The concern, critics say, is not limited to weapons that can select and engage targets on their own.

At the hearing, titled “Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain: Implications for Human Rights,” witnesses told members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission that AI can influence human decisions leading to a strike while leaving the individual formally responsible for the final call.

“The approval button alone does not demonstrate the control,” Anna Mysyshyn, a Ukrainian AI-governance researcher, told lawmakers.

The issue comes as the Pentagon pushes to use AI to accelerate military decision-making. The Pentagon’s 2023 AI adoption strategy identified “fast, precise and resilient kill chains” as a desired outcome, while its 2026 AI strategy calls for becoming an “AI-first” warfighting force by redesigning military workflows and operational concepts around current AI capabilities.

Mysyshyn questioned whether a person supervising multiple AI-enabled systems can recognize an incorrect recommendation and intervene fast enough before harm occurs. She cited Ukraine as an example of AI compressing decisions from hours to minutes.

In many scenarios, a human making the final decision does not necessarily have enough information, time or the ability to challenge the system’s recommendation, she said.

The Defense Department’s 2023 directive on autonomy in weapon systems requires autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.

Wednesday’s testimony focused on a broader question: whether that judgment remains meaningful if AI is influencing targeting faster than a human can authenticate.

Amanda Klasing, national director of government relations and advocacy at Amnesty International USA, warned that AI can compress the military “kill chain” in ways that make it difficult to determine whether meaningful human discernment actually occurred before a strike.

Joseph Chapa, a former military officer and scholar of military ethics, argued that the debate should not focus solely on how autonomous a system is. He urged policymakers to consider whether an AI system relies on statistical inference, what happens when it fails in a particular operational environment and whether its decisions can be audited afterward.

Statistical AI systems can fail differently from traditional software, Chapa said, including producing substantially different outputs from relatively small changes in inputs. More complex systems can also make it difficult to reconstruct how a particular recommendation was produced after the fact.

He called for greater AI education across the military, including specialized training for personnel working with targeting and intelligence systems.

Witnesses on Wednesday also pointed to a larger accountability problem: determining what happens when an AI-assisted decision results in civilian harm.

The Defense Department established its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan in 2022, including a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence intended to serve as a hub for analysis and training. Federal law requires the Pentagon to operate the center.

But a Defense Department inspector general review released in May assessed the department’s implementation of the civilian-harm framework and found problems including the loss or reassignment of personnel, the end of funding for a civilian-harm data-management platform and the failure of a senior steering committee to continue meeting.

That matters in the case of AI because, as Klasing noted, the military currently has limited ability to determine whether AI may contribute to improper targeting of civilians.

On the first day of the U.S.-Iran war, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed — more than 100 of them under the age of 12, according to UN and Iranian officials.

The school building sat fewer than 100 yards from a long-time Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval installation and was previously located within the IRGC compound perimeter until a wall appeared between 2013 and 2016, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by Amnesty International.

By the time the U.S. and Israel launched their first strikes on Feb. 28, the school had been established several years prior. It was active on social media and had its own website, a Reuters investigation found.

More than 120 House Democrats sent a letter to the Pentagon on March 12, demanding clarity on whether artificial intelligence, “including the use of the Maven Smart System, [was] used to identify the Shajareh Tayyebeh school as a target.”

U.S. military investigators in the wake of the incident stated that the strike was likely carried out by U.S. forces. The Pentagon, however, has still not released its investigative findings.

Klasing proposed adding information about AI involvement to the Pentagon’s annual civilian-casualty reports required under Section 1057 of the National Defense Authorization Act. The existing reporting requirement calls for information about civilian casualty mitigation efforts and investigations, but does not specifically require the department to identify whether AI contributed to an incident.

Steve Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Pentagon should collect data from military operations and conduct after-action reviews to determine whether AI-assisted systems accurately identified intended targets and whether errors contributed to civilian casualties.

“A bigger question is to what extent is the Pentagon collecting data and verifying the target accuracy of all these 1000s of strikes?” Feldstein said.

Feldstein also cautioned against treating AI itself as the source of every potential problem. AI can be used to help verify intelligence, detect changes in imagery and prioritize defensive responses to threats such as drones and ballistic missiles.

But if a human-influenced system is built around assumptions that certain demographic traits make someone a lawful target, Mysyshyn said, AI would not correct that underlying premise.

Feldstein similarly pointed to the rules humans establish before an AI system is used. If commanders determine that a particular level of civilian harm is acceptable in pursuit of a military objective, he said, the machine is operating within a human-defined framework.

The challenge is particularly acute when systems operate faster than people can meaningfully assess recommendations.

The commission opened Wednesday’s hearing with an example from Iraq. In 2004, Army squad leader Nick Ellison encountered two young men firing a machine gun from a car during a census patrol in Kirkuk.

Ellison made eye contact with one of the men, saw panic and ordered his soldiers to hold fire. The men turned out to be brothers of a newly married groom, and the gunfire was celebratory.

Mysyshyn said testing should examine bias, reliability, civilian protection, realistic time pressure, whether operators can interrupt systems and whether decisions can be traced throughout an AI system’s lifecycle.

Chapa said some AI systems may be difficult to audit after the fact, while Deborah Brown of Human Rights Watch said information about military AI use has often emerged through investigative reporting and whistleblowers rather than government disclosures.

The growing challenge, according to witnesses, is no longer making a machine pull a trigger, but whether the human who approves the trigger pull has enough time, information and authority to make a meaningful choice before disaster.

Military Times reporter Katie Livingstone contributed to this report.

James Lyon, 80, admitted to submitting fraudulent documents to the VA to help him pocket over $124,000 in disability payments, lying about his military service and claiming he earned combat accolades — including the Silver Star and the Bronze Star — during the Vietnam War.

Lyon never served in combat and confessed to refusing Marine Corps training roughly 60 years ago. Still, he claimed to serve over three different periods and lied about being diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, federal prosecutors said. He used that diagnosis to submit fake paperwork for VA disability payments.

Lyon has not yet been sentenced. He faces up to 10 years in prison without parole, the maximum sentence specified by Congress.

“Veterans’ benefits represent a sacred national promise that is rooted in our gratitude to the men and women who have sacrificed and served our country,” R. Matthew Price, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri, said in the statement.

“When individuals fraudulently obtain these benefits for their own personal gain, they undermine the integrity of these vital programs and divert resources from the veterans who earned them and need them most. That is unacceptable,” he said.

The case was investigated by the Department of Veterans Affairs Inspector General and is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney James Kirkpatrick.

The force needs to be “clear-eyed” about the environment ahead as future conflicts will be progressively contested and defy simpler solutions, Caine said in a Wednesday keynote at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

“We have to assume from now on that our formations will be hunted by autonomous systems, jammed across the spectrum and tracked in real time,” Caine said in his speech.

“We have to transition the joint force to be prepared to fight and win our future wars by generating and delivering lethality at scale with an agile, optimized, high-low mix of combat capabilities to give the young members of the 2.8 million-member all-volunteer joint force the tools that they need before they need them,” he continued.

While calling the American military and their families the country’s “ultimate insurance policy,” Caine asserted that the joint force needs to be ready for a fight before it begins.

Even as the country’s adversaries are geographically dispersed, they are connected through sharing technology, intelligence, weapons and economic support, he said. As the military branches study past and present American battlefields, they are looking for new ways to challenge the advantage, demonstrating the necessity for readiness and investment in a range of military capabilities before a crisis begins.

Recently, Russia and Iran have deepened their military partnership with a technological feedback loop amid the Ukraine war and the conflict in the Middle East. Moscow is sending Iran upgraded munitions, satellite imagery and targeting data that have been used against American forces in the Middle East.

Tehran first supplied Russia with Shahed attack drones for use in Ukraine in 2022 and has since arranged a license to build the Iranian-designed drones on Russian territory.

“The character of war is changing, and time is of the essence,” Caine said, emphasizing how the way and speed in which countries fight is altering on the modern battlefield as artificial intelligence, cyber capabilities and autonomous systems develop.

The chairman noted that the modern battlefield today operates from the seabed to the cislunar space, highlighting that the advantage will go to whoever can see, understand, decide and act first as a learning organization.

Caine highlighted the June rescue of two Army soldiers by way of a remotely piloted Navy unmanned surface as an example of how the military is adapting and utilizing AI and autonomous tools.

He also referenced how these tools are being used to change the threat in contested electromagnetic interference environments, such as in Ukraine, with first-person view drones.

“Take it together, these examples from the Strait of Hormuz to the front lines in Ukraine show how quickly technology is changing the character of war,” he said.

Caine spotlighted that it will be young service leaders who will be the ones in charge of the subsequent conflicts in these environments and will have to be adaptive and understanding of their environment with a plethora of information.

As technology, networks and software continue to change, the need for capable and lethal leaders will not, he said. The nation can bring autonomy and better networks to the force but none of it will matter without trusted leaders that can work under pressure.

“We must move together because the window to build the force that we need is closing,” Caine said. “We can buy almost anything in life, but we cannot buy time.”

In a report published Friday, the VA watchdog found that 59% of the VA’s 139 reporting facilities struggle to hire qualified practical nurses and 58% face issues hiring psychologists. For non-clinical staff, 57% of Veterans Health Administration leaders reported shortages of potential VA police officers while 53% faced problems hiring custodians.

The report, based on surveys from late March and early April, shows VA hospital leaders’ perceptions of occupations that are difficult to fill, not vacancies.

According to the report, VHA officials reported 4,712 severe staffing shortages across 389 occupations.

The surveys cover fiscal 2026, a period following a reduction in VA staff by roughly 30,000 jobs. Since Sept. 26, 2025, the VA workforce has declined by more than 19,000 persons, including 11,000 from the VHA, which manages the department’s health care services.

A VA official said Monday that the OIG report is not a reliable tool to assess staffing shortages because it is not based on actual vacancies. VA Press Secretary Quinn Slaven noted that the report states that a staff shortage refers to “occupations that are difficult to fill,” and this designation “does not necessarily indicate the presence of vacancies.”

But Democratic lawmakers who track VA staffing say the surveys indicate a problem, given that the fiscal 2026 report showed 4,712 severe shortages compared with 2,959 in fiscal 2024.

In the surveys, nearly all VA facilities — 97% — reported severe occupational staffing shortages for medical officers, up from 94% in fiscal 2025, while 86% reported shortages for nurses, up from 79% the previous year.

But Slaven said VA continues to “outperform most other health care organizations” when it comes to staffing, and actual vacancy rates are 15% for doctors and 9% for nurses.

“These are lower than most other health care systems, in line with normal VA historical averages and much lower than the respective 19% and 20% physician and nurse vacancy rates VA saw at times during the Biden Administration,” Slaven said in a statement to Military Times.

He added that pay caps for physicians hinder the VA’s hiring, and the department has asked Congress to address the “longstanding pay disparity” that hurts recruitment.

He noted that since January 2025, the VA has opened 41 new health clinics, enrolled an additional 250,000 veterans in health care and increased medical appointments at VA facilities and in the private sector by 4.1% and 12%, respectively, since fiscal 2024.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., issued a report last year charging that veterans services, including health care and research, were affected by the loss of 40,000 employees at the VA in President Donald Trump’s second term from voluntary retirements, resignations and layoffs.

On Monday, Blumenthal said the OIG report on staffing shortages was also affected by the elimination of “tens of thousands of positions” at the VA’s health care system, which he said artificially reduces vacancy rates and prevents facilities from hiring needed staff.

“This report confirms that staffing shortages at VA continue to increase in number and impact,” Blumenthal said in a statement to Military Times. “Even more employees left VA because of the toxic work environment this administration has created.”

According to the report, the top five medical occupations experiencing severe staffing shortages across VA facilities are: practical nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and nursing assistants.

The top five non-clinical occupations with shortages are: police officers, custodial workers, medical support assistants, food service workers and health care engineers.

As with previous reports on severe staffing shortages, the OIG made no recommendations to VA leadership regarding the data.

“This report is a descriptive review and is intended for informational purposes,” wrote Dr. David Krulak, assistant inspector general for healthcare inspections.

CBO estimates the conflict has consumed between one-half and two-thirds of the U.S. inventory of certain missile-defense interceptors since June 2025, leaving the military with fewer weapons available for a future conflict. Rebuilding those stocks could take at least five years, even if production rates increase, the agency found.

The estimate includes Patriot, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors. CBO said the Pentagon does not disclose how many interceptors it has in its inventory. Instead, analysts compared reported expenditures with the total number of missiles DoD has purchased to estimate how much of the inventory has been used. The estimate applies to the combined inventory of those four interceptor systems.

Those interceptors accounted for $13.1 billion of the $21.7 billion CBO estimates the Pentagon would need to replace in munitions that were expended through Aug. 1. Land-attack cruise missiles accounted for another $7.3 billion, with $1.2 billion for other munitions.

A separate Defense Department inspector general report estimated the cost of the operation at $33.4 billion through June 29.

CBO said the campaign involved large expenditures of munitions during the first few weeks, particularly as U.S. forces defended against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks.

The interceptor depletion is particularly significant because the weapons are expensive and produced at relatively low rates. CBO estimates unit costs of roughly $4 million for a Patriot or SM-6, $12 million for a THAAD interceptor and $28 million for a sophisticated SM-3. The agency said the United States has already used significant quantities of these weapons defending Israel and then expended more during Operation Epic Fury.

That figure includes expended munitions, equipment losses, increased flying hours, other operations and higher fuel costs. It does not include costs borne by other federal agencies or military operating costs already included in the federal budget.

The highest costs beyond munitions were $10.4 billion for increased flying hours, $2.7 billion for fuel and $1.9 billion to replace equipment lost in battle. The equipment losses included a THAAD radar destroyed by Iran.

The initial phase of Operation Epic Fury involved about 250 tactical aircraft, including roughly 90 from two carrier strike groups, as well as an amphibious ready group. Those forces were supported by bombers, airlifters, refueling tankers, other Navy vessels and Army air-defense, aviation and artillery units.

CBO said the Pentagon did not respond to its requests for information, so analysts relied on government databases and public reports. The agency cautioned that its estimate is therefore subject to considerable uncertainty.

The administration had requested $87.6 billion in supplemental funding in June, including $67.1 billion for the DoD, with $42.3 billion identified as directly related to the conflict. That portion was about 10% higher than CBO’s estimate.

The cost of the conflict also continues to grow. CBO estimates each additional month of fighting would cost roughly $2 billion to $3 billion if the intensity remains relatively low, with costs potentially higher if operations intensify.

The depleted interceptor stocks could pose a particular problem in a conflict with China, CBO said, because Beijing maintains large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles.

Known as “forever chemicals” because they resist breaking down and can accumulate in the body over time, PFAS are used in a host of products and equipment such as firefighting foam, weapons systems and textiles in military settings and food packaging, cookware, makeup, stain repellent and more.

At least one type of PFAS — PFOS — has been linked directly to testicular cancer, while another type, PFOA, is associated with kidney issues and increased risk of kidney cancer.

PFAS chemical exposure has also been connected to cardiovascular disease, thyroid dysfunction, low birth weight, developmental delays in children and reduced response to immunizations.

According to the study published Monday in Environmental Health Perspectives, young veterans had 13% to 24% higher concentrations of PFAS in their blood than non-veterans the same age.

Male veterans had higher PFAS concentrations than female veterans, while older veterans had levels comparable to their civilian counterparts.

The study reviewed the PFAS blood serum results of participants in National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys from 2003 to 2018.

According to the review, 58% of the 22.8 million veterans who participated, or 13 million, had blood PFAS levels above a threshold set by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine of 20 micrograms per liter.

Lead study author Christian Hoover, a National Institutes of Health Research Fellow at Brown’s School of Public Health and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the National Academies recommends that those who exceed the threshold be monitored by their physicians.

Having high PFAS levels in their blood does not mean a person will develop cancer or cardiovascular disease, Hoover said, but blood tests and monitoring can provide data that may be useful in the future.

“[Testing] gives people helpful context … as they age for some of the things that might happen to their bodies over time,” Hoover said. “If they don’t get tested now between [ages] 20 and 39 and they get to 55, and they’re having all of these health effects, they won’t know why.”

Study links 'forever chemicals' to testicular cancer in US troops

The surveys at the heart of the cross-sectional study did not ask about possible sources of PFAS exposure.

Hoover said previous research has shown that aqueous film-forming foam, related groundwater contamination on military bases, munitions, treated uniforms and even the burn pits used to dispose of industrial waste in combat zones could be responsible.

Younger veterans are more affected because they are most likely to have had recent exposure as a result of military service.

Older veterans are less likely to have acute exposure and PFAS that may have accumulated will be excreted over time, according to Joseph Braun, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University.

“The common PFAS chemical PFOA, for example, has a half-life of about one and a half to two years, which means that if someone drank a jar of PFOA today, it would take 10 years for their body to get rid of it,” Braun said in a statement.

The Department of Veterans Affairs does not provide or cover the cost of blood tests for PFAS. The Defense Department is required by law to offer blood tests for PFAS to active-duty and civilian DoD firefighters.

The 2020 legislation that mandated the testing does not include retired military firefighters, other active-duty personnel or dependents.

Hoover said all veterans, even those 40 and above, may want to talk to their doctors about exposure and possible health consequences.

“Even though our study wasn’t able to pick this up, it doesn’t mean that older veterans weren’t at the same risk when they were younger,” Hoover said.

Nearly 600 military installations, former defense sites and National Guard facilities have some degree of PFAS contamination. Since the late 2010s, the DoD has reviewed 727 installations and found that 590 require some type of cleanup.

The timeline for completing the review and remediation process has been extended for some installations to 2066.

U.S. Central Command told IG investigators that “Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict.”

While the report provided no details on damaged military facilities, it did include specifics on damage to U.S. diplomatic facilities.

The State Department told investigators that “U.S. diplomatic facilities in four countries suffered physical damage from Iranian strikes, with an estimated total cost of about $184 million.”

U.S. diplomatic sites in Iraq suffered more than 600 attacks, while the embassies in Kuwait City and Riyadh were also hit.

Operation Epic Fury had cost the United States $33.4 billion as of June 29, based on Pentagon estimates. The amount includes $22.3 billion in expended munitions, $3.7 billion in equipment losses and $7.4 billion in costs beyond CENTCOM’s normal operating expenses.

However, these estimates do not count the costs of repairing infrastructure.

The Department of Defense “did not include the cost of military construction for damaged infrastructure in its estimate because the DoD has not determined what its future posture will be in the region, how it will construct its bases, and what percentage of the construction costs allies and partners will contribute,” the report states.

Because Congress did not appropriate funds for the war in Iran, the money is being funneled from normal operating budgets, such as amounts set aside for training and maintenance.

“The absence of a dedicated appropriation for OEF means that it can be difficult to calculate the total ‘cost’ of OEF,” noted the report, which is among the first official assessments of Operation Epic Fury since it began on Feb. 28.

Funding is also becoming an issue for U.S. Transportation Command, which flew more than 1,500 missions to support the mission.

“During peak OEF times, airlift surged to 30 to 40 daily missions directly into the CENTCOM [area of responsibility], with an additional 20 to 30 daily aircraft pushing into the USEUCOM AOR for transload operations,” the report said.

This cost nearly $2.4 billion as of June 30.

“While these obligations have been largely reimbursed by the military services to date, USTRANSCOM reported that it anticipates delayed payments moving forward as service funding is depleted without a supplemental appropriation,” the IG said.

The report confirmed that dozens of U.S. manned and unmanned aircraft have been destroyed or damaged, based on data from a Congressional Research Service report released in May and “vetted” by CENTCOM as of Aug. 24.

The tally of destroyed aircraft includes four F-15Es, one A-10, four AH-6 helicopters, one AH-64 and one MH-60, as well as an MQ-4C drone and as many as 30 MQ-9 Reapers.

The report listed 18 dead U.S. military personnel as of Aug. 27. The Pentagon claimed 417 wounded as of June 30, though casualty figures released in late August soared to 774.

For some Chinese naval officers, however, the prospect of facing missile-equipped Marine Stand-In Forces, or SIF, on Pacific islands is concerning.

“The USMC’s continuous refinement of the SIF concept and optimization of deployment and operational employment will erode our land-enabled advantages in sea denial, make it more difficult for us to breach island chain blockades, induce rapid depletion of our combat resources, and complicate our operating environment,” according to a recent U.S. Navy translation of a 2023 Chinese military journal article.

“This escalates the real-world threats facing us and we must maintain strategic resolve and respond proactively and effectively,” wrote Senior Captains Yue Zhiqiang, Wang Li and Li Jinqia in the journal Military Art, which was translated by the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

Stand-In Forces were the centerpiece of the Marine Corps’ much-debated Force Design 2030 plan, which was first released in 2020. A far cry from the large, mechanized Marine operations of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, Force Design 2030 envisions a light infantry force with small, stealthy teams of Marines operating from Pacific islands.

Equipped with sensors and missiles, these personnel would interdict Chinese naval movements while providing surveillance and targeting data for U.S. naval and air operations.

American critics have denounced the plan as leaving Marine detachments unsupplied, unsupported and vulnerable to an overwhelming force. But Chinese experts see SIF units as “key assets for deterrence and containment along China’s frontiers,” which maintain “a persistent forward presence in China’s near seas.”

In particular, the Chinese report expressed concern that Marine littoral forces will unleash missiles as well as unmanned underwater vehicles.

“During crises and armed conflict, SIFs can deploy large UUVs or have submarines launch small UUVs to loiter near our shipping lanes,” they said. “They can covertly ambush or conduct suicide attacks against our undersea forces and large vessels.”

The article suggests the People’s Liberation Army Navy should target Marine SIF units with intensity in the event of a regional fight.

“To effectively counter the USMC SIF, we should adopt a proactive offensive posture, aggressively expand our operational reach, project forces forward, and apply countermeasures at the source,” they argue.

This, the report states, would mean forward-deploying Chinese forces, including extending “undersea combat capabilities as far forward as feasible.” China should also develop “undersea pre­positioned weapons systems,” the authors argue.

The report adds that China should expand surveillance by radar, satellites, underwater sensors and patrol aircraft, while better integrating military, paramilitary and civilian ships to mitigate “fragmented, redundant, and inefficient coastal surveillance efforts.”

A massive fleet of Chinese commercial vessels could also pose a threat to Marine forces, the paper notes.

“We can conduct maritime deception to overwhelm U.S. SIFs with massive information overload to paralyze and neutralize their capabilities, effectively supplementing our own reconnaissance and surveillance assets,” the article states.

To counter the use of unmanned U.S. platforms, the authors recommend developing cheap Chinese drones, as well anti-drone lasers and microwave weapons.

“We absolutely must avoid engaging small capabilities with large capabilities, or resource-intensive assets against lightweight assets,” the report states.

The authors go on to suggest that the command networks coordinating SIFs should also be targeted.

“We must leverage our late-mover advantage in cyber and electromagnetic domain technologies to develop offensive capabilities which can effectively paralyze U.S. maritime command and control networks,” the report states.

The Military Art article reflects longstanding Chinese concerns that U.S. deployments in the Pacific threaten China’s home waters, Lyle Goldstein, director of the China Initiative at Brown University’s Watson School, told Defense News.

“The article is suffused with major concerns about how U.S. strategy might use drones especially, but also small combat units to try to unhinge China’s military,” said Goldstein. “For example, by causing it to divert resources or by enabling long-range targeting of key Chinese assets, including submarines.”

The article also highlights China’s focus on undersea warfare and its sensitivity toward the safety of its own submarines.

“A major theme of the article is the undersea contest and how the USMC strategy could impact China’s egress of submarines,” said Goldstein, who is also director of the Asia Program at the think-tank Defense Priorities.

“It is also interesting that the article seems to place a very high premium on China’s ability to wield UUVs, along with the related undersea acoustic detection arrays off of Chinese ports and key waterways.”

According to a Justice Department release, Bailey A. Szramowski, 29, provided an active-duty sailor aboard the Lincoln with what was purported to be oxycodone in December 2022. The following month, the victim, identified solely by his initials, A.N., overdosed and died of “acute fentanyl intoxication” while on leave in San Leandro, California.

Local law enforcement officials found evidence of drug use at the scene, and a toxicology report later confirmed A.N.’s cause of death as fentanyl intoxication.

Ten days later, Szramowski, despite knowing of A.N.’s death, sold three more of the purported oxy pills to another sailor stationed aboard the Lincoln, identified as C.L. The sailor was hospitalized for an apparent overdose but survived.

According to court documents, Szramowski and his wife, fellow sailor Johnnese H. Poomaihealani, 25, then called C.L. and “instructed C.L. to tell law enforcement he received the pills from A.N. and not Szramowski.”

C.L. subsequently agreed to cooperate in a Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation into drug distribution activities aboard the Lincoln and A.N.’s death, according to the complaint.

C.L. told investigators that A.N. and Szramowski had been selling Percocet pills — which court documents state were likely counterfeit — to other sailors, including himself, for about a year, alleging Szramowski sold the pills aboard the carrier during its 2022 deployment and after the ship returned to San Diego, California.

According to C.L., Szramowski purchased the pills via mail, received them at a P.O. box in Coronado, California, and then charged sailors for the pills via CashApp, a mobile payment app.

Szramowski is also accused of attempting to cover up his alleged involvement in A.N.’s death, directing A.N.’s family to delete text messages between himself and A.N. on A.N.’s phone after his death. The family declined, according to the complaint.

The sailor allegedly told A.N.’s family members that “he ‘might go down for murder’ or it would ‘ruin his future,’ or words to that effect, if the police found the messages,” the complaint states.

Szramowski reported to the Lincoln in May 2021 after completing boot camp and surface combat systems training at Naval Station Great Lakes, Illinois, according to military records. He was promoted to logistics specialist third class in June 2024.

The husband-and-wife duo was originally charged with conspiracy to distribute fentanyl and cocaine. The pair on Monday pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances.

Szramowski and Poomaihealani are set to be sentenced on Dec. 11, 2026. Szramowski faces a minimum of five years in prison and up to 40 years, and a $5 million fine, while Poomaihealani faces a maximum of 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

Beth Sullivan contributed to this report.

The provision is Section 104(b) of the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, H.R. 9237. It carries forward the home-loan fee changes developed in the standalone Sharri Briley and Eric Edmundson Veterans Benefits Expansion Act, H.R. 6047, before that legislation was incorporated into the broader package.

The proposal would sharply increase two specified VA home-loan fees. The funding fee for Interest Rate Reduction Refinance Loans, or IRRRLs, would nearly triple from 0.50% to 1.42%, while the fee for assuming an existing VA-backed loan would double from 0.50% to 1%

For Air Force veteran Amy Murphy, who wants to refinance a $400,000 VA-backed mortgage solely to secure a lower interest rate and monthly payment, the proposed change would mean $3,680 more in funding fees. At the current rate, her fee would be $2,000. At the proposed rate, it would be $5,680.

“The point of the IRRRL is to make it easier for me to take advantage of a lower interest rate. But under the proposed fee structure, I have to save enough through the lower rate to overcome a substantially larger upfront cost.”

VA exempts certain borrowers from the funding fee, including veterans receiving VA disability compensation; some veterans entitled to compensation but receiving retirement or active-duty pay instead; certain borrowers with qualifying pre-discharge disability ratings; and active-duty service members who have received a Purple Heart. Active-duty status alone does not qualify a borrower for an exemption.

The number of IRRRL borrowers who would be subject to the higher fee is not clear from publicly available VA data. VA reported 119,457 IRRRLs in 2025, a 135% increase from 50,825 in 2024. VA’s loan-volume reports do not publicly identify how many of those borrowers paid the funding fee or how many were active-duty service members.

For borrowers who do pay the fee, VA allows the cost to be financed into the new loan. That avoids an upfront payment but increases the loan balance and means the borrower pays interest on the financed fee.

Marcia Black, a VA loan officer with M&T Bank, said higher fees could discourage veterans from refinancing when interest rates fall.

“Higher fees deter veterans from refinancing when market interest rates drop, trapping them in higher-rate loans,” Black said. “Targeting refinances disproportionately harms active-duty military and veterans trying to lower monthly payments during high-cost cycles.”

The Mortgage Bankers Association said it could not support H.R. 6047 as drafted because of the proposed funding-fee increases. MBA urged Congress to remove or substantially modify the proposed fee increases and the extension of higher VA home-loan fee rates.

The IRRRL is designed to streamline refinancing for existing VA borrowers, generally to obtain a lower interest rate or reduce the monthly payment.

In TCAVA’s proposed legislation of more than 60 veteran bills, the VA home-loan fee provisions serve as budgetary offsets.

In its March estimate of the standalone H.R. 6047, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill’s home-loan fee provisions would reduce net direct spending by about $4 billion from 2026 through 2036 by lowering the subsidy cost of VA loan guarantees. CBO estimated the overall H.R. 6047 package would reduce net direct spending by $42 million over that period.

For veteran borrower Mitchell Duffy, who has used VA-backed financing on multiple properties, the potential impact could accumulate across several loans.

Duffy owns four properties he now rents out that were financed with VA-backed loans and has about $1.15 million in combined mortgage debt. If the full $1.15 million were refinanced and each loan were subject to the proposed fee, the 0.92-percentage-point increase would amount to about $10,580 in additional funding fees. The actual amount would depend on the outstanding balance and eligibility of each loan when refinanced.

Section 104(b) does not establish a new IRRRL fee based on whether a veteran is using the VA home-loan benefit for a second or third time.

The House has not passed H.R. 9237. On July 16, a motion to recommit the bill failed 210-211, after which further consideration was postponed. The proposed fee changes have not yet become law.

“I don’t necessarily have an extra $3,680 sitting in the bank,” said Murphy. “So, if this legislation gets passed, I have a decision to make: is the lower interest rate still worth refinancing, or will the higher VA fee make the savings less worth it?”

The group, with a combined 250 years in the military and additional service as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, NASA administrator, Central Intelligence Agency director and other leadership posts, issued a video Tuesday asking voters, candidates and government officials to take time to understand the voting process in their communities and share the information with family and friends.

The message, sponsored by Team Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization with a goal to reduce political polarization, focuses on the principles of free elections and responsibilities of citizens to sustain confidence in American elections.

“Protecting our lawful electoral processes might be our most important civic role of all,” said retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as director of the National Security Agency under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and as Central Intelligence Agency director under Bush and President Barack Obama.

In the video, Hayden joined fellow retirees Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, Army Maj. Gen. Marilyn Quagliotti, Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, Marine Corps Major Gen. Charles Bolden and Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper in speaking on election integrity — without mentioning any candidates, political leaders, parties or previous election outcomes.

Advocates call on veterans to serve as poll workers for upcoming elections

President Donald Trump cast doubt on the security of the American election system when he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020. Although Biden won the popular vote 81.2 million to 74.2 million and the Electoral College 306-232, Trump attempted to overturn the results through legal challenges and political pressure.

According to a poll conducted in June by the Economist/YouGov, more than a quarter of Americans believe that the 2020 election was “rigged,” and only a quarter of Americans are “very confident” that the November mid-term elections will be conducted fairly.

It is in this heated climate that the retired generals have entered the fray. During an interview with Military Times Monday, Lute said the officers weighed in because they feel it is time to “get back to the basics.”

“Before, during and after elections, there are some fundamental rules that everybody ought to agree on, and I think you know why that’s important now,” Lute said.

According to the video, the five fundamental principles Team Democracy is asking Americans to commit to are their beliefs in: an honest process; nonviolent campaigns; secure voting; responsible oversight; and trusted outcomes.

The generals say that free, fair and trusted elections are the root of democracy, and without belief in the system, trust breaks down.

“We know what holds countries together and we know what tears them apart,” Hayden said in the video.

“These aren’t liberal ideas, conservative ideas. They are the rules of the road, the ones that make self-governance possible,” Lute said.

According to the group, more than 6,000 Americans have signed the principles, including roughly 2,000 candidates across the political spectrum.

In addition to supporting the principles, the officers urged Americans to get involved in the election process, sharing trusted information with others, volunteering as a poll worker or taking a tour of local election offices.

“I’ve traveled the world and I’ve seen this country at its best. I’ve seen what’s worth protecting,” McChrystal said.

Founded by two whitewater rafters — Ken Powley, who operated a rafting company in Weatherly, Pennsylvania, and Chris Newlon, an IT manager and specialist — Team Democracy partnered with The Carter Center and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation on the Principles for Trusted Elections campaign and has received financial support from The Carter Center to enable its work.

“My grandfather once said, ‘In our democracy, the only title higher and more powerful than that of president is the title of citizen.’ Whether you are a former U.S. president, a retired general, or any other American citizen, we have a shared responsibility to uphold the principles upon which our electoral system was founded: honest process, nonviolent campaigns, secure voting, responsible oversight and trusted outcomes,” Jason Carter, Carter Center Board of Trustees chairman, said in a statement to Military Times.

“These principles are not about politics — they are about ensuring that our elections remain credible, secure and worthy of our confidence,“ Carter added.

In addition to focusing on trust in elections, the group supports programs that support civic engagement and hosts rafting excursions that bring together people of various backgrounds.

In his interview, Lute said the political divide has become so rancorous he worries it cannot be overcome, especially regarding the topic of election integrity. But he hopes for a future where election winners will be “gracious winners” who are respectful of their opponents and consider their positions, even if they disagree.

“I was part of the transition between Bush and Obama and there was a strong mutual regard for the other party,” Lute said. “There’s an old saying in the Army that I suspect is the same across the other services, that effective leadership reflects that disagreement is not disrespect. … we need to get back to that as a sort of a political model.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday against the administration’s proposals to restrict mail-in ballots, allowing states to proceed as usual with their voting processes for this year’s midterm elections.

Nearly one-third of the country votes by mail.

The pardon came after years of advocacy by gun groups, which argued that Patrick Tate Adamiak was “wrongfully” convicted by a federal jury in 2022.

Lee Williams, who heads a journalism project funded by the Second Amendment Foundation, or SAF, has written more than 60 articles about Adamiak’s case and argued that he was wrongfully prosecuted.

According to the SAF’s reporting, Adamiak enlisted in the Navy in 2012. When he was arrested, he was an E-6 Master-at-Arms and one of the top 500 sellers on Gun Broker.

Williams said Adamiak “never committed a single crime” because he “never sold a single real firearm” and accused federal agents of targeting Adamiak personally and lying under oath about the case.

However, the jury convicted Adamiak, and an appellate court rejected most of his challenges to the conviction. A presidential pardon does not erase the underlying conviction or expunge a criminal record.

According to court documents, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, began investigating Adamiak in 2021 after receiving a tip from a confidential informant.

Between October 2021 and April 2022, prosecutors contend that Adamiak illegally sold to the CI seven machine gun receivers and a PPSh machine gun. Afterward, ATF agents executed a search warrant at his house, where they recovered 25 additional unregistered machine guns as well as two grenade launchers and two anti-tank missile launchers.

Prosecutors also said agents recovered invoices and schematics that detailed Adamiak’s illegal manufacturing of machine gun receivers as well as Adamiak’s phone, which contained messages with sources of machine gun parts.

One source, according to court documents, was a fellow sailor who allegedly straw-purchased gun parts for Adamiak and sold him items stolen from the Navy as well.

Trump pardoned Adamiak on Sept. 3 along with 22 others. According to the SAF, Adamiak plans to continue his legal fight to overturn his conviction.

Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao teed up the LRIP and deployment announcement in May during a Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing. Boeing’s MQ-25A will become the Defense Department’s first unmanned tanker and the Navy’s first operational carrier-based unmanned aircraft.

The UAV is designed to extend the life of the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornets and relieve the fighter jets of their aerial refueling role so the aircraft can focus on strike missions.

The Stingray is supposed to deliver at least 14,000 pounds of fuel over 500 nautical miles, around the same capacity as the Super Hornets, according to an August report from the Government Accountability Office.

The contract covers three LRIP Lot 1 MQ-25As and includes additional funding for components to support three Lot 2 MQ-25As, the Navy stated in its release. Initial Lot 1 deliveries are slated for 2029. The MQ-25 program of record includes 67 operational aircraft and nine test aircraft.

Boeing is forging ahead with production after several snags in the MQ-25 program. The Navy completed its first successful Stingray test flight on April 25, though that demonstration lagged a year behind the service’s initial plans. The Navy estimates it will continue flight tests through the end of this year.

The Pentagon’s April 2026 Modernized Selected Acquisition Report painted a pessimistic picture for the MQ-25’s timeline, noting that technical risks and the Boeing Union labor strike contributed to delays.

According to the report, the Pentagon expects the UAV could reach initial operational capability in 2029, four years later than initially planned.

The report also highlighted a milestone for the Navy, noting that in March, the USS Theodore Roosevelt became the first Navy carrier equipped with an Unmanned Air Warfare Center supporting the MQ-25A.

The Navy’s Stingray program has wound a complicated path from conception to production.

Originally envisioned as a stealthy ISR and strike drone known as the Unmanned Carrier Launch Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) platform, both the Pentagon and the GAO pushed the Navy to tighten its program’s scope.

By 2016, the service pivoted from a strike and intelligence mission to a carrier-based UAV mission.

Over six months after the evacuation of approximately 1,300 dependents from NSA Bahrain, some families remain separated from household goods, vehicles and pets that were left behind.

The Navy says family members and non-essential personnel who remain outside Bahrain have not been authorized to return to retrieve personal property because of ongoing security concerns.

“Service members and affiliated civilians are responsible for initiating the household goods move process from temporary safe havens and from Bahrain with their chain of command,” a Navy spokesperson told Military Times. “Service members currently located in Bahrain can ship their household goods and vehicles in person, and those who are located outside Bahrain can designate a representative to act on their behalf.”

One Bahrain-based sailor, who was granted anonymity due to concerns of reprisal, said the process remains frustrating and unclear.

An Aug. 31 town hall hosted by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, during which Caudle said troops would not be returning to Bahrain “anytime soon,” did little to assuage concerns over how household goods would be processed, the sailor told Military Times.

Another sailor, who also requested to withhold their identity, said their uniforms were among personal items destroyed during the events that led to the evacuation.

Months later, that sailor still has not been able to replace them. An insurance company has requested additional confirmation from the sailor’s commanding officer, the service member said, despite a Navy memorandum documenting the destruction, further delaying replacement uniforms.

“It’s just another expense I cannot afford right now, and it’s frustrating having to wait for the funds to get what I need,” the sailor told Military Times.

For some families, the displacement has meant leaving behind pets.

One military spouse said the family did not have time to gather everything before leaving Bahrain. The family’s Great Dane could not be accommodated during the evacuation, so they left the dog with locals they barely knew.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever get him back,” the Navy spouse told Military Times. “I don’t know what to tell my kids, but it’s been really hard on all of us.”

The Navy said it continues to provide affected service members, families and civilian personnel with “timely information, individual case management and relocation support.”

Before the Aug. 31 town hall, the Navy sent families a newsletter on May 13 from Naval Amphibious Force, Task Force 51/5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which said, “At the minimum, Service Members will have the opportunity to return to Bahrain to pack out their HHG.”

A separate Navy FAQ, meanwhile, said the service was still working out what would happen to personal property left there. It noted that undelivered household-goods shipments would be placed in government storage pending an “all clear.”

Families who remain unauthorized to return to Bahrain must establish and report a designated place by Nov. 30 to secure relocation, housing and separation entitlements, a Navy spokesperson told Military Times.

The Navy has requested data on the number of household-goods moves involving affected families and said it will provide those figures if they become available.

During the panel, “Rethinking the Stockpile: Building the Right Mix for Future Conflict” at the Air and Space Cyber Conference on Monday, Lyons noted that the service is working to balance “capability, capacity cost and the adaptability to produce at the speed and scale for future conflicts.”

Citing the conflict in Ukraine, where battlefield adaptations can come within hours and minutes, not months and years, panelist Bryon Kroger, founder and CEO of Rise8, noted that “when it comes to software, we’ve just historically been really bad. Like, in some cases, we’re building software slower than hardware. It’s wild.”

“You wouldn’t think about not establishing a refueling apparatus for aircraft that need to get across long distances,” said Kroger. “But we haven’t really thought about, from an enterprise IT perspective, how to create a similar refueling apparatus or the ability to continuously deliver software to the field in the way that you should. It’s not getting nearly enough attention and we need to start.

“We really have to decouple the software cycles from the hardware cycles. … We [need to be] deploying multiple times a day, where we can get an update to the field on demand. As soon as we need it.”

Ryan Hartman, chief executive officer of Ondas Sentinel, agreed.

“Inventory on the first day of the conflict is one important equation. But it is the ability for that inventory to evolve with the conflict. In my 27 years in the industry, I haven’t seen an adversary comply with our acquisition system yet. And therefore, we have to make sure that our acquisition system enables us to keep up with the pace of the conflict and the adaptability necessary to stay relevant in the conflict.”

When addressing how the government and industry can work together to address stockpile bottlenecks, both Hartman and Kroger offered simple, if possibly difficult to enact, solutions.

For Kroger, the biggest bottleneck Rise8 faces is something simple: a calendar.

According to him, “80-85%” of his company’s time is spent waiting on government authorization to operate — time spent “waiting in the queue” to get on the ”authorizing official’s calendar… if it takes six months to get on the ATO’s calendar, right there you’re at a minimum of six months to fill the system, but they’re going to find something because we always find things during test and evaluation. And now we go back, redevelop, and wait another six months to get on that calendar. This is how you get 12–18-month ATO cycles,” he noted.

For Hartman, the bottleneck within U.S. industry is clear: “The first is the supply chain, the second is the supply chain, the third is the supply chain and the fourth is testing.”

With technological advancements unfolding at breakneck speed amid conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, time is not a luxury the U.S. Air Force and its industry partners have much of.

That has been a boon to people like Kroger, who notes that a government that unleashes performance-based outcomes means that the defense industry is not an insider game anymore. Rather, contracts go to companies that offer solutions-based, scalable products.

As for the most important action the government and industries must take to be better positioned in the next few years, Hartman was blunt:

“Make sure we have capacity prior to a conflict.”

The $100 million Pentagon 9/11 Memorial Visitor Education Center, located across a busy parkway from the Pentagon and its adjacent memorial in Arlington, Virginia, will contain exhibits and host programs about the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The facility, expected to open in 2029, will also include event spaces, a cafe and bookstore.

The Pentagon Memorial first opened to the public on Sept. 11, 2008, the first of the three attack sites to have a monument. It will be the last, however, to have a museum or visitor center explaining its importance and impact on American history.

“We want people to remember what happened here. We want people to remember our loved ones. We want people to remember that feeling that swept through our country after 9/11 — that feeling of taking care of others who were in such pain,” said Jim Laychak, the Pentagon Memorial Fund board chairman and the brother of David Laychak, a U.S. Army budget executive who died in the building.

At 9:37 a.m. EST on Sept. 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 was deliberately crashed into the western facade of the Pentagon. Fifty-nine passengers and crew members on the aircraft that was originally bound for Los Angeles died, as did 184 people in the building.

In New York City, 2,753 people died in similar attacks on the World Trade Center, including civilians in the buildings and on the ground, 343 firefighters and 60 police officers. In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field following a struggle between passengers and hijackers, killing 44 passengers and crew members.

The Pentagon Memorial features 184 cantilevered, stainless steel and granite benches, each with a lighted water feature and memorial tree. The benches are arranged by age of the victims and positioned so that visitors viewing the names of those on the aircraft face the direction of the plane’s approach, while those viewing the Pentagon victims’ names see the building in the background.

The visitor center will explain the events of the day, the significance of the memorial and the aftermath of 9/11, including the reconstruction of the affected portion of the Pentagon. The fund began raising money in 2015 to support the project and has collected roughly 25% of the funding needed, including $12 million in federal dollars and $1 million from the state of Virginia.

Organizers have requested another $35 million from Congress in fiscal 2027 and hope to cover additional expenses from private funds and corporate sponsors, including American Airlines, Amazon, Lockheed Martin and others.

The National Park Service announced Wednesday that the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial is now an area affiliated with the national park system, although the memorial will continue to remain under the care of the Department of Defense, supported by the Pentagon Memorial Fund.

The NPS also announced a $2 million grant last week to support the memorial’s operation and maintenance.

During the groundbreaking ceremony Saturday, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said the visitor center will make sure the story is “told in a way that people understand it.”

“It may have been the worst day in American history, but my hope is we can learn from that, remember that — that we can remember those that ran into burning buildings but that we can also remember the nation states around the world that stood with us,” Warner said.

On Friday, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth joined with Pentagon leadership to mark the 25^th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Trump said in the aftermath of the violence, the United States “saw the authentic spirit of our nation.”

“The enemy might destroy what American hands had built, but they could not touch the fight and fire and the love in our great American hearts,” Trump said.

More information on the fundraising and construction effort can be found on the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial Fund website.

For Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, the 10 years of wanderings on a perilous sea as Odysseus took the really, really long way home could be seen as an “allegory for the real problems of combat veterans returning to civilian society.”

Shay, a psychiatrist at the Boston VA Medical Center, wrote that “Time and again, Odysseus shows himself as a man who does not trust anyone, a man whose capacity for social trust has been destroyed. This is the central problem facing the most severely injured Vietnam veterans.”

Shay connected the trials of Odysseus in returning to Ithaca to the recurring patterns he observed in his clinical practice with combat veterans — patterns of homelessness, explosive violence, mistrust of anyone other than combat veterans, substance abuse, a fixation on grievances and a “deep suspicion of others’ motives.”

“Odysseus stands for the veterans but as a deeply flawed military leader himself, he also stands for the destroyers of trust. Homer’s Odysseus sheds light, not always flattering light, on today’s veterans and military leaders,” Shay wrote.

For 10 years, Odysseus would remain the artful dodger through the harrowing journey back to Ithaca, where the conflicting traits of Odysseus’ character — war hero and war criminal, master strategist and liar only contribute to his charisma as the “master of cool,” according to Elizabeth Samet, the West Point literature professor and author of No Man’s Land.

Samet draws a similar parallel for modern-day veterans and the difficult journey home.

In a 2007 Book Browse Author interview, Samet called Odysseus her favorite hero in all literature — “He never bores you with his twists and turns, and he outfoxes everyone. Odysseus has restraint, but he can also lose his composure on occasion. He is an epic hero yet somehow a recognizably human creature.”

For Shay, the parallels between Odysseus and modern-day veterans are all too clear.

“I see the adventure with the Cyclops as an emblem for combat veterans’ attraction to danger, an attraction that has cost so many of them their lives after returning home, and tortured those who love them with untold hours of fear for their safety,” Shay wrote.

The Odyssey has survived and endured while so many other oral epics were lost “in no small part because it was — and still remains — the work of literature most seriously engaged with the question of how to reintegrate a damaged, troubled soldier back into civilian life,” according to Shay.

Shay has been credited with introducing the concept of “moral injury” that has been experienced by combat veterans. Shay described moral injury as “the profound psychological and spiritual damage experienced by combat veterans when fundamental moral codes are violated.”

Perhaps Shay’s most crucial insight stems from his conviction that psychologically wounded soldiers can be best healed by sharing their stories with other veterans. “For veterans, recovery from their psychological injuries best happens in the community of other veterans,” he said in an August 2009 interview with Metro West Daily News.

As a result of his work and that of others, moral injury has increasingly been recognized as a signature wound of service members who fought in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom following the 9/11 attacks.

In response to the work of Shay and others on PTSD, Military.com reported in 2023 that the Department of Veterans Affairs had begun “the first-ever large-scale population study of moral injury to be conducted among veterans of the post-9/11 wars.”

The main result of the study was the development of the “Moral Injury and Distress Scale (MIDS),” which the VA called “the first measure to assess moral injury symptoms indexed to a specific event and validated across several high-risk populations.”

MIDS was “being adopted throughout VA as a tool for identifying veterans with moral injury,” described as “the distressing psychological, behavioral, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of witnessing, failing to prevent, or participating in events that contradict one’s deeply held values and beliefs,” according to a March 2025 release from VA Health Systems Research.

In his chapter of the book titled Among the Dead: Memory and Guilt, Shay dealt with the concept of “survivors’ guilt” and contrasted Odysseus’s haunted memories with the profound “survivor’s guilt” experienced by modern soldiers over the loss of comrades as they second-guess choices that led to the deaths of their friends.

But the poet of the Odyssey, perhaps, put it best in describing the grief of Odysseus’ crew following their losses in the battle of Ismarus:

“Six benches were left empty in every ship that evening when we pulled away from death. And this new grief we bore with us to sea: our previous lives we had but not our friends. No ship made sail next day until some shipmate had raised a cry, three times, for each poor ghost unfleshed. Then two long days and nights we lay offshore worn out and sick at heart, tasting our grief.”

Gone are the days when America fought from sprawling command posts with overwhelming air superiority. Now faced with adversaries toting long-range fires and drones, the U.S. military is relearning a basic principle: how to hide.

As services adopt new strategies, the Army’s Combined Arms Command, or CAC, an outfit responsible for overseeing the service’s leadership and doctrine development, is changing how it teaches troops about concealment.

“Hiding in plain sight has become an imperative on the modern battlefield,” Lt. Gen. James P. Isenhower, the commanding general of CAC, told reporters during a Pentagon briefing on Thursday.

“We think very differently about how we employ ourselves [and] how we remain dispersed” compared to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, he explained, pointing, in particular, to the size of command posts. “We have to work really hard to look like that which we are not.”

Isenhower’s remarks come as details begin to emerge about the true scale of destruction wrought by an Iranian strike on a major forward base in the Middle East.

On Feb. 28, the Islamic Republic struck Naval Support Activity, or NSA, Bahrain with missiles and one-way attack drones following U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. Initially, the Pentagon reported no major impacts to military operations. However, the Wall Street Journal later reported that damages amounted to approximately $400 million.

In one of the most stark official disclosures about the war thus far, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told an Epoch Times reporter that Iran “blew the hell out of Bahrain.”

Far from isolated, America’s sprawling — and easy-to-find — Middle East footprint has been repeatedly subjected to assault since the start of the Iran war. In July, three U.S. soldiers were killed when an Iranian ballistic missile and drone attack penetrated air defenses around Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. Six U.S. soldiers were killed in March when an Iranian drone struck a tactical operations center at Port Shuaiba, Kuwait.

While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan saw bases attacked with mortars and rockets, U.S. forces did not have to contend with precise, long-range missile and drone assaults.

“For 20 years we didn’t have to worry about anything coming out of the sky, and we lost proficiency that I think we had trained in the Cold War era — through the 80s and 90s — where we were worried about adversaries who had fixed-wing aircraft and the capability to send long-range precision fires at us,” Isenhower said during the briefing. “That wasn’t the case in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Over the course of the Global War on Terror, air dominance allowed American bases to be havens, according to Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, where the U.S. could concentrate supplies, personnel and command centers without facing constant surveillance and threats from above.

“These bases were sanctuaries,” she told Military Times, calling the installations “an aberration, historically.”

The U.S. is now returning to a “period of warfare where the base itself is a vulnerability and something an adversary can attack,” she said, which can lead to the scattering of resources.

Exacerbating that susceptibility has been the U.S. military’s reliance on costly interceptor munitions to combat Iranian ballistic missiles and cheap, one-way attack drones, actions that have significantly depleted interceptor stocks.

A recent CSIS report estimated that between February and July, the U.S. had expended approximately 65% of its Patriot interceptor inventory. The number of THAAD ballistic missile interceptors, meanwhile, decreased by 38% since the start of the war, according to the report.

Grieco said that dispersing troops to account for these new vulnerabilities comes at a cost. Instead of funneling fuel, ammunition, food and other supplies through large hubs, the military must spread across more locations, potentially further apart.

“We’re now trading efficiency for survivability,” she said.

After the damage to NSA Bahrain, U.S. ships were forced to rely on a logistics hub at Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that sits more than 2,000 miles away from the service’s carrier strike groups in the Middle East.

The distance required personnel to place food orders 30 days in advance, which proved challenging due to the unpredictability of frenzied military operations.

Isenhower noted that as a division commander, meanwhile, he watched command posts shrink smaller and smaller during training because opposing forces — soldiers meant to act as the enemy during exercises — kept finding and precisely attacking them by using electronic signatures.

Units responded by dispersing and employing deceptive tactics to make it harder for the enemy to determine what they were seeing.

“We’ve got to create the benefits of mass without presenting the vulnerabilities of concentration,” he said. “It affects the squad differently than it affects a battalion, but we’ve seen in current combat operations: the vulnerabilities of a large, distinct signature, whether it’s physical, visual or something on the electromagnetic spectrum.

“It fundamentally changes how we operate.”

That vulnerability extends from command posts to moving equipment and aircraft.

In April, Iran downed a U.S. fighter jet after deploying a swarm of drones that were able to identify the aircraft’s GPS location, speed and direction, then feed that data to Iranian commanders, The New York Times reported.

Education about electromagnetic and drone warfare has been incorporated into all levels of the Army, Isenhower said.

Soldiers are learning to use electromagnetic data “to try to get a bearing or pinpoint a fix on the enemy,” he said, while learning “how to operate in that environment so they don’t do the same to us.”

The Pentagon now wants artificial intelligence that can cut through the confusion.

It’s seeking “AI-based software tools to turn fragmented sensor data into a continuously updated understanding of space and missile threats fast enough to drive operational decisions,” according to the Defense Innovation Unit solicitation, which is due Sept. 24. “Existing tools struggle to distinguish closely spaced objects, track emerging threats, and keep threat models current.”

The project, known as the “Space Threat Intelligence Synthesis Engine,” will leverage AI’s greatest strength: the ability to quickly analyze reams of data. The software will fuse “massive streams of multi-source data, including live video, satellite imagery, radar and sensor feeds, geospatial data, and classified intelligence reports.”

“By automating advanced cross-data correlation, the architecture aims to uncover hidden patterns, complex operational relationships, and predictive threat behaviors far beyond the capabilities of human analysis alone.”

Ultimately, the system should “generate actionable, confidence-scored alerts supporting analyst-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop, or automated workflows.”

The AI will help human operators — and other machines.

It will provide “intuitive, human-readable visualizations for frontline operators and low-latency, machine-to-machine APIs to drive automated command-and-control (C2) workflows.”

DIU is aiming for an open-source system with a latency delay of no more than five seconds — and preferably no more than two seconds — between the arrival of data and the results being displayed. Throughput should be 20 to 30 megabytes per minute, with bursts of up to five gigabytes.

Contractors should demonstrate that their products show “significant speed and accuracy improvements in event detection, characterization, and attribution compared to existing baseline systems.”

As skies fill with missiles and drones in conflicts like the ones with Ukraine and Iran, AI is increasingly being seen as an indispensable partner to overworked human operators. In particular, with a perpetual shortage of expensive interceptors, such as the Patriot air-defense system, operators must quickly decide when and where to allocate them.

Defense contractors and AI firms are teaming up to incorporate AI into missile defense.

For example, Northrop Grumman announced in July that it was partnering with AI firm Camgian to incorporate artificial intelligence into integrated air and missile defense systems. BAE and Scale AI have also teamed up for AI-enhanced missile defense.

The Thursday Anthropic report covers the time period between December 2025 and August 2026 and highlights the misuse of its large language model Claude, which it says the threat actor used to make targeting recommendations against U.S. Navy forces in the region.

“The threat actor used Claude to compile targeting handbooks…to identify and track naval positions based on open-source information,” the report said.

The bad actor used the AI software to collect information that included a list of U.S. service members it had sourced from public military photographs, ship and aircraft transponders — which broadcast a specific code that identifies them — commercial satellite-imagery query scripts that help locate exact geographic visuals, and a breakdown of public websites that track U.S. Navy movements.

The Iranian threat also used Claude to learn more about weaknesses in U.S. Navy shipboard systems that could be exploited.

Anthropic said it banned the account after it learned what it was doing, created safeguards to prevent similar activity in the future and shared the information with the appropriate government agencies to address the problem.

The report detailed a litany of other misuses of its Claude program, including a cell of Yemeni bad actors that used the program to develop targeting software for guided missiles.

The concerns over inappropriate misconduct involving Anthropic have grown to include individuals within the company too.

A researcher named Jacob Coxon from Anthropic and OpenAI resigned Tuesday, calling into question the ethics of the company in a lengthy X post.

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” said Coxon. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

The U.S. military previously used Anthropic but severed ties with the AI platform after it refused to agree to Pentagon terms that it said would open up Claude’s use for mass surveillance or use in fully autonomous weapons.

In New York, family members of the victims, many carrying pictures of their loved ones, joined Vice President JD Vance and four former U.S. presidents at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. The ceremony began, as always, at 8:46 a.m. Eastern Standard Time with a moment of silence to remember the shocking instant when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

Shortly after, victims’ family members began reading aloud the names of all 2,977 people who died on September 11, as well as the six people killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a somber recitation that lasts for hours. In a reminder of the time that has passed, some readers were children who had never met the relatives they lost in 2001.

Other moments of silence followed, marking when the other three airplanes crashed and the two towers collapsed. For the first time, a seventh moment of silence was set to honor the thousands who have died since 2001 from illnesses tied to the toxic dust that poisoned the air for months afterward.

Gregory Carafello attended the ceremony to honor the memory of his lifelong friend James Martello, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm that lost more than 650 employees in the attacks. Carafello was on the 18th floor of the South Tower but managed to evacuate.

“Everyone should realize that it was a very bad, catastrophic day for many families,” he said. “These were not warriors. These were people like you and me going to work.”

At the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, where American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building’s west flank, killing 184, President Donald Trump chronicled some of the stories of those aboard who perished in the crash: a woman pregnant with her first child, a family of four headed to Australia, three sixth-graders on a field trip.

The president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who also delivered remarks, both used their speeches to make the case for the Iran war, which they have defended as necessary to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

“We salute our first responders and law enforcement, and we love them,” Trump said. “And we salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon.”

Mourners were also gathering in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at the crash site where passengers brought down one of the four hijacked jetliners, United Airlines Flight 93, that had been headed for Washington.

Generational pain

The attacks shaped generations of Americans who lived through the day or grew up in its aftermath, influencing U.S. foreign policy, domestic politics and public attitudes toward security.

But for many whom the attacks directly affected — the victims’ families and friends, first responders and rescue workers — the anniversary is a tribute to the lives lost on a clear blue day a quarter century ago and the heartbreak that followed.

Caroline Ogonowski’s father, John, was the captain of Flight 11, which took off from Boston 47 minutes before striking the North Tower.

Ogonowski, now 39, had her first baby this year and named him after her father. She brought him to her father’s grave last week and attended a memorial ceremony in Boston on Friday.

“This year, there’s this new sadness in knowing that they won’t ever get to know each other,” Ogonowski, who has worked in disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, said in a phone interview. “My father will never know his grandson. And my son will never know his grandfather.

“We owe it to my father and all the others that we lost on that day to make sure that we continue to teach future generations about what happened, about who these people were, who these heroes were, how our country came together and became stronger because of it,” she added.

Lasting legacy

A generation of Americans has grown up since 2001 who are too young to remember the attacks but whose lives were fundamentally altered by them.

The attacks initiated the War on Terror, which led to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that lasted years. The resulting public backlash helped fuel Trump’s rise a decade ago, when he vowed not to start new foreign entanglements — a promise being tested by the Iran war.

At home, Americans expressed deep solidarity and patriotism, as well as sorrow, in the immediate wake of the attacks.

At the same time, however, Muslim Americans and immigrants from Muslim-majority countries faced a rise in prejudice and hate crimes. Public polls have found 9/11 colors Americans’ perceptions of Muslims to this day. Zohran Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor, faced calls from some Republicans to skip Friday’s ceremony, which he rejected.

Casualties were not limited to those who perished on September 11. Many rescue workers who spent weeks or months at the site afterward, as well as nearby residents and others, were sickened by toxins in the air and eventually died.

The New York City Fire Department lost 343 members on September 11. More than 600 additional firefighters, including some retired members who took part in the rescue effort, have died of 9/11-related illnesses since then, department figures show.

Twenty-six have died this year alone.

U.S. officials disputed that claim.

“All of our Saildrones are accounted for and fully operational,” an official told Military Times.

The IRGC has released footage of its forces attacking an American Saildrone USV in/near the Strait of Hormuz today.

The unmanned Saildrone can be seen burning. pic.twitter.com/hALY030MOe

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) September 10, 2026

The video comes on the heels of another incident in which an Anduril Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicle — designed for long-range surveillance and other undersea missions — was captured on Sept. 8.

U.S. Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins of U.S. Central Command told Reuters that the “defective drone was an older model that neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment.”

“Of course Iran will take every opportunity as a propaganda win,” Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the outlet. “It can help the (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) make better versions of their own designs.”

The Navy recently awarded Saildrone Voyager a $16.3 million task order to extend operations of the Voyager fleet in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, according to an August release.

Since 2023, Saildrone’s USVs have worked in coordination with the U.S. Navy, supporting the Joint Interagency Task Force South, or JIATF-S, and U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command/U.S. Navy Fourth Fleet, per the release.

The 33-foot-long Voyager is designed for persistent surface and subsurface surveillance and can also conduct nearshore mapping missions and seafloor characterization.

Able to remain “on mission and on station” for months at a time, the USVs are “both a deterrent and an alarm” along the U.S.’s expansive southern maritime border, according to the company.

“Everyone knows exactly what they were doing on that day, or where they were, but it’s weird too, because we don’t know what life was like before that,” the high school senior from Bradenton, Florida, explained.

She was born into a country already at war. By the time she was old enough to understand what war meant, American troops had been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq for years.

“I almost feel numb to all of the violence of it, because we were told about it so much when we were little … but we were too little to understand,” Cline said.

That distance is one of the defining legacies of 25 years of war. Millions of Americans came of age surrounded by its consequences without ever experiencing the wars themselves.

Now that generation is entering adulthood as the Pentagon confronts a different challenge: What happens when a generation comes of age during an era of war without being asked to participate in it? For most Americans who grew up after 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a constant presence, but military service was not. They inherited the consequences of those wars without necessarily inheriting a personal connection to the people who fought them.

A growing divide

The Defense Department has linked the growing divide to the military’s smaller footprint and declining numbers of Americans with family or personal connections to service.

In 1995, 40% of young people had a parent who had served in the military. By 2022, that figure had fallen to 12%, according to the Defense Department.

The change happened alongside the all-volunteer force and two decades of sustained military operations.

The Defense Department has also found that military service increasingly falls outside the range of careers young people consider. About 20 years ago, just over 25% of young people had never thought about serving. In recent years, more than half had never considered it.

A 2025 ThinkNow survey found that among Gen Z adults who had not served, 28% said they were very or somewhat likely to consider joining. Nearly half, 49%, said they were not very or not at all likely, while 23% were unsure.

For those who said they would consider joining, career opportunities were the leading motivation, followed by financial security and educational benefits. Family tradition ranked much lower.

Among those unlikely to join, about half cited a lack of interest in military service and cited concerns about physical or mental health risks. Others cited fear of combat or deployment.

Sherald Winans, a college freshman at Miami University of Ohio, said that when he pictures someone his age joining the military, he imagines boot camp, followed by deployment “somewhere in the desert to go to war.”

“I don’t know anyone who serves,” he said. “But I think that there’s more danger now than ever when going to fight in the military.”

Choosing to serve

Tiana Ramirez is an example of what that choice can look like today.

A recent high school graduate preparing to join the Marine Corps, Ramirez said she wanted purpose and the benefits that come with military service. She did not want to go to college immediately after high school and had heard positive things about the opportunities available to veterans.

Her grandfather served in Vietnam, and her older cousin serves in the Navy aboard the Freedom-class littoral combat ship USS Billings.

But 9/11 is not part of her personal history. She was not alive when the attacks occurred and has no direct memory of the wars that followed.

Ramirez said she thinks about Iraq and Afghanistan but does not spend much time worrying about whether she could experience a similar deployment. She wants to begin her military career with an open mind and see what comes next.

For her, the appeal is practical as well as personal: steady income, a career path, health care and education benefits.

She also described military service as a way to find her purpose and determine what she is meant to do.

What young Americans know about war

For young Americans who did not live through 9/11, the attacks are history, rather than memory.

Teachers who have watched those students encounter the subject in classrooms describe that difference.

Sarah Boyles, a Florida history teacher, said that during her first years teaching, she focused less on the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and more on their causes and consequences. At the time, the attacks were too emotional for some students to discuss.

Randall Faulks, a social studies teacher in Louisiana, said students do not always have an emotional response because they have no personal memory of the day.

For some students, the experience is more like learning about another major historical event.

Jerrica Santos, a junior in high school and daughter of an Army command sergeant major, said she does not believe people who did not experience 9/11 can feel the same pain as those who did.

“But we can understand their point of view,” she said.

Izzy Williams, another high school senior, compared that inherited experience with another event her generation did experience directly: the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We definitely understand how all of a sudden the world changed, just like how COVID changed everything we knew,” Williams said. “We started doing things differently and getting used to different ways.”

The civil-military gap persists

The Pentagon’s recruiting numbers have improved after several years of shortfalls.

By the end of fiscal 2025, all five active-duty services had met or exceeded their enlisted accession goals. The Army reached 101.72% of its goal; the Navy 108.61%; the Marine Corps 100%; the Air Force 100.22%; and the Space Force 102.89%.

Despite this, the DoD has cited a shrinking eligible population, declining birth rates, fewer family connections and lower willingness to serve among the challenges facing military recruiting and retention.

That disparity matters beyond who chooses to enlist. It also creates a widening gap between the generation that fought the post-9/11 wars and the generation now entering adulthood without a personal connection to them.

As the post-9/11 generation transitions out of the service, military historian Ben Connable shared his concerns about how much knowledge from Iraq and Afghanistan will carry forward.

Connable said the military has previously had to relearn lessons that were not successfully passed from one generation to the next — citing Vietnam as an example.

He said recent cases have often been poorly transmitted into modern military knowledge and warned that knowledge that was developed during years of counterinsurgency might not be passed down.

That transition is occurring alongside significant turnover among the Pentagon’s senior leadership.

At least 20 generals, admirals and civilian defense leaders have been fired or departed their positions since Hegseth became defense secretary, according to a Sept. 2 CBS News tally.

Hegseth directed a restructuring of the senior officer ranks in May 2025. His memorandum called for a minimum 20% reduction in four-star positions across the active component, a minimum 20% reduction in National Guard general officers and an additional minimum 10% reduction in general and flag officers tied to a realignment of the Unified Command Plan.

Inheriting a different military

The young Americans coming of age now are not the same young Americans who enlisted after Sept. 11.

They grew up watching the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down. They experienced a pandemic that disrupted daily life.

John Spencer, a military researcher and author who studies combat and military cohesion, cautioned against assuming that younger service members are inherently less capable than the generations before them.

Every generation, he said, has been told that it might not perform as well as the one before it when tested in war.

That is a recurring concern, not a judgment unique to today’s young troops.

What matters in combat, Spencer said, is not simply technology or individual ability.

“Cohesion remains critical to how units perform under pressure,” he said.

Ramirez is about to become part of the institution that shaped the world she grew up in, even though she has no memory of the event that set those wars in motion.

She leaves for boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina, later this month, without knowing what her military career will bring, or whether the wars she learned about in school will ever become a larger part of her own life.

“I signed up to serve because I want to do something different,” Ramirez says. “And something that makes a difference, too.”

On Aug. 20, SBA proposed replacing nearly 1,000 industry-specific size standards and exceptions with 338 broader ones.

In common IT services categories, the threshold would rise from $34 million in average annual receipts to $531 million. SBA estimates 37,002 firms already in the federal market would newly qualify, holding more than 105,000 contracts worth about $71 billion in fiscal 2025.

SBA has legitimate reasons to act. The system is complicated, inflation has eroded the thresholds and businesses need room to grow. But that raises a narrower question: Should a $10 million SDVOSB compete for the same set-asides as an SDVOSB approaching $500 million?

An SDVOSB must be small under the standard assigned to a contract, in addition to being veteran-owned and controlled. If these thresholds hold, veteran-owned companies at dramatically different stages will compete head-to-head, and they are not similarly situated.

A firm with hundreds of millions in revenue has more capital, deeper past performance, bigger proposal teams and more room to absorb delayed payments, protests and lost bids. Most newly eligible firms will be $40 million to $200 million companies, and the advantage is the same.

We should want veterans to build $500 million companies. But a program built for veteran entrepreneurs should not pretend that gap does not exist.

Nowhere is this more consequential than at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which by statute must set work aside for veteran-owned small businesses whenever two can perform it, and which awarded roughly a quarter of its prime dollars to SDVOSBs last year.

The veteran-owned IT firms that outgrew that program would walk back through the door and compete against the firm that won its first VA contract last year.

SBA acknowledges that a larger pool may reduce existing small businesses’ chances of winning, and says the greatest effect will fall on firms most similar in size to the new entrants.

In a set-aside decided on past performance, staffing depth and price, the firm most likely to lose is the one with the least of each: the emerging veteran-owned business the program exists to serve.

SBA also states it is “not possible for SBA to accurately predict which newly classified firms would be eligible for certification,” and expects firms near the threshold not to certify.

That may be true elsewhere. It is not true where certification is free, takes weeks and unlocks a category one agency funds at roughly $10 billion a year. And the data to test it already sit in SBA’s own systems: VetCert, SAM.gov and FPDS show every firm that has held or lost SDVOSB certification, its size and its awards.

Before finalizing, SBA should publish an analysis. How many larger firms would qualify on both size and ownership, what they already receive and where smaller SDVOSBs would face the most new competition?

Depending on the data, SBA should adopt an SDVOSB-specific safeguard. SBA already uses program-specific size definitions elsewhere, and Congress can settle any doubt about authority.

One option is a separate upper threshold for SDVOSB set-asides where the general standard would otherwise rise into the hundreds of millions. Something like $75 million, roughly twice today’s standard, would let a firm double before graduating. The principle matters more than the number.

Congress has a vehicle ready. The bipartisan Contract Our Veterans Act of 2026 would set a 5% government-wide goal for veteran-owned small business contracting. A goal is only as meaningful as the field it is measured against, and the same bill could define that field so the goal is met by veterans building companies, rather than by a few already large ones.

No soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, guardian or Coast Guardsman leaves the service and builds a $500 million company on day one. The SDVOSB program should be a working ladder to the open marketplace, not permanent shelter from competition. SBA can modernize and keep that ladder standing.

Comments are due Sept. 21, 2026, at regulations.gov, Docket SBA-2026-0199, and SBA must answer substantive comments in the final rule. If you own a veteran-owned business, tell SBA what this change would mean for you.

Justin Brown is CEO of The Nimitz Group, a Washington, D.C.-based government relations firm focused on veterans policy and federal procurement.

The reactor’s deployment helps carry out President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order calling for the swift integration of nuclear power within the military, with a goal of having at least one working reactor on a military base by Sept. 30, 2028.

“The MMR installation will provide reliable, around-the-clock power independent of the commercial electric grid, capable of sustaining critical operations under the most demanding conditions,” a Pentagon release said.

The reactor will help create American jobs, bolster the nuclear supply chain, provide nonstop power outside of the civilian electric grid and help support national security.

It will also be the first power-producing reactor installed in Indiana.

The reactor installation will be implemented by the Army’s Janus Program, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations and Environment, the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, and state of Indiana.

The Janus program was created to install nuclear power on military bases that can operate independently of the surrounding city’s electrical grid.

The Pentagon said it will work hand-in-hand with federal, state and local partners to ensure the reactor is installed in a way that complies with environmental and safety regulations.