The service unveiled its part of President Joe Biden’s overall defense budget request for fiscal 2024 to Congress today.

The service is asking to fund an Army with 452,000 active duty soldiers, 325,000 soldiers in the Army National Guard and 174,000 soldiers in the Army Reserve.

That’s a drop of 21,000 soldiers from the active rosters as compared to last year’s request for 473,000 active troops.

And last year’s figure was already the smallest active Army since before World War II, Army Times previously reported.

Last year bot the Guard and Reserve were left untouched. This year, the Guard’s numbers remain the same as the previous request but would cut 11,500 soldiers from the number of Guardsmen in uniform this time last year, which was 336,500.

The reserve suffers its own cuts from 178,000 reservist in Army green down to 174,000 under this current request.

As cuts to personnel began to mount last year in order to make room for modernization spending, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said at the time.

The service is fielding major platforms in nearly all categories now and in the coming years, from robotic combat vehicles to new helicopters, futuristic mixed reality goggles and anew rifle and machine gun.

But last year, senior leaders promised to put the Army on a path to increase its forces back to 485,000 active duty soldiers, though it didn’t provide a timeline.

Officials did not provide a timeline or target year for reaching that figure. Though previously officials have said that incremental increases could occur over the five-year budgeting period.

As it cuts soldiers from the rolls, the Army faces some of its most challenging recruiting obstacles in decades.

The force fell short on recruiting goals lasts year by 15,000 troops. The shortfall was one quarter of what the Army had expected to bring into the ranks.

Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said at the time that 2022 was the most difficult recruiting year for the Army since the start of the All-Volunteer Force in the 1970s.

She said then also that the active-duty side would need to lean on the Guard and Reserve to fill empty slots for deployments and training. Last year the Guard and Reserve remained level on their end strength numbers, with no cuts called by senior leaders.

The 2022 shortfall was when the service had a target of recruiting 60,000 new soldiers. That missed mark hasn’t stopped the service from setting an even more ambitious goal of recruiting 65,000 new soldiers this year, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said recently.

To recruit those soldiers the Army has revamped and relaunched its “Be all you can be” marketing strategy, pushed into major urban centers where it previously had little success.

It also added bonuses and rank to a soldier referral program and adopted a mentality that every soldier serves as a kind of recruiter.

The service is continuing its 10-year, $10 billion barracks and housing improvement plan.

This budget calls for five new barracks projects, costing the service $288 million in the coming fiscal year. Those efforts will add two buildings to Fort Bragg, North Carolina and one each at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, Fort Wainwright, Alaska and at the Natick, Massachusetts Soldier Systems Center, said Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo.

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.

Russia’s unprovoked re-invasion of Ukraine in February has sparked a deluge of combat footage online, much of it surfacing on YouTube and TikTok, with explosions synchronized with the distorted rolling bass lines of phonk music.

U.S. troops are increasingly finding their voice on policy issues across social media, as well. A coalition of Army moms connected via Facebook, for example, and launched a grassroots movement that ultimately won them a seat at the table influencing the service’s new parenthood policies, which rolled out in April.

But members posting online have long faced risks as well. Many have harmed their own careers with inappropriate messages, such as Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, whose videos criticizing the Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021 made him the second military member ever convicted under a UCMJ article against public criticism of civilian officials.

Other potential risk factors include a rising number of scams where criminals impersonate senior officials online or target troops in “sextortion” scams.

All these factors have inspired innovators across the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command to take a hard look at how the service teaches soldiers to navigate the social media space, both personally and operationally.

New training tools, classes and exercise scenarios are coming into play at all levels of the professional military education system, from basic training to special courses tailored for general officers.

To get a sense of where the Army might go next with social media in its schoolhouses, Army Times interviewed TRADOC Command Sgt. Maj. Daniel Hendrex and other officials developing social media training programs across the command.

Hendrex’s photo, it should be known, has appeared on a few online scam profiles.

“I actually got promoted in one of my fake profiles,” Hendrex said. “I got ‘promoted’ to general [by a scammer].”

‘That device is almost like an appendage’

TRADOC officials have been reviewing social media curriculum across the Army’s training enterprise as part of a broader top-down review of communications practices since roughly when Hendrex arrived in fall 2020.

The sergeant major admitted the review found “our training and education [were] spotty and not synchronized and [not] connected over a continuum of education.”

Leaders in the field were also telling TRADOC “that [we] really don’t have the level of training and expertise and education that we need.

“That’s what led us to the overhaul,” Hendrex said.

Hendrex and another TRADOC official, Combined Arms Command’s Maj. Megan Jantos, explained that effectively addressing the knowledge gap would likely require something more than the classic “death by PowerPoint” trainings that units are required to give on an annual basis.

The first step was to identify which groups had the greatest need for guidance.

Hendrex emphasized the importance of introducing new soldiers to military social media behavior earlier in their careers, since the current crop of recruits has grown up in a digital-first era and already established their own online accounts and habits.

“When I get to go meet future soldiers...they [usually get to ask me one question — and guess what it is?” said Hendrex. About “99% [of the time]...‘Sergeant Major, are you really going to take our phone from us during basic training?’”

In recent years, most trainees have been able to access their phones weekly.

But the review of social media training programs found that the service’s newest soldiers were receiving barely an hour of bare bones guidance, explained the sergeant major.

“We realized, ‘Okay, we’ve really got to expand upon that,’ and get past just simple things,” he said.

In response, TRADOC introduced a new interactive social media guide that walks users through what the Army expects of soldiers online. It debuted in March, and features sections explaining standards of conduct, potential risks to individual troops online and operational security. The guide even has a toggle to switch the site between light and dark mode.

Hendrex said that troops in basic training are required “to go through that interactive social media guide so it can help educate them to what their left and right boundaries are [online].”

One of the guide’s goals is to be more accessible to younger troops than a regulation, leaning on “do’s and don’ts” framing and straightforward language. It’s also supposed to be less boring.

The Army isn’t lost on the fact that many soldiers joining today are more social media-savvy than their superiors, the TRADOC CSM said, but the service does have an interest in helping them understand what won’t fly online as a new soldier.

Hendrex highlighted TikTok videos made in basic training as an example.

“You should not be making a TikTok video. You would think that’s a simple thing to say, but we get folks who have been influencers for several years before they came [to the Army],” he noted. “We have to bring them in and help educate them. Those are the things that that can get you in trouble very quickly, especially if you’re in uniform.”

Improved social media training is rolling out to NCO education, as well.

The service’s Basic Leader Course and Advanced Leader Course, which are respective promotion requirements for sergeant and staff sergeant, already include remote learning classes that hopeful leaders must complete before attending face-to-face.

TRADOC’s top enlisted member said the command is developing social media-focused vignettes to include in the distance learning prerequisites for those classes.

It’s not clear yet how social media may enter or change within the curriculum at higher-level NCO courses, but Hendrex argued that leaders have to approach social media looking for opportunity rather than viewing it with distrust or fear.

“Soldiers are already in this space and engaging, and as leaders, we’re [also] expected to be in this space,” he said.

New social media education coming for officers, too

Jantos, who has coordinated the review of social media curriculum for officer professional military education, told Army Times that a handful of officer schoolhouses around the Army have developed some “best practices” that her team is evaluating to potentially implement around the force.

One bright spot Jantos highlighted was the Medical Center of Excellence focus on social media and the information environment in its Basic Officer Leader Course for new officers and its Captains Career Course.

Students in both courses at the Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, Texas, center receive detailed in-depth instruction on social media and online presence, explained its director of leader training, Col. Shannon Shaw, and communications director, Tish Williamson.

Agents from the service’s local Criminal Investigation Division office visit the new lieutenants to talk about the importance of maintaining a secure online presence and avoiding scams.

Captains Career Course students, many of whom will take company command after graduation, face a different set of social media challenges. They will have to maintain unit pages and make decisions based on the information environment.

Early in the course, the captains have an hour-long Q&A session with Williamson intended to clarify anything they might not understand about being online as new Army commanders.

In May, the center also added a new training scenario to the final Captains Career Course field exercise where the trainees are running simulated medical operations in a large-scale combat environment, Shaw explained.

The wrinkle? A fake tweet showing a photo of an Army vehicle with a crew-served weapon altered to add a Red Cross logo to the side to make it look like an ambulance — a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, if it was real. Shaw said the tweet was cooked up by one of her instructors.

“The tweet said, ‘Hey, look how the United States is moving casualties. Legal?’” explained the colonel. Almost immediately after the students learn of the tweet, trainers roleplaying media organizations descend upon the students and request interviews about it.

Later on in the Europe-based scenario, the students learn that “a deployed medic had posted some pictures of real combat images using his personal social media accounts,” said Shaw. “Our competitors had access to the post...and they altered it for their own purposes and posted the falsified image to potentially bring discredit upon the [Army].”

Shaw and Williamson, the communications director, said the scenario helps the officers understand the very real implications of operational security violations and demonstrate their ability to work to correct misinformation “and reshape the narrative in favor of the U.S.”

According to Shaw and Jantos, senior leaders are taking notice of their practices, too.

Shaw has presented their training scenario to the generals who oversee Combined Arms Command and TRADOC, and she said both expressed enthusiasm for implementing similar scenarios across other career fields’ schoolhouses.

“The spot with the most potential that we could expand upon even further would be the Medical [Center of Excellence] one because...they really embrace it as a part of the curriculum,” Jantos confirmed.

Jantos, who oversees the Army Leader Exchange, said a similar program of instruction will soon debut at the Intelligence Center of Excellence on Fort Huachuca, Arizona, “oriented towards social media best practices.”

Both Jantos and TRADOC’s Hendrex emphasized that these early efforts are just a baseline that the service plans to build from to ensure soldiers across the force, both officers and enlisted, have regular training touch points on the importance of social media that are tailored to the challenges they will face in their next roles.

The service is poised to publish major information-centered doctrine in the coming months, including an overhaul of its existing information operations publication that will focus on how to gain and maintain “information advantage” over the Army’s foes.

A forthcoming update to the Army’s operations field manual is also widely expected to emphasize the importance of information — to include the social media space — in the Army’s future conflicts.

Jantos said the effort to shore up social media training nests well with those initiatives.

“That [new] doctrine tells the force how we need to operate to achieve...information advantage, and a portion of that is how do you leverage social media to get that advantage?” she explained.

“These days, everyone carries a cell phone...it’s a tool, [but] it can also be used as a weapon...We need to make sure that everyone knows how to use it for good.”

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.

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.”

The triad concept is to integrate and converge inherent capability from U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Army Cyber Command and Army Special Operations Command to provide campaign options to commanders globally.

“We know Army space capabilities will become even more formidable when used in concert with cyber and special operations,” Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler, commander of Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said Aug. 9 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “This new triad allows us to leverage individual strengths to maximum effect, providing flexible options to counter mis- or disinformation, cyberattacks and irregular asymmetric threats. These options include striking anywhere and anytime with surprise and retaliating or responding to adversary attack.”

In looking at the Army’s warfighting concept — multidomain operations — which lays out how the Army approaches adversaries and threats across all domains, the triad has a role to play whether that is in competition, in crisis or in conflict, Lt. Gen. Jon Braga, commander of USASOC, told reporters in a briefing at the conference.

“Information operations are extremely important, influence operations are extremely important, contributing to integrated deterrence is extremely important,” Braga said, but should operations move into conflict, the triad would have a different role to play, possibly “a combination of non-lethal effects like information operations, then perhaps a more kinetic [option], denying a capability or affecting a certain capability of an adversary — that would be a different flavor of approach.”

The idea for the triad was, in part, born out of Karbler’s previous experience at U.S. Strategic Command where he started to see the power of global integration. Karbler reasoned that Space, Cyber and Special Operations are similarly integrated.

But it wasn’t until Karbler’s deputy commander for operations, Brig. Gen. Isaac Peltier, a special operations officer, brought in that unique perspective that he realized the utility of space, cyber and special operations coming together regularly.

And while each brings its own unique capabilities, there are similarities.

“We all leverage intel extremely well for everything we do,” Braga said, “but there was more and more as we thought about it, a similarity, in a way, of our uniqueness, we are all transregional, we all work for multiple bosses. We all bring effects to try and have larger outsized effects for relatively small forces that contribute to a much larger joint force. We all approach it philosophically the same way.”

“We see this globally,” Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, US Army Cyber Command commander, said. None of the triad participants are restricted to a particular region even though they support specific COCOMs. “It enables us to deliver more options across the spectrum of competition, crisis and conflicts,” she added.

Additionally, as the triad establishes a framework, “we can turn these things more quickly than done before,” Barrett said, and share data more easily “in an age where data is absolutely paramount.”

The triad leaders have formed a campaign plan to implement the new concept, but one of the ways it is already operating together is through exercises.

The triad is participating together in Project Convergence which is set to begin later this fall and is a wider campaign of learning the Army puts on annually to experiment with emerging concepts and capabilities.

While space capabilities will be used in the exercise, Karbler said, “it’s not just going to be a sole space solution in a particular use case. We’ve got to drive toward SOF, cyber, space integrated solution to that case study.”

That experimentation with combined capabilities will help teach the triad what works best and what it has to go back and tailor, he added.

“Some of the things we have are very unique and different, so just making sure those capabilities can talk to one another is part of the effort we’re working on,” Braga noted.

And Project Convergence and other exercises will give the triad the opportunity to show the Army and the Joint Force what it can offer when it comes together, he said.

But the summary judgment Tuesday said federal immunity laws shield the two officers involved from facing Caron Nazario’s claims that they violated the Black and Hispanic soldier’s constitutional protections against excessive force and unreasonable seizure, as well as his right to free speech by allegedly threatening him with arrest if he complained about their behavior.

U.S. District Judge Roderick C. Young also ruled that the officer who initially pulled Nazario over is liable for illegally searching for a gun in the soldier’s SUV in violation of the U.S. Constitution and Virginia law, leaving the question of damages on that point up to a jury. Nazario had a concealed carry permit.

The December 2020 traffic stop of the uniformed military officer in the small town of Windsor drew national attention and outrage after Nazario sued in April 2021, citing police body camera images and his cell phone video of the encounter. He was never charged with a crime.

Nazario had been driving home in the dark from his duty station when Officer Daniel Crocker radioed that he was attempting to stop a vehicle with no rear license plate and tinted windows, the lawsuit says. Body camera video later showed that a temporary tag was taped to the inside of the rear window.

“It appeared to Lt. Nazario that there was no good location in the immediate vicinity to stop safely. So, for the benefit of the officer’s safety and his own, Lt. Nazario continued slowly down US 460,” the lawsuit says. Nazario drove below the posted speed limit for less than a mile until he reached the well-lit parking lot of a BP gas station, it says.

Crocker said the driver was “eluding police” and he considered it a “high-risk traffic stop,” according to a report cited in the lawsuit. Another officer, Joe Gutierrez, was driving by and joined him.

The lawsuit says both officers escalated the situation by immediately pointing their guns at Nazario and trying to pull him out of the vehicle while he kept his hands in the air. Gutierrez pepper-sprayed Nazario multiple times as the officers yelled for him to get out.

At one point, Nazario said he was afraid to get out, to which Gutierrez replied: “You should be.”

When Nazario did get out and ask for a supervisor, Gutierrez responded with “knee-strikes” to his legs, knocking him to the ground, where the two officers struck him multiple times and then handcuffed and interrogated him, the lawsuit says.

Officer Gutierrez was later fired for failing to follow department policy during the stop. A special prosecutor concluded late last month that Gutierrez should not be criminally charged under Virginia law, but should be investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for potential civil rights violations.

The federal judge ruled Tuesday that the officers had probable cause to pull Nazario over for an improperly displayed license plate, and to charge him with eluding police as well as obstruction of justice and failure to obey when he refused to exit the vehicle.

But Young said the allegations of false imprisonment, assault and battery that Nazario made under state law can move forward because Virginia law “only provides local officials immunity from suits alleging negligence.”

Explaining his summary judgment on Crocker’s search for the gun, Young wrote that “the firearm was not relevant evidence for the crimes of eluding or obstruction of justice.” However, he said Nazario’s claims that Gutierrez knew about the search and failed to intervene could proceed to trial. Gutierrez has argued that he knew nothing about the search.

Jessica Ann Swauger, an attorney listed for Gutierrez, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Jonathan Arthur, one of the attorneys representing Nazario, said the judge’s ruling is a victory even though three of the federal claims were tossed.

“Whether it’s under federal law or whether it’s under state law, the jury is going to speak,” Arthur said. “And we hope that the jury is going to stand up and say that this behavior will not be tolerated.”

Anne C. Lahren, an attorney for Crocker, said the remaining questions are “classic” issues for a jury, rarely decided at this stage in a civil suit. She also noted that the judge found the stop itself and the officers’ ensuing commands to be lawful.

“Lt. Nazario’s own actions gave rise to the unfortunate, but lawful, escalation of force ...,” Lahren wrote. “Had Lt. Nazario simply followed the lawful commands of the officers from the outset of the traffic stop, none of this would have been necessary.”

The 800-soldier unit racked up at least 60 misconduct offenses, including incidents with alcohol, drugs and adultery; a battalion commander was fired; members of one advising team are facing punishment for their behavior in Colombia; and another team’s actions in Honduras are under investigation, according to internal records and interviews conducted by Army Times.

Advisers deployed to Central and South America were also told to behave amid a rise in sexually transmitted diseases among married and single troops, and reports of advisers drinking against regulation, violating curfew and using dating apps concerned 1st SFAB leaders, according to emails sent in late 2021.

It’s an eye-popping amount of bad behavior from just one of the six SFABs created five years ago as a key initiative of then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

SFABs were championed as a novel way to build professional foreign militaries using top-notch U.S. soldiers. But it is U.S. professionalism that now concerns leaders at Security Force Assistance Command. And it comes at a time when bad behavior in Latin America could be especially risky, as left-wing parties — historically more suspicious of the U.S. military — sweep national elections in the region and China makes inroads.

The problems at 1st SFAB prompted the command to order all units to send detailed data on punishments meted out against advisers.

“Advisor misconduct remains the largest strategic and organizational risk for the SFAC,” a tasking order sent in July stated. “Recent media attention of Advisor misconduct requires proactive reporting of accurate misconduct statistics to HQDA (the Department of the Army’s Pentagon headquarters).”

The allegations corroborated through investigations include 21 offenses involving alcohol, six drug-use incidents, seven cases of adultery and six instances of counterproductive leadership, according to a 1st SFAB legal brief chronicling April 2021 through April 2022.

Given how spread out units were in places like Colombia, not every incident may have been reported or properly investigated.

“I would actually say those numbers are conservative,” said one SFAB officer. “The majority of the brigade does the right thing, but you do have a lot of teams that go over there that have some sort of issue.”

The crux of the problem, advisers told Army Times, boils down to immaturity among some of the small, 12-soldier advising teams that began fanning out across foreign countries to mentor local forces in 2020.

When 1st SFAB was founded in 2017, early missions to Afghanistan and Africa were mostly positive. But as the unit shifted to solely focus on Latin America missions, like counter-drug operations, the quality of soldiers selected to join dropped, four advisers said. That’s possibly due to the larger manpower woes across the Army, as well as the slow trickling out of experienced veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“When you bring in one bad apple, that can create 15 bad apples,” said one adviser.

Colombia, where much of the known misconduct occurred, may be a particularly sensitive situation. The longtime U.S. ally recently elected its first leftist president — Gustavo Petro, a former mayor of Bogotá and a guerrilla fighter in his youth.

“You’ve got a new president coming in who is not anti-American but certainly has less enthusiasm for this really tight mil-to-mil relationship,” said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight for the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America. “And if you want to give them a reason to say, ‘Hey, let’s put this on hold,’ this sort of behavior does that.”

‘Extremely embarrassing’

Officials declined to make leadership, including SFAC commander Maj. Gen. Donn Hill or 1st SFAB commander Col. Chris Landers, available for interviews.

SFAC spokeswoman Lt. Col. Melody Faulkenberry said the command “is taking steps to investigate all allegations of misconduct.”

Faulkenberry confirmed some investigations are underway at 1st SFAB, but declined to say their purpose or scope. She also declined to confirm how many of the offenses detailed in the legal brief occurred among 1st SFAB advisers who were deployed, rather than at home on Fort Benning, in Georgia.

But there has certainly been some trouble overseas.

An advising team sent to Honduras remains under investigation after members violated no-drinking orders and got into an argument with other forces in-country, a senior adviser said. Another advising team in Tolemaida, Colombia, was accused by an Army spouse early this year of visiting prostitutes, staying out all night and partying, according to unit records.

The spouse shared a picture of several advisers in a Colombian family’s home without commanders’ permission, prompting a formal investigation that determined the team was leaving base without approval and drinking.

Emails also show that 1st SFAB leaders were aware of reports that advisers across the brigade had been misbehaving.

In an email to 1st SFAB team leaders this fall, a senior enlisted soldier warned that he had been hearing of undisciplined acts “across the formation.”

“We have all now been in country for about two months and I am hearing that we have advisors that have broken the GO#1 no drinking policy without approval,” Command Sgt. Maj. Christopher J. Williams wrote Oct. 24, 2021. “(W)e have advisors that have violated curfew policy, we have married advisors that have TINDER accounts, advisors that have been hitting on hotel staff and we have teams that are not following all rules and guidelines.”

Williams also warned in the emails that there had been a rise in STDs among married and unmarried troops since his soldiers started missions in Central and South America, “and it is in mostly advisors that have been deployed.”

Then there was an incident in which a Colombian officer asked Williams to ensure his troops did not use drugs at a hotel or a nearby military base.

“‘I am not judging your Soldiers, but could you make sure that if your Soldiers want to smoke marijuana or do hallucinogen drugs please ask them not to do them on Canton Norte or in the Hotel,’” the Colombian said, according to Williams’ email.

“That was extremely embarrassing that a (Colombian) would ask that I ensure we don’t do illegal drugs when illegal drugs are forbidden in the Army,” Williams wrote in his email.

Several troops who spoke with Army Times said they were aware of rumors that advisers had used drugs, including cocaine, overseas. Faulkenberry said the SFAC is aware of the allegations, but “has no credible evidence of such activities occurring.”

The issues Williams was trying to tackle existed before his battalion rotated into Latin America and were brigade-wide, several advisers said.

“Williams was trying,” an adviser who served with him said. “But it was really hard to crack down because we were so spread out throughout the country.”

Colombia has long been an anchor for U.S. policy in Latin America. This spring, the White House designated Colombia a major non-NATO ally, a label that “lays the groundwork for us to work together even more closely,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the time.

Petro’s recent election as Colombia’s first leftist leader likely won’t herald any seismic shifts in that relationship. But even prior to his ascension, Colombian lawmakers questioned the purpose of SFAB deployments.

In 2020, the Colombian Defense Ministry had to answer to the Colombian Congress about who would supervise the SFAB teams and what operations they’d be carrying out.

“The senator who had asked for that (Iván Cepeda) is a leader of the incoming governing party,” said Isacson, of the Washington Office on Latin America. “So, Iván is on this and he’s a very big critic of the SFAB. He’s about to become more powerful.”

Colombia has hosted misbehaving Americans before. In 2015, the Justice Department reported that DEA agents in the country had “sex parties” with prostitutes hired by drug cartels. And the Secret Service, along with some U.S. military personnel, suffered a similar scandal in Colombia in 2012.

“We’re getting a reputation here,” said Isacson. “This is a military that the United States claims they want to help professionalize, and they’re doing it with all these examples of really unprofessional behavior.”

Drug warriors

Milley and other Army leaders championed SFABs as a way to provide professional advisers to train and mentor foreign partners so regular infantry, armor and aviation units could perform traditional duties elsewhere. The effort raised some eyebrows, since training foreign forces has typically been a role relegated to Army Green Berets, who have also had their share of scandals in Latin America.

“Special Forces is very good at training tactical-type units. They’re very good at accompanying tactical-type units,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said in 2020. “But SFABs build a professional military force, which is different. How do you do logistics. How do you maintain vehicles. How do you build a professional military.”

After a maiden deployment advising Afghan forces in 2018, the SFABs began preparing to go elsewhere in the world. By 2020, each SFAB was assigned to a different U.S. combatant command with distinct geographic areas of responsibility. Soldiers from 1st SFAB were tasked to U.S. Southern Command.

From the start, 1st SFAB had a counter-drug mission.

Advisers were dispatched to locations designated by Colombia as “priority areas,” SOUTHCOM officials said at the time, and helped with logistics, intelligence capabilities and information sharing.

SFAB advisers in SOUTHCOM have received praised for their counter-drug work, said Faulkenberry, the SFAC spokeswoman. She pointed to the establishment of a new Colombian military unit that synchronizes counter-drug efforts across the country.

“Early last year, former Colombian President Iván Duque specifically acknowledged the value of our military partnership and thanked 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade Advisors for their contributions following the Colombian Counter Narcotics Trans-National Threats Division activation ceremony,” Faulkenberry said.

Four 1st SFAB teams and a battalion command post were focused on increasing coca eradication, according to a U.S. Combined Arms Center report from April 2021.

“The biggest challenge faced by Colombian partners was the flow of intelligence and receipt of targeting-related products. Specifically, units lacked updated imagery of their (area of operations), making planning efforts difficult,” the report reads.

Advisers coached Colombian troops to stop using old Google imagery for planning missions and helped them access updated imagery. They also taught Colombians to “conduct historical analysis of cocaine yields, adjust eradication goals by unit and area, and allocate forces appropriately for the next calendar year,” the report reads.

“Moreover, other South and Central American countries took notice, submitting their own requests for advisor teams,” the report added. “The increase in advisor capabilities across South and Central America allows 1st SFAB to focus advising efforts in both the source and transit zones of narcotics operations.”

However, not all was well.

“Due to a political environment questioning the legality of our presence and pending Colombian congressional approval, adviser teams were told to cease activities within weeks of arrival to the outstations,” the 1st SFAB report reads. “Teams constantly competed with negative social media posts, tweets, and articles. They remained focused even after receiving threats by known in-country bad actors.”

Despite 1st SFAB’s efforts, cocaine production in Colombia was near record levels in 2021. And Colombia’s new leftist president has promised to rethink drug policy to promote development rather than coca eradication.

“The new defense minister who is about to come in is one of Latin America’s best known anti-corruption crusaders,” Isacson said. “This is going to be the big fight of the next year. … So, you’re really focusing on breaking links with organized crime, doing a lot of counterintelligence about your own people, fighting corruption on your forces.”

‘Big boy rules’

Three advisers with whom Army Times spoke said their early time with 1st SFAB was positive.

“What drew me in was the big boy rules — not needing to be told how to do something or when to do it, which, in the end, bit 1st SFAB in the ass,” one adviser said.

Small teams spread out over a large area, far from the command flagpole, can be difficult to manage. And although SFABs are supposed to be comprised of experienced soldiers, lower-ranking troops could still attend the Military Advisory Training Academy at Fort Benning and automatically promote to sergeant under certain circumstances.

“Many of the NCOs in the SFAB are young. They’re wild still,” one adviser said. “Your senior NCOs in the SFAB, it’s a smaller number than you’d think.”

Advisers are also under General Order #1 while deployed to SOUTHCOM, meaning drinking, except under specific circumstances, is off-limits.

“People are going to say they were trying to build camaraderie by going out drinking, but 90% of the partner forces want to go home at the end of the day,” an adviser said. “As a U.S. soldier in South America, you’re going to want to go out and explore, but your partner forces, they live there. It’s nothing new to them.”

Accusations of married troops using Tinder accounts and dating overseas also abounded at the unit, according to sworn statements compiled as part of an ongoing investigation and the emails.

“It can compromise a mission,” an adviser said. “You don’t know where these women are from or who they know, if they even support us. It can cause a lot of problems internally that shouldn’t be there.”

The division-level SFAC has been probing 1st SFAB, Faulkenberry confirmed. But she declined to share the exact nature of the investigations.

“We cannot comment on open investigations, however, earlier in the year the SFAC completed an investigation into a battalion commander’s leadership which resulted in their relief due to loss of trust and confidence in their ability to command,” Faulkenberry said.

She declined to say which battalion commander was relieved and why, other than it was for counterproductive leadership. Sources in the unit said it was 1st SFAB’s 2nd Battalion commander, Lt. Col. Joshua W. Brown, who declined a request for comment. His battalion had operational control over the team facing punishment for their actions in Colombia.

Advisers said the command needs to do a better job vetting personnel to ensure they’re mature enough to head overseas. Some changes to how the SFAC assesses and selects advisers were already implemented this spring, according to Faulkenberry.

“In March 2022, we increased the length of our Assessment and Selection course and added performance elements to more comprehensively assess Advisor candidates,” Faulkenberry said in her statement. “Some of the additions include proficiency exams, ethical assessments, physical tests, peer reviews, board interviews and cadre observational feedback.”

SFABs are, at the end of the day, a small part of the larger effort by America to keep its influence up among its southern neighbors. But there’s some anxiety within SOUTHCOM that its influence is slipping, or at least facing competition.

China has made economic investment overseas a priority through its Belt and Road Initiative. Latin America, though not the primary theater of the approaching U.S.-China showdown, is nevertheless an important area to watch.

“China is playing chess; they have a long term view,” SOUTHCOM boss Gen. Laura Richardson said July 20. “They are setting the theater. … When I show a map of the region where 21 of 31 countries have signed on to the Belt and Road Initiative, it covers almost the entire region.”

Colombia is not a member of the Belt and Road Initiative, but it has flirted with joining, and Chinese firms have already scored big contracts in the country, including a regional railway and 5G infrastructure projects.

After the coronavirus pandemic devastated regional economies, that type of investment, rather than military training, is particularly useful. Then there’s Colombia’s recent swing to the left, which echoes similar electoral outcomes in Peru, Chile and Honduras — and potentially Brazil soon.

“You have leaders coming in who might not be as interested in that sort of high profile level of (U.S. military) cooperation,” Isacson said. “Even if they’re happy to have exercises and exchanges and small courses and stuff, 100 (SFAB) guys in your country for four months is super high profile and it can be controversial if your ruling coalition includes people who are on the left or people who are historically suspicious of U.S. meddling.”

Several of the advisers Army Times spoke with were pleased to see the SFAC taking a hard look at all the brigades by requesting data and carrying out investigations. Others worried that the desire to preserve the SFAB mission would come first, and any problems found by internal investigations would be papered over.

“I think you need an outside agency, to be honest,” one adviser said. “Is anything major going to happen? No. Remember, this is a premier unit. It’s got to keep going.”

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.”

Several hundred troops arrived home Tuesday to Fort Stewart, where cheering parents, spouses and children welcomed them with waving flags and homemade signs.

Members of the 1st Armored Brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division found themselves scrambling to deploy in early March, barely a week after Russian troops invaded Ukraine. The soldiers from Georgia went to Germany to train alongside NATO allies in a show of force intended to deter further Russian aggression in Europe.

Spc. David King had to leave his wife and 2-year-old daughter with less than two days of advance notice. Both were waiting when he returned to Fort Stewart.

“I was a little worried that stuff was going to get crazy,” Kyra King, the soldier’s wife, told the Savannah Morning News. “But he stayed safe.”

Fort Stewart commanders say the rest of the 1st Brigade should be home by the end of August.

The U.S. military is sending another unit to take its place — the 3rd Armored Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division based at Fort Hood, Texas.

The platform built by the small data and technology company will use an Internet of Things system to monitor individual weapons at scale, according to the release.

“The resulting insights will enable units to regularly assess weapons’ health, reduce failure rates, extend the lifetime of a weapon and optimize maintenance plans, enhancing performance and reducing costs,” the company stated in the release.

Armaments Research will work in partnership with firearms company Sig Sauer, which the Army chose in April to manufacture the 6.8mm rifles and automatic rifles that will replace the standard-issue M4 variants in the close combat force. The Army’s general purpose forces will continue to use the M4.

“Our team is thrilled to partner with Sig Sauer to deliver this groundbreaking platform and refresh the Army’s weapons for the first time in several decades,” Armaments Research CEO Michael Canty said in the release. “The Army NGSW program office is pushing the boundaries in seeking a modern, data-driven approach to weapons readiness and we are honored to contribute.”

The company did not provide specifics in the release about the terms of its contract, including the price or the duration. Sig Sauer’s contract is for 10 years, with a $20.4 million initial delivery order.

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Armaments Research offers services to clients in the defense and law enforcement spheres. It claims on its website that its systems reduce tactical response time by 60%.

The Next Generation Squad Weapons program is an effort the Army launched in 2017 to prototype and develop more lethal small arms for the close combat force.

An Army spokesperson told WAGA-TV that the deceased soldiers, whose names have not yet been released, were at Yonah Mountain for a training program at the Maneuver Center of Excellence. The injured soldiers were treated by Army personnel before being transported to a hospital. Their conditions were not immediately available.

Details about what happened have not been released.

The Army conducts training on Yonah Mountain including the Ranger School’s Mountain Phase. Soldiers who train on the mountain typically will report out of Camp Merrill in the northern part of the state.

Yonah Mountain is about 70 miles northeast of Atlanta and 170 miles northeast of Fort Benning.

This is the second deadly incident involving soldiers stationed in Georgia in the past month. In late July, Sgt. 1st Class Michael D. Clark was killed by a lightning strike at Fort Gordon near Augusta. Nine other soldiers were also injured in the incident.

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.

The service has a wide variety of offensive and defensive missile capabilities, but also a need to tie into space sensors and non-Army organic sensors that can see at much farther ranges to cue these missile systems, Maj. Gen. Robert Rasch, the Army’s program executive officer for missiles and space, said Aug. 9 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. His office will conduct what it to become an annual integrated fires test campaign.

Sensors found across the services that can detect targets at long ranges are able to, for example, provide valuable targeting information for weapons like the Army Tactical Missile System, the forthcoming Precision Guided Munition and the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, Rasch said.

The Army has shown the effectiveness of integrating sensors with shooters on the battlefield to accomplish both offensive and defensive fires missions during its campaign of learning last year, Project Convergence, held at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.

The Army took its Integrated Battle Command System, or IBCS, which is meant to serve as the brains of its air and missile defense system, and expanded its defensive mission set to a precision strike capability.

Rasch said IBCS has finished its first phase of its major initial operational test and evaluation event, and is now gearing up for the second phase. Once the second phase concludes, the Army can make a full-rate production decision on the system, which is currently in low-rate initial production.

The system was demonstrated in one of the seven use-case scenarios at Project Convergence. During the joint air and missile defense use-case scenario, IBCS conducted a successful engage-on-remote test. Threat targets were launched from White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. An engagement operations center using IBCS picked up on the threats at Fort Bliss, Texas, and tracked them. Then the system was able to remotely initiate from Fort Bliss the launch of Patriot missiles at White Sands to neutralize the threat.

Part of the demonstration included using space-based sensors, which Joint Tactical Ground Station operators tap into through satellite communications to track a missile threat. While ground and airborne sensors have been used in demonstrations involving IBCS, the addition of the space sensors shows the system is able to tie into the space capability layer.

IBCS was able to obtain information from an F-35 fighter jet tracking a ground target and feed it to the Army’s fire control system — the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System — for the first time. That system then engaged the target using a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, Rasch said.

“How do we take it out of the experimental realm and move it into a ‘let’s do it every day’ realm,” Rasch said, describing the next step.

So in fiscal 2023, the service’s Program Executive Office Missiles and Space will conduct its first-ever integrated fires test campaign, Rasch noted. “We’re going to get an opportunity to bring these things out on the range that maybe were not initially designed or thought [were] being designed to work together, but actually have them out on the range and either demonstrate, if it’s early, or operationally test, if it is ready to get to materiel release for new capabilities.”

The Army is using Project Convergence to identify what does and doesn’t work well for the service, Rasch added. The plan is to take good ideas from Project Convergence, go through a hardening process and take it right out to test as part of the integrated fires test campaign, he explained.

The venue will also offer the Army an ability to get more sets and repetitions to build up range legs more on an annual basis, Rasch noted.

But more importantly, the integrated fires test campaign is an opportunity to get those good ideas fielded without having to wait six or seven years for the “big bang that is typically associated with the program of record,” Rasch said. “We have never done that before.”

Rasch told Defense News to stay tuned for more details on what specifically will be evaluated at the first campaign next year as the new incoming program executive officer puts his stamp on the event.

Rasch is tapped to become the next commander of the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office. The new leader at PEO Missiles and Space will be Brig. Gen. Francisco Lozano, who most recently served as the chief of staff in the Office of the Secretary of the Army for Acquisitions, Logistics and Technology.

FORT BRAGG — Barracks from which 1,200 Fort Bragg soldiers are being relocated because of mold, outdated ventilation systems and aging buildings, will be demolished, a Fort Bragg spokesperson said.

Officials announced the move Thursday and said it followed an inspection of living quarters near Smoke Bomb Hill, where leaders found inadequate heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.

Responding to questions Friday from The Fayetteville Observer, Fort Bragg’s statement said “the priority is to relocate soldiers into other barracks rooms on the installation.”

The statement said that mold was reported in the barracks that were built during the mid-1970s.

“Continuous repairs and changes to airflow created higher than normal moisture levels and quality of life concerns,” the statement said. “Army and installation leaders inspected the living conditions in these barracks and (are) taking action to ensure the safety and quality of life of our soldiers.”

According to the Fort Bragg news release, a preliminary assessment found that 10 to 12 of the barracks, which were built in the 1970s, “do not meet today’s HVAC standards.”

During the past six months, no soldiers were moved from the barracks near Smoke Bomb Hill, and none have reported any health or breathing issues tied to living in the buildings, the statement said.

“There is a medical expert available should soldiers have mold-related concerns or questions,” the statement said. “Soldiers experiencing any health-related issues are encouraged (to) seek medical help and notify their chain of command.”

Military.com first reported that Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston was part of the inspection “that did not go well” and the end of July and that Grinston “scolded local leadership” for the condition of the barracks that have been riddled with mold issues, and one room had a hole in the wall with exposed pipes.

The statement said that following inspections and assessments, some barracks on Fort Bragg will be renovated and the majority in the Smoke Bomb Hill area that are more than 50 years old will be demolished.

Past issues with barracks

The latest move is not the first time concerns have been raised about barracks or that soldiers have been moved.

In December, U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina wrote a letter to Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth after a Fort Bragg soldier contacted his office about mold in the barracks.

“It has come to my attention that many unaccompanied housing installations at Fort Bragg, North Carolina are experiencing issues due to mold and outdated infrastructure,” Tillis wrote.

Unaccompanied housing structures are living quarters, usually called barracks, for single soldiers.

In Tillis’ letter to Wormuth, he wrote that in October 2020, about 200 soldiers under the 1st Special Forces Command’s 528th Special Operations Sustainment Brigade were temporarily moved after faulty heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems caused moisture and mold in two barracks buildings.

In a previous statement to The Fayetteville Observer, Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, who was commander of the 82nd Airborne Division at the time, said that mold was found in two barracks buildings in early January 2021, but the mold was immediately addressed.

“We take these types of issues very seriously and we’re constantly inspecting our paratroopers’ barracks to ensure they are maintained to the high standards they deserve, just as we did after 1st Brigade’s historic deployment to Afghanistan in August (2021),” Donahue previously said.

Plans to fix Fort Bragg barracks

In Tillis’ letter to Wormuth, he said that as a member of the Senate Armed Service Committee, he will work to ensure the Army is effective in receiving funding to modernize and replace substandard barracks by 2030.

During a virtual town hall meeting in October 2020, Grinston announced that the Army planned to invest $9.5 billion to upgrade barracks through fiscal year 2030.

Former Fort Bragg garrison commander Col. Scott Pence said 24 of Fort Bragg’s oldest barracks were either undergoing renovations or scheduled for renovations this year.

The Fort Bragg spokesperson said the average age of barracks on Fort Bragg is about 28 years old and that there are 12 projects undergoing renovations, which usually take about two years or more to complete.

Another eight barracks will start renovations at the end of December.

Fort Bragg’s statement said soldiers are encouraged to use existing reporting systems to request maintenance of their quarters and to provide candid feedback to installation leadership.

The Army Maintenance Application allows soldiers to report work orders for facilities, barracks, roads and grounds repairs, which can be made online at armymaintenance.com.

Originally published by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can receive confidential help by calling the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network’s 24/7 toll-free support line at 800-656-4673 or visiting its website. You can be connected to a hotline staff member in your area or to the Department of Defense’s Safe Helpline.

Christian Alvarado began to type as he sat alone in an interrogation room at Fort Bliss, a sprawling Army post in El Paso, Texas. He’d spent most of the previous seven hours hooked up to a polygraph, answering a military investigator’s questions about an allegation that he’d sexually assaulted a fellow soldier.

His story had changed several times during the interview in late July 2020. The investigator told Alvarado he’d already failed two polygraph tests, then left the room so that the young soldier could type up his account in a sworn statement. With his fingers on the keyboard, Alvarado began describing the night in December 2019 that he spent in the barracks with a female soldier he’d met that day.

“She was drunk and so was I,” Alvarado, an Army private first class, typed on the investigator’s computer. “We had sex, but she passed out.”

He wrote that he’d lied about the encounter being consensual in previous interviews with investigators because he wanted to protect his Army career.

When Alvarado was done with his written admission, the military investigator walked back in the room. He asked Alvarado why he continued to have sex with the woman after she passed out. “I was in the moment,” the 20-year-old soldier replied.

The investigator then asked Alvarado about another allegation against him. An Army chaplain’s assistant had accused him of sexually assaulting her in May 2020 after a house party. Sex with her was “wrong due to how intoxicated she was,” Alvarado said, but he would not agree to a sworn statement about the second allegation because it would just be “icing on the cake.”

Alvarado told the investigator that he’d had sex with 42 women in the past four years, about a quarter of whom were intoxicated at the time. His sexual experiences had become boring and they blurred together, he said, to the point that he struggled to remember specific details about his partners.

At the end of the daylong interrogation, Alvarado’s commanders didn’t place him in detention or under any restrictions beyond the orders he had already received to stay at least 100 feet away from the two women who had accused him of assault, according to records. He was free to leave.

A month later, he sexually assaulted another woman.

Had Alvarado’s case been handled by civilians and not the military, his written admission could have been enough evidence to quickly issue an arrest warrant, according to two lawyers who previously worked for the El Paso County district attorney’s office.

“I would have felt comfortable charging at that point,” said Penny Hamilton, who led the Rape and Child Abuse Unit at the district attorney’s office and later served as an El Paso County magistrate judge. “When you have the offender admitting the sexual act took place and you have the offender admitting that the alleged victim couldn’t have consented because she was passed out, then you have the elements” of a criminal charge.

In Texas’ civilian system, a person charged with sexual assault goes before a magistrate judge, who’d set a bail amount that experts said could easily be in the tens of thousands of dollars. Civilian magistrates and judges use bail to ensure suspects show up at trial. Suspects are released only if they can pay the bond.

The military justice system has no bail. Many decisions about who should be detained for serious crimes before trial are made not by judges but by commanders, who are not required to be trained lawyers.

Recent congressional reforms changed the system, which has long drawn criticism for the extensive discretion commanders wield. While the revisions stripped some of their authority, commanders continue to control various aspects of the judicial process, including deciding whether service members accused of crimes should be detained while awaiting trial, a process called pretrial confinement.

A ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation into how commanders in the Army, the nation’s largest military branch, use pretrial confinement revealed a system that treats soldiers unevenly and draws little outside scrutiny. Over the coming months, ProPublica and the Tribune will explore how military justice operates, often in vastly different ways than the civilian system.

The news organizations obtained data from the Army on nearly 8,400 courts-martial over the past decade under the Freedom of Information Act. The resulting analysis, the first-of-its-kind, showed that soldiers accused of sexual assault are less than half as likely to be placed in pretrial confinement than those accused of offenses like drug use and distribution, disobeying an officer or burglary.

The analysis showed that, on average, soldiers had to face at least eight counts of sexual offenses before they were placed in pretrial confinement as often as soldiers charged with drug or burglary crimes.

That disparity has grown in the past five years. The rate of pretrial confinement more than doubled in cases involving drug offenses, larceny and disobeying a superior commissioned officer, but it remained roughly the same for sexual assault cases like Alvarado’s, the analysis found.

For instance, the Army opted against pretrial confinement for a staff sergeant who was accused of raping the wife of a soldier in his command at Fort Bliss, while at another post a 19-year-old Texas woman was placed in detention for more than three months for using drugs and mouthing off to commanders.

“Justice that’s arbitrary is not justice,” Col. Don Christensen, a former chief prosecutor for the Air Force, said. “It shouldn’t come down to the whims of a particular commander.”

Army officials defended the system. They said that soldiers accused of violent offenses aren’t necessarily more likely to get pretrial confinement. “The nature of the offense is one factor to consider in a decision to put someone in pretrial confinement, but it is not the sole factor,” said Lt. Col. Brian K. Carr, chief of the operations branch at the Office of the Judge Advocate General’s Criminal Law Division, in an email. Characteristics of individual soldiers and their willingness to follow orders are also important factors, Carr said.

He said that, under military regulations, commanders must first decide whether there’s good reason to believe that a soldier committed a crime and is either likely to flee before trial or engage in serious criminal misconduct. Commanders have to consider if other restrictions, such as directing soldiers to remain in military housing or requiring regular check-ins with superiors, are sufficient to keep them out of trouble. They should also weigh a soldier’s military service record, character, mental condition and any previous misconduct.

In March 2020, months before Alvarado was interviewed about the sexual assault allegations, commanders reprimanded him after El Paso police arrested him for firing an AR-15 outside of his girlfriend’s apartment. Alvarado told police at the time that he was attempting to scare off a pack of coyotes. An El Paso County warrant in the case remains outstanding.

Despite the reprimand and the initial sexual assault allegations, former Fort Bliss spokesperson Lt. Col. Allie Scott said that the conditions to justify placing Alvarado in pretrial confinement were not met. Scott, who recently transferred to another post, declined to clarify. She said Fort Bliss would not comment on internal deliberations.

Nearly a month after Alvarado walked out of the interrogation room at Fort Bliss, an Army captain determined there was probable cause that he committed sexual assault, according to records obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune. In a letter to the news organizations, Alvarado would later say he was innocent but declined to answer specific questions.

The Army’s decision, and the failure to quickly act on it, came too late for Lee, a civilian and the third woman whom he would later be charged with sexually assaulting.

Lee, who agreed to go by her middle name for this story, still relives the moment in late August when Alvarado assaulted her in her living room. He pinned her down on her couch and wrapped his hand around her throat while her two children slept across the house.

She recalls calling a friend and crying weeks later when she learned from military investigators that Alvarado had previously been accused of sexual assault.

“If something had been done sooner, he would have never gotten the chance to hurt me,” Lee said.

A justice system led by military commanders

The U.S. military justice system dates back to the American Revolution. Yet the way in which the system works and how it diverges from the civilian legal process is unknown to many Americans. (About 8% of adults in the U.S. currently serve or have served in the active-duty and reserve military forces.)

The system was created to help commanders keep their fighting forces in line. So, at the start, courts handled only military-specific offenses like desertion or dereliction of duty.

“George Washington needed a means to discipline his troops,” said Rachel E. VanLandingham, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles and a former Air Force judge advocate, which is a military attorney. “It was very much a commander’s tool.”

Bail was never part of the military system because service members were often stationed in fortresses or remote, frontier garrisons, where commanders controlled their movements, said Joshua Kastenberg, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law and former Air Force judge advocate.

Civilian crimes were not tried at court-martial until the American Civil War, and then only as a way to prosecute Union soldiers who were accused of crimes in Confederate states, Kastenberg said.

For decades after, the military could tackle civilian offenses only during times of war.

Then the first and second world wars exposed a greater number of enlisted men and women to a justice system that was dramatically different from the civilian one. For example, the people representing them at trial were not required to be trained lawyers.

In an effort to bring the military more in line with civilian court practices, Congress developed the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1950. This was a major turning point, giving the military — and, in turn, commanders — jurisdiction over civilian offenses like murder and sexual assault, not just during wars but in times of peace, Kastenberg said.

In the years since, the military pushed back against limiting commanders’ control. Some military legal experts interviewed by ProPublica and the Tribune maintain pretrial confinement is superior to the civilian bail system because a suspect’s freedom has nothing to do with their ability to pay. Criminal justice experts who oppose bail argue that it criminalizes poverty and penalizes people of color.

Critics of the military justice system say giving commanders authority over who gets detained reinforces an ongoing problem in the military. Commanders are an accused person’s supervisor and have little experience or training to make consequential legal decisions.

Commanders “have convinced themselves that they have some special insight shared by no others that makes them solely qualified to make prosecution decisions and control the justice system,” said Christensen, now president of the nonprofit Protect Our Defenders, an organization that promotes military justice reform.

The most recent congressional push to shield the courts-martial process from commanders’ influence followed the 2020 murder of Vanessa Guillén, an Army specialist who was sexually harassed by a supervisor and then allegedly killed by another soldier at Fort Hood, Texas.

Guillén’s death helped build momentum for a long-standing effort by some lawmakers to dramatically reduce commanders’ role in the military justice system. A bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, proposed stripping commanders of the power to decide whether to prosecute serious offenses and giving that authority to military lawyers.

The military brass pushed back. To remove commanders “from prosecution decisions, process, and accountability may have an adverse effect on readiness, mission accomplishment, good order and discipline, unit cohesion, trust, and loyalty between commanders and those they lead,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a May 2021 letter to Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee.

In the end, Congress approved a compromise last year that created a new office of military attorneys with the power to prosecute cases related to some serious crimes such as sexual assault, domestic violence, murder and kidnapping.

Commanders retained prosecutorial control over other offenses, like robbery, assault and distribution of controlled substances.

Under the new law, commanders also held on to authority over other parts of the judicial process, including pretrial confinement. They can consult military attorneys with legal questions, but they are not required to follow that advice. And while a magistrate judge reviews cases in which a person is placed in pretrial confinement, there is no such review when commanders opt against detaining soldiers accused of crimes.

“A Dangerous Person”

To understand the way that commanders’ discretion works in practice, consider the case of Randall S. Hughes, a Fort Bliss Army staff sergeant who was accused of raping the wife of one of his soldiers at a Super Bowl party in 2017.

The woman told ProPublica and the Tribune she repeatedly asked that the Army place Hughes in pretrial confinement after it began an investigation. Hughes’ commanders did not. They eventually decided against pursuing the case, citing evidence and advice from military counsel.

Hughes later moved to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey where, in May 2020, his 16-year-old daughter told military investigators that he had sexually assaulted her two months earlier.

Again, he was not detained.

Hughes’ commanders in New Jersey instead directed him to live on post and required him to check in by phone three times a day.

During the investigation into his daughter’s accusation, military law enforcement discovered allegations that years earlier Hughes sexually assaulted one ex-wife and raped another. The latter incident occurred while he was already under investigation for the rape at Fort Bliss. They learned a third ex-wife accused him of strangling her in 2015.

Hughes was again not put into pretrial confinement.

Matt Leonard, an Army spokesperson, said in an email that Hughes’ commanders “took appropriate action” to ensure the staff sergeant showed up at trial and did “not engage in further serious misconduct.” They also issued protective orders for the victims.

In a March 2021 plea deal, Hughes admitted to a number of charges, including raping the woman at the Super Bowl party and one of his ex-wives. He also was convicted of “squeezing” another ex-wife’s neck with his hands. A judge sentenced him to almost 14 years in prison and dishonorably discharged him. He did not plead guilty to sexually assaulting his daughter but admitted to using indecent language with her and pulling her by the hair.

Hughes’ appeals attorney did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Chayla Madsen, Hughes’ first ex-wife and the mother of the daughter who accused him of sexual assault, said she agreed to the plea deal only because military attorneys said it would speed up the judicial process and be better for the victims.

Madsen used to believe the safest place her daughter could be was on a military base. Now she has no faith in a system that failed to take serious legal action against Hughes in 2017 when he was first accused of sexual assault.

“They had every reason to believe he is a dangerous person,” Madsen said.

Serial Offenses

Fort Bliss, where Hughes was first accused of sexual assault, uses pretrial confinement significantly less often than the vast majority of Army posts, applying it at a rate of roughly 6% for cases without sexual offenses and 5% for sexual assault cases, according to the news organizations’ analysis.

Just as they had done with Hughes, Fort Bliss commanders similarly decided at various junctures not to detain Alvarado.

They had another opportunity two weeks after he assaulted Lee.

Military investigators guided the 30-year-old mother, who had a brief relationship with Alvarado before the assault, to contact him and see if he would acknowledge what happened on the night of Aug. 26, 2020, when he asked to come over to her house to talk.

While sitting in a room with investigators, Lee texted Alvarado and asked him to explain why he didn’t stop when she told him to.

He apologized.

“Do you even know what you’re apologizing for?”

“My aggressive behavior.”

“Alvarado, it was more than aggressive. You choked me until I almost passed out and left bruises around my neck. Even when I told you to stop, you still shoved your hand down my pants. Why didn’t you stop when I told you to?”

The two texted for more than an hour. Lee kept pressing even after Alvarado attempted to end the conversation. Then he finally answered.

“I choked you and fingered [you]. I don’t want to talk about it.”

After the admission, the Army ordered that Alvarado stay 100 feet away from Lee. He also had other restrictions, including a requirement that he check in with commanders seven times a day in person or by phone, text or video call.

Scott, the Fort Bliss spokesperson, said commanders determined Alvarado’s restrictions “based on the information available to them at the time.”

But six attorneys and military law experts expressed surprise that commanders still did not order him into pretrial confinement.

“He’s under investigation for two sexual assaults, he’s been told to leave these people alone and then we have credible evidence that he’s committed another sexual assault,” said Geoffrey S. Corn, a former Army officer and professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. “That’s enough to prove to me two things: No. 1, he’s dangerous and, No. 2, he might be a flight risk because he’s not getting the message he has to behave.”

One night, almost a month after the text exchange, Lee called 911 when her 10-year-old son told her that Alvarado had tapped on his bedroom window and said hello, according to a police report and an interview with Lee. Military police arrived quickly but could not locate anyone. Had Alvarado been there, he would have been in violation of the protective order that required him to stay away from Lee.

Scott said neither Fort Bliss investigators nor Alvarado’s commanders knew of the claim because military police files did not mention his name. Records obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune show that Lee shared Alvarado’s name and the fact that she had a protective order against him with a 911 dispatcher.

In late October, two months after Lee was assaulted, the Army formally charged Alvarado with three counts of sexual assault, as well as with strangling Lee and lying to investigators. Still, he was not detained.

By the end of December, Alvarado was in trouble again.

He was arrested for driving drunk during a trip to Arizona, where his family lives. Fort Bliss officials said they were not aware of the arrest because neither Alvarado nor the Scottsdale Police Department notified the post.

Alvarado then missed several required check-ins with commanders. Such failures could trigger pretrial confinement. They didn’t. After a month of missed check-ins, Alvarado’s company commander increased how often he had to contact his superiors and required him to write a 1,000-word essay on “the importance of Army leaders ensuring the safety and well-being of their Soldiers.”

“How long do we need to let a serial predator continue to violate orders and harm people?” said Franklin Rosenblatt, a law professor who previously served as a Fort Bliss judge advocate from 2010 to 2012.

Different Treatment

Army officials say that pretrial confinement should be a last resort because it detains soldiers before they’ve been convicted of a crime. But Pvt. Olivia Ochoa’s experience shows how aggressive Army commanders can be even in cases with more minor infractions.

A San Antonio native, Ochoa became interested in military intelligence jobs after meeting a recruiter her senior year of high school. She joined the Army as a promising soldier in August 2020 shortly after graduating and was promoted in rank, according to her recruiter.

The 19-year-old soldier soon began to get in trouble. Months into her Army career, Ochoa was reprimanded for sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment after she and another soldier were accused of slapping each other’s butts, inner thighs and frequently flirting during formation in Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

The incident, which Ochoa denies, was the first in a series of run-ins with her drill sergeants, ranging from not carrying “the appropriate amount of water” in her water bottle to more serious issues like underage drinking and eating a THC edible.

“Once I knew I was gonna get in trouble no matter how much I tried, I completely stopped trying,” Ochoa said.

By May 2021, one of Ochoa’s drill sergeants recommended that she be released from the Army.

While waiting to be discharged, Ochoa said, she was sexually assaulted by another soldier at an off-post hotel. She initially worried that if she filed a report, the military would delay her release, but after her mental health began deteriorating, she decided to report the assault.

In July, Ochoa was caught with psychedelic mushrooms and what investigators believed to be a vape pen with THC. The Army charged her with drug possession and use.

Her commander placed her under restrictions that, among other things, allowed her to visit only the few buildings on post where she slept, ate and worked out.

Two days later, Ochoa got in trouble for refusing her superiors’ order to go back to bed after she left her room to check on a friend who was being placed in confinement. That was enough for commanders to place her in pretrial confinement the next day.

A military magistrate ordered Ochoa’s release about a week later, determining confinement was “not warranted” because she had not broken her restrictions.

Her freedom was short-lived.

In the week following her release, Ochoa’s commander again placed her in pretrial confinement after she was caught two days in a row at stores she had been barred from visiting, once trying to buy cough medicine she said she planned to take to get high.

Although the Army’s case centered on drug use and possession, Ochoa was ultimately put in pretrial confinement both times for violating superior officers’ orders. Her commanders added seven new counts of disobeying and disrespecting superiors onto her drug case for reasons that included refusing to return to her room and visiting the on-post stores.

Ochoa’s actions showed that she should not be in the Army, but her punishment was excessive, said Rosenblatt, the law professor and former Army judge advocate. He said her case is an example of how pretrial confinement is used in “arbitrary” ways that can often be fueled by a commander’s relationship with the soldier.

Commanders often interpret drug use as jeopardizing the morale or safety of the unit, whereas they tend to view sexual assaults as a conflict between two people, said Aniela Szymanski, a private attorney and Marine Corps Reserve judge advocate.

“I think that’s going to take some time for commanders to grow into having the same knee-jerk reaction to sexual assault offenses as they do to drug offenses,” she said.

Ochoa spent 103 days in pretrial confinement. She stopped eating, barely slept and was losing her hair and eyelashes.

In November, after her initial trial date was pushed back by two months, Ochoa accepted a plea deal. She was sentenced to time served. During the hearing, Ochoa learned Army officials had decided not to pursue her sexual assault case, determining that they could not establish probable cause.

The decision was a surprise to Ochoa and her civilian lawyer, Sean Timmons, who said investigators did not interview key witnesses about the assault. Army officials later agreed to speak with additional people, but they came to the same conclusion and closed the case this year.

“I believe if she was a soldier who they actually liked and wanted to see have a productive career, they probably would have already taken steps to do this investigation properly,” Timmons, a former military attorney, said in an interview. “But because they don’t like her, they’re going to maltreat her and they’re going to do a half-assed job prosecuting him.”

A Fort Huachuca spokesperson said the Army takes sexual assault allegations seriously and conducted a thorough and independent investigation into Ochoa’s case.

“Broken”

In March 2021, more than seven months after Alvarado confessed during his interrogation, he was placed in pretrial confinement.

By then, the allegations of sexual assault against him had drawn national attention. Asia Graham, the soldier who Alvarado acknowledged he sexually assaulted while she was unconscious, died at age 19 after accidentally overdosing on drugs. Before her death, Graham had written a letter to her mother, Nicole Graham, about the pain she felt because the Army had failed to take action against Alvarado.

The publicity around Graham’s case caused two more women to come forward in an interview with the cable news network NewsNation and accuse Alvarado of assaulting them years earlier in Arizona. The women had not previously reported the incidents.

Commanders’ repeated decisions against pretrial confinement, which gave Alvarado the opportunity to assault Lee, did not draw public attention. But Alvarado’s civilian defense attorney last year, Sherry Bunn, told ProPublica and the Tribune that she believed Army leaders were simply reacting to “the press and publicity and the political nature” of Graham’s and Guillén’s deaths when they decided to confine him. Army officials say he was put in pretrial confinement because of the additional allegations.

Nicole Graham said her daughter might still be alive had commanders placed Alvarado in detention earlier. That might have convinced her daughter, who was haunted by the assault, that the Army was taking the case seriously, the mother said.

“I think she would have felt maybe stronger in her recovery and not self-medicated,” she said.

Nicole Graham got the chance to face Alvarado on June 18, 2021, when a military judge found him guilty of sexually assaulting her daughter and Lee, of strangling Lee and of lying to investigators. The judge acquitted him of all other charges, including the sexual assault of the chaplain’s assistant. After the judge’s ruling, Nicole Graham read a statement from the stand about Asia: “The military has let her down.”

The judge sentenced Alvarado to 18 years and three months in a military prison and a dishonorable discharge from the Army. He got credit for the time he spent in pretrial confinement ahead of his trial: 108 days, five days more than Ochoa.

Because of the dishonorable discharge and the length of his sentence, Alvarado’s case is under automatic appeal. A decision is still pending. He remains in custody.

The fact that Alvarado is behind bars gives Lee little comfort. The attack changed her.

She still has nightmares about the presence of someone in her home, walking up the steps to her bedroom and beating on the door.

Life was not perfect before the assault. She’d lost a pregnancy before having her two children. Two marriages to Army soldiers ended. But she still had a life. She used to enjoy socializing, inviting friends over for game nights or going out around town.

Now, she stays home most of the time.

She’s thought about cutting her long hair, because attackers can grab you by the hair.

She no longer likes to be touched, especially on her face. Even her young daughter loving on her can sometimes cause her to panic.

“I’m a little more broken than I used to be.”

The appeal to the Supreme Court — which has garnered support from two prominent former Trump administration officials — follows years of efforts by the late Staff Sgt. Joshua Berry’s family to honor the shoulder injury the soldier received while leaping over a desk to take cover from gunshots.

“This is simply an opportunity to honor Josh’s life — his sacrifice — and for his daughter to have something to hold on to, and [the Army] fought it tooth and nail,” said Meredith DiLiberto, who is part of the legal team at the conservative organization Judicial Watch, which is litigating on behalf of Berry’s family.

“The U.S. Army remains committed to ensuring soldiers, civilians, and contractors are properly recognized for their service to the nation,” said Lt. Col. Joseph Payton, a spokesperson for the Army, in a statement to Army Times. He declined to comment on this specific case, citing the pending litigation.

Purple Hearts are unusual among decorations in that eligible service members are automatically entitled to them once they meet the criteria. The medals are regularly awarded to service members who die or sustain wounds in combat, but those killed or wounded in international terrorist attacks are also eligible for the medal.

Congress in 2014 expanded the definition of international terrorism to include terror attacks in which the assailant is not directed by a foreign organization but is still in communication with them.

Congress’ action greenlit dozens of Purple Hearts for troops wounded in the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, which killed 13 and wounded more than 30. The assailant, former Maj. Nidal Hasan, had been radicalized in part by an al-Qaida propagandist.

The Army has argued that the injury Berry sustained during the attack does not qualify him for a Purple Heart because he was not in direct contact with the shooter.

When Hasan opened fire outside of the room Berry was in, the staff sergeant told others in the room to take cover and then leaped over a desk, dislocating his shoulder, according to the district judge’s summary of the facts of the case.

An Army medical board later deemed Berry unfit for service because of his shoulder injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as his arthritis. He died by suicide in 2013.

After Berry was initially denied a posthumous Purple Heart in 2015, an Army appeals board recommended awarding him the medal. But a few months later, the then–deputy assistant secretary of the Army for review boards, Francine Blackmon, stepped in to override that recommendation.

Berry’s father sued in D.C. federal court for the Army to award the medal. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper sided with the Army, noting that courts should be “unusually deferential” in reviewing decisions made by the military. An appeals court agreed with Cooper’s assessment.

This summer, Berry’s aunt — who has continued fighting for the Purple Heart after Berry’s father died in 2020 — asked the Supreme Court to review the case.

Conservative legal organizations First Liberty Institute and America First Policy Institute filed a friend-of-the-court brief challenging the heightened deference that courts often afford the military’s procedural decisions, like the one to deny Berry’s medal. The brief counted two notable names among its signatories: former Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie and former acting National Security Advisor Keith Kellogg, both of whom are employed by AFPI.

Wilkie speculated that the Army denied Berry the medal because the Obama administration was reluctant to draw more attention to the Islamic terrorist aspect of the attack. In 2015, 47 people were awarded Purple Hearts or civilian Defense of Freedom Medals in connection with the 2009 attack.

“I did not hesitate to put my name on this amicus brief, because I think it’s very important that we can’t just turn aside the heroism of people for some temporary political gain,” said Wilkie, who serves as a colonel in the Air Force Reserve. He added that he feels particularly strongly about this case because his father received three Purple Hearts for service in the Vietnam War.

First Liberty lawyer Mike Berry, who is a member of the Marine Corps Reserve and has no relation to Joshua Berry, argued that courts should defer to many of the military’s decisions, but not those that threaten constitutional and statutory rights.

“We think this presents a good opportunity for the Supreme Court to step in and say, ‘No, there’s not a different standard for the Department of Defense than for everyone else’ — that when you raise your right hand and you swear the oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and you join your military as a volunteer, you don’t forfeit the constitutional protections that are afforded your civilian counterparts,” he said.

Mike Berry pointed to service members seeking religious exemptions to vaccine mandates as one issue implicated by courts’ unusual deference.

It is by no means guaranteed that the Supreme Court will hear the case. In a typical term, the court receives more than 7,000 petitions and takes on roughly 80 of them.

A spokesperson for the solicitor general, who is representing the Army and Department of Defense leadership, declined to comment.

The cooperative research and development agreement with the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command Technical Center, which SpaceLink announced Monday, allows the organizations to share facilities, intellectual property and expertise to “elevate solutions for both the warfighter and industry,” the McLean, Virginia-based company said in a statement. There is no funding connected to the agreement.

While the work isn’t tied to a specific Army program, it comes as the service is making plans for a Tactical Space Layer that would enable it to use overhead imagery to target beyond-line-of-sight threats. The Army has been partnering with commercial companies and other military services to conduct experiments and prototyping efforts aimed at reducing the amount of time it takes to collect and deliver satellite data to a weapon system.

SpaceLink is investing internal funds to develop a satellite relay system that will reside in medium Earth orbit — between 1,243 and 22,236 miles above planet’s surface — and use laser communications for faster and more secure data transfer. Anthony Colucci, the company’s chief strategy and commercial officer, told C4ISRNET in an interview that SpaceLink is in the “ready-for-production phase” and plans to launch its first constellation of four satellites by the end of 2024.

Colucci said the company views the agreement as a sign the U.S. government understands the value its system will bring once on orbit. Although its constellation isn’t operational, SpaceLink will provide modeling and simulation tools that the Army can use to better understand how the capability could fit into its architecture.

“It can take hours, and sometimes even days, between the time somebody says, ‘I need certain data, I need an impact of what’s going on,’ until they have that data back,” Colucci said. “With our system, it can be minutes to even seconds. So, you can imagine the tactical importance.”

After its first satellites arrive on orbit in 2024, SpaceLink plans to launch new capabilities every two years, increasing processing speed and capacity with each iteration.

Colucci said the company has discussed its plans with the Space Force, Space Development Agency and the Defense Innovation Unit, providing studies and white papers to show how the system could improve data delivery times. He said he expects additional partnerships to be formalized soon but declined to provide details.

An Army veteran who pleaded guilty to stealing $2.1 million worth of military gear from a Texas army base was sentenced to 18 months in prison last Tuesday and ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution to the Army.

Jessica Elaintrell Smith, 30, was ordered to serve 18 months in prison followed by two years of post-release supervision by U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton during a remote hearing, the Killeen Daily Herald reported.

Smith must also pay nearly $1.3 million to the Army as restitution for her role in the Fort Hood theft, Tipton ruled.

The vet pleaded guilty in April to stealing dozens of Army thermal scopes, radios and night vision goggles from the Texas base. She and two co-conspirators snatched the expensive specialty equipment sometime overnight between June 16 and June 17 of last year, the local outlet reported.

The next day, soldiers at Fort Hood found the locks on 17 shipping containers had been cut and a count of inventory found that a total of 137 items worth about $2.1 million were missing from the containers.

“It was a smash-and-grab,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joel Stacey Dunn, said on Tuesday, according to the Herald. “They took whatever they could get.”

Smith and her co-conspirators were caught when Army investigators spotted items from the stolen loot for sale on eBay less than two weeks later. The items listed on the resale site had serial numbers that matched the missing equipment.

On April 5, Smith pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. A second count she was charged with was dropped as part of the plea agreement, according to the Herald.

The veteran apologized to the government, her Army unit and her family during her sentencing Tuesday, the outlet reported.

“I want a better reality,” Smith said. “I want to do better in life and I’ll never be in this situation again.”

Her lawyer, a court-appointed public defender, said the mom of two got “financially desperate” in trying to provide for her children.

One of Smith’s co-defendants in the case, Nathan Nichols, also pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced in October. He is expected to share in the responsibility of paying the $1.3 million restitution to the Army, the judge in the case said.

A third co-defendant and fellow Army veteran, Brandon Dominic Brown, pleaded not guilty in November 2021. He will go on trial on Sept. 6 with a grand jury.

Army and installation leaders, including Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston, who has made overhauling base housing one of his top priorities, recently inspected the barracks at the Smoke Bomb Hill area of the North Carolina base.

The inspection found “higher than normal moisture levels” — conditions ripe for mold — “and quality of life concerns,” a spokesperson for Fort Bragg said in an unsigned email statement to Army Times.

The base anticipates that all affected soldiers will be moved over the next 30 days.

“Our priority is to relocate Soldiers into other barracks rooms on the installation to maintain unit and squad integrity,” the spokesperson for the base said, adding that the base is now assessing room availability.

Any soldiers relocated off-post will be moved back once renovations are done, the spokesperson added. The Army will hire a moving company to help soldiers relocate, according to the spokesperson.

Some of the Smoke Bomb Hill barracks will be renovated, the spokesperson told Army Times, but the majority of them will be demolished.

Several soldiers took to the comments of a Reddit post containing a statement by Fort Bragg on the relocation to complain about the conditions in the Smoke Bomb Hill barracks.

“Most soldiers including myself have lived in rooms with so much mold that they’ve developed breathing issues and coughs,” user Friendfoxx said.

“One of my medics from 108th [Air Defense Artillery Brigade] got placed in there when we got back from deployment,” user Daumath said. “He wanted to go back to his tent in Iraq lmao.”

The Smoke Bomb Hill barracks were built in the mid-1970s through Project Volunteer Army, or VOLAR, in an effort to provide better living conditions for the newly all-volunteer force.

Asked if leaders would soon inspect other barracks on the installation, the spokesperson for Fort Bragg told Army Times, “Unit level leaders routinely walk through their facilities conducting inspections and are encouraged by senior leaders to report maintenance concerns through Army Maintenance Application (ArMA).”

In 2020, a mold problem at Fort Bragg forced more than 200 soldiers to move out of their barracks on short notice. But Fort Bragg is not the only military installation to have suffered subpar housing conditions.

Navy Times reported in February that some service members at the Maryland Navy base that is home to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center lacked hot water, air conditioning, and locking doors.

Families at the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and Fort Bragg also filed a lawsuit in 2021 seeking damages for mold and other issues in their privatized housing. And a January report by the Government Accountability Office found that nearly 30% of Defense Department buildings had exceeded their expected lifespans.

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)

The newspaper reported that Ryan Cunningham became police chief at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin in 2016, months after an investigation at Fort Wainwright in Alaska found he sexually harassed a female Army sergeant and made unwanted advances toward her and other women while he was that base’s acting police chief. Cunningham resigned while the investigation was ongoing.

An investigation at Fort McCoy, about 110 miles northwest of Madison, found that Cunningham often used slurs to refer to his officers and the hostile working environment may have contributed to the suicide of James Hamilton, the base’s former director of emergency services, who died in 2020. The investigation noted that it wasn’t conclusive that Cunningham’s behavior was a factor in Hamilton’s death.

Hamilton and Cunningham worked together for about six months at Fort McCoy before Cunningham left the base in January 2020 to become temporary police chief at another base, the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. He eventually became that base’s strategic planner, according to his LinkedIn page, although a base spokesperson said he no longer works there.

Cunningham declined comment.

Cunningham’s movement between bases raises questions about the Army’s ability to track sexual misconduct by civilian employees. Fort Wainwright spokesperson Eve Baker said that base’s investigation was a “local-level” probe and no central repository for investigative documents exits. But she said commanders would have told future employers that Cunningham left the base while under investigation if asked.

Fort McCoy spokesperson Tonya Townsell referred questions about Cunningham to the Civilian Resources Agency, which oversees civilian hiring at the base. Amy Stevens, a division chief with the resources agency, declined comment.

A former command sergeant major, now-Sgt. 1st Class Clinton Murray, pleaded guilty to assault. That came after he was hauled back to the Army via deserter warrant in August 2020 after allegedly forging his clearing paperwork to retire and avoid his second sexual assault court-martial.

Court records reveal the two cases have a common thread that troubles victims, attorneys and advocates alike: each of the accused received a favorable plea deal from the Army allowing them to retire, and neither were convicted of a crime that would require sex offender registration in virtually any state. Though the victims agreed to the plea deals with varying reluctance, they believe the Army left them without a choice.

Crosby pleaded guilty at a Nov. 10 general court-martial to touching the soldier’s breast and conduct unbecoming an officer — but the touching was only a simple assault, rather than the abusive sexual contact charge he’d initially faced. A judge sentenced Crosby to 30 days in jail, but his plea deal prevented the judge from kicking him out and taking his retirement.

Murray, who was previously acquitted of sexually assaulting a junior soldier in Afghanistan after an officer helped him destroy evidence, was later accused of blackmailing the same officer for nude photos. He was also accused of attempting to share nude photos of her, coercing her into sex and directing her to destroy evidence ahead of the first trial, among other charges related to his alleged desertion.

But under his plea deal, Murray was not convicted of a sexual offense or a felony equivalent — nor was the judge allowed to sentence him to a punitive discharge. According to trial records, he instead pleaded guilty June 15 to assault for grabbing the officer’s arm in his bedroom on the date of the alleged sexual assault. He also pleaded guilty to adultery, fraternization, failure to properly route his clearing worksheet and sexual harassment, for which he is currently serving a 90-day sentence.

Both either have or will retire with their military pensions. A Louisiana National Guard spokesperson confirmed that Crosby retired March 31. And Murray will retire as a sergeant first class after the judge reduced him in rank, according to a source familiar with the court proceedings.

Victims from the Murray and Crosby cases told Army Times of their frustration with the culture in the units where they experienced the crimes, as well as what they perceived as failures in the military justice system that allowed perpetrators to walk away with pensions intact thanks to favorable plea deals.

The structure of the military justice system encourages deals such as these and it will be years before any changes materialize — if any do at all — after the service’s Office of Special Trial Counsel takes over prosecutions for sexual misconduct and other major crimes by late December 2023, according to military law experts who also spoke with Army Times.

Murray’s attorney did not respond to emailed questions.

Crosby asked Army Times to “stop using my name in stories” and said in an email that “plea deals work both ways…I was not guilty, because I was not guilty.” He said, “no,” when asked if he was arguing that he pleaded guilty to crimes he hadn’t committed.

‘A common practice’

According to Philip Cave, a retired Navy JAG and experienced military defense attorney who serves as a director of the National Institute of Military Justice, plea deals such as these are “a common practice.” He said that, like in civilian courts, the “vast majority” of UCMJ cases are resolved outside of trial, though sex offense cases are more likely to go to trial in the military.

In courts-martial, plea deals are between the convening authority — the general whose command is trying the case, advised by their staff judge advocate — and the accused. An Army spokesperson noted that the convening authority “must consider” input from the victim, but they’re not obligated to follow their wishes.

Cave explained that the plea agreements are more common when the prosecution has doubts about success, or if they lack the time and resources to take a case to trial. Conversely, the accused, on the advice of defense counsel, are often eager for a deal when they think the evidence could lead a judge or panel to convict at trial.

And some cases without strong evidence make it to trial due to the insistence of the commanders that oversee courts-martial, explained Cave.

The seasoned defense attorney argued that pretrial agreements, even those that allow defendants to plead down to non-sexual charges, have their benefits: a relatively quick resolution to the case, as well as a predictable sentence. He noted that the government must consult with victims in such cases, and many support deals in order to get closure.

In some cases, prosecutors and victims either don’t fully understand or don’t support deals, explained retired Col. Don Christensen, who once was the Air Force’s top prosecutor but is now head of Protect our Defenders, a non-profit that aims to end sexual violence in the military.

Unlike the civilian justice system, the prosecutors, many of whom are captains, are not directly involved in deal-making, said Christensen.

The former top Air Force prosecutor argued that some staff judge advocates lack the prosecutorial experience to effectively gauge whether a case could be lost at trial. Christensen also said that “senior officers and senior enlisted people” often get a “pass” and are allowed to leave with their retirement benefits intact.

Judges can’t reject deals either, except for narrow circumstances.

The legal experts think it’s too soon to tell how the service’s ongoing work to establish an independent prosecution office for major crimes — including sexual offenses — will impact plea deals. Cave said it will take several years after full implementation to understand the overall effects of the change and to then decide on modifications.

The service’s independent prosecutor, who will be a general officer who reports to the Army secretary, will have “exclusive authority to enter into plea agreements” for covered offenses, Army spokesperson Sgt. 1st Class Anthony Hewitt told Army Times in an emailed statement.

The NIMJ director said most military law experts believe that the new independent office will focus on high-quality cases — which could leave prosecutors less likely to cut deals and defense attorneys more eager for them.

Cave thinks the answer won’t be clear “for a few years” after the office takes over prosecutions.

One thing is clear, though: victims from the Crosby and Murray cases aren’t happy with the current system.

‘The court fucked me over’

Melissa, a former Louisiana National Guard NCO, told Army Times in a series of phone interviews that prosecutors gave her the impression that Crosby would have to register as a sex offender as part of his plea deal, which she said officials pressured her to support. She asked that Army Times only publish her first name — she has since moved and started a new career.

Army Times covered Crosby’s conviction and subsequent retirement in May.

“There’s so much more to that story,” Melissa explained, venting her frustration.

“The SHARP [sexual harassment/assault response and prevention program] did their job,” she said. “[The lawyer] told me that this motherfucker was still supposed to be registered as a sex offender.”

Asked about situations like Melissa’s, Christensen of Protect our Defenders decried a “lack of honesty when [command officials] are talking to victims to try to convince them to do deals,” before adding that some prosecutors may not understand state sex offender registry laws.

According to online court records, Crosby told Melissa twice — each time with witnesses around — about his plan to assault her during her promotion ceremony after learning that she had been selected for sergeant.

He also told another NCO about his intentions. That led Melissa to ask not to have a ceremony — but that didn’t stop him from assaulting her the following day in the supply room of their small base in Jordan.

According to a prosecution motion, he “approached [Melissa], told her to stand up, placed the rank in front of her chest, leaned in to grab the rank with his teeth...then placed his face between [Melissa]’s breasts...[and] vigorously moved his head from side to side between [her] breasts while still holding the rank with his teeth.”

But the problems began before the promotion ceremony, she explained, contributing to what she sees as a double standard for disciplining senior personnel.

Melissa said Crosby was her company commander in the years leading up to the deployment, and he’d always paid close attention to her, including an assignment as his driver.

“It was an easy job,” she recalled. “He seemed like a good guy — like an easygoing commander — everybody wants an easygoing commander instead of an asshole, you know? If things would start to go into inappropriate comments, I would laugh it off and not say anything.”

She eventually earned a slot as the company’s supply sergeant despite only being a specialist, which led to her being selected to go on an advance party for the 256th Infantry Brigade Combat Team’s 2020-2021 deployment to the Middle East. Melissa’s unit, Company H, 199th Brigade Support Battalion, went to Jordan and supported one of the brigade’s infantry battalions — and Crosby had been assigned to the advance party as the battalion’s new logistics officer.

“The whole time we were on [advance party], the comments got worse. They got more sexual,” she said. “I couldn’t run from it. I was fucking stuck there.”

After the rest of her unit arrived, Melissa said, Crosby’s interest in her became widely known, leading some of her junior peers to spread rumors and shun her.

“Nobody told him anything like, ‘Sir, you need to check yourself;’ nobody reported anything,” Melissa added. “Even the [assault] witness didn’t want to be involved. Nobody was reporting shit because nobody gave a fuck.”

Not even the May 2021 promotion ceremony assault changed many of their minds, she recalled. Crosby was transferred to another base shortly after it occurred.

“It was as if people felt sorry for him,” she said. “They were more concerned about Crosby [than me], and though that situation was fucked up…they’re probably happy that he fucking retired.”

Melissa thinks that if she had done something similar to Crosby — publicly declared her intentions to touch another soldier sexually and then followed through on them — she would have been “crushed” by the military justice system.

She also blasted prosecutors in her case for making her feel “manipulated to [accept] an easy deal for him” that allowed the captain to retire after 30 days’ confinement.

“I can understand a lawyer trying to convince Crosby of taking a deal,” Melissa said. “But like why are you trying to convince me of a shitty deal?”

Early proposed deals would have allowed Crosby to retire without punishment and plead guilty to merely grabbing her shoulders, she added. She didn’t support the final deal, either.

Melissa’s special victims counsel submitted a formal memo for the court-martial’s convening authority, 1st Theater Sustainment Command’s Maj. Gen. Michel Russell, explaining her opposition to the deal, which she shared with Army Times.

“[Melissa] does not agree with the Article 120 offense, Abusive Sexual Contact, being reduced to Article 128,” a non-sexual assault consummated by battery, the memo said. “[She] is prepared to continue to cooperate with the Government and testify at court-martial.”

But she retracted that memo after cajoling from officials, she explained. One lawyer told her that she might not win at trial despite there being another NCO who witnessed the assault.

“When someone does something fucked up and a witness [is] involved, how is there any argument?” she asked. “[But] I felt I had to take the deal.”

With Melissa’s reluctant support, Crosby’s plea deal was accepted. He served his 30 days behind bars and retired with full benefits on March 31.

A spokesperson for 1st Theater Sustainment Command, Maj. Dan Parker, told Army Times in an email that Russell properly considered “the recommendations and input of the chain of command, the staff judge advocate and the survivor” in the Crosby case. He emphasized that Crosby was convicted “of a federal assault crime and sentenced to a month in confinement.”

“Capt. Crosby’s court-martial conviction and punishment ensured he was held accountable for his actions,” said Parker. “Soldiers must be able to trust their leaders. Capt. Crosby violated that trust.”

Melissa disagreed with the command’s assessment, arguing the justice system failed in her case. In the months since, she’s started counseling with the VA for issues stemming from the assault, the social fallout from reporting it and her struggle to find justice through the courts.

“The court fucked me over.”

‘I was set up to fail by the government’

Clinton Murray’s alleged victims have similar sentiments.

Army Times conducted a series of phone interviews with both women whom Murray was accused of assaulting, though the former cavalry squadron CSM was acquitted of sexual assault and instead convicted of fraternization in both cases.

One, then-Pfc. Morgan Masters, elected to speak under her name. The other, a junior officer, asked that her name not appear in the story. Both deployed with 3rd Squadron, 73rd Cavalry in 2017 with Murray as the unit’s senior enlisted soldier.

Court records reveal that Murray’s first court-martial, in January 2020, was for allegedly sexually assaulting Masters in his Kabul office during that deployment. Murray beat that allegation: a panel acquitted him of sexual assault and maltreatment. They instead convicted him of fraternizing with Masters, sentencing him to a reduction to master sergeant. The command dismissed charges that he fraternized with an officer during the deployment.

Prosecutors in that trial had a challenge: there was little physical evidence. And after the trial began, they learned why. The officer with whom Murray fraternized had destroyed evidence of the reported assault, allegedly at Murray’s behest — and two days into the trial, she showed up at Fort Bragg and was ready to talk.

It’s not clear if the officer testifying at trial would have changed the outcome since she arrived too late — the panel was already in deliberations and later acquitted Murray of the assault. But the newly-demoted master sergeant was immediately put under a new criminal investigation in February 2020 to look into the officer’s allegations, which included attempting to share nude photos of the officer, blackmailing her for nude photos and coercing her into sex.

Initially, the officer was “very confident.”

“The sense I got from the government was that they [knew] they had completely screwed up…so they’re going to put so much time and effort into getting justice,” the officer said.

Masters thinks the government screwed up, too — by failing to secure the evidence that the officer destroyed after Murray learned of the sexual assault allegation.

“They didn’t protect me and my legal process [by having] evidence handled properly,” she argued.

According to his charges, Murray was aware of the assault allegation against him by Dec. 10, 2017. Prosecutors alleged he told the officer to destroy the evidence sometime between Dec. 11 and Dec. 14, though that charge was dismissed. It’s not clear what measures the unit took to protect evidence of the alleged assault, and it’s not clear why they failed.

Murray caught more charges when he allegedly faked signatures on clearing paperwork, left Fort Bragg and collected his pension for three weeks. The Army said that was in error and ordered him back. Murray refused, suing the Army and losing before being dragged back on a deserter warrant in August 2020.

Ahead of the second trial, Masters told Army Times her experience had “been this awful feeling of relying on the other victim…so I can get my justice.”

But the officer’s case got complicated. A disagreement over a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder intake form from the Veterans Affairs administration being allowed into evidence, despite court-martial rules prohibiting mental health treatment records from being subpoenaed, led her to sue the Army and VA in an effort to block their disclosure to the court — and to the public. Her appeals were denied.

The former officer explained to Army Times that the prosecutor who had initially been gung-ho about going after Murray had left the division as well.

“The one person who was on my side from the prosecution team was removed, and so that kinda just stopped the case,” she said. “I felt like it just became another case on the docket and that the government just wanted to get through…They lost their fire to want to fight for this and it just became a burden on them to prosecute this guy.”

When the government approached her about a plea deal, her feelings were complex. She was ready for the five-year ordeal to end, especially after losing the fight over her psychiatric records, plus she knew the sexual assault charge might be difficult to win at trial. One thing was certain, though: she wanted him to at least plead guilty to the nude photograph charges.

According to a stipulation of facts from the trial, Murray admitted to soliciting nude photos of the officer until she capitulated out of fear that he would expose their unlawful relationship. When she tried to end the relationship, he threatened to “expose their relationship, including nude photos of [her].”

But Murray wouldn’t take a deal that included a registered sex offense or a felony, according to the officer. And any deal would have to let him keep his retirement.

He got the agreement he wanted, pleading guilty June 15. The sex crimes and desertion charge were dismissed, and Murray pleaded guilty to a series of minor offenses that included simple assault, fraternization, dereliction of duty (for misrouting his clearing paperwork) and discrediting the Army through sexual harassment.

Murray was also reduced to sergeant first class and sentenced to 90 days’ confinement, less one day of pre-trial confinement credit.

The officer, while “validated” by the fact that Murray ultimately went to jail, is furious with how the process played out.

“He gets to retire after all of this. After all that he’s done…he basically gets to spend 89 days in prison, retire as a sergeant first class, and still get benefits,” she said. “I was set up to fail by the government.”

Masters, who received a medical retirement due to mental health problems stemming from her experience in Afghanistan, is also disappointed. She feels that Murray was held to a lower standard than she would have been, especially on the dismissed desertion charge.

“As the victim, if I had gone [absent without leave]...I would have been eaten alive and put in some military prison for doing the exact same thing,” she said.

“I want to reiterate that I’m not mad at [the officer],” Masters asked Army Times to print. “She took her power back from what he did to her…I think the blame should be placed on the Army and how they didn’t really protect either one of us from him.”