USNS Harvey Milk is renamed after a WWII sailor in the latest Pentagon diversity purge
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday that the USNS Harvey Milk will be renamed after a World War II sailor who received the Medal of Honor, stripping the ship of the name of a slain gay rights activist who served during the Korean War.
In a video posted to social media, Hegseth said he was 'taking the politics out of ship naming.'
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Wall Street Journal
26 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Taking Hegseth Seriously on ‘Fake News' and the Iran Strike
A former TV journalist may not be a defense secretary for all seasons, but Pete Hegseth proved his usefulness Thursday by telling what radio man Paul Harvey used to call the rest of the story. It concerned a preliminary, thinly based and cursory analysis by the Defense Intelligence Agency (one of 18 federal intelligence agencies) with a pessimistic account of the Iran strikes even as more valid information was pouring in about the recently-completed bombing mission. One might even ask if the essentially worthless review was commissioned to be leaked. Mr. Hegseth, in an understandable rant, referred to 'fake news' and the media's desire for grist and 'spin, spin, spin' to paint the Donald Trump-ordered strikes in a bad light. He's right. Even a decade from now some Americans will likely cling to the dismissive DIA report just as they cling to the Steele dossier because they want it to be true.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
US Air Force to retire all A-10s, cancel E-7 under 2026 spending plan
The Air Force wants to retire its final 162 A-10 Warthog attack jets in fiscal 2026, as part of a plan to divest 340 total aircraft. The Pentagon also plans to cancel the E-7 Wedgetail program over what an official said were 'significant delays' and cost increases. The service released its list of planned aircraft retirements as the Pentagon released its belated 2026 budget plan, which calls for a $211 billion discretionary budget for the Department of the Air Force. That includes a $184.9 billion discretionary budget for the U.S. Air Force itself, and a $26.1 billion discretionary budget for the Space Force. The Pentagon also wants to add another $38.6 billion in 'mandatory' spending as part of the budget reconciliation bill, which would include $24.7 billion for the Air Force and $13.8 billion for the Space Force. If that passes, the department would receive $249.5 billion in total funding, which would be a 17.2% increase over enacted spending in 2025. But if the reconciliation bill does not pass, and the administration's request is enacted unchanged, the Space Force would see an 8.7% cut in spending from 2025, while the Air Force's spending would be virtually flat from the $184.1 billion enacted in 2025. If Congress grants the Air Force all of its requested retirements, it would be the biggest aircraft retirement in years. The service said earlier this year that, in response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's order to cut and reallocate about 8% of defense spending, it planned to accelerate its plans to retire old and outdated aircraft. The plan to completely shutter the A-10 program would be a dramatic acceleration of the service's previous timeline, which would have retired all Warthogs by the end of this decade. And while lawmakers have in recent years acquiesced to Air Force requests to retire some Warthogs — after years of bitter disagreements between the service and Capitol Hill over the future utility of the jet — it remains far from clear whether Congress has the appetite to mothball all of the attack jets. In addition to the A-10s, the Air Force wants to retire 62 F-16Cs and Ds, 21 F-15Es, 13 F-15Cs and Ds, 14 C-130H Hercules cargo planes, and 3 EC-130H Compass Call electronic warfare planes. The service's retirement list also includes 14 KC-135 Stratotankers, 11 HH-60G combat rescue helicopters, 35 T-1 Texan trainers, 4 UH-1N helicopters and a B-1 Lancer. But the proposed retirement list does not include Block 20 F-22A Raptors, roughly 32 of which the Air Force has tried to retire in recent years over concerns that they are not combat-capable. Congress has repeatedly blocked those efforts. In a June 26 briefing with reporters, an Air Force official said the cost of an E-7 airborne battle management aircraft had grown from $588 million to $724 million, helping prompt its cancellation. The official said the department had concerns over whether it would survive in a contested environment. Instead, the Pentagon is looking for ways to accomplish the mission that would have been done by the Wedgetail with space-based assets, and adding more Northrop E-2D Hawkeye aircraft. This would be a major shift for the Air Force, which is retiring its aging E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control, or AWACS, aircraft and has for years seen the E-7 as the best successor. The budget would also call for $10.3 billion in spending for the B-21 Raider, the Northrop Grumman-made stealth bomber that will be capable of carrying nuclear weapons, and $4.2 billion for the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, which will replace the aging Minuteman III. Northrop is also building a Sentinel. Procurement funding for the B-21 would grow from $1.9 billion in 2025 to $2.6 billion in 2026, plus another $2.1 billion in reconciliation spending. If all spending is enacted by Congress, that would more than double the procurement budget for the Raider. The budget calls for $3.1 billion to keep procuring the F-15EX Eagle II, which the Air Force had previously considered winding down after 2025. The Pentagon next year wants to buy 21 of the Boeing-made jets, which are an updated version of the fourth-generation F-15E, up from 18 in 2025. The military plans to sharply cut its purchase of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to 47 across the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps in 2026. That would be down from 74 in 2025. For the Air Force, the F-35A procurement would be cut nearly in half, from 44 tails in 2025 to 24 next year. Air Force spending on the Lockheed Martin-made jet would drop from $4.5 billion this year to $3.6 billion in 2026. This would mean the Air Force would get 45 new fighters in 2026, which is below the benchmark of 72 annual fighter procurements the service says is necessary to modernize its fleet. The Pentagon said money that would have been spent on procuring more F-35s will instead go to sustainment of the jets, and ensuring it has a strong enough supply base to support all the needed operations and maintenance. The Pentagon also wants to dedicate money to ensuring the jets' Block 4 upgrades will stay on track. The Air Force's budget also includes $807 million in funding for its drone wingmen program, called Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which it hopes will accelerate development of platforms and autonomy. The service is also requesting a $73.2 billion discretionary budget and a $4.5 billion mandatory — or reconciliation bill — budget for operations and maintenance, $44.3 billion in discretionary spending and about $200 million in mandatory spending for personnel. The research development, test and evaluation budget would total $46.4 billion, including $36.2 billion in discretionary spending and $10.2 billion in mandatory spending. The F-47 fighter, also known as Next Generation Air Dominance, would see its R&D budget increase from $2.4 billion in 2025 to nearly $2.6 billion in 2026. If another $900 million in spending requested as part of the reconciliation bill passes, that would bring the Boeing-made F-47's budget to almost $3.5 billion. The service's total procurement budget request would reach $36.2 billion, or $26.5 billion in discretionary spending and $9.7 billion in reconciliation bill spending. With reconciliation spending included, the Air Force's procurement budget would include $24.8 billion for aircraft, $6.1 billion for missiles and $784 million for ammunition. The Air Force wants to buy 14 Boeing-made T-7A Red Hawk trainer aircraft for $362 million in 2026. But there would be no new funding for the E-7 airborne battle management aircraft, also made by Boeing, amid a disagreement between the service and top Pentagon leadership over whether space-based target tracking would be better than an airborne platform. The proposed budget would restore $387 million in funding for Lockheed's hypersonic AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon. This could resurrect a program that once seemed doomed after several failed tests in recent years. Procurement spending on the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP — which was used for the first time last weekend to strike multiple Iranian nuclear sites — would be slightly lower in 2026. The Air Force has nearly $8.6 million budgeted for the MOP in 2025, which would drop to $6.8 million in 2026.
CNN
2 hours ago
- CNN
US' top general tells lawmakers
The US military did not use bunker-buster bombs on one of Iran's largest nuclear sites last weekend because the site is so deep that the bombs likely would not have been effective, the US' top general told senators during a briefing on Thursday. The comment by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, which was described by three people who heard his remarks and a fourth who was briefed on them, is the first known explanation given for why the US military did not use the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb against the Isfahan site in central Iran. US officials believe Isfahan's underground structures house nearly 60% of Iran's enriched uranium stockpile, which Iran would need in order to ever produce a nuclear weapon. US B2 bombers dropped over a dozen bunker-buster bombs on Iran's Fordow and Natanz nuclear sites. But Isfahan was only struck by Tomahawk missiles launched from a US submarine. The classified briefing to lawmakers was conducted by Caine, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Spokespeople for Caine did not return requests for comment. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy told CNN on Thursday night after receiving the briefing that some of Iran's capabilities 'are so far underground that we can never reach them. So they have the ability to move a lot of what has been saved into areas where there's no American bombing capacity that can reach it.' An early assessment produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency in the day after the US strikes said the attack did not destroy the core components of the country's nuclear program, including its enriched uranium, and likely only set the program back by months, CNN has reported. It also said Iran may have moved some of the enriched uranium out of the sites before they were attacked. The Trump officials who briefed lawmakers this week sidestepped questions about the whereabouts of Iran's stockpile of already-enriched uranium. President Donald Trump again claimed Friday that nothing was moved from the three Iranian sites before the US military operation. But Republican lawmakers emerged from the classified briefings on Thursday acknowledging that the US military strikes may not have eliminated all of Iran's nuclear materials. But they argued that doing so was not part of the military's mission. 'There is enriched uranium in the facilities that moves around, but that was not the intent or the mission,' Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas told CNN. 'My understanding is most of it's still there. So we need a full accounting. That's why Iran has to come to the table directly with us, so the (International Atomic Energy Agency) can account for every ounce of enriched uranium that's there. I don't think it's going out of the country, I think it's at the facilities.' 'The purpose of the mission was to eliminate certain particular aspects of their nuclear program. Those were eliminated. To get rid of the nuclear material was not part of the mission,' GOP Rep. Greg Murphy told CNN. 'Here's where we're at: the program was obliterated at those three sites. But they still have ambitions,' said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. 'I don't know where the 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium exists. But it wasn't part of the targets there.' '(The sites) were obliterated. Nobody can use them anytime soon,' Graham also said. Weapons expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies Jeffrey Lewis told CNN that commercial satellite images show that Iran has accessed the tunnels at Isfahan. 'There were a moderate number of vehicles present at Isfahan on June 26 and at least one of the tunnel entrances was cleared of obstructions by mid-morning June 27,' Lewis said. 'If Iran's stockpile of (highly enriched uranium) was still in the tunnel when Iran sealed the entrances, it may be elsewhere now.' Additional satellite imagery captured on June 27 by Planet Labs show the entrance to the tunnels were open at the time, according to Lewis. The preliminary DIA assessment noted that the nuclear sites' above ground structures were moderately to severely damaged, CNN has reported. That damage could make it a lot harder for Iran to access any enriched uranium that does remain underground, sources said, something that Graham alluded to on Thursday. 'These strikes did a lot of damage to those three facilities,' Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat, told CNN on Thursday night. 'But Iran still has the know-how to put back together a nuclear program. And if they still have that enriched material, and if they still have centrifuges, and if they still have the capability to very quickly move those centrifuges into what we call a cascade, we have not set back that program by years. We have set it back by months.' Caine and Hegseth on Thursday said the military operation against Fordow went exactly as planned but did not mention the impacts to Isfahan and Natanz.
