The U.S. military has been bombing two countries in the last several days — Syria and Yemen — though details are scarce and the mainstream media has given it very little attention. U.S. forces have also been attacked again in Syria, though this additional headline also went under the radar.
The Associated Press has reported that the U.S. struck nine targets in two locations in Syria on Monday, allegedly targeting Iran-aligned parties that previously attacked U.S. military personnel. Namely, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) posted on X that the strikes were conducted to “degrade the Iranian backed groups’ ability to plan and launch future attacks on U.S. and Coalition forces who are in the region to conduct D-ISIS operations.”
The Pentagon did not provide further details about both parties’ attacks or their respective locations by Monday evening, according to AP. (Update: CENTCOM posted on X Tuesday night that the U.S. struck an Iranian-supported weapons and logistics headquarters facility in response to an attack on U.S. personnel at Patrol Base Shaddadi.)
The U.S. has struck several Syrian targets over the last year. Notably, a previous U.S. attack on Syrian government military posts near the Iraq border killed 18 Syrian fighters back in August. In February, the U.S. hit 85 Iran-aligned targets in airstrikes in Syria and Iraq to retaliate against a previous attack on American troops. And U.S. ally Israel has also increasingly targeted Syria since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last year, striking military targets in the Aleppo and Idlib regions of Syria over the weekend.
Moreover, the U.S. also struck Yemen on Sunday and Monday over Houthi strikes against Israeli forces, hitting parts of Yemeni capital Sanaa and the northern Amran governorate.
These tit-for-tat attacks in Syria and beyond could ultimately escalate military tensions in a region already burdened by two major conflict flash points in Gaza and Lebanon. And such conditions leave U.S. troops in the area vulnerable to attack.
“It would be a travesty to allow an incident like Tower 22 to repeat,” noted Quincy Institute Middle East fellow Adam Weinstein, who co-wrote a report with QI’s Steve Simon about the perils of keeping troops in Syria and Iraq. He referred to the attack that killed three U.S. soldiers stationed in Jordan to assist the efforts in Syria, in January.
“With each strike and counterstrike, the cycle of tit-for-tat in Syria endures. But one lucky strike could cost U.S. lives in a mission with shrinking gains.”
President Donald Trump continues to pepper his new government with weapons industry mainstays.
Most recently, Trump has nominated Michael Obadal, a U.S. military veteran and current senior director of defense tech star Anduril Industries, to become the Under Secretary of the Army — the no. 2 civilian official in the organization.
If confirmed, Obadal would essentially act as the Army’s chief management officer, where he would help manage an $185 billion budget. Here, Obadal’s decades-long military career, where he’s commanded units and task forces in both the Army and Joint Special Operations, may serve his new role well. Considering Anduril’s manymilitary contracts and prominent lobbying presence in Washington alike, however, Obadal’s prominent weapons start up job also precipitates a direct conflict of interest.
And Obadal would be working under Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, who has argued that America’s defense industrial base must be revamped — in close collaboration with the weapons industry — to remain competitive with America’s adversaries.
“[W]e must reinvigorate our industrial base and revolutionize our procurement processes. We are not ready for large-scale conflict with a peer adversary. But we must be,” Driscoll wrote after being confirmed as Army Secretary. “Together, we will forge stronger partnerships with the defense industry to ensure you have the firepower to dominate our enemies.”
Critically, defense tech executives, like Anduril’s own Christian Brose and Palmer Luckey, have repeatedly made similar arguments in pushes for military contracts.
Trump is truly leaning on New Tech to populate prominent government roles. He selected Palantir’s former head of Intelligence and Investigations, Gregory Barbaccia, to be the new federal chief information officer, and tapped PayPal Mafia member David Sacks to be the new “White House AI and crypto-czar.” Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire investor sporting significant defense industry ties, was nominated for the position of Deputy Secretary for Defense.
And prominent entrepreneur Elon Musk, now a close confidant to the President through his DOGE role (he also previously threw $200 million at Trump’s successful campaign), is himself a prominent weapons contractor through SpaceX.
The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.
Here we go, again
The Pentagon merry-go-round is forever spinning, and eventually — if you’re paying attention — you begin seeing the same things over and over. The Bunker is flashing back 40 years when, as a reporter-tyke, he covered President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to stuff the Defense Department like a goose being force fed for foie gras. Reagan’s effort was foie cash. Two of his key goals were to develop a “Strategic Defense Initiative” to protect the U.S. from a Soviet nuclear-missile attack, and to build a 600-ship Navy.
The Pentagon spent billions on what came to be called Star Wars before the effort was abandoned in 1991. Today, its progeny is a leaky 44-interceptor missile-defense system that provides more defense-industry jobs for American workers than protection for U.S. citizens. The Navy also spent billions on a fleet that peaked at 594 ships in 1987, double today’s force. It bought far more bang for the buck than Star Wars’ sci-fi ever did.
President Trump declared in his March 4 congressional address that he will seek “a state-of-the-art golden dome missile defense shield to protect our homeland” from all kinds of attacks. He also said he’s bolstering U.S. Navy shipbuilding through a newly created “office of shipbuilding in the White House.” There’s both bad and good news here. The first goal is physically, and fiscally, impossible. The second is a worthy investment. Here’s hoping that those now force-feeding the Pentagon can tell the difference.
Beware another pig in a poke
Generally, the Pentagon and defense contractors are allies when it comes to their pipe dreams. But that doesn’t seem to be happening when it comes to Trump’s decision to develop a “Golden Dome for America” (PDF). That’s a missile-defense shield to protect the U.S. from an array of airborne threats, including ballistic, hypersonic, and advanced cruise missiles (it was originally dubbed “Iron Dome” by Trump, apparently until someone realized that’s a trademark held by Rafael, the defense contractor who built the much more modest “Iron Dome” system defending Israel).
Trump wants an outline of such a system, including warning satellites, space-based sensors, and orbiting interceptors, to detect, track, and destroy any incoming aerial threats by, um, April 1.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know such a multi-layered system is beyond the reach of mere mortals. Even if the Pentagon could get its Missile Defense Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, U.S. Space Command and the military services to cooperate, its cost would be prohibitive. Beyond that, the shield would simply push adversaries to figure out ways around it (how quickly we forget the lessons of 9/11).
Air Force Lieutenant General Philip A. Garrant, in charge of buying weapons for the U.S. Space Force, says he’s busy determining “what might be feasible from a physics perspective.” The challenge is “no joke of a physics problem,” adds Air Force Lieutenant General Shawn W. Bratton, the Space Force’s strategy chief.
While such humility is welcome, it’s not shared by the nation’s largest defense contractor, who would undoubtedly play a major role in such dome-building. “A Golden Dome can shield our nation from aerial threats, hypersonic missiles, drone swarms, and more,” Lockheed says. “It can detect, track, and defeat threats with unprecedented speed and precision, using artificial intelligence and real-time data to outmaneuver and outpace even the most sophisticated adversaries.”
This is um, rich coming from the builder of the Air Force’s F-35 fighter, which was mission capable only 51.5% of the time last year.
At least you get something for the money
Trump’s push for more U.S. shipbuilding can only benefit the U.S. Navy. Cost overruns, schedule delays, a shrinking workforce are all hampering the Navy’s ability to produce warships. The gray hulls are the most important weapon in the Pentagon arsenal to grapple with China’s growing military might in the vast Pacific Ocean. China now has the capability to build 200 times more ship tonnage than the U.S., Navy intelligence claims.
“We used to make so many ships,” Trump told Congress. “We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon.” Typical of Trump, there are no details about how this would happen, beyond a vague reference to tax incentives.
The Navy wants to increase its fleet of crewed ships from 295 today to 390 in 2054. That’s going to take more money, and lots of it. The Navy needs about $40 billion annually for the next 30 years to build that armada, 46% more than it has spent over the past five years, the Congressional Budget Office says.
Both missile shields and a blue-water Navy are costly investments. But only one of them can play offense.
Disappearing history
The Defense Department has slated more than 26,000 images on its execrable defense.gov website for deletion because they violate the Pentagon’s DEI-seeking missive banning such content, the Associated Gulf-of-Mexico Press reported March 7. The most ridiculous excision may be to disappear references concerning the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb (the B-29 was named for the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay Tibbets). The Pentagon has acknowledged that such bone-headed moves will likely be reversed.
But not all. A March 6 Facebook post attributed to Bobbie Scholley, a Navy diver for 22 years, said she was researching a fellow pioneer when she ran into a brick wall. “I was saddened, then angered, and finally just heartbroken when I realized that almost all the information and photos of this amazing naval officer have been erased from any official miliary or government site,” it said. “I don’t understand how this falls under DEI. All I know is that as one of the first women to become a navy diver, I and so many other women, had to work very hard to prove that we could handle what was expected of us just so that we were accepted into the community. … I don’t know why we would erase this history.”
The U.S. military’s edge over China is jeopardized by “a self-perpetuating cycle of budgetary and appropriations dysfunction,” the Ronald Reagan Institute said March 6.
U.S. B-52s have dropped live bombs for the first time in new NATO member Finland’s Lapland region, about 60 miles from the Russian border, the Barents Observer reported March 7.
U.S. security experts and leaders have been telling European NATO allies to increase their defense spending for at least a quarter century, initially as a gentle nudging, later more insistently, rising to a deafening din after Trump’s election.
The infamous White House press conference with President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 1 finally shocked Europeans out of their complacency and opened their purse-strings, according to American analysts, who seem very pleased with themselves.
But this approach puts the cart of military-spending-as-share-of-GDP before the horse of a dynamic assessment of the threats European countries actually face. Going on a spending spree to reach some arbitrary share of GDP or random number of billions of euros, to buy weapons systems favored by lobbyists but of dubious relevance, is a poor replacement for a comprehensive strategy for European security.
A European security strategy that deserves this name would have to include political and diplomatic efforts: war-ending diplomacy in the short term, followed by a crisis consultation mechanism that should be the beginning of a new European security architecture consisting of reciprocal regimes of arms control, confidence-building and eventual disarmament.
A closer look at Europe also shows that a new bellicism has swept up the continent’s elites and gone into cataclysmic overdrive in recent weeks. Nowhere has this new martiality been more pronounced than in Germany, where political leaders and a new crop of “military experts” egg each other on.
The latter have been abysmally wrong in their predictions of Ukraine’s certain victory and Russia’s imminent collapse again and again, but nevertheless dominate the country’s much-watched primetime debate shows. Last week, Germans were told that the coming summer will be the last one we will be at peace, because Russia will, under cover of war games in Belarus, invade NATO territory.
German officials have been bandying about the word “Kriegstüchtigkeit” — a compound noun meaning “being good at war” — which would not sound out of place in a scratchy Wochenschau newsreel from 1940, pronounced in the gravelly, pompous diction of that era. It takes a retired brigadier general to remind Germans that this is an ominous departure from previous nomenclature, “Verteidigungsfähigkeit” – or “capacity for defense..
The influential Brussels think tank Bruegel argues that Russia may attack Europe in as little as three years, simply because the country has x pieces of this and that military hardware. Bizarrely, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni has suggested that Ukraine should not be a NATO member yet still be covered by Article 5, while Finnish President Stubb proposes NATO membership not now, but triggered the moment Russia attacks Ukraine again, after the current war has ended.
The manic summitry launched by Macron and Starmer is all sound and fury: it has produced a series of unworkable proposals which, tellingly, are being proposed to the US, not Ukraine, let alone Russia. These summits also have no foundation in EU or NATO institutions.
Another €650 billion are supposed to be raised by member states for their weapons purchases, for which they will be exempt from the EU’s strict limits on borrowing. EU citizens, who have seen their welfare states starved and their public assets plundered in the name of fiscal discipline mandated by Brussels, have every reason to feel betrayed.
Meanwhile, former EU official and Quincy Institute non-resident fellow Eldar Mamedov observes, “weapons lobbyists are sprouting like mushrooms in Brussels”.
Predictably, this new defense spending has come with new calls to cut social spending even further. As economist Isabella Weber has shown, these dogmatic austerity policies have been the chief reason for the rise of far-right, undemocratic parties. Rapid rearmament accompanied by austerity on steroids might lead to the unthinkable: Germany’s AfD wants conscription back, too. And German nuclear weapons.
Europe’s bellicist frenzy may be induced by fear, but not of Russia actually waging war in Europe’s heartland. The suggestion that Russia will defeat and occupy all of Ukraine, then march on through Poland and soon thereafter through the Brandenburg gate flies in the face of observable military reality.
Instead, European elites seem to fear losing power and status, the position of global dominance they enjoyed vicariously in the shady comfort of the American nuclear umbrella. The prospect of having to deal with other nations as equals, as they will have to in the multipolar order acknowledged by Rubio, horrifies them.
Polish PM Tusk has made clear how important “winning” is, stating that “Europe is […] capable of winning any military, financial, economic confrontation with Russia — we are simply stronger”, that Europe “must win this arms race” and that Russia “will lose like the Soviet Union 40 years ago.”
Macron, in his recent address to the French public, emphasized how European capacities are strong enough to stand up to the U.S., but even more and especially so, to Russia. In this mindset, it must not be that Europe is not superior in this, and every, respect.
American foreign policy thinkers have shown that the pursuit of militarist great power competition has been bad for U.S. security, democracy and domestic well-being and counseled foreign and defense policies of restraint. One — entirely appropriate — of their recommendations is to reduce U.S. military commitment to Europe. However, to therefore celebrate the recent news of €800 billion for European defense is inconsistent.
Europe appears set to spend vast amounts of money without rhyme or reason, without taking into account dramatic new technological and tactical developments on the Ukrainian battlefield, let alone a consolidated assessment of threats and how those might be dealt with more effectively by a range of non-violent foreign policies.
If militarism has been bad for the U.S., leading to protracted wars that bring no greater security, the depletion of American society’s well-being, the capture of its politics by arms lobbies and the erosion of its democracy, why would such militarism be good for Europe?
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