US-Israeli war on Iran, day 12: An estimated 140 to 150 U.S. service members have been injured in Trump’s Iran war so far, multiple news outlets reported Tuesday, beginning with Reuters, then later Axios and CBS News.
“Approximately 140 U.S. service members have been wounded over 10 days of sustained attacks,” a Pentagon spokesman said, and added that 108 of the wounded had already returned to duty.
Notable: “Reuters could not determine the types of injuries and whether they include traumatic brain injuries, which are common after exposure to blasts.”
Iranian missile and drone attacks have dropped significantly since the war began. Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War are documenting each day’s tally in an updated chart over halfway through their latest daily report, here.
At least 14 ships have been attacked in the Hormuz Strait, including three in the past several hours, Reuters reported Wednesday. The most recent vessels included a container ship, a dry bulk vessel and a bulk carrier. “While there have been some voyages through the waterway in recent days, the majority of shipping traffic remains on hold with hundreds of ships anchored,” the wire service reports.
And the U.S. Navy says it won’t escort ships through the Strait just yet because the waterway is still too dangerous, industry sources told Reuters, reporting Tuesday from London. That update came shortly after U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright claimed on social media the U.S. Navy had “successfully escorted an oil tanker” through the strait—but that wasn’t true, and Wright later deleted his tweet, which caused a brief selloff in the global oil market, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Developing: Iranian forces have allegedly begun mining the Strait of Hormuz, Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News reported. CNN later confirmed her report, citing two people familiar with U.S. intelligence on the matter.
President Trump responded by ordering a new boat-strike campaign for the U.S. military, this time for the waters around Hormuz—in addition to the arguably illegal operation that’s been underway off the coasts of Latin America since September.
“We are using the same Technology and Missile capabilities deployed against Drug Traffickers to permanently eliminate any boat or ship attempting to mine the Hormuz Strait,” the president wrote on his social media platform Tuesday afternoon, after deleting a confusing post on the matter from nearly two hours earlier. “They will be dealt with quickly and violently,” he said.
By midnight, the U.S. military said it had destroyed at least 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels on Tuesday alone, and released a 34-second video illustrating several of these strikes.
Global energy concerns are so great that “The IEA is expected to recommend the release of 400 million barrels of oil, the largest such move in the agency’s history,” Reuters reported Tuesday evening. “Such a volume would be more than double the 182 million barrels released in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
New: Iran’s military says it is now targeting banks across the Middle East that do business with the U.S. or Israel, and advised people in the region to stay at least 1,000 meters away from such buildings, al-Jazeera reports. Dubai could be at increased risk as it is “home to many international financial institutions,” France24 reports, noting separately Tuesday, “Two Iranian drones hit near Dubai International Airport, wounding four people though flights continue.”
Iran also claimed it will now target offices across the region associated with Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle for those firms’ alleged assistance with the U.S.-Israeli war effort.
After around 10,000 U.S. and Israeli strikes, Iranian officials still refuse to surrender, and are attempting to message their resolve in the face of almost two weeks of constant attacks. “Get ready for the oil barrel to be at $200 because the oil price depends on the regional security, which you have destabilised,” Iranian spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaqari declared Wednesday.
Notable: “Israeli leaders now privately accept that Iran’s ruling system could survive the war,” and “Two other Israeli officials said there was no sign Washington was close to ending the campaign,” Reuters reported Wednesday.
Turkey has moved a Patriot air-defense system southeast, to the Kurecik NATO radar base, officials said Tuesday after the system was recently spotted on the move. That move comes after NATO forces shot down two Iranian missiles over Turkey in the past week.
And the Pentagon has begun cannibalizing air defense systems in the Pacific for its war with Iran, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. That includes “moving parts of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system from South Korea to the Middle East” and “drawing from its supply of sophisticated Patriot interceptors in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere to bolster its defense against Iran’s drone and ballistic missile attacks.”
The U.S. military is leaning heavily on AI during this war, Navy Adm. Brad Cooper said in a five-minute video message Wednesday. “These systems help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds so our leaders can cut through the noise and make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react,” Cooper said. “Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot, but advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.”
Big picture: In launching their war on Iran, “there’s no doubt that the United States and Israel are in violation of international law,” Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School, told Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker on Tuesday. She elaborates: “There’s the body of law that governs whether states can use force. And, here, there’s no doubt that the United States and Israel are in violation of international law, which provides that it’s only lawful to use military force against another state if it’s been authorized by the Security Council of the United Nations, or if a state is acting in its self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. And that has to be self-defense against an armed attack or an imminent attack. And I think the consensus is that there isn’t enough evidence to support the self-defense claim. And the fact that this has not been authorized by the Security Council means it is in violation of international law.” Read the rest, here.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth read scripture from the Old Testament to reporters in the Pentagon briefing room yesterday, and he added “amen” to his recital of excerpts from the New International Version of Psalms 144—excluding a line at the end of verse 2 about subduing people, and finished with what appeared to be Hegesth’s own exegesis—atop a briefing with reporters Tuesday morning. These breaks from precedent for a Pentagon chief are extensions of Hegseth’s documented dabbling in Christian nationalism, which lawyer Dahlia Lithwick referred to as Pete’s “secret weapon,” writing Tuesday for Slate.
“Reinstituting American Christian nationalism as a lodestar of U.S. public policy was one of the guiding principles of Project 2025, and it continues to lead the Trump administration in 2026,” Lithwick writes after speaking with Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “But Christian nationalism reared its ugly head in the McCarthy era, when, in the 1950s, there was a series of civic religious advances that really laid the foundation for what we’re seeing now,” Laser explains. It also coincided with “a peculiar U.S. cowboy individualism” that arose in the 1950s when American right-wing ideologues “embraced a fantasy world in which a hero cuts through the red tape of laws and government bureaucracy to do what he thinks is right,” historian Heather Cox Richardson explained Sunday in tracing the roots of Trump and Hegseth’s Iran war.
“The administration’s approach to foreign affairs appears to be the logical outcome of two generations of a peculiar U.S. cowboy individualism,” said Richardson. “That image was fed by TV westerns that rose after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to portray a world in which dominant white men delivered justice to their communities without the interference of government. By 1959, there were twenty-six westerns on TV. In one week in March 1959, eight of the top ten TV shows were westerns.”
Richardson continues: “The idea of white men acting for freedom and justice on their own, unhampered by a government that served Black Americans, people of color, and women, became a guiding image for the rising right wing beginning with Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. It found a home in the Republican Party with Ronald Reagan in 1980, as supporters took a stand against a federal government they insisted was redistributing the tax dollars of hardworking Americans to undeserving minorities and women. That cowboy individualism spread into foreign affairs as well, until by 2003, right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh could use it as shorthand to defend President George W. Bush’s military operation in Iraq,” with Limbaugh telling his audience “Bush because he distinguishes between good and evil” because “That’s what cowboys do.”
“You’re seeing it in this idea of fighting holy wars,” Laser told Lithwick, “I think maybe it’s most vivid with the so-called Department of War, where we’re seeing the secretary with a Christian crusade tattoo on his body, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, initiating prayer services and inviting his pastor, Doug Wilson, to lead prayer services that are broadcast across the department.”
But like Richardson’s tracing of the cowboy mythology in U.S. foreign affairs, Laser also describes the rise of Hegseth’s Christian nationalism as a “reaction to massive demographic and social changes that have been happening in this country.” Over the past 15 years, she said, “We’ve seen the advent of marriage equality, the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement—there’s just been a lot of change afoot, and we’re seeing a real backlash to that. So it’s not that Christian nationalism is brand-new, but it is strong, and it is raging.”
By the way: In May 2024, several top Trump officials met at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington, Va., to sharpen military aspects of Project 2025. They called themselves the Border Security Workgroup. “These were people with extensive ties to Trump, military professionals supportive of Trump, and the white nationalist and Christian nationalist substrate that undergirded Project 2025,” investigative journalist Beau Hodai reported Tuesday. Their guidance: “Become experts on the Insurrection Act” so as to widen the president’s domestic use of the military, according to notes shared with Hodai from that meeting nearly two years ago.
“Records show the group considered using a variety of means to target a number of different groups, including certain non-governmental organizations, government agencies, judicial districts and a number of states or cities governed by the Democratic Party,” Hodai writes. “They also contemplated targeting college students who were protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza.” Other proposals “sought the integration of a number of law enforcement, intelligence, military and other government databases—to be data-mined by AI, an undertaking the Trump administration has since pursued.”
“The group also prepared several draft emergency declarations for Trump” to lay the groundwork for many of Project 2025’s goals. (Trump declared at least 10 emergencies in just the first seven months of his second term; most presidents declared an average of about seven per four-year term, the New York Times reported in August.) However, Hodai observes, “While many things called for by the Border Security Workgroup have transpired, events that have unfolded during this Trump term have not perfectly mirrored its plans,” thanks in large part to pushback from courts—e.g., in the case of deploying the military to U.S. cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland. Read the rest, here.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1987, Iran attacked a third tanker in as many days, and warned the Kuwaiti government not to seek protection from Washington or Moscow.
Around the Defense Department
A year into Hegseth’s cuts, defense civilians report ‘degraded performance’ and low morale. “The climate, at least in my immediate organization, has shifted from fear to stress,” said one Air Force civilian who spoke with Defense One. “The fear of imminent [reductions-in-force] is not something we talk about much anymore because, while the threat of it persistently looms in the air, it is not in our best interest to constantly worry about it. Frankly, I’m too exhausted to keep thinking about it.”
Rewind: Within weeks of taking office last January, Hegseth ordered voluntary and involuntary cuts, along with a partial hiring freeze that forced managers to rescind untold numbers of job offers—untold because Pentagon officials have refused to say how many of those positions disappeared in the process. The freeze has also blocked the movement of thousands of employees to new roles, although some are now moving via a cumbersome exemption process. In total, nearly 110,000 of the department’s roughly 795,000 civilians departed last year, about 80 percent more than Hegseth’s goal. Some 30,000 jobs deemed essential to national security were subsequently re-filled. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more from conversations with DOD workers, here.
INDOPACOM was all in on Anthropic. Now it’s working to adjust, Defense One’s Jennifer Hlad reported Tuesday from Honolulu. “I actually started thinking about this last September,” said Bob Stephenson, INDO-PACOM’s resources and requirements director, speaking Monday at the Pacific Operational Science & Technology conference.
“We were working on a plan to be more model-neutral in our workforce. Now we’re just going faster,” he said in the wake of Trump’s order less than two weeks ago ordering federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s Claude AI platform after the CEO refused to lift restrictions on its use for autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance.
On the other side of the world, in Central Command, Stephenson said, “They’re executing about 1,000 fires a day. That’s a lot. That’s what we think, that’s what modern warfare looks like. They’re working really hard to try to stay up with this, and they’re using some AI tools that actually worked well for us.” Continue reading, here.
Related reading: Five national-security law experts told Reuters Anthropic “appears to have a strong case that President Donald Trump’s administration overstepped” by designating the firm as a supply chain risk. Worth the click, here.
NSA, Cyber Command get a permanent leader, ending 11-month gap. Gen. Joshua Rudd has spent his career largely in special operations and joint command roles. Senate confirms Josh Rudd to lead NSA and Cyber Command. Nextgov’s David Dimolfette reports, here.
Related reading: “US military contractor likely built iPhone hacking tools used by Russian spies in Ukraine,” Tech Crunch reported Tuesday.
