VoteVets, a non-profit group and political action organization that largely supports Democrat veteran candidates, launched a 10-day billboard campaign Monday in 10 U.S. cities that features photos of President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on a fiery background.

“Trump & Hegseth’s Iran War means higher prices for you with no end in sight,” the signs declare.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, senior adviser to VoteVets, told Military Times the effort is intended to connect “affordability with accountability,” linking political leaders’ actions with higher costs at the gas pump and grocery stores.

“[Service members] tend to be married young with children, and when you allow the cost of living — not just gasoline, but the whole business, grocery stores — … it’s a visible increase in prices that we are bearing,” Eaton said during an interview Friday.

Iran and Israel launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, killing numerous Iranian leaders, including its top official, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Trump said the strikes were meant to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

“[Iran] attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas and could soon reach the American homeland,” Trump said in a social media post following the attack.

Since the opening salvos, other regional powers have become involved, and the control of the Strait of Hormuz — a vital shipping lane through which roughly 25% of the world’s oil is transported — has fallen into dispute, interrupting maritime commerce.

The conflict has caused natural gas and oil prices to swing, affecting prices of the commodities. But Eaton said the billboards also seek to call attention to the rising national debt, which surpassed $40 trillion this week.

The national debt limit has doubled in the past decade under President Joe Biden and Trump, growing by $8.4 trillion while Biden was in the White House. When Trump took office in January 2025 that debt was hovering at $36.1 trillion.

“That level of accountability to affordability, that linkage is also what we’re trying to make clear to everybody,” Eaton said.

The locations of VoteVets’ billboard campaign include: Dayton, Ohio; West Point, New York; Fayetteville, North Carolina; San Antonio, Texas; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Tampa, Florida; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Tomah City, Wisconsin; and Savannah, Georgia.

The group’s 1,000-plus digital billboards are slated to stay up until Sept. 2.

“We are going where veterans and military families are around our nation’s military installations, and underscoring the cost of Trump and Hegseth’s neocon war to them directly,” the group said in a press release.

The Defense Department’s Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, released Friday, estimated that 20,492 active-duty service members, including 9,860 women and 10,632 men, were sexually assaulted in the year preceding the fiscal year 2025 survey, down from 29,000 in 2023.

The 2025 figures represent a drop in sexual assaults from roughly 35,900 in 2021.

“The FY 2025 report underscores our ongoing commitment to maintaining high standards, protecting our people, and building a unified, ready, and lethal fighting force,” Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata said in a statement Friday.

The assault estimates were derived from the department’s 2025 Workplace Experiences Survey that polls troops on various topics such as sexual assault and harassment, work climate, leadership and training.

According to the fiscal year 2025 survey, the estimated rate of assaults dropped among active-duty women from 6.8% to 4.3%, and among active-duty men from 1.4% to 1.0%.

At the same time, reports of sexual assaults increased, with 7,998 filed in fiscal year 2025. Given the results of the survey, an estimated one in three individuals filed a formal report of an assault, up from one in four in 2023.

Defense Department officials have long encouraged service members to report assaults as a means to address the issue in the ranks. The Pentagon uses the reports metric to help determine whether department and service sexual assault prevention and reporting initiatives are succeeding.

“Estimated percentage of victimized service members making Restricted and Unrestricted Reports – desired state is increase,” the report stated.

According to the report, the Marine Corps had the highest prevalence of unwanted sexual contact against women, at 6.8% of female Marines. The Navy had the highest prevalence of unwanted contact against men, at 1.5%.

The Air Force had the lowest prevalence of unwanted contact reported by its members at 2.8% by women and 0.7% by men.

The report noted that a majority of service members trusted their leaders to handle the problem, with 72% of women and 80% of men saying that those involved were “treated fairly.”

Trust in the system also has risen since 2023, according to the data, but female members still struggle with confidence in the process.

In 2025, 64% of men and 41% of women said they believed the system would protect their privacy, up from 61% and 41%, respectively.

69% of men and 45% of women said they trusted the military to ensure their safety after a sexual assault, up from 66% and 43% in 2023.

Female service members reportedly expressed more confidence in the resources provided by their sexual assault response coordinators and support team, with more than 60% saying they were satisfied with support from their victim advocates, sexual assault response coordinators and assigned attorneys.

Male troops were less satisfied with the services of their sexual assault teams; however, between 36% and 47% expressed confidence in their victim advocates, response coordinators and counsel.

The military services were required in 2023 to establish independent legal structures to handle serious crimes, including sexual assault, domestic violence, murder and manslaughter. The Office of Special Trial Counsel directly handles investigations and decisions to prosecute such cases, removing the chain of command from a role it historically held in judicial proceedings.

The first survey since the Office of Special Trial Counsel’s creation found that men were “significantly more likely” than women to trust that the office would treat them fairly if they were to experience a sexual assault, with 65% of men reporting favorably. Just 44% of women expressed the same confidence, however.

In the past, service members have hesitated to report incidents of sexual assault out of fear of retaliation from their leadership, peers and/or perpetrator. A 2021 study found that 31% of men and 28% of women said they experienced retaliation after a sexual assault.

The report released Friday found that retaliation continues to be a concern. Among women service members who indicated an experience of Unwanted Sexual Contact (USC), 17% reported saying they experienced retaliation prohibited by law. For both men and women, one of the most common reasons for not coming forward was “worrying about backlash from coworkers and peers.”

Along with the decrease in sexual assault, the prevalence of sexual harassment also declined among men and women. An estimated 4.4%, or 44,656 service members, said they experienced sexual harassment, down from 5.8% in 2023. Among women, 17.5%, or 39,744 service members, said they experienced sexual harassment, down from 24.7% in 2023.

Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group dedicated to promoting equality and ending sexual assault in the ranks, said Friday that its analysis of the 2025 data found that service members experienced 38% more unwanted sexual contacts than a decade ago. The group also noted that the 4.3% rate of sexual assault among military women in 2025 was the same as the rate reported in 2016.

The Defense Department cautions that the survey measure was substantially revised in 2021 and that prevalence estimates from 2021 onward cannot be scientifically compared with estimates from earlier years.

The rate among men, at 1%, was higher than the 2018 rate of 0.7%, the group noted.

The advocates said they have heard from personnel whose prosecutions never occurred or whose evidence and documents were lost, and victims were pushed out of the military without proper medical care, including mental health treatment.

“I wouldn’t take these numbers at face value, and neither should the American public. They are not what we are seeing,“ said Protect Our Defenders Senior Vice President Josh Connolly.

“Survivors are more afraid to come forward than they were two years ago, and this administration has spent the past year giving them reason to be – rolling back whistleblower protections, making it harder to report anonymously, warning people who come forward that they may be punished for it. A number that falls because people stopped talking is not progress,” Connolly said.

In the report, department officials attributed the decline to numerous changes they have made to address sexual assault and harassment in the ranks, which they called harmful behaviors that “act as internal adversaries, eroding the very foundation of our operational readiness and unit lethality.”

According to the department, the DoD assessed Sexual Assault and Prevention and Reporting Offices in Indo-Pacific Command in 2025, engaged at joint bases to improve collaboration across the services, conducted unit evaluations and standardized the workforce to address issues with the program.

“Dignity, respect, and discipline are foundational to the warrior ethos and the overall preparedness of the force. Sexual assault and sexual harassment undermine these values, eroding trust and threatening the mission,” Tata said in the release.

While the military trains medics relentlessly to treat the wound, we do not train them to handle the question.

I have spent years on both sides of that moment. I am a 68W combat medic instructor and a Tactical Combat Casualty Care instructor with the West Virginia Army National Guard, and I am also an endorsed chaplain.

This role encompasses teaching soldiers how to control hemorrhage and manage an airway to sitting with them months later, when the physical injury has healed, though something else has not.

The Army should close the distance between those two conversations by building trauma-informed care into how we train medics.

I expect the first objection, because I’ve made it myself. There is no time for feelings under fire. A medic has minutes, sometimes seconds, and every one of them belongs to the casualty needing life-saving treatment.

That objection misunderstands what trauma-informed care is. It should not be viewed as a separate task competing for time on the timeline. Instead, it is intertwined in the manner in which a medic performs the tasks.

Telling a casualty what you are about to do before you do it costs three seconds and keeps the individual from experiencing treatment as one more thing being done without warning.

Keeping a level voice and clear instructions is not bedside manner, but a technique that lowers physiological arousal in a patient who is already flooded. These should not be viewed as soft skills bolted onto medicine, but medicine itself.

The reason this matters is simple: soldiers are people first. They come to us carrying whatever burdens were there before the uniform — childhood adversity, losses, things never processed or disclosed. The injury a medic is treating, therefore, may not be that soldier’s first trauma. A medic who understands that will read the situation and respond differently than one taught to see only the wound.

With this approach, there are three key things every medic should be trained to recognize:

• Acute stress reactions: panic, dissociation, a casualty who has gone flat and unreachable.
• Post-traumatic symptoms in the days and weeks that follow: hypervigilance, nightmares, intrusive memories.
• Moral injury: the toll of having done, or failed to prevent, something that violates what you believe about yourself.

That last point is an area in which I have spent most of my career as a chaplain, and it is badly under-recognized in medicine because it does not present as a symptom.

Medics are positioned to catch all three areas earlier than anyone else in the formation. They are often the first medical contact for troops — and sometimes the only one — which makes them the gate to every referral that follows. A medic who has never been taught what to look for will not make the call. We know this is not a deficiency of compassion, but a general lack of awareness about what call to make.

So the ask is concrete. Add trauma-informed care instruction to 68W advanced individual training, and build it into annual recertification alongside TCCC, where it will actually stick.

Teach psychological first aid as a skill with steps: active listening, normalizing the stress response and connecting the soldier to resources. Teach medics how to avoid retraumatizing a patient during treatment. And make the handoff to a chaplain or behavioral health a taught, practiced action rather than something a medic must figure out alone. Doing so will contribute to both wellness and readiness.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimates that more than half of Americans have experienced a traumatic event, and the Department of Veterans Affairs reports higher rates of PTSD among women. Our formations reflect those numbers.

Soldiers whose psychological injuries are addressed early are more likely to return to their units and stay there. Every service member we lose downstream is a trained soldier who is not quickly replaced.

As the force plans for prolonged field care and longer evacuation timelines in future fights, medics will hold casualties longer before handing them off. Hours they spend with frightened, injured troops will matter more, not less.

Nothing in this approach is asking medics to become counselors. However, the Army must acknowledge that a medic is already doing psychological work in that moment, competently or not, trained or not. We might as well train to improve it.

Medics are taught to keep a body alive. We should also prepare them to help the soldier who walks away.

Staff Sgt. Jay Kotsko is a 68W combat medic instructor and Tactical Combat Casualty Care instructor with the West Virginia Army National Guard and an ecclesiastically endorsed chaplain. He holds a Doctor of Ministry in chaplaincy and is the author of “Even Here: Finding God in the Fractured Timelines of Trauma and Recovery.” The views expressed are his own and do not reflect the official position of DoD, the Army or the West Virginia National Guard.

Enlisting in January 2016, Schoen served four years as a logistics specialist aboard the USS New Orleans and the USS Theodore Roosevelt before separating in January 2020.

It was during a deployment on the New Orleans, however, standing lookout watch for hours at a time, that the shift in mindset began.

“Those three months of staring at the ocean, aside from my normal job during the day, I just realized how much time was passing by and how much I really need to get on actually living my life and creating something and moving forward in a positive direction,” Schoen said.

After the Navy, Schoen used his VA home loan benefit to buy a house in San Diego, then cycled through side hustles: vinyl wrapping, Airbnb hosting, flipping cars on Turo. None of it stuck long-term. By 2021, he had sold nearly everything he owned and moved into an SUV, becoming part of a growing community of veterans who had swapped traditional housing for life on the road.

For two and a half years, he lived out of a Porsche Cayenne, documenting his nomadic lifestyle on social media, before purchasing a 1985 Mercedes-Benz Unimog in 2023. While the previous owner had spent nearly two decades restoring it, the truck blew its engine an hour into the drive home.

Since getting it back on the road that November, Schoen has lived in it full time while continuing to renovate it, sinking close to $300,000 into the build.

“I’ve spent almost $300,000 entirely on this truck, both purchasing the truck and during ownership,” Schoen said. “It was taking so much of my free time doing all of these things as well.”

That lifestyle, and his Navy background, is what caught the attention of casting directors for the first season of “Beast Games,” the Amazon Prime Video competition series hosted by American YouTuber and media personality MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson.

The 2024 series, inspired by Netflix’s dystopian hit “Squid Game,” features 1,000 contestants as they compete for $5 million.

Schoen made it deep into the show’s first season and was chosen by 60 fellow contestants to serve as their team captain during a high-stakes challenge, largely because of the steady, low-key demeanor he had shown throughout the competition.

“People were able to kind of see safety in that, even though I told all 60 of these people that I live in a car,” Schoen said.

As team captain, Schoen was offered a counter that climbed toward $1 million, his alone to take if he pressed a button in front of him to eliminate his entire team from the competition. He didn’t take it.

“It wasn’t even a thought in my head that I would accept the money,” he said.

He was eliminated the following episode after a game of chance, declining an offer of immunity from two fellow contestants beforehand.

Schoen credits his service for the instincts that carried him through the show and the years of nomadic living that came before it.

“The military has allowed me to just move freely throughout the world, with the understanding of how to be safe with things, of how to only have a few important belongings, because that’s what you can carry,” he said. “And just the confidence to take care of yourself in whatever situations arise.”

He’s quick to note that the transition wasn’t seamless. “One of the hardest things to overcome that the military instills is moving from being told what to do, when to do it, every day for years, to having complete freedom,” Schoen said. “Nobody’s coming to save me, nobody’s going to tell me how to succeed in what I’m doing. It’s all on you.”

Now approaching 30, Schoen said he’s ready to trade constant motion for something steadier, even as he plans one more long ride: a motorcycle trip down the Pan-American Highway toward Argentina.

“I want to focus in the near future on building a life that someone can be a part of,” Schoen said. “I mostly want a place that I can call home.”

The department sought to fund 90% of its maintenance needs, but the GAO found that the services continue to request funding for only about 80% of their needs, according to the report released Friday. The funding shortfall led to an estimated $285 billion of maintenance backlogs in fiscal 2025.

“DOD has not fully determined the risks to its mission and to the quality of life of its personnel as a result of not meeting its funding goal,” the report reads. “Fully determining and communicating these risks would provide better information to DOD and Congress to weigh budget priorities.”

GAO authors examined Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force military installations across the U.S. and its territories for this report.

The report found that the department does not request the full amount of maintenance funding as recommended by its Facilities Sustainment Model, which estimates the average annual sustainment funding requirement for facilities based on their size, location and other factors.

This contributed to the increased backlog of deferred maintenance needs. Even though in 2014 an Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics memorandum was issued to establish a goal of funding regular maintenance at 90% or higher of the amount estimated by the Facilities Sustainment Model, the GAO continues to find that the services are not meeting that goal.

Instead, the Army, Navy and Air Force requested about 80% for fiscal years 2017 through 2020. The Marine Corps requested funding decreased from 80% to 40% over the past five fiscal years, opting to fund more facility restoration and modernization projects in exchange for reduced sustainment funding, the report says.

Maintenance and improvement projects’ backlogs can contribute to service members’ quality of life and negatively affect installations’ missions.

“By requesting less funding for installation maintenance and improvement projects than its models and experts recommend, DOD has chosen to accept some degree of risk that mission or quality of life will be negatively affected,” the report says.

In past reports, the GAO has found that barracks maintenance were “chronically neglected” and resulted in poor conditions of enlisted service members that affected their quality of life. Thousands of service members lived in substandard barracks, with some hosting potentially serious health and safety risks, a 2023 report found.

Of the 31 recommendations issued in 2023, the department implemented 19 as of April 2026. But many remain unaddressed, such as establishing an oversight structure for barracks, the report says.

The GAO found that challenges in hiring and retaining key maintenance workers are seen in remote and isolated locations and other obstacles include private sector employment competition as well as federal hiring, pay and work eligibility practices.

Military departments have not fully identified the extent of maintenance workforce shortages or created plans to address the hurdles.

The GAO also found that installations rely on maintenance work order data systems to respond to needs, but the tracking is limited and the data is generally unreliable for determining the effectiveness of maintenance performed across the services.

In the report, the GAO made 13 recommendations, including strengthening departmental oversight, determining risks associated with funding maintenance below levels proposed and improving maintenance data reliability.

The department fully or partially concurred with 12 recommendations and did not concur with one.

Following revelations from families about some U.S. service members aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln struggling with mental health after 250 days without a port visit, sailors, retirees and lawmakers told Military Times that troops were absorbing consequences of longtime flaws within the sea service that have been worsened by the current conflict.

The Navy has struggled for years to meet high operational tempo demands, they said. Deployments are regularly extended, scheduled maintenance is missed and the shipbuilding pace remains glacial, leading to delays in delivery and an undersized fleet.

The issues have spanned multiple presidential administrations but have been compounded by the handling of the Iran war and ensuing military operations, sources said, leading to dire circumstances for some sailors.

Leaders have disputed the descriptions of deteriorating conditions aboard the Lincoln and denied reporting about quality-of-life concerns.

Asked recently by reporters about families’ concerns over the length of the deployment, President Donald Trump dismissed the question, saying that it’s “not nearly long enough.”

Asked about those same concerns, Adm. Daryl Caudle, the service’s chief of naval operations, told Military Times, “Sailors first is not a slogan — it’s a warfighting imperative.”

“The sustained pace of operations in the Middle East has only reinforced that taking care of our sailors and maintaining combat readiness are inseparable,” Caudle said.

‘We need more ships’

Following outcry about conditions aboard the Lincoln, the Navy moved the Nimitz-class carrier USS George Washington from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East, where it arrived Wednesday. The ship is reportedly replacing the Lincoln, which will now steam toward its homeport of San Diego.

The move temporarily leaves the western Pacific without a U.S. aircraft carrier, the presence of which is a key part of the U.S. military’s effort to deter China in the South China Sea and reassure regional allies.

Operational tempo concerns, meanwhile, are nothing new for the service, according to retired Vice Adm. Fozzie Miller, who served as commander of U.S. Fifth Fleet and U.S. Central Command from 2012 to 2015.

Miller joined the Navy in 1979. From his early days in uniform, the service’s goal, he said, was to operate at a level that was neither too harsh for the individual sailor nor too unbearable for the equipment vital to mission success. An adequate number of warships was integral to maintaining that balance.

“We could use more carriers or less [operational] tempo,” Miller said. “It’s one or the other, but we’re a global Navy with global responsibilities, and so if we’re going to fulfill those, we need more ships.”

Rear Adm. Thomas Moore, who led the Navy’s acquisition program and went on to become commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, told Congress in 2013 that the service is “an 11-carrier Navy in a 15-carrier world.”

The demand is unlikely to dwindle, he said.

Thirteen years since Moore’s statement, the Navy is still at 11 carriers. With the USS Nimitz scheduled to retire at the end of next year, that number may soon be 10.

The USS Harry S. Truman and USS Gerald R. Ford are currently sidelined for maintenance after deployments, the latter of which notched a post-Vietnam record 326 days at sea in May after it was extended to support operations in the Middle East. The Nimitz-class USS John C. Stennis is undergoing a years-long overhaul.

The USS Ronald Reagan, also a Nimitz-class, is expected to be deployable by the end of August after a 17-month repair period. The Nimitz-class USS George H.W. Bush is in the Middle East.

“We just don’t have enough aircraft carriers right now in this rotation to sustain all the things we want to do, and I think this is a long-standing problem,” said Steven Wills, a Navy surface warfare officer who retired after 20 years.

In 2014, the Navy began implementing the Optimized Fleet Response Plan, or OFRP, deployment model, which places maintenance, training, evaluations and a single eight-month deployment within a 36-month cycle.

The service says the framework is intended to produce a more comprehensively manned and trained force while providing predictability to deployment schedules for sailors and their families.

In 2016, however, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that heavy operational demands led the Navy to increase ship deployment lengths and reduce or defer ship maintenance.

Those decisions made deployments less predictable, ate into training time, contributed to declining ship conditions and increased the time ships required for much-needed maintenance.

From fiscal 2014 through 2019, Navy ships spent more than 33,700 additional days in maintenance beyond intended scheduling, leading to fewer vessels available for training or operations.

An upended supply network

While the Navy has long struggled with carrier availability, current U.S. leadership has created more operational tempo issues through poor planning and insufficient wartime support, according to lawmakers and a sailor who deployed in support of the Iran war.

“Logistics was a complete failure the entire time out there — food, supplies, parts,” said the sailor, who served aboard an Independence-class littoral combat ship and was granted anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

Iranian attacks damaged the Navy’s longstanding logistics hub in Bahrain in February, disrupting the regional supply network supporting ships operating in the Middle East.

The Navy shifted the new logistics hub to Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that sits more than 2,000 miles away from the service’s carrier strike groups in the Middle East.

Diego Garcia’s distance proved to be problematic, the sailor said, with the hub requiring the LCS to place a food order 30 days in advance.

Those orders were nearly impossible, however, with an influx schedule exacerbated by poor planning, the sailor added. Sailors were unable to resupply from the hub, instead grabbing whatever could be salvaged from replenishment-at-sea oilers.

“There’s no excuse for why, if we’re at war, we can’t get an expedited food order,” the sailor said.

Rep. Mike Levin, D-Calif., told Military Times that the logistical issues described by the sailor were due to preparation failures.

“I’ve spoken to a lot of people who’ve been deployed, and you know, the basic problem seems to be that if they were going to use Bahrain as a hub to restock, to get food and to provide rest and all that,” Levin said. “If that was the idea, well, clearly that didn’t work out. After February, March — [the administration] should have thought of that.”

‘People can break, too’

At least two sailors attempted to jump overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln, families of Lincoln sailors previously told Military Times.

While the individual mental circumstances of the incidents remain unknown, the frantic operational tempo of combat operations inevitably takes a natural toll on service members, according to one sailor who has deployed to the Middle East aboard an aircraft carrier during the current conflict.

“Just like machines, people can break, too,” said the service member, who was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal from leadership. “They need rest.”

Time to rest was not always available. Losing sleep was sometimes part of ensuring safety.

If equipment broke, sailors would, at times, work well beyond normal shifts until it was fixed. In some instances, completion of the task could mean the difference between life and death.

In a 2021 review, the GAO found that just 14% of Navy officers surveyed slept at least seven hours per night during a recent deployment, while 67% reported five hours or less. GAO also found that the Navy routinely assigned fewer sailors to ships than workload studies indicated were needed to safely operate them.

By 2023, surface-fleet sailors were averaging 5.25 hours of sleep every 24 hours, below the Navy’s standard of providing at least 7.5 hours of sleep opportunity. GAO identified crew shortfalls and mattress problems as challenges to managing fatigue.

For its part, the Navy has implemented measures to try to address the issue, including initiating a study involving about 1,600 sailors wearing Oura rings to monitor sleep and other biometric indicators while underway.

But lack of sleep, according to personnel, has been just one detriment experienced during the conflict with Iran. Service members have also faced food shortages onboard the carrier, the sailor said, with quality that fluctuated between bad and horrible.

“It was either undercooked, overcooked or unrecognizable at all,” the sailor said.

As extensions piled on, a decline in morale took on a recognizable tone at the phone center or in conversations at the galleys. Humor darkened even more than usual, and port visits meant less and less.

“These things have been happening on deployments for always,” said Parker Moore, a nuclear reactor operator who served aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln before its recent deployment. “It is bad, but it is always bad.”

During Moore’s time on Lincoln, the stigma surrounding mental health remained prevalent. There were mental health professionals aboard the ship, but if a sailor sought help, the service member could be taken off their job.

“They’re terrified to disappoint the people around them,” Moore said. “If I don’t do my job, there’s only 30 people who can do it, right? So now there’s only 29 people.”

Following the report on mental health issues aboard Lincoln, the Navy said it had not observed an increase in suicidal ideation or suicide attempts. The service did note, however, that additional counselors and resources were being sent to the crew.

Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, visited Lincoln on Saturday and issued a statement claiming that the ship had the lowest number of mental health cases among the Navy’s 11 active aircraft carriers.

Lack of transparency

The Pentagon under the Trump administration has become increasingly tight-lipped over the information it provides to Congress.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released a memo in October 2025 informing Defense Department personnel, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that authorization was required for any communication to leaders on Capitol Hill.

Hegseth also dodged several questions from lawmakers during a July Senate hearing on the Iran War.

When Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., asked the Pentagon leader whether previous statements about Iran’s military being “destroyed” and “made combat ineffective” were true, Hegseth declined to answer.

Hegseth has also not held a Pentagon press briefing about the Iran war for more than 100 days, with the last coming on May 5.

To alleviate concerns over short-term problems with current military operations like those aboard the Lincoln, Congress must be able to carry out oversight, lawmakers said.

Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., told Military Times that the Pentagon should be sharing information that would allow political leaders to assess whether the president and defense secretary were deploying assets in the most mission-effective way.

Invoking the War Powers Resolution would allow lawmakers to hold the current administration accountable, some Democrats have argued.

The resolution requires the executive branch to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying military forces and allows lawmakers to enforce the removal of military forces within 60 to 90 days unless Congress has declared war or authorized military force.

Levin supports that approach, he said, and asked that his Republican colleagues stand up and ask tough questions.

Republican members of the House and Senate armed services committees did not respond to Military Times’ requests for comment.

“I think back to George W. Bush,” Levin said. “I disagreed wholeheartedly with Iraq, but you think about the steps that he took. You think about … Secretary Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, others — their consistent engagement.”

For the LCS sailor, planning deficiencies are already rearing their head.

Though the ship did assist with the Navy’s blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, turning away more than a dozen vessels, it will now be sidelined longer than scheduled because of deferred repairs.

It is one example, the sailor said, of there being no long-term plan for ship rotations.

“‘We’re gonna keep you out here,” the sailor said of the impression made on them, “until your ship can’t operate or function anymore.’”

The goal is to create a variant of the SeaSparrow that can be used by the 12 nations in the NATO SeaSparrow Project Office consortium, or NSPO, according to the Navy Sources Sought notice. The deadline is Oct. 19.

The NSPO is looking for a weapon that can be employed against a wide variety of threats. The NSV SeaSparrow “should have capability against current and future threat classes spanning a variety of threat characteristics including velocity (low-speed to high-speed), altitude (sea skimming to high diver), maneuverability (non-maneuvering to high Gravitational (G)-Force maneuvers), and signatures,” the Navy said.

The NSV is also meant to defend the fleet against massed salvos of missiles and function despite jamming.

The weapon “should be able to work in complex natural, contested, Radio Frequency (RF), Electro-Optical (EO), and/or Infrared (IR) environments.”

“The missile should have the capability to discriminate and resolve between multiple closely spaced targets and provide threat-track measurements to support missile guidance, navigation and lethality functions,” the Sources Sought notice continues. “The missile should have the capability to handle threat countermeasures.”

The notice included a graphic that appeared to depict surface ships — including two aircraft carriers — being targeted by a dozen missiles and torpedoes, plus a hostile fixed-wing aircraft and a helicopter. The friendly ships appeared to be using active illumination to paint some threats, while the SeaSparrow used its on-board sensors to intercept others.

NSPO seeks a modular, open-source design that would give the U.S. government “maximum rights in technical data, computer software, and computer software documentation (including source code), design artifacts, and interface specifications.”

“This approach will simplify future upgrades, promote interoperability across consortium platforms, and outpace evolving threats,” the notice said.

The NSPO wants contractors who can provide a complete missile system, including airframe, propulsion, guidance and software. The missile should have no more than a 10-inch diameter and fit inside a Mark 41 vertical launch tube.

The Sources Sought notice emphasized that the missile and its technical data should be releasable to the entire NATO SEASPARROW Consortium: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. Other users include Thailand and the United Arab Emirates.

The Block II RIM-162 Evolved SeaSparrow is currently manufactured by Raytheon, which doubled production to more than 350 missiles in 2025. Amid naval operations in the Persian Gulf, where Iran has launched numerous missiles and drones against dwindling stocks of U.S. and allied interceptors, future demand for short-range air defense weapons is likely to be brisk.

First fielded in 2004, the Evolved SeaSparrow is descended from the 1950s AIM-7 Sparrow radar-guided air-to-air missile.

Though the original Sparrow had a mixed combat record as an aerial combat weapon in the Vietnam War, the Evolved SeaSparrow was intended as a low-cost defense against anti-ship missiles, aircraft, helicopters and fast attack boats. The current version has an estimated range of around 30 miles.

But he feels helpless now to aid his brother, who worked for the U.S. government during the war in Afghanistan and has been stuck for nearly two years at a holding camp in Qatar, waiting for a visa to the United States.

Jamshidi’s brother is one of roughly 150 family members of U.S. troops and veterans stranded at Camp As Sayliyah, according to the aid organization AfghanEvac. The camp is currently slated to close Sept. 30. And while organization leaders aren’t confident the U.S. government will follow through on that closure timeline, nothing has been formally communicated, they say, to camp residents who are waiting in limbo.

Jamshidi was born in Afghanistan, but he came to the U.S. with his family around age five. He opted to enlist in the Marine Corps, he said, because he had a deep appreciation for the freedoms America offered, having experienced life without those guarantees in Afghanistan.

“My mother, her dying wish is to see her son before she goes … so we’re trying to keep her healthy until my brother gets there,” Jamshidi said. “I want to continue shining a light on this crisis so the American people can hear these stories and demand change … This is not a partisan issue; it’s an American obligation.”

AfghanEvac leaders say some 3,000 U.S. military family members in all are affected by a hard stop in visa distribution to Afghans that took effect late last year.

They say many, like Jamshidi’s brother, have received consulate Chief of Mission approval and completed the required interviews to come to the U.S.; all they lack is the final paperwork.

As the U.S. marks the fifth anniversary of the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan that ended the war but left thousands of allies stranded, a coalition of refugee assistance and resettlement groups is calling on Congress to pass the Afghanistan TPS Act, which would create temporary protected status for Afghan refugees and allow visa processing to begin again.

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., a retired Air Force brigadier general and a cosponsor of the bipartisan bill, said in a call with reporters this week that he supports a discharge petition, a measure that would force the bill out of committee and onto the House floor for a vote.

“Most Americans want a decent, I would call it a Christian policy here, and that’s not what we’re getting,” said Bacon, who describes himself as an “old Ronald Reagan-type Republican.”

“We have a moral obligation to those we serve with in Afghanistan, who served by our side, helping us out.”

Camp As Sayliyah, which began to be used as an indefinite waypoint for Afghans who’d been evacuated by the U.S. government in 2021, has received over 1,000 refugees. In addition to the limited freedoms and constrained conditions of life at the camp, residents are now contending with post-traumatic stress and other mental health crises from missiles flying overhead due to the Iranian conflict, Jamshidi said.

“There’s missile fragments falling on people’s homes; there’s loud noises and uncertainty,” he said.

One White House proposal has been to send the refugees in Qatar to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to figure out life for themselves from there. Jamshidi said he served at the U.S. Embassy in DRC’s capital, Kinshasa, in 2018, and the thought troubles him.

“I know the conditions there, and it’s even worse than some areas in Afghanistan,” he said.

Bacon and another member of Congress, Texas Democratic Rep. Julie Johnson, said there wasn’t a clear timeline for filing a discharge petition on the Afghanistan TPS Act, but emphasized it would happen “soon.” They both stressed that the ultimate goal was to create a pathway for permanent resettlement in the U.S. for eligible Afghan allies.

Jamshidi said he was part of a chat group with other troops and veterans with family at Camp As Sayliyah. The chat, he said, has largely gone silent as members have gradually lost hope in a policy solution. Jamshidi said he’s working to hang onto that hope.

“As a Marine, I understand what it means to keep your promise and to stand by our coalition, our partners who served us and who supported us, who sacrificed their life for us, and how important that is,” he said. “So I’m going to continue fighting for that.”

According to a recently released charge sheet, Aviation Boatswain’s Mate Jayjrion L. Rodriguez is accused of killing Boatswain’s Mate Seaman Jesse Braswell on June 6. He allegedly pointed his service pistol at his head and shot him.

The two men were aboard the Kennedy serving as part of the ship’s in-port security forces during the incident, USNI News reported. Afterward, Rodriguez was placed in pre-trial confinement before being released on June 11. Then, authorities charged him on July 29.

The investigation into the shooting is ongoing. The Navy did not immediately respond to questions about the incident Tuesday.

Rodriguez is from Massachusetts and enlisted in the Navy in 2025, USNI News reported. He joined the crew of the Kennedy that October, shortly after attending the Naval Air Technical Training Center at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.

Braswell, from Colorado, enlisted in October 2024, The Virginian-Pilot reported. He was assigned to the Kennedy in March 2025.

In addition to the death of Braswell, Rodriguez also faces simple assault and reckless endangerment charges. According to the charge sheet, he unlawfully pointed his loaded service pistol at different individuals once in February and twice in May.

After several delays, including the shooting, the Kennedy completed acceptance sea trials, which puts it on track to meet its scheduled delivery in 2027.

USS Benfold, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, suffered an “engineering casualty” with its generators, causing a power outage for four days while conducting routine operations in the Indo-Pacific, 7th Fleet spokesperson Cmdr. Matthew Comer told Military Times.

Comer declined to comment about where exactly the incident occurred, but multiple news outlets reported it happened in the South China Sea.

The ship received support from the George Washington Carrier Strike Group, which included meals from Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Robert Smalls.

The engineering incident occurred July 24, forcing the destroyer to be towed by contracted tugboats into Subic Bay, Philippines, for repairs on July 28. The ship was met upon arrival by subject-matter experts from Ship Repair Facility-Japan Regional Maintenance Center, Comer said.

“There were no injuries to the crew, who demonstrated resilience, grit, professionalism, and unwavering steadiness in their response,” Comer said.

The day after arriving in the Philippines, the ship’s crew received food and contracted lodging off board. Benfold’s power was restored July 30, and all necessary repairs were completed prior to the ship berth shifting for fuel over a week later on Aug. 7.

All engineering, combat systems and crew support systems were functioning normally by the time the ship left Subic Bay on Aug. 8.

“The crew was directly supported by ships in the strike group while at sea and every effort was made to ensure the crew was supported on arrival in Subic Bay, Philippines,” Comer said.

The engineering mishap is under investigation, Comer said.

The incident follows reports of poor morale and mental health conditions on USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been deployed for nine months, part of which has been in support of U.S. military operations against Iran.

Recently, U.S. Central Command leader Adm. Brad Cooper visited the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier after Military Times learned that at least two sailors attempted to go overboard during the ship’s extended deployment.

Cooper said that service at sea can be challenging but asserted that the Lincoln has the lowest number of mental health cases among the Navy’s 11 active aircraft carriers.

U.S. lawmakers have begun pressing the service for information on the Lincoln’s conditions and to elaborate on the ship’s lengthened deployment schedule, asking for reports on the ship’s problems with basic supplies, water, plumbing, mental health, deck safety and mail.

But Pentagon and White House leaders have continued to dismiss concerns, with President Donald Trump saying the deployment’s length is “not nearly long enough.”