising our Special Forces prerogative to flout Army uniform regulations, we sported the caps as an unofficial uniform, raising our profile on base as well as our spirits.

What I really needed, though, was a jacket. In packing for my first deployment, I didn’t realize how chilly the desert could get. Some nights dropped as low as 40 degrees, and I foolishly hadn’t packed anything warmer than a sweatshirt. I ordered a Patagonia jacket online and waited weeks, then months, for it to appear in the mailroom.

I didn’t expect any fashionable outerwear to come in the fabled haul of packages we’d been told about, but speculating about what loot they might contain turned into a game at our morning meetings. Most of us were lifters and hoped for tubs of pre-workout and protein powder. The dip addicts crossed their fingers for logs of Copenhagen. All wished for bags of gourmet coffee, pouches of beef jerky, energy drinks, maybe even board games.

A few weeks into the New Year, the day arrived. I discovered about 30 boxes stacked in the mailroom addressed to us, and the mail sergeant informed me another 90 were on the way.

A hundred and twenty! Even the rumored 100 had been a lowball. I piled them — all red-white-and-blue Priority Mail boxes the size of a birthday cake — high in my dusty Suburban, texted the boys and escorted the precious cargo over the bumpy dirt roads to our team room across base.

And then there we were at last. Green Berets circled like giddy children around a Christmas tree, each having selected one box from the pile and savoring those last moments of mystery before the riches were revealed.

What we found under those box flaps defied all our expectations: Fun-size Snickers and Milky Ways, decorated with jack-o’-lanterns — marking them as trick-or-treater rejects of three months prior — now grotesquely warped in their wrappers after melting in transit.

Canned foods, hearty staples a hermit might select to line the concrete walls of a survivalist bunker: beef stew, baked beans, creamed corn. Dried ramen noodles, brittle in their orange plastic five-packs and adorned with green circular “99¢” stickers no one had bothered to remove.

The senders, as if anticipating gastrointestinal distress from this dollar-store diet, thoughtfully included several rolls of toilet paper. And finally, in every box, there were exactly three pairs of bargain-bin white tube socks.

At first, the quiet was broken by a few quizzical chuckles as we pulled each item out of the boxes, which we soon realized were all packed with a depressing uniformity. Then the heavy silence of disbelief and shock. At last, my teammate said what we all were thinking: “What the fuck? Do they think we’re deployed, or homeless?”

Our gratitude was displaced by second-hand embarrassment, like hearing a badly delivered joke. The well-meaning rubes assembling these packages apparently envisioned us as refugees fleeing some unspeakable calamity that had left us starving, barefoot and without means to wipe ourselves, rather than residing at a sprawling, well-appointed manifestation of the 21st-century military-industrial complex, complete with running water, indoor plumbing and a dining hall serving three kinds of cake.

There were comforts of home that we pined for, but they sure as hell weren’t cheap socks and toilet paper.

Each box struck me as a physical manifestation of Thank You for Your Service — a gesture of appreciation nice enough on the outside but empty of substance. Missing from the packages was also what’s missing in Thank You for Your Service: minimal effort to understand the challenges that people in the military face. And without understanding, you can’t show genuine empathy. Instead, you get performative patriotism and a hundred boxes of things normally collected for homeless shelters.

If those citizens had simply asked any Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom veteran in their town, or even online, what soldiers on deployment need, they could have spent a fraction of the money on things we could’ve used, like that tub of pre-workout powder, a single bag of gourmet coffee, or in my case, a light jacket.

It was unsettling to learn that many civilians apparently have no grasp of the military-industrial behemoth their own taxes are funding. Like shipping ice cubes to Antarctica, these fellow citizens had sent us dried ramen and TP, while untold millions of their tax dollars were providing us with flush toilets and hot meals on a fully developed base established there over a decade ago.

So these people not only didn’t get our individual needs as soldiers, they were voting taxpayers with no comprehension of the resources given to us by the officials they elected and the defense budget they funded.

The boxes kept coming, multiplying like dividing cells. Soon our team room resembled a USPS distribution center, red-white-and-blue boxes stacked up the walls. We’d crack one or two in each batch to make sure the contents didn’t vary, and they never did: always the same cheap socks, the same beef stew, the same melted candies.

In the end we did what our government had so effectively taught us to do: We gave it all to the Iraqis. The whole damn pile. Waste disposal disguised as international aid.

We loaded up a truck, drove outside the wire and across the street to the Iraqi base, piled all 120 boxes in an orderly tower on a dusty concrete floor between crates of expired tourniquets and castoff camo fatigues — as if these TP rolls, socks and canned goods were part of the grand U.S. strategy all along — and walked away.

And for all I know, they could still be there, stacked neatly in a dark Iraqi warehouse — boxes we didn’t need, regifted to others in the same unsolicited way they’d been bestowed on us. No one bothered to ask the Iraqis if they liked creamed corn.

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

Zach West has served in the Army Special Forces in the Middle East, Europe and South America. He has also worked as a New York City paramedic, rare bookseller and contributor for Duffel Blog. A 2021 Tillman Scholar, he earned his master’s from Stanford School of Medicine and a doctorate from Butler University. He lives in California and practices as an internal medicine PA at Stanford Hospital.

Nikoletta Stoyanova, a Ukrainian photographer, watched as the six-armed behemoth took flight before soldiers hurried her into a basement. It was the dead of night in the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine, near the besieged city of Kupyansk. The city had already traded hands twice — the Russians had captured the city in the first days of the war, and the Ukrainians liberated it six months later.

Over the last year, the world’s attention has been focused on the U.S. administration’s chaotic push for a peace deal in Ukraine. The high drama of diplomacy between Trump, Putin and Zelensky has stolen the spotlight away from the gray, bloody realities on the battlefield. But the fact is that any settlement will be based on the realities on these frontlines.

It is here that the situation has been seriously deteriorating for Ukraine. The Russians, with a large advantage in manpower and munitions, are making serious advances into Ukrainian territory. New drone technology, and a lack of Western countermeasures, have aided them in slowly breaking down Ukraine’s weary troops.

The Ukrainian soldiers who had strapped the munitions to the drone hurried Stoyanova into the basement, where another group of soldiers are staring intently into screens, controllers in hands as if they were playing video games. These drone pilots are now Ukraine’s most crucial defense against the advancing Russians. Warfare has been revolutionized on these battlefields — and America is far behind in its understanding of how it operates.

She had gone to their base, in the embattled East, to see how the sky, full of thousands of drones, were changing modern warfare.

“Everything at the front line must be done at night, logistics are awful,” Stoyanova said from Ukraine’s Donetsk region. “They want to get as close to our cities as they can so they can terrorize them as much as possible with drones.”

Last time here she heard loud artillery, but the drones that replaced them are quiet killers.

“The war is more silent, and more deadly,” Stoyanova noted.

Ill-prepared for modern war?

What observers see on the dark, drone-infested front line looks nothing like the battlespace that America and its allies have been training their troops for.

Belatedly, the Pentagon is starting to take notice. A Department of Defense account was widely ridiculed among Ukraine watchers when it posted a video of a training exercise asking viewers whether they had ever watched a drone drop a grenade.

In fact, anyone can see thousands of such videos on Telegram channels and X accounts, some going back to as early as the first year of the war in Ukraine.

In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth led a tour of a Defense Department drone exhibition, calling drones “the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation, accounting for most of this year’s casualties in Ukraine.”

“Our adversaries collectively produce millions of cheap drones each year,” he said, adding that the U.S. is trailing behind.

Pentagon brass bragged that they had lowered the concept-to-development time for such weaponry from six years to 18 months. But in Ukraine, the newest battlefield development can be obsolete in weeks.

The U.S. is still far behind Ukraine and peer rivals such as China and Russia when it comes to integrating drone technologies into the modern battlespace.

Some U.S. companies have sent drones to be used in Ukraine, but as the Wall Street Journal reported, and Ukrainian soldiers have confirmed, Western drone technology does not measure up.

This mismatch reflects deeper problems in how the U.S. is still thinking about procurement and warfighting. In the early days of the war, the U.S. supplied many high-tech, expensive but powerful systems that radically improved Ukraine’s battlefield fortunes. But as the war has ground on, and the Russians developed countermeasures, developing a quantity of cheap systems has become far more important than a few high-ticket items.

As Dronesense reported, “a typical U.S. commercial drone intended for military use can cost upwards of $80,000, while a basic Ukrainian FPV attack drone costs under $500. This 160-fold cost difference makes the American systems economically unsustainable in a conflict that consumes approximately 10,000 drones per month. … Modern, high-intensity warfare … favors mass, adaptability, and attrition tolerance."

In Ukraine, drones have also added an element of civilian involvement into military procurement, with many ordinary civilians transforming their garages, basements and bedrooms into makeshift drone factories, while others hold crowdfunders to buy cheap commercial drones online that can be refitted for military purposes.

This allows average Ukrainians to contribute to their country’s war effort much more directly than they ever could before, with channels like YouTube and Telegram teaching how to assemble drones and ammunition in minutes.

Ukrainian soldiers complain that U.S. companies lack an understanding of electronic warfare, as well as the different types of air defense and other countermeasures that both sides use against the drone threat. If the U.S. is ever dragged into a large-scale war against a peer or near-peer adversary like China or Iran, it will be ill-equipped for a drone-heavy background like that in Ukraine.

On the ground in Ukraine

Back in Kharkiv, soldiers must drive navigating via hand torch until the last kilometer or two of their destination, then they must navigate by memory.

“Everything has changed because of drones. … Now there are hundreds of guys putting up nets over the road,” said Stoyanova. Other men by the side of the road wait with drone detectors and shotguns on the roadside ready to shoot.

Because of this, everything has become more dangerous under the dronescape, from the rotation of troops to resupplying front-line infantry.

“With shells, you hear the crack, and the whistle, and have a couple of seconds to hide or take cover. With the drones, you don’t hear anything until the explosion,” a senior official in the military administration stationed in Kherson, a liberated city in southern Ukraine that is under constant threat of Russian drone strikes, said.

Unless the U.S. adapts, the next war it fights may be just as silent, and far more deadly.