Author: Braxton Taylor

Air Force Special Operations Command has named a new top enlisted leader nearly two months after his predecessor was removed from the role amid an ongoing investigation.Chief Master Sgt. Courtney Freeman officially assumed command during a ceremony Monday at Hurlburt Field in Florida. He’s replacing Chief Master Sgt. Anthony Green, who was removed from the AFSOC leadership role in mid-April due to “a loss in confidence” in his abilities — a phrase often used by all the military services to obscure the specific reason behind a firing.Lt. Col. Rebecca Heyse, a command spokesperson, told Military.com on Wednesday that Green “has…

During the Vietnam War, William Broyles Jr. was deployed as an infantry platoon commander in the Marine Corps and visited a Navy hospital there full of severely injured troops. Peering through a window into the hospital, “it looked like that scene in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ where they take the Ark of the Covenant into the warehouse, and all you can see are boxes,” Broyles recalled. “All I could see were wounded teenagers.”The sight so unnerved Broyles that he fainted and broke his nose. That experience led to Broyles’ co-creating “China Beach,” a late-1980s television series about an Army…

A mere two weeks after public land advocates successfully blocked a measure that would have sold over 500,000 acres of federal public land, a U.S. senator has vowed to return the provision to the budget reconciliation bill.Utah Senator Mike Lee told Politico’s E&E News yesterday that he wants to see public land sales back in President Trump’s “one, big, beautiful budget bill.”When asked by reporters whether he intended to bring back public lands provisions that were cut from the House package, he responded, simply, “yes.”MeatEater reached out to Montana senator Steve Daines for a response to his Republican colleague’s comment.…

The program that allows veterans to see private doctors using Department of Veterans Affairs funding would get a 50% boost under a spending plan released by House Republicans on Wednesday.Overall, the House Appropriations Committee’s fiscal 2026 VA spending bill would give the department about $453 billion — a whopping $83 billion more than Congress approved for the department for this year.Most of that increase would be slated for so-called mandatory spending, the type of funding that goes to benefits such as veterans disability pay. Discretionary spending — the type of funding that is mostly used for medical care — would…

Coast Guard Gunner’s Mate Frank DeVita crawled over the bodies of the dead who lay in the blood and puke covering the deck of the Higgins boat on Omaha Beach to save the landing craft during the first wave of D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.DeVita’s main job as part of the landing craft’s crew was to raise and lower the front ramp on orders of the coxswain, or boat driver, to allow more than 30 troops from the 1st Infantry Division, the “Big Red One,” to storm ashore, but the German MG-42 machine guns took their toll.In oral histories…

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday accused two military veterans of assaulting a soldier and stealing equipment from an Army special operations compound in Washington state, a brazen break-in that ended with a cache of weapons and Nazi paraphernalia discovered in one of their homes.State and federal police arrested Charles Ethan Fields and Levi Austin Frakes after executing a warrant Monday for alleged assault, robbery and theft of government property, according to the complaint shared with Military.com by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Washington.Prosecutors say Fields and Frakes entered Joint Base Lewis-McChord on Sunday evening through the main…

Congress is weighing potential reductions to the National Reconnaissance Office’s budget for acquiring commercial satellite imagery—a move that could set the U.S. remote sensing industry back significantly and provide China with an advantage in the influence domain and on the battlefield. The stakes extend far beyond any single contract. China is rapidly building out its commercial satellite imagery industry and aggressively seeking new clients. And though European countries are unlikely to become reliant on Chinese imagery, the same cannot be said for governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. If China can offer comparable imagery at lower cost, Chinese companies will…

An Army brigade training in the Philippines has been able to 3D-print about 100 drones in the field, leaders told reporters Wednesday, in addition to sourcing and purifying their own water—all part of learning to better operate in the vast Indo-Pacific, where it’s not so easy to fly in supplies.The Hawaii-based 2nd Mobile Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, is one of the first Army units to join the Transformation-in-Contact initiative. Since March, the brigade has been in the Philippines, participating in Exercises Balikatan and Salaknib, as well as a Joint Pacific Multinational Training Center event.“All of the first-person-view drones…

Google Pla Apple PodcastsGuests: Col. Joshua Gaspard, commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, based in Vicenza, Italy. Learn more about exercises Swift Response and African Lion 2025 here and here, respectively. Find a transcript of this conversation below.Watson: Army Col. Joshua Gaspard commands the 173rd Airborne Brigade based in Italy. They’re viewed as America’s rapid response force for the European region and beyond. They have an incredibly storied legacy, and back when I was in the Army, it was maybe the most coveted assignment for airborne-qualified soldiers. Col. Gaspard, welcome to Defense One Radio.Gaspard: Thanks Ben.Watson: So your soldiers recently…

Laser Ammo USA Inc. is launching the recoil-enabled 2011 Match King Laser Training pistol. Based on an AW Custom HX26 “Match King” Compact airsoft pistol, this new training pistol is modified by Laser Ammo to make it a Class 1 eye-safe laser-training pistol with recoil. The new training pistol uses a CNC-machined conversion barrel with a SureStrike laser and PST (piston) back cap. The laser is available in red or infrared, and the barrel conversion includes a windage and elevation alignment system that allows the user to align the laser for accurate training. The new Recoil 2011 Match King delivers…