US-Israeli war on Iran, day 10: Eight American troops have died in the Middle East since the war on Iran began more than a week ago. U.S. and Israeli air and naval strikes continue in Iran and Lebanon; Iranian drone attacks continue in response. U.S. military officials on Sunday announced the seventh soldier to perish from the war’s initial attack and retaliation waves last weekend. 

“The service member was seriously wounded at the scene of an attack on U.S. troops in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on March 1,” Central Command officials said in a statement Sunday. After nearly six days of treatment, that service member passed away Saturday evening. His name is Army Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington, age 26, from Glendale, Ky., and he was assigned to 1st Space Battalion, 1st Space Brigade, based in Fort Carson, Colo.

The eighth American to perish was a National Guard soldier that officials said Sunday “died in a health-related incident in Kuwait on March 6 during a medical emergency.” Their cause of death is “under review,” CENTCOM said. 

Update: Close scrutiny of available footage shows a Tomahawk missile striking Iranian facilities immediately near an elementary school where 175 people were reportedly killed, including children, on the war’s first day. “The footage would appear to contradict US President Donald Trump’s claim that it was an Iranian missile that hit the school,” Bellingcat reported Sunday. 

“The US is the only participant in the war that is known to have Tomahawk missiles. Israel is not known to have Tomahawk missiles,” Bellingcat’s Carlos Gonzales writes—adding to reporting from Reuters Thursday that “U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible” for the strike on the school. 

Pentagon reax: “We’re investigating that. ​We, of course, never target civilian targets. But we’re taking a look and investigating that,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday at the Pentagon. Just two days earlier, he told reporters the U.S. military “is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history” with “No stupid rules of engagement” because, he said, “We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”

Developing: Elements of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division are on alert after its headquarters unit was unexpectedly pulled from a major training exercise, which is “fueling speculation within the Defense Department that soldiers specializing in ground combat and a range of other missions may be sent to the Middle East as the conflict with Iran widens,” Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported Friday. Military officials declined to comment. 

White House reaction to possible U.S. boots on the ground in Iran: “President Trump wisely does not remove options off of the table,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox TV on Sunday. 

Related reading: “At least 13 hospitals and health facilities hit during attacks on Iran, WHO says,” the Guardian reported Thursday.

New: Iran announced a new leader over the weekend: Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the country’s former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He’s 56 years old, and is thought to be “considerably more violent and ideological than his father,” according to Graeme Wood of The Atlantic. 

He is not a religious scholar, but that may not matter, Wood says and speculates—based on the intensity and intention of Israeli attacks—“whoever leads Iran next will have a life expectancy measured in weeks or even days.”

Like Israel, Trump already wants him dead so he can find someone else to run Iran. But the U.S. president has had a particularly hard time speaking clearly about why he joined this conflict, which has upended global markets and sent the price of oil over $119 per barrel for the first time since the pandemic. The Wall Street Journal calls the current conditions “the most severe energy crisis since the 1970s.”

Trump aims to profit off a changed Iran by appointing “a strongman who will cooperate with him on a peace deal and perhaps give the U.S. a slice of Iran’s oil industry,” Thomas Wright of Brookings writes for The Atlantic. 

Israel, on the other hand, “is seeking a far more sweeping transformation” and wants “to dismantle the regime entirely,” Wright writes. But the longer the conflict drags on, the less likely Trump will reach his goal while Israel’s aims might still endure relatively intact through persistent degradation. 

“The Trump administration initially reassured [Turkey] that the war would last only four days,” according to Aslı Aydıntaşbaş of the Brookings Institution. 

By the way: NATO air defenses just intercepted another ballistic missile over Turkish airspace, officials announced Monday. Some debris fell onto Turkish territory but no one was harmed, Ankara’s defense minister said on social media. The shootdown was the second of its kind for NATO and Turkey in the past five days. 

Related: “France to deploy almost a dozen warships, mulls Hormuz mission, Macron says,” Reuters reported Monday. 

Why is the U.S. at war? Over six days, Trump gave 10 different rationales for joining Israel’s full-scale attack on Tehran, by the count of Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl on Friday for The Atlantic. 

His reasons so far have included: Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. (though in conversations with lawmakers, U.S. intelligence agencies did not agree); to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon; to stop Iranian-backed militias across the Middle East; to implement regime change in Tehran; because of Iranian election interference; for world peace; for later generations; to preemptively attack before Iran attacks the U.S.; to fulfill an alleged religious purpose; and because the Israelis forced Trump’s hand. 

Read more: 

• Judd Legum of Popular Information documented “at least 17 different responses about why the war began” from White House officials since Feb. 28;
• See also this chronological account of the administration’s various public justifications for war via a timeline curated Saturday by Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian. 

Analysis: “Trump is the first president in modern times to take the United States to war without the backing of the public,” Peter Baker of the New York Times reported Friday. “Given that wars tend to grow less popular over time, the initial negative response portends political challenges for Mr. Trump and his fellow Republicans the longer the fighting continues.” 

Also notable: There are several similarities between the White House’s war rhetoric and Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, Anton Troianovski of the Times noticed on Sunday—and isolated at least five glaring instances just in the first week of war. 

Warning from Ukraine: Trump’s Iran war “will be short only if Washington quietly scales down its goals, gives up on regime change in Iran, and sells a much smaller outcome as victory,” former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on social media Friday. 

“We’re marching through the world,” Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., declared on Fox TV Sunday. “Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago. He is the greatest commander in chief of all time. Our military is the best of all time.” 

“Iran is going down, and Cuba is next,” Graham said, adding to rumors first reported by the Wall Street Journal in January then later Politico early last week. Now Justice Department officials are reportedly looking for ways to charge Cuban officials with crimes, according to NBC News, reporting Friday. Such charges “could ratchet up public pressure on the country and be used as the basis to levy additional economic sanctions” since “Trump has been talking about Cuba’s government increasingly since the raid on Venezuela.” Trump himself said Saturday, “They want to negotiate, and they are negotiating with [Secretary of State Marco Rubio] and ​myself ​and ⁠some others, and I would think ​a deal would ​be ⁠made very easily with Cuba.” 

Additional reading: 

• “Massive war price tag could be a massive problem for GOP leaders,” Politico reported Friday; 
• “Oil prices soar after Iran names Mojtaba Khamenei the new supreme leader,” the Associated Press reported Monday; 
• “Stocks Slide as Oil Hits Highest Price Since 2022,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday; 
• “How to war-proof your budget before regular gas hits $4 a gallon,” via the Washington Post reporting Saturday. 

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Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Merrimeck faced off in the first battle between ironclad warships.

Around the Defense Department

Meet the startups trying to build military-specific AI. “The battle between AI model builder Anthropic and the Pentagon has exposed a huge gap between what AI tools the military wants and what companies like Anthropic, xAI, and OpenAI actually make: AI tools for use by everyone, not specifically for the military,” reports Defense One’s Patrick Tucker. “A handful of veteran-run or -financed startups aim to fill that gap.” Read on, here. 

Trump says missile makers agreed to “quadruple” production after a White House meeting on Friday, but it’s not clear whether that’s news, a reflection of earlier agreements, or not true at all. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports off statements by the White House and several of the companies that sent their CEOs, here.

OpenAI hardware chief resigns after deal with Pentagon. On Saturday, Caitlin Kalinowski announced her resignation on social media, saying that the company’s Feb. 27 deal to provide unrestricted service to the Defense Department shouldn’t have been signed “with the guardrails undefined.” Echoing the sentiments that got Anthropic declared a “national supply-chain risk,” Kalinowski wrote, “AI has an important role in ⁠national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial ​oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved ​more deliberation than they got.” Reuters has more, here.

And lastly: what if ordinary citizens get unbreakable codes? The latest edition of Fictional Intelligence ponders a future in which quantum science takes an unexpected turn. Read that, from Peter Singer and August Cole, here.

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