CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper confirmed that AI tools are enabling faster targeting and decision-making throughout Operation Epic Fury, now past 5,500 strikes inside Iran. Cooper credited advanced AI systems with condensing targeting timelines that previously took hours or days into seconds, while emphasizing that humans retain final authority over all lethal decisions. The campaign has reportedly relied on Palantir's Maven Smart System and Anthropic's Claude AI.

Cooper reported that Iranian drone and ballistic missile attacks have declined sharply since the opening days of the campaign. The Joint Chiefs chairman cited an 83 percent drop in Iranian drone launches and a 90 percent reduction in ballistic missile attacks compared to the early phase of the operation. Since Feb. 28, at least seven U.S. troops have been killed and roughly 140 wounded.

The public acknowledgment of AI's targeting role carries significant institutional weight. The Anthropic dispute — in which the company sued DoD after being designated a supply chain risk — hangs directly over the AI-enabled war effort. Cooper's remarks implicitly validate the operational value of AI in combat, even as the legal and policy framework governing its military use remains unsettled.

U.S. Central Command announced that American forces destroyed 16 Iranian naval vessels identified as minelayers on March 10, operating near the Strait of Hormuz as part of Operation Epic Fury. The strike was part of a broader maritime campaign that has now targeted more than 60 Iranian vessels since the operation began on Feb. 28. Iran's mine inventory, estimated at 6,000 weapons including limpet, moored, and bottom mines, has been a persistent threat to the critical shipping lane since the war's outset.

The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly one-fifth of global oil shipments daily, making Iranian mining activity one of the highest-consequence threat vectors of the conflict. Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters issued statements warning that vessels belonging to the U.S., Israel, or their allies could be considered legitimate targets in the waterway. Tehran also announced it would not allow oil shipments through the strait under current conditions.

The mine threat echoes an earlier chapter in U.S.-Iran naval history. In 1988, the USS Samuel B. Roberts was crippled by an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf, triggering Operation Praying Mantis. The current scale of minelayer destruction reflects how aggressively U.S. forces are working to neutralize that threat before it can be executed, protecting both freedom of navigation and global energy markets.

The U.S. Army has approved the M111 Offensive Hand Grenade, its first new offensive grenade since the Mk3A2 entered service in 1968. Unlike the current M67 fragmentation grenade, the M111 uses blast overpressure rather than fragmentation to kill, making it far safer for close-quarters combat. Its plastic body is fully consumed in the explosion, eliminating the ricochet and fratricide risks that fragmentation creates inside rooms, bunkers, and confined urban spaces.

The design was driven directly by lessons learned in Iraq, where door-to-door fighting exposed the M67's limitations. Fragmentation can be deflected by furniture and walls, potentially killing friendly forces on the other side. The M111 is not intended to replace the M67 but to complement it, with the standard frag grenade retained for open terrain and the new blast model fielded for urban and enclosed environments. Both share the same five-step arming process and the same fuze, minimizing retraining requirements and simplifying production.

The M111 was developed by the Capabilities Program Executive Ammunition and Energetics alongside DEVCOM's Armaments Center at Picatinny Arsenal. A training variant, the M112, will allow repeated practice with inert fuzes. With urban combat widely expected to define future large-scale conflict scenarios, the timing of this approval is directly relevant: the Army is upgrading its most basic organic weapons even as it acquires advanced loitering munitions and AI-enabled platforms.

Turkey's Ministry of Defense confirmed that a second Patriot air defense system has been deployed to Malatya to protect the Kürecik AN/TPY-2 radar site, a forward-based sensor that is central to NATO's Integrated Air and Missile Defense architecture. The radar, hosted by Turkey since 2011, provides early warning of ballistic missiles fired from Iran. The deployment was ordered from NATO's Allied Air Command in Ramstein, Germany, supplementing a Spanish Patriot battery already positioned at Incirlik Air Base since 2015.

The move follows a string of Iranian strikes against forward-based missile defense radar systems in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE during the opening week of Operation Epic Fury. Two ballistic missiles fired from Iran toward Turkey have already been intercepted by NATO forces since the campaign began. Iran's demonstrated willingness to target radar infrastructure elevates the Kürecik site to a high-priority potential target, given its role in tracking inbound ballistic threats early in their flight.

The Kürecik deployment illustrates a mounting strain on NATO missile defense posture. Patriot batteries are finite, demand is rising simultaneously across the Middle East theater and NATO's eastern flank, and the United States is separately reported to be repositioning THAAD components from South Korea to the region. Every missile defense reallocation creates a gap somewhere else, and allied capitals are watching the calculus closely.

The Defense Innovation Unit and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are jointly soliciting industry for an AI evaluation "harness" capable of continuously testing whether military AI models perform as intended against mission-specific benchmarks. The solicitation calls for a pluggable, vendor-neutral architecture that can test any AI system and produce results actionable by decision makers. DIU's stated goal is evaluation infrastructure that keeps pace with the rate at which new AI models are released. The deadline for submissions is March 24.

The harness is expected to assess more than raw capability. DIU specifically wants evaluation of human-AI team performance, testing whether combined human-machine teams outperform either operating alone. The system must also simulate degraded network and communications conditions, modeling real operational stress environments where AI reliability matters most. A separate requirement mandates automated red-teaming to test whether adversarial AI can compromise or confuse friendly models.

The solicitation is timely given the operational moment. CENTCOM's confirmation that AI is being used in the current Iran campaign makes the absence of a standardized evaluation framework a recognized gap. Fielding AI-enabled targeting tools in combat without a standardized verification methodology carries both operational and legal risk, and DIU's push to establish one suggests institutional awareness of that vulnerability.

Marine Corps Systems Command has issued a Sources Sought notice for a Multispectral Camouflage Overgarment capable of masking individual Marines against visual, near-infrared, short-wave infrared, and thermal sensors. The garment must suppress heat signatures against ground and aerial sensors simultaneously, including at altitudes that put drone-mounted sensors at distances exceeding 5,000 meters. The service wants 13,000 units by 2027 and 61,000 by 2030, suggesting this is acquisition-track, not a research experiment.

Performance thresholds are aggressive. Against daytime visual sensors, the cloak must defeat detection at minimum ranges of 600 meters from the ground and 1,000 meters from the air. Against mid-wave infrared sensors, it must provide coverage at up to 5,000 meters from aerial platforms. Weight limits are 3.5 pounds maximum with a target below 2 pounds. Crucially, the garment must be donnable and doffable over existing gear in under 15 seconds without sacrificing load-carriage capability.

The Ukraine war provided both the impetus and the cautionary lessons for this program. Russia has deployed thermal cloaks extensively, and in some documented cases the garments made wearers more visible rather than less, appearing as cold spots against a warmer background. Britain's Royal Marines already field the Saab Barracuda system. The Marine Corps program reflects a broader recognition that cheap, drone-mounted thermal sensors have fundamentally changed infantry survivability calculus, and that a solution with rigorous performance standards is now operationally urgent.

The U.S. Army awarded Elbit Systems of America a $120.5 million Other Transaction Authority contract to develop Soldier Borne Mission Command, a head-borne system that fuses live multispectral sensors, assured positioning data, and real-time threat sharing into a single intuitive interface worn by individual soldiers. SBMC is designed to give every warfighter in a squad continuous situational awareness without requiring them to look away from the fight. Booz Allen Hamilton was tapped as the software integrator, contributing AI-enabled insights, extended reality solutions, and networking frameworks.

SBMC draws on Elbit's existing production base in see-through displays and night vision, including the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle Binocular and the F-35 helmet sensor fusion system. The concept scales those capabilities down to the dismounted soldier, allowing squads to operate as synchronized, sensor-enabled teams sharing a common recognized picture in real time. The system is designed for both denied and degraded operating environments, a critical requirement given ongoing adversary investment in GPS jamming and electronic warfare.

The contract is structured as an OTA, providing development flexibility and faster pathways to fielding. SBMC is explicitly positioned as foundation infrastructure for future human-machine teaming, autonomous integration, and what Elbit calls "cognitive warfare dominance." The $120.5M figure is a development award; production at the scale implied by Army modernization priorities would represent a substantially larger program.

A cyberattack has disrupted operations at Stryker Corporation, one of the world's largest medical device manufacturers, with the Iranian-linked Handala hacktivist group claiming responsibility and asserting that it wiped more than 200,000 of the company's devices. Stryker is headquartered in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and operates manufacturing plants, logistics networks, and clinical training systems across more than 75 countries. The full scope of the breach is still under investigation, but disruptions to operational technology and enterprise IT systems have been confirmed.

Stryker's product portfolio spans orthopedic implants, surgical robotics, hospital beds, and imaging equipment used in thousands of hospitals worldwide. A disruption to its manufacturing or logistics infrastructure can delay delivery of surgical equipment that hospitals depend on for scheduled procedures. Security analysts note that healthcare supply chain vendors have become increasingly attractive targets precisely because compromising them can cascade into hospital networks through trusted vendor relationships and device management systems.

The timing relative to Operation Epic Fury is significant. Handala has been active in targeting Israeli and pro-Western organizations since the October 2023 Hamas attacks, and a claimed intrusion of this scale against a major U.S. defense-adjacent supplier would represent a significant escalation. Whether the claimed magnitude of device wiping is accurate remains unverified; Iranian information operations have included inflated or fabricated damage claims. But the attack underscores the expanding definition of the battlefield: critical infrastructure suppliers to the U.S. military's medical and logistics apparatus are now active targets.

🔥 B-1Bs at RAF Fairford Swapping Cruise Missiles for Bunker Busters as Iran Air Supremacy Grows — Read More

📉 NATO Arctic Exercise Cold Response Loses Key Ships and Jets to Iran War Redeployments — Read More

✈️ Norwegian F-35s Intercept Russian Spy Aircraft During NATO Cold Response Drill — Read More

🎯 USAF Seeks Suppliers for New Stand-In Attack Weapon Sized for the F-47 and B-21 — Read More

🛩️ X-Bow Evolution Space Vehicle Acquired to Expand Hypersonic Testing Options — Read More

🇮🇷 Israeli Airstrikes Eliminate Iran's Last Operational F-14 Tomcats — Read More

🇩🇪 Ukrainian Combat Advisors to Train German Army on Modern Warfare Doctrine by 2029 — Read More

📡 India Tests Delta-Wing Drone With Extended Range Loiter Capability — Read More

🇹🇷 Turkey Debuts New Combat Drone Wing Configuration for Improved Payload — Read More

🛡️ Iran War Puts THAAD Redeployment From South Korea in Play, Seoul Warns — Read More

🚁 Pentagon Wants 30,000 New Drones; Here Are the Unanswered Questions — Read More

💰 Rheinmetall Projects $16.8B Annual Orders, Commits Entirely to Defense — Read More

🇺🇦 Inside Ukraine's $1,000 Interceptor Drones the Pentagon Wants to Buy — Read More

🇺🇦 Ukraine's Top Drone Units to Brief Pentagon and Congress on Frontline Tactics This Month — Read More

🚢 Three Cargo Ships Struck in Suspected Iranian Attacks Inside the Strait of Hormuz — Read More

🇫🇷 France's Mediterranean Carrier Group Signals Realignment as Middle East Tensions Reshape Alliances — Read More

⚓ US Coast Guard Authenticates Keel for Three New Offshore Patrol Cutters — Read More

🇨🇳 China's New Type 055 Destroyers Assigned to Taiwan-Focused Command — Read More

Space Force and BAE Systems Clear Preliminary Design Review for Epoch 2 MEO Missile-Warning Sats — Read More

York Space Systems Acquires Orbion Space Technology to Vertically Integrate Propulsion — Read More

New Airborne Signals Detection Tool Aims to Plug ISR Gap in Contested Airspace — Read More

Pentagon Opens Formal Investigation Into Suspected Iranian Strike on Iranian-Linked School — Read More

AI Deepfakes and PSYOP Tactics Are Targeting Military Families at Home — Read More

How Beijing Could Respond if the US Strikes Iran's Nuclear Program — Read More

HAVOC Expands National Counter-Drone Reach via Two California Acquisitions — Read More