Close to 50,000 soldiers around the U.S. and overseas spent a weekend night sweating out a 12-mile march after a small change in an Army regulation allowed soldiers to earn a unique foreign decoration for the march.
The soldiers at dozens of major Army bases took part in the Royal Danish Air Force March, also known as the Danish Flyver March, which ends in participants getting a patch and the ribbon. The event involves rucking 20 kilometers, or just over 12 miles, with a 10-kilogram (or 23-pound) rucksack.

WARSAW, POLAND – Over the past weekend, I received no small number of calls from Russian-speaking friends and colleagues in Kyiv, Moscow, Warsaw, etc. The subject was the same in each instance. All were laughing hysterically at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest conspiracy theory about Ukraine and its western allies that are “out to get Russia.”

This time Putin’s statements were more detached from reality than his usual lectures on fabricated and fantasy-inspired versions of Russian history.

Holly Dailey grew up in a small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania as one of six kids; most of her firsthand knowledge of military life came from history books and movies, though her mother had served in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II and her older brother had served as well. 
When her future husband Dan knocked on her front door, he was there to visit her brother who’d returned home from Desert Storm.
“When I answered the door, I swear my heart stood still. The world stood still,” she recalled. 
Weeks later, they were married, and she was PCS’ing to Fort Riley, Kansas.

(Cover Image by Melissa Ambrosini)
By the time Michael Sherbakov visited the tiny apartment he grew up in back in Moscow, it felt less like visiting an old home and more like just visiting a foreign country.
Home is the United States for him, the place his parents bet everything on when they immigrated there when he was five years old. It was also the country he swore to protect and defend as a Marine. 
Sherbakov’s story is one of faith in God’s plan and a servant’s heart. 
“We immigrated to the U.S.

One night in a quiet Texas bedroom, the impact of war finally caught up with Le Roy Torres. His lungs, which used to let him run long distances, burned with every breath. Everything he’d planned for his life was taken from him because of the war.
As he contemplated the unthinkable, his service dog—Hope—was at his feet. 
Hope saved his life that night with her steady presence and warm eyes, which seemed to hold and understand all of his pain.

Lori Simmons was a one-time military brat who became a military spouse for a time. As her marketing career took off, the military kept bringing her back, even when she thought that chapter was closed. 
Her story is one of deep faith, leaning into purpose, an enormous devotion to those who serve, and a heart for building community. 
Lori Simmons, top row, center. (Courtesy of Lori Simmons)
“My dad served in the Army National Guard from about 1957 to 1965,” Simmons shared. “He was able to get out before the Vietnam War really got bad, by the grace of God.

David Higgins joined the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans (NCHV) in 2019. Though he doesn’t have a connection to the military, he has always had a passion for America’s veterans.
His origin story of serving this country’s warriors began with his childhood in Jamaica and the Bahamas. 
“I moved to Atlanta to go to college when I was 16 and law school at Howard Law in 2005,” he told We Are The Mighty. 
With his undergraduate degree in journalism, Higgins spent a lot of time doing layouts and designs for his school’s newspaper.

At just 12 years old, Lyla Kohistany’s future was supposed to end in Kabul as the wife of a 51-year-old stranger. Instead, her brother went to war for her with the help of the United States Navy. Hers is a story of defying the odds, made possible by her brother’s love and a lifetime of service to America. 
Kohistany and her family immigrated to the United States from Afghanistan when she was a toddler, fleeing the ongoing war with the Soviet Union. Though she spent some time living in California, it was Springfield, Virginia, that became home.

As Kenneth Fisher talks about the Fisher House Foundation, the conversation doesn’t start with the milestones or even numbers. It begins and ends with family.
“The whole family serves,” he said. “It’s not just the man or woman who wears the uniform, but their entire family. They make sacrifices and bear burdens that the average American just will not understand.

After 13 years as the spouse of a Navy SEAL, Amber Capone was looking forward to a quiet life in Texas. Instead, a lifetime of ghosts and war trauma threatened to take her husband, just as they were finally settled.
This is a story of a spouse who never gave up and saved not just her own husband, but hundreds, in the process.
“I grew up in a very small town in southern Illinois. It is primarily agricultural, if you will. I grew up on a retired dairy farm,” Capone told We Are The Mighty.

When Verenice Castillo left Mexico at 16 years old for a new life in America, she thought her days of starting over were behind her. Still learning the language and culture, Castillo was thriving in El Paso, Texas. Just a few years later, she met a soldier. 
“Like literally, I was just learning about this country. I had no idea what the military was about. And when we met, he told me that if we got married, we’re gonna move around. I thought that we were gonna move around like houses or jobs or something,” she laughed.

When Melissa Washington graduated from high school in California’s East Bay, outside of San Francisco, her future seemed set. She was on track to become a preschool teacher, studying early childhood education at community college.
But a restlessness led her to a different kind of service. 
In 1991, Washington walked into a mall recruiting center and gravitated toward the only branch that felt like a fit. She laughingly remembers seeing the pull-up bar in the Marine Corps office. She knew the bar and the Corps weren’t for her, but she was enticed by the Navy.

Pennsylvania is home to the nation’s fourth-largest veteran population. Veterans living in Michelle Lang’s hometown of McConnellsburg make up a large portion of the community. 
Lang married the local “townie” from her college days, followed him to Fort Drum, and was suddenly thrown into a world she wasn’t prepared for. She never planned to be a military spouse, much less the eventual founder of a nonprofit standing in the gap for rural veterans and their families.
“I knew he was a soldier but had zero clue of what I was in for,” she laughed.

By her own admission, Meaghan Keeler’s mission is simple: get the good guys together, make them the best, and beat the bad guys. 
From a small town on Florida’s east coast to the nerve centers of United States Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, she built a career out of connecting people who rarely get headlines but carry an outsized share of the world’s hardest problems. 
“In high school, I did the International Baccalaureate program,” Keeler explained. “When I look back on it, that’s where the path to national security started.

From the outside looking in, Kerry Irvin is a polished leader with her red-bottom heels and classy business dresses. But she’s also a Krav Maga instructor who will quickly drive that red-bottom heel into an attacker’s foot and have them begging for mercy. 
Her life has been nothing short of extraordinary, and so is the work she’s devoted her life to. Because for Irvin, service was never a job description or a line on a resume. It’s the foundation of everything. 
She grew up around the world, a proud Army brat.
“My grandfather was an aviator. He was in the U.S.

Robert Zachery’s path was never a carefully plotted campaign. He calls it “luck and stumbling into it.” He grew up between two Americas: weekdays in the projects of Chattanooga, Tennessee, with his mom, weekends in the suburbs with his dad, then a jarring move to a small, mostly white rural town. 
A flashy Marine Corps commercial with a knight fighting a dragon had him headed one direction until an Air Force recruiter in blues popped in a VHS tape of airmen jumping out of planes and sneaking through the jungle.
“Sign me up,” Zachery remembers saying.

Suzy Malloy and her family live by a creed: all in, all the time. For her, service isn’t something you add to your life when things are easy, but how you live when everything gets hard. And when you think you’ve done enough, Malloy will encourage you to dig even deeper.
Growing up in New Jersey, Malloy idolized her parents. They were deeply in love, and it echoed throughout their home despite her father’s long absences as a Merchant Marine.
“When he was home for those two-month breaks in between it was almost like he was unemployed.

Richard Brookshire can tell you the cost of broken promises in numbers that will make your stomach drop. But before he helped launch the Black Veterans Project, he was once a military brat trying to figure it all out. 
His father enlisted in the Army and quickly deployed to the front lines of the Vietnam War. After returning, he stayed in and met Brookshire’s mother, a Haitian immigrant and fellow soldier, during the 1980s.
The couple married after his mom processed out of the Army, and Brookshire was born at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

Sharene Brown is well known for her role at Five & Thrive—and for being married to the now-retired former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown. But before she led a national nonprofit or stood beside her husband as the most senior military spouse, she was an exhausted mom fighting for her son’s care. 
This is the story of an “ordinary” military spouse turning a lifetime of challenges into a blueprint for change across the entire force.

After 22 years in the Air Force and a medical retirement, Purple Heart recipient Jason “JD” David refused to let his story end in a recliner.
Now known as the military’s “money guy,” he lives by the motto “there are opportunities in every challenge,” helping veterans uncover the benefits and financial freedom that can turn fear of transition into a new kind of service.
“My father and my father’s father were both in the Air Force, so I couldn’t not be drawn to the idea of service because I guess it was just kind of embedded into our DNA,” David explained.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a 2-year-old girl and her parents boarded United Airlines Flight 175 in Boston. They were headed for a vacation at Disneyland in California before hijackers overtook the cockpit. They diverted the flight path and crashed the plane into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
That family died upon impact. Lolita Jackson, who worked for a major financial services firm, was in the South Tower that horrific day. She was fortunate enough to get out of the tower before it crumbled to the ground.

The first time Sam Eckholm stepped onto a flight line, he was a kid watching his dad climb into a KC‑135 tanker. Decades later, he’d find himself suited up in a pressure suit, riding to 70,000 feet in a U‑2 spy plane, filming what would become a viral YouTube episode seen by millions. 
The line between those two moments isn’t luck but a determination to do something different with the military story.
“I don’t always say I’m a military brat per se… but I definitely came from a military family. That’s what inspired me to serve,” Eckholm told We Are The Mighty.

H.

A.E.

Global Defense N.
The U.S.

A U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone. Photo: USAF / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

Day 186 of Operation Epic Fury saw Iran break a 30-day standdown — and pay for it. An oil tanker was struck by three projectiles in the Strait of Hormuz, and the IRGC downed a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone. The Trump administration responded immediately, vowing a “hard response.” Tehran just handed Washington another pretext to escalate.
The numbers tell the real story of who is winning.

This video describes the military situation in

This video describes the military situation in

This video describes the military situation in

My greatest challenge while flight testing collaborative combat aircraft was not troubleshooting errors at high speed in the cockpit. It was when, in a single keystroke, my job shifted from pilot to something like a dog handler — a supervisor of an autonomous agent. As a test pilot, my instinct is to stop for surprise machine behavior, but that met a system where such unexpected behavior could be a good thing. Managing autonomy means accounting for a new phenomenon — machine behavior that is both correct and unexpected.

Editor’s Note: While War on the Rocks has a high standard for allowing pseudonyms, this is an unusual case: U.S. Army Special Operations Command requires its uniformed personnel to use pseudonyms when writing for public consumption (Policy 23-16). Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

In April, President Donald Trump issued two Defense Production Act determinations covering grid infrastructure and large-scale energy infrastructure. One found that the country’s constrained electric grid posed an increasing threat to national defense and made grid infrastructure and its supply chains essential to national defense. The other found that financing risks, regulatory delays, and market barriers were preventing large-scale energy infrastructure essential to national defense from being provided in a timely manner. Less than three months later, New York Gov.

The Russian state technology conglomerate Rostec has provided new details on the engines powering Su-57 fifth generation fighter, at a time when efforts to market the aircraft for export have continued to intensify. The engine “enables advanced aerobatic manoeuvres that allow the pilot to evade missile attacks. Clear proof of this was provided by test pilot Sergey Bogdan’s demonstration at this year’s Aero India airshow. At the controls of the ‘fifty-seventh’, he performed a dizzying series of aerobatic manoeuvres.

The cost of the F-35 fifth generation fighter is continuing to rise as the aircraft enters a new phase focused on advanced modernisation, with inflation, new upgrade requirements and expanded production costs contributing to a more than $50 billion increase in its estimated acquisition price. A newly released Pentagon acquisition report places the total projected cost of the program at $536.2 billion, up from $485.2 billion in the previous 2023 estimate.

The Kazakhstan Ministry of Defence is planning to acquire six Chinese K-8W lightweight combat jets, adding another Chinese-designed platform to a military aviation fleet that has increasingly diversified beyond its traditional Russian and Soviet origins. The reported acquisition closely coincides with the procurement of Chinese Y-9E transport aircraft, which has strengthened China’s position as a supplier of military aviation equipment to the Central Asian state.

On the night of August 30 the U. S. Army fired over 80 surface-to-air missiles from the MIM-104 Patriot system at the incoming Iranian ballistic missiles in Jordan, using two batteries on deployment from Ansbach, Germany. Close to four Patriot launches were made against each Iranian missile, with the large majority of launches caught on camera missile their targets.

Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll has submitted his resignation to President Donald Trump, DefenseScoop has confirmed.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the move Monday.
“The Secretary spoke to the President about the current state of the Army and submitted his resignation,” an Army official told DefenseScoop.
A service spokesperson said the Army had no comment.
Fox News reported Monday evening that Trump had not yet accepted the resignation.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll before the Senate Armed Services Committee, February 2025. Photo: U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

Sec. Dan Driscoll will resign as Army Secretary effective September 3, 2026. Driscoll, who has served as Army Secretary for 18 months, has been a major force resisting certain reforms in the Department of War undergoing a massive transformation under Sec. Pete Hegseth, report sources in the Pentagon. Driscoll wanted to push the Army in a different direction with reforms of his own.

Beyond his promises to build a border wall, President Donald Trump’s three campaigns may best be remembered for his repeated promises to prevent more “forever wars” in the Middle East.

And while Republicans were initially forgiving of the president’s war against Iran, the loyalty of the president’s voters is now being pushed as far as it can go, with voters telling media outlets and pollsters that they are no longer optimistic about the conflict.

President Donald Trump published a surprise announcement last week, claiming that the United States was preparing to begin replenishing its badly depleted Strategic Petroleum Reserve using oil secured under a new agreement with Venezuela.

And on paper, the deal seems like a good one.

Oil Platform. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Generic Oil Tanker Image. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Russia’s new jet-powered drones are bombarding Ukraine on a daily basis.

For four days beginning on Thursday, 27th August, Russia sent close to 1,500 drones westwards towards Ukraine.

MSTA Artillery Firing Creative Commons Image

The country’s capital, Kyiv, has been attacked continually for five consecutive days, with Russia strategically launching waves of attacks to maximize the number of air raid alerts Ukrainian life must endure.

It’s not just military targets, either. Russia is once again attacking infrastructure not directly connected to Ukraine’s combat readiness.

The Pentagon’s suite of commercial generative AI products has expanded beyond Google’s Gemini offering, according to officials who told DefenseScoop Monday that insiders can now chat with approved versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Starshield AI’s Grok frontier models when they log on to the GenAI.mil platform.
This long-anticipated integration is intended to enable U.S. personnel to apply the distinct technical strengths of each top-tier large language model provider to meet specialized military missions.

Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly fears that ending the war in Ukraine without a victory could threaten his own position — even as mounting military and economic problems give the Kremlin reasons to seek a way out.

“They will hang me,” Putin told people around him at some point during the war, according to sources close to the Russian president cited by The Economist newspaper.

Vladimir Putin of Russia. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Putin in May 2025. Image Credit: Russian Federation Government.

Could the Navy consider a haircut allowance for sailors as the service cracks down on grooming standards across the force?
One sailor posed the question to Navy leadership at a live town hall livestreamed from Fort George G. Meade on Monday. The top officer and enlisted sailor in the Navy seemed somewhat receptive to considering it, but also said that some things are generally just “out-of-pocket” costs that troops have to cover themselves. 
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle admitted the sailors’ public suggestion was one he had not heard or considered.

This video describes the military situation in

U.S. forces struck Iran again Sunday as senior commanders warned that the six-month war is stretching American forces and weapons supplies.

They struck two Iranian launchers on Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps terror group was observed preparing to launch rockets carrying sea mines, according to U.S. Central Command.

A B-2 Spirit soars after a refueling mission over the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, May 30, 2006. The B-2, from the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo.

Ukraine has published a detailed assessment of Russia’s 3M22 Zircon missile, the two-stage Russian missile used in both naval and land-attack strikes.

The new assessment reveals not only how one of Moscow’s most advanced weapons works, but also the massive industrial network keeping it in constant production.

An elevated port side view of the forward section of a Soviet Oscar Class nuclear-powered attack submarine. (Soviet Military Power, 1986) Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Buk-M2E Air Defense from Russia. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Paratroopers and other soldiers from the divisi

Over the weekend, Russia launched a huge attack on a warehouse west of Kyiv, which killed 38 people, for one of the largest single-attack death tolls of the entire war, as well as the largest this year.

And more strikes are to come.

MLRS Firing Creative Commons Image

“Russian forces have begun preparations for massive strikes against facilities in Ukraine’s energy sector in response to the ongoing attacks by the Kyiv regime on civilian infrastructure and on Russia’s oil and energy complex,” Russia’s defense ministry said on Telegram this week, as cited by The Guardian.

Graduation week at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland is the moment you have been waiting for. It’s also a very hectic week. In partnership with Navy Federal Credit Union, we built the Air Force and Space Force BMT Graduation Guide. This free guide allows you to spend the week watching your Airman or Guardian instead of hunting for answers. View Your BMT Graduation Guide
Free Wi-Fi from Sandboxx
Cell service constantly drops out on the graduation grounds. Thousands of people arrive at once, and everyone is reaching for their phone at the same moment.