The proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget would include $65.8 billion in shipbuilding capital to manufacture 18 battle force ships and 16 non-battle force ships, according to a White House overview of the budget.

“As waters around the world become increasingly contested, it is imperative that the United States be able to efficiently deliver the various naval platforms it requires to ensure maritime domain awareness and deterrence,” the overview said.

‘Everything costs what it costs’: Navy, Marine, Coast Guard chiefs call for historic funding

The budget’s maritime resources would be dedicated to building out Trump’s planned Golden Fleet, which he announced in December and which will include two so-called Trump-class battleships.

The president has claimed the vessels will be 100 times more powerful than any ship ever built.

The financial allotment would also fund next-generation frigates, increased public shipyard capacity, amphibious vessels, Columbia-class submarines, Virginia-class submarines, sealift vessels, hospital vessels, Consolidated Cargo Replenishment at Sea tankers, a special mission ship, submarine tenders and “other vessels vital for logistics,” the budget overview said.

The previous fiscal 2026 defense budget dedicated $27.2 billion for the Navy to build 17 ships.

Speaking at WEST Conference in San Diego, California, on Feb. 12, Navy Secretary John Phelan said ship production would likely double in fiscal 2027.

The new budget would help rebuild the maritime industrial base by manufacturing ships that were easier to construct than combat ships, which require complicated radar systems and nuclear propulsion systems, the Navy secretary said.

The request ultimately requires approval by Congress and will be debated by lawmakers in coming weeks and months.

The 2027 budget request comes as the president faces risky choices abroad, with the administration sending U.S. service members to the Middle East, and a public at home feeling the economic crunch of skyrocketing gas prices due to the conflict.

The request ultimately requires approval by Congress, where disagreement over Trump’s spending decisions recently led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

The president’s budget also reflects the administration’s political priorities ahead of the 2026 midterm elections in November, when Trump’s Republicans hope to maintain their small majorities in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

The huge proposed surge in defense spending to $1.5 trillion, up from about $1 trillion in 2026, includes a 5-7% pay raise for military personnel at a time when thousands of service members are actively deployed.

The defense request will please defense hawks on Capitol Hill, but also highlights how Trump is trying to pay for his doubling-down on military pursuits, even after Republicans boosted defense spending last year in party-line legislation.

The Pentagon already requested $200 billion in extra funding to pay for the Iran war, but the White House has not yet officially made that request to Congress, where it is also likely to face scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties.

Other specific funding increases proposed by Trump include his controversial Golden Dome missile defense shield, money to build up critical mineral supplies for the defense industry and $65.8 billion to build 34 new combat and support ships.

Funds for shipbuilding, a priority for Trump since his first term, include initial funding for the so-called Trump-class battleship as well as submarines.

It is unclear how this new spending would impact the U.S. budget deficit because the projections were not included by the White House. The deficit is expected to grow slightly in fiscal 2026 to $1.853 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill often treat White House budget requests as suggestive, as appropriators try to negotiate behind the scenes to maintain their own legislative priorities. But Trump’s latest budget will likely add to the ongoing tension with congressional Democrats over funding federal programs that they see as important — and plan to campaign to protect — as the president seeks to cut federal programs.

“Savings are achieved by reducing or eliminating woke, weaponized, and wasteful programs, and by returning state and local responsibilities to their respective governments,” the White House said in a budget fact sheet.

The abrupt move, one of three significant changes made by Hegseth the same day, cuts short George’s tenure, which began in September 2023, well before the end of the typical four-year term.

The Pentagon intends to replace him with a leader aligned with Hegseth and President Donald Trump’s vision for the Army, the official added. They did not specify what this vision entails.

George has more than four decades of military service, according to the Army. He was commissioned as an infantry officer from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1988 and served in the Gulf War, with subsequent deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that the current vice chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Christopher LaNeve, will replace George on an interim basis.

Parnell asserted that LaNeve is “a battle-tested leader with decades of operational experience and is completely trusted by Secretary Hegseth to carry out the vision of this administration without fault.”

The Department of Defense said it “has nothing further to provide at the moment.”

Hegseth on Thursday also removed Gen. David Horne, a former Army Ranger who had been overseeing the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, and Maj. Gen. William Green, the Army chief of chaplains, a Pentagon official confirmed to Military Times.

Since taking office, Hegseth has fired over a dozen generals and admirals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti.

The latest shakeup coincides with the Pentagon’s deployment of thousands of troops from the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East, as the war with Iran enters its fifth week.

The ouster was first reported by CBS News.

Funding for Trump’s marquee but controversial $185 billion “Golden Dome” missile defense shield is expected to be included in the budget request as well as Lockheed Martin F-35 jets and warships.

Procurement of Virginia-class submarines made by General Dynamics, and Huntington Ingalls Industries as well as other top shipbuilding priorities is expected.

Last year, Trump asked Congress for a national defense budget of $892.6 billion then added $150 billion through a supplemental budget request, sending the total price tag over $1 trillion for the first time in history.

While the budget request framework for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2027 is set to be unveiled on Friday, a Pentagon official said more details on the defense budget will be announced on April 21.

Earlier this year, the administration was contemplating whether the $1.5 trillion budget request could be in the form of a $900 billion national security budget, with a $400 billion to $600 billion additional request, similar to the structure used in 2026.

The administration plans to use funds for more weapons production in the hopes of deterring Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region and to rebuild weapons stocks depleted by conflicts in Israel, Iran and Ukraine.

The budget request will be debated in Congress in the coming weeks and months.

The contract framework, which will be spread across seven years, will match Lockheed Martin’s push to surge production on the PAC-3 MSE all-up round.

Lockheed in January announced a seven-year framework agreement to increase annual PAC-3 interceptor production from approximately 600 to 2,000.

“This agreement paves the way for us to scale rapidly to deliver increasingly sophisticated seekers,” Bob Ciesla, vice president of Boeing Precision Engagement Systems, said in a release announcing the deal. “In 2025, we increased deliveries by over 30% and we’re excited for the opportunity to grow our highly skilled workforce.”

Work on the seekers is expected to begin immediately, the company announced, and will be completed at Boeing’s facility in Huntsville, Alabama.

Boeing’s PAC-3 seekers work by identifying, tracking and knocking out a range of threats, from ballistic missiles and hypersonics to hostile air platforms.

Once the seeker identifies the target, the highly maneuverable interceptor, which uses a two-pulse solid rocket motor, engages and eliminates threats via direct body-to-body contact.

Wednesday’s announcement, meanwhile, comes as the U.S. military’s reliance on costly interceptors against cheap munitions, particularly those deployed by Iran during Operation Epic Fury, has come under increased scrutiny.

Iran’s stockpile of unmanned Shahed drones is immense, with the Islamic Republic reportedly producing 10,000 per month. Contrast the $35,000 average cost of an Iranian Shahed drone with an estimated $4 million price tag of a PAC-3, and the cost exchange, if engaged, is 114-1 in favor of Iran.

In spite of the lopsided cost, the Pentagon last week also announced a deal with BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin to quadruple production of infrared seekers for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptor.

That seeker deal aligns with a contract agreement in January between the Pentagon and Lockheed to quadruple the company’s annual production of THAAD interceptors from 96 to 400.

“To build a true Arsenal of Freedom, we must strengthen every link in the chain,” Michael Duffey, under secretary of war for acquisition and sustainment, said in a Wednesday release. “This agreement with Boeing is a direct reflection that speed, volume and a resilient supply chain are paramount. We are moving beyond the old model and forging direct partnerships with critical suppliers to ensure the entire defense industrial base is postured to expand production and deliver the decisive capabilities our warfighters need at speed and scale.”

Military analysts point to several possibilities, including coastal assaults, nuclear site raids or operations deeper inside the country.

Any one of these missions could unfold alone or evolve into something more broad. But across each scenario, U.S. forces would enter an environment where Iranian missiles, drones and ground units could begin targeting them as soon as they arrive.

A battle for the waterway

One version of the fight would likely unfold along the water.

U.S. forces could be tasked with seizing islands or coastal positions to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a global shipping route that has been heavily disrupted by the war with Iran.

The mission could be a limited ground incursion, with Marines and airborne units deploying to seize important terrain, said Joe Costa, director of the Forward Defense program at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center.

President Donald Trump has publicly threatened Kharg Island, Iran’s primary oil export hub, which is located off the country’s coast.

In a Truth Social post on Monday, he said the U.S. would finish its “stay” in Iran, by “completely obliterating” Kharg Island.

Costa, a former senior Pentagon official who worked on U.S. war plans, including Iran, acknowledged speculation about Kharg, but also described a scenario in which U.S. forces would try to secure islands such as Abu Musa, Larak and the Tunbs, off Iran’s southern coast.

“This helps us take out Iranian reconnaissance units as we think of ways to reopen Hormuz. If you have the ability to secure some of the ports along the coast as well, you go a long way to supporting naval assets to start to open up the Strait,” Costa said, adding that the operation could rely on Marine units for the initial assault, with airborne forces supporting limited incursions and air assault operations — all under U.S. air superiority.

The USS Tripoli and embarked 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit arrived in the region’s waters last Friday, and the elements of the 82nd Airborne Division are deploying to the Middle East, the Pentagon confirmed last week.

An opening fight would not be in isolation, Costa said, and though there are mixed reports about Iranian military capacity right now, the country still appears to have functional command and control and is capable of attacks.

The first waves of U.S. ground troops would undoubtedly face Iranian fire, Costa warned.

“We have overwhelming force and would likely be successful in securing territory, but at that point every commander will face the daily decision of assuming risk to troops or risk to mission — force protection becomes paramount, especially if we start to see casualties mount up,” he said, adding, “There’s a high risk of that in this operation.”

Targeting nuclear sites

A different type of operation would focus on Iran’s nuclear program instead of territory.

Instead of seizing ground, U.S. forces could be tasked with entering fortified sites and securing material, likely under fire and deep within Iranian territory.

An operation aimed at seizing enriched uranium would likely involve special forces at a nuclear site in Isfahan, a populous city in the center of the country, said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iran’s missiles and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Excavating nuclear material would require a myriad of support, from construction equipment to Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear assets, Grajewski, a professor at Sciences Po, said.

Ground forces would likely have to dig deep underground to access the highly enriched uranium canisters “and then go in there, excavate it, then get out of the country,” she added.

An extraction team would likely be met with force. The area is heavily trafficked, and the nuclear site in Isfahan is located near numerous military and missile facilities, making it exceedingly risky.

Grajewski described the operation as likely “one that the U.S. military has not really done before,” and said experts could only speculate on how it would be accomplished.

“I’m not sure how they’re thinking about doing it,” she said, pondering if “they’re going to fly in there and do this quick extraction under the guise of night?”

Iran’s response

Even targeted operations like seizing an island or extracting nuclear materials carry the risk of evolving into something larger.

Dan Grazier, the director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center, said the challenges U.S. forces may face goes beyond securing land or items. It centers on how Iran chooses to fight once American soldiers are on its ground.

“The Iranians are going to do whatever they can to kill and capture as many Americans as they can,” said Grazier, who is also a Marine Corps veteran, “for the propaganda victory alone.”

Rather than seeking decisive engagement, Iranian forces would likely avoid conventional confrontation and stretch the conflict over time, he said. Instead of defeating U.S. forces, he added, Iran’s objective becomes making the conflict costly and prolonged, forcing leaders in Washington to decide whether the fight is worth continuing.

Any sustained ground operation would also risk widening the battlefield, as Iran could activate proxy groups across the region to further target U.S. forces and partners.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies in early March estimated that the first 100 hours of the war cost billions of dollars, and experts warn that critical air defense interceptors could be depleted faster than the rate of replacement.

The human cost has also risen as the war enters its second month. Thirteen American service members had been killed and over 300 injured as of late March. A survey earlier in March found that a majority of Americans thought the war had gone too far, and a separate poll showed diminished confidence in the president’s handling of it.

“The Iranians don’t stand any chance of defeating the United States on the ground, I don’t think,” Grazier said. “They do stand a chance of defeating the United States politically back home.”

In an effort to export Ukrainian systems and know-how, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has criss-crossed the Gulf region this weekend to hash out deals with countries that have been targeted by waves of Iranian drone attacks this month.

“Ukraine is sharing expertise that is not available in the Middle East,” Zelenskyy told Reuters in an interview last week. “Expertise is not a drone, but a skill, a strategy, a system where a drone is one part of the defense.”

Indeed, Ukraine has signed framework cooperation deals with Saudi Arabia and Qatar in recent days, and has said one is in the works with the United Arab Emirates. Zelenskyy has stressed that arms sales must be decided at the government level, warning businesses against engaging with clients directly.

Ukraine’s drone sector is chomping at the bit.

“Everybody is sitting and waiting,” said Oleg Rogynskyy, CEO of UForce, a UK-headquartered Ukrainian military tech company which says its Magura sea drone has been the subject of intense commercial interest from the Middle East.

Several industry figures said the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran had underlined the potency of attack drones in modern warfare and exposed many countries’ vulnerabilities to their threat.

The conflict, some added, presented Ukraine with a unique opportunity to jumpstart exports and create a world-leading industry that could provide the backbone for post-war reconstruction and prosperity.

Wild Hornets and SkyFall, two other top Ukrainian interceptor drone makers, said they too had received inquiries from Middle Eastern countries but like UForce were not directly negotiating contracts before getting a green light from Kyiv.

Anastasiia Mishkina, executive director at Tech Force in UA, an association of nearly 100 Ukrainian defense companies, said some members had asked the government for permission to export and were waiting for a response.

“There is a risk of losing the moment because the international market does not wait,” she said.

The government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it risked moving too slowly on defense cooperation at a time of opportunity.

SEA DRONES MOUNTED WITH INTERCEPTORS

Ukraine has developed its technology and expertise over years of countering Russia’s drone attacks - a threat that Gulf states now face from Iran’s relatively cheap Shahed drones.

Hundreds of Russian drones are often fired at Ukraine in a single night, spurring an innovation race with the military and private firms developing interceptor drones to bring enemy craft down before they hit their targets.

These interceptors cost a few thousand dollars each, although they do not always succeed and Russia is constantly coming up with ways to get past them.

Ihor Fedirko, CEO of the Ukrainian Council of Defence Industry, a manufacturers’ association, estimated that Ukraine could export about $2 billion worth of weapons as a whole this year, excluding joint production ventures with allies.

He predicted that in a best-case scenario, annual defense exports could reach as much as $10 billion in five years.

Ukraine produced 40,000 interceptor drones in January, according to the government, which has made it clear the country will not export any weapons it needs to defend itself. Zelenskyy says that provided enough financing, Ukraine has the capacity to up its production to 2,000 interceptor drones a day and would only need 1,000 for itself, leaving plenty for export.

Rogynskyy, the UForce CEO, said the Magura sea drone produced by his company had obvious allure in the Gulf.

Ukraine initially used sea drones to attack and harry Russian warships in the Black Sea as an asymmetrical weapon to take on the dominant naval force. They have since become more sophisticated, with Rogynskyy saying they could be mounted with interceptor drones to combat aerial drones over water.

Ukraine’s military, he added, was already using the Magura off its southern coast to intercept Russian drones that pour into the port city of Odesa from across the Black Sea at night.

“It’s fully live, it’s tested,” he said.

Rogynskyy said stations equipped with Maguras carrying interceptors could be sited along the Gulf’s shoreline, operating on software that reduced the need for many personnel.

‘BETTER TO LEARN LATE THAN TOO LATE’

Zelenskyy has previously berated an unnamed Ukrainian-American company for selling interceptor drones without the government’s involvement.

That, he said, had ultimately tainted Ukraine’s reputation because the soldiers needed to train the clients to use the drones had not been available as that could only happen with government backing.

Halyna Yanchenko, a lawmaker close to Ukrainian defense manufacturers, told Reuters the government had moved very slowly to open up weapons exports, and manufacturers were still in dire need of capital to grow their operations.

She said state policy governing how weapons exports would function was still being formed. Like Mishkina at Tech Force in UA, she believed there was a major risk that Ukraine could miss the moment provided by the Iran war if it did not move quickly.

Even if agreements are struck, officials and drone operators said it could take months to set up drone-based air defenses and provide training.

Taras Tymochko, head of the interceptor drone program at Come Back Alive, a charitable foundation that has bought tens of thousands of interceptor drones for Ukraine’s military, said the sophisticated systems required a range of specialisms, from pilot training, combat experience and the know-how to safely arming warheads and fix technical malfunctions.

More important still, he said, was installing, configuring and correctly positioning radars to detect and track incoming drones and then to coordinate that work across different units.

He predicted the learning curve would be quicker for the Gulf states than for Ukraine, which had to forge ahead on its own while fighting for its survival.

“I’m confident that within a few months, some Gulf countries could form their own interceptor units and, a little later, begin demonstrating results,” Tymochko said.

“Unfortunately, in today’s reality, that time does not exist. But it is better to learn late than too late.”

This development marks a key shift in the country’s defense strategy. Japan committed to acquiring 400 Tomahawks last year to equip its eight Aegis destroyers as part of a larger standoff capability, which includes fielding upgraded Type 12 missiles in the southwest and deploying hyper velocity gliding projectile systems across the country.

The existing missile defense network may not be fully capable of responding to threats, Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi told reporters in a briefing on Friday.

“To prevent missiles flying through the missile defense network and to prevent further armed attacks, it is necessary to … have the ability to counterattack. Stand-off missiles can also be used for this counterattack ability,” Koizumi said.

Japan sprinkles fresh missiles across its islands to fend off would-be attackers

The destroyer’s launcher modification marks a landmark milestone in the country’s efforts to rapidly deploy stand-off capabilities and bolster deterrence measures, he added.

Stand-off weaponry describes a class of ams with ranges so long that operators can fire them from a safe distance, without fearing countermeasures capable of reaching them.

The defense ministry introduced stand-off capabilities in 2017, and it formed the core of the security strategy shift in 2020, which later expanded to additional policy documents, including a detailed buildup plan in the country’s southwest in 2022.

The Tomahawk cruise missiles can be launched from ships or submarines with a range of over 1,600km. The Japanese variant can be rerouted during flight, and advanced versions are capable of hitting moving targets.

The refitted JS Chokai can load and fire both the Block IV and V variants of the cruise missiles.

JS Chokai arrived at Naval Base San Diego, California, in October 2025 for renovations and crew training with the U.S. Third Fleet. Live-fire training is scheduled for August, before JS Chokai returns to its home port in Sasebo Naval Base in the southwestern Kyushu Island in September.

Japan is moving toward a “denial and limited strike” model by fast-tracking the implementation of its 2022 strategy, maritime security expert Benjamin Blandin told Defense News. Blandin is a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taiwan.

“Japan is operationalizing a long overdue counterstrike capability, shifting from strict homeland defense to semi-regional deterrence by being able to strike ground and naval targets at up to 1000 km,” Blandin said.

Japan’s existing defense force, including its stand-off missile capability, is the “minimum necessary for self-defense,” Koizumi said, adding that these would only be used “in the event of an armed attack from another country … and it does not pose a threat to other countries.”

Analysts have raised worries that the U.S. Tomahawk stockpile may be strained after reports indicated that over 800 missiles were used in four weeks during Operation Epic Fury against Iran, and this might impact missile orders for allies, including Japan.

Blandin said Japan’s Tomahawk orders are unlikely to be affected immediately, but prolonged military campaigns in the Middle East could cause minor to moderate setbacks.

American manufacturer RTX, in a Feb. 4 press release, said it had signed five agreements with the U.S. Department of Defense to boost production and expedite deliveries of Land Attack and Maritime Strike variants of the Tomahawk cruise missiles, with annual production expected to increase to more than 1,000.

“No major impact expected in regards to Iran, as deliveries will not take place all at once but probably over the course of a few years,” Blandin said. “In any case, the U.S. will likely prioritize Japan as a key Indo-Pacific ally.”

The United States has asked Ukraine to withdraw from all of the eastern region — including areas it has held during more than 14 years of Russian attacks — before it will finalize the long-term protections it has been discussing with Kyiv for months, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, describing the negotiation in comments to Reuters.

The demand followed bilateral talks in Florida with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and senior adviser Jared Kushner last weekend that Zelenskyy said produced no real progress, a sharper assessment than his earlier claim that the guarantees were “100% ready.”

Just three weeks earlier, Zelenskyy tried to close the door on the central trade-off in the talks. Ukraine would “never leave Donbas and the 200,000 Ukrainians who live there,” he told Corriere della Sera.

But the battlefield did not slow down to match the diplomacy. Ukraine seized more ground in a February counteroffensive than at any point since 2023, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

Russia answered this week with its spring offensive — nearly 1,000 strikes in 24 hours, the largest attack of the war. Ukraine hit back the next day with about 400 drones, crippling at least 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity, according to Reuters.

Russian officials said this week the talks had been paused, though it was not clear when — or whether — they would resume.

“What Ukraine is being asked to do is politically and morally unacceptable,” retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of U.S. Army Europe, told Military Times.

In his view, the Donbas demand isn’t a bargaining chip — it is the point of the deal, and a test of whether Washington is willing to trade Ukrainian territory for a paper promise.

“You’re asking a country that’s been invaded to surrender its people and its land, and you’re calling that peace,” Hodges said.

As experts see it, the deal isn’t a path to peace so much as a demand Ukraine can’t accept: trading away Donbas for an undefined guarantee from a guarantor whose credibility is already fraying, as the Iran war drains the weapons Kyiv needs and boosts the Russian war machine.

And if the message is that even a country that gave up its nuclear arsenal can be told to cede land for a “maybe,” the result won’t be peace, they argue, but more wars and more states concluding they need the bomb to survive.

Retired U.S. Ambassador Ian Kelly, who served as ambassador to Georgia when Russia occupied 20% of the country, said the pattern was not new.

“We gave them the Javelin but then said, ‘By the way, don’t use them,’” Kelly told Military Times.

Kelly said the outline is familiar: a concession Kyiv cannot make, paired with a promise that has not been spelled out — and offered by a sponsor whose follow-through is already doubted.

While any ceasefire signed under those conditions would be temporary, Kelly said, the precedent it sets would be permanent: it tells Moscow what kinds of demands work, and it tells U.S. partners what American protection is actually worth.

The uncertanties behind it come fast: what, exactly, Washington is offering; what enforcing it would actually require without the U.S.; and what happens if the guarantee fails its first credibility test.

Either way, the long shadow is the same. Deterrence doesn’t disappear — it migrates.

The guarantee mirage

The security guarantee at the center of the deal carries a basic problem: the people involved don’t appear to agree on what it means or whether it would hold up when tested.

In February, Zelenskyy tried to make one of Ukraine’s few real political concessions count: he said Kyiv would drop its bid to join NATO, a goal that had anchored Ukraine’s post-2019 foreign policy and one Moscow has long used to justify its war.

Washington, Zelenskyy said, offered what it described as “Article 5-like” security guarantees in return.

Hodges said the wording was the tell. Article 5 is a treaty commitment with a known trigger and an alliance behind it.

“Article 5-like” is neither. “That’s not a security guarantee,” he said. “It’s a phrase.”

He called it an “absolutely empty promise.” If the administration won’t even enforce existing sanctions — he pointed to India importing more Russian oil than before the war — “the administration’s not serious,” Hodges said.

“You can’t design security guarantees on the basis of ‘maybe,’” Hodges added.

He said he had zero confidence the current administration would treat a Russian drone attack on Ukraine the way it would treat one on New York or Washington.

“Does it have to be 50 drones or is it one drone?” he said. “I don’t have any confidence that they would really do that.”

But the deeper problem, he said, is that both sides know it.

“This is where we get into the Jedi mind tricks,” Hodges said. “I find it hard to believe that the Ukrainians trust ... the Americans. So, they’re also positing that simply as a negotiation tactic” to by time, he argued, for Europeans “to rediscover their strategic backbone and do what needs to be done to provide those capabilities.”

Most NATO allies still fall short of the alliance’s defense spending targets. Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull the U.S. out if they do not pay up, leaving Ukraine reliant on a security umbrella its own guarantor is threatening to fold.

Hodges said the administration’s approach was failing not because the negotiations were insincere, but because Washington had refused to back Ukraine on the most fundamental issues from the start.

“They never cared about the origin of the war,” Hodges said. “They’ve never been willing to say that Russia was the aggressor. They’ve never said, ‘Russia, you’ve got to get out.’”

A deal no one believes in

When looking at the track record — the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which failed to prevent Russia’s invasion after Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal, and the Minsk ceasefire agreements that repeatedly collapsed — the new guarantee does not get any easier to take at face value, experts and insiders said.

Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow for European security at the Royal United Services Institute and a former British Army infantry officer, said the guarantee breaks down in three places: Washington is unlikely to commit to it, Kyiv is unsure it would hold and the Kremlin would sign only to keep fighting on better terms.

“Is the U.S. going to provide Ukraine something like mutual security assistance? I don’t think so,” Arnold told Military Times. “And even if they did, do the Ukrainians believe in it? And pretty critically, does Putin believe in it?”

Arnold pointed to the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords, both presidential directives that were reversed by successor administrations.

“[Those directives] are not legally binding,” he said. “The U.S. has fairly consistently let Ukraine down.”

Even if the guarantees were defined, the rules of enforcement make it practically impossible to sustain without the U.S., whose military spending exceeds that of every European NATO member combined.

“Europe simply does not have the capacity to provide the same level,” Arnold said. “Yet at the same time, they can’t trust the United States, given America’s most recent actions — let alone history.”

And what European governments do send, they lose permanently from their own defense posture.

Arnold calculated that any peacekeeping force of 15,000 to 25,000 soldiers requires triple that in a rotation committed indefinitely.

“Whatever you’re going to put into Ukraine, you’re permanently taking it away from what is available to you,” he said.

The diplomat said the deeper failure was not material but political. The failure of European leaders to convince their own populations that Russian aggression was a threat to them, not just to Ukraine.

“Europe has completely failed at deterrence,” he told Military Times.

Arnold traced the political logic to its root.

“Politically, you don’t win votes by spending more money on defense and less on welfare,” he said.

The result is a continent that has, in many ways, lost strategic control of its own defensives.

“We have handed escalation control to Russia,” he said. “They continuously escalate. And we keep absorbing it.”

For Zelenskyy, a deal that locks in a Ukrainian withdrawal from Donbas would force Kyiv to formalize a loss it has spent years saying it will not accept. It would also put Zelenskyy’s own pledge to “never leave Donbas” on the line, along with the roughly 200,000 Ukrainians he has said are still there.

“It would be toxic to sign up to something just to say that Russia gets off the hook for everything it’s done in not just the last four years, actually the last 12,” Arnold said.

That is why the deal, as described, does not reduce the risk of another war, Arnold added. It pushes it down the road.

“Russians certainly don’t want peace,” he said. “They do want their economy to improve, probably to move against Ukraine again in the future.”

Putin “is not in the mood to negotiate and is kind of making a fool of Trump,” he added.

The price and the precedent

Kelly said Washington was not eliminating the risk of escalation with Russia, but instead moving that risk down the chain, from the U.S. onto Ukraine and onto European allies that have less capacity to absorb it. In doing so, the risk of where increases everywhere.

“If we don’t impose the necessary costs on that, it’s obviously a lesson for other countries in the world,” Kelly told Military Times.

Kelly said that is the logic of what economists call a “moral hazard.” One party avoids the cost of a dangerous outcome by shifting it onto someone else.

“That’s what we’re doing here. We see a risk of a nuclear engagement with Russia, so we transfer that risk to the only country that’s paying the price.”

That shift, he argued, forces U.S. allies to rethink the core premise that has underpinned European security since World War II: that Washington would backstop them if Russia attacked.

“Europe has to basically operate on the assumption that they can’t count on the United States when it comes to Ukraine,” Kelly said.

For decades, many U.S. partners shaped their defense policies around that backstop, scaling down militaries, forgoing their own nuclear options and betting that American power would be there in a crisis. If that guarantee is no longer assumed, Kelly said, countries start recalculating what they need to deter Russia on their own.

“Their ultimate deterrent was always the U.S. nuclear umbrella,” he said. Without it, the logic that kept dozens of nations from pursuing their own weapons programs collapses.

“That could mean that these states are going to want to have their own nuclear deterrent.”

The nuclear shadow

France has already started talking in those terms. In early March, President Emmanuel Macron used a speech at France’s nuclear submarine base in Brittany — home to the country’s nuclear submarine fleet — to argue Europe needs to think about deterrence in a more self-reliant way, and to signal Paris is prepared to play a bigger role.

“The global framework for nuclear arms control now resembles a field of ruins,” Macron said.

He ordered what could be the first expansion of France’s nuclear warheads since the Cold War and announced a doctrine of “forward deterrence” extended to European allies for the first time. This included the potential dispersal of strategic air forces across the continent, in what Le Monde called “a major step toward Europe.” Macron declined to disclose the size of the arsenal.

On the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov laid out the alternative conditions that could actually help ensure peace.

“The sky is secured, the Russian army loses its offensive potential and Russia’s economy can no longer sustain the burden of war,” he said.

But not one of those conditions has been met, and recent events seem to be taking Ukraine further from its goals.

Macron, standing among the submarines, answered a different question — the one the entire negotiation had been avoiding.

“Can we imagine the survival of our closest partners being threatened,” he said, “without that affecting our vital interests?”

“To be free, one needs to be feared — and to be feared, one must be powerful.”

The weapons that could be redirected include air defense interceptor missiles purchased through a NATO initiative launched last year, under which partner countries buy U.S. arms for Kyiv, the report said.

The consideration comes as U.S. operations in the region intensify. Adm. Brad Cooper, the Central Command chief leading U.S. forces in the Middle East, on Wednesday said the U.S. had hit over 10,000 targets inside Iran and was on track to limit Iran’s ability to project power outside its borders.

A Pentagon spokesperson told the newspaper that the Defense Department would “ensure that U.S. forces and those of our allies and partners have what they need to fight and win.”

In response to a query about the report, a NATO official said members of the alliance and its partners continue to contribute to its Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) program that funds the supply of U.S. arms for Kyiv.

“Equipment is continuously flowing into Ukraine,” the official added. “The amount pledged to PURL so far is of several billion U.S. dollars and we expect more contributions to follow.”

The Pentagon and the U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

In one example, the Dong Fang Hong 3, a research vessel operated by Ocean University of China, spent 2024 and 2025 sailing back and forth in the seas near Taiwan and the U.S. stronghold of Guam, and around strategic stretches of the Indian Ocean, ship-tracking data reviewed by Reuters shows.

In October 2024, it checked on a set of powerful Chinese ocean sensors capable of identifying undersea objects near Japan, according to Ocean University, and visited the same area again last May. And in March 2025, it criss-crossed the waters between Sri Lanka and Indonesia, covering approaches to the Malacca Strait, a critical chokepoint for maritime commerce.

According to the university, the ship was carrying out mud surveys and climate research. But a scientific paper co-written by Ocean University academics shows it has also conducted extensive deep-sea mapping.

Naval-warfare experts and U.S. Navy officials say the type of deep-sea data being collected by the Dong Fang Hong 3 – via mapping and placement of sensors in the ocean – is giving China a picture of the subsea conditions it would need to deploy its submarines more effectively and hunt down those of its adversaries.

The Dong Fang Hong 3 isn’t operating alone. It is part of a broader ocean mapping and monitoring operation involving dozens of research vessels and hundreds of sensors.

In tracing this effort, Reuters examined Chinese government and university records, including journal articles and scientific studies, and analyzed more than five years of movement by 42 research vessels active in the Pacific, Indian or Arctic oceans using a ship-tracking platform built by New Zealand company Starboard Maritime Intelligence.

While the research has civilian purposes – some of the surveying covers fishing grounds or areas where China has mineral prospecting contracts – it also serves a military one, according to nine naval-warfare experts who reviewed Reuters’ findings.

To gather information about underwater terrain, research vessels map the sea floor while traveling back and forth in tight lines. The tracking data shows that type of movement by the vessels Reuters tracked across large sections of the Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans.

At least eight of the vessels Reuters tracked have conducted seabed mapping, while another 10 have carried equipment used for mapping, according to a review of Chinese state media articles, vessel descriptions published by Chinese universities, and press releases by government organizations.

The vessels’ survey data “would be potentially invaluable in preparation of the battlespace” for Chinese submarines, said Peter Scott, a former chief of Australia’s submarine force. “Any military submariner worth his salt will put a great deal of effort into understanding the environment he’s operating in.”

The ship-tracking data show that China’s seabed-surveying effort is focused in part on militarily important waters around the Philippines, near Guam and Hawaii, and near U.S. military facilities on Wake atoll in the north Pacific.

“The scale of what they’re doing is about more than just resources,” said Jennifer Parker, an adjunct professor of defense and security at the University of Western Australia and former Australian anti-submarine warfare officer. “If you look at the sheer extent of it, it’s very clear that they intend to have an expeditionary blue-water naval capability that also is built around submarine operations.”

Moreover, Parker and other experts added, even where data is gathered for scientific purposes, the integration of civilian scientific research and military technology development has become a key focus of the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping. Beijing refers to this approach as “civil-military fusion.”

China’s ministries of defense, foreign affairs and natural resources didn’t respond to requests for comment about the seabed mapping and ocean-monitoring activities.

The U.S. Defense Department didn’t respond to questions from Reuters.

In testimony to a congressional commission this month, Rear Admiral Mike Brookes, the commander of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, said China had dramatically expanded its surveying efforts, providing data that “enables submarine navigation, concealment, and positioning of seabed sensors or weapons.”

He added that “potential military intelligence collection” by Chinese research vessels “represents a strategic concern.”

America recently overhauled its own efforts to map and monitor the ocean, but it typically does so with military vessels that are allowed to turn off the tracking system monitored by civilian software. China’s civilian survey ships also sometimes disable tracking, meaning its campaign may go further than Reuters could determine.

This is the first time the extent of China’s mapping and monitoring across the Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans has been reported. Previous reporting has revealed a portion of the effort around Guam and Taiwan, and in parts of the Indian Ocean.

“It is frankly astonishing to see the enormous scale of Chinese marine scientific research,” said Ryan Martinson, an associate professor specializing in Chinese maritime strategy at the U.S. Naval War College.

“For decades, the U.S. Navy could assume an asymmetric advantage in its knowledge of the ocean battlespace,” added Martinson. China’s efforts “threaten to erode that advantage. It is obviously deeply concerning.”

‘PARANOID ABOUT BEING BOXED IN’

The data that Chinese research vessels are collecting about the seabed and water conditions is critical to submarine operations and anti-submarine warfare, according to naval experts. Most obviously, said Australian defense scholar Parker, commanders need information about underwater terrain to avoid collisions and hide their vessels.

But that data is also essential for detecting submarines, which operate within a few hundred meters of the surface. Typically, submarines are identified through the sounds they emit or echoes from signals sent by sonar systems.

Tom Shugart, a former U.S. submarine commander who is now an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said the movement of those sound waves changes depending on the underwater landscape.

Sound waves and submarine movements are also affected by water temperature, salinity and currents.

The vessels involved belong to Chinese state entities like the Ministry of Natural Resources or state-affiliated research institutions like Ocean University, whose president in 2021 publicly celebrated its “close ties” to China’s navy and commitment to “the construction of a maritime power and national defense.” The university didn’t respond to a request for comment.

China has done its most comprehensive ocean surveying east of the Philippines, which sits along the First Island Chain, the string of territories largely controlled by America’s allies that runs from the Japanese islands in the north through Taiwan and on to Borneo in the south. The chain forms a natural barrier between China’s coastal seas and the Pacific.

“They’re paranoid about being boxed in to the First Island Chain,” said Peter Leavy, formerly Australia’s naval attache to the U.S. and now president of the Australian Naval Institute. China’s mapping “indicates a desire to understand the maritime domain so they can break out.”

The tracking data shows that China’s mapping also covers waters surrounding Guam – where some American nuclear submarines are stationed.

Strikingly, Chinese vessels have also mapped waters around Hawaii, one of America’s other regional military hubs; examined an underwater ridge north of a naval base in Papua New Guinea to which the U.S. recently gained access; and scouted around Christmas Island, an Australian territory on a route between the South China Sea and a vital Australian submarine base.

China’s efforts extend further. It has mapped large swaths of the Indian Ocean, a critical route for Chinese imports of oil and other resources from the Middle East and Africa.

“China has some key vulnerabilities when it comes to dependencies on maritime trade,” said Parker, the former anti-submarine warfare officer. The surveying “indicates that they will likely be conducting more submarine operations in the Indian Ocean.”

China’s vessels have also mapped the seabed west and north of Alaska, an essential sea route into the Arctic. Beijing has identified the Arctic as a strategic frontier and declared its ambition to become a polar great power by the 2030s.

The extensive surveying and Beijing’s growing undersea capability are “symptomatic of China’s rise as a premier maritime power,” said Shugart, the former submarine commander.

A ‘TRANSPARENT OCEAN’

Around 2014, Wu Lixin, a scientist at Ocean University, proposed an ambitious effort to create a “transparent ocean” by deploying sensors that would give China a comprehensive view of water conditions and movement through specific areas, according to a statement published by the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Sciences. The proposal quickly received at least $85 million in support from the Shandong provincial government, according to comments by Shandong officials.

The project began in the South China Sea, where Ocean University public statements boast it has now built an observation system covering the deep-sea basin.

Brookes, the director of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, told the congressional commission that China is building undersea surveillance networks that “gather hydrographic data – water temperature, salinity, currents – to optimize sonar performance and enable persistent surveillance of submarines transiting critical waterways like the South China Sea.”

After surveying the South China Sea, Chinese scientists expanded the transparent ocean project to the Pacific and Indian oceans. In the Pacific, records from the Chinese Ministry of Natural Resources, Ocean University and the Shandong government show that China has deployed hundreds of sensors, buoys and subsea arrays to detect changes in water conditions like temperature, salinity and subsea movement through the ocean east of Japan, east of the Philippines, and around Guam.

In the Indian Ocean, documents from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Ministry of Natural Resources describe a sensor array ringing India and Sri Lanka, including along an underwater mountain range known as Ninety East Ridge. The ridge – which Chinese vessels have also combed, according to the Starboard data – is one of the world’s longest undersea mountain ranges and sits astride the approach to the strategically essential Malacca Strait, through which much of China’s oil supply passes.

Ocean University and the Institute of Oceanology, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have said the wider network of sensors now provides China with real-time data about water conditions and subsea movements.

Some naval-warfare experts expressed caution about that claim, given technical challenges with real-time communication of data from underwater. But even delayed data is valuable, Parker said, as it could help China detect U.S. submarine operations.

Many sensors are placed in sensitive locations. For example, Reuters recently reported on a U.S. effort to fortify a key strait between Taiwan and the Philippines to cut off Chinese access to the Pacific. Ocean University studies show that China has deployed advanced sensors in parts of the strait through which U.S. submarines would move to reach the South China Sea.

Chinese scientists say these sensors monitor changes in climate and ocean conditions. But in 2017, government officials from Shandong province said the transparent ocean project was intended to “ensure maritime defense and security” and explicitly compared the project with a U.S. military effort to build an American ocean-sensor network.

Shandong’s government, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Oceanology didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mapping-program founder Wu now oversees the network through the Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, whose partners include China’s Naval Submarine Academy, according to the academy’s website. Wu didn’t respond to Reuters questions.

‘NEW TYPES OF COMBAT CAPABILITIES’

Together, China’s mapping and monitoring give it sophisticated tools to detect rival submarines and deploy its own in some of the world’s most contested waters.

“This is a manifestation of China’s far-seas reach,” said Collin Koh, a senior fellow in maritime security at Singapore’s RSIS Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies. “They now have a reasonably good picture of the maritime domain they hope to operate in, either in peacetime or in war.”

Chinese researchers, similarly, see strategic value in their work. Zhou Chun, an Ocean University researcher who oversees the Indian and Pacific ocean sensor arrays, was quoted last year in an Ocean University press release as saying that his work had shown him “the rapid development of my country’s maritime defense and military capabilities.” He didn’t respond to Reuters questions.

Going forward, Zhou pledged to “transform the most advanced scientific and technological achievements into new types of combat capabilities for our military at sea.”

Both Bahrain and Washington have blamed an Iranian drone attack for the March 9 blast, which the Gulf kingdom said injured 32 people including children, some seriously. Commenting on the day of the attack, U.S. Central Command said on X that an Iranian drone struck a residential neighborhood in Bahrain.

In response to questions from Reuters, Bahrain on Saturday acknowledged for the first time that a Patriot missile was involved in the explosion over the Mahazza neighborhood on Sitra island, offshore from the capital Manama and also home to an oil refinery.

In a statement, a Bahraini government spokesperson said the missile successfully intercepted an Iranian drone mid-air, saving lives.

“The damage and injuries sustained were not a result of a direct impact to the ground of either the Patriot interceptor or the Iranian drone,” the spokesperson said.

Neither Bahrain or Washington has provided evidence that an Iranian drone was involved in the Mahazza incident.

The use of costly, advanced weaponry to defend against attacks by far cheaper drones has been a defining feature of the war. The incident points to the risks and limitations of this strategy: The blast from the powerful Patriot, whether or not it intercepted a drone, contributed to widespread damage and casualties, while Bahrain’s air defenses were unable to prevent strikes that night on the nearby oil refinery, which declared force majeure hours later.

When asked for comment, the Pentagon referred Reuters to Central Command, which did not immediately reply to questions.

In response to questions sent to the White House, a senior U.S. official said the United States was “crushing” Iran’s ability to shoot or produce drones and missiles. “We will continue to address these threats to our country and our allies,” the official said, adding that the U.S. military “never targets civilians.” The official did not answer specific questions about the Patriot attack.

On February 28, the first day of U.S. strikes on Iran, an Iranian girls school took a direct hit. Investigators at the U.S. Defense Department believe U.S. forces were likely responsible, Reuters first reported, possibly because of outdated targeting data, two U.S. sources previously told the news agency.

Video of the aftermath of the Mahazza blast in Bahrain verified by Reuters shows rubble around houses, a thick layer of dust in the streets, an injured man and screaming residents.

Both Bahrain and the United States operate U.S. Patriot air defense batteries in the kingdom, a close U.S. ally located on the Persian Gulf that hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet along with the regional U.S. naval command.

Bahrain plays a critical role in the security of the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint that carries about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas and has been almost entirely closed by Iran, causing unprecedented disruption to world oil supplies.

On the night of the explosion in Mahazza, the refinery on Sitra came under Iranian attack, according to Bahraini national oil company Bapco. Videos show smoke rising from the facility on the morning of March 9.

Reuters could not establish whether the cause of the explosion during a night of Iranian attacks on Sitra would have been immediately apparent to U.S. and Bahraini forces. Bahrain in its statement did not say why it had not mentioned the involvement of a Patriot at the time. Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the incident.

Produced by Raytheon, part of RTX Corp. [RTX], the Patriot is the U.S. Army’s primary high-to-medium-range aircraft-and-missile interceptor system and forms the backbone of U.S. and allied air defenses. Raytheon didn’t respond to a request for comment about the incident.

Bahrain’s government declined to say whether the missile that detonated on March 9, was fired by its own forces or by the United States.

But research associates Sam Lair and Michael Duitsman and Professor Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey concluded with moderate-to-high confidence that the suspect missile was likely launched from a U.S. Patriot battery located about 4 miles (7 km) to the southwest of the Mahazza neighborhood.

The conclusions of the three American munitions and open-source intelligence researchers, reported here for the first time, were based on their review of open-source visuals and commercial satellite imagery.

Reuters showed the Middlebury analysis to two target-analysis experts and one Patriot system missile researcher, who found no reason to dispute its conclusion.

One of them, Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting advisor and policy analyst at the Pentagon, said Lair, Duitsman and Lewis’s conclusions were “pretty undeniable.”

Key to the Middlebury analysis was a video shot from an apartment building and shared on social media. The video shows the suspect Patriot roaring across the night sky at low altitude on a northeastern trajectory. It then angled downward and out of sight. A flash of light in the distance appeared to mark its detonation 1.3 seconds later.

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley specializing in digital forensics, reviewed the video for Reuters to determine if it was generated by artificial intelligence. He found “no obvious evidence that the video is fake.”

Lair, Duitsman and Lewis geolocated the video to a neighborhood in Riffa, Bahrain’s second-largest city. Reuters confirmed the geolocation. The earliest post of the video Reuters could find online was at around 2 am local time on March 9.

“The Riffa site’s location and orientation are consistent with the trajectory” of that of the suspect Patriot, the analysis said.

Multiple videos posted to social media the morning of March 9 show damage to residences in Block 602 of the Mahazza neighborhood. The researchers first geolocated the visuals using landmarks that appeared to match commercial satellite imagery of the area and visible street addresses. Reuters independently verified the geolocation.

The researchers then traced the trajectory of the suspect missile from Block 602 straight back to what they assessed – based on commercial satellite imagery – was the U.S. Patriot battery based less than half a mile from where the video of the missile in flight was recorded in Riffa.

A battery consists of a radar unit, a command hub and up to eight launchers that are integrated to detect, track and intercept aircraft and missiles.

Using commercial satellite imagery, the researchers determined that five launchers were visible at the Riffa site two days before the March 9 incident.

The battery has been there since at least 2009, according to satellite imagery. The Bahraini Defense Force did not start operating its own Patriot systems until 2024, according to a Lockheed Martin press release.

The Riffa site has features that are both distinctive to U.S. Patriot batteries in the region and different from those of known Bahrain-operated batteries, the researchers said, including protective walls, unpaved roads and a lack of permanent buildings. Based on these elements, the researchers concluded that the battery is likely operated by the United States, which uses Patriots to defend its naval sites in Bahrain.

The researchers were unable to say with confidence what caused the Patriot to explode. But they added that based on the available evidence, including the pattern and spread of damage on the ground, it appeared to have detonated mid-flight.

They concluded that it was possible the Patriot was aimed at a low-flying drone and that the combined explosion of the missile and drone ignited the blast, the analysis said.

“If this was the case, this was an irresponsible intercept attempt as it endangered the lives and the homes of allied civilians in a residential area,” the analysis said

This scenario matches what Bahrain’s government spokesperson said happened: that the Patriot intercepted an Iranian drone and both detonated in the air.

However, the analysis said, the direction of the damage and the lack of available evidence of a drone over the neighborhood suggested another scenario, that “the explosion was the result of the detonation of the warhead and unexpended propellant of a Patriot interceptor.”

Despite the claim by Bahrain, the researchers said it was less likely the missile made contact with a drone. Reuters could not independently verify the presence or not of an Iranian drone during the incident.

The analysis said that videos taken after the attack and photographs released by Bahrani authorities show that the blast damage was concentrated along four streets of Mahazza.

A Bahrain television news broadcast on March 9 and a government press release showed an extensively damaged home about 400 feet (120 meters) from the center of the main blast area, with interior photos showing holes in a wall created by shrapnel, the analysis said.

When all the damage is considered together, the Middlebury analysis noted, it matches what one would expect if a Patriot missile exploded in the air over a road intersection in the neighborhood. Pieces of the missile then flew about 120 meters farther and hit another house, the analysis said.

Robert Maher, an audio specialist who reviewed the video at the request of Reuters, said his analysis supports the approximate location of the explosion over the damaged homes.

In the video, a flash is seen about eight seconds in, but an explosion is never heard before the clip ends 19 seconds later. That’s because light travels faster than sound. Based on how long the sound would take to reach the person who shot the video, the explosion had to be more than four miles away. The damaged homes were about 4.6 miles (7.4 km) away, which fits with the timing.

Maher said that in the audio from the video he heard no drones or other missiles, although their sounds would have been faint or inaudible if they were more than four miles away from where the video was taken.

“I don’t see anything that is inconsistent with my observations from the audio,” Maher said after reviewing the Middlebury analysis.

Defense and industry officials say Patriot misfires are rare, but they do happen, including an errant missile in 2007 that hit a farm in Qatar.

In an X post on March 9, U.S. Central Command denounced Iranian and Russian news reports that said the incident in Mahazza was the result of a failed Patriot, calling it a “LIE.” It said an Iranian drone struck a residential neighborhood.

Reuters and the Middlebury researchers were unable to obtain or review any visual evidence of missile or drone fragments. Reuters attempted to contact witnesses in Bahrain, but several people declined to speak, citing fear of reprisals. Human Rights Watch has documented arrests of people in Bahrain during the war for posting videos on social media of attacks.

In the video of the suspect missile in flight, the Patriot appears to pass a much steeper smoke trail that the researchers said likely belonged to a first interceptor fired moments earlier.

Patriots are often fired in pairs to increase the chances that one hits the target. Neither the researchers or Reuters could establish what happened to the first missile.

The low trajectory of the second missile and its deviation from the route of the earlier launch could be signs of a possible problem, the researchers said. But they could not rule out the possibility that it was shot in that direction on purpose.

Bahrain’s spokesperson said any suggestion of malfunction or misfiring of the Patriots in Bahrain “was factually incorrect.”

In remarks to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard focused heavily on the threat of foreign terror groups with Islamist ideology to the U.S. and to “Western civilization.”

The phrase, while absent from recent threat reports, “fits the broader approach the administration has taken to U.S. allies in Europe, which is arguing that the threat is to Western civilization from immigrants,” according to Daniel Byman, director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The spread of Islamist ideology, in some cases led by individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, poses a fundamental threat to freedom and foundational principles that underpin Western civilization,” Gabbard said Wednesday. “Islamist groups and individuals use this ideology for recruiting and financial support for terrorist groups and individuals around the world, and to advance their political objectives of establishing an Islamist caliphate which governs based on Sharia [law].”

The report highlights the risks posed by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group working closely with the Iranian regime and currently fighting Israeli forces that have launched operations inside southern Lebanon. Hezbollah has been a critical actor in regional conflict, recently in the Syrian civil war and launching attacks against Israel in support of the Palestinian group Hamas.

Hezbollah has been severely degraded over the past two years, as Israel has wiped out much of its top political and military leadership. Still, the Lebanese state has thus far failed to reach an agreement to disarm the group.

Since the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah also lacks a reliable conduit for trade with Iran, although some smuggling continues. Additionally, the group may have been responsible for a drone attack on a British air base in Cyprus earlier this month.

Iranian proxy groups like Kataib Hezbollah and other militias, also referenced in the report, do pose a threat to U.S. assets and military installations in Iraq in particular, as they have for several years. The ongoing joint U.S.-Israeli operation against Iran means the threat of such attacks has increased.

The report’s other major concerns, including ISIS- and Al Qaeda-linked groups in Africa, likely pose more of a threat within their regional or national contexts.

ISIS is still active in parts of Syria, and could present a more significant threat in a nation struggling to stabilize and avoid civil war after decades of dictatorship.

Other ISIS-linked groups, like ISIS-Khorasan in Southwest Asia, have presented capabilities of attacking internationally in the past, though recent attacks have been more confined to regional focus points.

African groups, such Al Shabaab in the Horn of Africa and Boko Haram in Nigeria, continue to pose threats as well.

“Locally, a number of these groups are doing very well,” Byman said. “They’ve been conquering territory. They’re threatening capitals in some areas, [but] they don’t seem to have a huge or particularly active international presence.”

“As reported by U.S. CENTCOM yesterday, the US military dropped 5,000 pound penetrator weapons into underground storage facilities storing coastal defense cruise missiles and other support equipment,” Caine said at a Pentagon briefing with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “These weapons are bespokely designed to get through concrete and/or rocks and function after penetrating those barriers.”

Coastal defense cruise missiles, which Iran has deployed along its coastline to target naval and commercial vessels transiting the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, have been a recurring focus of U.S. strikes since Operation Epic Fury began on Feb. 28.

The munitions are consistent with the GBU-72 Advanced 5K Penetrator, a bunker-buster, which U.S. officials confirmed made its combat debut in similar strikes on hardened coastal missile sites near the strait on Tuesday, The War Zone first reported.

The GBU-72 is a precision-guided, deep-burial defeat weapon designed for hardened and deeply buried targets. It uses GPS guidance and a high-explosive warhead optimized for post-penetration detonation. Developed to replace the GBU-28, which has been in service since 1991, the Air Force expects the GBU-72 to offer substantially higher lethality against deeply buried and fortified targets.

‘It takes money to kill bad guys’: Pentagon seeks $200 billion in new funding for war in Iran

Caine said U.S. forces are expanding operations eastward, penetrating deeper into Iranian airspace to hunt one-way attack drone units and eliminate remaining maritime threats. He said forces have also continued to hunt and destroy mine storage facilities and naval ammunition depots across the region.

“To date, we’ve struck over 7,000 targets across Iran and its military infrastructure,” Hegseth said, adding that Thursday’s operations would feature “the largest strike package yet, just like yesterday was.”

Caine also said U.S. forces have continued to expand maritime operations since the campaign began.

“We continue to hunt and kill afloat assets, including more than 120 vessels and 44 mine layers,” he said.

The Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply transits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration — has been a central focus of Epic Fury operations.

Pentagon officials did not provide battle damage assessments or further details on munitions expenditure at Thursday’s briefing.

For decades, the U.S. military’s dream of high-energy laser weapons has been perpetually “five years away.”

Now, the Pentagon says it wants to finally make them an operational reality within the next three.

Speaking on a panel at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Pacific Operational Science and Technology conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, on March 9, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies Michael Dodd stated that the Defense Department plans on fielding directed energy weapons such as lasers and high-powered microwaves at scale within the next 36 months to defend service members from the threat of hostile drones, National Defense magazine reports.

While the Pentagon has deployed a handful of laser weapons overseas in recent years for operational testing and officially designated “scaled directed energy” as a critical technology area in November, this accelerated push for widespread fielding comes as U.S. forces engaged in the Operation Epic Fury struggle to counter waves of Iranian Shahed drones raining down across the Middle East, according to fellow panelist Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering James Mazol.

“We need to be able to deal with mass, and we need to be able to defeat mass that’s coming at us,” Mazol said, per National Defense.

These ambitions appear to have support at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Speaking at a White House press conference on Epic Fury on March 9, President Donald Trump touted the potential of laser weapons as a cheaper alternative to the pricey interceptor missiles U.S. forces currently rely on to counter drones and other aerial threats.

“The laser technology that we have now is incredible,” Trump, who previously declared laser weapons a key feature of his proposed “Trump-class” battleship, said. “It’s coming out pretty soon. Where literally lasers will do the work of, at a lot less cost, what the Patriots are doing and what other things are doing.”

Trump: "The laser technology that we have now is incredible. It's coming out pretty soon. Where literally lasers will do the work of, at a lot less cost, what the Patriots are doing and what other things are doing." pic.twitter.com/ugxLmwZ2c7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 9, 2026

That cost difference is at the heart of the Pentagon’s growing interest in directed energy. A single Patriot PAC-3 interceptor can cost more than $3 million, while the Iranian Shahed drones pummeling battlefields across the Middle East often runs between $20,000 and $50,000 — a punishing asymmetry for conventional militaries.

Directed energy weapons like high-energy lasers promise to invert this equation, with each shot requiring little more than the electricity required to generate the beam. And while laser weapons have clear limitations, they offer a potentially attractive complement to traditional missiles and other kinetic interceptors for countering the threat of low-cost weaponized drones.

This Pentagon-level push to field directed energy weapons comes as the military services have accelerated their own laser programs. Senior U.S. Navy leaders recently trumpeted their vision of “a laser on every ship” in the surface fleet, a notable shift from the caution that previously defined the service’s approach to directed energy.

The U.S. Army has laid out draft requirements to “produce and rapidly field” up to 24 new Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) systems in what might finally become the service’s first program of record. The Air Force is taking another run at both airborne laser weapons and ground-based systems for base defense after years of disappointment. The Marine Corps says it plans on investing in a “more deliberate program of record” for laser weapons, as a service spokesman previously told Laser Wars.

The Army and Navy are even teaming up on a brand new laser weapon system as part of Trump’s ambitious “Golden Dome for America” missile shield. All of this is occurring against the backdrop of $250 million infusion of funding for directed energy research and development included in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” reconciliation package the president signed into law in July 2025.

Taken together, these efforts may represent the Pentagon’s most serious attempt to transition laser weapons from experimental prototypes to routine military capabilities since President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983.

But while the R&D breakthroughs required for the orbital laser weapons envisioned by Reagan’s “Star Wars” never materialized, the technology has now advanced to the point where they are burning drones out of the sky in active conflict zones — and, occasionally, at home. Adaptive optics, more efficient power systems, improved thermal management and AI-assisted targeting have now converged to make laser weapons reliable and compact enough for real-world operations.

Transitioning laser weapons into fully funded military programs is as much a matter of institutional will as technological maturity. Many next-generation defense technologies end up languishing in the “valley of death” between R&D and acquisition because of shifting priorities or a lack of political support from stakeholders in the Pentagon or Congress; just look at the Navy’s experience with its electromagnetic railgun, which the service abandoned in 2021 after spending nearly $1 billion over two decades.

With senior military leaders, service secretaries and the commander-in-chief extolling the virtues of laser weapons, the chances of these systems actually watching over combat formations downrange have rarely been higher.

The most significant challenge facing the Pentagon’s scaled directed energy ambitions is the “scale” part. As Laser Wars previously reported, the essential components of laser weapons require rare earth elements and other critical minerals, the global production and processing of which China dominates.

And even if those inputs were abundant, advanced manufacturing capacity is not: U.S. defense contractors like AV and nLight, as well as Australia’s Electro Optic Systems (EOS), have all announced plans to boost production of laser weapons in recent months, but those manufacturing expansions will take months to ramp up and outputs will likely remain modest at perhaps a handful of systems a year (five to 10 annually at EOS’s new hub in Singapore, for example).

This pales in comparison to, say, the hundreds of FIM-91 Stinger missiles and Coyote interceptors that defense prime Raytheon can churn out in the same period. Scaling laser weapons from prototypes to scores of systems will require a defense industrial base that largely does not yet exist.

Scaled directed energy is not a standalone solution for the U.S. military’s air defense woes. Laser weapons, after all, aren’t magic: They can be extremely effective against drones and other targets, but they still require precious seconds of dwell time to inflict catastrophic damage and their performance can degrade depending on atmospheric conditions.

This makes them best suited as one segment of a broader layered air defense architecture rather than a wholesale replacement for missiles and guns. In practice, this means pairing lasers with kinetic interceptors, electronic warfare systems and other specialized countermeasures, all coordinated through a unified command-and-control system that can assign the right weapon to the right target at the right moment. Lasers and other exotic directed energy systems may help solve the cost problem posed by drone attacks, but only by working as part of a larger air defense ecosystem designed to handle the full spectrum of aerial threats.

After decades of laser weapons promises, the Pentagon has given itself a deadline. Now it has to prove that it can deliver — fast.

The Ground Truth Symposium will be hosted on March 25 by the Peace Through Strength Institute, a foreign policy and defense think tank based in Washington.

The event promises to translate “Ukraine’s frontline reality into clearer congressional understanding of the war, the capabilities shaping it and the conditions required to help bring it to an end on terms consistent with both Ukraine’s survival and United States strategic interests,” according to a release.

Representatives from several Ukrainian drone units will participate in the symposium, including soldiers from the country’s most effective UAV squads like Lazar Group, the 12th Special Forces Brigade and the 414th UAV Brigade “Magyar’s Birds.”

Discussions are expected to focus on Ukraine’s expertise in drone tactics and technology, along with the best practices for integrating the newer class of weapons into countries’ existing air defense systems.

The heavy use of several types of drones by multiple countries since the start of the recent conflict in the Middle East, currently involving about a dozen countries, will be a major talking point.

“Ukraine’s experience offers critical lessons for the United States and its allies — lessons the United States and our allies need now in the Iranian conflict,” the event’s press release stated.

Ukraine first made the shift to cheap interceptors not by choice, but because Russia’s nightly Shahed waves were burning through Western-provided missiles faster than allies could resupply them.

Last month, Ukrainian interceptors destroyed more than 70% of incoming Shaheds over Kyiv, freeing scarce Patriot missiles for the ballistic threats they were designed to stop.

Interceptor drones are small, fast, semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft — often costing between $1,000 and $2,500 each — designed to hunt and destroy incoming drones by ramming into them or detonating alongside them at altitude.

Compact enough to fit inside a duffel bag and fast enough to chase a Shahed in the dark, Ukraine’s interceptors can fly at speeds between 195 and 280 miles per hour, depending on the model.

Most combine thermal imaging with radar tracking and AI-assisted guidance, with a human operator taking manual control for the final seconds of the intercept.

“You don’t have time,” Andrii Hrytseniuk, the CEO of Brave1, recalled telling officials in recent years. “Shahed [drones] will come not only to Ukraine, but to other countries. You need to use your time not to stick to previous conventional warfare, but to work on the new era.”

Brave1 was established in 2023 as Ukraine’s state-backed defense innovation hub, which funds, tests, and fast-tracks new military technology from hundreds of Ukrainian startups.

Three years after Brave1’s formation, the Iran war has made Hrytseniuk’s warning prescient.

In the first week alone, the U.S. and Israel struck more than 3,000 targets across Iran while Tehran fired over 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones at U.S. bases and Israeli cities across 12 countries, burning through over 800 Patriot interceptor missiles in three days — more than Ukraine received from allies throughout four years of war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pointed out on Thursday.

“And we are not slowing down,” U.S. Central Command posted on X the next day.

The conflict has since drawn in at least a dozen countries and put Ukraine’s counter-drone expertise at the center of a global scramble, with the Pentagon and at least one Gulf state now in active talks to buy Ukrainian-made interceptor drones, according to Financial Times. An EU envoy, meanwhile, is reportedly brokering introductions between Gulf governments and Kyiv’s manufacturers.

“They are really asking for some help with interceptor drones specifically,” Hrytseniuk told Military Times on Friday.

Ukraine first made the shift to cheap interceptors not by choice, but because Russia’s nightly Shahed waves were burning through Western-provided missiles faster than allies could resupply them.

Last month, Ukrainian interceptors destroyed more than 70% of incoming Shaheds over Kyiv, freeing scarce Patriot missiles for the ballistic threats they were designed to stop.

The irony is hard to ignore: the besieged country that spent four years begging for Patriot batteries to combat a nuclear power 10 times its size has quietly built a new layer of air defense at a fraction of the cost, according to The New York Times — and now Washington, which spent roughly $4 billion on missile defense interceptors in the first week of the Iran war alone, is calling Kyiv for help.

Interceptor drones are small, fast, semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft — often costing between $1,000 and $2,500 each — designed to hunt and destroy incoming drones by ramming into them or detonating alongside them at altitude.

Compact enough to fit inside a duffel bag and fast enough to chase a Shahed in the dark, Ukraine’s interceptors can fly at speeds between 195 and 280 miles per hour, depending on the model.

Most combine thermal imaging with radar tracking and AI-assisted guidance, with a human operator taking manual control for the final seconds of the intercept.

Ukraine now has more than 20 companies producing interceptor drones, the National Security and Defense Council announced in January.

“The most impressive thing is how far we have technically advanced,” Roman Yeremenko, a director at Aero Center, a Ukrainian full-cycle manufacturer that builds both drones and their ammunition, told Military Times earlier this week.

Modern Ukrainian interceptors started with Mavic scouts dropping jerry-rigged grenades — simple, improvised.

Then came FPV drones: first 7-inch frames, then 10, then 12. Aero Center’s first munition, Malyuk (“Baby”), weighed just 450 grams — enough for one or two Mavic drops.

“But the troops kept asking for more capabilities,” Yeremenko said.

Then came “1 kg payloads, 1.5 kg, even bigger,” he said.

Engineers working long into the night learned to wire warheads directly to flight controllers, built initiation systems and moved into producing kamikaze FPVs.

What’s getting developed now? Heavy bombers carry 5–10 kg of ammunition and fly 25–35 miles regularly, according to Yeremenko.

“This is a war of technology,” he said. “And the one who is ahead will win this war.”

Several Ukrainian companies are now fielding systems with combat records no Western manufacturer can match.

Wild Hornets' Sting has been in combat longer than any other Ukrainian interceptor.

A spokesman for the group told CBS News last week that the $2,500 FPV drone has downed 3,900 drones since May 2025 — including, the company says, the first confirmed downing of Russia’s jet-powered Geran-3 and a Shahed fitted with an air-to-air missile.

Reaching 195 mph with a thermal camera and AI-assisted terminal guidance, it can engage targets up to 15 miles away and fits in a standard duffel bag.

At the lowest price point is SkyFall’s P1-SUN, a fiber-optic Shahed hunter on a 3D-printed modular airframe that costs Ukrainian units just $1,000 a pop.

A company representative recently told Reuters that the drone, which SkyFall says has been upgraded to 280-mph capabilities with computer vision and thermal imaging, has downed more than 1,500 Shaheds and 1,000 other drones in four months — and is a hot ticket item internationally since Iran came under fire.

Then there is Ukrspecsystems' Octopus, now built under license by more than 15 Ukrainian manufacturers and, since November, at a new factory in the United Kingdom.

It flies at night, cuts through electronic jamming at up to 4,500 meters, and locks onto targets autonomously — the kind of all-conditions reliability that made it the MoD’s pick for mass production.

The UK deal marked the first time a Western government licensed a Ukrainian-designed interceptor for domestic production, a model that five NATO countries — Germany, France, Italy, Poland and the UK — have since agreed to build on by jointly developing affordable interceptor drones of their own, per Militarnyi.

Not every system follows the same blueprint. Aero Center is teaming up with Dwarf Engineering, a software company focused on creating multiplatform mission control systems for UAVs, to build a comprehensive interceptor drone package for Ukrainian units and international partners that includes the drone, payload and software needed to integrate it into current air defense systems.

It’s a different approach to development entirely, Ihor Matviyuk, who heads Aero Center Drones, Aero Center’s subsidiary UAV division, told Military Times.

“An extra 100 grams [on a combat drone] can mean minus two kilometers range,” Vladyslav Piotrovskyi, Dwarf Engineering’s CEO, told Military Times on Friday.

Piotrovskyi added that the trade-off only works if all three components are optimized as one.

But every groundbreaking interceptor system in Ukraine’s arsenal faces the same expiration window.

Russia’s latest strike drone, the feared Geran-5, can reach speeds up to 370 mph — technically fast enough to outrun every Ukrainian interceptor currently in service, according to Business Insider — and they grow deadlier every day.

“The Russians are trying. They are not as stupid as they look,” Yeremenko told Military Times. “They are adapting to our means of destruction.”

Ukrainian and Russian tech becomes outdated every six weeks on average, the drone experts explained, so Ukraine cannot stand still.

Aero Center is now building medium-class drones with payloads up to 10 kilograms and ranges of roughly 25 kilometers — “middle-sized drones, but with the functions and features of big bombers” — designed for a battlefield where the threat evolves faster than any single airframe can answer, the company’s UAV expert said.

Ukraine has already learned how to build and integrate an entirely new air defense system in an asymmetric war. Now, it’s offering the playbook to allies — in exchange for the kind of help Kyiv still cannot produce on its own.

“We are ready to help. We are suggesting help,” Brave1’s CEO told Military Times. “For us, it’s important to have an alliance that is strong — to stop the war and prevent the start of new wars.”

Alongside an image of a burning Shahed posted Friday on X, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense spelled out its current offer to the West:

“We can help you fight against Shaheds. Help us fight against ballistic missiles.”

Shortly before the statement shared at Tuesday’s press briefing, he said “the last 24 hours have seen Iran fire the lowest amount of missiles they have fired yet.”

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. forces hit more than 5,000 targets, and that their three objectives included destruction of Iranian ballistic missile and drone capability; hitting Iran’s navy to allow movement through the Strait of Hormuz; and hitting “deeper into Iran’s military and industrial base.”

The rhetoric was equally sharp from Tehran. Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, said on X that Iran was “definitely not looking for a ceasefire.”

“We believe that the aggressor should be punched in the mouth so that he learns a lesson so that he will never think of attacking our beloved Iran again,” he said.

Another top Iranian security official, Ali Larijani, appeared to threaten U.S. President Donald Trump himself, writing on X that “Iran doesn’t fear your empty threats. Even those bigger than you couldn’t eliminate Iran. Be careful not to get eliminated yourself.”

Iran has been accused of plotting attempts to kill Trump in the past.

Witnesses reported hearing several explosions in Tehran in the afternoon as Israel commenced a new wave of airstrikes.

Attacks aimed at pressuring the US

Along with firing missiles and drones at Israel and at American bases in the region, Iran has also been targeting energy infrastructure and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for traded oil, sending oil prices soaring. The attacks appear aimed at generating enough global economic pain to pressure the U.S. and Israel to end their strikes.

Brent crude, the international standard, spiked to nearly $120 on Monday before falling back but was still at around $90 a barrel on Tuesday, nearly 24% higher than when the war started on Feb. 28.

Trump, who has previously said that the war could last for a month or longer, sought to downplay growing fears that it could take even longer, saying it was “going to be a short-term excursion.”

Still, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed the strikes on Iran would continue.

“Our aim is to bring the Iranian people to cast off the yoke of tyranny, (but) ultimately it depends on them,” Netanyahu said during a meeting with Israel’s hospital and health system leaders. “There is no doubt that with the actions taken so far, we are breaking their bones.”

Since the war began, at least 1,230 people have been killed in Iran, at least 397 in Lebanon and 11 in Israel, according to officials.

Seven U.S. service members have been killed.

The Pentagon said in a statement Thursday that it has “officially informed Anthropic leadership the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately.”

The decision appeared to shut down the opportunity for further negotiation with Anthropic, nearly a week after President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused the company of endangering national security.

Trump and Hegseth announced a series of threatened punishments last Friday, on the eve of the Iran war, after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down over concerns the company’s products could be used for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.

The San Francisco-based company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. It has previously vowed to sue if the Pentagon pursued what the company described as a “legally unsound” action “never before publicly applied to an American company.”

The Pentagon statement said “this has been about one fundamental principle: the military being able to use technology for all lawful purposes. The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command by restricting the lawful use of a critical capability and put our warfighters at risk.“

Some military contractors were already cutting ties with Anthropic, a rising star in the tech industry that sells Claude to a variety of businesses and government agencies. Lockheed Martin said it will “follow the President’s and the Department of War’s direction” and look to other providers of large language models.

“We expect minimal impacts as Lockheed Martin is not dependent on any single LLM vendor for any portion of our work,” the company said. It’s not yet clear if the designation aims to block Anthropic’s use by all federal government contractors or just those that partner with the military.

The Pentagon’s decision to apply a rule designed to address supply threats posed by foreign adversaries was quickly met with criticism from both opponents and some supporters of Trump’s Republican administration. Federal codes have defined supply chain risk as a “risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert” a system in order to disrupt, degrade or spy on it.

U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee, called it “a dangerous misuse of a tool meant to address adversary-controlled technology.”

“This reckless action is shortsighted, self-destructive, and a gift to our adversaries,” she said in a written statement Thursday.

Neil Chilson, a Republican former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission who now leads AI policy at the Abundance Institute, said the decision looks like “massive overreach that would hurt both the U.S. AI sector and the military’s ability to acquire the best technology for the U.S. warfighter.”

Earlier in the day, a group of former defense and national security officials sent a letter to U.S. lawmakers expressing “serious concern” about the designation.

“The use of this authority against a domestic American company is a profound departure from its intended purpose and sets a dangerous precedent,” said the letter from former officials and policy experts, including former CIA director Michael Hayden and retired Air Force, Army and Navy leaders.

They added that such a designation is meant to “protect the United States from infiltration by foreign adversaries — from companies beholden to Beijing or Moscow, not from American innovators operating transparently under the rule of law. Applying this tool to penalize a U.S. firm for declining to remove safeguards against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons is a category error with consequences that extend far beyond this dispute.”

While losing its big partnerships with defense contractors, Anthropic experienced a surge of consumer downloads over the past week due to people siding with its moral stance. Anthropic has boasted of more than a million people signing up for Claude each day this week, lifting it past OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini as the top AI app in more than 20 countries in Apple’s app store.

The dispute with the Pentagon has also further deepened Anthropic’s bitter rivalry with OpenAI, which announced a Friday deal with the Pentagon to effectively replace Anthropic with ChatGPT in classified military environments.

OpenAI said it sought similar protections against domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons but later had to amend its agreements, leading CEO Sam Altman to say he shouldn’t have rushed a deal that “looked opportunistic and sloppy.”

The United States has spared “no expense or capability” to enhance air defense systems to protect American forces and allies in the Middle East, Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon days after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in a war that has widened throughout the region.

“This does not mean we can stop everything, but we ensured that the maximum possible defense and maximum possible force protection was set up before we went on offense,” he said.

The acknowledgment that additional drone or missile strikes in the region could cause damage and harm to troops comes as President Donald Trump and top defense leaders have warned that more American casualties were expected in a conflict that began Saturday and could last months.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration revealed that a U.S. submarine fired a torpedo that sank an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean.

‘The risk is still high’ to American troops

U.S. service members “remain in harm’s way, and we must be clear-eyed that the risk is still high,” Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the news conference with Hegseth.

Six soldiers were killed when an Iranian drone strike hit an operations center Sunday in the heart of a civilian port in Kuwait, more than 10 miles from the main Army base. The husband of one of the slain soldiers, who was part of a supply and logistics unit based in Iowa, says the center was a shipping container-style building and had no defenses.

Caine declined to answer a question about the possibility of deploying ground troops in Iran, which Trump has not ruled out.

“I’m not going to comment on U.S. boots on the ground,” Caine said. “I think that’s a question for policymakers. And I don’t make policy, I execute policy.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that it was “not part of the plan for this operation at this time” but noted that “I’m not going to remove an option for the president that is on the table.”

Hegseth suggests conflict could last up to 2 months

Hegseth also signaled a possible longer time frame for the conflict than has previously been floated by the administration, saying it could last eight weeks but that the U.S. has the munitions and the equipment to beat Iran in a war of attrition. He declined to set a specific time range, saying the specific duration of the war would depend on how it unfolds.

“You can say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight, it could be three,” Hegseth said. “Ultimately, we set the pace and the tempo. The enemy is off balance, and we’re going to keep them off balance.”

More forces are arriving in the region, including jet fighters and bombers, Hegseth said, and the U.S. “will take all the time we need to make sure that we succeed.”

Hegseth and Caine say US forces have enough munitions

Supplies of weaponry are not an issue, Hegseth and Caine said, with the defense secretary noting that the military used more advanced weapons at the start of the campaign but was switching to gravity bombs now that the U.S. has gained control of the Iranian sky. Stockpiles of the advanced weapons remain “extremely strong,” Hegseth said.

Caine said U.S. attacks on Iranian missile sites and other offensive targets have been successful enough that forces can strike deeper inland, allowing for the shift from sophisticated weapons that can be launched from far away to more traditional, precision bombs dropped by aircraft.

Caine said the U.S. has “sufficient precision munitions for the task at hand, both on the offense and defense.” He noted that the military would not be releasing quantities, citing operational security.

“Our air defenses and that of our allies have plenty of runway,” Hegseth said. “We can sustain this fight easily for as long as we need to.”

Trump said this week the campaign is likely to last four weeks to five weeks but he was prepared “to go far longer than that.”

The number of ballistic missiles fired by Iran is down 86% from the first day of the U.S. military’s campaign, with a 23% drop in the past 24 hours, Caine said Wednesday, and Iran’s use of one-way attack drones is down 73% from the opening days. The decrease could indicate that Iran is holding some weapons in reserve to prolong the conflict.

Americans scramble to depart the Mideast

The administration promoted its efforts to help Americans depart the region. It abruptly advised those in 14 countries to leave immediately even as the threat of missiles and drones closed airspace in the region and caused widespread flight cancellations.

The State Department said it has assisted nearly 6,500 Americans since the start of the war and was working to arrange charter flights or other transportation. Caine said the military has opened up available seats as military transport planes arrive “to try to help folks get out.”

The State Department said more than 17,500 Americans have returned to the United States from the Middle East since Saturday, including more than 8,500 on Tuesday alone, although it acknowledged that the vast majority of those used commercial transportation without any government assistance.

French President Emmanuel Macron called for an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting in response to the U.S. and Israeli strikes in Iran. Germany and the U.K. are holding their own emergency meetings Saturday to discuss the situation. The European Union is evacuating some staff from the region and European leaders are planning to coordinate further responses.

The responses come after the U.S. and Israel launched a major attack on targets across Iran, and U.S. President Donald Trump called on the Iranian people to “take over your government” — an extraordinary appeal that suggested they could be seeking to end the country’s theocracy after decades of tensions.

The strikes by the U.S. create a dilemma for its democratic allies. While European leaders firmly oppose Iran’s nuclear program and crackdowns by its hard-line theocracy, they are loath to embrace unilateral military action by Trump that could breach international law and unleash a broader conflict.

Trump’s strikes on Iran last June, and the arrest of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro last month, caused a similar quandary.

It was unclear whether U.S. allies were given any advance warning of the attacks. The German government said it was only given notice Saturday morning. France’s junior defense minister said France knew something would happen, but didn’t know when.

“The escalation underway is dangerous for everyone. It must stop,″ Macron said in a statement. France, which has military presence in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan, would offer military aid to its partners in the Middle East, the president said.

“The outbreak of war among the United States, Israel and Iran has serious consequences for peace and international security,″ Macron said.

He called on Iran’s leadership to commit to negotiations on its nuclear and ballistic programs.

“The Iranian people should also be able to build their future freely. The massacres perpetrated by the Islamic regime disqualify it, and necessitate that the people be given a voice.”

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer chaired a meeting of the government’s emergency committee on Saturday morning.

“We do not want to see further escalation into a wider regional conflict,” a U.K. government spokesperson said, reiterating Britain’s support for a negotiated solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Britain was not involved in the strikes.

The German government’s crisis management team was also due to meet.

Concern of ‘new, extensive’ war

Responding to the attack, the European Union’s top diplomat called the conflict in the Middle East “perilous” and said she was working with Israeli and Arab officials to pursue a negotiated peace.

“Iran’s regime has killed thousands. Its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, along with support for terror groups, pose a serious threat to global security,” said Kaja Kallas, foreign policy chief of the 27-nation bloc, in a post on social media.

Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that he was concerned the failure of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran meant a “new, extensive war in the Middle East” would happen.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Madrid rejected “the unilateral military action by the United States and Israel, which represents an escalation and contributes to a more uncertain and hostile international order.” He said Spain “likewise” rejected the actions of the Iranian regime.

European Union leaders issued a joint statement Saturday calling for restraint and engaging in regional diplomacy in hopes of “ensuring nuclear safety.”

“We call on all parties to exercise maximum restraint, to protect civilians, and to fully respect international law,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa.

‘Totally irresponsible’

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons condemned the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran in harsher words.

“These attacks are totally irresponsible and risk provoking further escalation as well as increasing the danger of nuclear proliferation and the use of nuclear weapons,” said its executive director, Melissa Parke.

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim condemned Israeli strikes on Iran and accompanying U.S. military action, warning that the escalating conflict has pushed the Middle East to the “edge of catastrophe.”

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar on Saturday condemned what he described as “unwarranted attacks” on Iran during a phone call with his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry called the strikes “a pre-planned and unprovoked act of armed aggression against a sovereign and independent U.N. member state,” demanding an immediate halt to the military campaign and a return to diplomacy.

In a statement posted to Telegram, the ministry accused Washington and Tel Aviv of “hiding behind” concerns about Iran’s nuclear program while actually pursuing regime change.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he was designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a move that could prevent U.S. military vendors from working with the company.

Hegseth’s remarks, delivered in a social media post, came shortly after the Pentagon’s deadline for Anthropic to allow unrestricted military use of its AI technology or face consequences — and nearly 24 hours after CEO Dario Amodei said his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Defense Department’s demands.

Anthropic ‘cannot in good conscience accede’ to Pentagon’s demands, CEO says

Calling the company “Leftwing nut jobs,” President Donald Trump said Anthropic made a mistake trying to strong-arm the Pentagon. Trump wrote on Truth Social that most agencies must immediately stop using Anthropic’s AI but gave the Pentagon a six-month period to phase out the technology that is already embedded in military platforms.

At issue in the defense contract was a clash over AI’s role in national security. Anthropic had said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that Claude won’t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. But after months of private talks exploded into public debate, it said in a Thursday statement that new contract language “framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.”

Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, could afford to lose the contract. But an ultimatum this week from Hegseth posed broader risks at the peak of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer science research lab in San Francisco to one of the world’s most valuable startups. Military officials had warned Anthropic earlier in the week they could deem it “a supply chain risk,” a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries that could derail the company’s critical partnerships with other businesses.

Trump also said Anthropic could face “major civil and criminal consequences” if it’s not helpful in the phase-out period. Anthropic didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on the new developments.

The president’s decision was preceded by hours of top Trump appointees from the Pentagon and the State Department taking to social media to criticize Anthropic and slam their reluctance to acquiesce to the administration’s demands.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the penalties on Anthropic “combined with inflammatory rhetoric attacking that company, raises serious concerns about whether national security decisions are being driven by careful analysis or political considerations.”

The dispute stunned AI developers in Silicon Valley, where a growing number of workers from Anthropic’s top rivals, OpenAI and Google, voiced support for Amodei’s stand in open letters and other forums.

The move is likely to benefit Elon Musk’s competing chatbot, Grok, which the Pentagon plans to give access to classified military networks, and could serve as a warning to two other competitors, Google and OpenAI, that also have contracts to supply their AI tools to the military.

Musk sided with Trump’s administration on Friday, saying on his social media platform X that “Anthropic hates Western Civilization.”

But one of Amodei’s fiercest rivals, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, sided with Anthropic and questioned the Pentagon’s “threatening” move in a CNBC interview, suggesting that OpenAI and most of the AI field share the same red lines. Amodei once worked for OpenAI before he and other OpenAI leaders quit to form Anthropic in 2021.

“For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company, and I think they really do care about safety,” Altman told CNBC.

Retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan wrote on a social media that “painting a bullseye on Anthropic garners spicy headlines, but everyone loses in the end.”

Shanahan said Claude is already being widely used across the government, including in classified settings, and Anthropic’s red lines are “reasonable.” He said the AI large language models that power chatbots like Claude are also “not ready for prime time in national security settings,” particularly not for fully autonomous weapons.

“They’re not trying to play cute here,” he wrote Thursday on LinkedIn.

O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

The maker of the AI chatbot Claude said in a statement that it’s not walking away from negotiations, but that new contract language received from the Defense Department “made virtually no progress on preventing Claude’s use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons.”

The Pentagon’s top spokesman has reiterated that the military wants to use Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology in legal ways and will not let the company dictate any limits ahead of a Friday deadline to agree to its demands.

Sean Parnell said Thursday on social media that the Pentagon “has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement.”

Anthropic’s policies prevent its models, such as its chatbot Claude, from being used for those purposes. It’s the last of its peers — the Pentagon also has contracts with Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI — to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network.

Parnell said the Pentagon wants to “use Anthropic’s model for all lawful purposes” but didn’t offer details on what that entailed. He said opening up use of the technology would prevent the company from “jeopardizing critical military operations.”

“We will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions,” he said.

During a meeting on Tuesday between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Amodei, military officials warned that they could cancel Anthropic’s contract, designate the company as a supply chain risk, or invoke a Cold War-era law called the Defense Production Act to give the military more sweeping authority to use its products, even if the company doesn’t approve.

Amodei said Thursday that “those latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.”

Parnell left out the threatened use of the Defense Production Act in the Thursday post on X and said Anthropic has “until 5:01 PM ET on Friday to decide.”

“Otherwise, we will terminate our partnership with Anthropic and deem them a supply chain risk,” he wrote.

The talks that escalated this week began months ago. Amodei said that given “the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider.” But if they don’t, he said Anthropic “will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who is not seeking reelection, said Thursday that the Pentagon has been handling the matter unprofessionally while Anthropic is “trying to do their best to help us from ourselves.”

“Why in the hell are we having this discussion in public?” Tillis told reporters. “This is not the way you deal with a strategic vendor that has contracts.”

He added, “When a company is resisting a market opportunity for fear of negative consequences, you should listen to them and then behind closed doors figure out what they’re really trying to solve.”

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was “deeply disturbed” by reports that the Pentagon is “working to bully a leading U.S. company.”

“Unfortunately, this is further indication that the Department of Defense seeks to completely ignore AI governance,” Warner said in a statement. It “further underscores the need for Congress to enact strong, binding AI governance mechanisms for national security contexts.”

As Pentagon officials say they always will follow the law with their use of AI models, Hegseth told Fox News last February, weeks after becoming defense secretary, that “ultimately, we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything.”

Associated Press writer Ben Finley contributed to this report.

“It’s proven to be, over the years, not easy to make a meaningful deal with Iran, and we have to make a meaningful deal,” Trump has said. “Otherwise bad things happen.”

Trump likely will have a host of military options, which could include surgical attacks on Iran’s air defenses or strikes focused on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, experts say. But they warn that Iran could retaliate in ways it did not after attacks last year by the United States or Israel, potentially risking American lives and sparking a regional war.

“It will be very hard for the Trump administration to do a one-and-done kind of attack in Iran this time around,” said Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group. “Because the Iranians would respond in a way that would make all-out conflict inevitable.”

Trump has repeatedly threatened to use force to compel Iran to agree to constrain its nuclear program and, earlier, over Tehran’s bloody crackdown on nationwide protests.

Aircraft carriers bolster US presence

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and three guided-missile destroyers have been in the Arabian Sea since the end of January after being redirected from the South China Sea.

The strike group, which brought roughly 5,700 additional service members to the region, bolstered the smaller force of a few destroyers and three littoral combat ships already in the region.

Two weeks later, Trump ordered the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, along with three destroyers and more than 5,000 additional service members to head there.

This will bring the Navy’s presence in the region to at least 16 ships and it will dwarf the 11-ship fleet that was, until the Ford’s departure, stationed in the Caribbean Sea.

More aircraft have arrived

Numerous additional U.S. fighter jets and support aircraft also have touched down in the Middle East and bases in Europe.

More than 100 fighter jets, including F-35s, F-22s, F-15s and F-16s, left bases in the U.S. and Europe and were spotted heading toward the Middle East by the Military Air Tracking Alliance. That team of about 30 open-source analysts routinely analyzes military and government flight activity.

It says it also has tracked more than 100 fuel tankers and over 200 cargo planes heading into the region and bases in Europe in mid-February.

Adding to that force, the U.S. has moved 12 F-22 fighter jets to a base in Israel, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to detail sensitive military movements.

Satellite photos from Planet Labs PBC of Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan that were analyzed by The Associated Press showed more than 50 aircraft, nearly all likely part of the American buildup. There could be more in hangars.

Steffan Watkins, a researcher based in Canada and a member of the MATA, said he also has tracked support aircraft, like six of the military’s early-warning E-3 aircraft, head to a base in Saudi Arabia. Those are key for coordinating operations with a large number of aircraft.

The massive wave was preceded by the arrival of Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles. U.S. Central Command said on social media that the fighter jet “enhances combat readiness and promotes regional security and stability.”

At the time, analysts of flight-tracking data also noticed dozens of U.S. military cargo planes heading to the region.

The activity is similar to last year when the U.S. moved in air defense hardware, like a Patriot missile system, in anticipation of an Iranian counterattack after the June bombing of three key nuclear sites.

Iran launched more than a dozen missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar days after the strikes.

Expectations of retaliation

Seth Jones, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it’s important to note that the U.S. is not deploying a major ground force.

The U.S. deployed more than 500,000 troops during Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s and roughly 250,0000 American forces in Iraq in 2003.

“So, there are substantial limits to the force package,” he said of the current military assets in the region.

The U.S. military buildup is technically the region’s largest since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, even though the resources moved for the war dwarfed current assets, said Michael O’Hanlon, a defense and foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution.

O’Hanlon said the U.S. could simply use long-range B-2 bombers, as it had in June, if it wanted only to strike what is left of Iran’s nuclear program. The forces in place now are clearly designed for attacking targets in Iran and defending against retaliation.

Many likely expect Iran to “just keep firing drones and cruise missiles back at Israel and American bases in regard to almost anything we might do,” O’Hanlon said. But he said Iran could go bigger and broader, especially if its leadership feels targeted.

Vaez, the Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, said Iran is unlikely to limit its response as it did after the U.S. struck its nuclear facilities in June. Iran had signaled when and how it would retaliate with the attack on the military base in Qatar, allowing American and Qatari air defense to be ready and doing little damage.

“They have now come to the conclusion that the only way that they can stop this cycle is to draw blood and to inflict significant harm on the U.S. and Israel, even if that comes at a very high price for themselves,” Vaez said.

Behnam Ben Taleblu, Iran program senior director at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Iran is still believed to have ballistic missiles that can strike its enemies in the region.

“The Islamic Republic may think that would be a deterrent to Trump, whereas in reality, that might be an inducement to move the president from a limited operation to a larger one,” said Taleblu, whose think tank has long been critical of Iran and has been sanctioned by Tehran.

Defense officials in the Trump administration also warned they could designate Anthropic, which makes the AI chatbot Claude, as a supply chain risk — or invoke a Cold War-era law called the Defense Production Act to give the military more sweeping authority to use its products, even if the company doesn’t approve.

Some experts say that using the law this way would be unprecedented, and could bring future legal challenges. The government’s efforts to essentially force Anthropic’s hand also underscore a wider, contentious debate over AI’s role in national security.

Here’s what we know.

What is the Defense Production Act?

The Defense Production Act gives the federal government broad authority to direct private companies to meet the needs of national defense.

The act was signed by President Harry S. Truman in 1950, amid concerns about supplies and equipment during the Korean War. But over its now decades-long history, the law’s powers have been invoked not only in times of war but also for domestic emergency preparedness as well as recovery from terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

One of the act’s provisions allows the president to require companies to prioritize government contracts and orders deemed necessary for national defense, with the goal of ensuring the private sector is producing enough goods needed to meet a war effort or other national emergency.

Other provisions give the president the ability to use loans and additional incentives to increase production of critical goods, and authorize the government to establish voluntary agreements with private industry.

The DPA is “one of the government’s most powerful and adaptable industrial policy tools,” said Joel Dodge, an attorney and the director of industrial policy and economic security at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator.

Anthropic is the last of its AI peers to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network. Its CEO Dario Amodei repeatedly has made clear his ethical concerns about unchecked government use of AI, including the dangers of fully autonomous armed drones and of AI-assisted mass surveillance that could track dissent.

The Defense Department is considering invoking the DPA to give the military more authority to use Anthropic’s products, even if the company doesn’t approve of how, according to a person familiar with the matter and a senior Pentagon official.

That could mean forcing Anthropic to adapt its model to the Pentagon’s needs without built-in safety limits, or remove certain ethical restrictions from the company’s contract language.

Experts like Dodge say both would be “without precedent under the history of the DPA.”

“It’s a powerful law,” he said. ”(But) it has never been used to compel a company to produce a product that it’s deemed unsafe, or to dictate its terms of service.”

How has this law been used in the past?

Trump in his first term and former President Joe Biden invoked the DPA to boost supplies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. And during 2022’s nationwide baby formula shortage, Biden used the law to speed production of formula and authorize flights to import supply from overseas.

Biden also invoked the DPA in a 2023 executive order on AI, notably in efforts to require that companies share safety test results and other information with the government. Trump repealed the order at the start of his second term.

Decades ago, the administrations of both President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush used the DPA to ensure that electricity and natural gas shippers continued supplying California utilities amid an energy crisis.

And the law was used after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017 to prioritize contracts for food, bottled water, manufactured housing units and the restoration of electrical systems.

The DPA requires periodic reauthorization to remain in effect, which can expand or refine the scope of the law. According to congressional documents, its next expiration date is slated for Sept. 30 of this year. And depending on how the Defense Department’s reported demands unfold, Anthropic could be at the top of lawmakers’ minds.

Possible next steps for Anthropic

If the Defense Department uses the DPA provision aimed at prioritizing government contracts and ordering production of certain goods — which the Anthropic case suggests it will — a company can push back if the requested product isn’t something it already produces, Dodge and others say, or if it deems the terms to be unreasonable.

But the government may try and overrule that, notes Charlie Bullock, senior research fellow at the Institute for Law & AI.

“If neither side backs down, it seems realistic that there would be litigation between Anthropic and the government,” Bullock said.

Some have also noted tension between the Pentagon’s warning that it could designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk while also indicating that its products are so important to national defense that it needs to invoke the DPA — two assertions that seem at odds with each other.

“There are a lot of forces that I think the administration’s counting on that would lead Anthropic to just give in on Friday and agree with its terms,” Dodge said.

If there’s future litigation over a potential DPA order, Dodge doesn’t expect the government to prevail because “it seems very out of bounds under the text of the law.”

But if the administration is successful, or Anthropic simply agrees to new terms, that could open up “a Pandora’s box of what the government could do to assert power and control over private companies,” he added.