More results...
Cybercriminals spent much of 2025 automating their operations, shifting from one-off attacks to systems that can run entire intrusion cycles with minimal human input. Data collected from criminal forums, illicit marketplaces, and underground chat servi…
A vishing-as-a-service platform that helps scammers carry out so-called “press 1” scams is misusing text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities provided by AI voice technology company ElevenLabs, Mirage Security researchers claim. How “press 1&…
US-Israeli war on Iran, day 12: An estimated 140 to 150 U.S. service members have been injured in Trump’s Iran war so far, multiple news outlets reported Tuesday, beginning with Reuters, then later Axios and CBS News.
“Approximately 140 U.S. service members have been wounded over 10 days of sustained attacks,” a Pentagon spokesman said, and added that 108 of the wounded had already returned to duty.
Notable: “Reuters could not determine the types of injuries and whether they include traumatic brain injuries, which are common after exposure to blasts.”
Iranian missile and drone attacks have dropped significantly since the war began. Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War are documenting each day’s tally in an updated chart over halfway through their latest daily report, here.
At least 14 ships have been attacked in the Hormuz Strait, including three in the past several hours, Reuters reported Wednesday. The most recent vessels included a container ship, a dry bulk vessel and a bulk carrier. “While there have been some voyages through the waterway in recent days, the majority of shipping traffic remains on hold with hundreds of ships anchored,” the wire service reports.
And the U.S. Navy says it won’t escort ships through the Strait just yet because the waterway is still too dangerous, industry sources told Reuters, reporting Tuesday from London. That update came shortly after U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright claimed on social media the U.S. Navy had “successfully escorted an oil tanker” through the strait—but that wasn’t true, and Wright later deleted his tweet, which caused a brief selloff in the global oil market, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Developing: Iranian forces have allegedly begun mining the Strait of Hormuz, Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News reported. CNN later confirmed her report, citing two people familiar with U.S. intelligence on the matter.
President Trump responded by ordering a new boat-strike campaign for the U.S. military, this time for the waters around Hormuz—in addition to the arguably illegal operation that’s been underway off the coasts of Latin America since September.
“We are using the same Technology and Missile capabilities deployed against Drug Traffickers to permanently eliminate any boat or ship attempting to mine the Hormuz Strait,” the president wrote on his social media platform Tuesday afternoon, after deleting a confusing post on the matter from nearly two hours earlier. “They will be dealt with quickly and violently,” he said.
By midnight, the U.S. military said it had destroyed at least 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels on Tuesday alone, and released a 34-second video illustrating several of these strikes.
Global energy concerns are so great that “The IEA is expected to recommend the release of 400 million barrels of oil, the largest such move in the agency’s history,” Reuters reported Tuesday evening. “Such a volume would be more than double the 182 million barrels released in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
New: Iran’s military says it is now targeting banks across the Middle East that do business with the U.S. or Israel, and advised people in the region to stay at least 1,000 meters away from such buildings, al-Jazeera reports. Dubai could be at increased risk as it is “home to many international financial institutions,” France24 reports, noting separately Tuesday, “Two Iranian drones hit near Dubai International Airport, wounding four people though flights continue.”
Iran also claimed it will now target offices across the region associated with Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle for those firms’ alleged assistance with the U.S.-Israeli war effort.
After around 10,000 U.S. and Israeli strikes, Iranian officials still refuse to surrender, and are attempting to message their resolve in the face of almost two weeks of constant attacks. “Get ready for the oil barrel to be at $200 because the oil price depends on the regional security, which you have destabilised,” Iranian spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaqari declared Wednesday.
Notable: “Israeli leaders now privately accept that Iran’s ruling system could survive the war,” and “Two other Israeli officials said there was no sign Washington was close to ending the campaign,” Reuters reported Wednesday.
Turkey has moved a Patriot air-defense system southeast, to the Kurecik NATO radar base, officials said Tuesday after the system was recently spotted on the move. That move comes after NATO forces shot down two Iranian missiles over Turkey in the past week.
And the Pentagon has begun cannibalizing air defense systems in the Pacific for its war with Iran, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. That includes “moving parts of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system from South Korea to the Middle East” and “drawing from its supply of sophisticated Patriot interceptors in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere to bolster its defense against Iran’s drone and ballistic missile attacks.”
The U.S. military is leaning heavily on AI during this war, Navy Adm. Brad Cooper said in a five-minute video message Wednesday. “These systems help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds so our leaders can cut through the noise and make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react,” Cooper said. “Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot, but advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.”
Big picture: In launching their war on Iran, “there’s no doubt that the United States and Israel are in violation of international law,” Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School, told Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker on Tuesday. She elaborates: “There’s the body of law that governs whether states can use force. And, here, there’s no doubt that the United States and Israel are in violation of international law, which provides that it’s only lawful to use military force against another state if it’s been authorized by the Security Council of the United Nations, or if a state is acting in its self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. And that has to be self-defense against an armed attack or an imminent attack. And I think the consensus is that there isn’t enough evidence to support the self-defense claim. And the fact that this has not been authorized by the Security Council means it is in violation of international law.” Read the rest, here.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth read scripture from the Old Testament to reporters in the Pentagon briefing room yesterday, and he added “amen” to his recital of excerpts from the New International Version of Psalms 144—excluding a line at the end of verse 2 about subduing people, and finished with what appeared to be Hegesth’s own exegesis—atop a briefing with reporters Tuesday morning. These breaks from precedent for a Pentagon chief are extensions of Hegseth’s documented dabbling in Christian nationalism, which lawyer Dahlia Lithwick referred to as Pete’s “secret weapon,” writing Tuesday for Slate.
“Reinstituting American Christian nationalism as a lodestar of U.S. public policy was one of the guiding principles of Project 2025, and it continues to lead the Trump administration in 2026,” Lithwick writes after speaking with Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “But Christian nationalism reared its ugly head in the McCarthy era, when, in the 1950s, there was a series of civic religious advances that really laid the foundation for what we’re seeing now,” Laser explains. It also coincided with “a peculiar U.S. cowboy individualism” that arose in the 1950s when American right-wing ideologues “embraced a fantasy world in which a hero cuts through the red tape of laws and government bureaucracy to do what he thinks is right,” historian Heather Cox Richardson explained Sunday in tracing the roots of Trump and Hegseth’s Iran war.
“The administration’s approach to foreign affairs appears to be the logical outcome of two generations of a peculiar U.S. cowboy individualism,” said Richardson. “That image was fed by TV westerns that rose after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to portray a world in which dominant white men delivered justice to their communities without the interference of government. By 1959, there were twenty-six westerns on TV. In one week in March 1959, eight of the top ten TV shows were westerns.”
Richardson continues: “The idea of white men acting for freedom and justice on their own, unhampered by a government that served Black Americans, people of color, and women, became a guiding image for the rising right wing beginning with Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. It found a home in the Republican Party with Ronald Reagan in 1980, as supporters took a stand against a federal government they insisted was redistributing the tax dollars of hardworking Americans to undeserving minorities and women. That cowboy individualism spread into foreign affairs as well, until by 2003, right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh could use it as shorthand to defend President George W. Bush’s military operation in Iraq,” with Limbaugh telling his audience “Bush because he distinguishes between good and evil” because “That’s what cowboys do.”
“You’re seeing it in this idea of fighting holy wars,” Laser told Lithwick, “I think maybe it’s most vivid with the so-called Department of War, where we’re seeing the secretary with a Christian crusade tattoo on his body, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, initiating prayer services and inviting his pastor, Doug Wilson, to lead prayer services that are broadcast across the department.”
But like Richardson’s tracing of the cowboy mythology in U.S. foreign affairs, Laser also describes the rise of Hegseth’s Christian nationalism as a “reaction to massive demographic and social changes that have been happening in this country.” Over the past 15 years, she said, “We’ve seen the advent of marriage equality, the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement—there’s just been a lot of change afoot, and we’re seeing a real backlash to that. So it’s not that Christian nationalism is brand-new, but it is strong, and it is raging.”
By the way: In May 2024, several top Trump officials met at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington, Va., to sharpen military aspects of Project 2025. They called themselves the Border Security Workgroup. “These were people with extensive ties to Trump, military professionals supportive of Trump, and the white nationalist and Christian nationalist substrate that undergirded Project 2025,” investigative journalist Beau Hodai reported Tuesday. Their guidance: “Become experts on the Insurrection Act” so as to widen the president’s domestic use of the military, according to notes shared with Hodai from that meeting nearly two years ago.
“Records show the group considered using a variety of means to target a number of different groups, including certain non-governmental organizations, government agencies, judicial districts and a number of states or cities governed by the Democratic Party,” Hodai writes. “They also contemplated targeting college students who were protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza.” Other proposals “sought the integration of a number of law enforcement, intelligence, military and other government databases—to be data-mined by AI, an undertaking the Trump administration has since pursued.”
“The group also prepared several draft emergency declarations for Trump” to lay the groundwork for many of Project 2025’s goals. (Trump declared at least 10 emergencies in just the first seven months of his second term; most presidents declared an average of about seven per four-year term, the New York Times reported in August.) However, Hodai observes, “While many things called for by the Border Security Workgroup have transpired, events that have unfolded during this Trump term have not perfectly mirrored its plans,” thanks in large part to pushback from courts—e.g., in the case of deploying the military to U.S. cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland. Read the rest, here.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Wednesday 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 1987, Iran attacked a third tanker in as many days, and warned the Kuwaiti government not to seek protection from Washington or Moscow.
A year into Hegseth’s cuts, defense civilians report ‘degraded performance’ and low morale. “The climate, at least in my immediate organization, has shifted from fear to stress,” said one Air Force civilian who spoke with Defense One. “The fear of imminent [reductions-in-force] is not something we talk about much anymore because, while the threat of it persistently looms in the air, it is not in our best interest to constantly worry about it. Frankly, I’m too exhausted to keep thinking about it.”
Rewind: Within weeks of taking office last January, Hegseth ordered voluntary and involuntary cuts, along with a partial hiring freeze that forced managers to rescind untold numbers of job offers—untold because Pentagon officials have refused to say how many of those positions disappeared in the process. The freeze has also blocked the movement of thousands of employees to new roles, although some are now moving via a cumbersome exemption process. In total, nearly 110,000 of the department’s roughly 795,000 civilians departed last year, about 80 percent more than Hegseth’s goal. Some 30,000 jobs deemed essential to national security were subsequently re-filled. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more from conversations with DOD workers, here.
INDOPACOM was all in on Anthropic. Now it’s working to adjust, Defense One’s Jennifer Hlad reported Tuesday from Honolulu. “I actually started thinking about this last September,” said Bob Stephenson, INDO-PACOM’s resources and requirements director, speaking Monday at the Pacific Operational Science & Technology conference.
“We were working on a plan to be more model-neutral in our workforce. Now we’re just going faster,” he said in the wake of Trump’s order less than two weeks ago ordering federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s Claude AI platform after the CEO refused to lift restrictions on its use for autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance.
On the other side of the world, in Central Command, Stephenson said, “They’re executing about 1,000 fires a day. That’s a lot. That’s what we think, that’s what modern warfare looks like. They’re working really hard to try to stay up with this, and they’re using some AI tools that actually worked well for us.” Continue reading, here.
Related reading: Five national-security law experts told Reuters Anthropic “appears to have a strong case that President Donald Trump’s administration overstepped” by designating the firm as a supply chain risk. Worth the click, here.
NSA, Cyber Command get a permanent leader, ending 11-month gap. Gen. Joshua Rudd has spent his career largely in special operations and joint command roles. Senate confirms Josh Rudd to lead NSA and Cyber Command. Nextgov’s David Dimolfette reports, here.
Related reading: “US military contractor likely built iPhone hacking tools used by Russian spies in Ukraine,” Tech Crunch reported Tuesday.
]]>
Some experts question the significance of pro-Russia “hacktivist” groups.
US-Israeli war on Iran, day 11: Trump, Hegseth send conflicting messages to the world about the end of war on Iran. In a press conference after markets closed Monday, President Donald Trump told reporters at times contradictory information about the future of his joint war with Israel against Iran that has rattled the global economy and sent oil prices soaring.
Latest: “Today will be yet again our most intense day of strikes inside Iran,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday at the Pentagon.
“We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough,” Trump said to Republican lawmakers Monday in Florida. “We’re achieving major strides toward completing our military objective,” he told reporters later in the day. “And some people could say they’re pretty well complete. We’ve wiped every single force in Iran out, very completely.”
Shortly before those remarks and while the markets were still open, Trump told CBS News, “I think the war is very complete, pretty much…If you look, they have nothing left. There’s nothing left in a military sense.” U.S. stock indexes climbed sharply after his remarks, and the price of oil eventually fell to around $92 per barrel by Tuesday morning after reaching a high of $119 on Monday.
Rewind: On Sunday evening, Hegseth said, “This is only just the beginning,” in an interview with “60 Minutes” of CBS News. “But this is not a remaking of the Iranian society from an American perspective,” Hegseth said. In Iraq and Afghanistan,” “a lot of foolish approaches were used. This is war. This is conflict. This is bringing your enemy to their knees. Now, whether they will have a ceremony in—in—in Tehran Square and—and—and surrender, that’s up to them.”
Hegesth’s Defense Department sent a similar message to the world on Monday afternoon, declaring on Twitter, “We have Only Just Begun to Fight.”
Trump was asked about the two different answers Monday evening. “You said the war is ‘very complete.’ But your defense secretary says ‘this is just the beginning.’ So which is it?”
Trump replied: “You could say both. The beginning. It’s the beginning of building a new country,” he said, and noted, “As we speak, they’re being hit.” He then noted three developments administration officials have begun emphasizing this week amid allegations of strategic incoherence. “When you think about it, it’s incredible. We wiped out a big navy, very powerful navy,” Trump said Monday. “The Air Force is gone, everything’s gone. The missiles are down to a trickle. The drones are down to probably 25 percent and they’ll soon be down to nothing. We’ll have the—where they manufacture the drones are under fire.”
After a week in which White House officials gave at least 10 different reasons for going to war against Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, like Trump, listed three objectives on Monday as well. “The goals of this mission are clear,” he said, “and it’s important to continue to remind the American people of why it is that the greatest military in the history of the world is engaged in this operation: It is to destroy the ability of this regime to launch missiles, both by destroying their missiles and their launchers; destroy the factories that make these missiles; and destroy their navy.”
On Tuesday morning, Hegseth added his own, slightly different take: the U.S. is fighting to destroy Iranian missile capabilities, destroy the Iranian navy and “permanently deny Iran nuclear weapons forever,” he said at a Pentagon press conference. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more from that, here.
Tehran’s response to the conflicting U.S. messaging: “Iran will determine when the war ends,” a spokesman for the Revolutionary Guards said Monday. Another Iranian general claimed, “We are prepared for ten years of war with the United States. At least ten years.” And the country’s deputy foreign minister alleged, “Iran has upper hand in war [and] will decide when it ends.”
Related reading: “Iran Isn’t Winning This War,” But it might if the U.S. stops the bombing due to higher oil prices, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board argued in a commentary Monday.
Update: The first two days of the Pentagon’s Iran strikes cost $5.6 billion in munitions, the Washington Post reported Monday, citing three U.S. officials. “The estimate, shared with Congress on Monday, raises new questions about the Trump administration’s broad dismissal of lawmakers’ concerns that the Iran operation is quickly eroding the U.S. military’s readiness,” Noah Robertson writes.
Two more media outlets report video evidence strongly suggests the U.S. military attacked an elementary school on the war’s first day, killing more than 150 people, including children: The New York Times and the Associated Press joined earlier reporting from Bellingcat and Reuters, which arrived at a similar likelihood after consulting video forensics and—in the case of Reuters—preliminary results of an internal Defense Department investigation of the incident. The school was located beside an Iranian military base in southern Iran, and that base was one of the earliest targets in the war beginning Saturday, Feb. 28.
Trump was asked about the school attack Monday, and even though the U.S. military is the only one in the conflict deploying Tomahawk missiles, the president seemed to suggest Iran may have used the missile observed moments before impact. “Whether it’s Iran or somebody else, the fact that a tomahawk, a tomahawk is very generic. It’s sold to other countries. But that’s being investigated right now,” Trump said. AP called his allegation of Iran’s use of Tomahawks “erroneous.”
“We take things very, very seriously and investigate them thoroughly,” Defense Secretary Hegseth told reporters Tuesday when asked about the school strike.
Survey says: Most Americans still oppose the Iran war. “Even the highest level of public support for this conflict falls far lower than that at the start of most other conflicts, including World War II, the Korean War and the Iraq War,” the New York Times reported Tuesday. The gist: “So far, polls have found that most Americans oppose the Iran attacks. Support ranges from 27 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll to 50 percent in a Fox News poll. The wide variation suggests that public opinion is still taking shape as more Americans learn details of the attacks and the aftermath.”
Investor reax: “The risk of a 1970s scenario is rising,” one portfolio manager told Reuters Monday in an economic report on the risks of stagflation similar to the energy crisis that affected the U.S. and allies after Israel’s 1973 Yom Kippur war.
Latest: Saudi Arabia’s Aramco warned of “catastrophic consequences” if oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is paused much longer. “While we have faced disruptions in the past, this one by far is the biggest crisis the region’s oil and gas industry has faced,” CEO Amin Nasser said in an earnings call Tuesday, according to Reuters.
Analysis: Hormuz is unusually hard to defend, Axios reported Monday. “The Strait, which carries roughly 25% of the world’s seaborne oil supply, is approximately 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point, but the designated shipping lanes are far smaller—concentrating traffic into predictable corridors for Iran to monitor and target adversaries.”
Commentary: “Take the win. Stop the war,” argues Will Walldorf, Wake Forest University professor and senior fellow at Defense Priorities, writing Monday in Defense One. “The American experience in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan have shown that taking out leaders is the easy part; it’s what follows that turns into a disaster,” he says.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Tuesday 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 1987, Iran attacked three Kuwaiti ships as part of the Tanker War.
Hegseth presses Defense civilians to deploy for immigration enforcement. The U.S. military is reupping its request for civilian employees to deploy to the southwest border to assist with immigration enforcement operations, with supervisors now facing a stronger push to solicit their staff to sign up for the details, Eric Katz of Government Executive reported Monday. The memo is dated Feb. 19, more than a week before the U.S. and Israel began the war in Iran, though it was delivered to employees on Monday.
Hegseth encouraged “all who are interested” to volunteer for the detail, calling the work “vital to the national security of the United States.” According to an Army official, “With the potential for increased numbers of migrants in the interior of the United States territory and across the southwest border, [the Department of Homeland Security] needs volunteers to assist in its commitment to ensuring a safe and orderly immigration system.” Katz notes, “It was not immediately clear why the number of migrants entering the country could potentially increase—the Trump administration has consistently boasted that it has slashed the number of individuals illegally entering the country to record-low levels.”
“We all think it’s absurd,” one civilian said. The timing of the new push seemed to be a “bad look,” the person added, given the war the U.S. is currently waging against Iran. Continue reading, here.
The U.S. military says it killed six more people in its 45th known strike targeting alleged drug traffickers off the coasts of Latin America. The latest strike occurred Sunday as the vessel transited “known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific,” officials at Southern Command said in a statement Sunday.
Notable: Critics have likened the strikes to a campaign of extrajudicial killings, and the administration has yet to share evidence supporting its claims that those aboard the boats were in fact trafficking drugs when they were killed. The New York Times maintains a tracker from the ongoing strikes, here.
Anthropic sues DOD, Hegseth, other federal agencies. The AI company that was recently declared a “national security risk”—even as its tools were reportedly being used to plan strikes on Iran—filed suit on Monday with the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. The lawsuit “asserts that the government’s actions after this disagreement—primarily the designation of the company as a supply-chain risk and alleged violations of its right to due process through a lack of ‘core requirements’ such as ‘adequate notice and a meaningful hearing’—constitute illegal retaliation,” reports Nextgov’s Alexandra Kelley. Read on, here.
New science on heat is changing the future of soldiering. “The U.S. military has been studying the effects of heat on troops for almost a century, dating to the 1927 establishment of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory at the military’s request. Still, soldiers’ and commanders’ approach to core physical tasks—think timed runs, strenuous outdoor activity, or environmental exposure—lags the growing body of science about heat risks, sometimes by years or decades. That may finally be changing under new initiatives to expand research into human performance,” reports Defense One’s Patrick Tucker, here.
]]>
The Pentagon is focusing on operational objectives for success, leaving out Trump’s calls for “unconditional surrender” and an “acceptable” new leader.
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:
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:
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.
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.
]]>
US-Israeli war on Iran, day 7: Moscow joins Tehran: Russia is giving Iran the locations of U.S. forces, including warships and aircraft, the Washington Post reported Thursday, citing three anonymous officials. “The assistance, which has not been previously reported, signals that the rapidly expanding conflict now features one of America’s chief nuclear-armed competitors with exquisite intelligence capabilities.”
Second opinion: “In Iran’s War, Russia Serves as Backstage Partner,” Nicole Grajewski wrote Thursday for Russia Matters.
Update: Iran’s attacks have plummeted, but its targets are more spread out, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Since Saturday, Iran’s ballistic-missile launches are down 90% and drone attacks, 83%, defense officials said Thursday, thanks in part to the targeting of Iran’s underground missile cities. “But Iran still has other ways to retaliate, most important its arsenal of low-cost drones. It continues to launch drones by the hundreds at Arab neighbors across the Persian Gulf, spreading fear, roiling markets and disrupting shipments of oil and goods from a region that is crucial to the world’s economy.”
“Iran’s emphasis now is persistence, not volume,” said Hasan Alhasan, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a former foreign policy analyst for the crown prince of Bahrain. More, here.
Latest: Israeli strikes are pounding Lebanon, including an ongoing barrage around Beirut after the Israelis issued new evacuation orders for citizens living in and around Lebanon’s capital city. “At least three buildings collapsed, and thousands who live in the area have been displaced,” the New York Times reports as Israel targets Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in the region.
View a regularly-updated interactive map of U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran via the Institute for the Study of War, here.
The death toll inside Iran has risen to over 1,300 people while more than 200 have been killed inside Lebanon, according to the Times and al-Jazeera. On Friday, Israel also issued a new evacuation order for Iranians living in the Qom region, which is located near an Iranian nuclear site.
The State Department suspended operations at its embassy in Kuwait City amid the widening regional war, officials announced Thursday.
At least two of America’s Gulf allies complain the U.S. didn’t give them enough time to prepare for defense against Iranian drones and missiles, AP reported Friday. One expert said U.S. officials appear to have “underestimated the risk to its Gulf Arab allies, believing American troops and Israel would be the primary targets of Iranian retaliation.”
Related: “Operational secrecy kept the US from making evacuation plans—and that means Americans in the Mideast could wait days,” 35-year Foreign Service veteran Donald Heflin told The Conversation on Thursday.
Duration alert: The U.S. military has asked for more Iran-focused intelligence support “for at least 100 days but likely through September,” Politico reported Wednesday. “It’s the first known call for additional intelligence personnel for the Iran war by the administration, and a sign the Pentagon is already allocating funding for operations that may stretch long beyond President Donald Trump’s initial four-week timeline for the conflict,” Nahal Toosi, Jack Detsch, and Paul McLeary wrote.
But many Republicans are insistent that there is neither a war going on, nor that it will last long. “We’re not at war, we have no intention at being at war,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Thursday. “The president and the Department of Defense have made it very clear, this is a limited operation.”
Johnson spoke after House lawmakers failed to rein in Trump’s Iran war powers in a 212-219 vote in the lower chamber Thursday. The bill would have required the White House to suspend operations until it gained Congressional approval for the war. Four Democrats joined Republicans to oppose the effort—Reps. Jared Golden of Maine; Henry Cuellar of Texas; Ohio’s Greg Landsman; and Juan Vargas of California—while two Republicans joined the Democrats in support, including Kentucky’s Thomas Massie and Ohio’s Warren Davidson.
Trump acknowledged, but shrugged off dangers to stateside Americans. Time magazine asked the president this week whether Americans should be worried about retaliatory attacks at home from the Iran war. “I guess,” Trump replied. “But I think they’re worried about that all the time. We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things.”
“Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die,” Trump said.
On rising gas prices, “I don’t have any concern about it,” the president told Reuters Thursday. “They’ll drop very rapidly when this is over,” he said, “and if they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit.”
Related reading:
Welcome to this Friday 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 1987, the Reagan administration was finalizing its decision to escort reflagged commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, an operation that would lead to a shadow war with Iran and a one-day battle the following April.
After a report surfaced Thursday that the Pentagon is using artificial intelligence to carry out attacks inside Iran, two additional outlets have taken a much closer look at an airstrike Saturday on an elementary school that killed more than 170 people, including children in southern Tehran.
After visual analysis using satellite imagery, social media posts and verified videos, the New York Times reported Thursday that “official statements that U.S. forces were attacking naval targets near the Strait of Hormuz, where the I.R.G.C. base is located, suggest they were most likely to have carried out the strike.”
And according to Reuters, “U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible” for the Feb. 28 strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. However, officials “have not yet reached a final conclusion or completed their investigation,” the wire service notes. According to the Times, satellite imagery “shows that multiple precision strikes hit at least six Revolutionary Guards buildings along with the school. Four buildings inside the naval base were completely destroyed and two other buildings showed impact points at the center of their roofs, consistent with such precision hits.”
A former Air Force analyst said “the most likely explanation was that the school had been a ‘target misidentification’—that forces had attacked the site without realizing that it might have had large numbers of civilians inside.” Read more (gift link), here.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth batted away concerns about U.S. munitions stockpiles in a press conference Thursday at the Pentagon. Instead, he seemed to suggest that as Iran’s capabilities are weakened, the remaining missiles are stretching further, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports.
Notable: U.S. and partner forces have fired more than 800 Patriot missiles in the first three days of fighting, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday—adding that the total is more than Ukraine has been given since it was invaded by Russia four years ago, the Kyiv Independent reported Thursday.
Little planning for drones: “Fears are already circulating at the Pentagon that the U.S. will soon burn through its arsenal of advanced air-defense systems, given the intensity of the air war in the Middle East,” The Atlantic’s Simon Shuster and Nancy Youssef wrote Thursday. “Whether those fears are realized could depend on how long the war lasts. But the U.S. failure to deploy cheap and effective weapons against Iranian drones already looks like poor planning at best, and hubris at worst.” Read on, here.
U.S. forces destroyed Iran’s military space command, Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of Central Command, announced Thursday. But experts told Novelly that the country’s nascent space capabilities never posed a significant threat.
Decades-old B-1 and B-52 bombers have hit hundreds of Iranian military targets this week, defense officials said in another fact sheet from the ongoing war. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly has a bit more on the recent history and anticipated future of those airframes, here.
Analysis: “The inaugural deployment of the LUCAS drone, a near-clone of the Iranian Shahed-136, signals a big Pentagon step into the era of affordable mass,” writes Anna Miskelley of Forecast International. “While the Iranian drone flies to pre-programmed GPS coordinates, LUCAS has a vision-based object recognition system that enables it to find and hit specific military hardware.”
“And LUCAS’ combat debut may prove far more than a regional tactical experiment,” she warns. “If successful in the coming weeks, it could be a live-fire proof of concept for the Hellscape strategy being developed for the Pacific.” More, here.
Proxy watch: Most Iran-backed militants inside Iraq are not interested in jumping into this fight, Reuters reported Friday. Much of this is because Iran’s proxy network has been “hollowed out by years of targeted assassinations of hard-to-replace leaders; the loss of secure bases for training and weapons transit; and the transformation of Iraqi commanders into wealthy politicians and businessmen with more to lose than gain from confronting the West.”
On the other hand, the Kurdish people posted “a message to the American people” on Thursday. Their message comes amid reports the CIA is looking to arm Kurds to enter Iran to distract and help destabilize remaining regime forces. “Kurdish forces fought ISIS not only to defend our homeland, but also to protect the world from terrorism. We stood on the front lines against extremism because we believe in freedom, stability, and peaceful coexistence. However, we cannot ignore the painful moments of the past,” the Kurds wrote in their Thursday message.
“During the last nine years, decisions made during the presidency of Donald Trump left the Kurds in difficult situations three times: in 2017 in Kirkuk, in 2019 in Rojava, and again in 2026 in Rojava. In those moments, Kurdish forces were left to face powerful enemies alone,” the message reads. “We still see the United States as an important partner and a friend of the Kurdish people,” but “At the same time, we have learned from the past,” they said.
“The Kurds in Iran will not repeat the mistakes that happened in Iraq and Syria. Partnership must be built on clear understanding and real guarantees,” they said, which to our ears doesn’t necessarily sound like they’ve declined the offer to assist the U.S. in this conflict. Indeed, they conclude, “We believe in the same values of freedom, dignity, and the fight against extremism. Together, we can stand against terrorism and build a more stable and peaceful future.” Read the rest, here.
Related reading:
Drones will present a “bigger” threat than IEDs did in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, the head of Joint Interagency Task Force-401, told reporters on Thursday at an industry event hosted by the Army. “What I can tell you is that the challenge of unmanned systems, the threat posed from unmanned systems, is going to far exceed the threat that we saw from IEDs…where we made some progress, but never really got in front of it,” Ross said.
The U.S. spent more than $20 billion defending against IEDs 20 years ago, and never came up with a good detection system for roadside bombs, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports. But thanks to the efforts of then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the U.S. managed to create a vehicle—MRAPs—that at least offered much better protection from them than the unarmored humvees that troops had been using in the first years of those wars.
But unlike IEDs, “we’re going to see proliferation of unmanned systems into our commercial airspace,” Ross predicted. “It’s going to be very common in the next few years. And what that means is that our ability to manage that airspace safely—and then protect critical infrastructure that must be protected, whether it’s formations or locations—that market is just going to continue to grow over time.” More, here.
SecDef Hegseth just appointed a 25-year-old to run the Pentagon’s AI efforts. His name is Gavin Kliger, and he was one of Elon Musk’s staffers charged with overhauling the federal government in last year’s much-promised, little-delivered DOGE effort. Kliger led the DOGE operation at the IRS last February. Twelve months later, he’s been nominated to be the U.S. military’s Chief Data Officer, according to a social media post Friday morning on Twitter.
As CDO, Kliger will be “at the center of the Department’s most ambitious AI efforts,” the account for the Defense Department’s Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering said. “His background includes service on Secretary Hegseth’s [DOGE] team, where he oversaw the launch of GenAI.mil,” and an unspecified role in the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program. “Kliger will be a key leader in executing the Department’s AI strategy,” with a “focus on the day-to-day alignment and execution of the Department’s AI projects, working directly with America’s frontier AI labs to support the warfighter,” officials said in the Friday post.
Related reading:
]]>
Weekly summary of Cybersecurity Insider newsletters from the week of March 01, 2026.
The post AI Exploits, Cloud Breaches, and Identity Gaps Define This Week’s Cybersecurity Landscape appeared first on eSecurity Planet.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ nascent space program has only a handful of satellites.