Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Michael Rounds, R-S.D., members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote to Austin and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who’s helping to run the review.

The Pentagon announced July 24 that it would create a special panel to determine whether to retain or rescind the medals. The panel is expected to submit a report to Austin by Oct. 15 with recommendations for each recipient. Austin will then take those recommendations to President Joe Biden.

According to the Defense Department, 20 Medals of Honor were awarded to U.S. troops for their actions at Wounded Knee in 1890, when soldiers killed and injured between 350 and 375 Lakota men, women and children.

Austin ordered the U.S. Army to hand over all historical documentation about the massacre, including personnel files for the awardees, by July 26. Warren and Rounds argue in their letter that the deadline was too early for Native American tribes, families of victims, historians and academic institutions to share information that should be considered.

In a letter, they asked that the panel accept information from the public on a rolling basis.

“Stakeholders ... possess a wealth of information that is critical for the panel’s consideration,” Warren and Rounds wrote. “Much of that information may take more than just a matter of days to gather. Additionally, many critical stakeholders may not have the resources to operate on an overly compressed timeline.”

The killings, referred to as the Wounded Knee Massacre, occurred Dec. 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. It was part of a larger effort by the U.S. government to repress Native American tribes of the Great Plains and eradicate a religious movement known as Ghost Dance.

Reports about the Ghost Dance movement prompted the U.S. Army to guard reservations. On Dec. 29, 1890, troops from the 7th Cavalry were confiscating weapons from Lakota people when a struggle with a reportedly deaf man sparked a chaotic one-sided firefight. When the smoke cleared, dozens of cavalry troopers were wounded or killed by friendly fire — likely from their artillery — and hundreds of Lakota were dead.

A Pentagon memorandum issued last month lists 20 troops who were awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor, for their actions that day. One citation says a recipient showed distinguished conduct “in a battle with hostile Indians.” Another says one man “voluntarily led a party into a ravine to dislodge Sioux Indians concealed therein.”

A few citations said troops had rescued their fellow soldiers, and some said only that the men exhibited “extraordinary gallantry.”

Congress officially apologized for the massacre around its 100th anniversary in 1990, but it did not rescind the medals then. In 2022, Congress encouraged the Pentagon to review the awards.

The panel reviewing the Medals of Honor will comprise five experts, including two from the Department of the Interior, the Pentagon memo states. When reviewing the awards, panelists will consider the context at the time and use the military’s 1890 standards for awarding the Medal of Honor, rather than today’s standards.

Panelists will determine whether any of the soldiers did anything disqualifying them from the award, which includes intentionally directing an attack against someone who surrendered in good faith, murdering or raping a prisoner or engaging in any other act “demonstrating immorality,” Austin’s memo reads.

In their letter, Warren and Rounds applauded the review and described it as “long overdue.” They asked Austin and Haaland for transparency throughout the process.

“We ... hope this collaborative process includes DOD and DOI providing easy, mutual access to the records each agency receives,” the senators wrote. “We are greatly interested in seeing a review process that is informed by stakeholders’ documentation and testimonies.”

The Pentagon noted in July that this isn’t the first time Medals of Honor have come under scrutiny. In 1916, Congress ordered the Army to review all Medals of Honor awarded since the Civil War. At that time, a panel of five retired generals decided to rescind 911 of the awards. Six of those medals were later reinstated.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

Tim Walz, named Tuesday as the running mate of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, is the current governor of Minnesota, a former high school teacher, a six-term congressman and a long-tenured veteran of the Army National Guard.

Walz, 60, enlisted in the National Guard on April 8, 1981 at the age of 17. While serving, he held multiple positions within field artillery, including firing battery chief, operations sergeant and first sergeant, and he culminated his career serving as the command sergeant major for the battalion, said Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s state public affairs officer.

Walz retired in 2005 as a master sergeant because “he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy,” Augé said. Command sergeants major who don’t complete the Sergeants Major Course revert back to their prior rank, she explained.

In 2006, Walz became the highest ranking enlisted soldier to serve in Congress. He used the office to champion veterans issues, and a decade later rose to become the Democratic minority leader on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee. Chaired by former Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., the committee was praised widely during President Donald Trump’s administration as a rare example of bipartisanship.

Members of veterans organizations who worked with Walz during that time reacted positively Tuesday to Harris’ choice.

“Gov. Walz is a great choice,” John Rowan, the former president of Vietnam Veterans of America, wrote on Facebook. “He helped Vietnam veterans get the benefits they deserved to take care of their illnesses related to Agent Orange exposure during his tenure.”

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, or IAVA, released a statement Tuesday applauding Harris for choosing a veteran to add to the Democratic ticket.

The group earlier praised the nomination of Walz’ opponent, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, who served in the Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007 and deployed to Iraq as a combat correspondent.

When Trump chose Vance as his vice president candidate at the Republican National Convention in July, he became the first post-9/11 veteran to be nominated as part of a major-party ticket.

JD Vance represents veterans on ballot, but some ask, ‘At what cost?’

Both men represent the post-9/11 generation of veterans, as well as those who served in the enlisted ranks, said Allison Jaslow, CEO of the group.

Before Vance and Walz, the most recent veteran on a major-party ticket was John McCain in 2008. They are the first veterans of the enlisted ranks on a presidential ballot since Al Gore in 2000.

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The Post-9/11 generation of veterans is ascendant in America today,” Jaslow said. “We applaud Vice President Harris for heeding our call and choosing a post-9/11 veteran to join her in her candidacy to be commander-in-chief. And notably, someone who served in, and led troops, in the enlisted ranks.”

With the pick, Harris hopes to shore up her campaign’s standing across the upper Midwest, The Associated Press reported. As governor, Walz helped enact an ambitious Democratic agenda in Minnesota, including sweeping protections for abortion rights and generous aid to families.

Conservatives have criticized Walz over his handling of the arson and looting that followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.

Walz deployed the National Guard three days after Floyd’s murder, and some Republicans argued that he was too slow to respond.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

When former President Donald Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate in July, the moment marked a milestone for veterans who joined the military following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks: One of their own would be listed on a major-party ticket for the very first time.

Some veterans believe Vance’s ascension is worth celebrating. If he makes it to the White House, post-9/11 veterans will be represented at the highest levels of government, and someone with first-hand experience in America’s Global War on Terror will have the ear of the commander-in-chief.

That possibility is “invaluable” to a generation of veterans who often felt disconnected from the elected officials whose decisions affected ground troops during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said Allison Jaslow, an Iraq War veteran and the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Other prominent veterans who served in those wars are speaking out against Vance, as well as the notion that he represents them.

Those veterans — including retired Marine Corps officers Joe Plenzler and Scott Cooper, as well as Amy McGrath, a former Democratic political candidate from Kentucky and the first woman to fly a combat mission for the Marine Corps — accused Vance of political flip-flopping and criticized his isolationist stance toward foreign policy.

Vance’s promotion of unfounded claims about the 2020 presidential election doesn’t align with the oath of enlistment and the promise to defend democracy, McGrath argued.

A ‘good thing for our country’

JD Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2003 under the name James D. Hamel, the Marine Corps confirmed. He served a four-year enlistment as a combat correspondent and deployed to Iraq with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing from August 2005 to February 2006.

Vance left the service in 2007 as a corporal. He later went on to attend Ohio State University and Yale Law School, change his surname to Vance in honor of his maternal grandparents, work as a venture capitalist, write the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy and eventually become a leading voice in conservatism.

When he was nominated in July, some veterans celebrated Vance as the first veteran of any generation to be part of a major-party ticket since John McCain in 2008, as well as the first veteran of the military’s enlisted ranks to be on the ballot since Al Gore in 2000.

That representation of veterans on the ballot — and the perspective an enlisted Marine could bring to the White House — supersedes politics, Jaslow believes.

“The idea of war or what it takes to defend ourselves from terrorism is all too often an abstract concept that people want to intellectualize, when in reality, it’s something that impacts real human lives ... in ways that are lost on many of the American people in real time today,” Jaslow said. “Having a veteran serve in elected office would mean that the men and women whose lives are on the line to defend what we have here at home would be more top of mind than they otherwise would be.”

Likewise, Elliot Ackerman, a former Marine Corps special operations team leader who has authored bestselling memoirs about his service, views Vance’s political ascension as positive, despite Ackerman not agreeing with all of the VP nominee’s political beliefs.

“It should be applauded that we have a veteran running at that level, regardless of what you think about their positions,” Ackerman said. “I think it’s a good and healthy thing for our democracy that at senior decision-making levels you have individuals who served this country and whose experience is informed by that service.”

Vance is likely paving the way for other post-9/11 veterans to be nominated by a major party, Ackerman added.

“On the national stage, he’s the first at the top of the ticket, and I suspect he probably won’t be the last,” Ackerman said. “I think that’s a good thing for our country.”

Hugh Hewitt, a conservative political commentator, wrote in The Washington Post that Trump likely viewed Vance as key to reclaiming the support from veterans that the former president lost between his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. During the 2020 presidential race, polling showed that older veterans overwhelmingly backed Trump, while younger veterans and women veterans significantly preferred President Joe Biden.

Three weeks after Trump announced his VP choice during the Republican National Convention, it remained uncertain how the pick would affect polling.

In an Ipsos poll released July 30, 47% of Americans believe veterans make the best elected officials when compared to people with prior public service or those currently working in law enforcement, business, academia or news and entertainment. When it comes to confidence in elected officials, 76% believe that veterans elected to office would make good decisions.

The poll was based on a sample of 1,238 U.S. residents and conducted on behalf of With Honor Action, a veteran-led group that aims to increase the number of veterans in elected office and foster bipartisanship in Congress.

‘Doesn’t represent’ all veterans

While some veterans view Vance’s nomination as a symbolic win for U.S. veterans and service members, others see his rise as a threat to democracy and foreign policy. They also frown upon his alignment with Trump after Vance initially criticized the former president.

Upon Trump’s election in 2016, Vance called Trump “dangerous” and “unfit” for office and said he could be “America’s Hitler.” By 2021, Vance had reversed his opinion, citing Trump’s accomplishments as president.

“While we share being Marines and from the Great State of Ohio, I’m not voting for him,” said Plenzler, a former infantry officer and combat veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “His flip flop on the presidential candidate gives me whiplash, and I’m looking for someone with a steadier moral compass.”

Michael Smith, a former Navy officer and the executive director of Veterans for Responsible Leadership — a Super PAC comprised of “Never Trump” veterans — said that Vance’s military service was honorable, but his support of Trump’s antidemocratic views is not.

Similarly, Cooper, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who commanded an EA-6B Prowler squadron, criticized Vance for not speaking out against rioters who carried out the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Vance has said that unlike former Vice President Mike Pence, he would have used the VP’s role to contest the outcome of the 2020 election, which he said was “stolen” from Trump.

“We would hope that those who have served in the military would represent moral courage, a willingness to stand apart from the group, at personal risk, for what is right,” Cooper said. “He doesn’t represent what I feel deeply about.”

Naveed Shah, an Iraq War veteran and the political director of Common Defense, a progressive veterans organization, argued that people shouldn’t vote for candidates merely because of their status as veterans. Like Cooper, Shah doesn’t believe Vance represents the values held by some veterans of his generation.

McGrath, a veteran political candidate who lost her bid in 2020 to unseat Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., likewise said she would support a post-9/11 veteran making it onto a major-party ticket if the person stood for the values that American veterans fought for throughout history. Vance is not that person, McGrath argued.

“We have veterans who are Republicans, we have veterans who are Democrats, we have veterans who are conservative and we have veterans who are liberal. The red line is democracy itself,” McGrath said. “If you’re somebody who perpetuates a lie, particularly continuing to say that the last election was unfair, you’re basically doing the work of our adversaries. ... That’s so disturbing to me.”

In particular, McGrath and Plenzler criticized Vance’s “America First” approach to foreign policy. He would dismantle “a system of allies and partners” built by the Greatest Generation and abdicate the country’s responsibility to lead on the world stage, they argued.

Vance has accused America’s NATO allies of not paying for their fair share to support Kyiv, and earlier this year, he joined 14 other Republican senators to oppose an aid package to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Vance has said his military service helped to shape his beliefs on foreign policy. When he enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduating high school, Vance believed in the mission of the Iraq War — a belief he now describes as a mistake. Vance reflected on that time of his life in a speech on the Senate floor in April while arguing against sending aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

“I believed the propaganda of the George W. Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq, that it was a war for freedom and democracy,” Vance said. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to, that the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, who won the Democratic presidential nomination Monday, chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a longtime member of the Army National Guard, as her running mate, multiple news outlets reported Tuesday morning.

In addition to Walz, Harris’ pool of potential VP picks included Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, an Afghanistan War veteran, and Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a former astronaut and Navy aviator.

Walz enlisted in the National Guard in 1981 at the age of 17, and he ascended to the rank of command sergeant major, said Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s state public affairs officer. He retired in 2005 as a master sergeant because “he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy,” Augé said. He later became the highest ranking enlisted soldier to serve in Congress.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

In a statement, the department said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also ordered additional ballistic missile defense-capable cruisers and destroyers to the European and Middle East regions and is taking steps to send more land-based ballistic missile defense weapons there.

The shifts come as U.S. leaders worry about escalating violence in the Middle East in response to recent attacks by Israel on Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, which triggered threats of retaliation.

Biden in a call Thursday afternoon with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed new U.S. military deployments to protect against possible attacks from ballistic missiles and drones, according to the White House. In April, U.S. forces intercepted dozens of missiles and drones fired by Iran against Israel and helped down nearly all of them.

The assassinations of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday and senior Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukur in Beirut on Tuesday risk escalating the fighting into an all-out regional war, with Iran also threatening to respond after the attack on its territory. Israel has vowed to kill Hamas leaders over the group’s Oct. 7 attack, which sparked the war.

Austin is ordering the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East to replace the Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group, which is in the Gulf of Oman but scheduled to come home later this summer. That decision suggests the Pentagon has decided to keep a carrier consistently in the region as a deterrent against Iran at least until next year.

The Pentagon did not say where the fighter jet squadron was coming from or where it would be based in the Middle East. A number of allies in the region are often willing to base U.S. military forces but don’t want it made public.

The White House in a statement said Biden “reaffirmed his commitment to Israel’s security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.”

Earlier Friday, Sabrina Singh, Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters that moves were in the works. She said Austin “will be directing multiple” force movements to provide additional support to Israel and increase protection for U.S. troops in the region.

Military and defense officials have been considering a wide array of options, from additional ships and fighter aircraft squadrons to added air defense systems or unmanned assets. In many cases, the U.S. does not provide details because host nations are very sensitive about the presence of additional U.S. forces and don’t want those movements made public.

It’s unclear what new ships would move to the Middle East.

The U.S. has had a consistent warship presence there and in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, including two Navy destroyers, the Roosevelt and the Bulkeley, as well as the Wasp and the New York. The Wasp and the New York are part of the amphibious ready group and carry a Marine expeditionary unit that could be used if any evacuation of U.S. personnel is required.

In addition, a U.S. official said that two U.S Navy destroyers that are currently in the Middle East will be heading north up the Red Sea toward the Mediterranean Sea. At least one of those could linger in the Mediterranean if needed. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss troop movements.

While attending celebrations for Russia’s Navy Day on Sunday, Putin said that his country would take “mirror measures to deploy” these weapons, which may be able to carry nuclear warheads, “taking into account the actions of the United States, its satellites in Europe and in other regions of the world.”

Putin pointed out the perceived threat that American plans to deploy medium-range missiles to Germany by 2026 pose to Russia.

“The flight time to targets on our territory of such missiles, which in the future may be equipped with nuclear warheads, will be about 10 minutes,” he said.

The White House on July 10 said that the U.S. was planning to “begin episodic deployments” of conventional missiles to Germany in 2026. The statement added that “these conventional long-range fires units will include SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons, which have significantly longer range than current land-based fires in Europe.”

Russia wants 2,600 satellites in orbit by 2036. Is this realistic?

It remains unclear which missiles Moscow would seek to use or deploy, Nikolai Sokov, a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Nonproliferation who researches Russian missiles and arms control, said in an email to Defense News.

The ground-launched Kalibr was the “obvious” choice, he said, adding that it “will be easy to develop and test in time for 2026.” Increasing the range of Iskanders or even reviving the mothballed Rubezh project may also be on the table.

Iskander missiles are already stationed in Kaliningrad and Belarus, while longer-range systems could be stationed deeper in Russian territory, increasing early warning times on both sides.

“There is also the 9M729 cruise missile, which the US believes entered service in the 2010s,” Michael Duitsman, a research associate at the California-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said in an email to Defense News.

He pointed out that Putin explicitly mentioned the “coastal troops” in his Sunday speech, which include coastal artillery forces.

“The Russian military has used two of these systems, Bal and Bastion, to strike land targets in Ukraine,” said Duitsman, remarking that both could be upgraded with missiles of increased ranges. “With Oniks-M missiles, [the Bastion unit based in Kaliningrad] could hypothetically strike throughout the entirety of Poland in addition to their assigned anti-ship mission,” he said.

The USSR and U.S. in 1987 signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which outlawed this entire class of weapons with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. By 1991, both countries had destroyed their entire stockpiles -- a combined total of 2,692 missiles.

The Trump administration pulled out of the treaty in early 2019, alleging repeated Russian violations; in response, Russia, too, suspended its participation.

In his Sunday speech, Putin said that if the U.S. follows through on its missile deployment plans, Russia “will consider ourselves free from the previously imposed unilateral moratorium on the development of intermediate and shorter-range strike weapons.” The creation of such systems, he said, was “in its final stage.”

“We are entering a new Euromissile crisis,” said Nikolai Sokov, the senior fellow at the VCDNP. He added that, unlike Gorbachev, who was instrumental to the INF treaty’s success, Putin was less likely to make concessions. “A stand-off is more likely, and an agreement is less likely than was the case in the 1980s,” Sokov said.

They had just finished a massive military exercise in May. Months before, the U.S. had sent a mid-range missile launcher there for the first time, hinting at how valuable the Philippines could be in a conflict with China in the South China Sea that abuts the island nation. And after years of hedging against Washington under a former president, Manila had a new, pro-American leader.

That honeymoon ended over the next two months.

The night before Lloyd Austin met with his counterpart from Manila in June, the Philippines’ President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. publicly drew a “red line” on what he would consider an act of war with China, arguing the U.S. would back him up. When asked later about that red line at a defense summit in Singapore, Austin demurred, repeating the bromide that America’s commitment to their mutual defense treaty is “ironclad.”

Then on June 17, Chinese Coast Guard vessels intercepted Filipino ships that were resupplying an outpost. The incident nearly crossed the line Marcos set weeks before, threatening a war that could entangle Washington.

This week, Austin returned to Manila to meet with top officials, and announced new progress in their military alliance while pledging $500 million in long-term security aid.

At training event in Philippines, harsh climate challenges sustainment

“There’s no greater example of our progress in the Indo-Pacific than the Philippines,” a senior American defense official said before the trip.

But while the Philippines may be America’s fastest growing partner in the region, it also may be the country facing the greatest threat in the region from China. Austin may have come with a message of reassurance, but he’s arriving at a moment of uncertainty.

A roadmap

The warming in America’s ties with the Philippines has been rapid.

The two have had a mutual defense treaty since 1951, signed in the aftermath of World War II. But their relationship has stumbled at times. Marcos’ predecessor, in office until the summer of 2022, remained cozy with China even when their two countries had brief spats.

That changed when Marcos came into office.

He’s pivoted away from Beijing and closer to Washington. The two nation’s militaries are now exercising more often, sharing more information and working more in the same areas — including four new military bases that America got access to last year.

The two have also started partnering with other friendly countries in the region, such as Japan and Australia.

When Austin and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with their counterparts in Manila this week, they came with more support.

They announced $500 million in long-term military aid — first reported by Defense News before the trip — to help the nation’s military bulk up for bigger challenges, like defending its territory.

They also signed a roadmap for that work, directing how the Philippines will improve its force over the next five to 10 years and what the U.S. will do to help.

The new aid follows American spending on bases the U.S. military will have access to in the country. In the Pentagon’s requested budget for fiscal year 2025, there is $128 million for infrastructure on those sites, more than double in one year what the Defense Department had spent there in the past decade. The money would go toward small-scale construction, such as firing ranges, warehouses or command sites, a second senior U.S. defense official told reporters ahead of this week’s trip.

A return to the Philippines

Lastly, Austin announced that an agreement on securely sharing information will be done by the end of this year. This step would be very helpful for Manila, which doesn’t have the ability to monitor much of its territory and could benefit from data provided by American sensors.

Speaking at a press conference this week after a day of meetings, the Philippines Secretary of National Defense Gilbert Teodoro said the aid would be “a tremendous boost in order for us to establish a credible deterrent to unlawful foreign aggression.”

‘Most dangerous phase’?

Hanging over the trip, though, was a question over what Manila needs to deter.

The last confrontation with China was the climax of a years-long standoff over a naval post in the South China Sea. Beijing says it should have control of the waters, despite a 2016 ruling by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea saying otherwise. When Filipino sailors go to resupply their personnel on the post each month, Chinese coast guard vessels harrass them.

China escalated things in June when it seized Filipino vessels, supplies and weapons, injuring several Filipino sailors in the process.

In the weeks after, the two countries began talking and eventually reached a private agreement on the resupply missions. Based on their statements afterward, it hasn’t been clear whether both sides would respect the same terms.

Days before Austin arrived in Manila, the Philippines resupplied the post for the first time since June. It didn’t end up in another confrontation.

US close to sending $2 billion in security aid across the Indo-Pacific

“We were pleased to see that the first resupply mission subsequent to that understanding went forward without incident,” said Blinken at a press conference this week. “It’s very important that that be the standard, not the exception.”

Whether it will be the standard is still not certain, said Greg Poling, who studies Philippines security issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Manila had been sending construction materials to the post, a World War II-era ship run into a reef, to shore it against harsh weather. Poling said the government was confident that the external structure now wouldn’t collapse under a typhoon, as Beijing likely hoped.

But while that may now be the case the resupply missions will still need to continue, which leaves open the chance that further confrontations could follow.

“Either we’re already past the most dangerous phase and we’ve already started to de-escalate or we are in the most dangerous phase,” Poling said.

A “light brigade combat team” made up of soldiers from 3rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division recently completed a six-month rotation as part of the service’s Operation Pathways program that pairs Army units with partner forces in the region for training in the host nation.

Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, 25th ID commander, told reporters Friday that the brigade trained, tested and used various new technologies and equipment for the first time during the tour.

Soldiers worked alongside Philippine counterparts with the 7th Infantry Division out of Fort Magsaysay, Philippines.

Evans and division Command Sgt. Maj. Shaun Curry both said some of the immediately noticeable changes came in how quickly they could maneuver large groups of soldiers and detect threats at even the lowest unit level.

Army picks deploying units to test electronic, cyber and drone warfare

Squad leaders had their own small drones to recon their area as far as three to five kilometers ahead. Traditionally, they would have had to rely on drones at higher-level units such as the company or battalion, all competing with demands from other squads or platoons.

That allows units to rely less on the limited number of trained forward observers needed to call in fire or direct aircraft to strike a target.

But at the same time, those drone operators require some extra considerations, according to Evans.

“Before you bring in a helicopter to a landing zone, you now have to make sure that that airspace has been cleared from the small unmanned aerial systems that maybe have been performing a reconnaissance task,” Evans said.

Platoons also had electromagnetic detection equipment to see otherwise hidden enemy communications signatures that might have gone unnoticed, such as those emitted from adversary drones.

“It is very challenging in today’s environment to hide, and so, the sooner you can identify the threat that is intended to come at you and your formations, the better able you are to position yourself to mitigate that threat,” Evans said.

Less hi-tech but just as valuable were new devices such as the Silent Tactical Energy Enhanced Dismount, or STEED.

STEED is a casualty-carrying device that works as a kind of a combination wheelbarrow/stretcher, powered with an electric motor, allowing a single soldier to transport up to three casualties or 500 pounds, rather than using an entire squad of nine or more soldiers out of the fight to move casualties.

But soldiers saw more potential for the STEED than simply carrying wounded.

The same device was used to transport a company’s worth of communication equipment, while others were used to haul cumbersome 60mm and 81mm mortar systems, easing the burden on soldiers and speeding up their movement, Curry said.

Other speed-related initiatives include experimentation back in Hawaii with newly issued Infantry Squad Vehicles, or ISVs which showed brigade and battalion planners how they could attack at comparatively lightning speed when compared with traditional foot movement, helicopters or larger trucks, Evans said.

Evans said that, with the full complement of the squad vehicles, commanders could move a company or battalion over a 300-kilometer distance without support from larger units and disperse that company or battalion across the battlespace, making it harder for an adversary to detect or defeat.

Though the 3rd Brigade did not take ISVs to the Philippines, its fellow 25th Division unit, the 2nd brigade, plans to use them at an upcoming October rotation at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center, or JPMRC, in Hawaii. That rotation will be a validation event, preparing 2nd brigade for its Pacific rotation next year.

The center is one of the Army’s large-scale combat training centers. Similar to its counterparts such as the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California and the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, it is designed to accommodate multiple battalions or brigades for combat-like field training exercises.

A unit rotation at one of the centers is seen as the final test before an overseas deployment.

Third brigade got some early practice, as it was the first to use an exportable JPMRC west of the International Dateline, Evans said.

The exportable version uses observer controllers from the permanent training centers along with mobile equipment to track unit movements, communications and how in-field wargames play out. That setup gives units the ability to have a combat training center-like experience on any site with enough space to accommodate their units.

This mobile ability also means more partner nations, such as the Philippines, can participate on their home turf and receive the same kind of performance analysis, leaders said.

Adding new equipment and adjusting formations to use such gear more effectively is part of the Army’s overall effort, dubbed “Transforming in Contact,” by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George.

In February, George announced that the service would select several brigades to experiment with networks, cyber and electromagnetic warfare equipment and tactics during their standard rotations.

The ultimate makeup of both personnel, specialties and gear will be determined by the threats of the area and the unit’s mission. George said at the time the experimentation might show that, for example, the electromagnetic warfare needs for an artillery unit might vary from those of a cavalry squadron.

Senior leaders have emphasized a “bottom-up” feedback approach on how to equip and adjust such formations for current threats.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the 25th Infantry Division brigade that completed the recent Operation Pathways deployment to the Phillippines.

This was the finding of a bipartisan panel tasked by Congress to review U.S. defense strategy. Its nearly 100-page report reveals a crisis of confidence in American national security.

The commission chides a Pentagon it considers too plodding, a Congress it considers too partisan and multiple administrations it says have been too complacent to address threats from China, Russia and countries in the Middle East.

“The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago,” the report reads. “It is not prepared today.”

Every four years, Congress gathers a group of outside experts to review the country’s national defense strategy. The goal is to have an independent board assess U.S. national security like an accountant audits a company’s books. To do so, the eight commissioners spoke with lawmakers, U.S. allies, members of the administration and leaders in the Pentagon, including the secretary and deputy secretary of defense.

The report wasn’t due until the end of the year, and the panel finished early so that its findings could factor into the presidential election. Both the timing and tone are an attempt to yank public attention away from domestic issues, such as the border and the economy, said Jane Harman, a former Democratic Congresswoman from California and chair of the commission.

“Public awareness is dismal,” she said, calling America’s security threats “blinking red.”

The commission’s argument is almost as simple as supply and demand. In its eyes, America faces a much more dangerous world, with competitors that are either more willing to go to war, in the case of Russia, or much closer to being a military peer, in the case of China.

US to revamp its command in Japan amid renaissance in defense ties

But as those threats have emerged — or even merged given that many of America’s adversaries are now working more closely together — the report argues that the U.S. hasn’t grown stronger in proportion. Instead, the country has proceeded largely as usual, or even with more dysfunction. Examples include budgets that are too small, spending bills passed too late, legacy weapons preferred over new ones and a public either unaware of the challenges America faces or unmotivated to respond.

Even more, while the National Defense Strategy calls for “integrated deterrence,” or using more than just military might to prevent conflict, the commission found that the approach isn’t clearly defined or coordinated.

“The United States is still failing to act with the urgency required, across administrations and without regard to governing party,” the report says.

The commissioners were equally nominated by Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and all agreed to the report’s conclusions. Their arguments resemble those made by many defense hawks around Washington, such as Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who says that the country needs to spend far more on defense.

Many of them, including the commissioners authoring this report, use the Cold War as an analog.

During a defense buildup led by President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. spent 6.8% of GDP on defense. It now spends around 3%, though in real terms defense spending reached its all-time high during the wars on terror earlier this century, according to data from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

The last commission’s report, assessing the 2018 National Defense Strategy, recommended increasing the defense budget by 3% to 5% each year, a mark the U.S. has not hit though it’s unclear what analysis supports that number. One of the most recent barriers was a deal struck last year to avoid a government default, which capped increases to the Pentagon budget at 1%, a cut when accounting for inflation.

Since the war in Ukraine, the U.S. has passed multiple enormous supplemental security bills — most recently a $95 billion one this April that included funding to support Kyiv, Israel and countries in the Indo-Pacific. These bills don’t technically factor into the annual defense budget, like a garnish not listed in a recipe. But they’ve poured money into America’s defense industry.

‘A solution’

But legislation and money do little to solve what the commission calls America’s biggest issue: the home front. The military isn’t recruiting as many people as it wants, though it’s doing better retaining those who already joined. And during the Cold War, the report argues, higher tax rates for businesses and high earners made it easier to sustain a bigger defense budget. The combination of a less mobilized public, lower taxes and much higher government debt make a defense buildup harder, the report argues.

“We’re not just saying, ‘oh my god, the house is burning, figure it out,” said Harman. “We have ideas.”

Those recommendations fall into a few main categories.

The first is to reassess the Pentagon’s acquisition and innovation systems. Leaders in the Defense Department should review its orders and have more freedom to cancel less relevant purchases.

The Defense Department should also change its buying practices — a point argued by a separate congressional commission earlier this year — to fulfill purchases faster and work more with non-traditional defense companies, which are increasingly building more innovative weapons.

A second point concerns spending. Congress should “immediately” pass a supplemental defense bill so that the U.S. can build more equipment, harden military sites threatened by China and buy more weapons, particularly munitions. Perhaps most abruptly, Congress should also ditch the budget caps holding back defense spending this year.

Lastly, the U.S. should consider politically unpopular ways to pay for these reforms. One would be higher taxes. Another is reforming entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, whose costs are projected to swell by the end of the decade.

The upshot would be a force capable of more than protecting the homeland, fighting one major war and preventing another, which the last two defense strategies have proposed. Given the threat of Russia, China and Iran in the Middle East, America’s military should be able to fight across multiple theaters at once, it says.

‘Big changes’: Congressional panel proposes new defense budget system

Nevertheless, it doesn’t recommend specific spending or force structure targets, instead saying they should be bigger but not by how much.

“We weren’t going to dictate a solution, but it does need to be a multi-theater force planning construct,” said Tom Mahnken, head of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and one of the commissioners.

Some of the panelists have served on past review boards, made similar recommendations and seen them ignored. On one page in the report, they list key paragraphs from earlier reports issued in 2018, 2014 and 2010 — each escalating in alarm.

Mahnken, who worked on the last commission, listed shortfalls they identified that later proved prescient: munitions, raising defense spending, the ability for America’s military to fight jointly, or with multiple services working together. These have since become top priorities for the Pentagon and many members of Congress.

“We find that the situation has deteriorated since the 2018 Commission’s report and that many of the previous recommendations were not adopted,” this report says.

A judge sentenced Liam Collins, 25, of Johnston, Rhode Island, to 10 years in prison. Justin Wade Hermanson, 25, of Swansboro, North Carolina, received a prison sentence of one year, nine months. Both men were part of a neo-Nazi group that sought to destroy transformers, substations and other components of the power grid at about a dozen locations across Idaho and its surrounding states.

“As part a self-described ‘modern day SS,’ these defendants conspired, prepared, and trained to attack America’s power grid in order to advance their violent white supremacist ideology,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement. “These sentences reflect both the depravity of their plot and the Justice Department’s commitment to holding accountable those who seek to use violence to undermine our democracy.”

A third man was also sentenced Thursday. Paul James Kryscuk, 38, of Boise, Idaho, was sentenced to six years, six months in prison. Collins and Hermanson both pleaded guilty to federal firearms charges, while Kryscuk pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to destroy an energy facility.

Two other men were previously convicted in the plot. Joseph Maurino, a member of the New Jersey Army National Guard, and Jordan Duncan, a Marine veteran, pleaded guilty to weapons charges. Neither men have received their sentences.

Marine veteran pleads guilty to federal weapons charge in neo-Nazi plot

Collins was the leader of the neo-Nazi group, which communicated through the now-defunct web forum Iron March. He described the group as a “modern day SS” that went hiking and camping together, did gym sessions and performed live-firing training exercises, according to federal indictments. Collins reportedly added that the group had planned to “buy a lot of land,” and posted that all members would be required to have served in the military.

Collins joined the Marine Corps in 2017 with the intention of gaining experience and training to benefit his group, according to his indictment. He was stationed at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where he allegedly stole body armor and rifle magazines and delivered them to other neo-Nazi members, according to federal prosecutors.

Collins was kicked out of the Marine Corps in 2020. The nature of his discharge is not included in court documents. Hermanson served in the Marines as part of the same unit that Collins was last assigned.

“I’ll be in the USMC for 4 years while my comrades work on the groups [sic] physical formation,” Collins posted on Iron March in 2016. “It will take years to gather all the experience and intelligence that we need to utilize — but that’s what makes it fun.”

In addition to the weapons charge, Collins was accused by federal authorities of threatening to shoot Black Lives Matter protestors and conspiring to destroy government-owned energy facilities. Investigators said Collins asked group members to purchase thermite, a powdered mixture used in incendiary bombs. The group had discussed using the substance to burn through transformers.

On Iron March, Kryscuk shared his ideas for the group, which included buying property in “predominantly white and right leaning” locations, where they could recruit residents and stockpile weapons to take over local governments and industries.

While Collins was serving in the Marine Corps, Kryscuk manufactured firearms, and Duncan gathered a library of information, including some military-owned information, regarding firearms, explosives and nerve toxins.

The group created propaganda video montages of their live-fire training. In one video obtained by federal authorities, the participants are seen firing assault-type rifles. The video showed four group members wearing masks with a symbol of the neo-Nazi Attomwaffen Division and giving the “Heil Hitler” sign. An image of a black sun, a Nazi symbol, was pasted above them.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

The Chinese and Russian military activity Wednesday was not seen as a threat, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD, said. China and Russia confirmed Thursday that they had conducted a joint air patrol over the Bering Sea, which divides Russia and Alaska.

“NORAD will continue to monitor competitor activity near North America and meet presence with presence,” the command said in a news release.

While Russia’s military has long been active in the north Pacific, China has emerged as a new actor in recent years as its growing navy and air force expands their presence farther from the country’s shores.

The Russian Defense Ministry said the joint patrol also flew over the Chukchi Sea, which is on the north side of the Bering Strait. Russian fighter jets and strategic bombers were joined by Chinese strategic bombers in the exercises, which lasted more than five hours, the ministry said.

The joint patrol tested and improved coordination between the two air forces, said Zhang Xiaogang, a spokesperson for China’s Defense Ministry. He said it was the eighth joint strategic air patrol since 2019. He declined to comment when asked if it was the first such patrol over the Bering Sea.

NORAD said it had detected the two Chinese H-6 and two Russian Tupolev Tu-95 bombers in the North American U.S. Air Defense Identification Zone, an area beyond U.S. and Canadian airspace in which those countries require aircraft to be identified for national security reasons.

A photo released by the Russian Defense Ministry showed a Russian Su-30 fighter jet escorting a Chinese bomber. Another photo posted online by the military channel of China’s state broadcaster CCTV showed Russian and Chinese long-winged bombers flying in parallel formation against mostly blue skies.

The Japanese military has grown increasingly concerned about joint China-Russia drills and the potential threat they represent to the security of Japan and the region.

A fleet of Russian and Chinese warplanes including Tu-95s and H-6s was seen flying together last December over the waters between Japan and Korea, Japan’s Defense Ministry said. At the time, China’s Defense Ministry called it the seventh joint strategic air patrol with Russia.

Chinese naval ships have showed up in international waters near Alaska, most recently in mid-July when the Coast Guard spotted four ships in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, which extends 200 nautical miles from the shore.

Zhang described the naval activity as routine combat readiness training and said that China would continue to conduct far-seas training to improve the capabilities of its troops.

Palestinian civilians were dying five months into the Israel-Hamas war. Most of the territory was struggling to get food or near famine. And Israel wasn’t opening more land routes for assistance to flow in.

So the U.S. would make a route of its own.

“This temporary pier would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day,” Biden said during his State of the Union speech.

Instead, four months later, the pier’s mission is over and its clearest legacy is what wasn’t possible.

Despite the work of 1,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors using the Joint-Logistics-Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, capability, the pier couldn’t stay afloat for long due to choppy seas. And while it got aid into the Gaza Strip, it couldn’t fix another intractable problem: actually getting it to the Palestinian people — 96% of which face “acute food insecurity,” according to the United Nations World Food Programme.

Military’s novel floating pier arrives in Gaza amid security concerns

The Pentagon estimated the pier would cost $230 million, though the final number isn’t yet certain, and Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, said it would come in well under budget.

A clearer cost has been to U.S. personnel: One soldier remains in the hospital due to a pier-related mishap in May, and is still recovering stateside.

Citing privacy regulations, DOD officials have declined to explain what injured the soldier and two other service members, who were able to return to duty after the incident.

U.S. officials have defended the mission as the safest and most efficient way to get American assistance into Gaza during the war. And they can cite almost 20 million pounds of aid as evidence.

“The pier has done exactly what we intended it to do,” said Cooper.

Many watching from the sidelines in Washington disagree.

The pier arrived at a moment of acute political pressure on the White House to help the Palestinian people, said Steven Cook, an expert on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Despite that, he said, it’s become an emblem of what the U.S. hasn’t learned in the region.

“This is a constant theme in American foreign policy in the Middle East,” he said. “Despite our best intentions, we didn’t really understand what we were walking into.”

‘I was hopeful that would be more successful’

When announcing that the pier was being dismantled, military officials came with a list of statistics. The JLOTS pier delivered 19.4 million pounds of aid, or enough to feed half a million Palestinians for one month.

By comparison, the U.S. has sent 2.4 million pounds via air drops and 33 million pounds via land crossings since the start of the war in October.

In its 20 days of operating, the admiral said, it carried double or triple the amount of aid the U.S. initially expected. Altogether, it was the most humanitarian support America has ever sent to the Middle East.

“That data stands on its own,” Cooper said.

And yet, those numbers have another side. The aid may have gotten onto Gazan territory, but much of it hasn’t reached people in need. Due to rough weather, the pier was in service only about one-third of the time since it was first anchored in May. At one point, it buckled under rough seas and had to be repaired in the Israeli city of Ashdod.

Meanwhile, crowds ransacked at least one aid-laden truck coming from the pier before it could get to distribution points, The Associated Press reported, and the United Nations halted aid distribution at times due to security concerns.

“You can have the best fighting force in the world and the best logisticians in the world, but high seas and strong winds still create quite a dilemma,” said Brad Bowman, who researches U.S. defense policy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

After the NATO summit in July, even Biden acknowledged that the pier could have performed better.

“I was hopeful that would be more successful,” he said.

A JLOTS test case

Still, using the pier in a real-world combat zone likely helped prove its use to the Pentagon, argued Keith Robbins, a retired Army officer who oversaw the JLOTS program for U.S. Transportation Command before his retirement in 2007.

JLOTS is, in essence, a set of metal pieces that can be assembled in multiple ways. It’s meant for calmer waters than the eastern Mediterranean Sea, Robbins said, but there were few better options for the mission itself: quickly shuttling tons of aid onshore.

“JLOTS is the perfect capability to handle that, but it has to be put in the right place in order for it to be successful,” he added.

Now that JLOTS has made its debut in a combat zone, Robbins hopes it will convince the Pentagon to continue funding it.

“Ten, 15 years ago, when I was doing it, the higher-ups didn’t really understand what the capability was,” he said. “I would hope that this has been a great illustration of how valuable this capability can be.”

‘The needs are staggering’

In their briefing last week, CENCTOM deputy commander Cooper and an official from USAID argued the pier hadn’t only finished its mission — it was also no longer necessary.

The maritime supply route was now moving from off the 25-mile Gazan coast to Ashdod, Israel, where aid will enter the strip via trucks.

As the U.S. and humanitarian groups have said for months, there is no substitute for these land crossings.

“The needs are staggering and continue to grow,” said Solani Korde, a USAID official, briefing alongside Cooper.

From the start, U.S. officials stressed that the pier was “temporary.” In other words, the U.S. was not committing to an indefinite mission attached to Gaza, and it wasn’t suggesting this path could replace others.

“A maritime route is not a zero-sum discussion,” said Chris Hyslop, a former U.N. official who now works with Fogbow, a humanitarian advisory group that assisted the pier’s mission.

But even when aid crosses into Gaza it has been extremely hard to deliver. Roads are damaged. Swathes of territory are dangerous. And the actors involved — from Egypt to Israel to Hamas to other groups in Gaza — often don’t have reason to distribute aid quickly, whether due to cronyism, domestic politics or the terrorist group’s total-war strategy, said Cook, the analyst at CFR.

“That is really, chiefly, the obstacle to ensuring that the innocent people of Gaza get the lifesaving food, water, medicine that they need,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in a July briefing. “It’s distribution within as opposed to distribution from without.”

No pier or new land crossing can solve that problem. But while the pier’s mission may be over, some involved don’t think the maritime route should close.

Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon Middle East official who also works at Fogbow, the aid group, said the pier was a proof of concept, despite its limitations.

“I think it needs to be continued because quite frankly, the mechanism in Cyprus [where aid was sorted] and the aid delivery zone is already established,” he said. “If we don’t put something in its place that will be for naught.”

Being able to fix gear close to the fight is considered critical to any future conflict with China, according to officials.

The Pentagon recently released a regional sustainment framework that would “satisfy demand closer to the point of need,” while enhancing both U.S. and regional partners’ capabilities, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment Christopher Lowman told reporters at a recent briefing.

“For the past two and a half years, we’ve been focused on the realities of sustaining the U.S. joint force in a contested theater and what it would take to ensure success and mitigate some of the risk of relying on long, over-ocean lines of communication to retrograde equipment back to the United States for repair and then return,” Lowman said.

Historically, sustainment has been viewed solely as a national responsibility, with the U.S. government sustaining its own forces in theater.

The Pentagon’s new, partner-focused plans are “really a recognition that sustainment can be performed through a coalition and a network of regional providers, because each of those regional allies has capability, industrial capability, maintenance, repair and overhaul capability and a desire to support the work,” Lowman said.

The idea is not to build new maintenance and repair capabilities in theater, but to take advantage of what already exists while “making the appropriate changes to accommodate specific U.S. needs and then utilizing that through a joint venture arrangement, as opposed to a U.S. funded, built, owned and operated capability,” Lowman said.

The Pentagon’s under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, Bill LaPlante, and Lowman recently signed the strategy laying out the regional sustainment framework to align maintenance, repair and overhaul capabilities globally.

Such a strategy would cover sustaining equipment that has experienced normal wear and tear or battle damage.

The framework will also provide theater commanders multiple options to redirect equipment sustainment and “creates a higher level of uncertainty within adversaries’ planning cycles, and thereby enhancing deterrence,” Lowman said.

The plan is to establish the framework in the Indo-Pacific theater first, and the Defense Department is already working with five nations there to put together maintenance, repair and overhaul capability for American and partner equipment.

Lowman said he was unable to disclose the countries the U.S. is working with in the Pacific as terms of agreements are still being negotiated.

But he said the Defense Department is working with five Indo-Pacific countries to establish appropriate projects and to identify industrial partners, both U.S. and regionally based.

The Pentagon plans to build out regional sustainment partnerships within the European and Middle East theaters in fiscal 2025, followed by South America in FY26 and Africa later on, Lowman said.

INDOPACOM is being prioritized given the U.S. national defense strategy’s focus on China as the pacing threat, but also because it presents the greatest contested logistics challenge because relying on long, over-the-ocean lines will no longer prove effective if the U.S. finds itself in a war against China.

Already in the European theater, because of support for Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion, sustainment partnership capabilities are emerging within the context of NATO cooperation, but the Pentagon plans to apply lessons learned from the INDOPACOM pathfinder effort to other key theaters, according to Lowman.

Ideally, regional partners will come to the table with existing capability because those countries are similarly equipped, or are equipped with U.S. produced weapon systems, “so they have repair capabilities that we’ll capitalize on,” he said.

The Defense Department will also take a look at capabilities like shipyards that are not currently configured to accommodate America’s specific requirements, but would require money for expansions and workforce training, Lowman said.

Less desirable, but also under consideration, is to look at places where capability does not exist and build it, but “that would entail the greatest amount of capital investment,” Lowman added.

Already, the U.S. has seen what regional sustainment can look like through small examples during major exercises like Talisman Sabre in Australia. During the exercise, a vehicle was damaged during a road march and was able to be repaired in country using Australian parts.

In addition to the regional sustainment framework, Lowman said the Pentagon is also engaged in a major push to use advanced manufacturing techniques forward in theater, such as additive or subtractive manufacturing and 3D printing to make parts.

“What we’re doing is enabling a digital framework in order to transmit intellectual property to the point of manufacture and then, of course, secure that intellectual property at the point of manufacture and finally to ensure that the parts produced meet our standards of manufacture so that they’re safe and suitable to operate,” Lowman said.

The shift is animated in large part by proliferating ground-based air defenses that make manned flight over the battlefield almost impossible.

“In 2024, helicopters at the front, due to the threat and saturation of anti-aircraft means, primarily perform fire support along the line of combat engagement, using the toss bombing tactics [unaimed strikes by unguided missiles] and have also been a means of countering unmanned systems,” said Serhii Kuzan, a former adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

He recalled the Russian emphasis on helicopters during the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Moscow’s troops had planned a large-scale landing operation, which eventually failed, at the Antonov airport near Hostomel, only 25 kilometers from Kyiv.

The vulnerability of combat helicopters has translated into a high number of losses on the Russian side. In February, a report published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies found that the Russian Aerospace Forces had lost 40% of their pre-war Ka-52 Hokum-B attack helicopter fleet.

“Russian rotary losses have continued, but changes in tactics and the introduction of new weapons, in particular the LMUR (also known as the Kh-39) air-to-surface missile, which provides a greater stand-off range, have had an effect,” Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace at IISS told Defense News.

Maj. Gen. Pierre Meyer, commander of the French Army Light Aviation (ALAT), said Russia’s helicopter-based landing attempt should be a cautionary tale for military planners.

“At Hostomel, we saw Russian helicopters intervening almost on parade for two days, at a certain height and arriving en masse, tightly packed – in the end, it’s not a question of whether helicopters still have their place, it’s how we use them,” Meyer told the audience at the Paris Air Forum last month.

“Had we acted like the Russian helicopters, with the mode of action I’m talking about, we would’ve had exactly the same losses,” he said.

Meyer said there is utility in teaming helicopters with drones, as many Western armed forces are already doing, with unmanned aerial vehicles providing additional “aero-combat action and maneuver” to military choppers.

According to Kuzan, the former Ukrainian defense adviser, helicopters could soon become integrated with unmanned forces, “using their command control points, powerful communication relays or as a mobile means of radio-electronic warfare and intelligence.”

Bruno Even, the CEO of Airbus Helicopters, said rotary aviation can still play its trump card of all-around utility.

“Depending on the conflict, the attack helicopter has its rightful place and role to play – their use may have to evolve towards stand-off weapons that allow the aircraft to intervene from a greater distance,” he said at the Paris Air Forum.

Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris contributed to this report.

Cmdr. Jeromy Pittmann, 53, a civil engineer corps officer who deployed to Afghanistan in 2014 and 2015 with NATO Special Operations Command, received thousands of dollars for drafting, submitting, and falsely verifying bogus letters of recommendation for Afghan nationals seeking a Special Immigrant Visa that would allow them to live in the U.S., according to the Department of Justice.

The State Department issues a limited number of Special Immigrant Visas to Afghans who assisted U.S. troops and diplomats during the War in Afghanistan and served as translators.

In more than 20 letters, Pittmann claimed that he personally knew and oversaw the Afghan national visa applicants, and asserted they had served as interpreters for the U.S. military and NATO troops. These letters also claimed that these applicant’s lives were endangered by the Taliban, and affirmed his belief that they were not a national security threat to the U.S.

Navy officer charged with taking bribes to provide Afghan refugees with visas

“In reality, Pittmann did not know the applicants and had no basis for recommending them for SIVs,” the Department of Justice said in a news release. “In exchange, Pittmann received several thousands of dollars in bribes.”

“To avoid detection, Pittmann received the bribe money through an intermediary and created false invoices purporting to show that he was receiving the money for legitimate work unrelated to his military service,” the Department of Justice said.

Pittmann commissioned in 2003, and is a civil engineer corps officer, according to service records obtained by Navy Times.

Pittman first appeared in federal court in March 2022 on charges of accepting bribes and conspiring to commit visa fraud. Court documents alleged Pittmann worked with an unnamed co-conspirator in Kabul who solicited Pittmann’s assistance back in February 2018. The documents indicate Pittmann and the co-conspirator met during Pittmann’s deployment to Afghanistan in 2014 and 2015.

The money was wired to Pittmann through a Bank of America account in Hayward, California, and to an account with USAA in Pensacola, Fla., under the label “family support,” according to court documents.

“I got it today. Thank you and thank your friend for sending it,” Pittmann said in an email after receiving a payment in 2018, according to court documents. “I just wish the money would keep coming. Ha. Maybe one day we will get a business started. It would be nice to pay off my debts.”

Pittmann ultimately was convicted of conspiracy to commit bribery and false writing, bribery, false writing, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering, the Justice Department said.

Pittmann’s sentencing is slated for Oct. 21, and he faces up to 45 years behind bars.

IS claimed 153 attacks in the two countries in the first six months of 2024, CENTCOM said in a statement. According to a U.S. defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he wasn't allowed to speak publicly on the matter, the group was behind 121 attacks in Syria and Iraq in 2023.

Over 10,000 Islamic State fighters active in Iraq, Syria as attacks ‘significantly’ increase: UN

“The increase in attacks indicates ISIS is attempting to reconstitute following several years of decreased capability,” CENTCOM said.

In northeastern Syria, Kurdish-led authorities issued a general amnesty Wednesday that would include hundreds of Syrians who have been held by the main U.S.-backed force over their roles within IS.

The U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, are holding over 10,000 captured IS fighters in around two dozen detention facilities — including 2,000 foreigners whose home countries have refused to repatriate them. The SDF captured the last sliver of land in Syria from IS in March 2019.

The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria said a life sentence will be reduced to 15 years in jail, while those detainees serving life sentences who have incurable diseases will be set free, as will those who have reached the age of 75. It said the amnesty will not include IS officials and members who fought against the SDF, nor those who carried out attacks with explosives that killed people.

Legal expert Khaled Jabr told The Associated Press that the amnesty will include some 600 Syrian citizens who are held on terrorism charges and links to IS, as long as their hands are not tainted with blood or they were detained while fighting SDF members.

The announcement comes just after the 10-year mark since the militant group declared its caliphate in large parts of Iraq and Syria. At its peak, the group ruled an area half the size of the United Kingdom where it attempted to enforce its extreme interpretation of Islam, which included attacks on religious minority groups and harsh punishment of Muslims deemed to be apostates.

Militants also killed thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority and kidnapped thousands of women and children, many of whom were subjected to sexual abuse and human trafficking.

A coalition of more than 80 countries, led by the United States, was formed to fight IS, which lost its hold on the territory it controlled in Iraq and 2017 and in Syria in 2019, although sleeper cells remain in both countries and abroad.

Iraqi officials say that they can keep the IS threat under control with their own forces and have entered into talks with the U.S. aimed at winding down the mission of the U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq.

The talks come at a time of increased domestic tensions over the U.S. military presence.

From October to February, an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq launched regular drone attacks on bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, which they said was in retaliation for Washington’s support of Israel in the ongoing war in Gaza and were aimed at forcing U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraq.

Those attacks largely halted after three U.S. soldiers were killed in a strike on a base in Jordan, near the Syrian border in late January, prompting U.S. retaliatory strikes in Iraq.

On Tuesday, two Iraqi militia officials said they had launched a new drone attack targeting the Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. It was unclear whether the attack had hit its target. U.S. officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Associated Press writer Hogir Al Abdo contributed to this report from Kobani, Syria.

Washington’s top diplomat in Manila was joined by counterparts from key Western and Asian allies, including Japan and Australia, in a Manila forum to express alarm over increasing hostilities in the contested waters, particularly between China and the Philippines. They committed to help defend a rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region.

In the worst confrontation so far, Chinese coast guard personnel armed with knives, spears and an axe aboard motorboats repeatedly rammed and destroyed two Philippine navy supply vessels on June 17 in a chaotic faceoff at the disputed Second Thomas Shoal that injured Filipino sailors and led to the seizure of seven Philippine navy rifles.

China and the Philippines blamed one another for the incident, the latest in a series of high-seas confrontations since last year. Aside from China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have been locked in the decades-long territorial conflicts.

"With the backing of an increasingly interconnected latticework of alliances and partnerships, the United States continues to urge the PRC to cease escalatory and dangerous harassment of Philippine vessels lawfully operating in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone,” U.S. Ambassador MaryKay Carlson told the forum, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

China should “cease interfering with freedom of navigation and overflight of all states lawfully operating in the region,” Carlson said. “The volume of condemnation from the international community is loud and getting louder and it speaks to our common resolve in support of the international rules and norms that benefit us all."

The Biden administration has been strengthening an arc of security alliances in Asia as a countermeasure against an increasingly assertive China. That has dovetailed with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos’s efforts to boost his country’s territorial defense.

Beijing has opposed Washington’s alliance-building and has repeatedly vowed to defend its territorial interests at all costs.

The forum marked the anniversary of a 2016 ruling by an arbitration panel in The Hague, Netherlands that invalidated China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea based on the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. Beijing refused to join the Philippine-initiated arbitration, rejected the ruling and continues to defy it.

Dozens of protesters separately held a rally Friday to mark the anniversary of the arbitration ruling in suburban Quezon city, waving small Philippine flags and displaying posters that read: “China out!” and “Long live the arbitral ruling victory."

Australian Ambassador HK Yu said the June 17 incident at the shoal was “an escalation in a deeply concerning pattern of behavior by China … which threatens lives and creates risks of miscalculation and escalation.”

“The Philippines is not facing this challenge alone,” Yu said. “I can tell you this, you can count on Australia.”

"As allies, partners and friends, we stand united in navigating these uncertain waters and uphold the fundamental principles that safeguard our shared waters,” Ambassador Kazuya Endo of Japan told the forum that was attended by Manila-based diplomats and top Philippine security officials.

Japan, which has its own dispute with China in the East China Sea, has provided patrol ships and a coastal radar system to boost to the Philippines’ ability to defend its territorial interests in the South China Sea.

Philippine national security adviser Eduardo Ano called for international support in pushing for Chinese compliance to the arbitration ruling.

Manila, he said, would seek peaceful resolutions to the disputes but “we will continue to stand our ground and push back against coercion, interference, malign influence and other tactics that seeks to jeopardize our security.”

China and the Philippines have created such emergency telephone hotlines at lower levels in the past to better manage disputes, particularly in two fiercely disputed shoals where the Philippines has accused Chinese forces of increasingly hostile actions and China says Philippine ships have encroached despite repeated warnings.

Philippines seeking call with China over emerging Sierra Madre crisis

The territorial disputes, however, have persisted since last year, sparking fears of a larger armed conflict that could involve the United States, which has repeatedly warned that it’s obligated to defend the Philippines, a key Asian treaty ally, if Filipino forces come under attack in the disputed waters.

U.S. Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met Philippine military chief Gen. Romeo Brawner in Manila on Tuesday and discussed ways to further boost defense ties, enhance the militaries’ ability to operate jointly and ensure regional ability, the Philippine military said.

During a confrontation between Chinese and Philippine forces at the Philippines-occupied Second Thomas Shoal in August 2023, the Philippine government said it was unable to reach Chinese officials through an established “maritime communication mechanism” for several hours. That emergency telephone hotline was arranged after Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in January 2023.

Chinese and Philippine officials dealing with the territorial disputes held talks in Manila on July 2, following a violent confrontation at the Second Thomas Shoal in which Chinese coast guard personnel reportedly wielded knives, an axe and improvised spears and Philippine navy personnel were injured. The Chinese forces also seized seven Philippine navy rifles, said Brawner, who demanded China return the firearms and pay for damages.

Both sides “recognized the need to strengthen the bilateral maritime communication mechanism on the South China Sea” and signed an arrangement “on improving Philippines-China maritime communication mechanisms,” the Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila said in a statement after the talks in Manila, but did not provide a copy or details of the agreement.

A copy of the agreement's highlights, seen by the AP, said it “provides several channels for communication between the Philippines and China, specifically on maritime issues, through the representatives to be designated by their leaders."

The hotline talks could also be done “through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Foreign Affairs counterparts, including at the foreign minister and vice foreign minister levels or through their designated representatives,” it said, and added without elaborating that Philippine officials were “in discussions with the Chinese side on the guidelines that will govern the implementation of this arrangement."

US Pacific boss ‘very concerned’ about Chinese aggression in region

There was also a plan to set up a new communication channel between the Chinese and Philippine coast guards “once the corresponding memorandum of understanding” between them is concluded, according to the agreement.

During the talks in Manila, China and the Philippines agreed on two other confidence-boosting steps to intensify “cooperation between their respective coast guard authorities” and the possible convening of a maritime forum between Chinese and Philippine scientists and academic leaders.

“Both sides recognized that there is a need to restore trust, rebuild confidence and create conditions conducive to productive dialogue and interaction,” the Philippine department of foreign affairs statement said. It added that China and the Philippines “affirmed their commitment to de-escalate tensions without prejudice to their respective positions.”

It said that “there was substantial progress on developing measures to manage the situation at sea,” but acknowledged that “significant differences remain.”

Vance, 39, is the first millennial on a major-party ticket, and a prominent veterans group heralded him Monday as the first among the post-9/11 generation of veterans to appear on a presidential ballot.

“JD Vance may be the first of our generation of veterans to be on a major-party presidential ticket, but he most certainly won’t be the last,” said Allison Jaslow, an Iraq War veteran and the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, or IAVA. “The post-9/11 generation of veterans is stepping up to lead, just when America needs us most.”

Vance was raised in Middletown, Ohio, and enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduating high school in 2003. He served a four-year enlistment as a combat correspondent, during which he escorted civilian press and gathered information and wrote articles for a military news service. He deployed to Iraq as a corporal with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing in 2005.

IAVA, which has served as a voice for the younger generation of veterans since 2004, praised Trump’s choice of Vance particularly because he served in the enlisted ranks. Before Vance, the most recent veteran on a major-party ticket was John McCain in 2008. Vance is the first veteran of the enlisted ranks on a presidential ballot since Al Gore in 2000.

“We applaud former President Trump for choosing a post-9/11 veteran to join him in his candidacy to be commander-in-chief again, and notably, someone who served in the enlisted ranks and is representative of the average veteran,” Jaslow said.

Trump announced his choice for VP during the Republican National Convention on Monday in Milwaukee. The former president selected Vance from a pool of potential candidates that included Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, among others.

It remained uncertain Tuesday how Trump’s pick might affect polling. During the 2020 presidential race, polling showed that older veterans overwhelmingly backed Trump, while younger veterans and women veterans significantly preferred President Joe Biden.

Not all veterans agree about Vance. Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq War veteran and the founder and former CEO of IAVA, said Monday that Trump’s VP pick was “more of the same old partisan junk.” Rieckhoff launched Independent Veterans of America earlier this month to encourage veterans to break away from the two major parties and run for political office as independents.

“Vance is not an independent,” Rieckhoff said. “Not even close.... What America really needs now is independent leadership.”

When Vance enlisted in 2003, he believed in the mission of the Iraq War – a belief he now describes as a mistake. Vance reflected on that time of his life during a speech on the Senate floor in April, during which he argued against the U.S. sending aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.

“I believed the propaganda of the George W. Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq, that it was a war for freedom and democracy,” Vance said. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to, that the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”

Vance detailed his time in the Marine Corps in his bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which recounts his family’s struggles with poverty and addiction, his Marine Corps service and his journey to Yale Law School.

“When I joined the Marine Corps, I did so in part because I wasn’t ready for adulthood,” Vance wrote. “I didn’t know how to balance a checkbook, much less how to complete the financial aid forms for college. Now I knew exactly what I wanted out of my life and how to get there.”

The memoir skyrocketed Vance to national celebrity after its publication in 2016, which coincided with Trump’s victory in the presidential race that year. At the time, Vance called Trump “dangerous” and “unfit” for office and said he could be “America’s Hitler.” By 2021, Vance had reversed his opinion, citing Trump’s accomplishments as president.

Though he wrote extensively about his Marine Corps service in “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance said he didn’t want to use his military service to “score political points” during his Senate campaign in 2022.

“I’m very proud of my service... but at the end of the day, it’s not a political talking point,” Vance said on Newsmax that year. “I hate these guys who talk about their military service, not because it’s an important part of their identity, but to deflect against any criticism of their record.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

The groups released a joint statement in which they said all Americans had the responsibility of “lowering the temperature” in today’s political discourse and insisted that “we all have more in common than not.”

“Our fellow Americans often look to our community to provide leadership and to set politics aside, because of our commitment to our Constitution and culture of putting service to the nation first,” the statement reads. “We have a clear and universal message to our fellow Americans - violence has no place in American politics. A fundamental tenet of American democracy is to settle our differences at the ballot box.”

The groups that signed onto the statement included: We the Veterans, AmVets, Veterans of Foreign Wars, National Military Family Association, Student Veterans of America, Blue Star Families, More Perfect Union, Elizabeth Dole Foundation, Mission Role Call, Combined Arms, Military Veterans In Journalism, Military Family Advisory Network, Veterans for All Voters, National Security Leaders for America, The Chamberlain Network, Disabled Veteran Empowerment Network, Millions of Conversations, Vet Voice Foundation and VetsForward.

“Regardless of individual politics, an attack on any candidate for office, elected official or election official is an attack on all of us,” they said. “It is an attack on the system of self-government that our men and women in uniform have served and sacrificed to protect.”

Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, tried to assassinate Trump during a rally Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, the FBI confirmed. Trump said on social media the upper part of his right ear was pierced in the shooting. Two spectators were critically injured, and Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief, was killed. Secret Service agents fatally shot the gunman, who was perched on top of a nearby roof.

As of Monday, Crooks’ motive remained a mystery, with investigators saying they believe he acted alone. President Joe Biden ordered an independent security review of the attack, which prompted questions about how Crooks was able to open fire near the campaign event. The FBI was investigating the shooting as a potential act of domestic terrorism.

The lack of a clear motive prompted conspiracy theories to flourish online immediately following the attack and in the days after. In an address Sunday, Biden urged the public to “let the FBI do their job” and not make assumptions.

A week before the assassination attempt, the Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism coordinator warned that a “toxic political environment” has made the United States more vulnerable to acts of violence that threaten the country’s social fabric. Nicholas Rasmussen blamed prominent voices on both sides of the political aisle.

“The toxic political environment in which we live as Americans right now, and the existentialist ways in which voices in our public square frame our politics — not only zero sum terms, but the worst kind of zero sum terms — all of that leaves us far more vulnerable than ever to targeted violence here,” Rasmussen said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

After one final attempt to re-anchor the pier on Wednesday, the mission to deliver aid to Gaza through a temporary pier manned by U.S. Army and Navy personnel is coming to an end, the Pentagon announced Thursday.

The news comes less than two months after the mission began. The operation is estimated to have cost $270 million and left three U.S. service members injured in the process.

The announcement came after troops attempted to re-anchor the pier and failed “due to technical and weather-related issues,” Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement.

The pier delivered more than 8,100 metric tons, or nearly 20 million pounds, of food to Gazans caught in the crossfire of the Israel-Hamas war, but delivery was often hampered by security issues in Gaza.

Ryder said Thursday that the aid pier mission was always a temporary endeavor.

“As highlighted in the initial deployment announcement, the pier has always been intended as a temporary solution to enable the additional flow of aid into Gaza during a period of dire humanitarian need,” he said. “The pier will soon cease operations, with more details on that process and timing available in the coming days.”

The pier mission was hampered by rough seas and security issues on the ground that hindered the delivery of aid to those who needed it.

Military’s novel floating pier arrives in Gaza amid security concerns

And in an incident in May that the Pentagon has not fully explained, three U.S. troops sustained non-combat injuries in connection to the mission, with one service member requiring evacuation back to the states.

Officials have not disclosed the nature of that service member’s injury.

Despite the issues with the pier, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan called the project a success.

“Look, I see any result that produces more food, more humanitarian goods, getting to the people of Gaza as a success,” Sullivan said Thursday. “It is additive. It is something additional that otherwise we would not have gotten there when it got there. And that is a good thing.”

The decision to halt the Gaza pier aid mission comes as Israeli troops make another push deeper into Gaza City, which Hamas says could threaten long-running negotiations over a cease-fire and hostage release, after the two sides had appeared to narrow the gaps in recent days.

U.S. troops removed the pier on June 28 because of bad weather and moved it to the port of Ashdod in Israel. However, the distribution of aid had already stopped due to security concerns.

Before that, the pier was damaged by high winds and heavy seas on May 25, just a bit more than a week after it began operating, and was removed for repairs. It was reconnected on June 7, but removed again due to bad weather on June 14. It was put back days later, but heavy seas again forced its removal on June 28.

The United Nations suspended deliveries from the pier on June 9, a day after the Israeli military used the area around it for airlifts after a hostage rescue that killed more than 270 Palestinians. U.S. and Israeli officials said no part of the pier itself was used in the raid, but U.N. officials said any perception in Gaza that the project was used may endanger their aid work.

As a result, aid brought through the pier into the secure area on the beach piled up for days while talks continued between the U.N. and Israel. More recently, the World Food Program hired a contractor to move the aid from the beach to prevent the food and other supplies from spoiling.

The nonprofit, We the Veterans, reached its goal this month of recruiting 100,000 people to serve as poll workers in their communities. As of Wednesday afternoon, 136,815 had signed up. In total, about 1 million temporary workers will be needed to staff polling locations across the country this November, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Those workers welcome and check in voters, issue ballots and explain how to use voting equipment. Having veterans and their family members perform those tasks lends credibility to the process and helps quash skepticism during a time when public trust in the government is low, We the Veterans believes.

“You can be pretty confident that when you go vote, somebody in the direct line of your ballot is a veteran or military family member,” Gustafson said. “We think this is a great opportunity to engage our population in an important civic service, and we think a side benefit is that having our most trusted group of Americans doing the work of running elections should absolutely bring more trust across America into the process.”

Widespread misinformation about the voting process first prompted We the Veterans to recruit veterans and their families to work the polls in 2022. That year, the group recruited 63,500 people.

Disinformation creates ‘precarious year for democracy,’ experts warn

The group launched a renewed “Vet the Vote” campaign in February at the Super Bowl. Now that the group has surpassed its goal, it’s going to continue signing up as many veterans and family members as it can. Many jurisdictions start training poll workers in August for the presidential election and cease recruiting by September or early October, said Dan Vallone, director of Vet the Vote.

“The new way we’re looking at it is that we want to have as large a proportion as we can get,” Gustafson said.

We the Veterans also plans to continue its voting education programs. The group began traveling state-to-state last year, hosting events with secretaries of state to teach communities about the election process. Group members have recently visited Nevada, Arizona and South Carolina, and they’re planning more events across the country this summer.

Aboard the USS Yorktown near Charleston this May, We the Veterans hosted an event during which veterans walked people through a mock election process, explaining the check-in process and how voting machines worked.

Experts are already tracking rampant misinformation and disinformation about the upcoming presidential election — including domestic campaigns, as well as efforts by Russia, China and Iran — designed to encourage Americans to question the validity and integrity of their voting process.

“We believe giving people that education is a really important service in this time when there’s so much confusion,” Gustafson said. “A baseline education in how elections work can go a long way in building trust in the system.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

An FBI investigation revealed that Teixeira, a 22-year-old who ran a server on Discord called “Thug Shaker Central,” spent much of his life online, talking primarily with other young men via message, video calls and voice chats. He chatted about guns and military gear, threatened his school, made racist and antisemitic jokes, traded conspiracy theories, discussed antigovernment sentiments, and in a bid to show off, shared some of the military’s most closely guarded secrets about the Russia-Ukraine war and the Middle East.

By the time the young airman was arrested in 2023, media scholar PS Berge had been studying Discord and its users for three years and had created an online consortium of other academic researchers who were doing the same. That an intelligence leak occurred on the site, creating a national security incident, didn’t come as a shock to her.

“My response was, ‘Of course. Of course this would happen on Discord,’” Berge said. “Because on a platform like this, you share everything with your people. Everything about your life. So, why not share national security secrets?”

Teixeira pleaded guilty in March to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. His sentencing is scheduled for September, and prosecutors are asking that he serve between 11 and 17 years in prison.

The same month Teixeira agreed to a plea deal, the FBI revealed it had investigated another service member in 2022 for leaking information on Discord.

Former Air Force Staff Sgt. Jason Gray, who served as a cyber analyst at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, admitted to running a Facebook group for followers of Boogaloo, a loosely organized, antigovernment movement that advocates for a second Civil War. Gray was disgruntled with his military career, and he discussed his dissatisfaction with the U.S. government in several Discord channels created for the Boogaloo movement, according to a 2022 FBI affidavit that was unsealed in March.

Gray, who used the account name LazyAirmen#7460, was accused of posting a classified image in a private Discord channel that he “likely obtained” from his access to National Security Agency intelligence, the affidavit states.

Investigators said the image could’ve been shared “in furtherance of the Boogaloo ideology,” but didn’t elaborate on the image’s details. It’s uncertain whether the FBI is still investigating the potential leak. But while searching Gray’s electronic devices for evidence of an intelligence breach, authorities discovered hundreds of images of child pornography. Gray is currently serving five years in federal prison on multiple child pornography charges.

Oversharing is a hallmark of Discord, an online world where members of certain channels talk all day, every day, and even fall asleep together on voice calls, said Megan Squire, a computer scientist and deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

People who study the platform agree that it’s not inherently bad — it’s used by millions of gamers, students, teachers, professionals, hobbyists and members of the military community to communicate and socialize. However, extremists have hijacked a part of the platform to radicalize and recruit others to their causes, said Jakob Guhl, senior manager for policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Following the leak of national security secrets and other high-profile, nefarious uses of the platform in recent years, researchers are grappling with what to think of the platform’s small but headline-grabbing dark side, and many disagree on whether Discord as a company is doing enough to root out bad actors.

“It’s always a bit difficult to strike the right tone between not scaring people off the platform, because the majority of users are completely fine, but also highlighting that there is an actual issue of radicalization,” Guhl said. “It’s not the biggest or most offending platform, but it definitely plays a crucial role among this network.”

‘Not inherently evil’

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, known as START, studied decades of violent extremist attacks and found a military background to be the most commonly shared characteristic among those who committed or plotted mass casualty attacks from 1990 through 2022, more so than criminal histories or mental health problems.

Researchers from START said the study revealed why extremist groups tend to focus recruitment efforts toward people with military service records: Even a small number of them can have an outsized impact inside extremist movements.

While such recruitment occurs on Discord, Guhl, Berge and Squire agreed that the mere presence of service members and veterans on the platform isn’t a cause for concern.

“It’s a popular platform and not inherently evil,” Squire said. “I’d be much more concerned about military folks on 4chan, Telegram, places like that. Nothing good is happening on those platforms, but Discord could be useful.”

In fact, Berge said, it can be a valuable forum for marginalized people to foster a sense of community. On its “about” page, Discord describes its mission as one that helps users find a sense of belonging.

“Discord is about giving people the power to create space to find belonging in their lives,” the company’s mission statement reads. “We want to make it easier for you to talk regularly with the people you care about. We want you to build genuine relationships with your friends and communities close to home or around the world.”

That’s what the veterans group Frost Call is doing on the platform. The nonprofit encourages veterans and service members to stay connected through gaming, one of its founders told Military Times last year. As of June, it boasted 390 members.

“When we founded Frost Call, we built an organization around this idea of bringing veterans together, helping to improve camaraderie that’s missing from military service,” Marine Corps veteran Wesley Sanders said last year. “It serves an enormous mental health need, but also ... an existential need for a lot of veterans.”

Moreover, when new users join Discord, extremist elements of the platform are not easily visible.

Discord is made up of millions of servers centered on various topics. Users can join up to 100 servers, and each server has numerous text, voice and video channels. When a new user creates an account and searches servers to join, the platform will suggest “its most popular, most successful, public-facing communities,” rather than any disquieting, invite-only communities, Berge said.

“If you are a standard user, and if you’re signing in to Discord for your general interests — maybe you’re looking for fellow students or fellow veterans — 90% of the time, you’re not going to accidentally stumble upon an extremist group,” she said. “They actually go through a lot of effort to make these spaces insulated, to make them difficult to find.”

When using Disboard, a third-party search platform for Discord servers, prompts such as “Nazi” or “white supremacist” won’t elicit results like they used to, Berge said. In a 2021 study, she found thousands of Discord servers that marketed themselves on Disboard as hateful and Nazi-affiliated spaces.

“You used to be able to search for those terms and find communities. It was horrifying,” Berge said. “Those servers still exist, but they’ve changed the ways they’re identified, and in some cases, we know that high-profile, toxic communities have been shut down.”

Extremists find a foothold

Founders Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy created Discord in 2015 as a way to allow friends around the world to communicate while playing video games online. Its popularity exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, when lockdowns went into effect and many people became more isolated than ever before.

Just two years after it launched, Discord gained notoriety as the platform of choice for facilitators of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Organizers, including some veterans, used Discord to share propaganda and coordinate the protest, which turned deadly. James Fields was convicted of killing Heather Heyer when he drove his car into a group of counterprotesters. Fields had joined the Army in 2015 but was separated quickly because of a cited lack of motivation and failure to train.

In 2022, Discord made headlines again after a mass shooting at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, where seven people were killed and dozens more injured. The suspected shooter ran his own Discord server called “SS,” where he complained about “commies,” short for “communists,” according to posts archived by the nonprofit website Unicorn Riot.

That same year, an 18-year-old white gunman killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The gunman, Payton Gendron, spent months writing plans for the attack in a diary he kept on a private Discord server, visible only to him. About 30 minutes before the attack, Gendron sent out invitations for others to view the diary, and 15 people accessed it, according to Discord.

The platform again faced scrutiny following Teixeira’s leak of national security secrets.

“It’s periodic. Every couple of years, it seems like there’s something,” Squire said. “There are other platforms that are worse, but Discord keeps coming up over and over again.”

Research institutions such as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that Discord serves as a hub for socializing and community-building across far-right groups, including Catholic extremists, the white supremacist Atomwaffen Division and the antigovernment Boogaloo movement.

Extremist groups value the platform’s layers of privacy and anonymity, as well as its chat and video functions and collaborative nature, Guhl said. Berge described it as a walled garden, or an online environment where user access to content can be controlled. Servers come with the capability to assign hierarchy to different members and allow some members to access information that others can’t, the researchers said.

“In, say, a Twitter direct-messaging thread or Facebook DM, you don’t really have levels and hierarchies,” Squire said. “Discord really allows you to have more fine-grained ranking structures.”

Another reason for the prevalence of extremists on the platform stems from its roots in gaming, Guhl surmised.

Rachel Kowert, a globally recognized researcher on gaming and mental health, has spent five years researching extremism in video game communities. Though gaming itself is a powerful tool for connection and growth, extreme and hateful ideologies are now commonplace in those spaces, Kowert said.

“If you’re spending a lot of time in the social or gaming spaces where misogyny is commonplace, that can in turn start to internalize in the way you see the world and interact in it,” Kowert said.

Fighting a dark legacy

The existence of far-right groups on Discord — and the high-profile instances of extremism on the platform in the past several years — has spawned its “extremist legacy,” one from which it’s now trying hard to distance itself, said Berge.

Discord said it removed more than 2,000 far-right-affiliated servers following the “Unite the Right” rally. After the Buffalo killings, it removed Gendron’s server and worked to prevent the spread of content related to the attack, the company said. At that point, Discord agreed it “must do more to remove hate and violent extremism.”

“We created Discord to be a place for people to find belonging, and hate and violence are in direct opposition to our mission,” the company said in a statement at the time. “We take our commitment to these principles seriously and will continue to invest in and deploy resources.”

Earlier this year, the company reported that 15% of its staff works on its user safety team, which cracks down on harassment, hateful conduct, inappropriate contact, violent and abusive imagery, violent extremism, misinformation, spam, fraud, scams and other illegal behavior.

During the investigations into Teixeira and Jason Gray, Discord officials immediately cooperated with law enforcement, a company spokesperson told Military Times. And in recent months, Discord has leaned on machine-learning technology to moderate content.

“We expressly prohibit using Discord for illegal activity, which includes the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents,” the spokesperson said.

The company publishes reports each quarter showing actions taken against various accounts and servers. The latest report, published in January, says Discord disabled 6,109 accounts and removed 627 servers that espoused violent extremism during the last few months of 2023.

Squire and Guhl agreed that Discord is “pretty good” at responding to extremist content. Guhl credited the company for including extremism and hate speech in its community guidelines, as well as for deleting servers on a regular basis that breach its terms of service. Discord also created a channel where Squire could flag questionable content on the platform, and the company has been receptive to the concerns she’s raised, she said.

“I credit where credit is due, and I have to give them credit for that,” Squire said. “I think it’s taken seriously, and there are other platforms that I could not say that about.”

Extremists are ‘absolutely still there’

Berge applauded Discord for ramping up the technology behind its moderation and for introducing IP bans, which restrict a device from accessing the platform, rather than just an account. Still, she sees room for improvement.

Discord should place more emphasis on educating moderators and users about how to recognize when someone is being radicalized and pulled into an extremist space, Berge said. She also criticized the platform for disbanding a program in 2023 that included hundreds of volunteer moderators.

“It wasn’t Discord’s automated flagging systems that caught national security secrets being leaked by Jack Teixeira. It took other users and community moderators digging into it and someone finally reporting it,” Berge said. “Elevating people and giving them tools to moderate is absolutely central to protecting the platform, and that’s one area where I think they’re taking a step back.”

Berge is still researching communities on Discord, four years after she first uncovered a network of white supremacists using the platform as a recruitment ground. Despite its community guidelines and efforts to remove offending servers and accounts, Discord still serves as a meeting place for pockets of extremism.

“They’re harder to find, but they are absolutely still here. We’re still finding them,” Berge said. “It is still one of the most popular spaces for people to congregate, share and be in community with each other, for better or for worse.”

Discord remains the “platform of choice” for some hate groups, noted Squire, who described the company’s fight against extremists as playing whack-a-mole: As soon as one is removed, another pops up. A lack of institutional knowledge among far-right extremist groups is partly to blame, she said.

“Everybody’s always fresh, and they don’t have any structure for teaching one another and learning from mistakes of the past,” Squire said. “That’s convenient for us, because as we keep amassing knowledge, they make the mistake of reusing the technology that’s most convenient, rather than being strategic.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Kenneth Ekman said in an interview that a number of small teams of 10-20 U.S. troops, including special operations forces, have moved to other countries in West Africa. But the bulk of the forces will go to Europe, at least initially.

Niger’s ouster of American troops following a coup last year has broad ramifications for the U.S. because it is forcing troops to abandon the critical drone base that was used for counterterrorism missions in the Sahel, a vast region south of the Sahara desert where groups linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group operate.

Ekman and other U.S. military leaders have said other West African nations want to work with the U.S. and may be open to an expanded American presence. He did not detail the locations, but other U.S. officials have pointed to the Ivory Coast and Ghana as examples.

Ekman, who serves as the director for strategy at U.S. Africa Command, is leading the U.S. military withdrawal from the small base at the airport in Niger’s capital of Niamey and from the larger counterterrorism base in the city of Agadez. He said there will be a ceremony Sunday marking the completed pullout from the airport base, then the final 100 troops and the last C-17 transport aircraft will depart.

Under the junta agreement, two-thirds of U.S. troops and equipment must be out of the country by July 26, Ekman said. That deadline, which forced the Pentagon to move quickly, is a key reason why U.S. Africa Command will complete its withdrawal of all 1,000 troops from Niger early.

But it also leaves a counterterrorism gap that U.S. officials are struggling to fill as security threats from extremist groups in the Sahel grow.

One of those groups, Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, known as JNIM, is active in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger and is looking to expand into Benin and Togo. Those expansion locations could be used initially as hubs to rest, recuperate, get financing and gather weapons, according to U.S. officials, but the group also has increased attacks there.

“Niger was immensely helpful for us as a location because it was in the Sahel and it was adjacent to those areas where the threat is most concentrated,” Ekman said. Now, he said, the challenge is battling the insurgency while having to get access from outside Niger, which makes it more difficult.

He said other coastal West African nations are concerned about the Sahel-based threats and want to talk about how they can partner with American forces. Ekman added that the small teams of U.S. troops moving to other West African nations are not combat forces but advisers, as well as special operations, personnel recovery and intelligence and surveillance forces.

Talks with other nations continue, and Ekman said some may be interested but not ready to allow in more U.S. troops. One example, he said, is Togo, which is southwest of Niger on the coast.

“In Togo, what I find is a partner that is friendly to the U.S. but that right now is unresolved on the degree they want the presence of any additional U.S. military personnel there,” he said. “My assessment was, ‘Not yet.’”

Speaking to reporters from The Associated Press and Reuters from the U.S. embassy in Niamey, Ekman said that while portable buildings and vehicles that are no longer useful will be left behind when U.S. troops leave Niger, a lot of larger equipment will be pulled out. For example, he said 18 4,000-pound (1,800-kilograms) generators worth more than $1 million each will be taken out of Agadez.

Unlike the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said the U.S. is not destroying equipment or facilities as it leaves.

“Our goal in the execution is, leave things in as good a state as possible,” he said. “If we went out and left it a wreck or we went out spitefully, or if we destroyed things as we went, we’d be foreclosing options” for future security relations.

Niger’s ruling junta ordered U.S. forces out of the country in the wake of last July’s ouster of the country’s democratically elected president by mutinous soldiers. French forces had also been asked to leave as the junta turned to the Russian mercenary group Wagner for security assistance.

Washington officially designated the military takeover as a coup in October, triggering U.S. laws restricting the military support and aid.

Ekman said he has been told that there are fewer than 100 Russian troops at the base near in Niamey and that once they are done training Niger troops, they will also leave the country.

Nicholas Rasmussen, the DHS counterterrorism coordinator, blamed prominent voices in the political arena that frame politics as zero-sum, encouraging the belief that one political party’s gain is the other’s loss.

That type of framing leads to extreme political views, some of which gain footing among military and veteran communities, and increases the chance that people will be prompted to commit violence, Rasmussen said. The DHS labels that type of threat as domestic violent extremism.

“The toxic political environment in which we live as Americans right now, and the existentialist ways in which voices in our public square frame our politics — not only zero sum terms, but the worst kind of zero sum terms — all of that leaves us far more vulnerable than ever to targeted violence here,” Rasmussen said.

The FBI and DHS categorize extremism into four subtypes: racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism, anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism, animal rights or environmental violent extremism and abortion-related violent extremism.

Of those, Rasmussen said he is most concerned about racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism, which “continues to grow in scope and scale.”

The conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip exacerbated those risks, putting both Jewish and Muslim communities in the U.S. at greater risk of being targeted in attacks, he explained.

While other types of threats are currently more pressing, domestic violent extremism “has the potential to be more undermining of our social fabric than any other form of terrorism threat we face,” he added.

Data shows that the involvement of veterans and service members with extremist ideologies is furthering this type of violence.

Domestic extremists who plot or commit mass killings often share characteristics, such as histories of mental health and criminal issues. But the most common thread is a record of military service, according to research by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, which analyzed three decades of attacks in the U.S.

The findings illustrate a “small numbers, high impact” problem, said Ellen Gustafson, co-founder of We the Veterans, a non-partisan nonprofit that focuses on preserving and strengthening democracy.

“Seeing that there’s a potentially deadly outcome of more involvement by veterans in these extremist groups, it is imperative for us as a group of concerned citizens and also members of the veteran and military family community to try to do something about it,” Gustafson said when the research was released last year.

Rasmussen outlined the threats facing the U.S. during a speech in Omaha, Nebraska, where counterterrorism experts gathered for a conference hosted by the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center.

Threats of violence are “more challenging, more complex and more complicated” than ever because of increasing risks of domestic violent extremism, combined with concerns of terrorist networks gaining entry to the country through the U.S.-Mexico border, he told the crowd.

“I’ve often been called upon to articulate the details of the threat environment and to try to make sense of what we should be most worried about,” Rasmussen said. “It’s harder now, today, here in this moment, than it’s ever been before. We face more challenges, harder challenges.”

Highest on Rasmussen’s list of priorities are vulnerabilities at the southern border, where the U.S. has struggled to manage a record number of migrants over the past year. Tensions between state and federal authorities peaked in January amid record levels of unauthorized border crossings, during which the Texas National Guard and state troopers blocked U.S. Border Patrol agents from a 2.5-mile stretch of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, Texas.

During the feud, the Texas Military Department posted a photo to its official X account, showing a flag from the Texas Revolution flying above its headquarters in Austin.

Renae Eze, a spokesperson for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, said at the time that the state was using multiple tactics to deter people from crossing and blamed President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

“Texas will continue to deploy Texas National Guard soldiers, [Texas Department of Public Safety] troopers, and more barriers, utilizing every tool and strategy to respond to President Biden’s ongoing border crisis,” Eze said at the time.

Migrants continue to travel from all over the world to seek asylum, and while DHS tries to vet them for ties to terrorist networks, the agency isn’t always successful, Rasmussen said.

Earlier this month, the FBI arrested eight Tajik men with ties to the Islamic State who entered the country through the southern border, the New York Times reported. It’s unclear whether the men were planning a terror attack.

Rasmussen argued against the notion that terrorists are “streaming” across the border. However, the immigration crisis does increase the country’s vulnerability to attacks, he said.

“DHS employs rigorous screening and vetting of those arriving migrants to try to identify any individual who may present a terrorism-related threat to the homeland,” Rasmussen said. “Even in the midst of all of that work, we find ourselves facing a situation in which individual migrants or travelers do arrive here ... and we subsequently learn that they in fact have some form of potential threat. When that happens, we work ... closely with the FBI and local law enforcement around the country to deal with and mitigate that threat.”

In addition to border issues and threats of domestic violent extremism, homegrown violent extremists present another challenge for DHS, Rasmussen said.

Such threats, which come from longterm U.S. residents inspired by foreign terror organizations to reject Western culture and commit violence, comprise a significant share of the U.S.’ threat profile, he added.

According to data from START, approximately 15% of individuals with military backgrounds who were charged with plotting or committing mass killings during the past three decades were inspired by or linked to foreign Islamist extremist groups, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State.

DHS needs more resources to address these threats, Rasmussen said. The agency warned earlier this year that it faced a budget shortfall, and it urged Congress to approve a bipartisan immigration deal that would provide more than $15 billion to DHS to bolster security at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Senate Republicans blocked the deal for a second time in May after former President Donald Trump described the measure as a “gift” for Democrats and Biden’s reelection chances.

Because of the funding shortfall, DHS is relying on the intelligence community, as well as academic and private-sector counterterrorism researchers, to help it prioritize threats, Rasmussen said.

“We are today a counterterrorism community of finite resources. Not something I ever thought I would say in the post-9/11 environment, but it’s true,” Rasmussen said. “We must make choices and deal most urgently with the most threatening things on our worry list. We can’t treat every problem as a top priority.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

The rules, which have been in the works for nearly three years, codify the Pentagon’s definition of extremist activities, which was updated in 2021 to include online interactions that promote terrorism, as well as rallies, fundraising and organizing in support of extremist ideologies. The rules also clarify the responsibilities commanders have to prevent and report extremist activities, and they outline the disciplinary actions commanders can take when soldiers violate those policies.

U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth shared the rules Wednesday with all Army commands, service component commands and direct reporting units. In one of two directives signed by Wormuth, she wrote that extremist activities “damage the nation’s trust and confidence in the Army as an institution.”

“They undermine morale and reduce combat readiness,” Wormuth added. “Extremism calls into question a soldier’s ability to follow orders from, or effectively lead and serve with, persons of diverse backgrounds, and it prevents maximum utilization and development of the Army’s most valuable asset – its people.”

The new rules are the result of the National Defense Authorization Act approved by Congress in 2021, which ordered Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to establish standard processes to refer allegations of extremist activities to the Inspector General’s office. The law mandated the IG to annually gauge how effectively the Defense Department prevents and responds to extremist activities in the ranks.

Congress approved those measures in reaction to the presence of veterans and service members at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. As of May, 222 individuals with military backgrounds had been charged or convicted in connection with the attack, and 24 were active-duty service members or members of the National Guard or Reserves, according to data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

To comply with the 2021 law, the IG’s office released annual reports in 2022 and 2023 about the Pentagon’s responses to extremism. Its latest report revealed the Defense Department had investigated 183 allegations of extremist activity among service members in the past year, 37 more than in 2022.

However, the IG also detailed ongoing issues with how the services track and report data, which in turn made measuring the military’s response challenging.

“The report highlights ongoing challenges in compiling and validating data, emphasizing the need for consistent implementation of data collection,” the IG report states.

Problems persist with how services report extremism, DOD watchdog says

At the time, all services told the IG they were in the process of implementing standardized systems to streamline how data is collected and reported. The rules unveiled by the Army on Wednesday set that system into motion.

The rules require commanders and other Army authorities who receive allegations of soldiers engaging in off-limits extremist activities to notify an Army inspector general within 30 calendar days. Commanders and other authorities must also tell an Army IG whether they decided to refer an allegation for further investigation. If they decide not to have an allegation investigated, they must explain their reasoning.

Under the rules, commanders must also report to the IG if they took any disciplinary action, which could include a court-martial, a nonjudicial punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, an involuntary discharge, denial of reenlistment, reassignment or loss of security clearance.

The delay codifying these rules was due to a number of factors, said one Army official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The Pentagon didn’t issue guidance to the services about the 2021 NDAA until 2022, and then the rules were refined and reviewed by working groups, as well as Army headquarters and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness.

The Army and other service branches have been criticized, both by troops and extremism experts, for their efforts to address extremism so far, which included a Pentagon-mandated, one-day training following the Jan. 6 attack. Some service members described the training as “checking a box,” and one soldier called it a “one and done” training with no follow-up.

Extremism stand-down checked a box with no lasting result, critics say

The Army’s new rules — in addition to detailing the process for reporting allegations of extremism to the IG — aim to bolster the information soldiers receive about off-limits extremist activities. They require continued extremism training for troops and offer more precise guidance for how commanders should address incidents of extremism in their units.

The United States Army Training and Doctrine Command will implement information about prohibited extremist activities into initial active-duty training, pre-commissioning training, commander training and professional military education, among other training programs, one directive states.

Commanders also have the responsibility of advising troops periodically about extremist activities and how they are “inconsistent with the Army goals, beliefs and values, as well as the oaths of office and enlistment.”

The Army directed commanders to “remain alert” and intervene when they observe soldiers acting in ways that could indicate future extremist activity. In those cases, counseling should be commanders’ first option. Soldiers could be referred for mental health evaluations or financial counseling sessions, the rules say.

“In these situations, commanders will take positive actions to educate soldiers, putting them on notice of potential adverse effects that participation in violation of military policy may have upon good order and discipline in the unit and upon their military service,” one directive states.

The rules apply to the regular Army, the Army National Guard and Army Reserve. It was uncertain Wednesday whether other services would issue similar directives. The IG’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps had implemented reporting processes of their own.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.