Defense One - Threats

Pro-Iran hackers appear to increase critical infrastructure cyberattacks

Chris Teale — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

Cyberattacks against critical infrastructure from groups sympathetic to Iran appear to be ticking up, as the federal government warns that hackers may exploit vulnerabilities.

Last week, pro-Iranian hacking group Ababil of Minab claimed responsibility for a March hack on the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, publishing claims on Telegram that they said showed them accessing LA Metro’s internal systems. The transit agency shut down access to some of its network after its security team found unauthorized activity, although officials said bus and rail service was unaffected.

The group's claims may be false. It is an “emerging” group “with a limited public profile and little verifiable prior activity in threat intelligence reporting — making any definitive capability or intent assessment premature at this stage,” said a blog post by Tim Miller, field chief technology officer for public sector at Dataminr, an artificial intelligence-backed platform that helps leaders track events, threats and risks in real time.

Still, Miller wrote, “What can be cautiously observed from available evidence is that their explicit pro-Iran messaging and targeting of a major US public transit authority is broadly consistent with Iranian-aligned actors’ known pattern of targeting US critical infrastructure."

Other experts that track such events are similarly cautious. “There is no clear evidence that the claim is legitimate,” said a spokesperson for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which has warned of attacks on critical infrastructure by pro-Iran hackers.

Still, it is a worrying time for state and local governments and critical infrastructure operators, who have been waiting to see whether the ongoing U.S. war on Iran would draw retaliation by Iran-linked hacker groups.

"The threat of cyber-attack from Iran is real,” Andrew Chipman, governance, risk and compliance manager at cybersecurity company ProCircular, said in an email. “At this time, we expect to see that threat realized through proxies, hacktivists, and other allies to the Iranian regime. If Iran is able to build back their regime, we may see direct retaliation from Iran in the form of cyber-attacks against highly visible targets. History teaches us that hospitals and medical service providers are prime targets for the regime and its supporters. However, any critical infrastructure is a potential target.”

The alleged Iran-backed hack in Los Angeles preceded a April 7 warning from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and a slew of other federal agencies that various operational technology devices used in critical infrastructure, including programmable logic controllers, have been exploited by bad actors linked to Iran.

The agencies said those efforts, which have at times “resulted in operational disruption and financial loss,” have been designed to “cause disruptive effects within the United States.” CISA and its fellow agencies said the targets have included government services and facilities, water and wastewater systems and energy.

“Iran using cyberattacks to probe and impact American utilities should come as no surprise,” Lt. Gen. Ross Coffman (Ret.), president of artificial intelligence company Forward Edge-AI, said in an email. “Iran is using its long-range targeting tools to fight in every domain possible. We must continue to harden our cyber defenses and remind employees that they are the first line of defense. Our government's cyber professionals are the best in the world, so Iran is probing daily to find an exposed flank.”

Ababil of Minab warned that their “forthcoming actions will exact sterner pain,” although Miller said in the blog post that those pronouncements should be “treated as unverified rhetoric until corroborated by additional intelligence.” Chipman said some form of escalation could happen.

“Iran is not currently in a position to wage large scale cyber warfare against the United States or its allies, but hacktivists and proxy attackers are plentiful — expect attacks to come and prepare appropriately," he said.

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US has turned back 13 ships in blockade of Iran, Joint Chiefs chairman says

Meghann Myers — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:21:27 -0400

Since the United States began to blockade Iran’s ports on Tuesday, 13 ships have heeded warnings from U.S. warships to turn back, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Thursday.

The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group is leading the blockade, Gen. Dan Caine said at a Pentagon press briefing with sailors prepared to board any commercial vessels that attempt to cross the blockade line.

In addition to ships, there is a “massive, massive force of fighters, intelligence aircraft, helicopters, and other embarked forces, to include aerial refueling tankers that are up overhead this blockade area,” Caine said, indicating a chart of U.S. presence in the region.

Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, joined the briefing to talk about two recent trips to the Middle East, where he said he “had the privilege of personally recognizing more than 100 servicemen and women for their extraordinary valor, their courage and their initiative under fire.”

Cooper also said he met with teams who had recovered downed Iranian one-way attack drones and rebuilt them.

“We brought them back to America, took the guts out, put a ‘made in America’ stamp on them, and fired them right back to Iran,” he said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addressed Iran’s government directly in his remarks, asserting that Tehran can attempt to “dig out” of its destroyed military and defense industrial base facilities, “but you can’t reconstitute.”

Hegseth also challenged Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, saying they “don’t have a real navy or real domain awareness,” though Iran’s mines have effectively kept the waterway closed.

Hegseth then turned his ire upon the press.

“I just can't help but notice the endless stream of garbage, the relentlessly negative coverage you cannot resist peddling, despite the historic and important success of this effort and the success of our troops,” he said. “Sometimes it's hard to figure out what side some of you are actually on. It's incredibly unpatriotic.”

He compared coverage of the Iran war to that of the Afghanistan withdrawal, accusing the media of bending “over backwards to explain away” the chaos of the American airlift out of Kabul’s airport as Taliban forces took over the country.

In reality, news organizations at the time asked the Pentagon in its daily briefings how and why the withdrawal effort had been left to the last minute and allowed to get so out of control. Pentagon officials deferred questions about planning and decision-making to the State Department.

Hegseth then turned his attention to recruiting efforts by the Air Force and Space Force, which announced Tuesday they had met their fiscal year 2026 goals five months ahead of deadline.

“Where are the reports on that? Where's the coverage of the new spirit in the country? The new spirit in the ranks, the surge of Americans wanting to join the greatest military in the world,” he said. “Nothing from the fake news.”

In fact, ABC News reported on the story on Wednesday, becoming the latest of several news organizations to do so.

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US must adjust to Iran’s use of commercial satellite photos, Space Command says

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:45:50 -0400

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado—Iran’s use of commercial space imagery to strike U.S. and allied targets will force the Pentagon to adjust, the head of U.S. Space Command said.

“We have to recognize that the rest of the world can now see the entire planet transparently and almost 24/7 and so we have to be able to operate in that environment successfully,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, the head of U.S. Space Command told reporters Tuesday during the Space Symposium conference here.

U.S. Central Command, which leveled Iran’s nascent space command in the opening days of the war, more recently announced that the U.S. military had achieved “space superiority” over its enemy. Despite those quick victories, Whiting acknowledged that the conflict has still taught him that even less-equipped adversaries can still inflict damage using commercial satellite imagery and that the U.S. military’s space assets remain key targets during major operations.

“Every country, just about today, can somehow access space imagery, which then gives them an insight on what's going on in the battlefield,” Whiting said. “I think we need to be cognizant of that.”

A day before Whiting spoke, the chairman of the House Select Committee on China wrote to the Pentagon, asking how Iran came by the imagery it used to attack U.S. troops. In the letter, which was obtained by Defense One, Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Michigan, alleged there was a “high likelihood" that satellite photos taken by Airbus were provided to China's MizarVision ahead of Iran’s March 27 attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

The Europe-based company says it’s not true.

"Airbus denies these allegations, and this letter contains many inaccuracies regarding our operations and commercial relationships,” an Airbus spokesperson told Defense One. “We strictly comply with all applicable sanctions, export controls and international regulatory frameworks."

Moolenaar wrote that Airbus should “follow suit” with other commercial satellite imagery companies that have stopped releasing photos of the region. Planet Labs and Vantor, two of the U.S.’s leading satellite image providers, have limited customers’ access

“This decision reflects our responsibility to ensure that our services do not inadvertently increase risks to civilians or to U.S., allied, or partner forces given the highly dynamic and rapidly evolving conditions in the region,” Vantor said in an emailed statement to Defense One.

In harm’s way

Space Force guardians, as well as other troops supporting SPACECOM and CENTCOM, are working within reach of Iran’s missiles and drones.

During the press conference, Whiting took a moment to remember Army Staff Sgt. Benjamin Pennington. The soldier was assigned to Fort Carson’s 1st Space Battalion, 1st Space Brigade, and was killed in the March 1 attack on Prince Sultan Air Base.

Gen. Chase Saltzman, the Space Force’s top uniformed officer, has previously said guardians deployed for Operation Epic Fury had continued to launch space effects “despite being under attack from an adversary.”

Whiting said the U.S. military’s space capabilities will remain key targets for enemies who will seek to “balance their inferiority in conventional arms” in future conflicts. That includes Iran.

“Even a medium power like Iran will seek to target our space capabilities,” Whiting said. “We do not live in an era of sanctuary anymore, and so our systems need to be resilient to those kinds of attacks, be able to operate through those attacks.”

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Orbán’s loss won’t stop Russian influence campaigns, but it shows they’re beatable

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:20:31 -0400

The electoral defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán dealt a blow to Russia’s foreign-influence operations—and illustrated how the Kremlin’s approach is changing. In the victory of the opposition-party candidate, other Western nations can draw lessons for confronting Russia’s continuing efforts.

Orbán was a key player in Vladimir Putin’s effort to weaken the European Union and its support for Ukraine. In February, the prime minister blocked a 90-million-euro loan that would have funded Ukrainian defense and civil infrastructure. His government also tried to block EU sanctions against Russian oil interests. In March, news broke of Orbán’s foreign minister collaborating with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to influence EU voting. Orbán himself accused Ukraine, without evidence, of planning to attack pipelines that carry fuel to Europe and even of plotting to send troops to his home. With Orbán’s loss, Putin loses a critical aide in his drive to establish a “sphere of influence” over a fragmented Europe.

Extraordinary efforts

Russian efforts to keep its Hungarian friend in power included a coordinated disinformation campaign launched in January, when false narratives began to spout from TikTok accounts and other social media accounts affiliated with a Russian group called Storm-1516. The first claimed that Tisza Party candidate Péter Magyar—Orbán’s main rival and ultimately the election’s winner—“used a humanitarian trip to Ukraine as cover to divert $16.7 million in European aid.” A second claimed that Magyar and others conspired with Ukraine to embezzle $30 million in international aid.

Researchers at Clemson University tracked the false narratives. Others included rumors of “reinstating military drafts, offending world leaders, and drug addiction,” the researchers write in a new research paper. “Storm-1516 targeted Hungary with 11 narratives identified for this report, several of which received thousands of reposts.”

Storm-1516 collaborates with Matryoshka, another Kremlin-backed group. Discovered in 2023 by French researchers monitoring Russian attacks on France’s national elections, Matryoshka “impersonates North American and European public figures and media outlets, including French ones” to spread disinformation about Ukraine and, sometimes, French politicians.

Storm-1516 and Matryoshka increased their Hungarian efforts in February and March. They baselessly accused Orbán detractors of child sex abuse. They accused Ukraine of attempting to foment a coup. In April, the Kremlin dispatched Putin’s First Deputy Chief of Staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, to coordinate online campaign strategy with the Orbán regime.

This drew calls for an investigation from the EU Commission, which said that the approach “is modeled on previous interference campaigns that Russia has rolled out in other countries, most recently Moldova. The interference team is reportedly deployed on behalf of Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, and operating out of the Russian embassy in Budapest.”

But Russia’s measures were muted compared to Orbán’s own party, Fidesz, which funded proxy groups such as the National Resistance Movement. Fidesz and its allies were the election cycle’s biggest creators of AI-generated content, according to the independent Hungarian monitor Lakmusz and the European Digital Media Observatory.

“Researchers attributed some targeted disinformation attacks in the Hungarian campaign to known Russian groups. However, their reach and impact so far have remained limited, at least compared to the disinformation” produced by the Orbán regime, EDMO wrote.

What this shows

All this illustrates changes in how Russia is waging digital influence warfare.

First, Russia is creating vastly more fake social-media accounts. The Clemson researchers found 36 TikTok accounts that purported to be legitimate marketing efforts, building up followings of 10,000 to 80,000 followers.

“Before January 2026, these accounts did not engage with or post Storm-1516 content. Since then, the accounts have shifted from commercial marketing and promotional content to posting political content aligned with Russian narratives,” the Clemson researchers write.

Such influence campaigns often work alongside physical hybrid-warfare tactics such as sabotage and political violence, Soufan Center observers wrote in March.

Russia is also working to put a local face on its influence efforts. The Kremlin engages a friendly politician in a target country to take the lead, then boosts his or her message with fake accounts and a growing network of Kremlin-paid influencers.

“By leveraging influencers and the trust they have from existing communities, Russia can engage in focused messaging targeting specific communities with narratives that those communities may already be inclined to believe,” the Clemson researchers write.

When such politicians win, they erect institutional obstacles to prevent opposing candidates from displacing them. The Orbán government “had worked on every district, just crafting it to make it perfect for its own strengths and weaknesses. They had almost total control of radio, television and media. They were using massive, massive state resources for their own political purposes,” Thomas Carothers, director of Carnegie's Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment, said on a podcast this week. So Magyar “was going against, you know, it looked like every possible obstacle.”

U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have been open boosters of Orbán and his tactics. Vance campaigned for Orbán—even repeating a Matryoshka false claim: that Ukraine, not Russia, was interfering in Hungary’s election.

Russian efforts in Hungary will continue.

“Even without Viktor Orbán, Fidesz controls roughly 80 percent of Hungary's state media landscape and remains a willing partner. If anything, Russian operations will be even more network-driven, leveraging political allies and entrenched media infrastructure to sustain anti-Ukraine narratives and erode trust in the EU,” said former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Ellen McCarthy who now leads the Trust in Media Cooperative.

They will also find new targets outside of Hungary.

“Increasingly, they are targeting regional elections, trying to influence countries within their sphere of influence. We already know who their next target is: Armenia,” which has elections coming up in June, said Darren Linvill, one of the authors of the Clemson paper and co-director of the Watt Family Innovation Center Media Forensics Hub. Linvill pointed to several examples of new false social media accounts that he says were set up he says to target those elections. “From Russia's perspective, this is self-evidently worth it, largely because these efforts are cheap to produce and have very little downside. In the current political environment one could even say there has been no downside.”

In their March report, the Soufan Center says Russia’s ultimate hybrid-warfare goal isn’t actually to help one candidate over another, but to undermine democratic societies

“This strategy drains the financial resources, military capabilities, and political bandwidth of countries supporting Ukraine, or withdrawing from its traditional sphere of influence, while providing a testing ground to refine tactics for potential future conflict with NATO. Erode the guardrails that make democracies resistant to interference by exploiting pre-existing societal schisms, undermining trust in institutions and keeping populations polarized and confused.”

Magyar’s win, however, also offers a blueprint for beating Russian and Russian-aligned election interference. Magyar was particularly gifted at social-media campaigning, visiting more than 700 cities and towns across Hungary and continuously putting out social-media content that was watchable and nimble, said Carothers, a part-time resident of Hungary.

“He'd walk into a public building where the elevators were broken, and stand in a broken elevator and go, 'Why does this elevator not work? Why does nothing work in this country?' People loved them. Very clever social media campaign.”

The opposition candidate was also willing to face Russian disinformation head-on and call out specific attacks even before they hit the internet. On March 10, Magyar took to Facebook to warn of a new AI-enabled disinformation campaign targeting him.

“In the coming days, the Fidesz party, together with Russian services, will launch a smear and disinformation campaign that has already been tested in Moldova, primarily on social media, particularly on TikTok,” he said.

Perhaps the biggest factor that drove an election turnout above 80 percent was the simple fact that Hungarians are increasingly sensitive to Russia’s growing attacks on democracy, wrote Matt Steinglass, the Europe editor for The Economist. “People were much more concerned than we had thought about the country's shift towards Russia. They were concerned about leaving the European Union. More and more news started coming out about how Russia had sent social media operatives to Budapest to try to help Fidesz retain power.”

That is, perhaps, a warning for other politicians who saw Orbán as a model.

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A Russian space nuke was focus of US wargame, Space Command says

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:58:45 -0400

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado—Russia’s hypothetical use of its alleged nuclear anti-satellite capability was the focus of U.S. Space Command’s latest tabletop wargame, which pushed the U.S. government, allies, and dozens of defense companies to speculate on the fallout from the weapon’s launch.

Gen. Stephen Whiting, the head of U.S. Space Command, told Space Symposium attendees Tuesday that the reported development of the Russian weapon was the subject of the first “Apollo Insight” wargame, which concluded last month. The classified exercise involved Space Command officials and more than 60 companies that discussed the “worst-case scenario” and looked at industry solutions “to help prevent such a situation,” according to a recent news release.

“We just concluded our first [exercise] last month, and it was an event focused on weapons of mass destruction on orbit—a development we do not want to see come to fruition, but reporting about Russia’s plans to launch such a weapon, and that has forced us to prepare.”

In 2024, President Joe Biden’s administration said a suspected Russian testbed satellite for the weapon had been in orbit for two years. Moscow denied the claims. Countless defense experts have noted Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon in space would be a violation of the long-standing Outer Space Treaty.

The wargame involved a broad collection of defense companies, allied nations, and several U.S. government organizations that would be the most affected and that, ultimately, may be tasked with developing and fielding a counter-nuclear weapon capability.

“I feel as though the participants came away from the wargame with a better understanding and awareness of the seriousness of potential threats, and they were eager to share their thoughts on how they could be a part of the solution,” Jay Santee, Aerospace Corp. general manager, said in Space Command’s news release.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom participated, as well as U.S. government organizations including the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Energy Department, and NASA.

While Whiting and U.S. Space Command did not disclose the wargame’s findings, open-source reports have described the devastation such a weapon would cause to orbiting satellites.

“In a purely destructive sense, such a weapon could destroy large numbers of satellites. This would be done in two waves: the first would be those satellites in the line of sight of the nuclear explosion; the second would be satellites affected by the increased amount of trapped in the Van Allen belts,” according to the Secure World Foundation’s latest Global Counterspace Capabilities report. “Some of the effects would not be felt for days, weeks, or even months, as the higher radiation levels slowly degraded unhardened satellites and could persist for years afterwards, endangering the use of space by all countries.”

The wargame’s conclusion preceded U.S. Senate criticisms that the National Defense Strategy inadequately addressed emerging nuclear and space threats. The policy does not mention Russia’s potential anti-satellite weapon, but does allude to the country’s efforts to “modernize and diversify” its nuclear arsenal.

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The Pentagon claims ‘we control the sky’ over Iran. Experts say the air war isn’t that simple.

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:46:00 -0400

Updated: 4:41 p.m. ET.

To President Trump and his defense secretary, the herculean rescue of two downed airmen in hostile territory was further proof that the U.S. military has full control of the skies over Iran.

But the actual situation remains complicated and dangerous, according to former military officials and defense experts who said painting a simple picture overlooks the weapons that downed the F-15E—and that still hold vast swaths of airspace at risk.

On Easter Sunday, Trump said in a social media post that the daring recovery underscored that U.S. forces had “achieved overwhelming Air Dominance and Superiority over the Iranian skies.” The next day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said much the same.

“We control the skies. You see we flew for seven hours in daylight over Iran to get the first pilot, and we flew seven hours in the middle of the night to get the second and Iran did nothing about it,” Hegseth said Monday at a White House press conference.

But airpower experts, including Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, have been more measured. At press conferences, the former F-16 pilot has declared that air superiority exists over only certain areas of Iran; on Wednesday, he acknowledged the ongoing dangers that aviators face.

"I've laid out the statistics, but it does not truly capture the nature of combat. This is gritty and unforgiving business," Caine said. "It's chaotic, it's hot, it's dark, it's unpredictable and there's always unknowns."

Air superiority is defined in Air Force doctrine as “the control of the air by one force that permits the conduct of its operations at a given time and place” without severe enemy action that would result in mission failure. A higher level of control, air supremacy, is established when the “opposing force is incapable of effective interference,” but this “may be difficult to achieve in a peer or near-peer conflict.” A state of air superiority or supremacy may be limited to a certain time, location, or altitude.

“Control of the skies” and “air dominance,” on the other hand, have no formal meaning.

“I understand why people use it, but, from a doctrinal perspective, to say you ‘control the sky’ doesn't really say anything, because control of the air is a spectrum,” said Kelly Greico, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “When President Trump and Secretary Hegseth are using these terms, they're not necessarily using them the doctrinal way, the way that you see Gen. Caine using them.”

Trump’s use of “air dominance” really “doesn't mean anything,” Greico said, and added it’s not a term used in the Air Force’s doctrine.

In a statement, Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson wrote, "The United States does control the skies over Iran and maintains clear air superiority. Secretary Hegseth, Chairman Caine, and CENTCOM Admiral Cooper have all stated unequivocally that we control the skies, and the operational record proves it. We have conducted more than 13,000 combat flights and two successful rescue missions with zero effective challenge to our air dominance. That’s not rhetoric. That’s results. The Pentagon’s assessment is grounded in real-world performance, not theoretical analysis from the sidelines."

A joint force mission

Air Force doctrine holds that gaining the ability to operate in hostile airspace is not just the service’s responsibility, but “one of the first priorities of the joint force.” While heavy bombers have flown missions over parts of Iran and rescue helicopters can buzz in low and slow to the ground, other areas such as the Strait of Hormuz remain closed to ships due to air threats.

“I think that it's worth emphasizing that Air Force doctrine is clear: that air superiority is for the joint force,” Grieco said. “So, by that definition, we do not have air superiority near the Strait of Hormuz, because it's predominantly drones and missiles that are keeping the strait closed, and they’re keeping it closed to naval escort vessels.”

After the F-15E was shot down, an A-10 Thunderbolt II and multiple rescue helicopters and cargo planes were lost in the recovery mission, Caine said during the White House presser. Since the start of Operation Epic Fury in late February, Iran has destroyed or damaged multiple U.S. aircraft such as an F-35 which was forced to make an emergency landing after being hit during a combat mission.

Those mounting losses stand in contrast to the administration’s claims of total control of the Iranian skies, some former military officials say.

“I am somewhat surprised by the continued losses we were taking this deep into the conflict,” said Jack Shanahan, a retired Air Force three-star general, who thought the U.S. should have “more air supremacy” by this point.

But others said a state of air superiority or supremacy can exist even with heavy aircraft losses.

“Air supremacy doesn't mean that you're completely without risk,” a former military official said. “There are plenty of examples of how even with air supremacy and air superiority, you can still be challenged. I don't think you ever get to an environment where you're not completely without risk.”

This is particularly true at lower altitudes.

“When you're down below 5,000 feet, air supremacy and superiority feels a lot different than when you're up at 25,000 and 30,000 feet,” they said.

On Wednesday, Caine told reporters that 80 percent of Iran’s air defenses had been destroyed, but that anti-aircraft threats still persisted at lower altitudes. Trump had claimed days earlier that Iranian anti-aircraft and radar had been destroyed; that the F-15E was shot down by a shoulder-mounted, heat-seeking missile; and that other aircraft took small-arms fire.

Shanahan said the administration’s sweeping claims about air control have a parallel in its occasional reports about the number of targets struck in Iran. (More than 13,000, Caine said on Wednesday.) Neither is a direct measure of success, and may even be a distraction.

“We get caught up in the number of targets struck,” Shanahan said. “It’s back to almost Vietnam-era days when we started looking at body counts, number of tonnage of bombs dropped, but not understanding, maybe, the adversary has a different theory of victory in mind than you do. And if the regime survives, that may be their number-one criterion for success, whereas ours has seemed to be a little bit all over the map over the past 30 days.”

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Hegseth declares ‘decisive military victory’ in Iran, says U.S. is ‘hanging around’ to enforce ceasefire

Meghann Myers — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:55:07 -0400

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the U.S.’s war against Iran a “decisive military victory” during a press briefing on Wednesday—day one of a two-week ceasefire that could lead to more strikes if the U.S. and Iran can’t reach a long-term deal.

Hegseth said that “Iran begged for this ceasefire” and that “they’ve had enough,” though the 10-point plan Iran has proposed to end the war includes some propositions that have been non-starters for the U.S. in the past, including withdrawing U.S. troops from the Middle East and lifting all sanctions on Iran.

“Yeah, we'll be hanging around. We're not going anywhere. We're going to make sure Iran complies with this ceasefire and then ultimately comes to the table and makes a deal,” Hegseth said. “Our troops are prepared to defend, prepared to go on offense, prepared to restart at a moment's notice with whatever target package would be needed in order to ensure that Iran complies.”

The secretary boasted of 800 targets struck Tuesday night before the ceasefire began, “completely destroying” their defense industrial base. That followed his March 13 declaration that it had been “functionally defeated.”

“What little they have left buried in bunkers is all they will have,” Hegseth said Wednesday. “They can still shoot. We know that their command and control is so decimated they can't really talk and coordinate.”

Hegseth added that “Iran no longer has any sort of comprehensive air defense” capability.

Still, Iran retains the ability to fire on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which suggests that the country still has enough military power to be a threat beyond its borders. Eliminating Iran’s ability to do so is among the key military objectives repeatedly touted by the administration since strikes began in late February.

Hegseth’s claims about the operation’s success may be overwrought, officials and analysts told the Washington Post, in light of the downing of an F-15 fighter jet on Friday and the subsequent downing of an A-10 aiding in the rescue of the fighter’s aircrew.

At the briefing, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, estimated that the U.S. had taken out 80 percent of Iran’s air defense systems and sunk more than 90 percent of its navy over the course of striking more than 13,000 targets.

“Over the course of 38 days of major combat operation, the Joint Force achieved the military objectives as defined by the president,” Caine said in prepared remarks. “We welcome the ongoing cease fire, and as the Secretary said, we hope that Iran chooses a lasting peace.”

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Pro-Iran hackers have disrupted some industrial-control systems, US says

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:00:00 -0400

Iran-aligned hackers have exploited and disrupted operational technology control systems embedded in U.S. critical infrastructure, according to a federal advisory issued Tuesday.

“The authoring agencies assess a group of Iranian-affiliated advanced persistent threat (APT) actors is conducting this activity to cause disruptive effects within the United States.” the advisory reads. “The group has targeted devices spanning multiple U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, including Government Services and Facilities (to include local municipalities), Water and Wastewater Systems (WWS), and Energy Sectors.”

The assessment was signed by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FBI, NSA, EPA, the Department of Energy, and U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force.

It says hackers are especially targeting Rockwell Automation's Allen-Bradley line of programmable logic controllers, or PLCs, which monitor and automate the equipment used in industrial processes such as water treatment, power generation, and manufacturing.

It says that the hackers have manipulated data on human-machine interfaces and on supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, displays, and had harmful interactions with project files.

The advisory is the latest signal that Iran-aligned hacker groups have impeded U.S. systems since the United States and Israel went to war against Iran on Feb. 28.

It comes after an apparent Tehran-backed hacker group carried out a cyberattack against medical technology giant Stryker last month, which wiped employees’ phones and prevented workers from accessing their computers.

A request for comment sent to Rockwell Automation’s media relations email bounced back.

Pro-Iran hackers have made a habit of targeting any computer systems tied to nations deemed foreign adversaries by Tehran, especially the U.S. and Israel. In late 2023, amid the Israel-Hamas war, one hacker group defaced the interfaces of water treatment systems in Pennsylvania, which had Israel-made Unitronics equipment built inside.

In 2020, Rockwell Automation acquired Israel-based Avnet Data Security, aiming to bolster the cyber posture of its industrial control systems and operational technology.

The assessment urged organizations to keep PLCs off the open internet, review logs for suspicious activity and lock down affected Rockwell devices to prevent unauthorized access. Unsecured internet-connected operational technology can expose industrial systems to remote access, giving attackers a pathway to disrupt or manipulate functions.

The Iran war has been widely expected to test the strength of U.S. cyberdefenses, and experts have warned that exposed devices would be a potential target for pro-Iran hackers.

President Donald Trump escalated his threats against Tehran on Tuesday, saying a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by an 8 p.m. ET deadline.

Trump has promised to attack “every bridge” and power station in the country if a deal isn’t reached. Iran has promised a “devastating” response if such an attack occurs. Any sharp escalation could heighten the risk of retaliatory cyberattacks.

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CIA deception campaign helped rescue downed airman in Iran, director says

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:00:00 -0400

A deception campaign launched by the CIA bought time for U.S. forces to rescue an airman who went down in Iran on Friday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a White House news conference on Monday.

The CIA deployed human assets and “exquisite technologies” to contribute to the rescue of the weapons systems officer of an F-15E Strike Eagle, Ratcliffe said. The aircraft’s pilot was rescued earlier upon the crash, but Iran was “desperately hunting” for the backseater who ejected further from his wingman and had moved away from the crash site.

The injured officer was found by the CIA in a mountain crevice but was still invisible to Iranian forces.

“Following the successful exfiltration on Saturday night, our intelligence reflects that the Iranians were embarrassed and ultimately humiliated by the success of this audacious rescue,” Ratcliffe said.

At the press conference, President Donald Trump said it was the CIA’s “genius” that contributed to the rescue and that the spy agency had spotted “something moving up the mountain.”

“This is at night. And they kept the camera on him for 45 minutes,” Trump said, suggesting the CIA had a covert surveillance capability — potentially a drone or satellite — available to track the airman’s movements.

The public remarks about the mission show how the Trump administration has made it a point to highlight contributions that CIA operatives have made toward its national security efforts.

Those include operations that targeted the government of ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. The agency has also taken a more public-facing posture, releasing recruitment videos aimed at sourcing in China. And in the months leading up to the Iran war, agency spies had been reportedly tracking the movements of now deceased Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

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Trump vows to find ‘leaker’ who publicized search for second downed airman in Iran

Meghann Myers — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:59:30 -0400

President Donald Trump said his administration is going after the news outlet that first reported a second Air Force officer was missing after an F-15E Strike Eagle went down over Iran, he said during a press conference Monday. The officer was rescued Saturday.

Trump said Iran wasn’t aware until the news report that the fighter jet’s weapons systems officer was still in hiding after U.S. special operations forces quickly recovered the pilot following a crash on Friday. He did not specify which outlet he was speaking of, though both Channel 12 news in Israel and The Associated Press reported Friday that one crew member had been recovered and another was missing.

“We think we'll be able to find it out, because we're going to go to the media company that released it, and we're going to say ‘national security, give it up or go to jail,’” Trump said, suggesting the Justice Department will subpoena for the identity of a reporter’s source. “Because when they did that, all of a sudden, the entire country of Iran knew that there was a pilot that was somewhere on their land that was fighting for his life, and it also made it much more difficult for the pilots and for the people going in to search for him.”

The downed airman spent more than a day “scaling rugged ridges while hunted by the enemy,” before he was able to activate his emergency transponder to let his chain of command know he was still alive, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at the briefing.

A team flew seven hours into Iranian air space to rescue the weapons system officer, Hegseth said, one day after an earlier mission rescued the pilot.

“We control the sky,” the secretary said. “Iran did nothing about it.”

But during the pilot's rescue, Iran shot down one of the A-10 Warthogs that was supporting the mission, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the briefing. The A-10 pilot ejected over Kuwait, Caine said.

“This pilot continued to fight, continued the mission, and then upon exit, flew his aircraft into another country and determined that the airplane was not landable,” Caine said.

Hegseth said the U.S. on Monday launched the largest volume of strikes since day one of the war, back on Feb. 28.

“Tomorrow, even more than today,” he said. “And then Iran has a choice.”

The briefing took place one day after Trump threatened to target civilian infrastructure in Iran, via Truth Social post on Sunday, if the country doesn’t agree by Tuesday to stop firing on ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Asked during the press conference whether he stands behind his recent statements that the war is winding down, or equally recent statements that he intends to escalate it, Trump left things up in the air.

“I can’t tell you. I don’t know,” he said. “Depends what they do.”

Trump then asserted that the Iranian people would be fine with the U.S. striking their bridges and power plants, even saying that he’s gotten “numerous intercepts” from Iranians begging the U.S. to continue bombing them.

“They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom,” he said. He did not offer details of how the war would secure freedom for Iranians.

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‘It’s drones fighting drones’: Ukrainian officer offers inside look at roboticized war

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:01:00 -0400

Ukraine has sent hundreds of counter-drone experts to the Middle East to help the militaries of the United States, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE defend themselves from Iranian and Russian Shahed drones. Among them is Ukrainian Air Force Capt. Max Maslii, deputy chief of staff for the 96th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, who visited Washington, D.C., in March as part of a Ukrainian defense forces delegation. In this Defense One interview, Maslii describes how Ukraine is using robot swarms, agentic AI, and frontline innovation to define the future of military operations. He outlines how U.S. and NATO militaries must change how they buy, train, and conduct operations to meet the reality of robotic warfare.

Watch, here.

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The US has declared ‘space superiority’ over Iran. What does that mean?

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:33:51 -0400

The U.S. military declared space superiority over Iran this week, but defense experts question what that means given the country’s inchoate military space program and heavy reliance on space-based intelligence from other nations.

Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, said Tuesday that the U.S. had established control of the space domain during Operation Epic Fury. It was nearly a month after CENTCOM had announced “Iran's equivalent of Space Command” was destroyed, which harmed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ ability to coordinate retaliatory strikes.

“Our Space Force has given us the ultimate high ground, delivering space superiority, which has been a critical enabler to this fight,” Cooper said in a Tuesday video.

It’s not clear if the country is still actively jamming or spoofing U.S. assets, and it’s highly unlikely that the U.S. Space Force has physically destroyed the country’s handful of satellites. Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, a CENTCOM spokesperson, said he could not discuss details about space operations “due to classification.” Given Iran's rudimentary space capabilities, defense experts question what has changed to prompt the military to declare space superiority.

“It isn’t stopping them from using space assets,” Victoria Samson, the Secure World Foundation’s chief director of space security and stability, said of the U.S. declaring space superiority. “There’s just a lot of question marks … In regards to how they use space as a national security enabler, I don’t know that they’ve really stopped it, because they weren’t using it other than for imagery analysis.”

Iran is reportedly relying on China and Russia’s intelligence and commercial space-based imagery to target U.S. assets throughout the region. A U.S. official told Defense One that Iran’s use of another country’s space-based data doesn’t mean the service lacks control of the space domain.

“Just because the Iranians are receiving space-based intelligence doesn’t negate that we have space superiority,” the official said.

Since 2005, the country has launched a total of 26 satellites, only 13 of which were still operational, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s space data navigator tool. Three of those are registered to the IRGC. The U.S., by comparison, has upwards of 500 operational military and intelligence satellites.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s top uniformed officer, acknowledged “it wasn’t really a fair fight,” but said destroying Iran’s space capabilities gave the military an upper hand in communications and air operations within CENTCOM.

“You have space superiority if you can use space the way you want, and the adversary cannot use space the way they want, and I think those are the conditions that we've met in this particular instance,” Saltzman said during a Mitchell Institute event Wednesday.

The term “space superiority” was first publicized in a 1980s Air Force manual. A 2004 service document likened the idea to air superiority and said the two are “crucial first steps in any military operation.” Last year, the Space Force published a warfighting doctrine that said the service’s “formative purpose” is to achieve space superiority.

“Space superiority is the degree of control that allows forces to operate at a time and place of their choosing without prohibitive interference from space or counterspace threats, while also denying the same to an adversary,” the Space Force’s doctrine reads.

Some defense experts see the recent declaration of space superiority as a way for the service to highlight its warfighting rebrand in recent years.

“It’s a weird thing to say. I think it’s more a matter of floating the ‘Space Force as a warfighting’ thing,” Samson said.

Kari Bingen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of the Aerospace Security Project, said it’s not surprising to see the Space Force becoming more integrated into operations, given adversaries’ desire to target command, control, communications, and intelligence capabilities.

“Between Venezuela and Operation Epic Fury, these have been opportunities for the Space Force to better integrate space effects into a joint military campaign,” Bingen said. “We’ve long treated space as this special and different capability set. The physics are different, but to make it truly useful to the joint force, it needs to be fully integrated into planning and operations.”

Saltzman said guardians had been forward deployed to support Operation Epic Fury and continue to launch space effects in combat zones “despite being under attack from an adversary.” He also said some guardians are supporting the operation stateside out of Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina and CENTCOM headquarters in Florida.

“I won’t go into a lot of the operational details, as you might imagine, but you don't have to think too hard to understand what it is the Guardians are bringing to the fight,” Saltzman said. “All of the missions that we always do—missile warning, satellite communications. The links are vital. Over-the-horizon communications is as important now as it ever has been. We create disruption for an adversary.”

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Once again, Trump declines to describe desired end-state to his Iran war

Meghann Myers — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:45:15 -0400

President Donald Trump promised a swift end to his war in Iran during a Wednesday-night speech that didn’t detail what military objectives his administration is pursuing nor what it wants from the Iranian government.

Speaking during the fifth week of Operation Epic Fury, Trump made no mention of thousands of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division who arrived in the Middle East in recent days, nor of reports that the Pentagon had put together plans for a ground operation to seize Iran’s highly enriched uranium.

“Thanks to the progress we've made, I can say tonight, we are on track to complete all of America's military objectives shortly, very shortly,” the president said. “We're going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong. In the meantime, discussions are ongoing.”

Trump did not detail which military objectives are still left to achieve, though Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said during briefings over the past month that those had included destroying Iran’s ability to produce and deploy ballistic missiles and drones to target U.S. interests.

“The country has been eviscerated,” Trump said, adding that Iran “is really no longer a threat.”

One day earlier, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that B-52 bombers had entered the fray, continuing air strikes that have hit more than 12,000 targets thus far.

Three weeks ago, when only 6,000 targets had been struck, Trump told Axios there was “practically nothing left” to target in Iran.

On Wednesday, Trump did not say what he wants from Iran to end the war, though he mentioned he could still “hit” their oil.

He characterized Iran’s new leadership as “less radical,” though newly ascended Ayatollah Mojtaba Khameinei, son of assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khameinei, has been described as even more extreme than his father.

Trump also called on other countries to “go to the Strait” of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively shut down by firing on commercial vessels, and “just take it… It will open up naturally.”

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Wednesday that the United Kingdom would convene a meeting of 35 countries, not including the U.S., to discuss possibilities for reopening the strait.

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Pro-Iran hackers claim breach of FBI director’s email

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:51:00 -0400

A pro-Iran hacker group claimed to have accessed FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email and posted purported contents from the inbox online.

Handala, which claimed responsibility in recent weeks for hacks against Stryker and Lockheed Martin in response to the Iran war, circulated images and documents online that they claimed to be from Patel’s email account. Many images include pictures of Patel in a personal capacity before becoming FBI director.

The leaks appear to be authentic, according to a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to publicly discuss details of the breach.

The incident was first reported by Reuters.

“The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information, and we have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity. The information in question is historical in nature and involves no government information,” the bureau said in a statement after this story published.

Handala said it carried out the intrusion after the FBI last week said it seized domains used by the group.

“Today, once again, the world witnessed the collapse of America’s so-called security legends,” the group wrote on its website. “While the FBI proudly seized our domains and immediately announced a $10 million reward for the heads of Handala Hack members, we decided to respond to this ridiculous show in a way that will be remembered forever.”

The breach is likely legitimate, according to a former U.S. official who said that administration officials’ personal email accounts are a frequent target of Iranian hackers.

It would not be the first time that Iran-aligned hackers executed a “hack and leak” operation against U.S. targets. In 2024, the Trump campaign was accessed in an Iranian hack that exposed vetting documents for Vice President JD Vance.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include remarks from a former U.S. official and the FBI.

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Iran is adopting Russian drone tactics, Ukrainian troops say

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 06:27:55 -0400

Iran is using Russian drone-warfare tactics to target U.S. forces and other operations in the Middle East, Ukrainian military personnel said Thursday in Washington, D.C.

Last June, Iran responded to U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities with drones and missile attacks that were largely thwarted by U.S. and Israeli defenses.

But Iranian tactics have “changed from July last year to now,” one of the visiting Ukrainian military members told a small group of former government officials, analysts, and media at the German Marshall Fund on Thursday. “Now, those tactics are very similar to the Russians we’re fighting.”

Instead of large “existential” attacks, Iran is launching smaller numbers of drones and missiles, but more often, and at a wider variety of targets—including civilian and economic infrastructure that is a lower priority for U.S. forces to protect, as documented by the Institute for the Study of War.

Tehran has largely decentralized its operations and instructed commanders to "fire at will," ISW said. And while ISW suggests that U.S. efforts to incapacitate Iran’s missile and drone capabilities will likely work eventually, Iranian tactics have caused U.S. casualties, damaged bases, and created other disruptions.

The Ukrainian troops said this new strategy mirrors the “attrition” strategy Russia has used against Ukraine: aiming at civilian and infrastructure targets to impose economic and political costs.

ISW reported a similar finding on March 15, saying that Iran seeks to “outlast Washington rather than to militarily defeat it outright.”

The visiting Ukrainians reiterated what top E.U. officials and U.S. intelligence sources have previously stated: that Russia is providing Iran with targeting intelligence. On March 15, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted that Russia had supplied Iran with Shahed-136 drones before the U.S. and Israeli launched their surprise attacks in February.

Meanwhile, the war with Iran is having other negative effects on the U.S., Europe, and Ukraine. The United States has suspended sanctions against Russian oil interests and some Iranian oil producers, effectively boosting the finances of two nations aligned against it, even as Washington carries out military strikes against one of them.

However, the White House, has been reluctant to call out Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime for assisting Iran. Instead, President Donald Trump this month snubbed Ukraine’s offer to help the U.S. better defend itself against Russian and Iranian drones.

Some U.S. and NATO military leaders are more open to Ukraine’s assistance. The visiting military officials said that over the last few days, they met with military officials involved in the Defense Department’s “drone dominance” effort launched in July, as well as officials tasked with counter-UAS operations.

During a Tuesday hearing, Space Force Director of Force Structure Lt. Gen. Steven Whitney praised Ukrainian innovation as “out of this world.” Military officers across all ranks also routinely attest to the value partnership with Ukraine is bringing to U.S. military readiness.

That partnership is particularly important now, said the visiting Ukrainian military personnel, as autocratic states increasingly align to weaken the United States and Europe.

“Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia—that's all one war,” said one.

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National Defense Strategy ‘falls short’ on nuclear, space threat: SASC chair

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:10:41 -0400

Count the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee among the defense-policy experts who say the National Defense Strategy is inadequate in key ways.

At a Thursday hearing, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said the defense policy’s tepid treatment of satellites and nuclear weapons might encourage Chinese and Russian ambitions.

“It’s no secret that I believe this NDS falls short in several areas,” Wicker told U.S. Strategic and Space Command leaders gathered to testify. “I am particularly concerned that the current strategy does not address space and nuclear threats with anywhere near the urgency they deserve.”

The NDS makes only passing mention of Russia's efforts “to modernize and diversify” its nuclear arsenal. It mentions space as one of several areas where “direct military threats to the American Homeland have also grown in recent years.”

Wicker raised concerns about Russia’s reported development of a space-based nuclear anti-satellite weapon, saying it would be a “major game changer.”

Lawmakers first began warning about such a device in early 2024. A few months later, Biden officials said a suspected Russian testbed satellite had been in orbit for two years, but that the weapon was not operational—a claim Moscow denied. (Find a description of Russian and Chinese concepts of operations here.)

The Trump administration’s NDS does not mention the weapon, which Adm. Richard Correll, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, said is “very significant” and something the U.S. military must prepare for.

“Russia has indicated, and has been publicly acknowledged, that they're working on a nuclear capability that could be placed in space,” Correll told lawmakers. “We have to account for it in terms of the architecture that we have and what we can do about it. The department's very focused on that. We do have some options.”

Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, said that a nuclear anti-satellite weapon would be devastating not only to the U.S., but any country that operates in outer space.

“That would be an indiscriminate weapon that, if detonated on orbit, would immediately place at risk every country's space capabilities in low Earth orbit—the United States, China, Russia, Japan, Europe, you name it,” Whiting said. “That would violate the Outer Space Treaty and would not be a development, obviously, that we can tolerate.”

When asked how soon Russia could field such a nuclear space weapon, neither Correll or Whiting provided a public answer to lawmakers.

Some senators expressed concern that the Trump administration has so weakened trust in the American “nuclear umbrella” that European leaders are considering launching the kind of atomic-weapons programs they long ago forswore.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., asked Correll whether he was concerned by that development. The Navy admiral responded that he detected “no change” in attitudes from allies.

“At every opportunity in mil-to-mil engagements, I reinforce our extended deterrence commitment on the part of the United States,” Correll said.

The National Defense Strategy called for supporting U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere and said the government would “increase burden-sharing with allies and partners around the world.”

Similarly, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told Correll that NATO allies’ refusal to heed President Trump’s requests for help with his war on Iran have made the U.S. government's international relationships look weak to Russia and China.

Correll told Warren he disagreed with her assessment and said the military relationship with allies remains strong and that China and Russia believe that to be the case, too.

Warren told the Navy admiral that his answer lacked “any credibility.”

“Russia and China watch us insult our allies, then beg for their help, and then our allies don't give that help, and you think Russia and China think ‘there is an alliance that's working just great?,’” Warren said. “It is not only an embarrassment when the President begs and our allies say no, it is a national-security threat, because our enemies take note of that.”

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Ex-NSA leaders say Americans are becoming ‘numb’ to cyber threats

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:35:00 -0400

SAN FRANCISCO — American society is becoming increasingly apathetic to major cyberattacks, and the U.S. has still not achieved a hardline strategy to deter foreign adversaries and their hacker operatives, former NSA and Cyber Command leaders said Tuesday.

“I think we’ve become numb to it,” said retired Gen. Paul Nakasone, who served as director of Cyber Command and NSA from 2018 to 2024. He was joined on stage at an RSAC Conference discussion with other retired officials who held the dual-hatted role over the years, including Gen. Keith Alexander, Adm. Mike Rogers and, most recently, Gen. Tim Haugh.

“I think we continue to see these different intrusions, and intrusions have gotten to a size that the scale is just incredible to me” Nakasone said. “And I think that we are out of balance in terms of being able to keep up with the adversary, whether or not it’s ransomware, whether or not it’s deepfakes, whether or not it’s the brain drain within our government.”

“I think for society, we are just becoming so numb to this,” said Rogers. “We’re starting to accept this, in some ways, as the price of living in the digital age, and we have not yet had a level of trauma that has driven fundamental behavioral change.”

The sobering remarks underscore a growing concern among former U.S. cyber leaders that the steady drumbeat of high-impact cyber intrusions has failed to galvanize a proportional policy or societal response.

Recent incidents highlight that threat picture, from China-linked hackers like Volt Typhoon embedding in U.S. critical infrastructure systems and Salt Typhoon targeting global telecom networks for espionage, to ongoing disruptions at home, including a March breach at medical device maker Stryker that’s been tied to a pro-Iran hacker gang.

“I would definitely say we have not achieved deterrence,” Rogers said. “I see a private sector, network owners, that are very energized and focused. I see a government that’s unwilling to expend political capital to really drive fundamental change in cyber, and it’s a reflection of the fact that, politically, we are so divided. And as a society, we are so divided.”

Alexander reinforced the same worry over a lack of national readiness against major cyber players.

“What I’m concerned about is what we’re doing as a nation to think about what China could do to hurt us,” he said.

The Trump White House has released a long-anticipated national cyber strategy, which includes a pillar focused on reshaping the behavior of cyber adversaries to create incentives to not target U.S. networks. Details of that effort remain to be seen, though the private sector is expected to play a major part.

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A-10s are striking Iranian boats. Some say it’s a ‘wake-up call’ to stop the Warthog’s retirement.

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:23:18 -0400

A-10 Thunderbolt IIs are strafing boats in the Straits of Hormuz as part of President Trump’s war on Iran, and at least some experts say it shows why the venerable aircraft should remain in service.

"The A-10 Warthog is now in the fight across the southern flank and is hunting and killing fast-attack watercraft in the Straits of Hormuz,” Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a Pentagon press briefing on Thursday.

The Defense Department posted images of the A-10 flying in U.S. Central Command airspace this week. CENTCOM praised the Warthog’s capabilities, noting in an X post on Sunday that the aircraft “can loiter for hours, standing by and ready to execute a mission whenever needed.”

The close-support aircraft, battle-proven in the Gulf War and Global War on Terror, has been threatened with retirement for decades. Congress has often pushed back; the most recent National Defense Authorization Act caps the number that can be scrapped until the Air Force details its retirement strategy. Experts told Defense One that the aircraft’s latest operations prove the war in Iran shouldn’t be the Warthog’s last rodeo.

The A-10s renewed use in the Middle East should serve as a “wake-up call” for lawmakers and the military calling for its retirement, said Dan Grazier, a Stimson Center senior fellow and the director of the nonprofit's national-security reform program.

“The longer the A-10 exists, the more impressed I am with that aircraft,” Grazier said. “It's just proof positive that when you design a weapon system that is stripped down and all the decisions that were made in the course of its design were all made for matters of military effectiveness, you get a really effective aircraft."

The NDAA requires Air Force Secretary Troy Meink to provide Congress “a briefing on the status of A-10 aircraft inventory and the proposed plan for divesting all A-10 aircraft prior to fiscal year 2029.” That report is due later this month. The annual defense policy bill, signed into law in December, says the service may not “decrease the total aircraft inventory of A-10 aircraft below 103 aircraft” until the end of this fiscal year.

An Air Force spokesperson did not immediately respond when asked by Defense One if the report had been submitted early or if the service is rethinking its A-10 retirement strategy.

Earlier administrations have argued that retiring the A-10 was necessary to pivot from Middle East deployments to competition with China and Russia. The F-35 was initially pitched as a close-air-support replacement for the Warthog, but internal tests raised questions and doubts that the fifth-generation fighter could be a suitable replacement, according to a report obtained by the Project on Government Oversight.

“The F-35 was the national-security establishment going through a midlife crisis and purchasing a Ferrari,” Grazier said. “The A-10 is like that old reliable Chevy pickup truck that, as long as you can get parts for it, is going to continue with regular maintenance to provide useful service.”

U.S. and allied fourth- and fifth-generation fighter jets have helped destroy Iran’s air defenses and military infrastructure during Operation Epic Fury, but experts told Defense One last week that their continued use against cheap, one-way attack drones is expensive and unsustainable. The U.S. has also relied heavily on aging B-1 bombers, which are slated for retirement in the 2030s.

On Thursday, an F-35 aircraft had to make an emergency landing during a combat mission over Iran, said Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, a CENTCOM spokesperson. The fifth-generation fighter landed safely and the incident is being investigated. That afternoon, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps posted a video claiming to have hit an F-35.

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‘It takes money to kill bad guys,’ Hegseth says of $200B Iran war request to Congress

Meghann Myers — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:17:30 -0400

The Pentagon’s $200 billion request to cover the costs of the Iran war will reimburse what the Defense Department has already spent and what is ahead, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday as a third week of strikes drew to a close.

That includes replenishing munitions, which have been expended by the thousands since strikes began Feb. 28.

“Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys,” Hegseth said during a Pentagon press briefing. “So we're going back to Congress and our folks there to ensure that we're properly funded for what's been done, for what we may have to do in the future, ensure that our ammunition is—everything's refilled.”

Among the weapons that need replacing are 5,000-pound penetrator bombs dropped on underground facilities that housed Iranian cruise missiles, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during his remarks.

There have also been “precision strikes against more than 90 targets on Kharg Island, which included all of their military-only infrastructure, which included air defenses, naval base, mine storage and deployment facilities,” Caine said.

Hegseth began his fifth briefing of the war with a different tone: for the first time, he led by mentioning U.S. troops killed in action.

“What I heard through tears, through hugs, through strength and through unbreakable resolve was the same from family after family: they said, ‘Finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver. Do not stop until the job is done,’ ” he said of Thursday’s dignified transfer of six airmen killed in the March 2 crash of their KC-135 Stratotanker.

Hegseth then turned his attention sharply to the media, calling them “dishonest and anti-Trump,” accusing “our press” of reporting on AI-generated video falsely purporting to show the aftermath of a drone strike on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. But the White House already acknowledged Monday that credulous coverage of that video came from foreign outlets.

They “will stop at nothing, we know this at this point, to downplay progress, amplify every cost and call into question every step,” Hegseth said of the American media.

“To the patriotic members of the press, nobody can deliver perfection in wartime. This building knows that more than anyone,” he said. “But report the reality: we're winning decisively and on our terms.”

He then turned his ire to U.S. allies who have refused to send forces to the Persian Gulf—for example, European leaders who have noted that Trump launched the war without consulting them, after threatening to seize European-controlled territory, and without apparent consideration for the ways it might bolster Russia’s war on European soil.

“The world, the Middle East, our ungrateful allies in Europe, even segments of our own press, should be saying one thing to President Trump: ‘Thank you,” the defense secretary said.

Asked how the U.S. intended to fully denuclearize Iran without a protracted conflict, Hegseth dodged, reiterating talking points about a “conventional umbrella” of non-nuclear weapons meant to defend Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon, as well as delays in the negotiating of a new nuclear deal.

When asked whether Israel’s targeting of Iranian oil facilities was counter to U.S. objectives to focus on military targets, the secretary dodged again.

“We have allies pursuing objectives as well, and the truth speaks for itself,” he said. “We can hold anything at issue, anything—the United States military controls the fate of that country. Iran has the ability to make the right choices.”

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US intelligence elevates AI as a top global threat in new report

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:10:25 -0400

Artificial intelligence is a major subtheme of the U.S. intelligence community’s annual report on threats—one increasingly described in strategic, not just technical, terms.

In its 2026 Worldwide Threat Assessment, released on Wednesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence calls AI a “defining technology for the 21st century,” notes that it is being used in combat, and identifies China as “the most capable competitor” to the United States. The assessment, released on Wednesday as intelligence leaders testified to lawmakers, offers a rare window into how they interpret the global threat landscape.

The new version of the annual report treats AI far more prominently than in 2024 and 2025. It gives AI a larger role in the report—but one that resists easy categorization. Unlike enduring threats from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and terrorist groups, AI is treated less as a discrete actor or capability and more as a cross-cutting force shaping each of them.

The 2024 report, for instance, describes AI as “moving into its industrial age,” noting its potential for economic benefit and disruption, but also the hypothetical development of new “chemical weapons” and materials that could make China’s or Russia’s military more competitive. It also notes that authoritarian regimes might use AI to generate fake content and as a tool for mass surveillance and coercion of their own populations.

“During the next several years, governments are likely to exploit new and more intrusive technologies—including generative AI—for transnational repression,” it says.

That trend is well underway. AI-created misinformation and disinformation have proliferated across global social media, often supported by China, Russia, and other authoritarian regimes, and often at the expense of the U.S. government, military, or other institutions.

The 2025 report took note of Russian deepfakes but didn’t describe the intent or consequences. The authors were more concerned about Moscow’s pioneering use of AI: on the battlefield, particularly in anti-drone efforts. They also highlighted China’s “multifaceted, national-level strategy” to displace the United States as the “most influential AI power by 2030.”

Over the past year, AI has seized a growing share of public attention, private investment, and White House and Defense Department focus. While the Pentagon has used it for intelligence analysis since 2017, the new threat report notes that AI “has been used in recent conflicts to influence targeting and streamline decision-making, marking a significant shift in the nature of modern warfare.”

It reiterates its predecessors’ emphasis on the importance of U.S. dominance in AI technology while also noting that “other global powers' robust progress in AI is challenging U.S. economic competitiveness and national security advantages.” In particular, it says, “China is driving AI adoption at scale—both domestically and internationally—by using its sizable talent pool, extensive datasets, government funding, and burgeoning global partnerships.”

There is also a special warning about the use of autonomy in warfare. AI carries risks that require careful human engineering to mitigate the dangers of AI autonomy before they are broadly deployed.

At the Wednesday hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that a China-run data-extortion operation last August foretold the future: the perpetrators used “an AI tool” to extort ”international government, healthcare, public health, emergency services sectors, and religious institutions.”

What’s missing

Missing from today’s hearing and the new report is any meaningful mention of AI’s role in election interference, disinformation, and the advancement of autocracy.

That’s a big change from 2024, when those uses of AI drew much comment at the hearing connected with the annual threat assessment. Brett Michael Holmgren, then-assistant Secretary of State for intelligence and research, said that “tools like generative AI will essentially lower the barrier for actors, state and non-state, with fewer resources to engage in potential election interference.” CIA Director William Burns said that threat actors in the Arabian Peninsula had “used AI to generate videos aimed at inspiring lone-wolf attacks as a result of the Gaza conflict as well.” And Avril Haines, the then-Director of National Intelligence, said, “Russia is deploying AI tools in the context of their influence efforts in Ukraine.”

Over the past two years, the Republican party and the Trump administration have dismantled efforts to prevent the spread of misinformation: pressing social-media companies to end moderation efforts, forcing universities to cease monitoring programs, and shuttering a key office at the Department of State.

But allied governments continue to mark the threat. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, speaking on Tuesday at a conference in Belgium, noted: “AI has taken cognitive warfare to the next level, in the movie business and many other sectors, including our democratic space.”

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Anduril: new factory will start making drone wingman in just ‘days’

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 20:11:36 -0400

Anduril will soon start making its robot drone wingman offering for the Air Force at its new Ohio factory months ahead of schedule, a company official told Defense One in an exclusive interview.

The private defense contractor announced last year that it would build its manufacturing facility, dubbed Arsenal-1, in Columbus, Ohio, and “the first products will be manufactured beginning in July 2026.” But Jason Levin, the company’s senior vice president of engineering for air dominance & strike, said on Wednesday that production was imminent. The first product made at the facility will be the YFQ-44A Fury, the drone that the company is pitching in the Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft competition.

“We're moving production of YFQ-44 into our Arsenal facility in Columbus, Ohio, in a matter of days, actually, we're gonna start production there,” Levin said in a soon-to-be released Defense One video series. “We'll be able to produce YFQ-44s at rate, but also many other Anduril products as well.”

Anduril’s investment in the American heartland comes amid the Trump's administration push to have defense companies invest in domestic manufacturing. Levin said the facility is “5 million square feet”; last year, the company boasted of Arsenal-1’s location next to a local airport providing access to two 12,000-foot runways and a 75-acre private apron “capable of supporting military-scale aircraft, ensuring rapid delivery of components and systems.”

A company spokesperson did not immediately provide the date when Fury production would start at the Ohio facility. Anduril, General Atomics, and Northrop Grumman are all in the running to build the Air Force’s first collaborative combat aircraft.

When first established, the CCA concept was defined by affordability and attritability. Levin said Anduril has been keeping costs low on its drone wingman offering leaning on a broad commercial supply chain for the aircraft’s key components such as the engine, avionics, and landing gear.

"We can go out to multiple vendors. That actually gives some price leverage as well, but also allows us to scale if the demand were to come,” Levin said. “So, if we need to build hundreds, multiple, of these aircraft, we can get that done by going out to a broader supply base, not just kind of bottlenecked by one or two vendors."

Last month, Anduril started armed flight testing with its CCA offering. It closely followed an Air Force announcement that the service validated its government-owned Autonomy Government Reference Architecture to integrate RTX Collins software aboard General Atomics’ YFQ-42 CCA aircraft and Shield AI’s technology on Anduril's YFQ-44 CCA.

Anduril, in another milestone, announced late last month it had completed its first semi-autonomous flight and was able to switch between Shield AI and its own mission autonomy software suites mid-air.

The Air Force has said a competitive Increment 1 production decision is expected in fiscal year 2026.

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Lawmakers press SOUTHCOM on Hegseth’s ‘no quarter’ rhetoric

Meghann Myers — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:41:34 -0400

Questions about following illegal orders—a frequent theme of the second Trump administration—came up again at a Capitol Hill hearing on Tuesday.

Just days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that the U.S. war on Iran would feature “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies”—on its face, a violation of international law—the leader of U.S. Southern Command was pressed by House lawmakers who had questions about attacks on alleged drug-running boats off South America.

“Has an order been issued to you on ‘no quarter,’ no survivors?” Rep. Eugene Vindman, D-Va., asked Marine Gen. Francis Donovan, alluding to the Sept. 2 “double-tap” attack on the survivors of an initial strike.

The Law of Armed Conflict considers survivors of a strike to be “out of the fight” and thus off the table as targets.

Donovan said he had not been given any direct orders to offer “no quarter,” a term the military uses to describe sparing survivors of an attack who are no longer able to defend themselves.

Asked whether he would consider such an order unlawful, Donovan responded that he would not follow an unlawful order.

“Okay, that’s an unlawful order,” Vindman said.

It was a familiar line of questioning, going back to the early days of the administration, when Hegseth and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll were asked about their willingness to follow unlawful orders. It was an unusual query for a confirmation hearing, but one that lawmakers insisted on in light of allegations by one of Trump’s former defense secretaries that he had suggested shooting at unarmed protestors.

In his own testimony on Tuesday, Joseph Humire, who is serving unconfirmed in as the Pentagon’s top civilian for homeland defense, said there have been 45 strikes, killing 157 aboard 47 vessels. Legal experts have from the beginning debated whether any of these strikes have been legal, as the Pentagon has offered little evidence that the targets were actively trafficking drugs at the time they were killed.

Unlawful orders came up again later in the hearing, as Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., pressed Donovan and his U.S. NORTHCOM counterpart, Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, in response to recent Trump comments that he had considered federalizing the November midterm election.

On March 10, the Democratic National Committee sued the administration to compel a response to whether there are considerations to deploy the military or station armed federal agents outside polling places.

Donovan and Guillot were much more clear when asked whether they would deploy troops to stand outside polling locations on election day, an illegal action according to federal law.

“Congresswoman, I'm aware that doing so is against the law and I will not follow an unlawful order,” Guilott told Houlahan, while Donovan followed up with, “I will commit to the same.”

Humire said that he was not aware of any direction to deploy troops, but said he would “reserve the decision space” for the president.

“I hope, Mr. Humire, that you take a look at the law and follow it,” Houlahan said.

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Why the ‘narrow,’ ‘short-term’ sanctions reversal for Russia is neither

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:25:36 -0400

The Trump administration’s “narrowly tailored, short-term” lifting of sanctions on Russian oil may produce a longer-term boost to Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

Treasury Department Secretary Scott Bessent insisted that wasn’t so as he announced on Thursday that countries would be allowed to purchase any Russian oil in ships at sea as of March 12.

The move “will not provide significant financial benefit to the Russian government,” Bessent wrote on X.

But experts, European allies, and Democratic Party lawmakers said Russia would indeed gain from Trump officials’ attempt to buffer Americans and global markets from the effects of their war on Iran.

The windfall could reach $10 billion a month, estimated Isaac Levi, an analyst with the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

Six members of the European Group of Seven condemned the move because “Russia is benefiting from that,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Friday.

Two members of the U.S. Congress wrote Bessent to “demand the immediate reversal” of his decision.

Earlier in March, Trump made the decision to ease oil sanctions specifically for India, a preview of the larger expansion in sanctions reversal. “Even more troubling than the rise of oil prices is the lifeline the United States has given to Russia just as U.S. officials confirmed Russia is providing Iranian forces with the locations of American military assets, including warships and aircraft. By providing this waiver, you have signaled that the United States will reward attacks on our troops, not deter them,” Rep. Sam Liccardo, D-Calif., and Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., wrote in a March 9 letter about the sanctions reversal specifically for India.

“Short term”

Sanctions are “hard to put back on once taken off,” wrote Mike Pompeo, who as Secretary of State in the first Trump administration withdrew from a deal that was limiting Iranian nuclear development. Dropping sanctions also removes “leverage,” Pompeo wrote in a 2023 book.

Doing so before the punished country changes its behavior returns a situation to “factory settings,” diminishing pressure without getting much in return, Washington Institute analysts wrote of Iran four years ago.

The relief won’t likely enable Moscow to open new fronts in the Ukraine war immediately, Elina Ribakova, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told the Wall Street Journal, but: “I would worry that if it were to hold for half a year that Russia would gain more appetite to do so.”

The move also weakens European allies politically. The EU has banned 90 percent of Russian oil sales, and those sanctions are likely to remain despite the fact that energy prices in Europe are higher than they are in the United States. The White House move counteracts the effect of those sanctions while keeping prices higher in Europe (as they maintain their own sanctions.)

Sanctions are only being lifted on oil “loaded on vessels” by March 12, the Treasury Department notice said. But that will be difficult to enforce because of Russia’s widespread use of illicit “shadow fleet” tankers that mask their identification numbers, ports of origin, and cargo.

“Data on how much, and most importantly whose oil a tanker is carrying, is much more sensitive for the owners and practically unverifiable,” Dmitry Nekrasov, an economist with the Center for Analysis and Strategies in Europe, has noted.

Satellites and AI have made it somewhat easier to track shadow fleet vessels, but the Trump administration has fewer people around to do so.

Within weeks of taking office last year, the administration disbanded a Biden-era task force that was central to enforcing sanctions against Russia. The administration also froze and restricted hiring for federal jobs, including at Treasury offices that monitor sanctions. Last April, Senate Democrats reported that the team “has been unable to keep pace with the attrition caused by numerous staff departures.

“The Trump Administration let pressure dissipate despite the growing number of Russian circumvention efforts, and it has stood by as evaders in the PRC [China] and other countries have profited from their support to the Kremlin’s war machine,” their report said.

One official who is welcoming the break from sanctions is Russia’s Kirill Alexandrovich Dmitriev, an envoy of Vladimir Putin and the head of the country’s sovereign-wealth fund.

“Russian energy is indispensable to easing the world’s largest energy crisis. EU bureaucrats will soon be forced to recognize this reality, acknowledge their strategic blunders, and atone,” Dmitriev wrote on X, about a day after he met in Florida with White House special envoy and real-estate mogul Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

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The D Brief: 6 die in tanker crash; Russia’s US-war windfall; Iran’s industry ‘functionally defeated’; Escorts for Hormuz vessels?; And a bit more.

Ben Watson, Bradley Peniston, Lauren C. Williams, and Meghann Myers — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:18:42 -0400

US-Israeli war on Iran, day 14: The U.S. lost six more service members amid President Trump’s war against Iran on Thursday. All six crew members perished when their KC-135 refueling tanker aircraft went down in western Iraq after colliding with another aircraft. (An initial version of this newsletter noted the aircraft went down in western Iran; but that was a regrettable typo.)

“The incident occurred in friendly airspace during Operation Epic Fury,” military officials at Central Command said in an initial statement Thursday evening. “Two aircraft were involved in the incident. One of the aircraft went down in western Iraq, and the second landed safely. This was not due to hostile fire or friendly fire,” and the accident is under investigation, they said.

“All six crew members aboard a U.S. KC-135 refueling aircraft that went down in western Iraq are now confirmed deceased,” CENTCOM said in a follow-up Friday morning.

The casualties raise the U.S. death toll to 13, in addition to at least 140 injuries from retaliatory attacks by Iranian forces since Feb. 28.

More than 1,400 Iranians have died in the war so far, as well as 15 in Israel and at least 19 in nations across the Gulf region, al-Jazeera reports. More than 2,000 Israelis have been wounded from retaliatory attacks. And an estimated 18,000 have been injured inside Iran alone, according to the country’s Ministry of Health. At least six French soldiers were also wounded in attacks on a military base in Iraq, the governor of Erbil said Thursday, according to Reuters.

More than 680 others have been killed inside Lebanon, which is Israel’s additional front in this war as it pursues Iran-backed militants around Beirut. Another 1,700 have been reportedly injured in those attacks, and 816,000 have been displaced across Lebanon since the outbreak of the war. That represents roughly 14% of the country’s population.

Another potential casualty: U.S. influence. “Analysts say the war has left Gulf states reassessing both their security dependence on Washington and the prospect of eventually engaging Tehran on new regional security arrangements,” Reuters reported Wednesday.

Survey says: “Americans don’t see the point of this war,” CNN reported Thursday, calling it “the biggest Iran polling takeaway” so far citing at least seven recent surveys.

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston, Lauren C. Williams and Meghann Myers. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1567, the Eighty Years War began in present-day Belgium; the conflict temporarily halted in 1609 before later giving way to the much-bloodier Thirty Years War, which swept across Europe until it came to an end in 1648.

New: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims Iran’s weapons production capabilities are now “functionally defeated,” he said at a press conference Friday at the Pentagon.

Missile attacks are down 90 percent and one-way attack drone strikes are down 95 percent since the first day of Iranian retaliation, according to Hegseth. “So we're shooting down and destroying what missiles they still have in stock, but more importantly, ensuring that they have no ability to make more—their production lines, their military plants, their defense innovation centers, defeated,” he said

Hegseth also claimed Iran’s new leader “is wounded and likely disfigured,” at least partly because Mojtaba Khamenei’s first public message Thursday was read aloud on state TV and did not include a video or photo. “Iran has plenty of cameras and voice recorders. Why a written statement? I think you know why. He is scared. He is injured. He is on the run,” Hegseth said. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more.

Related reading:

“How Hegseth Came to See Moral Purpose in War as Weakness,” via Greg Jaffe writing Thursday for the New York Times;
See also, “‘America’s mortal enemy’: Pete Hegseth expressed extreme antipathy toward Iran for years,” via the Guardian reporting Thursday using comments about Iran from Hegseth’s own books, speeches and online videos.

Eventually, the U.S. Navy may begin escorting tankers through Hormuz “as soon as it is militarily possible,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the UK’s Sky News on Thursday. Navy officials earlier this week reportedly declined escort requests, citing elevated risks inside the Strait, which include Iranian air and naval drones, as well as mining efforts along the ordinarily busy waterway.

Bessent also suggested the escorts might happen “perhaps ⁠with an international coalition,” though it’s unclear just yet who might be involved in such a high-risk mission. France has ordered nearly a dozen warships to the Mediterranean and the Red Seas; but its defense minister said Thursday none will head to the Strait of Hormuz.

Update: At least 22 civilian ships in the region have been attacked by Iran since the war began, Reuters reports in a detailed tracker published Thursday, citing data from the Institute for the Study of War and AEI Critical Threats project. That includes two tankers attacked at an Iraqi port Thursday.

Trendspotting: U.S. and allied militaries have turned to fighter jets in their struggle to ward off Iranian drones, but former pilots say the mission is expensive, dangerous, and, ultimately, unsustainable with current tactics, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Thursday. On Tuesday, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that U.S. and allied forces had conducted “intercepts against one-way attack drones using fighters and attack helicopters,” and said it was one reason that Iran’s use of the drones had “decreased 83 percent since the beginning of the operation.”

One former British military officer called it “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.” Some of Iran’s drones, which cost in the low five figures, are being downed by missiles that cost twenty or forty times as much, launched from aircraft with relatively high operating costs. And the speed differential between jets and drones can pose problems in chaotic battlespaces.

That’s at least partly why the U.S. is now seeking advice, guidance, and support from Ukraine’s military on how to counter enemy drones based on what it has learned during its four-year war with Russia. Continue reading, here.

Putin’s big break: The U.S.-Israeli war has disrupted global energy markets so deeply that the Trump administration just lifted sanctions against the sale of Russian crude oil, the U.S. Treasury Department announced Thursday. As much as half of Russia’s annual revenue comes from petroleum sales. The sanctions were put in place after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than four years ago in flagrant violation of international law. The new U.S. authorization is initially set to last 30 days, ending April 11.

Big picture: “The war in the Middle East is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” the International Energy Agency announced in a new report Thursday. “The ultimate impact on oil and gas markets and the broader economy from the conflict will depend not only on the intensity of military attacks and any damage to energy assets, but also, crucially, on the duration of disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz,” the report’s authors write.

Just last month, Russian oil sales had declined to their lowest levels since the start of Putin’s Ukraine invasion, the IEA said Thursday. “The decline was due to reduced exports to India—as Washington discouraged such cooperation with Russia—and to the closure of flows via the Ukrainian stretch of the Druzhba pipeline to Hungary and Slovakia at the end of January,” Reuters reports.

But Russia is now “earning as much as $150 million a day in extra budget revenues from its oil sales, making it the biggest winner from the conflict in the Middle East,” the Financial Times reported Thursday. That includes an “estimated $1.3bn-$1.9bn windfall from taxes on oil exports” since the onset of war, and it “could receive $3.3bn-$4.9bn in overall additional revenues by the end of March,” FT calculates citing industry data and analyst assessments.

Moscow has already made more than $6.8 billion in estimated oil sales since Feb. 28, the Guardian reported citing a new analysis published Thursday by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. “Currently, Russia can balance its budget with a price of $59 a barrel,” the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this week. But the price of oil is now well above that, and has surged 40% since the war began nearly two weeks ago.

Expert reax: The current high prices “will help Russia to meet budget indicators this quarter and even start saving some money,” Borys Dodonov, head of energy and climate studies at the Kyiv School of Economics, told FT.

Capitol Hill reax: “Instead of squeezing Russia’s faltering economy, the President’s ill-planned war is giving Putin a windfall while American families face higher prices,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.

Kyiv’s reax: “This certainly does not help peace,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said during a visit to Paris. “This easing alone by the United States could provide Russia with about $10 billion for the war,” he predicted. “Lifting sanctions only so that more drones will later be flying at you is, in my opinion, not the right decision,” he added.

“Another beneficiary could be Iran,” the Washington Post reported Thursday, “because its government and independent militias probably own many of the tankers that make up a ‘shadow fleet’ of hundreds of vessels currently holding Russian oil. This fleet is designed specifically to evade sanctions. It is made up of older, less reliable vessels that sailed uninsured and used radar-jamming devices and other techniques to avoid detection.”

After opposing a resolution forcing Trump to seek congressional approval for the Iran war, GOP Sen. Todd Young of Indiana criticized the lack of public debate and hearings about the conflict in remarks Thursday at the Ronald Reagan Institute’s National Security Innovation Base summit in Washington, D.C. “It's consistent with our responsibilities to force hard questions, to stress test plans in development, to take our public conversations private where necessary, and dive more deeply and then move to the extent we can, with a more unified country, into military conflict,” Young said.

“I think it's an indictment of our own party and our own institution that we didn't force some harder conversations over the last several weeks preceding military engagement,” he said eight days after joining more than 50 of his Republican colleagues in shooting down the war powers resolution. “We're now at war. We are at war, and I want the President to succeed in his stated objectives as he's brought more clarity to those and I'm going to be helpful in that regard, and I hope this ends quickly, as does he. But what incentive do future commanders in chief have to work with Congress to make their case to the American people, if there aren't a few of us piping up and indicating that ‘now we may be on board, but we're still not happy with how we got here.’”

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., voted in support of the resolution, which would have spurred more public debate. Most of what senators know about the Iran war comes “from classified hearings, and that's one of my gripes about this is that if we only get information and classified, that means we can't really answer questions that we ought to be able to answer,” Kaine said Thursday. “I've got all these Virginians who are deployed in the Ford carrier strike group, and those in the Bush strike group that are about to go out, and their families ask me questions: ‘How long? What's the end game?’ Et cetera. And as frustrating as it is to not know the answer to a question, it's even more frustrating to know an answer and yet be handcuffed and not able to say it, because thus far, the hearings have only been classified.”

After numerous reports emerged this week claiming the first week of war cost around $11 billion, Kaine said he couldn’t share exactly what he knew because related briefings have been classified, but those estimates were not far off. “I can't really tell you what I know,” he said Thursday. “It's been pretty widely reported that the daily cost is around $800 million a day. And I'll just say that that is not wildly wrong, so let me just leave it there.”

As the Iran war rages, NATO is rewriting its air-defense plans, and “This is the first time this has been done in decades,” the top commander of U.S. forces in Europe told the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday. Those plans “should be done by this summer,” said Air Force Gen. Alex Grynkewich, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and commander of U.S. European Command. Defense Scoop has a bit more.

Grynkewich also warned that bombing civilians during a war, as the U.S. military is reportedly alleged to have done on the first day of the conflict, can have lasting effects on the duration of fighting. Grynkewich was speaking about Russia’s war in Ukraine when he told lawmakers Thursday, “What I've observed over the course of studying air power in history is that any time you attack a civilian population, you usually end up finding that it just hardens their resolve,” he said. “We take this all the way back to the London Blitz in World War II. The Brits just had a stiff upper lip and kept on fighting, and I think that’s what we’ve seen in Ukraine, as well.”

Rewind: Experts predicted a similar effect in Iran. Air strikes “usually stiffen a government’s grip on power, not loosen it. That’s especially true in countries that have long suffered from foreign meddling, such as Iran, where the U.S.-backed ouster of Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953 remains a source of anger, and where the war launched in 1980 by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein solidified support for the new Islamist regime,” wrote Rosemary Kelanic, who leads the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, in January.

Additional reading:

“Israeli Officials Think Iran’s Regime Isn’t Likely to Fall Soon,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday;
“Hormuz oil shock cuts 8 million barrels a day globally,” Quartz reported Thursday;
On top of shocks to global energy markets, the “US economy expanded at sluggish 0.7% in fourth quarter, government says, downgrading first estimate,” the Associated Press reported Friday;
“White House turns to a familiar promise of pain for gain as oil spikes,” Semafor reported Friday;
And ICYMI, “Iran appears to have conducted a significant cyberattack against a U.S. company, a first since the war started,” NBC News reported Wednesday.

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Iran’s defense industrial base is ‘functionally defeated’: Hegseth

Meghann Myers — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:35:24 -0400

Fourteen days into the war on Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the country’s ability to develop and manufacture new weapons “functionally defeated,” noting as well its shrinking missile force, navy “at the bottom of the Persian Gulf,” and disabled air force.

Missile attacks are down 90 percent and one-way attack drone strikes are down 95 percent since the first day of Iranian retaliation, Hegseth added in the latest update to the Pentagon metric.

“So we're shooting down and destroying what missiles they still have in stock, but more importantly, ensuring that they have no ability to make more—their production lines, their military plants, their defense innovation centers, defeated,” he said at a Pentagon press briefing.

The U.S. is continuing to strike factories and munitions warehouses, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the briefing.

After comparing Iran’s remaining leaders to rats and questioning why its new leader issued his first statement in writing rather than on camera, Hegseth turned his ire upon the defense press.

“Some of this crew in the press just can't stop. Allow me to make a few suggestions,” he said. “People look up at the TV and they see banners. They see headlines. I used to be in that business, and I know that everything is written intentionally.”

Hegseth worked for a decade for Fox, which in 2023 paid $787 million after it was sued for promoting lies.

At the press briefing, he criticized CNN for reporting that the administration underestimated how badly the war would affect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

“For decades, Iran has threatened shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. This is always what they do: hold the strait hostage. CNN doesn't think we thought of that. It's a fundamentally unserious report,” Hegseth before making reference to CNN’s upcoming merger with Paramount, a media company seen as favorable toward the Trump administration. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

Asked why the U.S. Navy isn’t escorting commercial ships through the strait, Hegseth said, “We want to do it, eventually, in a way that makes the most sense for what we want to achieve, and ensure that we're sending the right signal to the world when we do so.”

He later said there’s no evidence that Iran is still placing mines in the strait.

The secretary then acknowledged the deaths of four aircrew aboard the KC-135 tanker that crashed in Iraq on Thursday.

“Bad things can happen,” he said.

Caine began his remarks with a tribute to the airmen, confirming four had been recovered and there is an active rescue mission to locate the other two members of the tanker’s crew.

“Please keep these brave airmen, their families, friends and units in your thoughts,” Caine said. “In the coming hours and days, our service members make an incredible sacrifice to go forward and do the things that the nation asks of them."

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