All Department of Defense personnel are forbidden from such financial transactions either directly or through a third party when using insider information, according to a memo signed last week by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“The lives of our service members often depend on the enemy not knowing what is coming,” Hegseth wrote in the memo. “The men and women who carry our flag into harm’s way deserve a Force that protects them — not one that exposes them to the enemy for personal gain.”

The memo comes six months after a U.S. soldier involved with the capture of ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was charged with using insider information to win $400,000 by betting on his removal through the prediction market Polymarket. The soldier, a master sergeant with U.S. Army Special Forces, later pleaded not guilty, and his criminal trial is slated for early December.

The same month, individuals across the globe used Polymarket to place bets on the rescue mission of Dude 44 Bravo, one of the airmen who ejected from a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle that was shot down over Iran by enemy fire during Operation Epic Fury. 

Polymarket later took down the wagers, saying it didn’t meet the site’s integrity standards, but other war-related markets users can bet on were created before and after the Iran war began, causing concern over national security among lawmakers and experts. 

Another instance of an individual betting on military operations involved an anonymous Polymarket account making $550,000 off of trades on the first day of strikes in Operation Epic Fury, wagering on the U.S. strikes against Iran and the removal of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by Israeli air strikes on the war’s first day.

The recent memo, which was shared with senior Pentagon leadership, combatant commanders, defense agencies and field activity directors, reinforces federal law that prohibits government employees from using nonpublic information from their work for personal financial gains.

The ban extends to all financial platforms, including betting platforms and prediction markets, with the directive pointing to Polymarket and Kalshi as specific examples. 

The memo first publicly circulated on the unofficial Facebook page Air Force amn/nco/snco. A Defense Department official shared a copy of the memo with Military Times, confirming the authenticity of the one circulating on social media.

The directive asserts that signals are generated when personnel engage in a financial transaction on a military outcome. The signal can then be watched by adversaries in these markets and exploited by hostile foreign intelligence services to anticipate American movements, targets and timing.

“The memorandum from the Secretary of War regarding predictive markets is a reminder that engaging in financial transactions using nonpublic information, and using nonpublic information to further private interests, is prohibited and may result in punitive action,” the Pentagon official told Military Times.

“The Department takes this misconduct seriously and will take appropriate action, to include coordinating with the Department of Justice, to ensure anyone who engages in this misconduct is held accountable,” the official concluded.

Violations can result in administrative, disciplinary or criminal action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or applicable federal law, the memo says.

Alongside operational security unease, Hegseth argues in the memo that financial stakes can negatively impact judgment and weaken the “warrior ethos” as personnel become invested in certain outcomes. 

“We are restoring lethality, discipline, and singular focus on fighting and winning our Nation’s wars, and nothing should distract us from that sacred mission,” Hegseth writes. “Not entertainment. Not a payout.”

The service members were assigned to Naval Air Technical Training Center and Naval Aviation Schools Command.

“The Navy mourns the loss of our shipmates and extends our deepest condolences to the sailors’ families, friends, and fellow sailors during this difficult time,” the Navy said in a statement provided to Military Times. “Grief counseling service and support are available through local Navy chaplains.”

Local media affiliates reported that police were notified of the crash at 1:35 a.m. Saturday morning.

Police told local reporters that the car was in flames when first responders arrived.

Once the blaze was doused, the three sailors were found inside.

The circumstances that led to the crash were not immediately clear. 

The names of the service members have not yet been released.

^{Under federal law, former spouses may receive up to half a service member’s time-based military retirement pay. But medical-based military retirement pay and any Veterans Affairs disability pay is protected and not divisible.}

^{In Marschner v. Marschner, which was accepted by the high court earlier this month, Roxane Marschner, who married North Dakota Army National Guard soldier Richard Marschner, is seeking to enforce a clause in her divorce settlement in which Richard agreed to pay her the equivalent of her portion of military retirement pay if any of it was offset by disability compensation.}

^{The couple married in 1994 and divorced 22 years later. In their settlement, Roxane was to receive a percentage of Richard’s military and federal civilian benefits when he retired. But Richard later was medically retired as a result of service-connected injuries and received medical retirement pay and VA disability compensation — neither of which is divisible under the Uniformed Services Former Spouses Protection Act.}

^{Roxane then took Richard to court, arguing that he had agreed to pay her if she did not receive her share of benefits. The lower court ruled in her favor. Richard then petitioned the North Dakota Supreme Court, which said the provision was unenforceable.}

^{Roxane Marschner then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the case, saying that the law and a previous Supreme Court ruling only limited courts from instating provisions that divided disability compensation and did not apply to private agreements negotiated by spouses.}

^{She also argued that other states, including Virginia, Illinois, Nevada and Alaska, have allowed enforcement of such agreements, known as indemnification provisions, in divorce settlements, and a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court was necessary to ensure equity across the legal system.}

^{Richard Marschner’s attorneys have said the state courts don’t have the authority to divide federally protected benefits and the North Dakota district courts order to Richard to pay Roxane is invalid as a result.}

^{Marschner’s attorney, Johanna Clyborne of Minnesota-based Brekke, Clyborne and Ribich, told Military Times that divorce agreements such as the Marschners’ happen “more than people realize” because veterans — and attorneys — often don’t understand federal protections of disability benefits and medical retirement payments.}

^{“Congress has spoken on this issue, right, and it is non-divisible. There’s going to be different sorts of interpretations, but Congress thought that the veterans were entitled to disability benefits and basically prioritized, and to allow them to be stripped by a state court in very narrow circumstances is not what was intended,” Clyborne said in an interview.}

^{Several previous cases have addressed the division of retirement pay and disability benefits in military divorces. In Howell v. Howell, the Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that state courts cannot require a veteran to compensate his spouse half his retirement pay when he waived a portion of it to receive non-taxable VA disability compensation.}

^{The Court has not scheduled a date for Marschner v. Marschner, although the case could be heard as early as January.}

^{Clyborne said the case has the potential to affect divorce agreements for veterans who receive Combat-Related Specialty Compensation, Concurrent Retirement Disability Pay and other benefits.}

^{“Hopefully it will settle a lot of questions folks have been wrestling with,” Clyborne said.}

Texas-based Warhound was conceived by Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey and entrepreneur Ben Lamm, who started Colossal Biosciences, a company best known for its efforts to revive extinct species.

In a press release, Warhound chief executive David Spirk said the company aims to reduce the United States’ dependence on a “shrinking” European supply chain for working dogs.

“Our long-term goal is simple: healthier dogs, better-prepared teams, and more service members and first responders coming home safely,” Spirk said, adding that he cares deeply about “protecting people and helping the animals who support them.”

Before joining Warhound, Spirk held several defense-related positions, including senior counsel at Palantir Technologies and chief data officer at both the Defense Department and U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM.

According to the announcement, Luckey and Lamm conceived the idea for Warhound years ago at the annual Moonshots Summit, a gathering where entrepreneurs discuss ambitious ideas.

They recognized two challenges with military working-dog programs: Most of the canines never complete training, and the U.S. relies heavily on a foreign supply chain. 

According to Warhound, overseas suppliers provide 80% of military working dogs. The company also says the United States must train roughly 200 dogs to field 100, in part because so many fail to complete training.

Warhound plans to combine the founders’ respective areas of expertise to address those problems.

“Colossal’s science will help produce healthier dogs with characteristics suited to demanding missions, while Anduril’s technology will give dogs and their handlers greater awareness and protection in the field,” the company said.

Warhound also said it will work with the American Humane Society to safeguard the animals’ health and welfare. The company said its goal is to reduce training washouts, limit the number of dogs entering intensive training unnecessarily and enable safer, more effective missions.

Barrett was commissioned through Navy ROTC in 2000 and spent four years leading infantry and scout sniper Marines from 2000 to 2004.

When most of his platoon headed to sniper school, he went with them.

It was a “pretty unusual” move for a Marine officer, he told Military Times.

The Marine Corps has since trained its final scout snipers and moved sniper training into reconnaissance and Raider units under Force Design 2030.

After the Marines, Barrett built a business, sold it and started farming. When a friend asked him to join an aid convoy to Ukraine, he had four kids in school and a harvest underway. His first answer was no.

That night, he read about pastors killed and churches destroyed by Russian forces. As a Christian, he wondered how he’d missed it. He made the trip, then kept going back.

Now, despite declaring that he is “not a filmmaker,” Barrett has produced two series on the war in Ukraine: A Faith Under Siege and Faith in War. Within that series is Safe Ground, the story of a Green Beret who removes landmines in Ukraine.

During those trips, Barrett heard about a sniper with the call sign of Lektor, a special forces sniper from the Department of Active Measures with Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence, who, in December 2024, hit a moving Russian soldier at 2,069 meters using a single .338 Lapua Magnum round from a Sako TRG M10. He fired standing in a trench, nearly level with his target, and hit on the first shot.

Lektor is still running missions and only reluctantly agreed to press, Barrett said. Soon, however, Barrett’s time with Lektor will become a short documentary.

Barrett’s crew spent a morning on the range with his unit testing whether American M118 ammunition could match its costly hand-loaded rounds. Lektor said there was “practically no difference,” so the unit stuck with the M118 it already had.

“I was struck by just his humility,” Barrett said.

Lektor, a former gamekeeper, waved off the praise.

“Honestly, I don’t consider myself a super expert,” he told Barrett’s crew in an interview translated from Ukrainian. “This is my job for the duration of the war.”

Before the shot, his team had spent two weeks on the zero line watching for a Russian assault, under orders not to fire. When the situation changed and the team was set to move, Lektor asked for one more chance.

“So I simply begged the commander: give us a day or two for free hunting,” he said.

He spotted a soldier whose gear set him apart from ordinary infantry. The man was walking a tree line at a steady pace and a workable angle. As Lektor prepared to fire, his partner called a wind correction in the wrong direction.

“I managed to shout: recalculate, something’s wrong,” Lektor said. They fixed it in seconds while the target was still moving.

Barrett pointed to the longest confirmed .338 Lapua kill — British Cpl. Craig Harrison’s 2,475-meter shot in Afghanistan in 2009 — which came after several sighting rounds. Shots like that, he said, are “really more like competition shooting.” Lektor is skeptical of the rankings for the same reason.

“Two shots maximum: if you didn’t hit, that’s it,” he said. “That’s how you should compare.”

Within half an hour of the shot, drones were overhead.

“The only thing that saved us was that the enemy didn’t expect a shot from such a distance,” Lektor said. The Russians shelled an area about 500 meters out. His team waited a full day in a dugout before slipping out.

Now, thermal cameras hunt for heat.

“After a shot, a simple suppressor can give you away, because it’s hot, it glows,” Lektor said.

Early in the war, Lektor said, the walk to a firing position was about a kilometer. He now walks eight.

Barrett asked him whether snipers were even relevant anymore. Lektor admitted the role is “a little outdated” but not finished.

“Snipers, in my opinion, are the neurosurgeons,” he said. A sniper team can watch a sector almost continuously, he explained. “Drones have to return to recharge, they get shot down.”

Near Bakhmut, Lektor’s team killed a Russian sniper. A neighboring unit then told them he was the fifth one killed at that position.

“They have absolutely no regard for the lives of their own men,” Lektor said.

Barrett sees Ukraine’s regard for its own people as an advantage, along with its speed in adapting to new technology. Russia, he said, treats the war like a meat grinder: “If I just put so much meat into it, that it breaks the grinder, then we’ll win.”

Lektor’s son enlisted first, and the two have served together most of the war.

“He’s my child, I have to be there,” Lektor said.

Once, while Lektor was hospitalized with wounds, his son was fighting with another team in Chasiv Yar. He was the only one of four men in his group to come out unharmed.

On his own team, Lektor keeps one rule.

“I [am] the first to go in and the last to come out,” he said. “That’s our unwritten rule.”

The extent of the drone war is underestimated, with Ukraine and Russia each using roughly 10,000 drones a day, the former CIA director and onetime commander of U.S. Central Command said, speaking at an American Primary Aluminum Association event in Washington.

“This is an unmanned systems war,” Petraeus said. “Tanks aren’t survivable there anymore.”

For Ukraine, drones and unmanned weapons have become central to how the country has leveraged a smaller, outgunned force against a much larger, better-financed adversary for almost five years.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered the creation of a new Unmanned Systems Forces military branch in 2024, and the Defense Ministry has said time and again that developing more autonomous weapons is a top priority.

But for the rest of the world, Petraeus said, the fighting in Ukraine is a window into the future and a warning about the dangers of being underprepared for the battles to come.

“Really, no NATO country and not even the United States is undertaking yet the urgent revolutionary institutional change that should be taken based on what we see in Ukraine, which is the future of war,” he said.

The U.S. needs a new concept of warfare that runs through force structure, training, procurement, personnel policy and bases, the general said, replacing much of the legacy, heavily manned equipment with unmanned systems that are cheaper and far more numerous.

“What’s going to happen is we’ll see the introduction of autonomous systems really for the first time in warfare,” Petraeus said.

Washington is making “some commendable steps” toward developing these weapons, according to Petraeus, including establishing a new Autonomous Warfare Command that requires each military branch to stand up its own component command.

“But my hope is that they will not just create an unmanned systems force in terms of force structure, but that they will also spur the initiation of true institutional change,” Petraeus said.

That includes how the U.S. buys weapons, Petraeus said, calling for “very, very substantial manufacturing capacity but not necessarily producing all the time.”

“You want it to be able to make software changes every week, hardware changes every few weeks, which is what’s going on in Ukraine because the enemy continues to evolve and Russia’s been innovating very substantially as well,” he said.

Ukraine will produce as many as 20 million unmanned systems this year, Zelenskyy said in a July speech, with a shortage of trained operators and the acquisition of some weapons components — including optics, gimbals, brushless motors and fiber-optic cable — becoming the domestic industry’s production bottleneck.

The general also rejected the idea that the U.S. war with Iran has hurt Washington’s ability to help Kyiv, though he acknowledged the U.S. has used “a fair number of missile interceptors,” which “makes it more difficult to share those with others around the world.”

The war has consumed between one-half and two-thirds of the U.S. inventory of certain missile-defense interceptors, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate released in September.

“We can help the Ukrainians in any way in which we decide to assist them,” Petraeus said. “These are policy decisions.”

On March 6, 1945, the Navy found its solution in Jane Kendeigh and her 11 fellow flight nurses. For the first time in the war, the U.S. Navy began deploying combat nurses to an active battlefield. With only six weeks of training, these nurses began to instantly triage and evacuate wounded Marines, working in frigid, unpressurized aircraft amid constant enemy assaults.

Oftentimes called “mom” by their wounded comrades, these 12 women evacuated 2,393 men on 125 flights — more than 13% of everyone evacuated from Iwo Jima — and continued their bloody, lifesaving work in what was to become the largest Allied amphibious landing in the Pacific theater and the final island battle of the Pacific, Okinawa.

Author and professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, Leah Garrett, sat down with Military Times to discuss her latest work, The Flight Nurses’ War: The American Women Who Saved Thousands of Lives at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, as well as the conditions these women worked under and how researching her latest book left her with one of “the most moving moments of my life.”

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity.

Military Times: When one thinks of Iwo Jima, images come to mind of the blackened sand, brutal conditions and Mount Suribachi, but never women. How did the story of these 12 women come to your attention?

Leah Garrett: When I was writing my last book, I kept hearing these rumors that there had been women at Iwo Jima, and I thought there was no way that there were women at Iwo Jima. I reached out to the Navy, and I got military clearance and worked with an archivist there. He had written a bit about it, but there had never been a book about it — the full story of who these women were and what they were doing there.

Once I started to search about it, I found out that there had indeed been these 12 Navy flight nurses who had landed at Iwo Jima under fire, and in the worst kind of nightmare anyone can imagine, and flew out these men. Part of the reason that no one had done their stories is that these women themselves … I don’t think they realized how extraordinary it was what they had done.

I started to reach out to the families of those 12 flight nurses, and discovered that every historian wants to discover — there was a massive amount of material. Most of the story was actually in these well-cared-for boxes in basements and garages, and so the way I wrote the story was I worked with the military archivists, but then I flew around the country and met with the families themselves, interviewed the children, and went through the boxes and found just all this extraordinary first-person material: photographs, letters, memoirs.

Before we get into the nurses themselves, can you talk about the creation of flight nurses?

All of the flight nurses signed up to join the military after the attack on Pearl Harbor. For each of them, that was the watershed moment when they said, “I need to serve.”

There’s this one woman named Mary O’Connor who goes to Washington and says, “Look, we want you to set up a flight nurses program.” The reason that they wanted to set it up is that the Army had women in combat positions who were nurses, but the Navy didn’t.

As we get into 1945, the final two battles in the Pacific were really far more horrific than anyone expected them to be in the Navy, particularly at Iwo Jima. The Japanese were targeting the medical corps as well, so there was a massive attrition rate, and they did not have enough people there to take care of the men. And also, Iwo Jima is really complicated because you can’t set up field hospitals in Iwo Jima because of the landscape; it’s just too exposed. So then the question becomes: “Well, how do we get these men out?”

What happens is all these different nurses are serving in the Navy at different military hospitals, Navy hospitals around the country, and their supervisors reach out to the best one or two of each group and say, “Look, would you be interested in overseas service?” Nobody knows what it will be, but these women say yes. O’Connor gets hundreds of applications. She picks the top 24 that seem the best to her — basically smart, very capable, very brave women. So these 24 women are then sent out to Alameda, California, to do … this very intense six-week training.

The cream de la creme of the 24 were then flown to Guam, and once they’re in Guam, they’re going to be given their assignment. This had never been done before. The Navy had never put women in combat positions under direct fire, and it was a very incredibly dangerous thing to do. I mean, what if they’re killed? What if they’re captured? What if they’re used for propaganda? Like, there’s so much that could have gone wrong, and I think, much to everyone’s surprise, probably including some of the women, they were so effective in getting those men out.

On March 6, 1945, Jane Kendeigh became the first Navy flight nurse to appear on an active Pacific battlefield. Ultimately, she and 11 other nurses evacuated 2,393 men from Iwo Jima. That’s an incredible statistic, but does any story in particular stand out to you?

One of the crazy aspects of this story is that when you’re in an aircraft flying from Iwo Jima to Guam, there are no doctors on these flights. They fly over there with their corpsman and then a pilot, maybe a navigator. And when they get to Iwo Jima, it’s active fire.

Every time they’re supposed to be landing, there’s supposed to be a lull. There’s no lull because it’s such a horrific battle. They can’t turn around. They have to land. And when they land, they all talked about this visceral aspect of it. The smell of death. The sulfur smell. That the airstrip is shaking. And again, because there are no field hospitals there, they walk over to scores of extremely wounded Marines who are just lying there on stretchers on the ground in terrible, terrible shape.

It’s absolute chaos that they have to face, and then they’re on the aircraft, and they’re by themselves. One of them said, “I can’t even phone anyone to ask what I should do. I’m in the middle of the Pacific. There are these men who are dying or near death all around me, and I have to figure out what to do.” All of it was this learning curve on the plane. It’s freezing cold. There’s no air pressure.

One of the stories that moved me so much — it’s actually one of the more famous stories — but I think one of the most moving ones is about Kendeigh’s first flight. She’s actually not supposed to go on the first flight. There’s this photo a Navy photographer takes of Jane, where she gets off the plane, and she walks over to a Marine, Sgt. Bill Wyckoff, lying there. He’s got bandages all over his face. Wyckoff later said it was like an angel took my hand. He’s lying there near death, and he hears this woman whispering in his ear, “It’s going to be okay.”

Albeit brief, what kind of relationship did these Marines and nurses forge?

The men called them mom. They would say, “Mom, can you come here?”

“Mom, can you put on your lipstick?”

“Can I watch you put on your lipstick like my mom used to do?”

When the book was published, I insisted the font color on the cover be that lipstick red.

The women always said, “We were treated with the greatest respect by these men.” They never dealt with any hassling, no sexualization, none of that. It was just pure respect and love that they received and gave back.

One of my colleagues likes to talk about “research rapture.” What was the process like researching for The Flight Nurses’ War?

The families were incredible because I think that they were so glad somebody was finally telling these amazing stories of their role. And I had so many extraordinary moments. Part of the way that the unpacking of the boxes would work was that I would be with the children as we unpacked the boxes, so it was this extremely moving and rich moment that the kids would remember: “Oh wait, like there’s a shell necklace from Guam,” and then they would tell the story of how the mom got it when she was there.

I talk about this moment a lot in the book, and I always get very seriously teary when I talk about it. Another one of the flight nurses, Mary Leahy Hudnall, came from Massachusetts. She didn’t particularly want to go on planes. She joined the Navy because she thought that she would be on a ship. There you go.

She ends up on these flights, and in one instance they’re putting these men on the aircraft who are mortally wounded, right? There’s no doctor; it’s just them and the corpsman. One of the Marines on her flight out of Iwo Jima, who she knows is very, very, very wounded. He’s probably not going to make it, and he insists that she take a vial of sand from Iwo Jima that he took. She says, “No, you’re going to be fine, you’re going to be fine,” but he keeps saying, “No, can you please take this. I need you to take it because you need to tell the story of what we went through.”

So she takes the vial of sand, and then he unfortunately passes away. She gives that vial of sand to her daughter, and then when I’m in Canada visiting with her daughter, we find that vial of sand in one of the boxes. I got to hold it, and it was honestly one of the most moving moments of my life.

I took a picture of it and put it in the book because, as a historian, it’s my imperative to tell his story. I’m not only telling the story of the nurses, but I’m equally telling the story of the wounded men under their care whose stories need to be told.

That is, at least, the proper terminology in this great American age of rebrands, one that has borne witness to such seismic overhauls as the Gulf of Mexico becoming the Gulf of America, Lake Ontario becoming Lake America, and a push to call New Mexico … New America.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Sept. 29 the term “artificial intelligence” would henceforth be retired in favor of “super intelligence.”

“As these capabilities continue to improve, they increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence,” the executive order stated.

The president followed that “SI” declaration up with an Oct. 8 Truth Social post asserting that anyone who uses the previous moniker would be branded “THE ENEMY!”

The U.S. Navy this week became one of the first services to avoid that traitorous designation, cementing the super initiative and calling on “all Navy echelons, commands, activities, and personnel [to] use ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI,’” a service memo stated.

“This policy applies effective immediately across all official Navy correspondence, flag letters, OPORDs, wargame documentation, instructional material, fleet advisories, public communications, official websites, strategic assessments, congressional reports, and non-statutory internal and external policy documents,” the memo continued.

As part of the super overhaul, echelon II commanders, type commanders and systems commanders will be required to review all “public releases, intranet portals, and external presentations for compliance” no later than 30 days after the release of the super memo. These personnel will then be required to submit a super report on completing the task.

The directive does not require retroactively amending previously published documentation or contracts, the message noted, while existing laws and statutes “will continue to be cited as statutorily required until conforming congressional amendments are enacted.”

A Military Times request for comment from the sea service regarding what consequences might result should “artificial intelligence” be used was not returned as of press time.

Becker, a decorated explosive ordnance disposal officer, was sentenced in 2022 to life without parole in the 2015 death of 32-year-old Johanna Hove-Becker, with a jury finding he was guilty of premeditated murder, assault consummated by a battery and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. The trial followed years of dispute over who would prosecute the case; Becker remained in the custody of Belgian legal authorities for two years after Hove-Becker’s death while the Navy declined to take jurisdiction. Then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis ultimately ordered the Navy to take the case in 2018.

While prosecutors said Becker had had a “visceral” reaction to learning Hove-Becker had a new boyfriend and was thus motivated to later drug her with sleeping pills and push her from the window to her death, Becker’s attorney says evidence left out of trial points to the deceased woman’s own mental instability.

In an Oct. 16 petition for writ of certiorari, or formal review request to the Supreme Court, Becker’s attorney David Sheldon, a former Navy Judge Advocate General, argues that a series of text messages between Becker and his wife seven months before her death constitute evidence that she was suicidal and should have been included as part of Becker’s defense. Both Becker and Hove-Becker, the petition states, were separated at the time of her death and had other partners, though they continued to live together and co-parent.

In the messages, included in the petition, Hove-Becker allegedly tells Becker she’s “trying to work on not being nuts” and “terrified” of “losing my memory and my wits … losing my mental faculties against my will.”

The texts were excluded by the trial judge as hearsay, Sheldon states, but should have been included as key evidence of a “history of mental health problems,” particularly in light of other testimony from the prosecution that sought to establish Hove-Becker’s soundness of mind.

It’s the last in a series of appeals and follows previous disputes over hearsay in the case. A 2021 decision by the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals, or NMCCA, overturned a decision by the trial judge, Navy Capt. Aaron Rugh, which had excluded statements Hove-Becker made in 2013 accusing her husband of physical violence. She had claimed Becker had thrown her “around their hotel room and strangled her” after learning she’d had an affair, but she later recanted the statements in a joint counseling session, court documents show.

Later in 2021, though, the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, or CAAF, reversed the lower appellate court’s ruling, finding the judge was right to suppress the statements.

Texts Hove-Becker allegedly sent on the night of her death, including one stating “I f—ing hate my life,” also complicate the picture, though Becker was later accused of sending those messages himself.

In an interview, Sheldon said he believed the lower appellate courts should have allowed for admission of evidence supporting Becker’s claim that his wife had died by suicide.

“The government paints this picture throughout the trial that she somehow is sane right before she dies,” he said. “And that just didn’t match reality.”

In a 111-page opinion issued late last December, NMCCA declined to overturn Becker’s conviction, finding the prosecution had “presented overwhelming evidence of preparation, including [Becker] retrieving pills from his former desk one day before [Hove-Becker’s] death that match a description of zolpidem, and buying wine for someone he described as having a drinking problem.”

The court also noted that Hove-Becker was described by friends and co-workers as “happy and moving on with her life” around the time of her death.

CAAF, the last military appeals court before the Supreme Court, announced in June that it would not reconsider the case, and denied reconsideration a month later.

Becker has been incarcerated at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, since his sentencing, Sheldon said. The Supreme Court is likely to make a decision within the next 90 days on whether it will take up the case, he said.

In a federal lawsuit, the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, Battalion Search and Rescue and Southern Border Communities Coalition argue the Trump administration is misusing so-called “national defense areas” to circumvent longstanding restrictions on military participation in civilian law enforcement.

In a statement, Brian Netter, legal director at Democracy Forward, one of the teams representing the plaintiffs, called the “national defense area” designation “an extraordinary abuse of power with devastating consequences for the people who live, work, worship, recreate, and carry out lifesaving humanitarian work along the border.”

“Public lands do not become military installations simply because the president says so, and the military cannot be handed sweeping new authority to police civilians by drawing a line around land that belonged to the public,” he said, adding, “Our Constitution and laws impose clear limits on the use of the military for civilian law enforcement for a reason.”

The Trump administration began sending troops to the area in March 2025 to support border security and has since expanded the military’s presence along the border in other states. By April of that year, the Defense Department assumed jurisdiction over the 109,651 acres from the Department of the Interior.

The designation made the land, officially named the New Mexico National Defense Area, an expansion of Fort Huachuca for three years. The Defense Department said the designation allowed troops to detain people accused of trespassing in the military area after crossing the border illegally.

However, the lawsuit argues that the federal agencies exceeded their authority to transfer public land through emergency powers. “No statute authorizes the creation of ‘national defense areas,’ let alone permits carving one out of formerly public land,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit adds that the Defense Department has historically used such land restrictions only temporarily to protect people or property during accidents or emergencies.

“Creating a semi-permanent military zone along the southern border for purposes of immigration enforcement is directly contrary to the agency’s longstanding practice,” the lawsuit says.

Beyond alleging violations of federal law, the plaintiffs say the military zones are disrupting their work by limiting access to public lands used for recreation and conservation; supporting border communities; and providing humanitarian aid.

James R. Holeman, founder of Battalion Search and Rescue, said his organization leads volunteers who search for people in distress in remote areas and recover the remains of migrants who died crossing the border. Over the past three years, he said, the group’s monthly searches along the Arizona and New Mexico border have uncovered more than 100 death sites.

“Imagine how many more people could be found if we had the access, resources, and support to search systematically. Instead, we’re being locked out,” he said, adding that vast stretches of borderlands are “virtually inaccessible to humanitarian searchers” because of federal designations.

“Now the government is closing off even more territory. We don’t find weapons or drugs. We find Bibles, prayer cards, love notes, and the belongings of people simply trying to survive,” Holeman said. “There is no meaningful, systematic government effort to search for the missing and the dead. They don’t search, and now they’re preventing us from searching.”