Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

Internet access is restricted while a ship is underway to maintain bandwidth for military operations and to protect against cybersecurity threats.

The Navy quietly relieved Grisel Marrero, a command senior chief of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, in August or September 2023, and released information on parts of the investigation this week.

The Navy Times was first to report on the details.

Marrero, a former information systems technician, and senior leaders paid $2,800 for the Starlink High Performance Kit and had it installed in April 2023 prior to deployment of the San Diego-based Manchester, according to the investigation.

She and more than a dozen other chief petty officers used it to send messages home and keep up with the news and bought signal amplifiers during a stop in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, after they realized the wireless signal did not cover all areas of the ship, according to the investigation.

Those involved also used the Chief Petty Officer Association’s debit card to pay off the $1,000 monthly Starlink bill.

The network was not shared with rank-and-file sailors.

Marrero tried to hide the network, which she called “Stinky,” by renaming it as a printer, denying its existence and even intercepting a comment about the network left in the commanding officer’s suggestion box, according to the investigation.

Marrero did not respond to an AP email Friday seeking comment.

She was convicted at a court-martial in March where she pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty and providing false official statements to commanders, the Navy Times reported.

She was demoted to a chief petty officer after the trial.

Marrero was relieved “due to a loss of confidence in her leadership abilities,” said spokesperson Cmdr. Cindy Fields said via email.

“Navy senior enlisted leaders … are expected to uphold the highest standards of responsibility, reliability and leadership, and the Navy holds them accountable when they fall short of those standards,” Fields said.

Last week a commander of the destroyer USS John McCain was relieved of duty after he was seen in a photo firing a rifle with a scope mounted backward.

Editor’s Note: a previous version of this story identified Marrero as a Navy officer. She is a command senior chief.

“We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed,” the statement read.

“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” said the cemetery in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. “Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants.”

Trump participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Monday, marking the third anniversary of the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in an attack by the Islamic State outside the Kabul airport in Afghanistan. More than 150 Afghans were also killed. Parents of fallen service members have expressed anger at President Joe Biden’s administration for a lack of answers surrounding the attack.

After the ceremony, Trump headed to Section 60 of the cemetery, where some service members killed in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried and recording is typically heavily restricted.

NPR first reported Tuesday that two Trump campaign staffers had a confrontation with a cemetery official who tried to prevent them from filming.

Trump communications director Steven Cheung denied some of the details of the report and said the campaign was willing to release footage to support its claim.

“There was no physical altercation as described and we are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made,” Cheung said in a statement. “The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony.”

Cheung followed up in a statement on X, saying Trump was allowed to have a photographer there.

Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita posted a video on x that showed Trump laying flowers at a gravesite.

In a statement, he said a “despicable individual” physically prevented Trump’s team from accompanying him to the event.

“For a despicable individual to physically prevent President Trump’s team from accompanying him to this solemn event is a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hollowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery,” LaCivita said. “Whoever this individual is spreading these lies are dishonoring the men and women of our armed forces, and they are disrespecting everyone who paid the price for defending our country.”

LaCivita claimed that Trump was at Section 60 at the invitation of Abbey Gate Gold Star families “to honor their loved ones who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their country.”

Trump generated controversy this month when said this month that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a civilian award, was “better” than the top military award, the Medal of Honor, because those who receive the latter are often dead or injured.

Trump has previously faced scrutiny over a 2020 report in The Atlantic, which former White House chief of staff John Kelly later confirmed, that he made disparaging remarks about fallen soldiers, calling them “suckers” and “losers.” Trump has denied the allegation.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

“It was an off-base shooting from a passing vehicle that fired shots towards the gate, prompting our security forces to respond,” base spokesperson Stefanie Antosh said in a statement. “There is no threat to the installation. We had no injuries, no fatalities.”

Antosh said the shooting was being investigated by San Antonio police, who said in a release that the first shooting occurred about 2:15 a.m.

“The security personnel stated they heard several shots fired as well as the fired rounds go past them,” Sgt. Washington Moscoso said in the release. “After this incident, the security personnel added more armed guards as a precaution.”

A vehicle later stopped near the same entrance shortly after 4:30 a.m., Moscoso said.

“For a second time, shots were fired at the Air Force security personnel, however, with the additional security personnel present, multiple Air Force personnel returned fire toward the suspect vehicle,” Moscoso said.

The vehicle then fled. No injuries were reported and the shootings remained under investigation, Moscoso said.

It was not known how many rounds were fired, how many shooters there were, or what their motive was, according to Antosh.

The entrance was closed for several hours after the shooting before reopening about 9:30 a.m., but the base was not locked down, according to Antosh.

In addition to Lackland, Joint Base San Antonio includes Randolph Air Force Base and the Army’s Fort Sam Houston and the Camp Bulllis training camp.

Lackland is home to more than 24,000 active duty members and 10,000 Department of Defense civilians, according to the base website. It includes the 37th Training Wing; 149th Fighter Wing; 59th Medical Wing; the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency; 24th Air Force Wing, 67th Network Warfare Wing; the Cryptologic Systems Group; the National Security Agency; and 70 associated units.

The remains of U.S. Army Private William Calkins were identified after being exhumed along with other unknown soldiers buried at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines, the Department of Defense said in a statement reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The department’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, tasked with recovering prisoners of war and service members missing in action, said Calkins was captured after U.S. troops in Bataan province surrendered to Japanese forces. After surviving the harrowing 65-mile (105-kilometer) Bataan Death March, he was held at Cabanatuan POW Camp #1, where records show he died on Nov. 1, 1942, at the age of 20. He was buried with other prisoners in what was known as Common Grave 704.

After the war, his remains were exhumed from the camp and relocated to the Philippine capital, where they were buried as “unknowns” at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, the agency said. They remained unidentified until this year.

In 2018, in an effort to identify the unknown remains associated with Common Grave 704, the agency exhumed them once again and sent them to a laboratory. There, scientists used DNA analysis and other techniques to identify Calkins’ remains.

A rosette will be placed next to his name on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery to indicate he has been accounted for, the agency said.

Calkins’ remains are set to return to Oregon for burial in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro in September.

Louis Gigliotti’s caretaker says the former U.S. Army medical technician has a card from the Veteran Administration but he never realized he could use his status to access “free perks” such as health care.

Gigliotti, who goes by the nickname Jiggs, could use the help to pay for dental, hearing and vision problems as he embarks on his second century. He was honored last week by family, friends and patrons at the Alaska Veterans Museum in Anchorage, where he lives with his nephew’s family.

Melanie Carey, his nephew’s wife, has been Gigliotti’s caretaker for about a decade but only recently started helping him pay his medical bills. That’s when she realized he was paying out of his own pocket instead of going to the VA for care. She investigated with the local facility, where staff told her he’d never been there.

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“OK, well, let’s fix that,” she recalls telling them.

“I don’t think he realized that when you’re a veteran, that there’s benefits to that,” Carey said. “I’m trying to catch him up with anything that you need to get fixed.”

Gigliotti was raised in an orphanage and worked on a farm in Norwalk, Connecticut. He tried to join the military with two friends at the outset of World War II, but he wasn’t medically eligible because of his vision. His friends were both killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Alaska National Guard said.

His second attempt to join the military was approved after the attack on the Hawaii naval base, and he served as a surgical technician during the war without going to the combat zone.

After the war, he moved to Alaska in 1955. He owned two bars in Fairbanks before relocating to Anchorage 10 years later. There, he worked for two decades as a bartender at Club Paris, Anchorage’s oldest steakhouse.

His retirement passions were caring for Millie, his wife of 38 years who died of cancer in 2003, and training boxers for free in a makeshift ring in his garage.

The state Office of Veterans Affairs awarded Gigliotti the Alaska Veterans Honor Medal for securing his benefits. The medal is awarded to Alaska veterans who served honorably in the U.S. armed forces, during times of peace or war.

“This event is a reminder that regardless of how much time has passed since their service, it is never too late for veterans to apply for their benefits,” said Verdie Bowen, the agency’s director.

Carey said Gigliotti is a humble man and had to be coaxed to attend the ceremony.

“I’m like, ‘Geez, it’s really important that you get this done because there’s not a lot of 103-year-old veterans just hanging out,’” she said.

And the reason for his longevity depends on which day you ask him, Carey said.

For the longest time, he’s always said he just never feels like he’s getting old. “I just want to go more,” he said Tuesday.

On other days, the retired bartender quips the secret is “you got to have a drink a day.”

U.S. Army Pvts. Philip G. Shadrach and George D. Wilson were captured by Confederates and executed by hanging. Biden recognized their courage 162 years later with the country’s highest military decoration, calling the operation they joined “one of the most dangerous missions of the entire Civil War.”

“Every soldier who joined that mission was awarded the Medal of Honor except for two. Two soldiers who died because of that operation and never received this recognition,” Biden said. “Today, we right that wrong.”

The posthumous recognition comes as the legacy of the Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 Union and Confederate service members between 1861 and 1865, continues to shape U.S. politics in a contentious election year in which issues of race, constitutional rights and presidential power are at the forefront.

Biden has said that the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump was the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War. Meanwhile, Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, riffed at a recent Pennsylvania rally about the Battle of Gettysburg and about the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

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The president said Wednesday that Shadrach and Wilson were “fighting and even dying to preserve the union and the sacred values it was founded upon: freedom, justice, fairness, unity.”

“Phillip and George were willing to shed their blood to make these ideals real,” Biden said.

Theresa Chandler, the great-great-granddaughter of Wilson, recalled for The Associated Press how the Union soldier had the noose around his neck on the gallows and spoke his final words.

She said that Wilson essentially said that he was there to serve his country and had no ill feelings for the people of the South, but that he hoped for the abolition of slavery and for the nation to be united again.

“When I read that, I had chills,” Chandler said. “We can feel that as a family and that we’re enjoying our freedoms today, what he tried to move forward at the time.”

Brian Taylor, a great-great-great-nephew of Shadrach, said this was an opportunity for his ancestor to be remembered as “a brave soldier who did what he thought was right.”

“I kind of feel that he was a bit adventurous, a bit of a free spirit,” Taylor said.

Shadrach and Wilson are being recognized for participating in what became known as the Great Locomotive Chase.

A Kentucky-born civilian spy and scout named James J. Andrews put together a group of volunteers, including Shadrach and Wilson, to degrade the railway and telegraph lines used by Confederates in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

On April 12, 1862, 22 of the men in what was later called Andrews’ Raiders met up in Marietta, Georgia, and hijacked a train named The General. The group tore up tracks and sliced through telegraph wires while taking the train north.

Confederate troops chased them, initially on foot and later by train. The Confederate troops eventually caught the group. Andrews and seven others were executed, while the others either escaped or remained prisoners of war.

The first Medal of Honor ever bestowed went to Pvt. Jacob Parrott, who participated in the locomotive hijacking and was beaten while imprisoned by the Confederacy.

The government later recognized 18 other participants who took part in the raid with the honor, but Shadrach and Wilson were excluded. They were later authorized to receive the medal as part of the fiscal 2008 National Defense Authorization Act.

Shadrach, born on Sept. 15, 1840, in Pennsylvania, was 21 years old when he volunteered for the mission. He was orphaned at a young age and left home in 1861 to enlist in an Ohio infantry regiment after the start of the Civil War.

Wilson was born in 1830 in Belmont County, Ohio. He worked as a journeyman shoemaker before the war and enlisted in an Ohio-based volunteer infantry in 1861.

The Walt Disney Corp. made a 1956 movie about the hijacking titled “The Great Locomotive Chase,” starring Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter. The 1926 silent film “The General,” starring Buster Keaton, was also based on the historic event.

__

Associated Press writer Will Weissert contributed to this report.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

Within minutes, it was turning away volunteers to carry his casket.

A bagpiper came forward to play at the service. A pilot offered to perform a flyover. Military groups across the state pledged a proper sendoff.

Hundreds of people who knew nothing about the 86-year-old beyond his name showed up on a sweltering afternoon and gave Brooks a final salute with full military honors Thursday at the Maine Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery in Augusta.

Patriot Guard Riders on motorcycles escorted his hearse on the 40-mile route from the funeral home in Belfast, Maine, to the cemetery. Members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars paid tribute with a 21-gun salute. Volunteers held American flags next to the casket while a crane hoisted a huge flag above the cemetery entrance.

Some saluted while filing by. Others sang The Marines’ Hymn.

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“It’s an honor for us to be able to do this,” said Jim Roberts, commander of the VFW post in Belfast. “There’s so much negativity in the world. This is something people can feel good about and rally around. It’s just absolutely wonderful.” He said Brooks’ son, granddaughter and son-in-law came to the funeral but did not speak during the service.

Roberts said the VFW is called a couple times a year about a deceased veteran with no family or with one that isn’t willing to handle the funeral arrangements. But “we will always be there.” Like other veterans helping out Thursday, he hadn’t known Brooks.

So many groups volunteered to take part in paying tribute that there wasn’t enough space to fit them into the 20-minute burial service, said Katie Riposta, the funeral director who put out the call for help last week.

“It renews your faith in humanity,” she said.

More than 8 million of the U.S. veterans living are 65 or older, almost half the veteran population. They are overwhelmingly men. That’s according to a U.S. Census Bureau report last year. As this generation dies, it said, their collective memory of wartime experiences “will pass into history.”

Much about Brooks’ life is unknown.

He was widowed and lived in Augusta. He died on May 18, less than a week after entering a nursing home, Riposta said. A cause of death was not released.

The funeral home and authorities reached his next of kin, but no one was willing to come forward or take responsibility for his body, she said.

“It sounds like he was a good person, but I know nothing about his life,” Riposta said, noting that after Brooks’ death, a woman contacted the funeral home to say he had once taken her in when she had no other place to go, with no details.

“It doesn’t matter if he served one day or made the military his career,” she said. “He still deserves to be respected and not alone.”

The crowd on Thursday wasn’t all strangers — and it turned out Brooks hadn’t been one, either.

Victoria Abbott, executive director of the Bread of Life shelter in Augusta, said he had come every day to eat at their soup kitchen, always ready to crack “dad jokes” and make the staff smile. He had a favorite table.

“Your quintessential 80-year-old, dad jokes every day,” Abbott said. “He was really great to have around. He was part of the soup kitchen family.”

But most people there Thursday met him too late. The memorial book posted online by Direct Cremation of Maine, which helped to arrange the burial, had a few strangers’ good wishes.

“Sir,” one began, and ended with “Semper Fi.”

The two others, a couple, thanked Brooks for his service. “We all deserve the love kindness and respect when we are called home. I hope that you lived a full beautiful life of Love, Kindness, Dreams and Hope,” they wrote.

They added: “Thank you to all those who will make this gentleman’s service a proper, well deserved good bye.”

Linda Laweryson, who served in the Marines, said this was the second funeral in little over a year that she has attended for a veteran who died alone. Everyone deserves to die with dignity and be buried with dignity, she said.

Laweryson read a poem during the graveside service written by a combat Marine who reflects on the spot where Marines graduate from boot camp.

“I walked the old parade ground, but I was not alone,” the poem reads. “I walked the old parade ground and knew that I was home.”

___

Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs provides talk therapy and medications to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and runs a pilot program involving service dogs. The VA can prescribe service dogs to certain veterans diagnosed with a visual, hearing or substantial mobility impairment, including eligible veterans with PTSD, and will cover some costs associated with having a service dog.

The agency continues to review the research “to evaluate the effectiveness of service dogs,” said VA press secretary Terrence Hayes, “and we are committed to providing high-quality, evidence-based care to all those who served.”

Study co-author Maggie O’Haire, of the University of Arizona’s veterinary college, said one of the researchers’ goals was “to bring evidence behind a practice that appears to be increasingly popular, yet historically did not have the scientific base behind it.”

For the study, service dogs were provided by K9s For Warriors, a nonprofit organization that matches trained dogs with veterans during a three-week group class. The dogs are taught to pick up a veteran’s physical signs of distress and can interrupt panic attacks and nightmares with a loving nudge.

Researchers compared 81 veterans who received service dogs with 75 veterans on the waiting list for a trained dog. PTSD symptoms were measured by psychology doctoral students who didn’t know which veterans had service dogs.

After three months, PTSD symptoms improved in both groups, but the veterans with dogs saw a bigger improvement on average than the veterans on the waiting list. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open.

It wasn’t clear from the study whether spending time with any dog would have had the same effect. (About 40% of the veterans in both groups owned pet dogs.) And all the veterans in the study had access to other PTSD treatments.

Service dogs should be considered complementary and not a standalone therapy, O’Haire said.

“When you add it to existing medical practices, it can enhance your experience and reduce your symptoms more,” she said.

PTSD is more common among veterans than civilians, the VA says, affecting as many as 29% of Iraq war veterans over their lifetimes. Symptoms include nightmares, flashbacks, numbness or the feeling of being constantly on edge.

“I would wake up in the middle of the night, almost nightly, in a pool of sweat,” said Dave Crenshaw, who served with the Army National Guard in Iraq and was diagnosed with PTSD in 2016 while working undercover in law enforcement. Antidepressants helped with some symptoms, he said, but he still felt numb.

The 41-year-old veteran met his service dog, a pointer-black lab mix named Doc, in 2019. He immediately felt what he described as “joy and wholesomeness. It’s just an overwhelming feeling of ‘Hey, everything’s going to be OK.’”

Doc senses when he’s upset, often before he notices himself, and come close, Crenshaw said. Today, Crenshaw is no longer taking antidepressants and is enjoying retirement from the military and law enforcement. He gives Doc credit for getting his life back on track.

“It’s the greatest medicine with the least amount of side effects,” Crenshaw said.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

Robert Burke, who served as vice chief of naval operations, faces federal charges including bribery and conspiracy for what prosecutors allege was a corrupt scheme that led to the company hiring him after his retirement in 2022 with a starting annual salary of $500,000. He oversaw naval operations in Europe, Russia, and most of Africa.

Also charged in the case are Yongchul “Charlie” Kim and Meghan Messenger, who are co-chief executive officers of the company. The company is not named in court papers, but Kim and Messenger are named as the CEOs on the website for a company called NextJump, which provides training programs.

“The law does not make exceptions for admirals or CEOs. Those who pay and receive bribes must be held accountable,” said Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. “The urgency is at its greatest when, as here, senior government officials and senior executives are allegedly involved in the corruption.”

Burke, 62, of Coconut Creek, Florida, made his initial appearance in Miami on Friday but didn’t enter a plea during the hearing, according to defense attorney Timothy Parlatore. The lawyer said Burke will plead not guilty and intends to clear his name at trial.

“I think a jury will see through this,” Parlatore said.

Burke conditionally retired from the Navy on July 31, 2022. Senior officers will often conditionally retire if there are administrative matters pending.

Rear Adm. Ryan Perry said the Department of the Navy has fully cooperated with the investigation.

“We take this matter very seriously and will continue to cooperate with the Department of Justice,” Perry said in a statement.

Kim and Messenger’s company provided a workforce training pilot program to a component of the Navy from August 2018 through July 2019. The Navy terminated the pilot program in late 2019 and directed the company not to contact Burke.

But the two company executives arranged to meet with Burke in Washington, D.C., in July 2021. During the meeting, Kim and Messenger proposed that Burke use his Navy position to steer them a contract in exchange for future employment at the company, the indictment alleges.

In December 2021, Burke ordered his staff to award a $355,000 contract to train personnel under Burke’s command in Italy and Spain, according to the indictment. Burke began working at the company in October 2022.

Parlatore noted that the value of that contract was smaller than Burke’s starting salary.

“There was no connection between this contract and his employment.” Parlatore said. “The math just doesn’t make sense that he would give them this relatively small contract for that type of a job offer.”

___

Associated Press writer Lolita C, Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.

The group ranges from 96 to 107 years old, according to American Airlines, which is flying them first to Paris. The flight is one of several that are taking veterans to France for the commemoration.

The group will take part in a wreath-laying ceremony at Suresnes American Cemetery, visit the Eiffel Tower and join in a daily ceremony known as le Ravivage de la Flamme, which honors fallen French service members at the Arc de triomphe.

They then head to the Normandy region for events that include wreath-laying ceremonies on Omaha and Utah Beaches, two of the landing sites for the Allied forces.

Almost 160,000 Allied troops, 73,000 from the United States, landed at Normandy on June 6, 1944, in a massive amphibious operation designed to break through heavily fortified German defenses and begin the liberation of Western Europe.

A total of 4,414 Allied troops were killed on D-Day itself, including 2,501 Americans. More than 5,000 were wounded.

The group traveling from Dallas includes six Medal of Honor recipients from wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam who wish to honor the World War II veterans.

There are also two Rosie the Riveters, representing women who worked in factories and shipyards during the war.

Hundreds of thousands of military women from Allied nations also worked in crucial noncombat roles such as codebreakers, ship plotters, radar operators and cartographers.

There are various ceremonies to commemorate the day in France and to thank veterans, some of whom will make the long trans-Atlantic journey despite advanced age, fatigue and physical difficulties.

“We will never forget. And we have to tell them,” Philippe Étienne, chairman of commemoration organizer Liberation Mission, told The Associated Press.

The Marines were killed when their MV-22 Osprey experienced a catastrophic mechanical failure known as hard-clutch engagement, a known problem with the tilt-rotor aircraft that has happened more than a dozen times since 2010.

The families named Bell Textron, The Boeing Co. and Rolls Royce in their lawsuit. Bell assembles the Osprey in a partnership with Boeing in its facilities in Amarillo, Texas; Rolls Royce produces the Osprey’s engines.

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The Osprey can take off or land like a helicopter but fly like an airplane. The military services have called it a game-changer in that it allows them to travel long distances quickly and land on a target, but it has not been without significant cost: More than 50 service members have been killed in accidents since 2000 in the aircraft.

The lawsuit alleges that the Osprey’s design was flawed and did not meet U.S. safety standards.

The Osprey’s two engines are linked by an interconnected drive shaft that runs inside the length of the wings. On each tip, by the engines, a component called a sprag clutch transfers torque, or power, from one proprotor to the other to make sure both rotors are spinning at the same speed. That keeps the Osprey’s flight in balance. If one of the two engines fails, the sprag clutch is also a safety feature: It will transfer power from the working side to the failing engine’s side to keep both rotors going.

When a worn clutch slips, a hard-clutch engagement can occur as the system rapidly re-engages. This creates a power spike that surges power to the other engine and can throw the Osprey into an uncontrolled roll or slide, which can cause catastrophic loss of control, leaving pilots only seconds to save their aircraft or crew.

The investigation into the 2022 crash concluded that the Marines were doing routine flight operations when they experienced a dual hard-clutch engagement, leading to a “catastrophic, unpreventable and unanticipated mechanical failure.”

There were no steps the pilots could have taken to prevent it and “no means of recovery once the compound emergency commenced,” the Marines’ 400-page report said.

The Osprey crashed in a remote area near Glamis, about 115 miles (185 kilometers) east of San Diego.

Five Marines died in the crash: two pilots, Capt. Nicholas P. Losapio, 31, of Rockingham, New Hampshire, and Capt. John J. Sax, 33, of Placer, California; and three crew chiefs, Cpl. Nathan E. Carlson, 21, of Winnebago, Illinois, Cpl. Seth D. Rasmuson, 21, of Johnson, Wyoming, and Lance Cpl. Evan A. Strickland, 19, of Valencia, New Mexico.

As the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps had begun looking at the problem following multiple incidents in 2022, including the fatal crash, they determined that the clutches may be wearing out faster than anticipated. The Osprey program is working on a redesign for a component that mitigates clutch slippage.

In its 2022 report, the Marine Corps warned that more accidents were possible because neither the military nor the manufacturers have been able to isolate a root cause. It said future incidents were “impossible to prevent without improvements to flight control system software, drivetrain component material strength, and robust inspection requirements.”

The lawsuit comes as families await results from investigations into two deadly Osprey crashes last year. In August of 2023, three Marines were killed in an Osprey crash off of Australia, and eight U.S. Air Force Special Operations service members were killed in November 2023 when their Osprey crashed off the coast of Japan. The Air Force took the unusual step of quickly identifying a materiel failure as a potential cause of that crash, and a week after the crash all of the services had grounded the Osprey fleet. The ban on flights was lifted three months later.

Boeing and Bell said they were unable to comment on litigation. Rolls Royce did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

More than 29,000 active-duty service members said in the survey that they had unwanted sexual contact during the previous year, compared with nearly 36,000 in the 2021 survey, according to several defense officials. The decrease is the first in eight years.

At the same time, 8,515 sexual assaults were reported last year involving members of the U.S. military, a decrease from 8,942 in 2022. And officials said the U.S. military academies also saw fewer reported sexual assaults in the school year that ended last spring versus the previous year.

President Joe Biden hailed the improved numbers as he spoke Wednesday to his military commanders, who were gathered at the White House.

“I’m proud that for the first time in nearly a decade, rates of sexual assault and harassment are, within the active-duty forces, are down. They’re down. That’s because of your leadership,” Biden said.

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Senior defense officials said the assault numbers are still far too high and there is much more work to do, but they expressed cautious optimism that the military could be turning a corner, with help from an array of new programs and increased personnel. Sexual assault reports in the military have gone up for much of the last decade, except for a tiny decrease in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the report has not been publicly released.

While it’s difficult to point to any one reason for the recent decreases, the Defense Department has been making a series of changes over the past year that officials say may be contributing to the shift. The services are using an infusion of more than $1 billion in the last two budgets to improve programs and hire up to 2,500 personnel as part of a new “prevention workforce” and place them at military installations around the world. So far, more than 1,000 have been hired.

The Pentagon releases a report every year on the number of sexual assaults reported by or about troops. But because sexual assault is a highly underreported crime, the department does a confidential survey every two years to get a clearer picture of the problem. That survey is conducted online.

The data for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 also suggests that a greater percentage of service members came forward to report sexual assaults, which has been a key goal for the Defense Department. About 25% of those who said on the survey that they had faced unwanted sexual contact reported it last year, compared with 20% in 2021, according to defense officials and documents reviewed by the AP.

Defense officials have long argued that an increase in reported assaults is a positive trend because so many people are reluctant to report them, both in the military and in society as a whole. Greater reporting, they say, shows there is more confidence in the reporting system and greater comfort with the support for victims, and results in a growing number of offenders being held accountable.

But the Pentagon and the military services also have come under persistent criticism and pressure from members of Congress to reduce sexual assaults and harassment in the military. Service leaders and lawmakers have all argued that the sexual assaults and harassment contribute to the military’s struggles to meet recruiting goals.

Alarmed members of Congress have enacted a number of changes, including a new prosecution system that uses independent lawyers. Lawmakers argued that some commanders failed to take victims’ complaints seriously or tried to protect those in their units who faced accusations, making victims reluctant to come forward.

The services have long worked to develop programs to prevent sexual assaults, encourage reporting and bolster confidence in the system. The Army, for example, has a new training program for soldiers when they report to their first duty station that shows service members acting out dangerous situations and teaches troops how to respond.

The number of reported sexual assaults decreased across all the military services, which is a marked improvement over the 2022 fiscal year, when the number of sexual assaults in the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps all shot up significantly. A 9% drop in Army reports in 2022 offset the increases in the other branches so that there was an uptick of about 1% for the whole military. The Army is the largest military service.

According to officials, the number of sexual assaults reported in the Army decreased from 3,718 in 2022 to 3,507 last year, while the Navy went from 2,052 to 1,942 and the Air Force from 1,928 to 1,838. The Marine Corps had the smallest decline, going from 1,244 to 1,228.

Included in the 8,515 total were 541 service members who reported an assault that occurred before they entered the military and 612 civilians who said they were assaulted by a member of the military.

At the military academies, the number of assaults dipped from 155 in 2022 to 124 in the 2023 school year. Service commanders are still working, however, to address what was a dramatic spike in 2022.

The latest survey also showed that nearly a quarter of all active-duty women said they’d faced sexual harassment, a decrease from the 28.6% in 2021.

One troubling area continues to be female service members’ satisfaction with the help they get when they make a complaint and their overall trust in the system and their leaders.

While a large percentage of victims seek out sexual assault response staff, fewer than 70% are happy with the services they get. And that hasn’t changed much over the past several years. Roughly the same percentage says they trust the military to respect and protect them and their privacy.

Officials said the hiring of more permanent, full-time workers will help improve that process.

___

Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed.

An Air Force instructor pilot at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, died Tuesday after an accident on Monday.

According to a statement from the base, the pilot with the 80th Flying Training Wing died Tuesday after being injured Monday when the ejection seat of their T-6A Texan II aircraft activated while on the ground.

Per Air Force policy, the pilot’s name is being withheld until 24 hours after the notification of next of kin.

An investigation into the cause of the incident is ongoing.

T-6A TEXAN II TRAINER

The T-6A Texan II is a single-engine two-seater aircraft that serves as a primary trainer for Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps pilots.

In a training flight, an instructor can sit in the front or back seat; both seats have lightweight Martin-Baker ejection seats that are activated by a handle on the seat.

TROUBLE WITH EJECTION SEATS

In 2022, the T-6 fleet and hundreds of other Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps jets were grounded after inspections revealed a potential defect with one component of the ejection seat’s cartridge actuated devices, or CADs. The fleet was inspected and in some instances, the CADs were replaced.

When activated the cartridge explodes and starts the ejection sequence.

Ejection seats have been credited with saving pilots’ lives, but they also have failed at critical moments in aircraft accidents. Investigators identified ejection seat failure as a partial cause of an F-16 crash that killed 1st Lt. David Schmitz, 32, in June 2020.

In 2018, four members of a B-1 bomber crew earned the Distinguished Flying Cross when, with their aircraft on fire, they discovered one of the four ejection seats was indicating failure. Instead of bailing out, all of the crew decided to remain in the burning aircraft and land it so they all would have the best chance of surviving. All of the crew survived.

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“I don’t have words. I’m just overwhelmed,” said Wilfred Ikemoto as he choked up while speaking of the belated honor given to his older brother Haruyuki.

The older Ikemoto was among 31 men killed when their C-46 transport plane hit a cliff while attempting to land in Okinawa, Japan, on Aug. 13, 1945.

“I’m just happy that he got recognized,” Ikemoto said.

Army records indicate only two of the 31 ever received Purple Heart medals, which the military awards to those wounded or killed during action against an enemy.

Researchers in Hawaii and Minnesota recently discovered the omission, leading the Army to agree to issue medals to families of the 29 men who were never recognized. Researchers located families of the five from Hawaii, and now the Army is asking family members of the other 24 men to contact them so their loved ones can finally receive recognition.

The older Ikemoto was the fourth of 10 children and the first in his family to attend college when he enrolled at the University of Hawaii. He was photographer and developed film in a makeshift darkroom in a bedroom at home.

“I remember him as probably the smartest and most talented in our family,” said Wilfred Ikemoto, who was 10 years old when his older brother died.

On board the plane were 12 paratroopers with the 11th Airborne Division, five soldiers in a Counter-intelligence Detachment assigned to the paratroopers, 10 Japanese-American linguists in the Military Intelligence Service and four crew members.

They had all flown up from the Philippines to spearhead the occupation of Japan after Tokyo’s surrender, said Daniel Matthews, who looked into the ill-fated flight while researching his father’s postwar service in the 11th Airborne.

Matthews attributed the Army’s failure to recognize all 31 soldiers with medals to administrative oversight in the waning hours of the war. The U.S. had been preparing to invade Japan’s main islands, but it formulated alternative plans after receiving indications Japan was getting ready to surrender. Complicating matters further, there were four different units on the plane.

Wilfred Motokane Jr. said he had mixed feelings after he accepted his father’s medal.

“I’m very happy that we’re finally recognizing some people,” he said. “I think it took a long time for it to happen. That’s the one part that I don’t feel that good about, if you will.”

The Hawaii five were all part of the Military Intelligence Service or MIS, a U.S. Army unit made up of mostly Japanese Americans who interrogated prisoners, translated intercepted messages and traveled behind enemy lines to gather intelligence.

They five had been inducted in January 1944 after the MIS, desperate to get more recruits, sent a team to Hawaii to find more linguists, historian Mark Matsunaga said.

Altogether some 6,000 served with the Military Intelligence Service. But much of their work has remained relatively unknown because it was classified until the 1970s.

During the U.S. occupation of Japan, they served crucial roles as liaisons between American and Japanese officials and overseeing regional governments.

Retired Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, who recently stepped down as head of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, presented the medals to the families during the ceremony on the banks of Pearl Harbor. Nakasone’s Hawaii-born father served in the MIS after the war, giving him a personal connection to the event.

“What these Military Intelligence Service soldiers brought to the occupation of Japan was an understanding of culture that could take what was the vanquished to work with the victor,” Nakasone said. “I’m very proud of all the MIS soldiers not only during combat, but also during the occupation.”

AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than 1,000 unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028.

It was fitting that the dogfight took place at Edwards Air Force Base, a vast desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound and the military has incubated its most secret aerospace advances. Inside classified simulators and buildings with layers of shielding against surveillance, a new test-pilot generation is training AI agents to fly in war. Kendall traveled here to see AI fly in real time and make a public statement of confidence in its future role in air combat.

“It’s a security risk not to have it. At this point, we have to have it,” Kendall said in an interview with The Associated Press after he landed. The AP, along with NBC, was granted permission to witness the secret flight on the condition that it would not be reported until it was complete because of operational security concerns.

The AI-controlled F-16, called Vista, flew Kendall in lightning-fast maneuvers at more than 550 miles an hour that put pressure on his body at five times the force of gravity. It went nearly nose to nose with a second human-piloted F-16 as both aircraft raced within 1,000 feet of each other, twisting and looping to try force their opponent into vulnerable positions.

At the end of the hourlong flight, Kendall climbed out of the cockpit grinning. He said he’d seen enough during his flight that he’d trust this still-learning AI with the ability to decide whether or not to launch weapons in war.

There’s a lot of opposition to that idea. Arms control experts and humanitarian groups are deeply concerned that AI one day might be able to autonomously drop bombs that kill people without further human consultation, and they are seeking greater restrictions on its use.

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“There are widespread and serious concerns about ceding life-and-death decisions to sensors and software,” the International Committee of the Red Cross has warned. Autonomous weapons “are an immediate cause of concern and demand an urgent, international political response.”

Kendall said there will always be human oversight in the system when weapons are used.

The military’s shift to AI-enabled planes is driven by security, cost and strategic capability. If the U.S. and China should end up in conflict, for example, today’s Air Force fleet of expensive, manned fighters will be vulnerable because of gains on both sides in electronic warfare, space and air defense systems. China’s air force is on pace to outnumber the U.S. and it is also amassing a fleet of flying unmanned weapons.

Future war scenarios envision swarms of American unmanned aircraft providing an advance attack on enemy defenses to give the U.S. the ability to penetrate an airspace without high risk to pilot lives. But the shift is also driven by money. The Air Force is still hampered by production delays and cost overruns in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost an estimated of $1.7 trillion.

Smaller and cheaper AI-controlled unmanned jets are the way ahead, Kendall said.

Vista’s military operators say no other country in the world has an AI jet like it, where the software first learns on millions of data points in a simulator, then tests its conclusions during actual flights. That real-world performance data is then put back into the simulator where the AI then processes it to learn more.

China has AI, but there’s no indication it has found a way to run tests outside a simulator. And, like a junior officer first learning tactics, some lessons can only be learned in the air, Vista’s test pilots said.

Until you actually fly, “it’s all guesswork,” chief test pilot Bill Gray said. “And the longer it takes you to figure that out, the longer it takes before you have useful systems.”

Vista flew its first AI-controlled dogfight in September 2023, and there have only been about two dozen similar flights since. But the programs are learning so quickly from each engagement that some AI versions getting tested on Vista are already beating human pilots in air-to-air combat.

The pilots at this base are aware that in some respects, they may be training their replacements or shaping a future construct where fewer of them are needed.

But they also say they would not want to be up in the sky against an adversary that has AI-controlled aircraft if the U.S. does not also have its own fleet.

“We have to keep running. And we have to run fast,” Kendall said.

After five sailors assigned to the aircraft carrier died by suicide within a year, including three in one week in April 2022, some of the ship’s commanders dismissed claims about poor living and working conditions, and at least one of them admitted to having a weak grasp of the mental health issues that plagued his sailors, the messages show. 

“I myself, have an extremely limited understanding of mental health issues and have a very hard time understanding why,” William Mathis, the executive officer, wrote in one of the roughly 130 emails the Navy recently provided, nearly two years after NBC News filed a Freedom of Information Act request. 

At the time, several sailors said their struggles were directly related to a culture in which seeking help was not met with the necessary resources, as well as the unbearable state of the ship while it was docked and undergoing a lengthy overhaul in Virginia.

The deaths sparked investigations, prompted visits from the Navy’s most powerful officials and led to the relocation of more than 280 sailors. 

For at least one sailor’s family, the years have done little to heal wounds.

“It’s still fresh, and it seems like they swept it under the carpet and moved on,” said John Sandor, whose 19-year-old son, Xavier, had long complained about the George Washington before taking his own life on the ship. 

A string of tragedies 

Mika’il Sharp, 23, died by suicide on April 9, 2022, at a family gender-reveal party in Portsmouth, Virginia. He had gotten married in the last year and had been promoted days prior, according to his family and the findings of a Navy investigation.

After Natasha Huffman, 24, ended her life the next day, the Navy began discussing whether the two should be promoted posthumously. 

They appeared eligible for such advancements, a Navy program manager wrote to the ship’s leaders on April 12, 2022. Under the Navy’s guidelines, any sailor who dies in the line of duty and meets certain eligibility requirements can be posthumously advanced.  

Brent Gaut, the ship’s commanding officer, appeared supportive of the promotions and said he would deliver a decision shortly.

On the morning of April 15, 2022, Mathis, who began his role as Gaut’s second-in-command two months earlier, emailed behavioral health care doctors on his team to see if the Navy could have done anything to prevent Sharp and Huffman’s deaths. 

“I am not trying to point fingers at anyone else,” Mathis wrote. “Hoping to learn something to take forward.”

Gaut, Mathis and Christopher Zeigler, the third-in-command, were “starting to see more and more gripes about lack of access to mental healthcare,” Mathis wrote to the physicians, as he set up a meeting to discuss the issue.

“It seems to me that we probably have a lack of supply to meet the demand,” he said. “I need a better understanding here as well.”

That night, while working his usual 12-hour shift on the ship, Xavier Sandor stepped inside a bathroom and told his parents in a text message that being home was the only thing that made him happy, according to his father. He asked to be buried near his high school friend before taking his life.

His mother read the message first and let out a painful howl. His father raced down the hall of their Shelton, Connecticut, home, which Xavier had walked through that morning.

By the time the Sandors arrived at the Riverside Regional Medical Center in Virginia, where Xavier was taken, he was gone. John Sandor, 51, fell to the floor in anguish. 

“The doctor got on his knees with me and said he did everything he could,” he said.

In Tennessee, where he was on leave, Gaut, who is now 53, had a “mini panic attack,” he said in an email. His deputy sent out a mass email to department heads, alerting them to the third death of a freshman sailor in six days.

“I know most of you are already aware, but I regret to inform you all that we had another apparent suicide last night,” Mathis wrote. 

“Call all of our folks and give them a verbal hug,” he continued. “Let our Sailors know that we had another tragic event last night and remind them that they are loved and that there are resources available if people are struggling.”

Two days later, Mathis, now 46, questioned the posthumous promotions.

“I am now in the anger phase of grief so I realize that is affecting my judgement,” he wrote. “But I am not seeing how a Sailor committing suicide should warrant a posthumous advancement.”

Gaut, Mathis and Zeigler directed comments to the Navy. A Navy official said the emails are a “snapshot and do not fully represent the level of care and support” the commanders took to immediately help their crew.

The official said the correspondence “reflects a period of time in which Navy leadership were working to provide council, guidance and comfort to the crew.”

Of the three sailors who died that week in April, Huffman was posthumously promoted, the Navy said. Sharp was not eligible because he had recently advanced, and Sandor had not taken the advancement test that would have made him eligible, according to the Navy.

Facing the public, missed red flags

The next week, as the deaths made national headlines, the ship’s leaders began to brainstorm how to share the news. 

Gaut asked a public affairs officer to start thinking about a Facebook post that would tell families “what happened and the way forward,” but the idea was quickly shut down.

“There is nothing we can say other than what has been said,” the press officer wrote. “A social post will only attract negative attention.”

The public affairs team sent Gaut a draft of “talking points” to consider when addressing the sailors. Mathis reviewed the memo, which confirmed five deaths by suicide since December 2021.

“I thought briefly that maybe we should discuss data up to 12 months ago but I changed my mind and thought we should just focus on the 9‐10 months you have been in command,” he wrote to Gaut. 

A Navy investigation released publicly in December 2022 determined that Sharp and Huffman’s deaths were not related to life onboard the ship, but Xavier Sandor’s was. A separate investigation found that the shipyard lacked sufficient parking, transportation and access to food and housing.

Ten days after Xavier’s death, Gaut remained adamant that the suicides were not related to the ship’s conditions. He wrote to a colleague that he was staying off social media because he knew “this was not a quality of life issue.”

A month after the deaths, Zeigler still dismissed claims about problems on the ship when a local pizzeria owner wrote the leaders with an offer to send 420 free pies, one to each of the sailors believed to be living onboard. 

“The issues we have aren’t because of the exaggerated media stories of our living conditions so just want to make that perfectly clear before we move forward,” Zeigler, now 50, wrote.

From 2017 to 2023, the George Washington was docked at the Newport News Shipyard in Virginia, where it underwent significant repairs and upgrades.

While most of the roughly 2,700 sailors went home after their shifts, hundreds who lived out of state or didn’t have off-site housing stayed on the vessel, where several sailors said there was constant construction noise and a lack of hot water and electricity. 

For three months, Xavier, who was over 6-feet tall, lived in his Toyota Corolla and made 16-hour round trips back home when he could to escape the George Washington, his father said. Those drives usually happened every other weekend. 

“He’d crash for most of the two days and then drive back,” John Sandor said.

Shortly before his death, Xavier skipped a meeting with Zeigler to go home. It was a punishable offense, but the ship’s leaders failed to properly document the infraction, which would have given them a reason to temporarily take away his firearm and potentially see that he was struggling to adapt to shipyard life, investigators said.

In the three days before he died, Xavier got a maximum of about 14 hours of total sleep, which likely affected his decision-making ability, according to the investigation. 

His father said he will blame himself forever for not seeing the red flags, but he blames his son’s commanders for missing them, too. 

“He shouldn’t have been armed,” John Sandor said. “My son should have never been put in that situation.”

Nine sailors died by suicide during the roughly six years the George Washington was docked in Virginia, Navy spokesperson Sandra Gall said.

After the spate of deaths in April, the Navy gave the sailors more mental health resources, including psychologists, social workers and chaplains. Before, there had been only one psychologist on the ship.

Leaders also amplified communication efforts, hosted morale-boosting events and provided shuttles to ease parking woes, Gall said.

“Navy leadership remains fully engaged with the crew to ensure their health and well-being, and to ensure a climate of trust that encourages Sailors to ask for help and provide quality of service feedback,” Gall said.

Today, the Sandors sit and mention Xavier’s name as much as they can. They no longer host holidays in their home, which they’ve filled with photos of the young sailor and where they display the folded American flag they were given at his funeral. 

Xavier’s goldendoodle puppy, Grace, still waits on his bed every day, anticipating his return, John Sandor said.

“It totally changed our lives,” he said, “and it’s miserable without him.”

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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The U.S. military launched an air assault on dozens of sites in Iraq and Syria used by Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Friday, in the opening salvo of retaliation for the drone strike that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan last weekend.

The massive barrage of strikes hit more than 85 targets at seven locations, including command and control headquarters, intelligence centers, rockets and missiles, drone and ammunition storage sites and other facilities that were connected to the militias or the IRGC’s Quds Force, the Guard’s expeditionary unit that handles Tehran’s relationship with and arming of regional militias. And President Joe Biden made it clear in a statement that there will be more to come.

The U.S. strikes appeared to stop short of directly targeting Iran or senior leaders of the Revolutionary Guard Quds Force within its borders, as the U.S. tries to prevent the conflict from escalating even further. Iran has denied it was behind the Jordan attack.

It was unclear what the impact will be of the strikes. Days of U.S. warnings may have sent militia members scattering into hiding. With multiple groups operating at various locations in several countries, a knockout blow is unlikely.

Though one of the main Iran-backed militias, Kataib Hezbollah, said it was suspending attacks on American troops, others have vowed to continue fighting, casting themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause while the war in Gaza shows no sign of ending.

“Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing,” Biden warned, adding, “let all those who might seek to do us harm know this: If you harm an American, we will respond.” He and other top U.S. leaders had been saying for days that any American response wouldn’t be just one hit but a “tiered response” over time.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the targets “were carefully selected to avoid civilian casualties and based on clear, irrefutable evidence that they were connected to attacks on U.S. personnel in the region.” He declined to detail what that evidence was.

The strikes took place over about 30 minutes, and three of the sites struck were in Iraq and four were in Syria, said Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, director of the Joint Staff.

U.S. Central Command said the assault involved more than 125 precision munitions, and they were delivered by numerous aircraft, including long-range B-1 bombers flown from the United States. Sims said weather was a factor as the U.S. planned the strikes in order to allow the U.S. to confirm it was hitting the right targets and avoiding civilian casualties.

It’s not clear, however, whether militia members were killed.

“We know that there are militants that use these locations, IRGC as well as Iranian-aligned militia group personnel,” Sims said. “We made these strikes tonight with an idea that there there would likely be casualties associated with people inside those facilities.”

Syrian state media reported that there were casualties but did not give a number. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that 18 militants were killed in the Syria strikes.

Iraqi army spokesman Yahya Rasool said in a statement that the city of al-Qaim and areas along the country’s border with Syria had been hit by U.S. airstrikes. The strikes, he said, “constitute a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and undermine the efforts of the Iraqi government, posing a threat that will pull Iraq and the region to undesirable consequences.”

Kirby said that the U.S. alerted the Iraqi government prior to carrying out the strikes.

The assault came came just hours after Biden and top defense leaders joined grieving families to watch as the remains of the three Army Reserve soldiers were returned to the U.S. at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

Just Friday morning, Iran’s hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi reiterated earlier promises by Tehran to potentially retaliate for any U.S. strikes targeting its interests. We “will not start a war, but if a country, if a cruel force wants to bully us, the Islamic Republic of Iran will give a strong response,” Raisi said.

In a statement this week, Kataib Hezbollah announced “the suspension of military and security operations against the occupation forces in order to prevent embarrassment to the Iraqi government.” But that assertion clearly had no impact on U.S. strike plans. Harakat al-Nujaba, one of the other major Iran-backed groups, vowed Friday to continue military operations against U.S. troops.

The U.S. has blamed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a broad coalition of Iran-backed militias, for the attack in Jordan, but hasn’t narrowed it down to a specific group. Kataib Hezbollah is, however, a top suspect.

Some of the militias have been a threat to U.S. bases for years, but the groups intensified their assaults in the wake of Israel’s war with Hamas following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and saw 250 others taken hostage. The war has led to the deaths of more than 27,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and has inflamed the Middle East.

Iran-backed militia groups throughout the region have used the conflict to justify striking Israeli or U.S. interests, including threatening civilian commercial ships and U.S. warships in the Red Sea region with drones or missiles in almost daily exchanges.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said “this is a dangerous moment in the Middle East.” He said the U.S. will take all necessary actions to defend its interests and people, and warned, “At this point, it’s time to take away even more capability than we’ve taken in the past.”

As of Tuesday, Iran-backed militia groups had launched 166 attacks on U.S. military installations since Oct. 18, including 67 in Iraq, 98 in Syria and now one in Jordan, according to a U.S. military official. The last attack was Jan. 29 at al-Asad airbase in Iraq, and there were no injuries or damage.

The U.S., meanwhile, has bolstered defenses at Tower 22, the base in Jordan that was attacked by Iran-backed militants on Sunday, according to a U.S. official. While previous U.S. responses in Iraq and Syria have been more limited, the deaths of the three service members in Jordan crossed a line, the official said.

That attack, which also injured more than 40 service members — largely Army National Guard — was the first to result in U.S. combat deaths from the Iran-backed militias since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out. Tower 22 houses about 350 U.S. troops and sits near the demilitarized zone on the border between Jordan and Syria. The Iraqi border is only 6 miles (10 kilometers) away.

Also Friday, the Israeli military said its Arrow defense system intercepted a missile that approached the country from the Red Sea, raising suspicion it was launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels. The rebels did not immediately claim responsibility.

And a U.S. official said the military had taken additional self-defense strikes inside Yemen Friday against Houthi military targets deemed an imminent threat. Al-Masirah, a Houthi-run satellite news channel, said British and American forces conducted three strikes in the northern Yemeni province of Hajjah, a Houthi stronghold.

U.S. officials said they are still determining which of several Iran-backed groups was responsible for the first killing of American troops in a wave of attacks against U.S. forces in the region since the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel. Biden plans to attend the dignified transfer to mark the fallen troops’ return to American soil on Friday and answered in the affirmative when asked by reporters if he’d decided on a response, as he indicated he was aiming to prevent further escalation.

“I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East,” Biden said at the White House before departing for a fundraising trip to Florida. “That’s not what I’m looking for.”

It was not immediately clear whether Biden meant he had decided on a specific retaliatory plan. A U.S. official told The Associated Press that the Pentagon is still assessing options to respond to the attack in Jordan.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters traveling with Biden aboard Air Force One that he would not preview the U.S. response, but indicated it would come in phases.

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“It’s very possible that what you’ll see is a tiered approach here, not just a single action, but potentially multiple actions over a period of time,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah, one of several groups eyed by U.S. officials, announced Tuesday in a statement “the suspension of military and security operations against the occupation forces in order to prevent embarrassment to the Iraqi government.”

The attacks on U.S. forces by Iraqi militias over the past four months have placed the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani in an awkward position. Sudani was brought to power by Iranian-allied factions but has also attempted to stay in Washington’s good graces and has condemned the attacks on U.S. forces serving in Iraq as part of an international commission to fight the Islamic State. Iraqi and U.S. officials on Saturday opened talks aimed at winding down the commission’s presence.

Kirby said that Biden spoke with the soldiers’ families Tuesday morning and extended his condolences, pledging full assistance to the families as they grieve.

In separate calls with the families, Biden also gauged their feelings about his attendance at Friday’s dignified transfer of the fallen service members’ remains at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Friday, and “all of them supported his presence there,” Kirby said.

“He was grateful for their time. He expressed to them how proud we all are of their service,” Kirby said of Biden’s calls with the families. “How we mourn and feel sorrow over their loss.”

Kirby added: “The president will be going to the dignified transfer on Friday.”

The solemn ceremony marks the return of fallen service members to American soil as they journey to their final resting place, with silent honor guards carrying flag-draped transfer cases holding the remains from transport aircraft to military vehicles.

The Pentagon identified those killed in the attack as Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, Georgia; Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, of Waycross, Georgia; and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, of Savannah, Georgia. The Army Reserve announced on Tuesday that it had posthumously promoted Sanders and Moffett to the rank of sergeant.

There have been a total of 166 attacks on U.S. military installations since Oct. 18, including 67 in Iraq, 98 in Syria and now one in Jordan, a U.S. military official said. On Tuesday, Al-Asad Air Base in Western Iraq was targeted again by a single rocket, but there was no damage and no injuries in that attack, a U.S. military official said. The three soldiers killed in the Jordan strike were the first U.S. military fatalities in the Middle East since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out. One contractor has also died as the result of a heart attack after a strike on Al-Asad in December.

In 2021, Biden attended the dignified transfer of the remains of 13 troops killed in a suicide attack during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Separately, Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany said it expected to receive 3 U.S. service members who were injured in the drone attack, including one listed in critical, but stable, condition. The Pentagon has said at least 40 troops were injured alongside the three killed in action.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

One crew member was killed and seven others are missing, along with the aircraft. The cause of Wednesday’s crash, which occurred during a training mission, is still under investigation. Search operations widened Friday with additional U.S. military personnel joining the effort, while Japanese coast guard and military ships focused on an undersea search using sonar.

The Pentagon said Thursday that U.S. Ospreys continue to operate in Japan, and Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said she was not aware of an official request from Japan to ground them.

“We are concerned about the continuing Osprey flights despite our repeated requests and the absence of a sufficient explanation about their safety” from the U.S. military, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said Friday.

The U.S.-made Osprey is a hybrid aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter but can rotate its propellers forward and cruise much faster, like an airplane, during flight.

Ospreys have had a number of crashes, including in Japan, where they are used at U.S. and Japanese military bases, and the latest crash rekindled safety concerns.

Japanese officials say they asked the U.S. military to halt Osprey flights in Japan except for those involved in the search operations.

Defense Minister Minoru Kihara said he met with the commander of U.S. Forces Japan, Lt. Gen. Ricky Rupp, on Thursday afternoon and repeated his request that flights be allowed only after the aircraft’s safety is confirmed. He acknowledged that he did not specifically use the words “grounding” or “suspension.”

Kihara said he asked Rupp to explain what measures are being taken for Osprey flights in Japan in response to the crash.

On Thursday, Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa met with U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and asked the United States “to promptly provide information to the Japanese side.”

U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command said the CV-22B Osprey that crashed was one of six deployed at Yokota Air Base, home to U.S. Forces Japan and the Fifth Air Force, and was assigned to the 353rd Special Operations Wing.

The aircraft had departed from the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Yamaguchi prefecture and crashed on its way to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japanese officials said.

A total of 44 Ospreys have been deployed at U.S. and Japanese military bases in Japan. In Okinawa, where about half of the 50,000 American troops in Japan are based, Gov. Denny Tamaki called on Japan’s defense and foreign ministries to request the U.S. military to suspend all Osprey flights in Japan, including in search operations.

“It is extremely regrettable that Ospreys are still flying in Okinawa,” Tamaki said in a statement Thursday. “I have serious doubts about Osprey safety even for their search and rescue operations.”

The cause of the crash and the status of the seven others on board were not immediately known, Japanese coast guard spokesperson Kazuo Ogawa said.

The Osprey is a hybrid aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter, but during flight it can rotate its propellers forward and cruise much faster like an airplane.

Ospreys have had a number of accidents in the past, including in Japan, where they are deployed at U.S. and Japanese military bases. In Okinawa, where about half of the 50,000 American troops are based, Gov. Denny Tamaki told reporters Wednesday that he would ask the U.S. military to suspend all Osprey flights in Japan.

Ogawa said the coast guard received an emergency call Wednesday afternoon from a fishing boat near the crash site off Yakushima, an island south of Kagoshima on the southern main island of Kyushu.

Coast guard aircraft and patrol boats found one male crew member, who was later pronounced dead by a doctor at a nearby port, Ogawa said. They also found gray debris believed to be from the aircraft and an empty inflatable life raft in an area about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) off the eastern coast of Yakushima, he said.

The coast guard said it planned to continue searching through the night.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said the Osprey disappeared from radar a few minutes before the coast guard received the emergency call. The aircraft requested an emergency landing at the Yakushima airport about five minutes before it was lost from radar, NHK public television and other news outlets reported.

NHK quoted a Yakushima resident as saying he saw the aircraft turned upside down, with fire coming from one of its engines, and then an explosion before it fell to the sea.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said he planned to seek a further explanation from the U.S. military, but he declined to say whether he would seek a temporary suspension of Osprey operations in Japan.

U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command said in a statement that the CV-22B Osprey was from Yokota Air Base and assigned to the 353rd Special Operations Wing.

Ogawa said the aircraft had departed from the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Yamaguchi prefecture and crashed on its way to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa.

Japanese Vice Defense Minister Hiroyuki Miyazawa said it had attempted an emergency sea landing and quoted the U.S. military as saying its pilot “did everything possible until the last minute.”

Yokota Air Base is home to U.S. Forces Japan and the Fifth Air Force. Six CV-22 Ospreys have been deployed at Yokota, including the one that crashed.

While the U.S. Marine Corps flies most of the Ospreys based in Japan, the Air Force also has some deployed there.

Last year, Air Force Special Operations Command ordered a temporary stand down of its Osprey fleet following back-to-back safety incidents where the Osprey clutch slipped, causing an uneven distribution of power to Osprey’s rotors.

The Marine Corps and Navy have reported similar clutch slips, and each service has worked to address the issue in their aircraft, however clutch failure was also cited in a 2022 fatal U.S. Marine Corps Osprey crash that killed five.

According to the investigation of that crash, “dual hard clutch engagement” led to engine failure.

Separately, a U.S. Marine Corps Osprey with 23 Marines aboard crashed on a northern Australian island in August, killing three Marines and critically injuring at least five others who were onboard during a multinational training exercise.

Pfc. Avery L. Rosario was detained in June after the girl was found at Camp Pendleton in California. Military prosecutors charged him in August with sexual assault of a minor.

Rosario’s defense has said that he met the girl on Tinder and that her profile said she was 21. Two charges were referred to a general court-martial by Brig. Gen. Andrew M. Niebel, the commanding general of the 1st Marine Logistics Group, a spokesman group said.

Rosario is expected to appear before the court-martial Thursday, said Capt. Virginia Burger, the logistics group’s communications director.

The girl was found at Camp Pendleton, which is near Oceanside, on June 28, more than two weeks after her grandmother reported her missing to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, officials said.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

news Aug 12

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Military Jul 3

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

Brown’s confirmation on a 83-11 vote, months after President Joe Biden nominated him for the post, comes as Democrats try to maneuver around holds placed on hundreds of nominations by Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville over the Pentagon’s abortion policy. The Senate is also expected to confirm Gen. Randy George to be Army Chief of Staff and Gen. Eric Smith as commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps this week.

Tuberville has been blocking the Senate from the routine process of approving military nominations in groups, frustrating Democrats who had said they would not go through the time-consuming process of bringing up individual nominations for a vote. More than 300 nominees are still stalled amid Tuberville’s blockade, and confirming them one-by-one would take months.

But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., reversed course on Wednesday and moved to force votes on Brown, George and Smith.

“Senator Tuberville is forcing us to face his obstruction head on,” Schumer said. “I want to make clear to my Republican colleagues — this cannot continue.”

Tuberville did not object to the confirmation votes, saying he will maintain his holds but is fine with bringing up nominations individually for roll call votes.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby said that Brown’s confirmation, along with expected votes on Smith and George, is positive news. But “we should have never been in this position,” he said.

“While good for these three officers, it doesn’t fix the problem or provide a path forward for the 316 other general and flag officers that are held up by this ridiculous hold,” Kirby told reporters.

Brown, a career fighter pilot, was the Air Force’s first Black commander of the Pacific Air Forces and most recently its first Black chief of staff, making him the first African American to lead any of the military branches. His confirmation will also mark the first time the Pentagon’s top two posts were held by African Americans, with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as the top civilian leader.

Brown, 60, replaces Joint Chiefs Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley, who is retiring after four decades in military service. Milley’s four-year term as chairman ends on Sept. 30.

Tuberville said on Wednesday that he will continue to hold up the other nominations unless the Pentagon ends its policy of paying for travel when a service member has to go out of state to get an abortion or other reproductive care. The Biden administration instituted the policy after the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to an abortion and some states have limited or banned the procedure.

“Let’s do one at a time or change the policy back,” Tuberville said after Schumer put the three nominations up for a vote. “Let’s vote on it.”

In an effort to force Tuberville’s hand, Democrats had said they would not bring up the most senior nominees while the others were still stalled. “There’s an old saying in the military, leave no one behind,” Senate Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed said in July.

But in a frustrated speech on the Senate floor, Schumer said Wednesday he was left with no other choice.

“Senator Tuberville is using them as pawns,” Schumer said of the nominees.

The votes come as a host of military officers have spoken out about the damage of the delays for service members. While Tuberville’s holds are focused on all general and flag officers, they carry career impacts on the military’s younger rising officers. Until each general or admiral is confirmed, it blocks an opportunity for a more junior officer to rise.

That affects pay, retirement, lifestyle and future assignments — and in some fields where the private sector will pay more, it becomes harder to convince those highly trained young leaders to stay.

The blockade has frustrated members on both sides of the aisle, and it is still unclear how the larger standoff will be resolved. Schumer did not say if he will put additional nominations on the floor.

The monthslong holds have devolved into a convoluted procedural back and forth in recent days.

Tuberville claimed victory after Schumer’s move, even though the Pentagon policy remains unchanged.

“We called them out, and they blinked,” he told reporters of Schumer.

___

Associated Press writer Colleen Long contributed to this report.

Jeri Kozobarich noticed something was wrong as soon as she arrived at the sprawling U.S. Marine Corps training facility in North Carolina, healthy and seven months pregnant, in the spring of 1969.

At a reception for the wives of the officers on the base, Kozobarich approached another pregnant woman who was “round as a ball” and dressed in black.

“When are you due?” Kozobarich asked.

“My baby is dead,” the woman said, before turning away.

Horrified, Kozobarich raced home, unable to fathom such a fate. Then, at a routine weekly checkup at the facility’s Naval hospital about two months later, she had to. A doctor told Kozobarich, who had no previous pregnancy complications, that the baby girl in her womb was dead. 

Kozobarich, then 24, carried the baby for another three weeks until she delivered on May 24, 1969. Then she buried her first child in a section of a cemetery known as “Baby Heaven,” tucked next to Camp Lejeune, where dozens of infant graves surround Kozobarich’s daughter’s and the tiny teddy bear statue that marks her headstone.

Read the full story on NBC News.com here.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

Three had been confirmed dead on Melville Island and five were flown in serious condition 80 kilometers (50 miles) to the mainland city of Darwin for hospital treatment after the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey aircraft crashed around 9:30 a.m., a statement from the Marines said.

“Recovery efforts are ongoing,” the statement said, adding the cause of the crash was under investigation.

Aircraft had been sent from Darwin to retrieve more survivors from the remote location but no further details on the fate of the other 15 Marines on board had been released hours later.

A U.S. military official reported to Australian air traffic controllers a “significant fire in the vicinity of the crash site,” according to an audio recording of the conversation broadcast by Nine News television.

Melville resident Shane Murphy was fishing from a beach when the Osprey crashed and told Australian Broadcasting Corp. he saw a “big mushroom of black smoke” rise from the wreckage.

Northern Territory Police Commissioner Michael Murphy said no one on board had escaped injury.

One of the injured was undergoing surgery at the Royal Darwin Hospital, Northern Territory Chief Minister Natasha Fyles said around six hours after the crash.

“We acknowledge that this is a terrible incident,” Fyles said. “The Northern Territory government stands by to offer whatever assistance is required.”

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said only Americans were injured in the crash during Exercise Predators Run, which involves the militaries of the United States, Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines and East Timor.

“Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the three U.S. service personnel who lost their lives, those who have been injured, the rest of the crew and indeed the entire United States armed forces,” Albanese said in a statement.

“Australia will continue to provide assistance to our friends for as long as is required,” he added.

Around 150 U.S. Marines are currently based in Darwin and up to 2,500 rotate through the city every year. They’re part of a realignment of forces in the Asia-Pacific that’s broadly meant to face an increasingly assertive China.

The 12-day exercise is scheduled to end Sept. 7. It involves troops on land, in the sea and in the air. The exercise has been paused since the crash.

The Osprey is a hybrid aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter, but during flight can rotate its propellers forward and cruise much faster like an airplane. Versions of the aircraft are flown by the U.S. Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force.

Before Sunday, there had been five fatal crashes of Marine Ospreys since 2012, causing a total of 16 deaths.

The latest was in June 2022, when five Marines died in a fiery crash in a remote part of California east of San Diego. A crash investigation report last month found that the tragedy was caused by a mechanical failure related to a clutch.

There had been 16 similar clutch problems with the Marine Ospreys in flight since 2012, the report found. But no problems have arisen since February when the Marine Corps began replacing a piece of equipment on the aircraft, the report said.

Melville is part of the Tiwi Islands, which along with Darwin are the focus of the exercise that involves 2,500 troops. It’s Indigenous-owned land and is mostly covered by tropical woodland. Its population is around 1,000 mostly Indigenous people.

The Osprey that crashed was one of two that had flown from Darwin to Melville on Sunday, Murphy, the police commissioner, said.

Darwin is a large city by the standards of Australia’s sparsely populated tropical north with a population of 150,000. But multiple casualty events can test its major hospital’s resources. The hospital has been put on its highest possible emergency alert, which means treatment of less urgent medical cases could be affected, Fyles said.

The U.S. military was also taking part in a multinational military exercise in July when four Australian personnel were killed in an army MRH-90 Taipan helicopter crash off the northeast Australian coast.

U.S. Army Special Operations Command, in a lengthy study, reported a wide range of “overtly sexist” comments from male soldiers, including a broad aversion to females serving in commando units. The comments, it said, are “not outliers” but represent a common sentiment that women don’t belong on special operations teams.

“The idea that women are equally as physically, mentally and emotionally capable to perform majority of jobs is quite frankly ridiculous,” said one male commenter. Others said they’d quit before serving on a team with a female, and that serving in such a situation it would create problems and jealousy among their wives.

The blunt and sometimes crass comments ring familiar to many who have watched the difficult transition as women moved into the military’s front line combat jobs. And they paint a disturbing, challenging picture for leaders.

The exhaustive report surveyed more than 5,000 people assigned to Army special operations forces units, including 837 female troops, 3,238 male troops and the rest defense civilians.

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It revealed that “the vast majority” of the negative attitudes toward women serving in special operations “unfortunately did come from senior noncommissioned officers. So it does seem to indicate that it is generational,” Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann, the most senior enlisted soldier in the command, said in a call with reporters Monday about the findings.

However the negative sentiments revealed the 2023 report echo sharp opposition voiced by special operations troops across the services in 2015, when surveyed on whether women should serve in the dangerous commando jobs. Later that year, in a landmark decision, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered all combat jobs open to women.

That change followed three years of study and debate, and reflected a formal recognition that thousands of women had served — and many were wounded or killed — on battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then, women have made significant strides throughout the military, gaining high level command posts, but the report underscores that significant biases remain.

“I think people’s perspectives change when they interact and see the awesome soldiers that are out there,” said Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, USASOC commander. “I’m talking about personal interactions that I’ve had with female special operations aviators that have performed some of the most daring denied-area-of-penetration rotary wing insertions in history,” Braga said, referring to how special operations pilots carry forces into areas where they are under fire or under threat.

“I don’t think anyone in the back of this helicopter is like, ’Man, I wish there was a male pilot. No, they want them to be an awesome pilot.”

Two years ago, Army special operations leaders ordered a study to identify and eliminate barriers to females serving in their force. USASOC is the first to do this type of study of its specialized force. It’s unclear if other services will do similar reviews.

The Army study focused on women serving in operational roles such as Green Berets, Ranger Regiment, aviation and psychological and civil affairs teams. The study and meetings, however, also included women in a wide array of support jobs such as engineers, mechanics, fuelers and communications and intelligence personnel who work with or sometimes accompany commandos on missions. The recommended changes are designed to benefit all females in the command.

The report, which is only now being released, identified a number of major issues, as female soldiers complained of sexism, isolation, poor-fitting and inadequate equipment, and lack of child care and health care, particularly involving pregnancy. They also expressed an overwhelming belief that they are passed over for jobs that are then given to less qualified men and that they have to do more and be perfect to get respect.

“I have to work hard to prove my excellence, while men have to work hard to prove their mediocrity,” one female soldier said.

Many male soldiers said female soldiers are respected and have the same chance for promotions as men. But the numbers dip when asked if woman have equal skills.

One male soldier dismissed any idea that women were pursuing career goals, saying women asking for special operations assignments “are looking for a husband, boyfriend or attention.” But there also were some who countered that men with negative opinions hadn’t worked with women, and that once they did they would realize their value.

All together there are roughly 2,200 female soldiers in USASOC — or nearly 8% of the 29,000 active duty soldiers. There also are 427 female civilians. Of the 2,200, a bit more than 250 are in what would be considered operational jobs with the Green Berets, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Ranger Regiment and psychological and civil affairs teams.

Four women have passed the grueling course to become Green Berets, and several are serving in those jobs. Seven females are serving in the Ranger Regiment, which totals about 3,000 soldiers.

The report made 42 recommendations. Several involving increased training and messages to the force to expand awareness of sexual harassment, mentorship, health care and other issues, have been done. Other changes are in progress.

Overall, the report said that gender bias is “deeply embedded” in staffing and equipping the special operations force.

And, it reflected confusion. While there is solid agreement that standards cannot be lowered for females, many interpret that as prohibiting any gender-specific accommodations.

“Women may require different tools than men to perform the same task,” the report said. “A mentality change is necessary to modify the archaic attitude that supplying tools to female service members is an act of accommodation versus simply providing our warfighters with the right tools for the job.”

Key examples are body armor, helmets and rucksacks that are often too big for female soldiers and small-stature men. The Army has been struggling for years to address the body armor problems, and two years ago began distributing short and longer small-sized protective vests and combat shirts designed to better fit women.

The new report, however, said that USASOC has too few of those scalable vests, and efforts to address the helmets and rucksacks are ongoing.

Sexual harassment is a common, but complicated complaint.

While nearly every woman in focus groups said she had experienced sexual harassment, only 30% called it a challenge and very few were willing to report or publicly acknowledge it. According to the report, 25 sexual harassment complaints were filed by female special operations command soldiers between 2016 to 2020.

Women said they fear reprisal and don’t trust commanders to take action because of a “good ol’ boys club.” And female officers said they’re told to develop a “thick skin” so they can survive in a man’s world.

In contrast, male soldiers said that sexual harassment training has made them fear interaction with women because a joke or comment could end their careers.

AP writer Tara Copp contributed to this report

But fans in the historic halls of the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday night were in for an unprecedented surprise, when Morgan, 59, was sworn in as a warrant officer with the U.S. Army Reserves, becoming the first person to commission at the home of country music — Nashville, Tennessee.

“I feel like an 18-year-old kid, I can tell you,” Morgan said in an interview with NBC News ahead of the ceremony. “I’m excited, nervous. But humbled. I’m humbled for the opportunity.”

For more on this story, go to NBC News.

The order formally implements legislation passed by Congress in 2022 aimed at strengthening protections for service members, who were often at the mercy of their commanders to decide whether to take their assault claims seriously.

Members of Congress, frustrated with the growing number of sexual assaults in the military, fought with defense leaders for several years over the issue. They argued that commanders at times were willing to ignore charges or incidents in their units to protect those accused of offenses and that using independent lawyers would beef up prosecutions. Military leaders balked, saying it could erode commanders’ authority.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York spent about a decade in an uphill battle to reform how the military handles sexual assaults and get the legislative changes passed that were codified through Biden’s order.

“While it will take time to see the results of these changes, these measures will instill more trust, professionalism, and confidence in the system,” Gillibrand said.

The change was among more than two dozen recommendations made in 2021 by an independent review commission on sexual assault in the military that was set up by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. And it was included in the annual defense bill last year. But since it requires a change to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it needed formal presidential action.

In a call with reporters previewing the order, senior Biden administration officials said it was the most sweeping change to the military legal code since it was created in 1950.

The Pentagon had already been moving forward with the change. A year ago, the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force set up the new special trial counsel offices, which will assume authority over prosecution decisions by the end of this year. Beginning Jan. 1, 2025, that prosecution authority will expand to include sexual harassment cases.

The changes come as the military grapples with rising numbers of reported sexual assaults in its ranks.

While the services have made inroads in making it easier and safer for troops to come forward, they have had far less success reducing the number of assaults, which have increased nearly every year since 2006. Overall, there were more than 8,942 reports of sexual assaults involving service members during the 2022 fiscal year, a slight increase over 8,866 the year before.

Defense officials have long argued that an increase in reported assaults is a positive trend because so many people are reluctant to report them, both in the military and in society as a whole. Greater reporting, they say, shows there is more confidence in the reporting system, greater comfort with the support for victims, and a growing number of offenders who are being held accountable.

“He’s jeopardizing U.S. security by what he’s doing,” Biden said of Sen. Tommy Tuberville. “It’s just totally irresponsible in my view.”

More than 260 nominations are stalled by Tuberville, including Biden’s pick for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America’s top military officer. The U.S. Marine Corps is currently without a confirmed leader for the first time in a century because of the block. It also affects scores of one-, two- and three-star officers who are assigned to new base commands.

“I’d be willing to talk to him if I thought there was any possibility of changing his ridiculous position,” Biden said during a press conference with the president of Finland. Biden traveled to Finland as a show of support for the new NATO member, following the NATO summit in Lithuania this week.

“The idea that we’re injecting into fundamental foreign policy decisions what, in fact, is a domestic social debate on social issues is bizarre,” Biden said.

There were also efforts at the Pentagon to encourage Tuberville to drop his opposition. The senator told reporters later Thursday that he had just spoken with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and expected to speak with him again.

The block also affects the families of nominees, who usually relocate over the summer to their new military communities so school-age children can get settled in before fall.

And it stretches to hundreds more younger military personnel who don’t need Senate confirmation but are still affected by the hold because they are assigned to serve as staff or aides to the relocating generals. Those aides move their families as well. So they are essentially stuck, too.

A proposal last month to hold a Senate debate over Pentagon abortion policies as part of the annual defense bill negotiations was seen by some senators as the best prospect for getting Tuberville to lift those holds, but he opposed it.

The Alabama senator’s action bucks decades of precedent in which swaths of military officers and promotions are approved by voice vote and with no objections. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., has said that if the Senate were to vote individually on the 260 nominations, it would take 27 days with the Senate working “around the clock” or 84 days if the Senate worked eight hours a day.

Tuberville has said he wants Democrats to solve the problem by introducing legislation on the abortion policy and then holding a vote on it. Tuberville does not have his own bill to change the policy.

“I’m leaving it up to them,” Tuberville said Wednesday.

But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says that Republican leaders, most of whom have criticized Tuberville’s holds, should prevail on the senator to change his mind. Biden, too, said Tuberville’s fellow GOP senators should work to stop his block.

“I’m confident the mainstream Republican party does not support what he’s doing, but they got to stand up and be counted. That’s how it ends,” Biden said.

___

Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report from Washington. Long reported from Washington.

In an effort to counter what he calls “a recruitment and retainment crisis unlike any other time in American history,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., has proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would eliminate marijuana testing for military recruits and allow those who had recently used the drug to enlist in the military.

Known as the NDAA, the bill is an annual reauthorization of U.S. military programs and considered must-pass legislation, meaning any adopted amendments stand a greater chance of becoming law.

Asked about his proposal, Gaetz said in a statement: “I do not believe that prior use of cannabis should exclude Americans from enlisting in the armed forces. We should embrace them for stepping up to serve our country.”

A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on pending legislation.

Recreational marijuana is legal in 23 states, with medical marijuana allowed in 15 more. A poll conducted last year by Monmouth University found that 54% of U.S. adults said they have used marijuana in their lifetime.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

The violence marked a rare use of Israeli airpower in the territory. During the clashes, Palestinian militants detonated a roadside bomb next to an Israeli military vehicle. At least 45 Palestinians were wounded, five seriously. The Israeli military said seven members of the paramilitary border police and the army suffered light and moderate wounds.

The escalation was the latest in more than a year of near-daily violence that has wracked the West Bank.

The Israeli military said troops came under a “massive exchange of fire” during an arrest raid in Jenin and shot back at Palestinian gunmen.

“As the security forces exited the city, a military vehicle was hit by an explosive device, damaging the vehicle,” the army said, adding that helicopters “opened fire toward the gunmen in order to assist in extraction of the forces.”

Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said that hours after the initial firefight, the army had flooded the area with troops in order to extract personnel pinned down in five disabled vehicles at the scene, describing it as an “evacuation” operation.

“We’re bringing in heavy equipment to get these vehicles out,” Hecht told reporters.

The militants’ use of a roadside bomb in the West Bank was “very unusual and dramatic,” Hecht said, adding that it may affect future military strategy in the territory.

Unconfirmed amateur video footage from Jenin appeared to show a roadside explosive targeting an Israeli armored vehicle. Another video posted online appeared to show Israeli military helicopter launching a rocket during the ongoing army operation.

The Israeli military rarely uses aircraft in its operations in the occupied West Bank. Israeli media reported that it was the first use of an attack helicopter in the territory since the Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s.

The Palestinian Health Ministry identified those killed as Khaled Asasa, 21, Qassam Abu Sariya, 29, Qais Jabarin, 21, and 15-year-old Ahmed Saqr, and said at least five others remained in serious condition after being wounded in the shootout.

Hussein al-Shekh, a senior Palestinian official, accused Israel of waging “a fierce and open war” against the Palestinian people and said President Mahmoud Abbas would make “unprecedented decisions” in an upcoming emergency meeting.

Egypt’s Foreign Ministry condemned what it called Israel’s “continued escalation against the Palestinians,” saying it only further inflamed the situation and undermined efforts to reduce regional tensions.

Israel and the Palestinians have been gripped by months of violence, focused mainly in the West Bank, where some 124 Palestinians have been killed this year. The city of Jenin has been a hotbed of Palestinian militancy.

Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians seek those territories for a future independent state.

Israel has been staging near-nightly raids in the West Bank in response to a spasm of Palestinian violence early last year. Palestinian attacks against Israelis have surged during that time.

Israel says most of the dead were militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and others not involved in confrontations have also been killed.

Palestinian attacks against Israelis have killed at least 20 people this year.

“I remember it like it was yesterday. We drove him to the airport, the Norfolk airport, and he boarded the plane. And we said goodbye, and he said, ‘I’ll see you soon. Be good kids for your mom.’ There were four of us, and, you know, he was excited to go,” Patricia Wilson said through tears.

On Memorial Day, News4 remembers Sgt. 1st Class Marshall Robertson, of Virginia. He was killed in Vietnam in 1969 on a final assignment he didn’t have to take. In a last love letter to his wife, Robertson said he was doing it “for my boys” and asked her to forgive him.

Robertson spent 10 months in Vietnam before he was pulled from the front lines and began preparing to go home.

But then he got news he wasn’t expecting: A leader in his platoon had been injured, and Robertson felt the need to return.

It’s a story Wilson learned in 1982 after she read more than 300 letters her father wrote home to her mother.

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“He probably could have sat in the back somewhere safe and rode out his time and come home, and he chose not to do that. He chose to take a chopper back to the front lines. He felt like his boys really needed him. These young 19, 20-year-old kids, and he had been the platoon leader for most of his time over there,” Wilson said.

On Aug. 26, 1969, Robertson was with Charlie Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry when they were in a firefight near Million Dollar Hill in the Que Son Valley.

Wilson later learned her father was trying to get to a wounded soldier when he was hit.

“I just remember the knock on the door, my mother just falling completely to pieces. She was inconsolable,” Wilson said.

For many years, Wilson said her family never talked about her father’s death. There were no pictures of him in the house, and life moved on.

But the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in D.C. in 1982 changed everything.

Wilson and her siblings tried to learn everything they could about their father’s service. They went to the wall, took photos there and read his name in ceremonies.

Wilson says her father’s service was heroic. She knows that from the last letter he sent home, dated Aug. 20, 1969.

Wilson Read Her Late Father’s Last Letter Aloud

“My dear darling, honey I love you so very much. I am writing this letter at 8:30 p.m. tonight, for I want you to know how I feel about you. For you see, this might very well be my last letter. I know you will not understand or be able to understand what or why I’m doing, but I’ve got to do it. You see my company went in to relieve B company, where they had 27 men killed in two days. Well, now my company is taking a beating. Capt. Murphy, my company commander, has been hit in both legs and I am going out at 4:30 in the morning. Now I know what you are thinking, that I have too much to live for. Well, that’s very true but there are some times in a man’s life when he must do what he must. Honey please forgive me for this but my men have a brand-new officer, I just have to go out there and help them. I know that you will not understand but please try to see my side of it. My love, if I should die over here, it will not be for my country or this country. It will be for my boys. Please tell the kiddies that I love them and if this is my last letter please remember me. Whatever happens, I love you.”

Robertson was 33 when he was killed in action.

Wilson said her family knew her dad had chosen to stay in Vietnam even before his last letter reached them. Walter Cronkite had featured him on the CBS Evening News, in a moment that filled their family with pride.

The suspension of air operations was effective immediately, with units grounded until they complete the training, said Lt. Col. Terence Kelley, an Army spokesperson. For active-duty units, the training is to take place between May 1 and 5. Army National Guard and Reserve units will have until May 31 to complete the training.

“The move grounds all Army aviators, except those participating in critical missions, until they complete the required training,” the Army said in a statement.

On Thursday, two Army helicopters collided near Healy, Alaska, killing three soldiers and injuring a fourth. The aircraft from the 1st Attack Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment at Fort Wainwright, near Fairbanks, were returning from training at the time of the crash, according to the Army. The unit is part of the 11th Airborne Division, which is nicknamed the “Arctic Angels.”

Military investigators were making their way to Alaska’s interior, with a team from Fort Novosel, Alabama, expected to arrive at the crash site by Saturday, said John Pennell, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Alaska. Little new information about the crash was released Friday.

The Army on Thursday said two of the soldiers died at the site and the third on the way to a hospital in Fairbanks. The injured fourth soldier was taken to a hospital and was in stable condition Friday, Pennell said. The names of those who were killed were not immediately released.

“The safety of our aviators is our top priority, and this stand down is an important step to make certain we are doing everything possible to prevent accidents and protect our personnel,” Army Chief of Staff James McConville said of the decision to ground flight units for training.

The crash is the second accident involving military helicopters in Alaska this year.

In February, two soldiers were injured when an Apache helicopter rolled after taking off from Talkeetna. The aircraft was one of four traveling to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage from Fort Wainwright.

In March, nine soldiers were killed when two U.S. Army Black Hawk medical evacuation helicopters crashed during a routine nighttime training exercise about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northeast of Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

The Army said that while Thursday’s crash and the one in Kentucky remain under investigation, “there is no indication of any pattern between the two mishaps.”

Healy is home to about 1,000 people roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of Denali National Park and Preserve, or about 250 miles (400 kilometers) north of Anchorage.

Located on the Parks Highway, the community is a popular place for people to spend the night while visiting Denali Park, which is home to the continent’s tallest mountain.

Healy is also famous for being the town closest to the former bus that had been abandoned in the backcountry and was popularized by the book “Into the Wild” and the movie of the same name. The bus was removed and taken to Fairbanks in 2020.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

The cemetery expansion project is expected to add 50,000 to 60,000 burial spaces and extend its ability to accommodate new burials by 19 years — until 2060, under the current eligibility requirements. Work on the expansion has already begun and will not be halted no matter what the judge decides at the trial’s conclusion.

At issue is how much money, if any, the federal government must pay to Arlington County for the nine acres (3.6 hectares) of land it took from the county to accommodate the expansion.

The federal government says it’s fulfilling its duties by replacing and improving the road network on the cemetery’s southern border, including significant improvements to a highway, Columbia Pike, that serves as a primary commuter route.

The county, on the other hand, contends that it also should be compensated for a 4-acre (1.6-hectare) parcel that could be developed into housing if it were rezoned. The county says the plot of land is particularly valuable in a region that is starved of adequate housing and is within walking distance to the Pentagon and the new Amazon headquarters being built in the county.

The condemnation that facilitated the cemetery expansion has been the subject of discussions and negotiations for more than 20 years. Despite urging from U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema that the two sides settle their dispute, no agreement was reached, and a bench trial began Monday that is expected to last the better part of the week.

The early negotiations contemplated a land swap in which the county would receive a developable plot of land from the federal government in exchange for what it was ceding on the cemetery’s border.

But the negotiations went nowhere and in 2017, the Army opted to condemn the property without a negotiated agreement. Since then, the county has been focused on ensuring it receives what it believes is a fair price for the land that was taken.

The federal government says improvements to the roadway adequately compensate the county. The improvements to Columbia Pike make it significantly wider and straighter, adding sidewalks and bike paths. The bike paths, as an example, widen the road’s footprint and necessarily take away space that could have been used for burials, former cemetery superintendent Katharine Kelley testified Monday.

But the Army agreed to the wider configuration, in part to help the county placate “a very vocal and somewhat powerful bike constituency” that demanded the path’s inclusion, Kelley said.

The Justice Department also argued that the federal government deeded the land to the county in the 1950s and 1960s under the condition that it be used only for roads, so a multimillion-dollar housing development would be impermissible.

“The county is looking for a windfall from the federal government using the very road the federal government conveyed to the county for free,” Justice Department attorney Emma Hollowell said during opening statements.

The county says nothing in the deeds restricts it from developing the land and that it has longstanding policy commitments to address a housing shortage that the land in question could help ameliorate.

“A vacant multi-acre land parcel is a rare asset within a County comprising only 26 total square miles,” lawyers for the county wrote in their trial brief. An appraisal conducted for the county in 2020 concluded that the land would be worth $21 million if it were developed into about 50 townhouses.

In 2021, Brinkema ruled in favor of the federal government. But the county appealed, and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond vacated her ruling and sent the case back for trial.

The cemetery — which dates back to the Civil War and is the final resting place for more than 400,000 service members, veterans and their families — estimates that the expansion will be completed in 2027.

The cemetery’s life could be extended further under changes proposed in 2019 that would significantly restrict the eligibility for burial there. That proposal is still making its way through the rulemaking process.

Eight Russian military planes and four navy vessels, including two submarines, have come close to Alaska in the past week as Russia and China conducted joint military drills. None of the planes breached U.S. airspace and a Pentagon spokesperson said Tuesday there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen the Russians and the Chinese flying, you know, in the vicinity, and that’s something that we obviously closely monitor, and it’s also something that we’re prepared to respond to,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a news conference Tuesday.

As part of a “force projection operation” the Army on Sept. 12 sent the soldiers to Shemya Island, some 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, where the U.S. Air Force maintains an air station that dates to World War II. The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, also said the U.S. military deployed a guided missile destroyer and a Coast Guard vessel to the western region of Alaska as Russia and China began the “Ocean-24” military exercises in the Pacific and Arctic oceans Sept. 10.

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The North American Aerospace Defense Command said it detected and tracked Russian military planes operating off Alaska over a four-day span. There were two planes each on Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

Sullivan called for a larger military presence in the Aleutians while advocating the U.S. respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“In the past two years, we’ve seen joint Russian-Chinese air and naval exercises off our shores and a Chinese spy balloon floating over our communities,” Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday. “These escalating incidents demonstrate the critical role the Arctic plays in great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

Sullivan said the U.S. Navy should reopen its shuttered base at Adak, located in the Aleutians. Naval Air Facility Adak was closed in 1997.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp and Lolita Baldor contributed from Washington, D.C.

A military news release said the service members came from Florida, Texas, Missouri, California, North Carolina, Alabama and New Jersey.

“This is a time of great sadness for the 101st Airborne Division. The loss of these Soldiers will reverberate through our formations for years to come,” said Maj. Gen. JP McGee, commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and Fort Campbell.

Two HH-60 Black Hawk medical evacuation helicopters crashed near Fort Campbell on Wednesday night in southwest Kentucky during a training exercise, killing all nine soldiers aboard the two aircrafts. The crash occurred in Trigg County, Kentucky, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northwest of the Army post that is home to the 101st Airborne Division.

A special military investigative team was on the scene Friday but rain and wind have slowed the early work, Army officials said.

The two Black Hawks were flying together during a training exercise at night and the pilots were using night-vision goggles, Army officials said. The accident occurred during flying and not during the course of a medical evacuation drill, said Brig. Gen. John Lubas, the 101st Airborne deputy commander.

The helicopters carried flight data recorders, similar to the black boxes that investigators use to analyze crashes involving passengers planes. Officials are hoping the devices on board the helicopters yield some information about the cause of Wednesday’s crash.

The Army identified the soldiers as: Warrant Officer 1 Jeffery Barnes, 33, of Milton, Florida; Cpl. Emilie Marie Eve Bolanos, 23, of Austin, Texas; Chief Warrant Officer 2 Zachary Esparza, 36, of Jackson, Missouri; Sgt. Isaacjohn Gayo, 27, of Los Angeles, California.; Staff Sgt. Joshua C. Gore, 25, of Morehead City, North Carolina; Warrant Officer 1 Aaron Healy, 32, of Cape Coral, Florida; Staff Sgt. Taylor Mitchell, 30, of Mountain Brook, Alabama; Chief Warrant Officer 2 Rusten Smith, 32, of Rolla, Missouri; and Sgt. David Solinas Jr., 23, of Oradell, New Jersey.

The four soldiers piloting the two Black Hawks were Esparza, Smith, Barnes and Healy, according to the Army.

Dave Busby, who taught Smith in middle school, was among several of Smith’s childhood teachers and classmates who posted tributes on Facebook after learning of his death.

“What a great kid. What a tragedy,” Busby said in a phone interview Friday from his home in St. James, Missouri, the small town where Smith grew up. “I’ll be honest I wept — what a shame.”

Even as a teen, Smith was ambitious, forward-looking and perceptive, Busby said: “You could tell he was going places.”

Solinas’ dedication to being a flight medic showed his character, his brother, Aidan Solinas, said in a statement.

“We are a faithful family and we are proud David was training to rescue soldiers on the battlefield,” he said. “Being a flight medic is one of the most difficult jobs that you can do, and illustrates that David was a man of compassion and faith.

Gore’s father, Tim Gore, told the Goldsboro News-Argus that his son leaves behind a wife who’s pregnant. Gore, a pastor in Wayne County, said that his son, who was known to family as Caleb, was an infant when the family moved to North Carolina and remained in the state until he joined the Army after graduating high school.

“His passion was search and rescue, and if you were wounded on the battlefield, Caleb coming out of that helicopter would be the most beautiful thing you would ever see,” Gore told the newspaper. “He was kind, compassionate, and a gentle giant because he was built like a tank.”

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear on Friday ordered flags at all state buildings to be lowered to half-staff from sunrise on Saturday until sunset on Monday in honor of the soldiers.

Over the last 10 years, the Army’s Black Hawk helicopter has been involved in 40 so-called Class A mishaps, which are incidents that involve either a fatality or more than $2.5 million in damage. There were 44 personnel killed in those incidents.

Wednesday’s crash was the deadliest training incident for the Army since March 2015, when a Black Hawk helicopter crashed into the water off the Florida coast in dense fog, said Jimmie Cummings, spokesperson for the Army Combat Readiness Center at Fort Rucker. Four soldiers from the Louisiana Army National Guard and seven Marine special operations forces were killed.

Cummings said the most deadly non-combat Black Hawk crash was in 1988 and also involved Fort Campbell aircraft. The crash killed 17 troops when two helicopters collided in mid-air. The most deadly Army aircraft training incident was a Chinook crash in Germany in 1982, that killed 46 U.S. and international forces. The second was a C-23 Sherpa fixed wing aircraft crash in Georgia in 2001 that killed 21 Army and Air Guard personnel.

Fort Campbell also had a multi-aircraft crash in 1996, when two Blackhawks clipped propellers, killing five soldiers. The last deadly aviation accident at Fort Campbell occurred in 2018, when an Apache helicopter crashed during training, killing two soldiers on board.

The Black Hawk helicopter is a critical workhorse for the U.S. Army and is used in security, transport, medical evacuations, search and rescue and other missions. The helicopters are known to many people from the 2001 movie “Black Hawk Down,” which is about a 1993 battle in Somalia.