America’s election infrastructure is safe and secure, and voters should feel confident in the process, said Suzanne Spaulding, a former undersecretary for the Department of Homeland Security who now works with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

However, some foreign actors are trying to persuade voters to view the process as too corrupt to participate in, and these same actors will likely try to convince Americans after Election Day that the results were illegitimate, she said.

“In 2016, our assessment was that it would be extremely hard, virtually impossible, for an adversary to change votes or tallies in order to change the outcome of a national election,” said Spaulding, who was working with DHS that year. “I think that is only more true today. We’ve gotten better at shoring up the cybersecurity of election infrastructure.”

Spaulding spoke Thursday on a panel hosted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research group focusing on foreign policy and national security. Earlier this month, the group flagged an Iranian-linked website that was attempting to stir up antidemocratic sentiments among veteran voters.

Iran-linked website targets vets with disinformation, think tank warns

Disinformation experts have been warning for months that malign actors, both foreign and domestic, would attempt to weaken the democratic process this election year. Spaulding and other experts who spoke Thursday said the efforts would likely result in some voters not believing the outcome of the election next week.

“The elections are going to be secure, but we are going to have a meltdown on Nov. 7 or 8 — no matter what happens — because of people’s perceptions of what happened,” said Mark Montgomery, who works with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Russia, China and Iran are targeting Americans in order to paint a negative picture of democracy and eventually sideline the U.S. military, added Bradley Bowman, an Army veteran who focuses on U.S. defense policy for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Part of their strategy is to encourage isolationist beliefs among the U.S. population and encourage citizens to oppose intervention in overseas conflicts, he said.

“They want us so weak, divided and distracted that we question ourselves and don’t have the time or the will to go and defend our interests abroad,” Bowman said. “Divide us at home, degrade our democracy in our own minds and the minds of others, and then deceive us into believing falsely we have no core interests to defend in places like Taiwan, Ukraine, Israel. Then, they don’t need to worry about our military.”

In order to combat the foreign influence campaigns, Montgomery suggested Congress provide more funding to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a component of DHS that works to protect the country from cyber threats, as well as the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which exposes and defends against foreign propaganda and disinformation.

Government leaders should also pay more attention to information from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, he said.

Spaulding said the U.S. population should work to become more resilient against disinformation, in part by improving civics education in American schools. Kids should learn the fundamentals of American democracy and the role individuals play to preserve it, she said.

“The target is every single American. Americans should not take that lightly,” Spaulding said. “They should be demanding [that] policymakers ... have a vigorous response to counter this activity.”

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

The study, published Tuesday, was conducted by the university’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, which consulted with the nonprofit We the Veterans. The nonpartisan group has spent the year recruiting veterans and military family members to serve as election workers, believing they were the key to quashing skepticism and restoring confidence during a time when disinformation is eroding trust in U.S. elections.

The study proves that idea, said Ben Keiser, co-founder of We the Veterans.

“This study confirms our hypothesis that veterans and military families — who have already demonstrated their unwavering commitment to our country — serving as poll workers help to strengthen public confidence in elections,” Keiser said.

The study involved 1,263 people across the country who were representative of the adult population in the United States. That population was split into two groups, with each receiving a written story, modeled off of news articles, about recruitment efforts of elections workers in Maricopa County, Arizona.

One story said elections officials were recruiting veterans and military family members, while the other story said officials were looking for volunteers from the local community, without reference to any specific demographics.

After reading the vignettes, the groups were asked questions about whether the voting process would be fair, safe and accurate.

Vet the Vote recruits nearly 160,000 veterans as election workers

Those participants who read the story about veterans and military family members being recruited to work the polls were 7% more likely than those who read the other story to express confidence that their votes would be counted accurately. Among those who said they questioned the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s election in 2020, confidence rose by 15% after reading about the recruitment efforts.

The group that read the story about veterans and military family members were 9% more likely to say the elections workforce would be committed to their jobs and 7% more likely to say that the voting process in Maricopa County would be fair and safe.

That group was also 8% less likely to be worried about potential violence, threats and intimidation at the polls, and 5% less likely to be concerned about voter fraud.

“The findings of this study are timely and crucial for the 2024 elections,” said Michael Hanmer, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement. “That sizable portions of the public lack confidence in our elections is a serious problem. Our study provides powerful evidence that recruiting veterans and military family members to work at polling places not only strengthens public trust in the process but also addresses concerns about potential threats to election security and violence at the polls.”

The findings led the University of Maryland to recommend that election officials create their own programs to recruit veterans and military family members to work the polls and make it known to the public when people from those communities are working in their precincts.

We the Veterans estimates that one out of every five election workers in November will be a veteran or a military family member. Through its Vet the Vote campaign, the group recruited more than 163,000 volunteers across the country.

Between 800,000 and 1 million temporary workers will staff polling locations across the country next week, said Thomas Hicks, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Those workers welcome and check in voters, issue ballots and explain how to use voting equipment.

“It is likely that our elections workforce is already populated with significant numbers of veterans and military family members. Where this is the case, our results suggest that publicizing this information can help increase confidence in elections,” the study reads.

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

In the last month, North Korea has sent 10,000 soldiers to eastern Russia, where they began training across three military sites. Around 2,000 of these troops have since moved west, with some receiving Russian uniforms and equipment. A smaller group has already entered the region of Kursk, where Ukrainian forces seized land earlier this fall.

“There’s a good likelihood that these groups will be introduced into combat,” Austin said Wednesday, speaking alongside South Korea’s defense minister, Kim Yong-hyun, who was visiting Washington.

Since publicly confirming last week that North Korea had sent forces into Russia, the Pentagon has warned Pyongyang against joining the nearly three-year war. After decades of chilly relations — including years of Russia trying to limit North Korea’s nuclear program — the two countries have warmed to each other following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

North Korea has helped supply Russia’s military with munitions and other military equipment during the war, and their two leaders have held multiple in-person summits. American officials have grown concerned about what Pyongyang is receiving in return.

That barter likely includes Russia transferring advanced technology on tactical nuclear weapons, reconnaissance satellites, intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines, said Kim, the South Korean defense minister.

“There’s also a high chance that they will try to replace their equipment” that may have grown obsolete, Kim said.

The U.S. does not have direct relations with North Korea and already has a raft of sanctions imposed on the country. Austin said the administration is working with allies on how to respond to the deployment, though he wouldn’t specify how.

“It does have the potential of lengthening the conflict or broadening the conflict if that continues,” Austin said of these troops fighting alongside Russia. If they do, he said, they would be fair targets for Ukrainian soldiers, including with American-provided weapons.

Pentagon and White House officials have argued that the deployment is a sign of “desperation” from Russia, which is suffering immense and accelerating casualties in Ukraine’s east — more than 1,000 per day with more than 600,000 during the whole war.

Austin went further Wednesday, saying the Kremlin is now asking Pyongyang for manpower to avoid another draft. Russia has been able to replace much of its losses through recruitment drives, offering higher pay and pensions, but a mobilization could be politically unpopular.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “doesn’t want to mobilize, because then the people in Russia will begin to understand the extent of his losses, of their losses,” Austin said.

After Russian advances toward the key eastern city of Pokrovsk this fall, Ukraine’s defenses have held. Still, Ukraine is also taking heavy losses and has a much smaller population, making them harder to replace.

The Global Project on Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that tracks extremist activity online, reported Tuesday that chatter of election denialism increased on Telegram, Gab, Communities.win and Fediverse — social media sites that lack moderation and allow users to share extreme and controversial viewpoints. Posts about election denialism, the false belief that elections are unfair and could be “stolen,” increased by 317% on Telegram and 105% on Gab throughout October, the nonprofit said.

The posts are often violent in nature. Some people on the platforms suggested if the election doesn’t go their way, the military should be used to prevent a peaceful transfer of power, while others called for the killing of elected officials and anyone accused of voter fraud. The Proud Boys, a far-right group that has historically recruited veterans, posted violent calls to action on Telegram. The Rhode Island chapter told members to “keep your rifles by your side” in one post viewed by Military Times.

The rhetoric differs from what extremism experts saw in 2020, when election denialism spiked after President Joe Biden was projected as the winner, rather than before the election.

“They are preparing themselves for the election to be stolen in a way they didn’t in 2020 – something we find concerning,” said Wendy Via, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “If the election does not go the way the folks on these fringe sites want them to, we’re going to see another very sharp spike after the election, and we’re going to have to double-down on our tracking and monitoring.”

The Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation released a joint bulletin earlier this month that warned of potential violence from domestic violent extremists before, during and after the election. Extremists who pose the greatest threat are those who believe claims of election fraud or harbor anger toward perceived political adversaries, the bulletin warns.

‘Toxic’ politics increase terrorism, extremism risk, DHS official says

The agencies wrote that extremists would likely target voting locations, ballot drop-boxes, voter registration locations, political rallies, campaign events and the offices of political parties.

In the weeks before the election, some of those warnings have become realities. An Arizona man was accused of shooting at a Democratic National Committee office Wednesday near Phoenix. On Monday, ballot boxes in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, were set on fire, and hundreds of ballots were destroyed.

Despite those incidents, Via and Heidi Beirich, the co-founders of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said Tuesday they were more concerned about violence occurring after the election than in the days leading up to Nov. 5 or on Election Day itself.

Elections officials and law enforcement have had time to prepare for potential violence since the election in 2020, which saw unprecedented levels of threats against election workers, Via and Beirich said.

In addition, they argued that the prosecution of people who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol could serve as a deterrent. Of the nearly 1,500 people charged or convicted for their involvement in the Capitol breach, 222 had military backgrounds, according to data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. About two dozen were associated with the Proud Boys.

Via and Beirich also cited the efforts of the nonprofit We the Veterans as a potential deterrent for violence at polling locations. As of Tuesday, the group had recruited more than 163,000 veterans and their family members to volunteer as poll workers. During a time when misinformation is eroding trust in U.S. elections, the nonprofit believes veterans are the key to quashing skepticism and restoring confidence.

Vet the Vote recruits nearly 160,000 veterans as election workers

Still, Via and Beirich said they are concerned about the potential for violence after Nov. 5. If it’s a close race and takes days to project a winner, emotions will be heightened, Via said. So far, national polls have projected a neck-and-neck race, and election experts do not expect a winner to be announced on Election Day.

On a call with reporters last week, former Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar said the swing state’s ballots would likely be counted sometime the day after Election Day, but it could take weeks if the race is close enough to trigger a recount.

“There are so many variables that are going to happen between now and the days after the election. Tracking extremist groups, analyzing the data — it’s about being prepared and understanding the potential threat,” Via said. “But don’t let fear and intimidation keep you from exercising your right. People need to be prepared and cautious, but not afraid.”

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

Israel’s military described the attack as “precise strikes on military targets in Iran,” without immediately elaborating.

“The regime in Iran and its proxies in the region have been relentlessly attacking Israel since Oct. 7 – on seven fronts – including direct attacks from Iranian soil,” an Israeli military statement said. “Like every other sovereign country in the world, the State of Israel has the right and the duty to respond.”

In Tehran, the Iranian capital, the sound of explosions could be heard, with state-run media there initially acknowledging the blasts and saying some of the sounds came from air defense systems around the city.

A Tehran resident told The Associated Press that at least seven explosions could be heard, which rattled the surrounding area. The resident spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Meanwhile, state media in Syria described its air defenses as targeting “hostile targets” there as well.

Iran has launched two ballistic missile attacks on Israel in recent months amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip that began with the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel also has launched a ground invasion of Lebanon.

The strike happened just as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was arriving back in the U.S. after a tour of the Middle East where he and other U.S. officials had warned Israel to tender a response that would not further escalate the conflict in the region and exclude nuclear sites in Iran.

White House National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said in a statement that “we understand that Israel is conducting targeted strikes against military targets in Iran” and referred reporters to the Israeli government for more details on their operation.

Israel had vowed to hit Iran hard following a massive Iranian missile barrage on Oct. 1. Iran said its barrage was in response to deadly Israeli attacks against its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, and it has promised to respond to any retaliatory strikes.

Israel and Iran have been bitter foes since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Israel considers Iran to be its greatest threat, citing its leaders’ calls for Israel’s destruction, their support for anti-Israel militant groups and the country’s nuclear program.

Israel and Iran have been locked in a yearslong shadow war. A suspected Israeli assassination campaign has killed top Iranian nuclear scientists. Iranian nuclear installations have been hacked or sabotaged, all in mysterious attacks blamed on Israel. Meanwhile, Iran has been blamed for a series of attacks on shipping in the Middle East in recent years, which later grew into the attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on shipping through the Red Sea corridor.

But since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, the battle has increasingly moved into the open. Israel has recently turned its attention to Hezbollah, which has been firing rockets into Israel since the war in Gaza began. Throughout the year, a number of top Iranian military figures have been killed in Israeli strikes in Syria and Lebanon.

Iran fired a wave of missiles and drones at Israel last April after two Iranian generals were killed in an apparent Israeli airstrike in Syria on an Iranian diplomatic post. The missiles and drones caused minimum damage, and Israel — under pressure from Western countries to show restraint — responded with a limited strike.

But after Iran’s early October missile strike, Israel promised a tougher response.

The Committee for Safe and Secure Elections created the PSA in response to increased threats against election officials leading up to the presidential election on Nov. 5.

Violent threats have been on the rise since 2020, when former President Donald Trump began criticizing the people who administer elections and making unsubstantiated claims of fraud.

In the PSA, retired Army Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess and retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Marty France urge the U.S. population to not give into the false rhetoric about elections being unfair.

“I would say to voters as we look at the current environment we find ourselves in, we are a nation of values, we are a nation of laws. And we need to allow our election officials to do their jobs,” said Burgess, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

A Brennan Center poll of election officials found in May that 38% of officials had experienced threats, harassment or abuse for doing their jobs.

Widespread threats prompted the Justice Department to establish an Election Threats Task Force in 2021, and on Monday the department announced it would set up a special hotline for people to report harassment or other types of voting interference. The hotline — (888) 636-6596 — will become available Saturday and remain open until Nov. 8.

Carly Koppes, the county clerk and record in Weld County, Colorado, is one of two election officials who participated in the PSA. Koppes has been working local elections for 20 years, and November will mark her sixth presidential election.

“The atmosphere going into this one is definitely more heightened and intense,” Koppes told Military Times.

Before 2020, Koppes didn’t hear from many people who were curious about how elections work. But in the four years since, she’s engaged in thousands of one-on-one conversations, group presentations and tours to try to alleviate concerns and push back against incorrect claims, she said. Most of the time, the conversations are successful in giving people renewed trust in the voting process, she added.

Koppes hopes her participation in the PSA will help remind Americans that election workers are people who live in the communities where they work, and not “somebody behind a curtain pulling strings.”

It helps to have the public support of veterans, she said, because they’re widely perceived as trusted and respectable. Koppes’ husband is a veteran, and several veterans volunteer to work the polls in her county, she said.

“It really gives me an extra boost in my backbone to stand firm against all of this, and to be able to know I have some extremely high integrity, strong people that are supporting me in my role,” Koppes said. “I feel very appreciative for the veterans who have decided to come out and support us, because I do believe veterans voices are some of the most respected in our society.”

Disinformation creates ‘precarious year for democracy,’ experts warn

One of the veterans in the PSA, Gen. France, said in the video, “Condoning, inciting or participating in political violence is really the threshold between a free and fair democracy and authoritarianism. Attacking and threatening election officials and their families happens in war-torn countries, not America.”

France was motivated to become involved after seeing the attacks on election workers following the 2020 presidential election, he told Military Times.

“If nothing else, I did this out of empathy and support for the election officials that are doing such a difficult job, made more difficult by extremists who think it’s their role to intimidate and even harass them,” France said.

Service members’ oaths to the Constitution should extend after their military service and include defending the country’s democratic institutions, France added.

He encouraged other veterans to help and suggested they start by talking to their friends and families about their news consumption. Academics warned this summer that a proliferation of websites were mimicking the appearance of real news organizations and targeting U.S. voters with disinformation.

One Iranian-linked website was discovered earlier this month to be attempting to stir up antidemocratic sentiments among veteran voters, specifically.

“Anything I can do to tone down the rhetoric concerning election officials and the threats against them — anything I can do to help support the validity of safe and secure elections — I want to do,” France said. “This should not be a partisan issue. Our elections are safe, they are secure, and we can’t allow doubt and intimidation to creep into the process.”

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

The two governments finished the deal this spring but unveiled it Tuesday, Australia’s Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy said. He declined to give specific delivery numbers or a schedule, only saying that the funding would last for a decade.

“There was a strong view we needed to both upgrade the capability of air defense, but also increase the numbers of missiles we’re holding,” Conroy said in an interview while visiting Washington.

Missile defense is one of the top priorities listed in Australia’s 2024 defense strategy, published this April, which name drops the SM-6. In the plan, the government pledged to double its number of major warships and build a firmer defense industry of its own — as the country, like America, accepts competition with China as the norm.

Canberra’s defense budget, published a month after in May, committed a record $37 billion, or just over 2% of GDP, toward its military. The government aims to reach 2.3% of GDP, right now around $67 billion, by 2033-2034.

The SM, or Standard Missile, Block IIIC and 6 included in the sale will help Australia defend against advanced missile attacks and, in the case of the latter, can provide an anti-ship weapon. The American missile company Raytheon manufactures both, which have a medium and long range respectively.

“This combination of long range air defense, anti-ship strike capability ... and giving us our first ability to defend against ballistic missiles through terminal ballistic missile defense was a huge step forward for our navy,” Conroy said.

Australia became the first country outside America to fire the SM-6 from a warship this August, when the HMAS Sydney shot one during a military drill near Hawaii. The Pentagon’s proposed fiscal year 2025 budget requests 125 of the missiles for its own stocks.

The Army also adopted the SM-6 as part of its mid-range missile launcher that deployed to the Philippines this year, a mission that irked China.

While in Washington, Conroy met with the deputy secretary of defense and heads of the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, where they discussed work between the two defense industries and progress on the AUKUS agreement between Australia, the U.S. and Great Britain — a deal to share nuclear-powered submarines and advanced technology.

But that day heralded the start of a great upending for the U.S. Navy, after Hamas militants streamed into Israel and murdered more than 1,200 people, sparking a war that continues to threaten to engulf the Middle East to this day.

All the Houthi-US Navy incidents in the Middle East (that we know of)

The moment that would change the Navy forever actually took place aboard the Carney 12 days later, on Oct. 19, when it became the first American warship to take out a barrage of Iran-backed Houthi rebel missiles and drones fired from Yemen.

Such intercepts have since become a harrowing, near-daily occurrence for destroyers in those waters, and the year that followed Oct. 19, 2023, has irrevocably changed the Navy for the foreseeable future, Navy leaders and outside analysts say.

On this day one year ago, starting around 4 p.m. local time, Carney took out a Houthi attack the Pentagon later said was headed for Israel, downing 15 drones and four land-attack cruise missiles over 10 hours.

While their pre-deployment training prepared them for anything, the Carney was not expecting to find itself taking on the Houthis in a near-daily battle to keep the claustrophobic Red Sea lanes open for commerce, Cmdr. Jeremy Robertson, the ship’s commanding officer for that cruise, told Navy Times this week.

“None of us really could have known what we were going to get into once Oct. 7 happened,” he said.

Since those fateful 10 hours a year ago, the Red Sea has become the arena for the longest sustained “direct and deliberate attacks at sea” that the fleet has faced since World War II, Fleet Forces Command head Adm. Daryl Caudle said in a statement to Navy Times.

“While I could not have predicted the complexity and interrelationships of all that has transpired since [Oct. 19, 2023], I am not surprised,” said Caudle, who commands the Navy East Coast-based fleet.

Inside the USS Carney’s harrowing and unprecedented deployment

“The world is a very tense place right now given the vast range of power-seeking agendas between peer competitors and opportunistic regional proxies. Any small spark can have serious consequences, which is why we take every situation so seriously.”

Since Carney’s first victory, the surface fleet has subsequently honed its tactics and tuned its radars for such a fight, instances when a ship’s Combat Information Center sometimes has mere seconds to ascertain and take out a Houthi attack.

Combat lessons are being routed back to schoolhouses and training centers, giving the Navy real-time knowledge on its combat systems and how to best use them.

Skippers also report that their crews have been galvanized by such experiences, finding meaning to their seemingly endless training in the life-and-death minutes they endure in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

“This really gave our sailors the why,” Robertson said. “Why do we train so hard, why do we do all the reps and sets.”

“The stage was not too big, the lights were not too bright. They were able to draw a connection.”

These successes at sea “validate our readiness to respond, our Sailors’ warfighting spirit and the technological superiority of our exquisite combat systems,” Caudle said.

But despite the tactical successes and demonstrated proficiencies, some question how fast the Navy is burning through munitions, sometimes to take out cheap Houthi drones, and whether a drawdown of missiles could one day impact a long-feared war with China in the West Pacific.

The Houthi menace in the Middle East has also caused the Navy’s aircraft carriers to be run hard, and some have been scrambled to the region when others weren’t ready to go, further raising readiness alarms in some corners.

And while tactical battles have been won, strategic wars have not, according to James Holmes, a retired Navy gunnery officer and professor of maritime strategy at the Naval War College.

“The tacticians have done their work magnificently … and the combination of sensors, fire control and weaponry has performed as advertised against an array of threats similar to what [Iran, Russia and China] field,” Holmes told Navy Times. “Bringing down anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles is no easy feat, but they have done it.”

What the Navy is learning from its fight in the Red Sea

And while such successes will reverberate on other maritime battlefields, the Navy to date has been unable to stop the Houthis from attacking merchant vessels traveling through the vital economic waterway that is the Red Sea, he said.

“The failure part is that the mission has fallen short of its strategic goal, namely allowing merchant shipping through the Gulf of Aden, Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and Red Sea to resume unmolested,” Holmes said. “We can flip strategic failure to success when shipping firms — and the all-important maritime insurance companies — feel comfortable enough to start using that route again.”

A year in, the Navy is getting more judicious about how it fights Houthi attacks, according to Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst at the Hudson Institute think tank.

Navy ships threw the “kitchen sink” at incoming drones and missiles after the Carney’s first intercept a year ago, but the fleet is becoming more adept at using electronic warfare, guns and less-expensive interceptors to counter such Houthi attacks, Clark said.

Questions of sustainability of effort are now arising, he said, noting that the Navy has in some instances used carrier-based fighter jets to shoot down Houthi drones and missiles, an expensive and inefficient approach.

“The challenge going forward will be how to sustain this level of presence in the region,” Clark said. “The Pentagon may need to consider putting missile defense systems on barges or ashore so [destroyers] can deploy elsewhere or return home for maintenance.”

Robertson left the Carney after it returned to Mayport, Florida, in May, and is now the Navy’s Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training, or SWATT, director, passing on his hard-earned knowledge.

“It’s certainly surreal,” he said of his time commanding Carney. “I love every one of the sailors and officers and chiefs I worked with. Just a great crew. They’ll remember this for the rest of their lives.”

As the one-year anniversary of Oct. 19 comes and goes with no end in sight for the Navy’s Red Sea fight against the Houthis, Caudle noted that it’s difficult to forecast how the conflict will end.

“While I won’t speculate on how our involvement with the Houthis will culminate, I can tell you that I’m laser-focused on readiness, sustainment and lethality,” he said. “We’re ready for this fight, no matter how long it lasts.”

Sinwar has topped Israel’s most wanted list since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war just over a year ago, and his killing strikes a powerful blow to the militant group. There was no immediate confirmation from Hamas of his death.

The military confirmed Sinwar’s death after conducting DNA tests on a body it said was among three militants killed Wednesday during operations in Gaza. Foreign Minister Israel Katz called Sinwar’s killing a “military and moral achievement for the Israeli army,” saying it would “create the possibility to immediately release the hostages.”

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant addressed Hamas fighters, saying it “is time to go out, release the hostages, raise your hands, surrender.”

Sinwar was one of the chief architects of Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel has vowed to kill him since the beginning of its retaliatory campaign in Gaza. He has been Hamas’ top leader inside the Gaza Strip for years, closely connected to its military wing while dramatically building up its capabilities.

An Israeli security official said it appeared that the man who turned out to be Sinwar was killed in a battle, not in a planned targeted airstrike.

Photos circulating online showed the body of a man resembling Sinwar with a gaping head wound, dressed in a military-style vest, half buried in the rubble of a destroyed building. The security official confirmed the photos were taken by Israeli security officials at the scene. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

The Israeli news site N12 said Sinwar appears to have been killed by chance in a battle on Wednesday. It said that troops tracked a group of militants into a building, then attacked the militants with tank fire, causing the building to collapse. As troops unearthed the dead militants, they noticed that one appeared to resemble Sinwar.

Sinwar was imprisoned by Israel from the late 1980s until 2011, and during that time he underwent treatment for brain cancer — leaving Israeli authorities with extensive medical records.

President Joe Biden has been briefed on Israel’s investigation into whether it killed Sinwar, and U.S. officials have been in close contact with Israeli officials throughout Thursday morning, according to a senior administration official.

Sinwar was chosen as Hamas’s top leader in July after his predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in an apparent Israeli strike in the Iranian capital Tehran. Israel has also claimed to have killed the head of Hamas’ military wing Mohammed Deif in an airstrike, but the group has said he survived.

The report of his death came as Israeli forces continued a more than week-old major air and ground assault in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. On Thursday, an Israeli strike hit a school sheltering displaced Palestinians, killing at least 28 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Fares Abu Hamza, head of the Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency unit in the north, said the dead included a woman and four children, correcting an earlier report of five children. He said dozens of people were wounded.

The Israeli military said it targeted a command center run by Hamas and Islamic Jihad inside the school. It provided a list of around a dozen names of people it identified as militants who were present when the strike was called in. It was not immediately possible to verify the names.

Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza. The Israeli military says it carries out precise strikes on militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but its strikes often kill women and children.

Israel launched its campaign in Gaza to eliminate Hamas after the militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. Some 100 captives are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says women and children make up a little more than half of the fatalities.

Northern Gaza was the first target of Israel’s ground invasion nearly a year ago and has suffered the heaviest destruction of the war, with entire neighborhoods in Gaza City and other towns reduced to rubble. Most of the population fled after Israel issued evacuation orders in the opening days of the war, but about 400,000 are believed to have remained despite the harsh conditions.

Earlier this month, Israel once again ordered the full-scale evacuation of the north, and allowed no food aid to enter the area for around two weeks. That led many Palestinians to fear that it had adopted a surrender-or-starve strategy suggested by former Israeli generals.

Israel allowed two shipments of aid to enter the north earlier this week after the United States warned it might reduce its military aid if its ally did not do more to address the humanitarian crisis.

Since the start of the conflict, Israeli forces have launched repeated operations into Jabaliya, a densely populated urban refugee camp dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. The military says militants have repeatedly regrouped there after major operations.

Sami Magdy reported from Cairo. AP writers Jack Jeffery in Jerusalem and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut, contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden spoke Wednesday morning with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy before the White House announced the latest round of aid to help Kyiv in its ongoing war against Russia’s invasion.

The two leaders discussed the state of the war and a “victory plan” Zelenskyy has touted to end the conflict, according to a readout of the call.

The Ukrainian president publicly discussed that plan for the first time in a speech before the country’s parliament Wednesday. Arguing that his framework could halt the war by the end of 2025, Zelenskyy described five main points — chief among them membership in NATO and long-term military support from the West.

This week’s package includes many of those weapons Ukraine needs most, though it solely involves equipment America has sent in the past. The White House’s authority to send more assistance was set to expire at the end of September, forcing the president to designate the aid toward the existing list of approved systems.

The White House pledged that within months the U.S. would send “hundreds” of air defense interceptors and “dozens” of smaller air defense systems, both of which have become as valuable as they are scarce two-and-a-half years into the war. Russia has consistently overwhelmed Ukraine’s air defenses with cheap drones and ballistic missiles in attacks on military and civilian targets.

Kyiv is bracing for more such strikes heading into the winter as Ukraine struggles with a damaged power grid.

A Pentagon release specified that the air defense ammunition would include interceptors for National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, or NASAMS. The package also features artillery and “thousands” of armored vehicles, according to the White House.

Biden had intended to host an October summit of leaders from countries supporting Ukraine’s self-defense but cancelled to help coordinate the response to Hurricane Milton. The White House said that meeting will now occur virtually in November.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flew to Brussels Wednesday for meetings with his NATO counterparts. Austin will later attend a summit of defense ministers from the G7, a group of developed countries, where support for Ukraine will be on the docket.

Since the summer, Moscow has continued to take territory in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk, including a steady advance toward Pokrovsk, a city at the center of multiple roads that help move people and equipment.

As Russia moves closer to the city, and hits thicker defensive lines, its costs have mounted. This September was its deadliest month during the entire war, a senior U.S. defense official told reporters on a call Wednesday.

“Russian losses, again both killed and wounded in action, in just the first year of the war exceeded the total of all Soviet losses in any conflict since World War 2 combined,” the official said.

Despite western predictions to the contrary, Russia has still been able to sustain an all-out fight two and a half years on. That’s been true despite scores of military equipment lost or damaged, chunks of the government budget redirected toward defense and a smaller mobilization of troops.

This last category is strategically important, given how politically unpopular it would be for the Kremlin to force a larger draft, the official said. So far Russia has been able to recruit more soldiers mostly through higher pensions and pay. The growing losses along the front may challenge that approach.

That said, the rising body count doesn’t augur a victory for Ukraine, which is also taking huge losses. A senior U.S. military official, joining on the call, said the Pentagon expects Russia will continue making “incremental gains” along the front, using its advantage in numbers to cut through the otherwise firm defenses.

“It’s kind of the Russian way of war where they continue to throw mass into the into the problem, and I think we’ll continue to see high losses,” the military official said.

South Korea’s defense minister also warned this week that North Korea will likely send troops to fight alongside Russia — adding to a bevy of military equipment Pyongyang has also donated.

The U.S. defense official wouldn’t comment on multiple questions about whether that will occur.

In addition to the casualties incurred, Russia has seen 32 vessels in its Black Sea naval fleet damaged or destroyed, along with two-thirds of its pre-war stock of tanks, the defense official said. These losses have forced the Kremlin to dredge through warehouses of Soviet-era military equipment to retrofit and then deploy.

This week, U.S. President Joe Biden had planned to host a forum of world leaders supporting Ukraine in Ramstein, Germany — where the Pentagon often gathers a similar group of defense officials. The plans were canceled due to preparations for Hurricane Milton, set to make landfall in Tampa Wednesday. The White House has not yet announced a makeup date.

In Washington, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and Arab capitals, opponents and supporters of Israel's offensive are offering clashing ideas about what the U.S. should do next, as its ally racks up tactical successes against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen and presses its yearlong campaign to crush Hamas in Gaza.

Israel should get all the support it needs from the United States until Iran's government “follows other dictatorships of the past into the dustbin of history,” said Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at Washington's conservative-leaning Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — calls echoed by some Israeli political figures.

Going further, Yoel Guzansky, a former senior staffer at Israel’s National Security Council, called for the Biden administration to join Israel in direct attacks in Iran. That would send "the right message to the Iranians — ‘Don’t mess with us,’'' Guzansky said.

Critics, however, highlight lessons from the U.S. military campaign in Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein, when President George W. Bush ignored Arab warnings that the Iraqi dictator was the region's indispensable counterbalance to Iranian influence. They caution against racking up military victories without adequately considering the risks, end goals or plans for what comes next, and warn of unintended consequences.

What will the surge of US forces to the Middle East cost the military?

Ultimately, Israel “will be in a situation where it can only protect itself by perpetual war,” said Vali Nasr, who was an adviser to the Obama administration. Now a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS, he has been one of the leading documenters of the rise of Iranian regional influence since the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving limited weight to Biden administration calls for restraint, the United States and its partners in the Middle East are “at the mercy of how far Bibi Netanyahu will push it,” Nasr said, referring to the Israeli leader by his nickname.

“It's as if we hadn't learned the lessons, or the folly, of that experiment ... in Iraq in 2003 about reshaping the Middle East order,” said Randa Slim, a fellow at SAIS and researcher at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

Advocates of Israel’s campaign hope for the weakening of Iran and its armed proxies that attack the U.S., Israel and their partners, oppress civil society and increasingly are teaming up with Russia and other Western adversaries.

Opponents warn that military action without resolving the grievances of Palestinians and others risks endless and destabilizing cycles of war, insurgency and extremist violence, and Middle East governments growing more repressive to try to control the situation.

And there’s the threat that Iran develops nuclear weapons to try to ensure its survival. Before the Israeli strikes on Hezbollah, Iranian leaders concerned about Israel’s offensives had made clear that they were interested in returning to negotiations with the U.S. on their nuclear program and claimed interest in improved relations overall.

In just weeks, Israeli airstrikes and intelligence operations have devastated the leadership, ranks and arsenals of Lebanon-based Hezbollah — which had been one of the Middle East’s most powerful fighting forces and Iran's overseas bulwark against attacks on Iranian territory — and hit oil infrastructure of Yemen's Iran-allied Houthis.

A year of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza appears to have reduced the leadership of Iranian-allied Hamas to a few survivors hiding in underground tunnels. However, Israeli forces again engaged in heavy fighting there this week, and Hamas was able to fire rockets at Tel Aviv in a surprising show of enduring strength on the Oct. 7 anniversary of the militant group's attack on Israel, which started the war.

Anticipated Israeli counterstrikes on Iran could accelerate regional shifts in power. The response would follow Iran launching ballistic missiles at Israel last week in retaliation for killings of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders.

It also could escalate the risk of all-out regional war that U.S. President Joe Biden — and decades of previous administrations — worked to avert.

The expansion of Israeli attacks since late last month has sidelined mediation by the U.S., Egypt and Qatar for a cease-fire and hostage release deal in Gaza. U.S. leaders say Israel did not warn them before striking Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon but have defended the surge in attacks, while still pressing for peace.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said in an interview with CBS' “60 Minutes” aired Monday that the U.S. was dedicated to supplying Israel with the military aid needed to protect itself but would keep pushing to end the conflict.

“We’re not going to stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and in the region, including Arab leaders,” she said.

Israel’s expanded strikes raise for many what is the tempting prospect of weakening Iran’s anti-Western, anti-Israel alliance with like-minded armed groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen to governments in Russia and North Korea.

Called the “Axis of Resistance," Iran's military alliances grew — regionally, then globally — after the U.S. invasion of Iraq removed Saddam, who had fought an eight-year war against Iran's ambitious clerical regime.

But the unintended effects of the U.S. intervention were even bigger, including the rise of Iran’s Axis of Resistance and new extremist groups, including the Islamic State.

“An emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” of the 2003 Iraq war, notes a U.S. Army review of lessons learned.

“Two decades ago, who could have seen a day when Iran was supporting Russia with arms? The reason is because of its increased influence” after the U.S. overthrow of Saddam, said Ihsan Alshimary, professor of political science at Baghdad University.

Even more than in 2003, global leaders are offering little clear idea on how the shifts in power that Israel’s military is putting in motion will end — for Iran, Israel, the Middle East at large, and the United States.

Iran and its allies are being weakened, said Goldberg, at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. So is U.S. influence as it appears to be dragged along by Israel, Nasr said.

The conflict could end up hurting Israel if it bogs down in a ground war in Lebanon, for example, said Mehran Kamrava, a professor and Middle East expert at Georgetown University in Qatar.

After four decades of deep animosity between Israeli and Iranian leaders, “the cold war between them has turned into a hot war. And this is significantly changing — is bound to change — the strategic landscape in the Middle East,” he said.

“We are certainly at the precipice of change,” Kamrava said. But “the direction and nature of that change is very hard to predict at this stage.”

Hamas marked the anniversary of its Oct. 7, 2023, attack by firing a barrage of rockets at Tel Aviv, underscoring its resilience after a year of war and devastation in Gaza. Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which began firing rockets at Israel on Oct. 8 in support of its ally Hamas, fired more than 170 rockets despite its recent losses.

The conflict soon drew in the United States military as well, and troops levels there remain higher than normal in order to prevent a bigger war from breaking out.

A few weeks after Hamas’ attack, on Oct. 19, the Navy destroyer Carney became the first American warship to take out a salvo of drones and missiles fired by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

That back-and-forth between the Houthis and the Navy has continued on a near-daily clip for the past year in the Red Sea and Gulf of Oman, and Navy ships have also played a role in shooting down Iranian missiles fired at Israel on two occasions.

U.S. ground forces have also endured months of attacks by Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq, although the frequency of such attacks has lessened.

Still, a January attack on the Tower 22 base on Jordan’s border with Syria killed three U.S. troops.

They are Sgt. Kennedy Sanders, Sgt. Breonna Moffett and Staff Sgt. William Rivers.

Questions have also emerged about how long the U.S. military — and the Navy in particular — can keep expending finite resources in the region.

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to press Israel’s campaigns on all sides, the military bombarded southern Lebanon with more than 120 strikes in an hour Monday, saying it was targeting Hezbollah positions. An earlier strike killed at least 10 Lebanese firefighters, the latest of dozens of first responders killed in recent weeks, according to Lebanon ‘s Health Ministry.

In a possible sign of the expansion of its campaign, the military said it would soon launch operations on Lebanon’s southern coast, telling residents to stay off the beaches and the sea for a 36-mile stretch along the Mediterranean.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Israeli troops shot and killed a 12-year-old Palestinian boy in a refugee camp, Palestinian health officials said. The military said it opened fire on Palestinians throwing stones at its forces.

A year since Hamas’ surprise cross-border attack, the war in Gaza rages on even as Israel is fighting a new war against Hezbollah, escalating its bombing campaign in Lebanon the past three weeks. There is also a mounting conflict with Iran — which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah — that threatens to drag the region into an even more dangerous conflagration.

And within Israel, two main commemorations for the day underscored the country’s divisions. One was held by the government, the other in Tel Aviv by families of those killed on Oct. 7 and of hostages still held in Gaza who refused to join the official ceremony.

It was a sign of how Israelis’ faith in their leaders and military were shaken when the militants stormed out of Gaza, catching the country unprepared on a major Jewish holiday. The militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted another 250. Around 100 hostages have not been returned, a third of whom are believed to be dead, and cease-fire efforts have ground to a halt.

What will the surge of US forces to the Middle East cost the military?

No formal commemorative event is planned in Gaza, where Israel’s assault since Oct. 7 has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, huge areas have been completely destroyed, most of the population have been driven from their homes and hunger is widespread.

At 6:31 a.m., four projectiles were launched from Gaza toward the same communities that came under attack last year, without disrupting ceremonies there.

The military said another five rockets were launched from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis toward central Israel, setting off air raid sirens in Tel Aviv. Two women were lightly wounded, according to first responders, and there was minor damage. The military said it struck the launch sites.

Sirens blared a second time in central Israel hours later when Yemen’s Houthi rebels fired a ballistic missile. The military said the missile was intercepted.

All the Houthi-US Navy incidents in the Middle East (that we know of)

Israel responded to the Oct. 7 attack by launching one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history.

“We lost everything we have,” said Liyala al-Shanar, who fled her home in Gaza City. “We live in a tent that doesn’t protect us from the winter cold or the summer heat.”

Hamas’ fighters have repeatedly regrouped in areas where Israel carried out major operations. On Sunday, Israeli forces encircled the northern town of Jabaliya and launched another major operation there that the military says is aimed at rooting out militants.

The past year has seen a surge of violence in the West Bank, including Israeli raids on towns targeting armed groups, increased attacks by Palestinian militants and Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has kept up its fire even after intensified Israeli strikes have killed many in its top command — including longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah — and pounded large areas of Lebanon.

Israel’s strikes have killed at least 1,400 Lebanese, including civilians, medics and Hezbollah fighters, and 1.2 million have been driven from their homes. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said Monday’s strike that killed the 10 firefighters hit the municipality of the southern town of Baraachit just as they prepared for a mission. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.

Israel launched what has so far been a limited ground operation across the border last week. It says it aims to drive the militant group from its border so tens of thousands of Israeli citizens can return home.

Israel has also vowed to respond to a ballistic missile attack last week that Iran said was in response to the killings of Nasrallah, top Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and one of its own Revolutionary Guard generals.

Hezbollah said Monday it would continue its attacks until there is a cease-fire in Gaza, saying Israel “was and will remain a deadly, aggressive, cancerous gland that must be eliminated, no matter how long it takes.”

Military aircraft and warships bombed Houthi strongholds at roughly five locations, according to the officials.

Houthi media said seven strikes hit the airport in Hodeida, a major port city, and the Katheib area, which has a Houthi-controlled military base. Four more strikes hit the Seiyana area in Sanaa, the capital, and two strikes hit the Dhamar province. The Houthi media office also reported three air raids in Bayda province, southeast of Sanaa.

The strikes come just days after the Houthis threatened “escalating military operations” targeting Israel after they apparently shot down a U.S. military drone flying over Yemen. And just last week, the group claimed responsibility for an attack targeting American warships.

The rebels fired more than a half dozen ballistic missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles and two drones at three U.S. ships that were traveling through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, but all were intercepted by the Navy destroyers, according to several U.S. officials.

What will the surge of US forces to the Middle East cost the military?

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet publicly released.

Houthis have targeted more than 80 merchant vessels with missiles and drones since the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza started last October. They have seized one vessel and sunk two in the campaign that has also killed four sailors.

Other missiles and drones have either been intercepted by a U.S.-led coalition in the Red Sea or failed to reach their targets, which have included Western military vessels.

The group has maintained that they target ships linked to Israel, the U.S. or the United Kingdom to force an end to Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza. However, many of the ships attacked have little or no connection to the conflict, including some bound for Iran.

The Navy has released video footage of Bulkeley’s role in defending Israel as the U.S. warship steamed in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

AEGIS weapons systems aboard both warships are designed for ballistic missile defense, and “multiple missiles are believed to have been successfully engaged,” the Navy said.

The sky lit up over central and southern Israel Tuesday evening as ballistic missiles collided with air defense interceptors. Both the Pentagon and the Israel Defense Forces said launched around 200 missiles and there had been no recorded casualties.

Pentagon officials said Wednesday that “initial reports indicate that Israel was able to intercept the majority of incoming missiles and that there was minimal damage on the ground.”

The website was one of nearly two dozen flagged in a recent report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research group focusing on foreign policy and national security. The group warned that Iranian operatives were trying to pass off the sites as legitimate news outlets and use the content to cast doubt on America’s democratic process.

In addition to veterans, the sites target various minority groups, including Black, Spanish-speaking and Muslim voters, FDD reported.

“Not Our War” posts articles that disparage U.S. military operations overseas and criticize both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Many of its posts are written in a way to elicit strong reactions from veterans, and its homepage includes a tab labeled “Veterans,” said Max Lesser, a senior analyst on emerging threats at FDD.

“The broader aim of the website is to discredit US military actions across the board, but then there is another focus, which is targeting veterans,” Lesser said.

Disinformation creates ‘precarious year for democracy,’ experts warn

The cybersecurity company Mandiant warned of the same website during a briefing about election interference given to members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission earlier this year. The company, a subsidiary of Google, said the site praised the Iranian government and prominent pro-Iran political figures, denigrated the Israeli government, criticized U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and posted about divisive issues in the U.S., including the upcoming presidential election.

Experts have warned for months that U.S. adversaries — such as China, Russia and Iran — would target American voters with disinformation leading up to the election. Some of the messaging meant to sow division is reaching veterans by preying on their sense of duty to the U.S., some experts warned.

A 2017 study from Oxford University found Russian operatives disseminated “junk news” to veterans and service members during the 2016 presidential election. In 2020, Vietnam Veterans of America warned that foreign adversaries were aiming disinformation at veterans and service members at a massive scale, posing a national security threat.

“Conspiracy theories are a threat to vulnerable veterans, and they could drag your loved ones into really dark and dangerous places,” Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Military Times in May.

Microsoft reported in August that Iran had begun an election-interference campaign in the United States by setting up four websites that masqueraded propaganda as news. FDD used Microsoft’s findings to uncover other websites using the same web-hosting servers, it said.

Russian election interference scheme targeted US military competency

FDD released its report quickly after finding the other websites in an attempt to warn people they were fake before one of the posts gained significant traction online, Lesser said.

“We’re exposing it left of boom, before this network goes viral,” Lesser said. “That’s a note of optimism.”

Targeting veterans with disinformation isn’t a new tactic for Iran. Vlad Barash, a scientist at the social media research company Graphika, testified to Congress in 2019 that both Russia and Iran were trying to exploit veterans’ frustrations with the U.S. government by promoting the narrative that democracy was broken. At the time, Barash said such attacks “show no signs of stopping.”

In its report, FDD recommended the U.S. government sanction and indict the operatives running the websites. It also urged social media companies to monitor and block the domains. The FBI declined to comment Monday when asked whether it was investigating the websites.

Despite the room for improvement, Lesser said America’s response to election-interference campaigns has come a long way since 2016. He cited an increase in researchers uncovering disinformation attacks, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s regular warnings about election interference and efforts by the Justice Department to seize websites spreading propaganda.

“Yes, foreign adversaries are still launching operations targeting our elections,” Lesser said. “But I think as a society, we have become markedly more resilient in terms of exposing these operations and taking action against some of the operators.”

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

Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder declined to say what kind of ordnance was used by the warships Cole and Bulkeley, or whether their intercept were successful, but he said the operations took place while both ships were in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Iran’s direct and widespread missile attack on Israel Tuesday was the second of the year, and once again threatened to spark all-out war in the Middle East, a grim future that the United States has worked to stave off since the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

The sky lit up over central and southern Israel Tuesday evening as ballistic missiles collided with air defense interceptors. Both the Pentagon and the Israel Defense Forces said they were still assessing the attack, but that Iran had launched around 200 missiles and there had been no recorded casualties.

“Initial reports indicate that Israel was able to intercept the majority of incoming missiles and that there was minimal damage on the ground,” Ryder said.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called Iran’s response “failed and ineffective,” but warned that it was also a “significant escalation.”

What will the surge of US forces to the Middle East cost the military?

“This [result] was first and foremost the result of the professionalism of the IDF, but in no small part, because of the skilled work of the U.S. military and meticulous joint planning in anticipation of the attack,” Sullivan said.

Iran’s attack comes a week after Israel assassinated the leader of Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia group that Tehran has armed for years. The strike in Beirut, followed by operations Israel launched across the border, have escalated a burgeoning conflict in Lebanon.

The U.S. has already surged forces to the Middle East to help defend Israel and its own forces. It continued to do so this week, sending three fighter squadrons, including F-15s, F-16s and A-10s. This almost doubles the number of fighters in U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East.

Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also ordered the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to remain in the region as a bulwark against a wider war. Another carrier, the Harry S. Truman, is heading to U.S. European Command.

These posture changes will add “a few thousand” U.S. forces to CENTCOM, according to the Pentagon, adding to the 40,000 already there — 6,000 more than normal.

The U.S. insists the surge in forces has helped avert an a wider war in the region, an assessment Ryder repeated from the podium Tuesday, despite the recent attacks.

“We’ve been working very hard from the beginning to prevent a wider regional conflict.,” he said. “Certainly, the type of aggressive action that we saw by Iran today makes that more challenging.”

American forces, meanwhile, are under an elevated threat from Iran-backed proxies in the region.

Last week, the Houthis, a militia group in Yemen, launched what the Pentagon called a “complex attack” with aerial drones and cruise missiles on U.S. ships in the Red Sea, though officials said no ships were struck and no sailors were injured.

Iran’s attack Tuesday included around two times as many ballistic missiles than a similar barrage this April, which largely featured aerial drones that are much easier to intercept, Ryder said. No U.S. forces were targeted in the attack Tuesday, he continued.

Austin spoke with his Israeli counterpart to discuss the attack and the “severe consequences” that would follow for Iran. Ryder wouldn’t elaborate on what those consequences will be, nor whether the U.S. would assist Israel in a direct strike on Iranian territory.

The U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence, said the U.S. is actively supporting Israeli defensive preparations.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a warning Monday to Iran, which backs Hezbollah and Hamas.

“There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach,” Netanyahu said, just days after an airstrike south of Beirut killed the leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah group, which is backed by Tehran.

The Israeli military earlier warned several southern Lebanese communities near the border to leave their homes, shortly after starting what it called a limited ground operation against Hezbollah targets.

Hezbollah’s acting leader, Naim Kassem, promised the group will fight on following the death of its long-time chief Hassan Nasrallah and several of the group’s top commanders who have been assassinated in recent days. Kassem said the group’s fighters are ready and the slain commanders have already been replaced.

Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire across the Lebanon border almost daily since Oct. 8, the day after Hamas sent fighters into Israel and sparked the war in Gaza. It’s been almost a year since some 250 people were abducted from Israel, and friends and family are worried about their loved ones as attention turns away from hostages and north toward Lebanon.

JERUSALEM — Iran is preparing to “imminently” launch a ballistic missile attack on Israel, according to a senior U.S. administration official, who warned Tuesday of “severe consequences” should it take place.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence, said the U.S. is actively supporting Israeli defensive preparations. This comes after the Israeli military on Tuesday warned people to evacuate nearly two dozen Lebanese border communities hours after announcing what it said were limited ground operations against Hezbollah.

White House officials did not immediately offer any evidence backing its intelligence finding. The official added that the administration was confident in the determination.

U.S. ships and aircraft are already positioned in the region to assist Israel in the event of an attack from Iran. There are three U.S. Navy destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea, an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Oman and fighter jets arrayed throughout the region. All have the abilities to shoot down incoming missiles.

What will the surge of US forces to the Middle East cost the military?

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the carrier Abraham Lincoln to remain in the region over the weekend, and the Pentagon announced that additional Air Force fighter jet squadrons were heading to the Middle East on Monday.

Iran’s state media has not suggested any attack is imminent. Iranian officials could not be immediately reached for comment.

Iran already launched an unprecedented direct attack on Israel in April, but few of the Iranian projectiles reached their targets. Many were shot down by a U.S.-led coalition, while others apparently failed at launch or crashed while in flight. Even those that reached Israel appeared to miss their marks, experts and an AP analysis in September showed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a Tuesday statement that Israel is facing “large challenges” as it fights an Iranian axis. In the videotaped statement, he urges the public to listen to public safety guidelines from the army’s Home Front Command. He made no direct mention of a missile threat.

Hezbollah denied Israeli troops had entered Lebanon, but hours later the Israeli army announced it had also carried out dozens of ground raids into southern Lebanon going back nearly a year. Israel released video footage purporting to show its soldiers operating in homes and tunnels where Hezbollah kept weapons.

A ‘few thousand’ more US troops are headed to the Middle East

If true, it would be another humiliating blow for Iran-backed Hezbollah, the most powerful armed group in the Middle East. Hezbollah has been reeling from weeks of targeted strikes that killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and several of his top commanders.

Israel advised people to evacuate to the north of the Awali River, some 60 kilometers (36 miles) from the border and much farther than the Litani River, which marks the northern edge of a U.N.-declared zone that was intended to serve as a buffer between Israel and Hezbollah after their 2006 war.

“You must immediately head north of the Awali River to save yourselves, and leave your houses immediately,” said the statement posted by the Israeli military on the platform X. The warning applied to communities south of the Litani.

The border region has largely emptied out over the past year as the two sides have traded fire. But the scope of the evacuation warning raised questions as to how deep Israel plans to send its forces into Lebanon as it presses ahead with a rapidly escalating campaign against Hezbollah.

Anticipating more rocket attacks from Hezbollah, the Israeli army announced new restrictions on public gatherings and closed beaches in northern and central Israel. The military also said it was calling up thousands more reserve soldiers to serve on the northern border.

U.S. Central Command said it struck northwestern Syria on Tuesday, targeting a senior militant from the al-Qaida-linked Hurras al-Deen group and eight others. They say he was responsible for overseeing military operations.

US-led drone strike in Syria kills al-Qaida-linked leader

On Sept. 16, a “large-scale airstrike” on an IS training camp in an undisclosed location in central Syria killed 28 militants, including “at least four Syrian leaders," Central Command said.

“The airstrike will disrupt ISIS’ capability to conduct operations against U.S. interests, as well as our allies and partners,” the statement read.

There are some 900 U.S. forces in Syria, along with an undisclosed number of contractors, mostly trying to prevent any comeback by the extremist IS group, which swept through Iraq and Syria in 2014, taking control of large swaths of territory.

U.S. forces advise and assist their key allies in northeastern Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, located not far from strategic areas where Iran-backed militant groups are present, including a key border crossing with Iraq.

The increased presence will come from multiple fighter jet squadrons, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters.

Additional personnel include squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagle, F-16, A-10 and F-22 fighter jets and the personnel needed to support them. The jets were supposed to rotate in and replace the squadrons already there. Instead, both the existing and new squadrons will remain in place to double the airpower on hand.

It follows recent strikes in Lebanon and the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, a significant escalation in the war in the Middle East, this time between Israel and Hezbollah.

What will the surge of US forces to the Middle East cost the military?

On Sunday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also announced that he was temporarily extending the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and its associated squadrons in the region.

The jets are not there to assist in an evacuation, Singh said, “they are there for the protection of U.S. forces.”

The American and Iraqi governments announced Friday a phasing down of Combined Joint Task Force — Operation Inherent Resolve, a U.S.-led military operation to counter the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Previewed for months after U.S. President Joe Biden met with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia al-Sudani in April, the decision will close the task force by 2026. The U.S., which has 2,500 troops in Iraq, will then negotiate directly with the government in Baghdad on its military presence inside the country.

Since the war started in Gaza last October, American military personnel around the Middle East have been increasingly under threat. Militia groups sponsored by Iran have targeted U.S. ships and bases, including a strike that killed three troops just across the Syrian border in Jordan this January. The attacks, along with America’s support for Israel, have continued to shift America’s military footprint in the region.

There are now 40,000 U.S. personnel in Central Command, 6,000 higher than normal.

In a call previewing the announcement with reporters, a senior U.S. administration and defense official wouldn’t comment on how many troops would remain in Iraq or where they would operate — other than to say there would not be a full withdrawal.

What will the surge of US forces to the Middle East cost the military?

“It’s time to do that transition. But that doesn’t mean every detail has been worked out,” the defense official said.

The task force itself will end in two phases. The first will arrive next September, when the coalition’s military mission inside Iraq will close. Because ISIS remains a threat nearby, the officials said, Iraq will allow the coalition to keep using its territory for missions across the border into Syria at least until September 2026.

Launched in 2014, when the Islamic State seized swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, the task force includes more than 30 countries and eventually secured 42,000 square miles once controlled by ISIS, the defense official said. The terrorist group lost its ability to hold territory in Iraq in 2017, and in Syria two years later.

Ending the international mission now, the official continued, reflects two changes: a weakened ISIS and an empowered Iraqi military. The coalition has given local security forces more than $4 billion in military equipment and trained around 225,000 personnel.

America has also supported the Iraqi military directly. This week, the U.S. State Department approved a $65 million foreign military sale to Iraq for ship repair and maintenance.

“During these past years, we’ve seen very significant improvement in the Iraqi Security Force’s capability,” the defense official said.

In late August, U.S. and Iraqi forces conducted an operation in western Iraq that killed 14 ISIS operatives, including four leaders, as announced by CENTCOM. Seven American personnel were injured in the raid.

Just before the defense secretary visited Subic Bay, Philippines, the former site of a massive U.S. Navy base, Israel killed the political leader of Hamas, who was visiting Iran.

Austin’s July visit was meant to show his focus on Asia, the region America says is its top priority. Instead, he ended the trip distracted by the Middle East, spending hours containing the crisis on a flight back to Washington.

“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that we keep things from turning into a broader conflict,” Austin told reporters that day.

The U.S. military has spent much of the past year backing up that sentiment.

Since Oct. 7, when Hamas’ attack on Israel provoked all-out war in Gaza, the Pentagon has been on call. When the region has approached a wider war, the Defense Department surged forces there to calm it down. But after a year, some in Congress and the Pentagon are growing concerned about how to sustain that pace, and what it will cost the military in the long term.

Call it the U.S. Central Command squeeze. The Pentagon insists its surge has helped stop the Middle East from falling into chaos. But the longer the region borders on conflict, the more the U.S. tests its endurance for crises later on, most notably, a future conflict with China.

The pressure on the military increased even further this week. After their most intense attacks in almost 20 years, Israel and the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah are close to a larger war. On Monday, Austin yet again ordered more troops to the region, joining 40,000 other American personnel there, 6,000 more than normal. Another aircraft carrier may soon follow.

“We’re caught in this kind of never-ending quagmire of having to divert resources, and we’re burning [out] on the back end,” a senior congressional aide said.

This story is based on interviews with analysts, current and former defense officials and congressional staffers, many of whom were allowed to speak anonymously either because they weren’t permitted to talk to the press or because they were discussing sensitive topics.

Their message was that America’s military wouldn’t exhaust itself anytime soon, but that a year of unplanned deployments and spent missiles come with a cost. Even more, they said, the longer the crisis continues, the more the Pentagon will have to manage tradeoffs between the urgent needs of the Middle East and the rising challenges of the Indo-Pacific.

Merging

The way American military leaders in the Middle East describe it, they woke up to an entirely new world on Oct. 7.

For the last several years, the narrative around U.S. forces in the region had been one of decreased focus, with adversaries in the Europe and the Pacific taking priority.

That changed when Hamas fighters stormed into Israel, killing 1,200 and taking hundreds more hostage. For the short-term, at least, the U.S. was refocused on the Middle East.

“We didn’t know what this was the start of,” an American military official told Defense News. “We immediately started to go to worst-case planning.”

Within weeks of Oct. 7, in support of Israel, the U.S. sent two carrier strike groups, the Gerald R. Ford and the Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and Middle East. It doubled the number of Air Force fighter squadrons in CENTCOM. And to defend its forces already in the region, the Pentagon rushed valuable air defense batteries nearby.

“Our advice to those who might seek to exploit the situation or amplify the conflict is simple, don’t,” a senior U.S. defense official warned in an October press briefing.

This phrase, which became a cliché among senior members of the U.S. government, was still a clear statement of mission. America was sprinting to defend Israel and its own forces in the region.

That became harder the longer the war lasted. Oct. 7 brought direct attacks between Hamas and Israel, but it also upset a delicate balance among other groups.

Soon after the attack, Israel and Hezbollah — which has a formidable force, armed with over 130,000 rockets — started trading fire in a cycle of escalating skirmishes.

Militant groups armed by Iran started attacking Israeli and American forces, especially the 3,500 or so stationed between Iraq and Syria, with three soldiers dying in one such attack in January.

Meanwhile, the Houthis, a terrorist group in Yemen, started firing on commercial ships in the Red Sea, a vital economic waterway where 15% of global trade flowed before last fall.

The Navy’s running sea fight with the Houthis is the longest and most kinetic since World War II, according to service leaders.

“There’s flavors of all those activities in the past and previous rounds that I’ve been involved in, but I don’t recall a period when so many of them have merged,” said another senior U.S. defense official, describing the different attacks.

‘Bear the burden’

As the threats rose, so too did the demand on America’s military. By December, the U.S. began Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational mission to protect shipping in the Red Sea. It devoted an aircraft carrier and destroyers to the task.

In April, when Iran lobbed hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel, the U.S. and its partners helped intercept nearly all of them.

America’s national defense strategy accepts that its military can’t be everywhere in the numbers it would want. Instead, the plan is to have a movable force. Put more practically: the U.S. argues it can rush to contain crises like the Middle East after Oct. 7 while still deterring a conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific.

“That’s what we were saying before Oct. 7 and we just demonstrated it,” said Dana Stroul, a top Pentagon Middle East official until early this year. “It’s been a proof of concept.”

But the plan requires these emergencies to eventually end. Despite months of intense diplomacy in the region, the administration is now showing less confidence in its proposed ceasefire deal. And now Israel — the country America has spent the last year defending — may itself be opening a new front in the war against Hezbollah.

“You can’t employ diplomacy without the backbone of military capability,” said retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, who led CENTCOM until 2022. “Military capability without diplomatic messaging is not a good way to approach the problem either.”

“You need both but you have to be willing to bear the burden,” he continued.

For some in Congress especially, the concern is that the Middle East is a distraction from the Indo-Pacific.

Pentagon leaders say they calculate the risk in pulling assets from one region to another, and that the choice to move forces away from Asia is a sign that they consider the region stable enough to do so.

Not everyone in the region is convinced.

“I have relayed messages that it is better to invest in deterrence where there is no overt conflict, rather than intervene in a conflict where there is one already,” the Philippines Secretary of National Defense Gilberto Teodoro said in an August interview. He wouldn’t specify who in the U.S. those messages have reached.

‘We had mission and purpose:’ A chat with the CO of the USS Eisenhower

Cost and benefit

The benefit, in the Defense Department’s eyes, of such a large response in the Middle East over the last year is to contain a crisis that threatened to engulf the entire region.

The periodic surges haven’t accomplished everything the U.S. has wanted. The Navy regularly intercepts Houthi drones and missiles, but the attacks by the Iran-backed group continue, and most shipping companies have chosen to reroute rather than risk becoming a target. Nor is it certain that the militia group will stop even if there is a ceasefire — something Pentagon officials say they still don’t know.

As the recent fire between Israel and Hezbollah has shown, the U.S. is also stuck responding to the rise and fall in the regional conflict, what Pentagon leaders often liken to riding a roller coaster.

“It’s obviously lasted longer than anyone would want,” the second defense official said.

That notwithstanding, there hasn’t yet been a wider war in the Middle East. And while it acknowledges other forces at work, the Pentagon says it’s helped avoid one.

Amid Red Sea clashes, Navy leaders ask: Where are our ship lasers?

“The force posture does matter,” Secretary Austin told reporters this month. “In some cases, Iran can see … many of the capabilities that we have available. In many cases, they can’t.”

That said, the cost of this posture is also becoming clearer.

The first, and perhaps the most important, part of that tally is the military’s ability to meet future needs, known as “readiness” in defense jargon. By sending more forces to the Middle East, the Pentagon is accepting what amounts to a mortgage: higher costs on its forces to avoid an even bigger bill.

There’s no more pressing example of this trade than aircraft carriers.

These ships are the Navy’s most powerful, most visible weapon, and they’re a primary way the U.S. often flexes its military muscle.

That said, carriers need a lot of maintenance, and spend about two-thirds of their life in port undergoing some kind of repair. The Navy calibrates their time at sea and their time for maintenance, allowing for some margin, but not much.

Central Command spent two years without a carrier after America left Afghanistan in 2021. But since Oct. 7, the U.S. has rotated four of them into the Middle East. Most of them have also been deployed longer than their scheduled seven months at sea.

“If we delay a carrier from going back into port and going back into a maintenance period by a month, it causes an even longer period” of disruption, the third defense official said. “It’s not a one-for-one delay.”

Without specifying the impact of these extensions so far, multiple defense officials and congressional aides said the U.S. is already having to manage “tradeoffs” between the needs of the Middle East today and other areas in the future.

Still, in an interview, the head of readiness for the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command, which oversees the East Coast-based fleet, argued that the schedules and ships themselves have proved resilient and aren’t yet showing higher wear.

“Sailing those ships in harm’s way for more months certainly will put stress on that, but I really don’t see that process breaking,” Rear Adm. Paul Lanzilotta said.

Close calls

This February, the Houthis shot a ballistic missile at the Navy destroyer Gravely in the Red Sea, one of many times the militia group targeted American ships in the waterway.

But this one came close. In fact, the ship used a short-range weapon — rather than the typical missile — to intercept the attack. The Houthis came within a nautical mile of success, according to Navy officials.

This is an example of the other two costs involved in the Pentagon’s response. One is to personnel, who are being targeted by militia groups more often and are, in some cases, being deployed longer than planned. The other is the military’s own weapons needed to respond.

The Navy estimates that between Oct. 7 and mid-July, it fired $1.16 billion worth of munitions while on station in the Red Sea.

Many of these are older versions of missiles — such as Tomahawks and Standard Missile 2 interceptors — that wouldn’t be as useful in a fight against China, said a second congressional aide.

Still, as long as the Navy is around the Red Sea, it will need to fire weapons that cost more than what they’re shooting down — an equation known in the military as an “exchange ratio.” That deficit has fallen as the U.S. escorts fewer vessels and experiments more with other ways to stop these attacks, multiple officials and analysts told Defense News. But there’s only so many ways the military can adapt, and it won’t risk losing sailors or ships that cost billions.

“We’ve dodged disaster so far, but that doesn’t really mean it’s mission accomplished,” said a third congressional aide.

In April, Congress passed a $95 billion addition to the Pentagon budget, with $2.44 billion in extra money for Central Command. That funding was designed to last six months, according to the first congressional aide, which would mean it’s almost out today.

The Pentagon comptroller office declined to offer an estimate of how much more the surge in forces is costing and whether the Defense Department was still running a deficit to pay for it.

Multiple staffs in Congress said the bill for the last six months will be about the same number as in April: $2 to $3 billion.

Lawmakers can either pay the bill down in another supplemental or by folding the total into their overall defense spending bill, as the Senate did with $1.75 billion for Central Command. That said, lawmakers will soon start the year on a short-term budget called a continuing resolution, which freezes Pentagon spending at last year’s level.

‘Still in the crisis’

Meanwhile even as funding runs out, the war in Gaza shows no sign of ending.

In August, after Austin returned to Washington from the Philippines, he sent a fighter squadron, a submarine, destroyers and a second aircraft carrier rerouted from the Indo-Pacific this year to CENTCOM. Iran didn’t attack, and Hezbollah’s response to an Israeli strike was limited. After a month and a half of relative calm, one of the two carriers in the region left.

During regular briefings, the Pentagon even started arguing that it had gotten in the “headspace” of Iran.

Then, earlier this month, Israel detonated thousands of devices belonging to Hezbollah and launched airstrikes in Lebanon — prompting the group to vow revenge. The two sides are now exchanging heavy fire across the border. Austin postponed a trip to Israel and Jordan this week, containing yet another flare up.

Between the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and CENTCOM, the U.S. now has at least one submarine, an aircraft carrier, three amphibious warships and nine destroyers, a defense official said. Two of those destroyers are in the Red Sea and were once slated to exit, the official said. After the attacks last week, the official continued, the Pentagon ordered them to stay.

In a call with reporters after Israel and Hezbollah’s latest standoff began, a senior administration official yet again said that the U.S. had helped avert a wider war and that a ceasefire was the best option for all in the region.

In the days after, Israel continued striking Lebanon killing hundreds in attacks that escalated their conflict further.

Another carrier strike group deployed for Europe this week on a previously scheduled deployment. The defense official said the Pentagon is drawing up plans in case it needs to divert into CENTCOM and transit the Red Sea.

“We very much will maintain that deterrent posture, because we are still in crisis,” the senior administration official said.

But Navy flattops have undertaken anything but regular deployments in the past year.

Other East Coast carriers have seen their deployment plans uprooted by the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, one that has repeatedly threatened to engulf the Middle East in a broader war since it began nearly a year ago.

American aircraft carriers have been at the forefront of Pentagon efforts to prevent the conflict from widening.

Fellow East Coast carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower was diverted to the Middle East last fall and spent nine months there before heading home this summer, while fellow carrier Gerald R. Ford conducted its own extended cruise in the Mediterranean Sea that ended earlier this spring.

West Coast carrier Theodore Roosevelt steamed over from the Indo-Pacific to relieve the Ike in July, and was later joined by the Abraham Lincoln.

TR departed the Middle Eastern waters of U.S. Central Command earlier this month.

So while the Navy says Truman’s deployment will be to Europe, it remains to be seen whether events in the Middle East will conform with those plans.

Ike’s deployment “highlighted the need for continuity in our sustained presence amid escalating international tensions,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, said in a statement this week.

US sending more troops to Middle East as violence rises in the region

Caudle added that the Truman and its strike group “will contribute to the ongoing training and combat readiness of our naval forces.”

“The operational experience gained through these deployments is invaluable for maintaining a deep bench of skilled warfighters with trust and confidence in their system’s reliability, adaptability, and lethality in a rapidly changing security environment,” he said.

The Pentagon announced Monday plans to beef up its troop presence in the Middle East and cautioned that a wider regional conflict could emerge, following recent strikes from Israel against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

However, Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder declined to provide specifics on the troop increase.

“In light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional U.S. military personnel forward to augment our forces that are already in the region,” Ryder said Monday. “But for operational security reasons, I’m not going to comment on or provide specifics.”

Members of the House Armed Service Committee questioned Army leaders about the rules during a hearing Thursday. The rules, introduced in June, say commanders must ensure troops are trained about off-limits extremist activities, take action when they spot extremism in their units and report any incidents to the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General.

Oops! Army training mislabeled nonprofits as terror groups for years

The rules 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, among other prohibited behaviors.

Rep. Jill Tokuda, D-Hawaii, questioned Lt. Gen. Patrick Matlock, the Army deputy chief of staff, about who makes the final determination when a soldier is accused of engaging in a potential extremist activity. Matlock said that responsibility fell to commanders, who could consult with legal and law enforcement experts before coming to a decision on whether something should be labeled as extremism.

“I think the problem here is we have a diffused sense of accountability,” Tokuda said. “If every single command has its own arbitrary, subjective ability to make a determination on an extremist activity, therein lies your problem, and I think you have to answer the question of where does the buck stop.”

Army imposes stricter rules for addressing extremism among troops

Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., likewise said there was too much “gray area” about what constituted active participation in extremism. The Army’s rules add another layer of accountability but don’t solve the problem, she said.

“There still seems to be enough of a gulf that you could drive a Mack truck through,” Sewell told Matlock and Agnes Gereben Schaefer, the assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs. “There’s still gray area, and that leads to ambiguity and subjectivity. It makes it harder for those of us who hear legitimate complaints from our service members about extremism to actually have those addressed.”

Sewell joined other Democratic lawmakers to advocate for legislation in 2021 that would’ve established an office of countering extremism within the Defense Department. That measure was dropped due to Republican opposition.

Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., asked Army leaders Thursday about how troops were educated on the extremist policies. The Army’s new rules mandate the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command add information about prohibited extremist activities into initial active duty training, precommissioning training, commander training and professional military education, among other training programs,.

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 rules state.

Matlock said he had reviewed the training materials ahead of Thursday’s hearing, and he described them as “very well designed.”

“It’s delivered in a standard package across the Army,” Matlock said. “We take maintaining good order and discipline in our formations very seriously, and the extremism policy is a key part of how we do that and deliver combat-ready units.”

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