At The Intercept, Nick Turse reveals that two US officials have warned that the Iran war has pushed the United States military toward a breakdown in its ability to keep fighting a conflict that, according to the president, was only supposed to last a few weeks.
The officials describe a cascade of pressures: Iranian strikes on bases and warships, depleted air defense stocks, mounting casualties, deteriorating ships, and deployments stretching past anything the fleet was built to absorb.
The damage began on Feb. 28, when an Iranian missile and drone barrage wrecked Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters and the region’s main logistics hub.
The Pentagon insisted for months that operations were unaffected. Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao conceded last week that “they blew the hell out of Bahrain.” Rebuilding could cost more than $400 million.
With no functioning port, the Navy had to haul fuel and food more than 2,000 miles from Diego Garcia, a 14-to-18-day cycle that one official called unsustainable.
Carriers bore the brunt. The USS Gerald R. Ford completed a record 11-month deployment marred by a 30-hour fire and chronic plumbing failures.
The USS Abraham Lincoln spent nine months at sea with almost no port calls amid supply shortages and reports of at least one crew member going overboard, which Trump dismissed by saying the deployment was not long enough.
Four of the Navy’s 11 carrier strike groups have already cycled through the region.
Roughly 65% of Patriot missiles were fired between February and July, leaving fewer than 830 of a prewar 2,330, while THAAD inventories fell from over 450 to under 270.
A Pentagon inspector general report has acknowledged strategic shortfalls and industrial bottlenecks. Iran has struck more than 15 bases across the region, and 410 troops were killed or wounded since July 7 alone.
If You Read One More Thing: Navy Mental Health System Struggles at Sea
At Military Times, Riley Ceder reports that the mental health system aboard deployed US aircraft carriers could not meet the demands of prolonged combat deployments, with sailors and Navy clinicians describing weeks-long waits, overwhelmed therapists, and a treatment model built for shore clinics rather than warships.
After a deployed resiliency counselor left the USS Abraham Lincoln six months into its deployment and was never replaced, roughly 5,000 service members were left with two licensed clinicians. The Navy said one provider could handle 1,600 to 2,500 personnel.
Providers aboard carriers report stretching their work weeks from 40 hours to 90. A sailor from the USS Harry S. Truman, whose eight-month Red Sea deployment was extended twice, said appointments could take months.
The Navy employed 34 deployed resiliency counselors, 81% of its billets, and spotty internet at sea left them with months of backlogged patient paperwork once ashore, which sources said drove burnout and hurt retention.
Sources describe a system oriented toward returning sailors to duty rather than treating them. “Unless you say you’re suicidal, you have to wait weeks,” said a Lincoln sailor.
A Court Halts Third-Country Removals … for Now
At The American Prospect, Gillian Brockell reports that the First Circuit Court of Appeals has largely upheld a lower court ruling striking down the Trump administration’s third-country removal policy, objecting based on safety grounds to the deportation of immigrants to countries where they have never lived.
More than 25,000 people have been expelled to third countries during Trump’s second term, according to Third Country Deportation Watch. This includes deportations to authoritarian states like Eswatini and Equatorial Guinea.
The panel cast doubt on the blanket diplomatic assurances that host governments gave the State Department and noted that the policy offered no protection against chain refoulement, which Senate Democrats found has befallen more than 80% of those removed.
Attorneys expect the administration to seek a Supreme Court stay, as it did in 2025 when the shadow docket let removals continue. Dana Camilleri said she had “zero confidence” the justices would refuse.
Deep Dive: The US Airstrikes That Killed Hundreds in Yemen
Between December 2023 and May 2025, US airstrikes on Yemen killed at least 213 civilians and injured 363 more, according to a new report. Researched and authored by the Mwatana for Human Rights watchdog in Yemen, the report was published through Brown University’s Costs of War project. It documents 46 separate incidents that include strikes on homes, hospitals, water infrastructure, a steel factory, an oil port, and a migrant detention center.
Victims and their families, according to the report, have received almost no compensation and no acknowledgement from Washington.
From December 2023 until January 2025, then President Joe Biden’s administration led a multinational military effort it called Operation Prosperity Guardian in response to Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. After returning to the White House, President Donald Trump’s administration conducted Operation Rough Rider from March 15 until May 6, 2025.
Mwatana’s field team, working under Houthi security restrictions that blocked access to some sites, has documented seven incidents under Biden and 39 under Trump. Researchers conducted 59 interviews with survivors, relatives, eyewitnesses, and first responders. They also collected death certificates, medical records, and identification documents to verify the civilian status of individuals, excluding anyone whose status couldn’t be confirmed.
The seven Biden-era incidents led to 27 casualties, while the seven-week Operation Rough Rider caused 549, including 50 children and 25 women.
The deadliest single strike came at around 4:30 in the morning on April 28, 2025, when three US airstrikes hit the pretrial detention center in Saada. Roughly 120 African migrants were asleep in a hangar. One strike hit the hangar directly. When it was over, 68 migrants were dead and 47 wounded, along with several prison guards. A 25-year-old Ethiopian survivor told researchers that “30 of my fellow detainees died; their bodies were charred.”
The delay in rescue, which he attributed to the Houthi authorities running the prison, pushed the death toll higher.
In Hajjah governorate, three direct strikes on April 1, 2025, destroyed the only health center serving the village of Abu Haqqa, where residents already lacked electricity and running water and women carried water from the valley on their heads.
No authority announced plans to rebuild it. In Saada, US jets hit the nearly complete Great Prophet Hospital for Oncology, a $7 million Omani-funded facility meant to spare cancer patients from three governorates the journey to Sana’a, with three missiles on March 16 and five more on March 24, leaving it almost entirely destroyed. West of Al-Hudaydah, a strike on a Water and Sanitation Corporation building wiped out its computer systems and disrupted supply.
The economic damage has compounded over the months since. The strike on the Ras Issa oil port killed 80 people and injured 171, most of them loading and unloading laborers paid by the day.
Surviving workers cut their shifts out of fear. “I work in terror, not knowing when US aircraft might strike again,” one survivor said.
Families of the roughly 50 contractors killed there petitioned the Yemen Petroleum Company to register the dead as formal employees so their salaries would continue, but the company refused. One widow received about $95. The destruction of the Al-Akhawain steel factory in Al-Hudaydah cost around 200 workers their jobs. A strike on the government complex in Raymah destroyed the local radio station and put 20 more out of work.
Survivors compared the US campaigns unfavorably to the Saudi and Emirati coalition bombing of 2015 to 2022, which drew years of international condemnation, saying the American strikes produced heavier civilian tolls on many of the same sites. Compensation was minimal and, according to some families, distributed selectively by Houthi authorities: food baskets and about $20 for the families of schoolchildren wounded in a 2024 strike in Taiz, roughly $380 for a house guard in Sana’a.
Mothers described children who could not sleep and ran trembling at the sound of thunder. Interviewees still carried shrapnel in their hands, thighs, and feet with no access to surgery.
The report classifies the strikes under nine categories of international humanitarian law violations, including indiscriminate attacks, strikes on essential civilian infrastructure, and attacks on medical teams during rescue operations. It notes that the US has a long record in Yemen of failing to disclose civilian casualties from its counterterrorism strikes, and that the Pentagon’s own annual reports claimed zero civilian deaths in the country in 2018 and 2019, years in which Mwatana documented at least 17.
The two operations together, according to economist Linda Bilmes’s estimate, cost the US between $9.65 billion and $12.07 billion.
Show Us the Receipts
At Inkstick, Jon Letman reports that China’s nuclear arsenal has grown to an estimated 620 warheads, roughly double its size around 2020. The issue of nuclear weapons looms large ahead of Xi Jinping’s Sept. 24 White House visit, where arms control appears unlikely to make the agenda. Analysts have disputed predictions that Beijing would reach parity with the US by the 2030s, and the Pentagon recently revised its projection to 1,000 warheads by 2030. Xiaodon Liang of the Arms Control Association warns that Senate backing for two new US tactical nuclear weapons could push China to match them by breaking “the taboo.”
Inkstick’s Tyler Hicks documents how immigration enforcement has shifted since Kristi Noem’s ouster from DHS. Her successor, Markwayne Mullin, has largely traded raid photo ops for record arrest numbers. ICE arrested more than 50,000 people in both July and August after Congress delivered nearly $70 billion in new funding. Immigration courts have meanwhile expanded “mega-master” hearings that sometimes pull more than 100 people onto dockets years ahead of schedule, producing record numbers of in-absentia removal orders.
At The World, Marco Werman speaks with Bellingcat researcher Sebastian Vandermeersch about an open-source investigation, produced with Jeune Afrique, that reconstructs three years of Malian military drone strikes and found that footage broadcast on state television as precision attacks on terrorists repeatedly showed civilians being killed. In July, state media celebrated a strike that hit a supply truck and killed four people. Three of them were young girls, according to Doctors Without Borders. Vandermeersch says Russia’s Africa Corps helped operate the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones and that the strikes had become the top concern in northern Mali. “People are going to bed not knowing if they’ll wake up alive,” he adds.
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Critical State is written by Inkstick Media in collaboration with The World.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from PRX and GBH.
Inkstick Media reports on how security decisions shape everyday life, following the money, power, and consequences of war.
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.