The video, in explaining exactly how the rifle works, shows why the weapon is an efficient, and ultimately dangerous, weapon.

“I have always enjoyed animation and illustrating how things work,” designer and 3D animator Matt Rittman says in his bio. “I’m especially interested in firearms and anything mechanical. My aim for this channel is to provide easy to understand, how-it-works 3D animations.”

Rittman’s AR-15 rendering is one of several videos on the mechanics of firearms.

The AR-15 was first designed as a military rifle in the late 1950s. Its manufacturer, ArmaLite, began producing the firearm before selling manufacturing rights to Colt.

For more than five decades, the AR-15 has been a favorite among enthusiasts. A common iteration of the rifle, the M-16, has long been used by service members. And according to NPR, it once even appeared in a Sears catalog.

“The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates there are roughly 5 million to 10 million AR-15 rifles owned in the United States, a small share of the roughly 300 million firearms owned by Americans,” CNBC reported.

But the AR-15 has a dark history, too. The rifle has been involved in 11 mass shootings between 2012 and April 2022.

Eighteen-year-old Salvador Ramos deployed an AR-15-style rifle in the killing of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.

Most notably, the D.C. National Guard arrived at the Capitol more than three and a half hours after the violence began. And it emerged this summer that the Pentagon wiped the phones of top officials as they departed at the end of the Trump administration, deleting key records from that day.

But in testimony given behind closed doors to the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, Army Gen. Mark Milley, the Defense Department’s top uniformed officer, has helped shed some light on what took place at the Pentagon on Jan. 6 and in the days that followed.

During its blockbuster televised hearings, the Jan. 6 committee has played short audio clips of testimony by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All of the audio that has been released so far was played at the July 21 hearing, although some of the snippets were also previewed on June 9, the first day of the hearings.

More testimony from Milley may come out when the hearings resume in September, once Congress returns from its summer recess.

In the scraps of testimony that the committee has presented, Milley has addressed then-President Donald Trump’s conspicuous inaction, then-Vice President Mike Pence’s plea to activate the National Guard, and his own phone calls with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the aftermath of the attack.

Here’s all of Milley’s testimony that has been released so far.

Milley’s response to Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6

In a snippet presented by Rep. Adam Kinziger, who was driving home Trump’s refusal to act during the attacks on the Capitol, Milley explained his reaction to Trump’s behavior.

“Yeah. You know, commander in chief, you got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America. And there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?” Milley said.

Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran, added, “I can tell you that General Milley’s reaction to President Trump’s conduct is 100% correct.”

It was Pence who called to activate the Guard

Later in the July 21 hearing, Rep. Elaine Luria relied on testimony by Milley to demonstrate that it had been Vice President Mike Pence — and not Trump — who made efforts to secure the Capitol so it could resume its joint session, including by calling military leaders.

Milley told the committee:

“Vice President Pence? There were two or three calls with Vice President Pence. He was very animated, and he issued very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders. There was no question about that.”

Pence’s orders were ‘direct’ and ‘firm’

“[Pence] was — and I can give you the exact quotes, I guess, from some of our record somewhere — but he was very animated, very direct, very firm,” Milley said.

“And to Secretary Miller, ‘get the military down here, get the Guard down here, put down this situation,’ etc.,” Milley added, paraphrasing Pence.

Christopher Miller, then the acting defense secretary, told the D.C. Guard at 3:04 p.m. to deploy to the Capitol.

The Guard arrived at the scene at 5:40 p.m., after the violence had largely ended.

Milley refused to join in on Trump’s narrative

Luria then introduced a snippet of Milley describing a phone call he had with Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff.

“[Meadows] said — this is from memory. He said, ‘We have — we have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative that, you know, that the president is still in charge and that things are steady or stable or words to that effect.’ I immediately interpret that as politics, politics, politics,” Milley said.

“Red flag for me personally, no action, but I remember it distinctly,” he added. “And — and I don’t do political narratives.”

According to recent reporting in The New Yorker, Milley has been especially sensitive to any appearance of politicization since he received criticism for marching in battle fatigues in a June 2020 photo op with Trump after the president had the area forcibly cleared of Black Lives Matter protesters.

Trump was in a ‘dark place’

The committee also presented testimony by administration officials who said they were disgusted by Trump’s response to the attack but did not resign because they were, in Kinzinger’s words, “sincerely worried that leaving President Trump to his own devices would put the country at continued risk.”

Milley described calls he had with members of Trump’s inner circle, including the White House chief of staff and the secretary of state, to keep tabs on the president.

“There was a couple of the calls where, you know, Meadows and/or Pompeo, but more Meadows, you know, how — how is the president doing?” Milley recalled. “Like, Pompeo might say, ‘How’s the president doing?’ And Meadows would say, ‘Well, he’s in a really dark place.’ Like here’s one, for example, on the 7th of January.”

Milley then quoted what Meadows told him on that call: “POTUS is very emotional and in a bad place.”

In private, Milley referred to these conversations as “land the plane” calls, according to recent reporting in The New Yorker.

Under the new guidelines, pregnant airmen will still be able to access prenatal medical care while maintaining health information privacy, a standard that aligns with other medical privacy policies, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

“Pregnancy is the only medical condition identified in profiles, personnel and readiness systems, making the diagnosis accessible to the unit before some women are able to process the news, determine viability, or even notify their own families,” Capt. Frances Castillo, the Air Force Women’s Initiatives Team lead, said in a press release.

Under the new guidance, pregnant airmen will be given a general 30-day profile that only documents mobility, duty and fitness requirement restrictions — a departure from the previously required 10-month profile given during an airman’s pregnancy.

While airmen are still encouraged to inform their direct chain of command, knowledge of pregnancy status will now be limited to necessary leadership and health authorities only.

“As part of maintaining operational readiness, units must be notified of mobility, duty, and fitness restrictions,” Castillo said. “However, the medical diagnosis driving those deferments should be kept private, similar to every other medical condition, so women are empowered to decide when to make their pregnancy public.”

Additionally, the automatic recipients of Air Force healthcare documents — Form 469, Form 422, and Department of Defense Form 2992, which dictate flying status and profiles — will be minimized to further guarantee an airman’s privacy.

This latest update comes amid a series of efforts from the Women’s Initiatives Team to help minimize stigmas surrounding pregnant service members.

In 2021, the General Disparity Report for the Air Force showed that maternal bias was one of the leading reasons why women did not feel included in an organization. The report also noted that having limited, delayed or canceled training, for example, was causing pregnant airmen to face professional setbacks in addition to feelings of being excluded.

Furthermore, the report showed that one in four women were delaying pregnancy testing, which could lead to severe health concerns for the service member and fetus alike, because they were concerned the chain-of-command response would negatively impact their careers.

“The Air Force is addressing systemic changes,” Minihan said, “but until those changes are implemented, I expect everyone under my command to maximize the privacy, health, and readiness of pregnant Airmen.”

About 10% of National Guardsmen — around 45,000 soldiers and airmen — are not fully inoculated against the coronavirus that has killed more than 1 million people in the United States and nearly 6.5 million worldwide since December 2019.

They run afoul of the Pentagon’s mandate that all troops must have completed a one- or two-shot regimen by June 30 to comply with medical requirements protecting service members from the new virus and keeping them fit for deployment. Personnel who disobey the order are subject to separation.

“Readiness is based on the number of people you have. We can’t afford to lose anybody,” Army Gen. Daniel Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told Military Times in an exclusive interview while traveling Monday. “I’m trying to just work with the leaders [to] make sure we’re doing everything we can to get our folks vaccinated.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on July 13 gave Maryland-based Novavax the go-ahead to distribute its Adjuvanted vaccine under an emergency use authorization, making it the fourth COVID-19 shot formula to earn that approval so far.

“As soon as it was approved, we started ordering that and we’re getting it out to all of our states,” Hokanson said. “This past weekend [Aug. 6-7] was really the first drill weekend of the month, so over the course of the next couple of days, we hope to hear how successful that’s been.”

It will take time to gauge that progress. National Guard Bureau spokesperson Maj. Matt Murphy said Novavax supplies started shipping out this month and are just now arriving at their destinations, so the military projects it will take at least 90 days to get shots in arms and gather reportable data.

Still, Hokanson is optimistic that Novavax will succeed where Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have not: convincing those who have refused the other COVID-19 vaccines on religious grounds to get the jab.

Many of the troops who oppose the shots cite their remote connection to abortion. Novavax claims it did not use any cell lines or tissue derived from human fetuses to create its vaccine.

“Laboratory-grown cell lines descended from fetuses that were aborted decades ago were used in some early-stage testing of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and to grow viruses used to manufacture the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The vaccines do not contain fetal cells,” according to the Associated Press.

Everyone who joins the military must receive a a variety of immunizations to enter, including chickenpox, rubella and hepatitis A. Each of those shots also involves cell tissue derived from fetuses, as does one version of the rabies vaccine. Rabies shots are required only for some service members in certain career fields.

Four Air National Guardsmen had received religious waivers as of July 12, with 2,640 applications still pending, according to federal court documents. Out of more than 1,300 religious exemptions requested by Army National Guardsmen as of July 21, the service said it has granted none.

That leaves tens of thousands more Guardsmen who are neither vaccinated nor in the religious waiver pipeline. For those troops, Hokanson said, military doctors are available to answer any questions they may have about the vaccines’ safety and efficacy.

Air and Army Guardsmen can get their shots when they show up for drill, during a drop-in appointment throughout the week, or from a civilian medical provider like CVS clinics or a primary care doctor.

The number of Guardsmen who have started a vaccine regimen since the Army National Guard’s June 30 deadline to be fully protected — the latest of any service component — continues to rise. Between 700 and 1,000 Guardsmen a week have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 shot since that cutoff date, Hokanson said.

“We’re watching that very closely,” he said. “As it gets closer to [a new] deadline, I think we have more folks that will make the decision.”

What exactly that new deadline is remains unclear. Hokanson said it’s up to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Army Secretary Christine Wormuth to set those dates for their respective Guardsmen, but ongoing court battles are holding up a decision.

Army and Air Force spokespeople did not respond to a query on the matter by press time Thursday.

For example, a federal class-action lawsuit — which covers all active duty airmen and Space Force guardians, Air Force Reservists and Air National Guardsmen, and cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado who have applied for a religious exemption to the vaccine — has temporarily blocked the Department of the Air Force from punishing or separating those troops until the parties settle or reach a conclusion at trial.

It protects at least 100 airmen and guardians who are part of ongoing lawsuits contesting the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate, and more than 9,000 others affected by the policy, according to Siri & Glimstad, a law firm representing the plaintiffs in Doster v. Kendall in U.S. District Court in Ohio.

Hokanson said he updates all 54 adjutants general each Thursday on how the situation is progressing.

“At the end of the day, we want to make sure every soldier and airmen has had a chance to make their case, and then the services will make those decisions,” he said.

Kicking out such a large portion of the Guard could create steep readiness challenges for the military at a time when they are already stretched thin by a slew of domestic and overseas missions.

That’s led to a schism between some state Guards and their national leadership about the right way forward, in court and in the press.

On Aug. 4, Florida National Guard boss Maj. Gen. James Eifert published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal pushing back on the vaccine mandate and the looming threat of losing troops to discharge.

“I’ve never been more worried about the future of the U.S. armed forces than I am right now,” Eifert began.

Asked whether public disagreement is undermining the National Guard’s effort to protect its force, Hokanson dismissed the op-ed as Eifert’s personal opinion.

“It’s not reflective of the organization or what we think,” he said. “We need every single soldier and airman … and we need them to be ready.”

As of Monday, 94.4% of the Air National Guard and 88.7% of the Army National Guard were fully vaccinated. Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Vermont Guards are the most vaccinated at over 97%, while Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma Guards are the least vaccinated at 82% or less.

Hokanson noted the Guard has already met its 2022 recruiting goal, and that many soldiers and airmen are extending their service. That can help offset the pain of losing people who violate the vaccine mandate, he argued.

The Guard is not considering implementing a “stop-loss” policy that would involuntarily keep troops in their jobs to prevent the exodus from worsening, Hokanson said.

“Once we get somebody in the door, they really like what they’re doing,” he said. “So, that’s the key, is just to get them in.”

Iranian national Shahram Poursafi, 45, who also goes by Mehdi Rezayi, allegedly plotted the murder-for-hire in response to the United States’ January 2020 assassination of Qassim Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force. Poursafi offered to pay $300,000 to anyone who would carry out the assassination of Bolton in or around Washington, according to a DoJ release.

Soleimani, an architect of Tehran’s proxy wars in the Middle East, was killed in a targeted airstrike at Baghdad’s international airport.

“This is not the first time we have uncovered Iranian plots to exact revenge against individuals on U.S. soil, and we will work tirelessly to expose and disrupt every one of these efforts,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said in a release. “The Justice Department has the solemn duty to defend our citizens from hostile governments who seek to hurt or kill them.”

Poursafi, who remains at large abroad, allegedly instigated the plot in October 2021 when he contacted a U.S. resident he’d previously connected with online, the report said. The following month, the IRGC member used an encrypted messaging platform to offer the individual $300,000 to hire someone to murder Bolton, providing the contact with screenshots of Bolton’s work address and asserting that he would require video documentation of the murder.

By January 2022, Poursafi was growing restless, reportedly bemoaning to his U.S. contact that the murder had not been completed by the two-year anniversary of Soleimani’s death.

Poursafi then provided his contact with details about Bolton’s schedule that “do not appear to have been publicly available,” according to court documents. He told the U.S.-based individual they would be able to “finish the job” since he believed Bolton’s home did not have a security presence.

“Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, through the defendant, tried to hatch a brazen plot: assassinate a former U.S. official on U.S. soil in retaliation for U.S. actions,” said U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves. “Iran and other hostile governments should understand that the U.S. Attorney’s Office and our law enforcement partners will do everything in our power to thwart their violent plots and bring those responsible to justice.”

In addition to the plot to murder Bolton, Poursafi reportedly told his informant about a second “job” — worth $1 million — that had already had surveillance completed by someone “working on behalf of the IRGC-QF,” the report said.

Charges levied against Poursafi include using interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire and providing and attempting to provide material support to a transnational murder plot. The charges carry maximum sentences of 10 and 15 years, respectively, as well as fines.

“An attempted assassination of a former U.S. Government official on U.S. soil is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” the FBI’s Assistant Director in Charge Steven M. D’Antuono said in a release.

“The FBI will continue to identify and disrupt any efforts by Iran or any hostile government seeking to bring harm or death to U.S. persons at home or abroad. This should serve as a warning to any others attempting to do the same.”

Russia and Ukraine are each casting blame for the prison’s destruction, meanwhile, with Moscow alleging that Ukrainian forces used U.S.-made ordnance—a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS—to bring the building down, according to the Washington Post.

In a video posted to Russian news site TVZVEZDA, Seagal, who is identified as a special representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation for Humanitarian Relations between Russia and the U.S., appears to serve as a spokesperson against Ukraine’s use of HIMARS.

“It definitely looks like a rocket,” Seagal is reported to have said. “If you look at the burning and other details, of course it’s not a bomb. Not to mention the fact that Russia really has a lot of artifacts from HIMARS. This is where HIMARS hit, 50 people were killed, another 70 were injured.”

According to the Russian site, Seagal added a conspiracy angle by suggesting that HIMARS was used by Ukrainian troops because the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wanted to silence a “Nazi” being held at the prison.

“The interesting thing is that one of the killed Nazis is a Nazi who just started talking a lot about Zelensky,” Seagal added, “and that Zelensky is responsible for the orders about torture and other atrocities that violate not only the Geneva War Convention, but are also crimes against humanity.”

The Post, however, indicated that the images from the attack on Olenivka prison are not consistent with HIMARS.

“The experts could not definitively say what caused the damage, but they pointed to a lack of shrapnel marks and craters and only minimal damage to internal walls in the available visuals of the aftermath,” the Post reported. “Instead, there were visible signs of an intense fire, which is at odds with damage caused by the most common HIMARS warhead.”

TVZVEZDA reported that Seagal was among a number of representatives to visit the prison.

“Media representatives from France, Italy, Germany, Serbia, Nicaragua, North Korea got acquainted with the evidence that the strike was carried out by Ukrainian militants and from HIMARS, and also saw with their own eyes all the destruction at the site of this barbaric shelling,” the news site reported.

Open-source intelligence analyst Oliver Alexander weighed in on the veracity of the Seagal footage and indicated its authenticity.

Imagery of the prison from BBC appears to match elements of Seagal’s surroundings as he gave his statement. The same imagery was also matched with a scene in which the action star is positioned on a bench with blast artifacts, footage taken two weeks after the area was originally photographed, Alexander suggested on Twitter.

“[That’s] not how I would expect this ‘smoking gun’ evidence to be handled if Russia, 1. believed it was actual evidence and 2. had any intention of letting UN investigators to the site,” Alexander told Military Times.

Odessa Journal also verified the visit.

Seagal is known for his pro-Russian stature. In particular, he showed strong support for Putin’s plan regarding the annexation of Crimea. In 2016, the actor was given Russian citizenship.

“What they’re trying to do is to take a look at it today and make sure that all the decision-making processes make sense in how the requests come through,” National Guard Chief Gen. Daniel Hokanson told Military Times in an exclusive interview during a trip to Arkansas on Monday.

It’s one aspect of a broader analysis that Air Force Maj. Gen. Sherri McCandless, commanding general of the D.C. Guard, is leading to chart the organization’s future, Hokanson said.

Because D.C. lacks statehood, its mayor doesn’t have the same legal leeway that a governor does to activate the local Guard. Instead, federal law dictates that the president, not the mayor, is the top civilian in charge of the District’s guardsmen.

When D.C.’s mayor asks to use those airmen and soldiers for local support under state active duty orders, the request must go through the Army secretary and then to the defense secretary for approval. If officials want to pursue a more fundamental shift, he added, it may need Congress to sign off.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth is “very involved” in discussions about potentially updating the process, Hokanson said.

In considering a new way of calling up the D.C. Guard, Hokanson stressed that the military wants to make the right move rather than a hasty one.

“I’d like to say it’s going to be shorter-term, in the next six months, but it could go on longer than that depending on how much has to be changed,” he said of a potential decision.

A spokesperson for Wormuth declined to comment on the record Tuesday. The D.C. National Guard referred questions to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office did not answer an email seeking comment.

“The hallmark of our military professionalism has always been the drive for constant assessment and improvement,” a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday. “As a learning organization, DoD continues to review lessons learned from responding to requests for support in D.C. and the broader National Capital Region, and how to improve DoD’s response to such requests in the future. In this context, the Department is reviewing how the D.C. National Guard is employed.”

Letting the top politician in the District make the call on whether to bring in local troops would require congressional intervention. Choosing a different set of military offices to route a request through, such as the Air Force District of Washington headquarters, may not.

In July, House lawmakers approved a measure from D.C. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton that would extend Guard command authority to the District’s chief executive. The amendment to the annual defense policy bill passed 218-209 but could be scrapped in the final compromise version of the bill, as it was last year.

The unorthodox relationship between the Pentagon, the D.C. government and the 2,700 or so soldiers and airmen under its control has become a point of contention in recent years.

The deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, threw that tension into stark relief.

Hundreds of former President Donald Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol building, hoping to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election that Trump lost.

Hours after the melee began, National Guard troops were eventually allowed to secure Capitol Hill. Seven people died during or shortly afterward in connection with the day’s events. What delayed the D.C. Guard’s response is now a key focus of a congressional panel investigating the circumstances surrounding the riot.

Most recently, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Aug. 5 denied Bowser’s plea for 150 Guardsmen to indefinitely support the District as it tries to provide humanitarian support for thousands of undocumented migrants that Texas and Arizona’s governors have bussed to the capital from the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We have determined providing this support would negatively impact the readiness of the DCNG and have negative effects on the organization and members. We understand SAMU First Response has received grant funding through FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program, and has indicated that sufficient EFSP funds exist at this point to provide migrant assistance,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

Hokanson, who is not part of the chain of command that approves the city’s Guard deployments, noted that the D.C. Guard has a particularly busy training schedule because of the Washington region’s extra security needs.

District officials work closely with the Army secretary to decide whether it’s a good time or a worthwhile mission to take troops away from those regular duties, Hokanson said.

“The reason the Guard exists is to fight our nation’s wars,” the Army four-star said. “At the end of the day, we have to be prepared and ready to do that.”

Are you worried about having to wear a suit, fetch coffee and make copies in your first job post-graduation?

U.S. Army Recruiting Command would like you to consider an alternative: become a soldier.

Its newest ad, “This Instead,” says that unlike civilians who enter the job market fresh out of college, you won’t be the bottom rung on the totem pole. You’ll be a leader.

Because everyone knows that, just out of Officer Candidate School, Army 2nd lieutenants are in charge of everything. And they are most certainly not the butt of any jokes about rank entitlement and poor land navigation skills.

This video is part of the Army’s latest recruiting campaign: “Decide to Lead.” The ad’s closing line suggests soldiers can “skip entry level.”

It follows the branch’s latest line of recruitment pushes designed to make civilian life look terrible in comparison to military life. The last batch, “Know Your Army,” centered on the so-called benefits of being in the military, including pension, paid parental leave, early retirement, and homebuying.

While it is true that officers are technically in leadership roles placed higher in the hierarchy of rank structure than enlisted troops, all soldiers must earn their stripes with grunt work, trust, and team building — just like any corporate job in America.

Even though the Army might do work to inflate newly minted officers’ egos during OCS, soldiers must also contend with the inability to choose where in the world they live, what jobs they have, or if the housing where they reside is livable or has wall-to-wall black mold. Even coffee-fetching civilians never have to worry about that.

In a House Armed Services Committee panel held July 19, Army leadership revealed it will likely be at least 7,000 soldiers short of its staffing goal at the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30.

While retention is high at 57,000, about 3,000 more soldiers reenlisted than than the expected 54,000, the Army’s number issues lie with recruiting.

“We are examining a wide range of additional steps we could take in the short and longer term to recruit more soldiers into the Army without lowering standards or sacrificing quality,” said Army Secretary Christine Wormuth in a previous statement to Army Times.

El Paso County Sheriff’s Deputy Andrew Peery, 39, was wounded Sunday after he arrived with two other law enforcement officers to investigate a report of a shooting at the home in the community of Security-Widefield near Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs police said in a statement.

John Paz, 33, fired at the officers, hitting Peery, and another sheriff’s deputy returned fire, police said.

Officers found the body of the woman in the home’s front yard, police said. Paz died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, police added.

Paz worked at the Air Force Academy’s airfield in the 94th Flying Training Squadron, which conducts glider training for cadets. He had been an aviation resource management technician there since December, school spokesperson Dean J. Miller said.

“Our condolences go out to all the friends and family affected by Sunday’s incident,” Miller said.

Colorado Springs police, who are investigating the shooting, believe Paz also killed the woman. Her connection to Paz was still being investigated, spokesperson Jason Newton said.

People lined up on Sunday to honor Peery as a hearse carrying his remains drove from a hospital to the coroner’s office.

Gov. Jared Polis also expressed sympathy to the family of Peery, who was a decorated member of the sheriff’s department’s SWAT team.

“My thoughts and condolences are with the family and friends of Deputy Peery and all our neighbors in law enforcement who put their lives at risk to serve others,” he said.

The Pentagon hasn’t found any defective ejection seat parts on its F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, or on other potentially affected combat and training aircraft, during widespread checks that began in July, a spokesperson for seat manufacturer Martin-Baker told Air Force Times on Sunday.

F-35s across the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have started returning to flight after three weeks of an effort to ensure the safety of America’s premier fighter jet, but U.S. military officials aren’t divulging many details as inspections progress. Several other fleets may be carrying the faulty seat component as well.

At issue is the seat’s part called the cartridge, which contains magnesium powder that ignites to shoot an aviator out of the cockpit when they trigger an escape.

Martin-Baker spokesperson Steve Roberts confirmed that as of Aug. 5, only one faulty seat cartridge has turned up during inspections of the F-35 fleet — the one that first prompted concerns when it was discovered at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, in April. Martin-Baker discovered another pair of bad cartridges in its own inventory that same month, bringing the total found to three.

The company has data that suggests the cartridge problem may be limited to the F-35, Roberts said in July.

“Outside the F-35, not a single anomaly has been discovered worldwide as a result of the forensic investigation, which continues at pace,” he said.

A routine inspection at Hill turned up an F-35 cartridge that was loose and missing its explosive charge, Air Force Times previously reported. Maintainers checked a limited number of other aircraft to see whether the discovery was an isolated incident and decided the jets could return to flight.

Sometime in the months that followed, Martin-Baker conducted a quality-assurance check and found that its production line was turning out defective cartridges. It’s unclear when the company realized the problem, or when it alerted its military customers.

On July 19, the Pentagon’s F-35 Joint Program Office ordered workers to inspect all ejection seats within 90 days. That came three months after Hill found the first faulty cartridge, during which pilots could have run into the issue during an in-flight emergency.

Military and company officials note that the defect only affects aircraft with cartridges from certain production batches, but have declined to answer how many cartridges were built as part of those lots or the number of aircraft on which they were installed.

The situation picked up steam as it entered the public eye in the weeks that followed.

The Navy said it began shipping replacement parts to its own maintenance centers with planes that could be affected by the problem on July 24, two days before it went public with the situation in a July 26 press release.

The release disclosed that a cartridge problem affected some Navy fixed-wing aircraft — the F/A-18B/C/D Hornet and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter jets, E/A-18G Growler electronic attack plane, and T-45 Goshawk and F-5 Tiger II trainers.

But the sea service didn’t mention the Marine Corps F-35B or the Navy F-35C variants, despite finishing F-35C inspections on July 26, the same day as it issued its press release.

The next day, Breaking Defense first reported that the Navy had grounded an undisclosed number of affected planes for inspections, not including F-35s.

Then, after news reports that the entire Joint Strike Fighter enterprise was under scrutiny, the Navy confirmed it was done checking C-models.

Rather than stretch inspections over a 90-day span, the Navy and Marine Corps checked each plane before their next flight. Possibly defective cartridges on the F-35Cs were replaced, Breaking Defense reported.

“All potentially affected F-35Cs have been returned to operational status,” Navy spokesperson Cmdr. Zachary Harrell told Air Force Times Friday.

Marine Corps spokesperson Maj. Jay Hernandez said in an emailed statement on Friday that the service had inspected all ejection seat cartridges “even earlier in the maintenance cycle than recommended” by Martin-Baker.

“Over 90 percent of the inspections on Marine Corps ejection seat cartridge actuating devices are now complete,” Hernandez said. That figure has stayed the same since at least July 29.

The Navy said no one has died or been injured as a result; the Air Force has stressed its groundings are a precaution to get ahead of any fatalities.

On Monday, Air Combat Command spokesperson Alexi Worley said maintainers were making “good progress” on F-35A inspections but declined to answer how many jets had been checked or returned to flight.

ACC oversees most of the Air Force’s more than 300 F-35s and grounded its fleet July 29 to speed up its seat checks. Each fighter can resume normal flying as it passes inspection.

“The stand-down of aircraft will continue through the weekend, and a determination to safely resume normal operations is expected to be made early next week, pending analysis of the inspection data,” Worley told Air Force Times on July 29.

She did not provide an update by press time Friday.

Air Education and Training Command, the Air Force organization that oversees F-35s used at pilot training squadrons in Arizona and Florida, also ordered the more than 100 Lightning IIs it owns to stand down on July 29 to expedite inspections.

“A portion of the AETC F-35 fleet has been inspected and cleared for flight, with inspections continuing on the remaining aircraft,” the command said Tuesday. “Our ability to execute the highest priority missions supporting national defense are not impacted.”

Other Air Force organizations that fly the F-35A overseas indicated their fleets are conducting missions but would not say whether the cartridge problem was discovered and resolved on any airframes.

All F-35As in Europe have resumed normal operations, U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Force Africa said in a Monday email to Defense News. Pacific Air Forces confirmed to Air Force Times Thursday that it has continued to fly its aircraft after wrapping up inspections.

At least one international F-35 partner, Israel, has paused the jet’s operations to search for problems as well. Other nations that are currently part of or plan to join the F-35 program include Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Singapore, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Lockheed Martin plans to build more than 3,000 F-35s for militaries around the globe. More than 800 planes have been delivered so far over the past 15 years, over half of which belong to the U.S. More than 1,700 pilots fly the F-35 from 26 bases and 10 ships globally.

In April, the Government Accountability Office reported it will cost more than $1.7 trillion for the Pentagon to buy, operate and maintain the American jets.

Neither Martin-Baker nor the F-35 Joint Program Office provided an update on how inspections are progressing by press time Friday.

Concerns about defective cartridges have also affected the Air Force’s training enterprise.

Air Force Times first reported that Air Education and Training Command halted flights of two potentially impacted trainer fleets, the T-6A Texan IIs and T-38C Talons, on July 27.

T-6 turboprop planes are used to teach basic flight skills, while the T-38 prepares pilots to fly fighter and bomber aircraft.

The next day, the service said it would keep nearly 300 airframes across the T-6 and T-38 fleets on the ground while it double-checked their cartridges. That comprised about 40% of the T-38 fleet and 15% of the T-6 fleet, including planes at each undergraduate pilot training base and Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.

The remaining airframes continued business as usual, and AETC said more trainers have since returned to the sky.

“Members of the flying training wings continue to produce sorties every day with operational tempo increasing as the affected aircraft progress through the ejection seat inspection process and are cleared for flying,” AETC told Defense News on Tuesday.

However, AETC would not say how many of its grounded trainers had cleared inspections and returned to the sky, nor how many remained to be inspected. Like their counterparts used in combat operations, it’s unclear if any faulty cartridges have been found on the trainers so far.

The issue may also affect European airframes like the Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Rafale and aircraft flown by Turkey and South Korea, which use the same seat.

The U.K. Royal Air Force stopped “non-essential” flights for its Red Arrows jets and Typhoon warplanes over safety concerns with its ejection seats, the Daily Mail reported. NATO has not responded to questions on how the ejection seat issue is affecting its aircraft.

WMAZ-TV reports that an F-15 Eagle from Robins Air Force Base flew over a Little League baseball tournament in Warner Robins on Wednesday.

Alisha Brown, who lives in nearby Bonaire, said the plane made an unusually loud and sharp noise, which her husband described as “like a bomb.”

Brown, who said she’s from a military family, said she’s hiring an inspector to look for damage to her roof after a vinyl ceiling on her porch bulged. Several other Bonaire homeowners sent pictures showing insulation hanging out of a ceiling’s edge, cracks in brick, and fallen exterior vinyl strips.

Robins Air Force Base spokesperson Roland Leach said the flight was conducted at an approved altitude above 1,000 feet and did not break the speed of sound, which would produce a sonic boom. Some residents speculated the noise they heard was a sonic boom.

Other residents also said the flyover seemed louder and lower than usual and shook their homes.

Air Force officials said people who believed their homes were damaged could file complaints and that the Air Force would investigate them for possible reimbursement.

Dezwaan, an active duty member of the 775th Civil Engineer Squadron at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, most recently served as his squadron’s noncommissioned officer in charge of EOD equipment, the Air Force said Thursday.

He is accused of several violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including: dereliction of duty; destroying military property; reckless endangerment; unauthorized access of a government computer; obtaining classified information; and aggravated assault.

CNN previously reported a perpetrator set up military-grade explosives more powerful than a hand grenade near ammunition storage and showers at Green Village, a small American outpost in northern Syria. Blasts injured four service members, who were treated for traumatic brain injuries and returned to work later in April.

About 900 U.S. personnel remain in Syria to advise and assist the Syrian Democratic Forces fighting government troops in the country’s civil war.

The Air Force did not answer how long Dezwaan was deployed to Syria at the time of the attack. He was arrested in the U.S. on June 16 and placed in pretrial confinement. A Hill spokesperson declined to say where the suspect is being held.

Dezwaan is scheduled to appear at an Article 32 hearing at Hill on Aug. 23, where a military judge will decide whether evidence is sufficient to move on to a court-martial. The proceeding is the military justice system’s equivalent of a preliminary hearing ahead of trial in civilian court.

Dezwaan enlisted in the Air Force in October 2007, two years after graduating from high school in western Michigan, according to a 2010 article in the Holland Sentinel.

While stationed at Kadena Air Base, Japan, in 2010, Dezwaan received the Air Force Combat Action Medal in recognition of his deployment with the Marine Corps to Afghanistan’s Helmand province the previous year.

He told the Holland Sentinel he received the medal for a mission in which he helped clear a route between Forward Operating Bases Delaram and Golestan in southern Afghanistan.

“Twelve hours into the route clearance, we came to what is called Buji Bast Pass. This is the entrance into the Black Pass,” Dezwaan said in the question-and-answer article. “The area is known for frequent and deadly insurgent activity.”

But the route between the two mountains is the only way to get between the two bases, so sweepers walked ahead of the convoy with metal detectors to find any IEDs.

“Halfway through Buji Bast Pass, my vehicle was struck by an IED blast which detonated right under the front right tire. The 40-pound blast completely immobilized the vehicle,” Dezwaan said.

A 2010 Air Force press release said he wasn’t sure what had happened, but the explosion caused Dezwaan to hit his head.

“We experienced only minor injuries, ranging from some bruising to a cut and busted-open lip,” he told the Holland Sentinel.

The convoy waited for a recovery team to arrive about 24 hours later. After an hour, though, the troops came under indirect mortar fire and gunshots from the mountains above them.

“We returned fire, making the terrorists withdraw,” Dezwaan said. “When our recovery assets came, the supporting EOD team’s vehicle was struck by an IED, also 40 pounds of bulk homemade explosives, approximately 75 meters away from the site of our disabled vehicle.”

That vehicle was immobilized as well.

“They linked up with our convoy to continue the mission as we waited for more recovery assets,” he added.

Dezwaan received several other military medals, including the Joint Service Achievement Medal for “outstanding achievement or meritorious service,” according to the Air Force, plus seven other achievement and commendation medals from the Army, Navy and Air Force.

It’s unclear if the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division are looking into any other suspects.

“Airmen who have charges preferred against them are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty,” Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said Thursday.

In the case of some magnet fishers who cleared 86 rockets, a tank tracer round, and .50 caliber ammo belts from a river on Fort Stewart, the toll was a number of fines by Fort Stewart Conservation Law Enforcement.

The group, led by treasure hunter Bryce Nachtwey, called the bomb squad after their magnet fishing dredged up the ammunition and 86 rockets in a Delta Airlines duffel bag, saying they were just trying to do the right thing.

The exchange played out on Nachtwey’s YouTube channel: Outdoors Weekly.

A Fort Stewart Military Police officer called to the scene noted that he had never seen something like this, and needed to check in with his command to see what next steps to take. However, upon arrival, the federal game warden with Fort Stewart Conservation Law Enforcement ticketed them for magnet fishing off the Fort Stewart bridge.

“I didn’t see any signs,” said one of Nachwey’s teammates.

“You’re all gettin’ tickets, you can come to court and talk to a judge, okay?” the warden said. “The reason magnet fishing is not allowed is because of exactly what y’all got right there. You don’t know what’s going to blow up and not blow up.”

The alternative to tickets would be to go to jail, he added.

Nachtwey said that he and his team had called the DNR ahead of time, which purportedly said magnet fishing is legal as long as it’s in a “green zone.”

However, the warden stated that red (off-limit) and green (acceptable) zones don’t apply in this scenario because the group was on Fort Stewart property. Because the base is owned by the Federal Government, the Department of Natural Resources has no authority to issue such permission.

The warden issued three tickets each to Nachwey and his two compatriots — two $130 tickets and one $80 ticket — for magnet fishing at Fort Stewart, entering a closed area and not having Fort Stewart permits.

The trio’s federal court date is Sept. 9, 2022.

(Correction: An earlier version of this story listed the game warden’s employer as the Georgia Department of Natural Resources)

Healy served as Scobee’s deputy for about a year before becoming head of the Reserve. He joined the Air Force in 1989 and pursued a career as a transport jet pilot and, later, in force planning.

“I’m inclined to a sense of urgency,” Healy said, quoting Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown’s marquee initiative. “‘Accelerate change or lose’ was music to my ears.”

The Air Force Reserve includes about 66,000 troops and 4,000 civilian employees across three numbered air forces, 33 flying wings and one space wing. Three-quarters of reservists work part-time in addition to their civilian lives.

Healy plans to continue updating the Reserve’s inventory while making sure airmen have the resources to do the “basic blocking and tackling” for their everyday jobs.

He also pledged to ramp up initiatives implemented over the past year designed to help airmen and their families at the wing level.

Healy will lead the Air Force Reserve through a recruiting crunch, discussions of whether and how to create a separate Space Force counterpart, efforts to maintain and replace aging aircraft, and a hectic slate of missions to extinguish U.S. wildfires and monitor hurricanes.

In June, Air Force Reserve Command told Congress it may need to cut operations short at the end of fiscal 2022 because it doesn’t have the money for about 15% of its expected missions.

“These shortfalls could result in some AFRC units facing ‘stop-flying’ dates,” the Reserve said in written testimony. “Significant stoppages to flying hour programs will have pernicious effects on readiness by reducing pilot absorption, deferring maintenance, and delaying aircrew currency training.”

In recent years, air reservists have bolstered operations across multiple crises at home and abroad.

“Three days into the job, Tyndall got wiped off the face of the map,” Scobee said of the Florida Air Force base that was directly hit by a Category 5 hurricane in 2018.

Nearly 650 Air Force reservists helped staff health care facilities overwhelmed by coronavirus patients earlier in the pandemic. And last summer, the Reserve prepared 80 aircrews and 36 aircraft in under 72 hours during Operation Allies Refuge, the frantic effort to evacuate at-risk Afghans and U.S. civilians from Kabul after the Taliban retook power. They supported nearly 40 evacuation missions and 13,000 Afghans starting new lives in the United States.

Service leaders praised the Reserve’s efforts in the face of uncertain funding and its growing list of challenging missions.

“You set up the New England Patriots on a high school team’s budget,” Healy told Scobee. “I have every confidence in the team we have set forth.”

Movies often have warnings and mandatory disclosures during their previews — a film’s official rating from the Motion Picture Association, anti-piracy warnings and more.

A group of academics and film industry professionals want to add a new disclosure: whether a movie or show received production support from the Defense Department, as more than 2,500 productions have since the military established a Hollywood liaison office in the late 1940s.

The list is extensive, including both Top Gun films and a host of other blockbuster films.

It’s the subject of a new documentary, Theaters of War, directed and narrated by University of Georgia communication studies professor Roger Stahl.

The idea behind the DoD’s production support program is simple: Hollywood producers who want to make a movie or show portraying the military can get access to DoD gear, vehicles, personnel and more if they are willing to turn over a copy of their script for approval.

Sometimes filmmakers make edits to their scripts or films to receive Pentagon support, which can exponentially lower filming costs. And some films that can’t get approval never get made.

The documentary leans heavily on interviews with two avowedly anti-war journalists — Tom Secker and Matt Alford — who have obtained countless documents about the program over the years via the Freedom of Information Act, as well as other Hollywood figures like Oliver Stone.

Secker and Alford’s crowning discovery is a database tracking production assistance requests, allowing for unprecedented systemic understanding of the program.

Stahl describes a list of “showstoppers” that can keep a project from receiving military support, unless they’re handled with extreme care. These include friendly fire incidents, fragging of officers, American war crimes, military sexual assault, suicide and more.

All the interviewees agree that this system amounts to a silent propaganda push that lets the military influence the way it’s depicted on screen.

But is it really censorship or propaganda, and do Americans even care? Whether the Pentagon production support program amounts to censorship or propaganda depends on the beholder.

I described the program’s early years as soft censorship in my thesis. That was mostly because, in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the Korean War, there weren’t private-sector options for filmmakers to obtain the equipment and vehicles they needed. While many think the military shouldn’t be forced to help unfavorable productions, the impact on that era’s war movies was real.

Thus, the military’s support decision was often life-or-death for a project, and not even John Wayne was immune to the Marine Corps denying cooperation on a proposed film in 1954.

“Giveaway Hill” never made it onto the silver screen because of the Corps’ offense with “the bloody carnage depicted in many areas of the script” and “the calling of fires on own troops by a Marine battalion commander,” among other issues.

Many cut out “objectionable” scenes to keep the Pentagon’s support flowing, effectively cleansing early Cold War-era war movies of darker topics, such as American war crimes, racism in the ranks and more.

But in the decades since, projects with big enough budgets have been able to spend their way out of that bind.

Theaters of War describes how one film, “Thirteen Days” from 2000, had to find fighters and air bases in the Philippines and borrow a destroyer from a museum to overcome the Pentagon’s limited willingness to support a movie about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Even if it’s not censorship — or propaganda — Stahl and Theaters of War just want you to decide for yourself. And that’s a start.

Theaters of War is available for streaming on Vimeo for $4.99.

About one-third of eligible lieutenant colonels — 555 of nearly 1,800 — were tapped to pin on the full bird in the latest selection round, according to Air Force Personnel Center data released July 27.

The vast majority of those earned a promotion at 22 years of military service and three years in grade, known as on-time or “in-the-zone” selection. Around half of the lieutenant colonels up for an in-the-zone promotion received one — almost exactly the same as in 2021, the Air Force said.

In contrast, just 40 of the 840 lieutenant colonels who tried to move up one year later than their peers, known as “above-the-zone” promotions, were chosen to become colonels. That amounts to less than 5% of selectees, compared to nearly 7% last year.

Promotion statistics are slightly higher than in 2020, the last year of a “below-the-zone” process that let airmen advance before a certain number of years in service or in grade. Officials ended below-the-zone promotions to give airmen more time to develop their skills at a particular rank instead of fast-tracking promising candidates.

The competition to make colonel was held in the spring, about three months early, to better match up with when colonels receive job assignments, said Col. Scott Arcuri, head of the Air Force’s selection board secretariat, in an August 2021 press release.

“Previously, the design of our promotion system selected the best and fully qualified officers to the next higher grade, agnostic of requirements,” Air Force spokesperson Tech. Sgt. Deana Heitzman said. “Increasing developmental categories allows the Air Force to promote the best and fully qualified … to meet requirements better.”

That means the service can promote as many people as it needs in a particular career field, independent of staffing in other jobs. Its categories span air operations and special warfare; nuclear and missile operations; information warfare; combat support and force modernization.

A previous category for space-related jobs disappeared once the Space Force began handling its own promotions.

This is the first round of promotions that has considered prospective colonels in the newest category, dubbed “cross-functional operations” or “LAF-X,” that was created in July 2021.

“The new category consists primarily of foreign area officers who now have their own Air Force specialty code,” Arcuri said. “LAF-X consists of only majors and above.”

Foreign area officers become specialists in a particular country and region of the world, through studying history, politics and culture, language immersion and by living abroad.

Twelve of nearly 40 airmen who were considered for promotion under the new category, either on or behind schedule, were picked to become colonels.

Here’s how colonel selection played out in the other career fields:

• Air operations and special warfare
• • 2022: 56.7% in the zone (287 of 506 considered); 4.3% above the zone (15 of 351 considered)
  • 2021: 56.1% in the zone (277 of 494 considered); 6.6% above the zone (20 of 301 considered)
• Nuclear and missile operations
• • 2022: 58.8% IPZ (10 of 17); 0 of 24 chosen APZ
  • 2021: 53.3% IPZ (8 of 15); 4.2% APZ (1 of 24)
• Information warfare
• • 2022: 48.8% IPZ (62 of 127); 4.6% APZ (8 of 173)
  • 2021: 48.3% IPZ (70 of 145); 6.8% APZ (10 of 147)
• Combat support
• • 2022: 55.6% IPZ (84 of 151); 4.2% APZ (7 of 167)
  • 2021: 55.9% IPZ (104 of 186); 6.1% APZ (8 of 131)
• Force modernization
• • 2022: 59.1% IPZ (55 of 93); 6.9% (6 of 87)
  • 2021: 58.5% IPZ (55 of 94); 9.6% APZ (7 of 73)

“I guess 299BSB is broke as hell, and we still went to NTC,” wrote user u/willsugmar, who shared a picture of a meager biscuit, sad scrambled eggs, and a pathetic puddle of gravy.

Many commenters likened the meal to prison food.

“In prison or the DFAC?” asked user diopsideINcalcite. “Because DFAC can get rough when you’re fighting over French toast. Dudes get shanked routinely.”

Some went so far with the joke as to discuss all the soldiers they’ve had to shank in order to get a decent meal.

Complaints about the food at installation dining halls across the Defense Department are not new. And military officials don’t track the effectiveness of their ability to feed service members, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

The Defense Department withholds money from troops’ pay to provide on-post meals, three times a day. The quality of those meals, however, have left a bad taste in service members’ mouths.

“After many broken promises the system is still largely the same, with evidence showing that service members on meal cards are eating less than half the meals they are entitled to and for which they are charged,” Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, said in a statement to Military Times.

Reviews of base dining facilities on Yelp also paint a dire picture.

As for the dismal breakfast, “Convicts in Federal prison eat better then that,” wrote user Florida_man727.

Those are small, though important, changes in how they can better combat a growing list of nasty threats that do not always involve bullets and missiles.

But what will really change their work is a combined threat review, new strategy and increased funding to push CBRN to the forefront of defense thinking.

The larger “pivot” and “transformation” that one senior defense official signaled at a conference devoted to the trade of defeating such threats, is a comprehensive posture review, increased funding across multiple years and a new way to integrate CBRN defense into everything troops do.

With that new prioritization and funding, officials hope CBRN gear and strategy seep into the total force.

Adding another layer of data mining and machine learning will help frontline CBRN better face currently unknown dangers that threaten to overwhelm defense, civilian and emergency response in ways that could exceed the COVID-19 pandemic.

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense programs Deborah Rosenblum laid out the big picture in her remarks on July 28, the second day of the annual National Defense Industrial Association’s CBRN conference here in Baltimore, Maryland.

“We are not going to figure it out as we go,” Rosenblum said. “We need a radical transformation.”

Rosenblum characterized the growing chemical and biological threat as “vastly more difficult” and “rapidly changing.”

Multiple speakers throughout the two-day event hammered away that the old days of “one bug, one drug” are gone. That is the methodology that existed for decades with threats such as smallpox or anthrax, both deadly viruses that do have existing vaccinations.

While COVID-19 came from human-animal contact, current and future threats may be designed by adversaries such as Russia, China, North Korea, Iran or non-state actors specifically to confound existing identification tools. That masks who made it, what it is and how to treat it.

And those are not casual references. The 2022 State Department Report on Adherence and Compliance for arms control, including chemical and bioweapons programs, made specific notes as to these adversaries.

“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) continued to engage in activities with dual-use applications, which raise concerns regarding its compliance with Article I of the BWC,” the report read.

The bulk of the State Department report regarding alleged weapons programs, specifically dual-use ones, includes estimated activity and fears of malign uses of biological and chemical technology due to incomplete, inaccurate, or sometimes misleading information.

The United States also has its own biodefense and biological technology programs, which could themselves be switched to “dual-use.” The United States also pursued and created vast stores of chemical weapons and biological agents before committing to end offensive bioweapons programs and joining the Chemical Weapons Convention, along with most other states in the world.

Russia maintained a robust biological and chemical weapons infrastructure while part of the Soviet Union. Despite public denial of such programs, Russian officials admitted in the early 1990s that its bioweapons program continued into the late days of the Cold War.

Media reports have also pointed to multiple political assassinations that the Kremlin, at the behest of Russian President Vladmir Putin, conducted using radiological elements and the fourth-generation nerve agent Novichok.

Then there’s North Korea, which has had a bioweapons capability since the 1960s, according to the State Department report.

“North Korea probably has the capability to produce sufficient quantities of biological agents for military purposes upon leadership demand,” the report stated.

However, outside experts, such as those with the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists, note that depictions of North Korean military capabilities want for tangible evidence. The closed-border country’s leadership could be touting strong bioweapons programs simply as a strategic bluff.

“One must be prudent when discussing North Korea, and not jump to conclusions or ascribe a threatening meaning to any sliver of information that manages to emerge, particularly when it emerges in a time of crisis,” wrote Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, then an associate professor studying biodefense at George Mason University, in a 2017 article on the Bulletin.

A 2020 report by the thinktank Stimson drew a similar conclusion. The Stimson report noted that the U.S. government has made these claims for years without a clear definition of a bioweapons program.

“However, based on a definition by United Nations (UN) inspectors investigating Iraq’s BW activities, probably the most that can be said in the case of North Korea is that it may have or have had a BW program,” the Stimson report stated.

Regardless, biological and chemical threats still present a challenge for the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a memo in late 2021 calling for a Biodefense Posture Review both for naturally occurring and manufactured biological threats.

That review kicked off in January and is expected to take about a year, according to Rosenblum, the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs.

Ian Watson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for chemical, biological defense, said in a separate panel in Baltimore that the posture review will “outline critical aspects of the threat.” The move will raise the profile of CBRN in the national defense strategy, concepts of operations and operation plans across the force, he added.

“Early warning is critical,” Watson said. That is because the use of biological or chemical attacks could preclude the start of armed conflict to prepare the battlespace.

But already, the Pentagon bumped up spending on chemical and biological defense with $300 million more in the currently proposed budget and a total of $1.2 billion additional funding over the next five years of budgeting.

Major moves that Rosenblum is pushing include adding CBRN sensors on most existing tactical platforms, as well as future platforms, from manned to unmanned, troop carriers to individual drones.

The Pentagon also needs to use advanced algorithms and technical solutions to do better satellite and thermal imaging that could spot and track the spread of chemical weapons releases.

A variety of entities across the Defense Department are developing modern vaccines that can be used before exposure as a protective measure and afterward as a treatment.

That same vaccine research is also solving the “one bug, one drug” problem by building vaccines that address a family of viruses or even attack the symptom, such as upper respiratory problems, which exist across several viruses.

A major initiative comes down to the lowest level — the individual soldier, sailor, airman or Marine. And that is through a program that seeks to have detection capabilities on wearable devices.

The Pentagon tried this before, with old chemical detection strips that often got contaminated by other debris. They also built a white-faced watch-like device to detect exposure called the DT236. The problem with that device was that it had to be sent to a lab for analysis.

That meant a soldier in the field unsure if they had been exposed was waiting days or longer to find out.

But the new wearables, such as commercially available smartwatches with certain sensors, could provide real time updates to chemical and bioweapons exposure.

“With these efforts, every warfighter can be a chemical or biological sensor themselves,” Rosenblum said.

And while all those efforts are necessary for new threats, a new strategy will drive better protection, she said.

“We can have the best material in the world, but if culture and mindset are not integrated…it’s going to sit on the side,” Rosenblum added.

Past practices did not always allow CBRN experts to know what they were dealing with, at what concentration and at what scale. That often meant pulling entire units out or cordoning off swaths of the battlespace.

Those measures are great for adversaries because it reduces troops in the fight and restricts the battlefield.

But, if leaders can take a more tailored approach to how they prepare for such attacks and react to them when they occur, they can be more effective on the battlefield, experts said.

Southern District of Ohio Judge Matthew McFarland’s July 27 decision to certify the case, Doster v. Kendall, as a class-wide complaint temporarily protects at least 100 airmen and guardians who are part of ongoing lawsuits contesting the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate, and more than 9,000 others affected by the policy, according to Siri & Glimstad, a law firm representing the plaintiffs.

The group now includes anyone in the active duty Air Force and Space Force, Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard, U.S. Air Force Academy and Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps who have asked for a religious exemption to the vaccine since Sept. 1, 2021, showed a sincere religious belief opposing the jab, and whose requests were denied or are not yet settled.

“Members who submitted requests for religious accommodation may cancel or amend previous voluntary retirement or separation requests, or requests to transfer to the Air Force Reserve,” McFarland wrote.

The Air Force and Space Force must also accept unvaccinated people who otherwise qualify to join the military, he added.

This marks the second time a federal court has barred a branch of the military from separating members for failing to comply with the Pentagon’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The Navy became the first to halt that practice in March, when a judge granted class-action status in a case representing Navy SEALs who refused the shots on religious grounds.

Department of the Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek confirmed July 28 that the department, which includes the Air Force and Space Force, will comply with the order.

As of July 11, the Air Force had already kicked out more than 830 airmen and guardians who refused vaccination, according to its most recent data.

The number of exemptions sought has fluctuated over the last several months as some people decided to get the shots or leave the service instead of seeking accommodation. As of July 12, the Air Force had denied about 6,800 initial religious waiver requests and 3,600 appeals, and has not ruled on nearly 3,500 more cases.

In contrast, 135 airmen and guardians have secured religious exemptions so far.

That included 106 in the active duty Air Force, three in the active duty Space Force, 22 in the Air Force Reserve and four in the Air National Guard, according to court documents in Doster v. Kendall. The Air Force does not publish religious accommodation data by component in its twice-monthly updates.

The department has also awarded about 430 waivers for medical reasons, including 286 for active duty airmen and guardians, and 105 administrative exemptions, including 83 among Reservists.

In the Ohio case, 2nd Lt. Hunter Doster of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and more than a dozen other plaintiffs argue the Air Force is forcing them to lose their livelihoods or violate their religious beliefs by receiving vaccines they say are impure or have ties to abortion.

Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA products used cells replicated from a fetus aborted in the 1970s to make sure the vaccines worked in human cells. The fetal cells were not used to produce either vaccine, National Geographic reported last fall.

Johnson & Johnson uses cells replicated from a fetus aborted in 1985 to produce its vaccine, but those cells are filtered out from the final product.

Some service members have opted for Covaxin, a vaccine made in India and endorsed by the World Health Organization, or Adjuvanted, made by Maryland-based Novavax and approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration. Neither product claims to use cell lines or tissue derived from human fetuses, making them potential winners for those who object to abortion.

Everyone who joins the military must receive a slate of several vaccines to enter, including chickenpox, rubella and hepatitis A. Each of those shots also involves cell tissue derived from fetuses, as does one version of the rabies vaccine. Rabies shots are required only for some service members in certain career fields.

The Air Force had a chance to convince the judge not to green-light the class action, but he went ahead and broadened the suit.

“Defendants fail to raise any persuasive arguments for why the court should not extend the preliminary injunction issued on March 31, 2022, to cover the class members,” McFarland wrote in the order.

The Air Force can still take an airman or guardian’s vaccination status into account when considering them for upcoming assignments, deployments or other operational decisions.

All but approximately 14,000 airmen and guardians, about 3% of Department of the Air Force troops, are fully vaccinated.

Nearly 91 million COVID-19 cases have been reported in the United States so far, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 1 million people have died from the virus; about two-thirds of the country is fully vaccinated.

“COVID-19 vaccination significantly lowers your risk of severe illness, hospitalization, and death if you get infected,” the CDC said. “Compared to people who are up to date with their COVID-19 vaccinations, unvaccinated people are more likely to get COVID-19, much more likely to be hospitalized … and much more likely to die.”

Correction: This story was updated at 11:13 a.m. Aug. 2 to correct the nature and timing of an Air Force response.

And while there are plenty of films that chronicle the scaly heroes of the Mesozoic Era, it also is fun to see movies and shows about dinosaurs living among humans.

As a series, “Jurassic Park” has long had an affinity for the Cretaceous period’s favorite predator: the Velociraptor. But what if you substituted in Velociraptors for the leading men and women in your favorite military or war movies?

One Twitter user, @ButWithRaptors, has done just that. These are our favorites.

1. “1917″

1917 (2019) but with a Velociraptor pic.twitter.com/SIyHR8onkP

— But With Raptors (@ButWithRaptors) July 29, 2022

2. “Inglorious Basterds”

Inglourious Basterds (2009) but with Velociraptors pic.twitter.com/bfedCDmE4d

— But With Raptors (@ButWithRaptors) April 23, 2022

3. “A Few Good Men”

he wants the truth pic.twitter.com/YLrv2SPl84

— But With Raptors (@ButWithRaptors) June 18, 2022

4. “Top Gun: Maverick”

Top Gun: Maverick (2022) but with a Velociraptor pic.twitter.com/hsS7CviLIm

— But With Raptors (@ButWithRaptors) May 23, 2022

5. “Air Force One”

Air Force One (1997) but with a Velociraptor pic.twitter.com/7yokAqlFqW

— But With Raptors (@ButWithRaptors) April 25, 2022

Personally, I’d like to see full cuts of all these movies, but if I have to, I’ll continue to settle for the GIFs and shorts.

The software used to create these hilarious clips is made by Maxon, which helps designers with visual effects. There is one piece of it called “Universe Raptorize,” which specifically turns “Tom Cruise in any footage into Velociraptor Cruise in seconds.”

A group of more than 400 military members and another 150 local, state and federal emergency workers flood into Philadelphia where the “strike” has collapsed Lincoln Financial Field structures and derailed a train at the CSX railyard, which triggered a chlorine leak that’s spreading fast.

Those troops and civilian responders bring Nuclear, Biological, Chemical and Radiological detection and decontamination gear with them.

And the lead element — Task Force 46, primarily composed of Michigan Army National Guard members — also brings five years of experience rehearsing, planning and executing training geared for exactly this type of event.

The exercise involved 150 role players with realistic fake wounds and symptoms from the simulated attack. And for the thousands of Philadelphians who saw military helicopters flying low through the city and watercraft speeding along the Delaware River on July 27, day two of the three-day exercise, the scenario might have seemed too real for comfort.

But these types of exercises, with Russia breaking chemical weapons treaties and China fueling hypersonic missile development to defeat U.S. defenses, are sorely needed for the Guard and their local, state and federal partners in the homeland, officials said.

“This is an opportunity to train firsthand with some of the best first responders in the world who do this day in and day out,” said Army National Guard Col. Chris McKinney, TF 46 chief of staff.

The Army created the task force in 2013.

The most recent series of Dense Urban Terrain-focused CBRN exercises kicked off in 2018. Some version of the event has been held each year since then, while Guard forces also responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Past events have included similar hazardous material simulated attacks on Detroit, Michigan, and recovery training at the Guard’s Muscatatuck Urban Training Center near Butlerville, Indiana.

Each annual exercise has grown in both the number and variety of partners in recent years.

This year’s Guard participants include aviation and medical units from Alabama, California, New York, Indiana, Louisiana, Montana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

Outside the Guard, U.S. Army North, the Army Reserve and the Coast Guard also provided personnel.

Philadelphia’s Director of Emergency Management Dominick Mireles told Army Times that this was a “different style of exercise for the city.”

“From the Philadelphia perspective, this is our first time doing something to this scale in recent history,” Mireles said.

The event allows civilian agencies to run complex equipment with military counterparts. That gives those emergency workers a chance to run their gear in near-real world action, he said.

“For me, the value is seeing these things turned on and not just on a piece of paper or slide deck,” he said.

Guard members were able to respond to the “strike zones” and simulate CBRN detection with tests of materials and role player victims. They then worked with civilian counterparts running mass decontamination sites.

Other elements of the task force conducted high-level entry work at the Philadelphia Fire Academy and worked in mock rubble to rescue trapped role players as they would in major building collapses from such a missile attack.

Some worked in subways, testing communications gear underground for simulated search and rescue. And still others set up expedient landing zones as they coordinated victim evacuations.

The city also offered new training opportunities for the Guard visitors.

McKinney noted that five military helicopters, two UH-60 Black Hawks and two HH-60 Pave Hawks with the Pennsylvania National Guard and a Coast Guard aircraft were running patient evacuation efforts.

But the waterways also provided ways to bypass snarled traffic that would plague any real-world disaster response.

McKinney stressed that out of all the missions the Guard performs, homeland defense is their top priority.

“So, soldiers at all levels of command understand exactly what to do when working with a civilian incident command,” McKinney said.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correctly reflect the billet of Col. Chris Mckinney with Task Force 46.

It’s a love story as old as time.

Marine meets girl, girl needs healthcare, Marine needs BAH to pay off an old drug dealer. So what do they do? Get married after three brief conversations the day before he ships off to Iraq and split the money.

That is the premise of Netflix’s “Purple Hearts,” which stars Sofia Carson as Cassie Salazar and Nicholas Galitzine as Luke Morrow.

Cassie is a struggling singer working in a bar that sometimes lets her band perform one song every Friday. She has Type I Diabetes, but her art doesn’t afford her health insurance. Luke, on the other hand, is an addict in recovery. He joined the Marines to get a fresh start and earn his dad’s respect, but he owes his former dealer a hefty sum of money.

She first propositions a lifelong friend-turned-Marine to engage in the fraudulent marriage, but he turns her down because he already has a girlfriend of his own. Enter his bunkmate, Luke. And while the marriage is fake, the consummation that takes place at the base hotel after their courthouse wedding certainly isn’t...

Despite essentially being strangers, the two Skype often so Uncle Sam doesn’t catch onto the sham marriage. But after a few conversations, Luke becomes Cassie’s muse, and she pens a song for the deployed men called “Come Back Home.” Unfortunately, Luke does indeed make his way home with a serious IED injury, turning their fake marriage into one where the pair must now care for each other ... in sickness and in health.

As you can imagine, eventually the Marine Corps finds out about the sham, Luke loses everything, and he has to serve out a prison sentence. On the other hand, Cassie’s dreams all come true — her band takes off and gets to open for Florence + the Machine. Everything falls into place for her, except for the minor inconvenience of having fallen in love with her fake husband.

The movie is based on a novel by Tess Wakefield, and is something of a soap opera-esque take on a military marriage entered into for the benefits. The best way to describe the movie itself is wounded in action — it tries, but it’s just not quite at 100%. It is exactly as corny as you’d expect, but I couldn’t look away. The storyline is thin, and the military premise is cliché, but, frankly, the chemistry between Galitzine and Carson is off the charts.

Plus, once Luke finishes his stint in jail, he and Cassie live happily ever after — complete with a closing montage beach scene that looks like a Tommy Bahama ad for white linen apparel.

Watch Purple Hearts on Netflix.

The U.S. military discovered a problem with the ejection seats used across its F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fleet in April, but waited three months to ground those aircraft flown by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps to fully investigate the issue, multiple sources told Air Force Times Friday.

Officials initially saw the problem as a potentially isolated incident. But an ongoing investigation sourced the issue to the production line, prompting waves of temporary stand-downs this week.

“During a routine maintenance inspection at Hill [Air Force Base, Utah,] in April ‘22, an anomaly was discovered with one of the seat cartridge actuated devices in the F-35 seat,” Steve Roberts, a spokesperson for seat manufacturer Martin-Baker, said Friday. “This was quickly traced back to a gap in the manufacturing process, which was addressed and changed.”

Cartridges are the ejection seat component that explode to propel an aviator out of the cockpit and prompts their parachute to open. The defective part was loose and missing the magnesium powder used to ignite the propellant that shoots someone to safety, Roberts said.

A maintainer inspecting an F-35 found that an ejection cartridge felt suspiciously light, according to an unconfirmed summary of a briefing within the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command obtained by Air Force Times. After a closer look, the cartridge turned out to be missing its explosive charge that would lift someone to safety.

The military tested 2,700 F-35 ejection seat cartridges and discovered three failures as of Wednesday, the briefing summary said. Service officials declined to confirm or deny the summary’s narrative of events.

Roberts said the problem was unique to a particular cartridge number and to the F-35, but did not answer how many defective parts have turned up so far. The U.S.-led Joint Strike Fighter program conducted a “short inspection” and determined that the jets could return to flight, he said.

“Martin-Baker has been providing the [prime aircraft contractors like Lockheed Martin] and multiple [government] agencies with supporting data to prove that all other aircraft may be excluded,” Roberts said. “Outside the F-35, not a single anomaly has been discovered worldwide as a result of the forensic investigation which continues at pace.”

A majority of the Air Force’s F-35A Lightning II fleet on Friday became the latest to stand down amid concerns about Martin-Baker ejections seats on a wide range of military aircraft at home and abroad.

Air Combat Command spokesperson Alexi Worley confirmed that the first faulty cartridge was found during a routine inspection in April. The military immediately inspected additional aircraft, she said, and halted its investigation when Martin-Baker discovered a quality-assurance failure on its production line.

The F-35 Joint Program Office then issued a “routine” directive, known as a time compliance technical order, that mandated inspection of all ejection seat cartridges within 90 days starting July 19. Ten days later, Air Combat Command grounded its F-35s to speed up those checks, Worley said.

ACC aims to finish looking at the seats within 90 days, or by mid-October, Worley said in a statement first reported by Breaking Defense on Friday. Each plane can return to regular flights once it passes inspection.

“The stand-down of aircraft will continue through the weekend, and a determination to safely resume normal operations is expected to be made early next week, pending analysis of the inspection data,” Worley told Air Force Times.

Though ACC owns most of the Air Force’s more than 300 F-35As, some are managed by other major commands like U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Pacific Air Forces. Command spokespeople did not respond to emailed queries Friday.

Air Education and Training Command also paused its F-35 operations on Friday “to allow our logistics team to further analyze the issue and expedite the inspection process,” spokesperson Capt. Lauren Woods told Breaking Defense. AETC oversees F-35 training units at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, and Eglin AFB, Florida.

“Based on the results of these inspections and in conjunction with ACC, the lead command for F-35, AETC will make a decision regarding continued operations,” Woods said.

The Navy and Marine Corps have also stopped flying F-35B and F-35C jets while investigations are ongoing. Each aircraft will be inspected before its next flight rather than in batches over three months.

“All inspections are being conducted in an expedited manner with a high priority,” F-35 Joint Program Office spokesperson Chief Petty Officer Matthew Olay said Friday.

Naval Air Systems Command has declined to say how many aircraft are affected, citing operational security concerns. It began shipping replacement parts to its own maintenance centers with planes affected by the problem on July 24.

The issue “only affects aircraft equipped with [cartridge actuated devices] within a limited range of lot numbers,” the service said in a statement.

Military and company officials declined to say how many cartridges were produced as part of the defective lots. The Navy said no one has died or been injured because of the defect; the Air Force has stressed its groundings are a precaution to get ahead of any fatalities.

On Wednesday, the Air Force temporarily stood down its T-38 Talon and T-6 Texan II training aircraft due to the same ejection seat worries. Most were slated to returned to service on Friday, but nearly 300 aircraft that may be affected by faulty cartridges will remain on the ground. That comprises about 40% of the T-38 fleet and 15% of the T-6 fleet, including planes at each undergraduate pilot training base and Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.

The T-38 is a supersonic jet used to prepare pilots to fly fighter and bomber aircraft, and the T-6 is the service’s turboprop plane used to teach basic flight skills. Each aircraft contains multiple explosive cartridges so pilots have backup options if one charge fails.

It’s unclear how taking a significant portion of Air Force trainers out of commission will affect the service’s ability to graduate new pilots amid an enduring shortage of about 1,600 airmen, particularly in the fighter community. The Air Force produces about 1,300 new pilots a year.

“Our primary concern is the safety of our airmen and it is imperative that they have confidence in our equipment,” Nineteenth Air Force boss Maj. Gen. Craig Wills, who runs an organization responsible for the service’s training enterprise, told Air Force Times in an emailed statement. “Our actions … were taken out of an abundance of caution in order to ensure the safety of our pilots and aircrew.”

Several aircraft fleets across the Defense Department that use Martin-Baker ejection seats — from the T-38s and T-6s to the Navy’s F/A-18B/C/D Hornet and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter jets, E/A-18G Growler electronic attack plane, and T-45 Goshawk and F-5 Tiger II trainers — are on hold while the military digs into the problem. The issue may also affect European airframes like the Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Rafale and aircraft flown by Turkey and South Korea.

The U.K. Royal Air Force also stopped “non-essential” flights for its Red Arrows jets and Typhoon warplanes over safety concerns with its ejection seats, the Daily Mail reported. NATO’s Allied Air Command did not respond to queries emailed Friday about the potential impact on the international fighter enterprise.

F-35 Joint Strike Fighters are the Pentagon’s premier fighter jet flown by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, plus more than a dozen foreign countries that have ordered or received them. In April, the Government Accountability Office reported it will cost more than $1.7 trillion for the Pentagon to buy, operate and maintain the jets in the U.S.

Lockheed Martin plans to build more than 3,000 F-35s for militaries around the globe. More than 800 planes have been delivered so far over the past 15 years, over half of which belong to the U.S.

Joint Strike Fighters were last publicly grounded in South Korea in January after one of the country’s jets malfunctioned and landed on its belly. Before that, the U.S. grounded all of its F-35s worldwide over fuel tube problems, among a slew of other software and hardware hurdles to the fleet’s rollout.

The same day as the military began probing its ejection seats in earnest, Bloomberg reported some F-35s could be grounded for a separate problem: an enduring shortage of working engines.

Nine percent of F-35s weren’t operational in mid-2020, GAO said in a July 19 report.

“DOD’s strategy allows 6% of F-35s to be unavailable for missions at any given time due to engine issues,” the federal watchdog wrote. “But the number of F-35s that this leaves available for operations isn’t what the military services consider to be sufficient … in part because its strategy doesn’t ensure enough spare engine parts are available.”

The June 24 memo, signed by the DoD’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, Gilbert Cisneros, also limits award of the Inherent Resolve Campaign Medal to just troops who serve on the ground in Syria or operate within 12 nautical miles of its coast or airspace. The policy went into effect July 1.

The GWOT-SM has been a virtually automatic award for troops since its introduction in 2003.

The Army, for example, determined in March 2004 that all active duty troops who served after Sept. 11, 2001, merited the award because they’d all “served in some way in support of GWOT,” according to the Human Resources Command website.

And while blanket eligibility was later amended to require that members serve 30 consecutive or 60 non-consecutive days “in support of” a GWOT operation, units have loosely interpreted the “support” criteria and awarded the medal regardless of actual connection to the ongoing conflict. Units have argued that even 30 days in garrison counted as part of the broader GWOT-focused deployment readiness cycle.

But after Sept. 11, “the service member must have directly served in a designated military [counter-terrorism] operation” for at least 30 days, the memo says.

It clarifies that direct service doesn’t include the previous “support” loophole as well. The memo describes direct service as someone who “deployed on orders for a designated CT operation [or] directly supported a [designated] CT operation on a full-time basis while assigned to an organization conducting a CT operation.”

According to a DoD list last updated in March, ongoing CT operations eligible for the award include:

• Operation Noble Eagle, a North American airspace patrol mission.
• Operation Enduring Freedom, which continues in East Africa.
• Operation Enduring Sentinel, the over-the-horizon CT mission focused on potential threats in post-withdrawal Afghanistan.
• Operation Inherent Resolve, the long-running fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
• Operation Pacific Eagle — Philippines, a dormant CT operation that has not had a new inspector general oversight report since November 2020.

Despite the changes to the GWOT and Inherent Resolve campaign medals, the memo doesn’t address whether there will be any changes to National Defense Service Medal eligibility.

Should DoD cease awarding the GWOT-era NDSM, which is automatically awarded to people who join the military during a designated conflict period, it would represent a symbolic close to the wars that began after Sept. 11.

Mayor Muriel Bowser formally asked the White House last week for an open-ended deployment of 150 National Guard members per day as well as “suitable federal location” for a mass housing and processing center, mentioning the D.C. Armory as a logical candidate. She met on July 21 with Liz Sherwood-Randall, assistant to the president for homeland security, and Julie Chavez Rodriguez, director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.

The crisis began in spring when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey announced plans to send busloads of migrants to Washington, D.C., in response to President Joe Biden’s decision to lift a pandemic-era emergency health order that restricted migrant entry numbers.

Since then the city estimates that nearly 200 buses have arrived, delivering more than 4,000 migrants to Union Station, often with no resources and no clue what to do next.

A coalition of local charitable groups has been working to feed and shelter the migrants, aided by a $1 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But organizers have been warning that both their resources and personnel were nearing exhaustion.

“This reliance on NGOs is not working and is unsustainable — they are overwhelmed and underfunded,” Bowser said in her letter. She has repeatedly stated that the influx was stressing her government’s ability to care for its own homeless residents and required intervention from Biden’s government.

“We know we have a federal issue that demands a federal response,” Bowser said at a July 18 press conference.

In her letter, Bowser harshly criticizes Abbott and Ducey, accusing them of “cruel political gamesmanship” and saying the pair had “decided to use desperate people to score political points.”

Bowser does not have the authority to personally order a National Guard deployment, an issue that has become emotionally charged in recent years as a symbol of the district’s entrenched status as less than a state.

Her limited authority played a role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol building by supporters of former President Donald Trump. When it became clear that the U.S. Capitol Police were overmatched by the crowds, Bowser couldn’t immediately deploy the district guard. Instead, crucial time was lost while the request was considered inside the Pentagon, and protesters rampaged through the building.