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The seniors playing in this weekend’s Army-Navy football game all know where they are headed after graduation.
Navy’s star quarterback, Blake Horvath, will be off to Naval flight school in Florida. His favorite receiver, Eli Heidenreich, will spend a year training as a Marine Corps ground officer.
Army linebacker Kalib Fortner, the team’s defensive captain who as a sophomore was named the 2023 Army-Navy game MVP, is headed to the infantry, one of eight Army senior cadets who will serve in that branch, the same number who will train in artillery.

At the end of the movie “Black Hawk Down,” Chief Warrant Officer Mike Durant (played by actor Ron Eldard) is sitting in a dark room as a prisoner of the Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, as a helicopter flies by overhead. From the passing bird comes a voice as the sun goes down:
“Mike Durant, we won’t leave you behind.”
This makes for an agonizing scene, with Durant suffering from a broken cheekbone, eye socket, back, femur, and nose from his fight with Somalis near the crash site of Super Six-Four.

Rob Evans, an Army veteran who created a popular Yelp-like app to report problems with enlisted barracks, has now built a new website that allows veterans to provide anonymous reviews of Department of Veterans Affairs medical facilities.
VetStats allows veterans to rate VA clinics and medical centers in terms of service quality, facilities and amenities, mental healthcare access, care access, and wait times, said Evans, who is not working with the VA on the effort.

The Russo-Ukrainian War has elevated the global importance of the Black Sea region and demonstrated the wide-ranging impacts that conflict there can have on the world. As the sea’s littoral states struggle to cope with international, regional, and domestic challenges, we asked five experts to offer insights into what events or trends to watch in the region over the next year.Read more below.

A serving member of the UK military has died in an accident in Ukraine while observing testing of “a new defensive capability”.

The Pentagon is rolling out a purpose-built platform — GenAI.mil — to deliver commercial artificial intelligence options directly to its almost entire workforce, with Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government products the first to be housed and available in the new asset.
“For the first time ever, by the end of this week, 3 million employees, warfighters, and contractors are going to have AI on their desktop, every single one,” Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael announced on Tuesday.

A new congressional measure could require that the military services assign blast safety officers to help enforce safety rules and teach troops about the health risks of blast overpressure caused by heavy weapons during training.
The measure comes as the mental health and physical safety risks of repeated exposures to blasts from heavy artillery and explosives have caught the attention of Congress and the Department of Defense. In August 2024, military officials released new rules with recommended safe distances for troops firing mortars, howitzers, rifles and breaching explosives.

The U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command is built on a lineage of air commandos who show up where the odds are worst, and the margin for error is zero. From hacking improvised airstrips out of the Burmese jungle to flying lumbering gunships that can put a single round on a single truck in the dead of night, these airmen exist to solve problems no one else can.
They move special operations forces, pull the wounded out of places no helicopter should be, and turn the sky itself into close air support, often under fire and far from help.

The annual Army-Navy Game is one of college football’s biggest rivalries, and there’s a lot of history around the game, not only because of the 125-plus games the Midshipmen and Black Knights have played over the years, but also because of one man who might show up to watch: the President of the United States.
Related: 7 of the coolest things to watch for during the Army-Navy Game
No matter who occupies the Oval Office, the Commander-in-Chief showing up to watch these two service academy football teams on the gridiron is a big deal.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last week quietly ordered a name change to the military entity charged with influencing foreign audiences, reverting its title back to one used 15 years ago.
Since 2010, military activities designed to manipulate the behavior of foreign governments, combatants and even individuals have fallen under the unassuming title of “military information support operations,” or MISO. Now, those efforts will once again be part of “psychological operations,” or PSYOP, according to a memorandum Hegseth signed Dec. 2.