Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is announcing plans to cut the number of generals and admirals in the military by 20%.
Hegseth formally approved the plans in a Sept. 15 memo. The military branches were directed to complete the reductions by the end of the year, a Pentagon official said Tuesday.
The 20% figure doubles the across-the-board reduction of generals and admirals that the defense secretary called for in a May 5 memo to senior Pentagon leaders. The military has about 850 active-duty generals and admirals.
Former special counsel Jack Smith vowed not to be “silenced” by threats of prosecution during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
Republicans said Smith should be disbarred and prosecuted for past answers to Congress where he failed to disclose that he had obtained the contents of some lawmakers’ communications with White House officials.
Smith did acknowledge one mistake: He said he had not done enough to communicate his case to the public. He said he allowed attacks on his case to go unanswered, which cost him public support.
Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt, who called Smith a “dirtbag” during the hearing, was devoured by his own “gotcha” moment that backfired. He displayed an email that he thought implicated Smith as being in Georgia at an Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024 and accused Smith of perjury.
However, images and video reports confirm and Smith replied he was actually in Maryland during that same weekend, watching the Iowa Hawkeyes and then-college basketball star Caitlin Clark take on the Maryland Terrapins.
President Trump is leaning into his plan to deploy lethal force against drug cartels he has likened to ISIS, dismissing critics who say the operation hasn’t limited U.S. drug consumption enough to justify its costs.
Trump used the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas to highlight deadly boat strikes as something “no other president had the courage to do”.
Trump’s doubling down on deadly strikes is a direct challenge to Democrats, who want stricter oversight of the attacks on the grounds that the strikes lack congressional authorization. Lawmakers also worry that the killings override due process.
Missile launchers and advanced radar systems in Europe are multiplying quickly, but finding enough actual missiles to load into them is proving increasingly difficult.
Four years of war in Ukraine, followed by months of the U.S. countering Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and defending against Iranian missile strikes, have led to Western militaries firing missiles far faster than the defense industry can replace them.
Germany is the latest NATO ally to press the U.S. for permission to manufacture the most advanced missiles in the Patriot system. Germany is seeking to bring more of the Patriot supply chain onto European soil as demand outstrips existing production.
Meanwhile, NATO is trying to replenish missiles already used in combat while attempting to build a much larger air-defense force for a potential war with Russia.
And finally… South Korea’s Defense Ministry says a North Korean land mine that wounded three South Korean soldiers had been planted near the Demilitarized Zone, not displaced by weather.
The Sept. 21 explosion took place south of the Military Demarcation Line, the de facto border that runs through the middle of the DMZ.
Military sources had acknowledged that the mine could have been carried south of the line by a landslide or mudslide caused by seasonal rains, but the agency says that was not the case.
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