US-Israeli war on Iran, day 5: The global economy is still slipping as the war proceeds against Iran, with oil tankers stuck in the Strait of Hormuz as markets in Asia are getting hit particularly hard today. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. to underwrite risk insurance for commercial vessels transiting the Middle East, where many firms have changed course and routed tankers away from the conflict at increased cost. 

Latest: NATO air defenses downed an Iranian ballistic missile headed for Turkey, Ankara’s defense ministry announced on Twitter Wednesday. It’s unclear just yet what shot down the missile. France on Tuesday ordered its aircraft carrier from the Baltics to the Mediterranean Sea, citing a drone strike Monday on a British air force base in Cyprus. The Associated Press has more.

New: A U.S. Navy submarine sank an Iranian warship with a torpedo in the Indian Ocean, Sri Lankan officials told Reuters on Wednesday. Nearly three dozen people were rescued from that incident, and at least 80 people died in that attack, the wire service reported a few hours later. Pentagon officials confirmed the sinking of the warship, saying it was the first for an American submarine since World War II.

The warship is among 20 Iranian vessels the U.S. military says it has sunk as of Wednesday morning Eastern time. The BBC verified 11 of those sunken vessels in satellite imagery, reporting Wednesday. 

Developing: Trump is considering ordering the U.S. Navy to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz in order to “ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD,” he announced Tuesday on social media. The insurance and naval-escort plans followed a meeting with his treasury and energy secretaries Tuesday at the White House. “U.S. support for tanker insurance is not unprecedented,” Reuters explained Tuesday. “After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. issued insurance policies to keep shipping moving amid elevated ​war-risk premiums,” and “During ​the Iran-Iraq conflict in the s, Washington reflagged tankers ⁠and provided naval escorts when private insurers withdrew coverage.”

But some experts doubt this plan will have a large impact. “Given concerns about the safety of crews and vessels moving through the Strait,” Evercore analysts wrote in a note Tuesday, Trump’s plan “will likely not be sufficient to meaningfully increase traffic” at least in part because “the heavy use of drones and potential for sea mines have changed the calculus for many.” (h/t Carl Quintanilla of CNBC)

Coverage continues below…

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Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2002, U.S. special operators fought the Battle of Roberts Ridge, one of the fiercest engagements of the war in Afghanistan.

Update: Four of the six American service members killed so far have been identified by the Defense Department. “All soldiers were assigned to the 103rd Sustainment Command, Des Moines, Iowa,” officials said in a statement Tuesday. They include: 

• Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35, of Winter Haven, Fla.; 
• Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Neb.; 
• Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minn.; 
• Sgt. Declan J. Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, Iowa. 

The four perished on March 1 when a drone struck their makeshift facility in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, roughly a dozen miles south of the large U.S. base at Camp Arifjan, as CBS News reported Tuesday. 

Sgt. 1st Class Amor “was just a few days away from coming home to her husband and two children when she was killed,” the Associated Press reports. 

“Amor was moved off-base to a shipping container-style building a week before the drone attack. The building had no defenses,” her husband told AP. “They were dispersing because they were in fear that the base they were on was going to get attacked and they felt it was safer in smaller groups  in separate places,” he said.

Expert reax: “No reason to have a makeshift operations center in a war where you determine D-day,” said Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “Those service members would still be alive if there had been a basic effort by their leaders at hardening/passive defense.” 

Contrasting solemnity: Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine opened his remarks Wednesday before reporters saying, “First, it's with profound sadness and gratitude that I share the names of four of our six fallen heroes.” Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, on the other hand, began by asserting, “America is winning—decisively, devastatingly and without mercy. Under the direct command of President Trump…” 

Hegseth also promised to begin using “500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound GPS-and-laser-guided precision gravity bombs, which we have a nearly unlimited stockpile,” he told reporters Wednesday. “More bombers, fighters are arriving just today,” he added. 

He also promised “in under a week, the two most powerful air forces in the world will have complete control of Iranian skies.” That’s a notably different picture from what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent painted when he told CNBC Wednesday morning, “Everything is going magnificently. The execution of Epic Fury is proceeding and doing better than planned. I believe last night we took full control of the Iranian skies, along with the Israeli air force. So the two most powerful air forces in the world now have complete control of the Iranian sky.” 

• Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more from Hegseth’s press conference, including some numbers of targets hit and missiles fired, here.

Developing: Many U.S. troops were told Trump’s Iran war is for “Armageddon” and the return of Jesus, which would seem to violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice, according to a flood of complaints from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, journalist Jonathan Larson reported Monday, citing data from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

According to one of the complaints, their commander “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.”

One related problem for troops: “If you’re being proselytized to by your superior, you can’t say, ‘Get out of my face.’ Under the military’s criminal code of justice, insubordination is considered a felony,” Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of MRFF, told HuffPost on Tuesday. Read more from Larson’s initial reporting, here. 

The CIA’s station in Riyadh was allegedly hit in a drone attack Monday, the Washington Post reports. The attack caused “structural damage” and “collapsed” part of the embassy’s roof, according to a State Department alert obtained by WaPo, which added, “No CIA personnel were wounded,” and embassy personnel are sheltering in place.  

The U.S. consulate in Dubai was struck Tuesday and temporarily erupted in flames, CNN reported. “Videos geolocated and verified by CNN show a black plume of smoke rising over the consulate building, visible from a considerable distance.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed a drone hit the “parking lot adjacent to the chancellery building,” but everyone was accounted for afterward. 

For Americans stranded in the Middle East, Trump wrote a social media post Tuesday promoting the State Department’s evacuation planning and coordination website. “We are already chartering flights, free of charge, and booking commercial options, which we expect will become increasingly available as time goes on,” he said. 

Trump was asked Tuesday, “Why wasn’t there an evacuation plan?” He replied, “Because it happened all very quickly.” 

Related reading: “Dubai evacuation costs rise as high as $250,000 as more families flee,” the Financial Times reported Wednesday. 

The U.S. military base al-Udeid, in Qatar, was hit with a ballistic missile Tuesday, Qatar’s defense ministry confirmed in a statement. The attack didn’t cause any casualties, the officials said. 

Alert: Iran managed to strike the largest radar operated by the U.S. in the Middle East, located in Qatar: Space Force’s AN/FPS-132 Ballistic Missile Early Warning Radar System, which has an estimated cost of around $1 billion. Sam Lair of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies shared satellite imagery from Planet of the strike’s aftermath, noting, “It’s unclear how extensive the damage is,” however, “Debris from the damaged face has fallen on the roof of the main building and there is water runoff from the firefighting effort.” (To see more damage from the ongoing conflict, Lair is flagging multiple additional locations attacked across Iran, including missile bases and related production facilities.)  

Rewind: “Trump Promises to Defend Qatar, a Reassurance After Israel’s Strike,” the New York Times reported in October.

Strategic consideration: Given the great deal of concern in recent years about China’s missile stocks, and the associated threats those missiles pose to naval forces, officials in Beijing may be “looking at Iran's failure to achieve political objectives via missile coercion and rethinking some assumptions/discussions they've been having about their war planning,” observed analyst Decker Eveleth, writing Tuesday on social media. (One particularly notable difference, of course, is China’s known nuclear stockpile compared to Iran’s reported lack of a single nuclear weapon.) 

Trump’s CIA is reportedly banking on Kurdish forces to “spark an uprising in Iran” and help topple the country’s leadership, CNN reported Tuesday. (Reuters had similar reporting a bit later.) “Iranian Kurdish armed groups have thousands of forces operating along the Iraq-Iran border,” and “are expected to take part in a ground operation in Western Iran, in the coming days,” a senior Iranian Kurdish official told CNN. “The idea would be for Kurdish armed forces to take on the Iranian security forces and pin them down to make it easier for unarmed Iranians in the major cities to turn out without getting massacred again as they were during unrest in January.”

“Another US official said the Kurds could help sow chaos in the region and stretch the Iranian regime’s military resources thin,” five journalists for CNN write. “Still other ideas have centered around whether the Kurds could take and hold territory in the northern part of Iran that would create a buffer zone for Israel.”

Expert reax: “Count me extremely skeptical that this'll prove a good idea—for (a) intra-Kurdish, (b) regional geopolitical and (c) internal Iranian reasons,” Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute wrote Tuesday on social media. He added that “it's this policy pillar that's generating concern about [likely undeclared] U.S. boots on the ground in Iran.”

Rewind: 

• “‘Trump betrayed us’: Fleeing Kurds condemn U.S. decision to leave Syria,” PBS Newshour reported in October 2019; 
• “Yes, Donald Trump Dumped the Kurds (And We Should Not Be Shocked),” wrote Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute that same month; 
• And “US abandons Syria’s Kurds, risking regional turmoil and an IS resurgence,” Kamran Matin of the University of Sussex wrote just five weeks ago for The Conversation. 

Trump lashed out at Spain during a meeting Tuesday at the White House with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain,” Trump said after Spain refused use of its airfields for the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. 

“They said we can’t use their bases. We could use their bases if we want,” Trump alleged Tuesday. “We could just fly in and use it. Nobody is gonna tell us not to use it.”

AP notes: “It is unclear how Trump would cut off trade with Spain, given that Spain is under the umbrella of the European Union. The EU negotiates trade deals on behalf of all 27 member countries.”

The view from Madrid: “We are not going to be accomplices to something that is bad for the world, simply because of fear of reprisals from some,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a televised speech Wednesday. “It’s not even clear what the goals are of those who launched the first attack,” he added. 

Context: “For Mr. Sánchez, in office since 2018, an assertion of independence was also a political necessity,” the New York Times reports. “His anti-Trump positions give his Socialist party a chance to shore up their base and ward off challenges from far-left rivals.”

Developing: Cuba may be next in Trump’s sights, if activists in Florida get their way, Politico reported Monday. It’s not that far-fetched either, since the Wall Street Journal in January reported the Trump administration “is searching for Cuban government insiders who can help cut a deal to push out the Communist regime by the end of the year.”  

“The president is feeling like, ‘I’m on a roll’; like, ‘This is working,’” an administration official told Vivian Salama of The Atlantic on Sunday. However, Salama cautioned, “A Cuba in turmoil could cause an influx of refugees to the United States at a time when the administration is trying to reverse immigration flows. A military campaign might set the stage for a revolt, but there is little organized opposition in the country after almost seven decades of repressive rule.” 

The White House is threatening Venezuela’s interim leader again as “Federal prosecutors have put together possible corruption and money laundering charges” against Delcy Rodriguez “unless she continues to comply with Trump’s demands,” Reuters reported Wednesday. “The probe focuses on Rodriguez’s alleged involvement in laundering of funds from Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA” between 2021 and 2025. 

Related reading: 

• “The Missiles Hit the Gulf With No Warning. Then the Escape Planning Began,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday; 
• “US shale bosses warn they cannot replace war-hit Middle East oil,” the Financial Times reported Tuesday; 
• “House Republicans are publicly cheering Trump’s Iran war. Privately, many are worried,” Politico reported Tuesday; 
• “Canadian PM Carney says US and Israel’s strikes on Iran mark ‘failure of the international order’,” The Hill reported Tuesday; 
• And ICYMI, “US Marines fired on protesters storming consulate in Pakistan's Karachi,” killing 10 people on Sunday, Reuters confirmed on Monday. 

Around the Defense Department

The U.S. military just carried out a joint operation against alleged drug traffickers in Ecuador, officials at Southern Command announced Tuesday on social media. Special operators are helping plan missions in what the New York Times wrote “appeared to be a major expansion of the U.S. military’s unilateral strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific. More, here.

The Army just launched an open call for industry ideas. “The Army is looking to stretch its limited research and development dollars by teaming up with private industry to develop projects that can be used by the service as well as commercial customers,” reports Defense One’s Myers, here.

Pentagon’s war on Anthropic based on ‘dubious’ legal thinking’ and ideology, not real risk, according to legal experts and officials who spoke with Defense One’s Patrick Tucker. Read their takes, here.

Related reading: 

• “Trump’s CISA nominee to exit Coast Guard role, but still in running to lead cyber agency,” reports Nextgov’s David DiMolfetta with Defense One’s Thomas Novelly.
• DOD and DHS spent more than $78 million sending 708 migrants to Guantanamo Bay, according to a report by the State Department’s Inspector General’s office.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ducked a question on whether Iran posed an imminent threat before the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury, instead arguing that that the country’s slow-rolling of a nuclear deal and its continued nuclear ambitions necessitated the U.S. launching a war that would kill its leaders and degrade its conventional military capabilities as well. 

Hegseth’s comments at a Wednesday morning Pentagon press conference echoed a line of reasoning offered earlier this week by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose rationales have shifted, expanded, and come in for criticism by U.S. officials, regional experts, and lawmakers with access to classified information.

“The evidence in front of us since the 12-day war [of June 2025] was that Iran had no intention of actually negotiating a nuclear deal,” Hegseth said, though he did not clarify why there was a concern about Iran’s nuclear program after the administration had repeatedly touted its “obliteration” as recently as Trump’s State of the Union address in February. 

The U.S. military has been targeting Iran’s short-range ballistic missile capabilities and its navy “to prevent them from threatening the U.S. forces, partners and interests in the region,” Hegseth said.

“They've been killing Americans for 47 years, thousands of missiles pointed at us. They have ongoing nuclear ambitions, and they're at the weakest they've ever been,” he said. “What makes the most sense was to do this to ensure that the narrow objectives we have, of ensuring they never have a nuclear weapon, have a maximum effect.”

During his remarks, Hegseth acknowledged the six U.S. service members who have been killed during the operation so far, saying, “we will avenge them, no doubt,” before moving on to a metaphor about Iran as a football team with no plays left to call.

Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, took on the task of reading the names of the four dead Army Reserve soldiers who have been identified so far. The Pentagon has not released an update of total injuries thus far. 

“To our wounded warriors and their loved ones, we will never forget your sacrifice,” Caine said. “Our nation stands with you, and we are eternally grateful for your courage, your resiliency, your devotion to this mission and to our nation.”

Since Saturday, Iran’s use of ballistic missiles has dropped 86 percent, Caine said, with a 23-percent decrease in the past day. Their one-way attack drone strikes are down 73 percent since the weekend, he added. 

The drop in activity has allowed the U.S. to secure the air space along Iran’s coast, allowing strikes to “expand inland,” he said.

“I know there have been a lot of questions about munitions. We have sufficient precision munitions for the task at hand, both on the offense and defense,” Caine said. “But I want to tell you, teammates, as a matter of practice, I don't want to be talking about quantities, and I know there's been a great debate about that. I appreciate the interest, but just know that we consider that an operational security matter.”

The U.S. has hit more than 2,000 targets, he said, and destroyed more than 20 Iranian vessels, including one sunk by a U.S. submarine, the first strike of its kind since 1945.

“Iran, on the other hand, has been indiscriminate and more imprecise in their attacks,” Caine said. “They fired more than 500 ballistic missiles and more than 2,000 drones, striking innocent civilian targets throughout the region.”

Asked whether there was any initial assessment as to who bombed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school on Saturday, killing 160 students, Hegseth would only say that the incident is under investigation.

A year ago, Hegseth moved to dismantle a civilian protection office within the Defense Department that was aimed at reducing collateral deaths during combat operations. 

“Our fighters have maximum authorities, granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it,” the secretary said in his prepared remarks. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly how it should be.”

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Further escalating hostilities in Iran could leave state and local governments in the crosshairs of hacktivists aligned with the regime as they look to retaliate in cyberspace, experts warned this week.

While internet traffic in Iran itself has dropped precipitously since the U.S. and Israel began their bombing campaign over the weekend, observers with the nonprofit Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center warned that groups aligned with the Iranian regime in other countries may strike vulnerable targets, including government websites, financial services and the energy sectors.

Randy Rose, MS-ISAC’s vice president for security operations and intelligence, said this could at first take the form of “low-level cyber activity” like denial-of-service attacks, website defacement and malicious code injections. And TJ Sayers, MS-ISAC’s senior director of threat intelligence, said those efforts are all part of those hackers’ plans in the event that the regime fell.

“What we are seeing, and this is largely happening from outside of Iran, is hacktivist organizations are basically mobilizing to try to start targeting domestic U.S. and allied networks,” Sayers said during a webinar hosted by MS-ISAC and the Center for Internet Security. “This is largely based upon prior guidance that they've received from Iran, that if a red line was crossed, like the killing of the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei], that they should carry out operations like this, and in some cases, they're even operating autonomously.”

Rose said any cyberattacks would come as part of an “invisible war” waged over the “cyber domain” for the past decade. And there have already been some apparent Iran-linked skirmishes in cyberspace, as a U.S. port was targeted with a DDoS attack by the DieNet group, while the Fatimiyoun Cyber Team, known as FaD Team, claimed to have injected code and released personally identifiable information from a township in the U.S.

Sayers warned governments to stay vigilant, as it appears, based on their observations, that hacking groups are starting to cooperate, rather than work autonomously.

“The hacktivist groups are largely operating independently, but we are starting to see some coalescence of these hacktivist groups to form somewhat of a collective, which would give them a little bit more robust targeting capabilities and kind of help unify their targeting efforts,” he said.

Another worry for U.S. state and local governments could be the potential targeting of physical infrastructure many rely on, including data centers. Two Amazon Web Services data centers were reportedly hit by Iranian drone strikes in the United Arab Emirates, leading to disruptions in various digital and financial services in the region. Those attacks and others in the Middle East led Recorded Future’s Insikt Group to conclude in a blog post that if hostilities in Iran escalate further, “the likelihood of state-sponsored destructive cyber operations against critical infrastructure increases significantly.”

“The targeting profile for the near term includes Israeli media outlets, telecom providers, and SMBs, with US and Gulf organizations in the escalation path,” the blog post continued. Recorded Future also warned that critical infrastructure could be under more threat if hacktivists “shift” their target to it.

And some state and local governments may face supply chain issues in the coming weeks, especially if their technology is Israeli-made, Sayers said. Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz could spark higher energy prices and result in delays of equipment arriving, he added.

One other aspect for governments to monitor is Iran’s efforts to spread disinformation and social media manipulation to try to undermine public opinion on the conflict. And with new technologies available to hackers, including artificial intelligence, Rose warned that those efforts could take on a new dimension.

“Historically, Iran has been a capable [information operations] actor,” he said. “[Right] now, as they're absorbing kinetic losses from conventional warfare, they are pivoting their resources. We're not seeing a ton of information operations right now, but we anticipate those narratives targeting Western public support for the conflict, amplification of imagery, particularly AI-generated deepfake imagery and attempts to fracture the US-Israel coalition, are likely to spike in the coming weeks.”

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