The Space Force is the Pentagon’s hub for organizing, training and equipping the units that provide satellite communications to the joint force, track missile launches, catalog debris that could damage spacecraft, take images of troop movements and wildfires from orbit, and more.

But as the newest service has taken shape — pulling together soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and fresh recruits to form the military’s smallest branch — the growing importance of space in global security has highlighted the need for a flexible, collaborative workforce for the decades to come.

“I’m extremely proud of the Space Force and all the good that it has accomplished,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Feb. 13 at an Air and Space Forces Association conference in Colorado. “But as good as we are, as much as we’ve done, as far as we’ve come — it’s not enough.”

The service hit its congressionally authorized staffing goal — about 13,900 billets overall — for the first time in 2023.

As of Dec. 31, the Space Force employed around 4,400 officers, 4,600 enlisted guardians and 4,900 civilians. The service plans to expand to 14,526 members, including 9,400 in uniform, in fiscal 2024.

Each year, that number creeps closer to the 16,000 personnel the Pentagon estimated the Space Force would reach as it lobbied Congress to create a lean new service in 2019.

Katharine Kelley, the Space Force’s civilian personnel boss, predicts “steady-state growth” that allows the service to keep up with operational needs without stressing the training pipeline or setting unattainable recruiting goals.

“We’re realists about what we can actually produce,” she said in a Feb. 23 interview. “There are plenty of people that say to me, ‘Why don’t you just add 10,000 more people?’ … We’re not trying to grow for the sake of numbers. We’re trying to grow for the sake of the mission capability.”

The Space Force is preparing to welcome reservists to its ranks under a new model that will allow guardians to serve in a full- or part-time capacity without leaving active duty. That approach lets the Space Force avoid the bureaucracy of standing up a separate reserve component while ideally offering troops more flexibility than active military service typically provides.

The window for reservists in the other armed forces to apply to transfer into the Space Force will likely open this summer or fall, Kelley said.

In the meantime, service officials will continue hashing out the details of how that hybrid workforce will function: How would it affect military housing or health care? How would promotions work? What would it mean for unit staffing? And what back-end human resources software does that require?

“It’s not copy-and-pasting the reserve model and dropping it into the Space Force,” Kelley said. “It’s truly, how are you going to manage one composition that has a couple of different ways to serve?”

Further growth may require the Space Force to take a more active role in its own recruiting. The Air Force has so far handled guardian recruitment in an effort to minimize overlapping bureaucracy between the two services, which comprise the Department of the Air Force.

But Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna, the service’s top enlisted leader, said that could change.

“We don’t have Space Force recruiters right now,” he told Air Force Times in a Jan. 11 interview. “That’s probably something we have to do.”

Still, the Space Force’s accession numbers haven’t suffered from a lack of in-house recruiters.

More than 4,000 people sought to fill just 492 enlisted billets in fiscal year 2023, the service told Congress in January. It signed up all but three of the 259 officers it sought last year.

The Space Force plans to recruit nearly 700 new enlisted guardians and 321 new officers in fiscal year 2024.

Bentivegna plans to work on refining the Space Force’s recruiting strategy in 2024, to give potential enlistees a better understanding of the service’s mission and what their place in it could be. That might mean mounting an ad campaign targeted at those who future guardians might ask for advice on joining the military.

“What do they say? What do they know about us?” he said of recruits’ family and friends. “I want to … start owning that more as a service.”

Rethinking training

As the service continues to expand, leaders are reconsidering whether the foundation they’ve built can carry them into the future. That begins with an overhaul of the training pipeline.

The Space Force has already designed a service-specific curriculum for enlisted recruits inside the Air Force-run boot camp. Now it wants to shake up how guardians train for their first job in uniform, starting with the officer corps.

Rather than sending officers to technical school to learn about a narrow slice of military space, the Space Force will start them out with an introductory Officer Training Course that exposes troops to the basics of its three core operational fields — intelligence; cyber; and running the satellites, radars and other systems that comprise space operations.

Once the foundational course is done, guardians will pick the career field they like best and head to their first operational unit for on-the-job training, rather than spending more time in the classroom, Kelley said.

That means the Space Force will eventually stop sending guardians to some Air Force-run tech schools, like intel training at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas.

The service eventually plans to expand the same idea to the enlisted corps. It’s unclear how long the vision might take to implement.

Officials hope the idea will lead to a more intuitive workforce that better understands how the military space enterprise functions overall. Graduates will go on to staff units that increasingly look to blur the lines between operations, acquisition and sustainment of military space assets.

“It is very difficult to separate satellite operations, cyber operations and the intelligence that you need to understand to deal with the domain,” Saltzman said.

For example, he said, “a cyber operator will be far better at their job defending the network if they understand the satellite operations, and they understand the intelligence and the threat, and how to ask the right questions.”

The new ops floor

As the pace of operations mounts — fueled by wars in Europe and the Middle East, deterrence in the Pacific, the proliferation of satellites on orbit and burgeoning threats to the U.S. military space ecosystem — the Space Force is unsatisfied with the number of troops it has focused on the daily mission, Kelley said.

The service plans to bolster its shift work, hoping to ease burnout among operational teams, make better use of the troops it has and create more bandwidth in case of a surge.

The Space Force wants to grow the number of crews who staff ops floors around the clock from three to five or so, Kelley said, to give guardians more time to train when they aren’t handling the mission.

To build those rotational crews, the service aims to more cleanly divide guardians who handle administrative work from those who staff daily operations — allowing more operators to focus on the mission rather than distracting them with managerial tasks.

Those crews will form standard packages of combat squadrons the service offers the joint force for daily missions around the world, like the Navy’s carrier strike groups and the Air Force’s future expeditionary wings.

That comes as the Space Force continues to open service component units that work directly with combatant commands like U.S. Central Command and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to ensure precision-guided weapons can land on target, pass communications between troops, protect U.S. satellites from electronic attack and flag incoming rockets, among other tasks.

The tenor on ops floors is changing, too. Space leaders want guardians to see themselves not as button-pushers at desks, but as warriors in a fight that extends around the globe and into orbit.

In the past, “it was not about what happens if somebody actually tries to take out one of your satellites,” Kelley said. “What we’re focused on now is where to put that manpower and those resources to really flesh out the operational warfighter capabilities.”

The service expects to lean more heavily on enlisted guardians to run daily operations, while officers handle more of the joint force planning to which space is key. Bentivegna noted the Space Force plans to open a retraining program this year to more easily balance its noncommissioned officer corps and others across specialties.

Space Operations Command boss Lt. Gen. David Miller told reporters on a Feb. 27 call that the service is “in a good place” in terms of the staff needed to handle daily tasks, though it’s “in no way … overmanned.” He declined to say in which fields the Space Force is spread thinnest.

But he acknowledged that as the mission set grows, so will the need for staff in expanding areas like missile warning and tracking. That’s especially driven by the Pentagon’s plans to put hundreds of disposable satellites on orbit to become more resilient in case of attack.

It’s time for the service to take a hard look at how many people it needs in each of those roles, and figure out how to promote and pay them fairly, Chief Bentivegna said.

“Am I happy with the structure? No,” he said.

Bentivegna said he’d like to see all guardians who are fully qualified be promoted, up to the first noncommissioned officer rank of sergeant (E-5) — when troops start vying for a smaller number of leadership positions.

“I don’t want to have commanders make a decision that, ‘Only 65% can get promoted this cycle,’” he said. “The only thing that the guardians should be … comparing themselves against is the standard, not one another.”

Kelley, the civilian personnel boss, said the service will advocate for guardians to be allowed to pocket salaries that rival those in the commercial space, cyber and other technology-focused sectors that compete with the Space Force for talent. When guardians may qualify for bonuses and how large those might be is also under consideration.

Officials contend there’s no time to lose in nailing down the details.

“There’s [a] real world at stake here. This is not hypothetical,” Kelley said. “As much as I worry about how much we’re trying to attack at once internally, to get stood up and do all these new things and build new laws and new policies, what’s at stake is you’re farther and farther behind where you need to be. And so I’m excited for what we can do.”

The U.S. Treasury, State Department and Commerce Department plan Friday to impose roughly 600 new sanctions on Russia and its war machine in the largest single tranche of penalties since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. They come on the heels of a series of new arrests and indictments announced by the Justice Department on Thursday that target Russian businessmen, including the head of Russia’s second-largest bank, and their middlemen in five separate federal cases.

The EU announced Friday that it is imposing sanctions on several foreign companies over allegations that they have exported dual-use goods to Russia that could be used in its war against Ukraine. The 27-nation bloc also said that it was targeting scores of Russian officials, including “members of the judiciary, local politicians and people responsible for the illegal deportation and military re-education of Ukrainian children.”

“The American people and people around the world understand that the stakes of this fight extend far beyond Ukraine,” President Joe Biden said in a statement announcing the sanctions. “If Putin does not pay the price for his death and destruction, he will keep going. And the costs to the United States — along with our NATO Allies and partners in Europe and around the world — will rise.”

While previous sanctions have increased costs for Russia’s ability to fight in Ukraine, they appear to have done little so far to deter Putin’s aggression or ambitions. The Biden administration is levying additional sanctions as House Republicans are blocking billions of dollars in additional aid to Ukraine.

The war is becoming entangled in U.S. election-year politics, with former President Donald Trump voicing skepticism about the benefits of the NATO alliance and saying that he would “encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to countries that, in his view, are not pulling their weight in the alliance.

Many of the new U.S. sanctions announced Friday target Russian firms that contribute to the Kremlin’s war effort — including drone and industrial chemical manufacturers and machine tool importers — as well as financial institutions, such as the state-owned operator of Russia’s Mir National Payment System.

In response to Navalny’s death, the State Department is designating three Russian officials the U.S. says are connected to his death, including the deputy director of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, who was promoted by Putin to the rank of colonel general on Monday, three days after Navalny died.

The sanctions would bar the officials from traveling to the U.S. and block access to U.S.-owned property. It is unclear, however, how many of the sanctioned officials travel to or have assets or family in the West. If they do not, the sanctions may be largely symbolic.

The U.S. also will impose visa restrictions on Russian authorities it says are involved in the kidnapping and confinement of Ukrainian children.

In addition, 26 third-country people and firms from across China, Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, and Liechtenstein are listed for sanctions, for assisting Russia in evading existing financial penalties.

The Russian foreign ministry said the EU sanctions are “illegal” and undermine “the international legal prerogatives of the UN Security Council.” In response, the ministry is banning some EU citizens from entering the country because they have provided military assistance to Ukraine. It did not immediately address the U.S. sanctions.

The U.S. specifically was to target individuals associated with Navalny’s imprisonment a day after Biden met with the opposition leader’s widow and daughter in California. It was also hitting “Russia’s financial sector, defense industrial base, procurement networks and sanctions evaders across multiple continents,” Biden said. “They will ensure Putin pays an even steeper price for his aggression abroad and repression at home.”

The EU asset freezes and travel bans constitute the 13th package of measures imposed by the bloc against people and organizations it suspects of undermining the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.

“Today, we are further tightening the restrictive measures against Russia’s military and defense sector,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said. “We remain united in our determination to dent Russia’s war machine and help Ukraine win its legitimate fight for self-defense.”

In all, 106 more officials and 88 “entities” — often companies, banks, government agencies or other organizations — have been added to the bloc’s sanctions list, bringing the tally of those targeted to more than 2,000 people and entities, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and his associates.

Companies making electronic components, which the EU believes could have military as well as civilian uses, were among 27 entities accused of “directly supporting Russia’s military and industrial complex in its war of aggression against Ukraine,” a statement said.

Those companies — some of them based in India, Sri Lanka, China, Serbia, Kazakhstan, Thailand and Turkey — face tougher export restrictions.

The bloc said the companies “have been involved in the circumvention of trade restrictions,” and it accuses others of “the development, production and supply of electronic components” destined to help Russia’s armed forces.

Some of the measures are aimed at depriving Russia of parts for pilotless drones, which are seen by military experts as key to the war.

Since the start of the war, U.S. Treasury and State departments have designated over 4,000 officials, oligarchs, firms, banks and others under Russia-related sanctions authorities. A $60 per barrel price cap has also been imposed on Russian oil by Group of Seven allies, intended to reduce Russia’s revenues from fossil fuels.

Critics of the sanctions, price cap and other measures meant to stop Russia’s invasion say they are not working fast enough.

Maria Snegovaya, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that primarily sanctioning Russia’s defense industry and failing to cut meaningfully into Russia’s energy revenues will not be enough to halt the war.

“One way or another, they will have to eventually address Russia’s oil revenues and have to consider an oil embargo,” Snegovaya said. “The oil price cap has effectively stopped working.”

Treasury Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo, in previewing the new sanctions, told reporters that the U.S. and its allies will not lower the price cap; “rather what we’ll be doing is taking actions that will increase the cost” of Russia’s production of oil.

He added that “sanctions alone are not enough to carry Ukraine to victory.”

“We owe the Ukrainian people who have held on for so long the support and resources they desperately need to defend their homeland and prove Putin wrong once and for all time.”

The Department of Defense also acknowledged that an American MQ-9 Reaper drone went down on Monday in the Red Sea off the coast of Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen.

“Initial indications are that it was shot down by a Houthi surface-to-air missile,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Tuesday during a press briefing, adding that at that time it had not been recovered.

The Navy and coalition partners remain engaged with Houthi militants as the group continues to launch attacks against military and commercial vessels in the region.

The Houthis shot down another MQ-9 in November, according to The Associated Press.

Over the last few days, U.S. forces struck a number of anti-ship cruise missiles, mobile unmanned surface vessels and one-way attack unmanned aerial vehicles launched by the militant group from Yemen, as well as the unmanned underwater vessel, which CENTCOM said was taken out on February 17.

Early Tuesday morning, the Navy destroyer Laboon identified an anti-ship cruise missile headed in its direction, which it subsequently shot down. That marks at least nine confirmed incidents the Laboon has participated in.

Some of the recent attacks by the Iran-backed Houthis have involved U.S.-owned commercial ships, which experienced minor damages. CENTCOM admonished the Houthis for such attacks, noting that they have exacerbated already high levels of humanitarian need in Yemen.

Earlier this month, a Defense Intelligence Agency report confirmed that Houthi forces have employed various missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles from Iran in their regional attacks.

Please review this tracker report for up-to-date information regarding the ongoing series of engagements between the U.S. Navy and the Houthis.

Military Times’ Pentagon bureau chief Meghann Myers contributed to this story.

Because of the crash, hundreds of Osprey aircraft across the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy have been grounded since Dec. 6. There are two investigations that are looking into the Japan crash — a safety investigation board, which is a privileged internal review conducted in private to help inform pilots and crews, as well as an accident investigation board, which is the official administrative review. Both are still ongoing.

Separately, Air Force Special Operations Command is undergoing its own comprehensive review of its CV-22 Osprey program, and while the command has said it knows what failed, it has not made those details public.

“At this time, the material failure that occurred is known but the cause of the failure has not been determined. Engineering testing and analysis is ongoing to understand the cause of the material failure, a critical part of the investigation. Any disclosure of findings prior to investigations being finalized is premature and presumptive,” Air Force Special Operations Command said in a statement released Tuesday.

The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have been coordinating their efforts on when Osprey crews will be able to safely return to the skies. Each service will make its own determination, and the Air Force said to return its fleet of about 50 Ospreys to flight, “the priority is to inform our deliberate return to fly and ensure CV-22 aircrew and maintainers have the information they need to prevent future mishaps.”

The Osprey is a tiltrotor aircraft that can fly like both a helicopter and airplane.

Late Monday, NBC News reported that the crash was linked to chipping from the Osprey’s proprotor gearbox. When small pieces of metal chip off gears in the aircraft due to wear, it can generate dangerous metal debris that can damage engines. The gearbox has been under scrutiny in various Osprey accidents and some of its components have been wearing out quicker than expected. In January 2023, the Department of Defense awarded Bell-Boeing $12.7 million to improve the gearbox design across all of the Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps and Navy Osprey variants.

Air Force Special Operations Command was not available to comment on whether a gearbox chip caused the accident. However, it would not be the first time a chip issue was linked to an Air Force Special Operations Command Osprey mishap.

In July 2013, an Osprey experienced a proprotor gearbox chip inflight, the size of the debris required the entire gearbox to be replaced. In January 2014, an Osprey made a precautionary landing after another mid-flight gearbox chip, according to data obtained by The Associated Press.

Chipping can be caused by a variety of factors, including a lack of lubrication for the gears, or the gear teeth being subject to force overloads, said Rex Rivolo, a retired Air Force pilot who analyzed the Osprey for the Pentagon’s test and evaluation office from 1992 to 2007 as an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses.

The Osprey has a chip detector that triggers a warning to crews if metal fragments are detected, alerting them that there are pieces of metal breaking off the gears. “The procedure is to land immediately,” Rivolo said. “Most chip warning lights are due to very small pieces of metal and are harmless, and the aircraft lands safely.”

The officials, who were not authorized to comment and insisted on anonymity, said preliminary accounts suggest the enemy drone that struck the installation known as Tower 22 may have been mistaken for an American drone that was in the air at the same time.

The officials said that as the enemy drone was flying in at a low altitude, a U.S. drone was returning to the base. As a result, there was no effort to shoot down the enemy drone.

The preliminary conclusion was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Explanation for how the enemy drone evaded U.S. air defenses on the installation came as the White House said Monday it’s not looking for war with Iran even as President Joe Biden vows retaliatory action. The Democratic administration believes Tehran was behind the strike.

Biden met with members of his national security team in the White House Situation Room to discuss the latest developments.

The brazen attack, which the Biden administration blames on Iranian-based proxies, adds another layer of complexity to an already tense Mideast situation as the Biden administration tries to keep the Israel-Hamas war from expanding into a broader regional conflict.

“The president and I will not tolerate attacks on U.S. forces, and we will take all necessary actions to defend the U.S. and our troops,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Monday as he met at the Pentagon with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Biden faces a difficult balancing act as he looks to strike back against Tehran in a forceful way without allowing the Gaza conflict to further metastasize. The drone attack was one of dozens on U.S. troops in the Middle East since Hamas launched attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, igniting the war in Gaza. But it’s the first in which American service members have been killed.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby reiterated a day after Biden promised to “hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner [of] our choosing” that the U.S. administration wasn’t seeking to get into another conflict in the Middle East.

But Kirby also made clear that the American patience has worn thin after more than two months of attacks by Iranian proxies on U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria and Jordan and on the U.S. Navy and commercial vessels in the Red Sea. The groups — including Yemen’s Houthi rebels and the Iraq-based Kataeb Hezbollah — say the attacks are in response to Israel’s ongoing military operations in Gaza.

“We are not looking for a war with Iran,” Kirby told NBC’s “Today” show. “We are not looking to escalate the conflict in the region. … Obviously, these attacks keep coming. We’ll keep looking at the options. I can’t speak for the supreme leader or what he wants or he doesn’t want. I can tell you what we want. What we want is a stable, secure, prosperous Middle East, and we want these attacks to stop.”

Iran on Monday denied it was behind the Jordan strike.

“These claims are made with specific political goals to reverse the realities of the region,” Tehran’s official IRNA news agency quoted foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani as saying.

Republicans have laid blame on Biden for doing too little to deter Iranian-backed militias, which have carried out some 150 attacks on U.S. troops in region since the start of the war.

“Biden’s response to these attacks has been disorganized, ineffective, and weak,” Republican National Committee spokesman Jake Schneider said in a statement. “Now, more Americans have lost their lives because of Biden’s incompetence.”

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump on Sunday called the attack “yet another horrific and tragic consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness and surrender.”

The attack hit a U.S. military desert outpost in the far reaches of northeastern Jordan known as Tower 22. The installation sits near the demilitarized zone on the border between Jordan and Syria along a sandy, bulldozed berm marking the DMZ’s southern edge. The Iraqi border is only 10 kilometers (6 miles) away.

The base began as a Jordanian outpost watching the border, then saw an increased U.S. presence after American forces entered Syria in late 2015. The small installation includes U.S. engineering, aviation, logistics and security troops, with about 350 U.S. Army and Air Force personnel deployed.

Iraq’s government condemned the drone strike in an apparent effort to distance itself from an attack likely carried out by the Iranian-backed militias that have a strong presence inside Iraq.

Government spokesman Bassem al-Awadi said in a statement on Monday that Iraq is “monitoring with a great concern the alarming security developments in the region” and called for “an end to the cycle of violence.” The statement said that Iraq is ready to participate in diplomatic efforts to prevent further escalation.

An umbrella group for Iran-backed factions known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has claimed dozens of attacks against bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria since the Israel-Hamas war began. On Sunday, the group claimed three drone attacks against sites in Syria, including near the border with Jordan, and one inside of “occupied Palestine,” but so far hasn’t claimed the attack in Jordan.

The attack came as U.S. officials were seeing signs of progress in negotiations to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas to release the more than 100 remaining hostages being held in Gaza in exchange for an extended pause in fighting. While contours of a deal under consideration would not end the war, Americans believed that it could lay the groundwork for a durable resolution to the conflict.

Top U.S., Israeli, Egypt and Qatari officials held talks on Sunday in France about an emerging framework for a hostage deal. Israel said “significant gaps” remain but called the talks constructive and said they would continue in the week ahead.

The Jordan attack also had U.S. allies on edge that the situation in the Middle East could further spiral.

German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Sebastian Fischer said that “in view of the extremely tense situation in the region, this act is completely irresponsible and could lead to pushing the region further toward escalation.”

“We expect from Iran that it finally exert its influence on its allies in the region so that there is no uncontrolled conflagration, in which no one can have an interest,” Fischer said.

Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad, Jon Gambrell in Jerusalem and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed reporting.

The drone attack, which U.S. officials said hit the Tower 22 outpost near Jordan’s border with Syria, is the first such strike that has resulted in U.S. fatalities after months of attacks against American troops in the region by Iran-backed militias.

The extent of injuries to the wounded personnel is unknown at this time. One U.S. official told Reuters, meanwhile, that numerous troops are being evaluated for traumatic brain injury.

In a White House-issued statement on Sunday, President Joe Biden said he was “grieving the loss of these warriors” and blamed the attack on “radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.”

“These service members embodied the very best of our nation,” Biden said. “Unwavering in their bravery. Unflinching in their duty. Unbending in their commitment to our country — risking their own safety for the safety of their fellow Americans, and our allies and partners with whom we stand in the fight against terrorism. It is a fight we will not cease.”

Biden added that the U.S. “will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner [of] our choosing.”

Tower 22, which had not been targeted in previous strikes by Iran-backed militias, is located approximately 12 miles south of the al-Tanf garrison in southeastern Syria, where U.S. troops have maintained a presence to train partner forces as part of the campaign against the Islamic State.

The small installation, which Jordan does not publicly disclose, includes U.S. engineering, aviation, logistics and security troops. An estimated 3,000 U.S. troops are typically stationed in Jordan.

Sunday’s attack is the latest of more than 150 strikes that have been launched on regional bases housing U.S. troops since Oct. 17, shortly after the U.S. sent aircraft carriers, Air Force fighter squadrons and other troops to the Middle East following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Iran-backed militias have struck American military installations using a mix of drones, rockets, mortars and ballistic missiles. Scores of U.S. personnel have been wounded since October, including some who sustained traumatic brain injuries.

The attack Sunday was the first targeting American troops in Jordan amid the Israel-Hamas conflict.

“I am outraged and deeply saddened by the deaths of three of our U.S. service members and woundings of other American troops,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Sunday. “The president and I will not tolerate attacks on American forces, and we will take all necessary actions to defend the United States, our troops, and our interests.”

The U.S. in recent months has carried out strikes against targets in Iraq, Syria and Yemen in response to attacks on American forces in the region and as a means of deterring Iran-backed Houthi rebels from continuing to threaten commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

Militias claiming responsibility for attacks since October have said the strikes are in retaliation for U.S. support of Israeli in its war in Gaza. Militant groups have also stated the attacks are intended to push U.S. forces out of the region.

The attack Sunday comes as U.S. and Iraqi governments are expected to soon begin discussions about the future role of U.S. troops in Iraq. In a Jan. 10 interview with Reuters, Iraqi prime minister Shia al-Sudani described the presence of 2,500 U.S. troops who deployed to Iraq in support of the mission to defeat ISIS as destabilizing. That rhetoric, however, has yet to yield any formal requests either to the Pentagon or White House, according to U.S. officials.

In accordance with Department of Defense policy, the identities of those killed in Sunday’s attack are being withheld until 24 hours after next-of-kin notifications.

Military Times reporter Meghann Myers contributed to this report.

That number includes 47 incidents in Iraq and 55 in Syria, the official said, “by a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and close-range ballistic missiles.”

Most of the attacks either didn’t reach bases or were shot down by U.S. defenses, the official added.

The small number that did, however, have resulted in 66 injuries to U.S. troops, a number that has held steady since Dec. 7.

The Pentagon has characterized the injuries, to include dozens of traumatic brain injuries, as “non-serious.” All of the troops have since returned to duty, the defense official confirmed.

The U.S. military has carried out three strikes on facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in Syria in response to the ongoing attacks, in addition to running down at least one group of perpetrators following an attack in Iraq.

Pentagon officials have declined to tie the surge in attacks to the U.S.’ support of Israel in its war against Hamas, but have warned that Iran’s support of these groups could further deteriorate the situation in the Middle East.

“Attacks by these Iranian proxies threaten the region’s citizens and risk a broader conflict,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during a press conference on Monday in Israel. “Of course, the United States does not seek war, and we urgently call on Iran to take steps to de-escalate.”

WASHINGTON, LONDON and PARIS — Several nations have announced their contributions to Operation Prosperity Guardian, a new multinational security initiative in the Middle East to help protect merchant ships in the Red Sea area from drones and missiles.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin formally announced the effort Dec. 18, after previously hinting that collective action is required to protect civilian ships in the region.

To date, Houthi rebels in Yemen have launched at least 100 attacks with one-way drones and ballistic missiles, targeting 10 merchant vessels that represent more than 35 different nations, according to a readout of a virtual meeting between security group participants.

“Operation Prosperity Guardian is bringing together multiple countries to include the United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain to jointly address security challenges in the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, with the goal of ensuring freedom of navigation for all countries and bolstering regional security and prosperity,” Austin said Dec. 18.

He noted this effort will fall under the purview of the Combined Maritime Forces — a multinational maritime partnership based in Bahrain — and its Task Force 153. The CMF is made up of 39 nations, and its various task forces help secure the Gulf of Oman, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Some task forces also focus on countering piracy across the region as well as and training and partner-building activities.

About 20,000 commercial vessels transit the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden every year, according to the French Navy. Task Force 153 specifically covers the Red Sea and was established in 2022 to address human trafficking and smuggling of both legal materials like coal and illegal weapons and drugs, Defense News previously reported.

The readout of Austin’s meeting noted that task force “could be leveraged to deter attacks under the CMF,” but the Defense Department declined to provide additional information.

Here are some details about forces participating in Operation Prosperity Guardian.

Britain

Britain has committed a Type 45 destroyer equipped with air defense weapons to the international task force.

The Defence Ministry announced Dec. 19 the destroyer HMS Diamond will lead the Royal Navy’s contribution to Operation Prosperity Guardian.

HMS Diamond has been in the region for a little more than two weeks and moved to the Red Sea on Saturday. It was almost immediately called into action to shoot down a suspected Houthi drone aimed at a commercial ship in the area. This was first time the Royal Navy shot down an aerial target since the Gulf War in 1991.

“This is an international problem that requires an international solution. That is why HMS Diamond has joined Operation Prosperity Guardian,” Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said while announcing the work with the security group.

British forces have been on hand with a small fleet of ships in the region. For example, the military operates a flotilla out of Bahrain that includes the frigate HMS Lancaster, three mine-hunting vessels and a Royal Fleet Auxiliary support ship.

Italy

Italy will do its part to counter “destabilizing terrorist activity” by sending the multimission frigate Virginio Fasan to the Red Sea, the country’s Defence Ministry said in a statement.

Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto and Austin discussed maritime security in a video call Tuesday, including options for securing shipping routes to avoid economic repercussions and “dangerous impacts” on commodity prices.

“It’s necessary to increase the presence in the area in order to create the conditions for stabilization, to avoid environmental disasters and also to avoid a resurgence of the inflationary push,” Crosetto said in the statement.

France

The French multimission frigate Languedoc has been patrolling the Gulf of Aden and the southern area of the Red Sea since Dec. 8 to secure freedom of navigation, the French Navy said in a Dec. 15 statement.

The Languedoc shot down two drones coming from the direction of Yemen that appeared hostile on the second day of its patrol duty. The frigate destroyed a drone threatening the Norwegian oil tanker Strinda on Dec. 11, before moving in to protect the stricken tanker and prevent a hijacking, according to the Navy. A fire aboard the Strinda was brought under control without injuries.

Norway

Norway will dispatch as many as 10 staff officers to the Combined Maritime Forces, the Norwegian Defence Ministry said.

Marita Isaksen Wangberg, a ministry spokesperson, told Defense News the country isn’t sending any vessels.

The Netherlands

The Netherlands plans to contribute two staff officers to the operation. The country doesn’t have any vessels in the area at this time, and the contribution of ships is under review, Navy spokesperson Alex Kranenburg told Defense News.

Spain

Spain has not made a decision regarding its participation in Operation Prosperity Guardian, the Defence Ministry’s spokesperson, Nuria Fernández de la Fuente, told Defense News. Any participation by Spain, the representative added, would not be unilateral but within the framework of NATO or the European Union.

While the service maintains that Teixeira acted alone, the Air Force’s investigation turned up four separate instances where Teixeira was observed looking at or discussing intelligence a person in his role would have no business accessing. His supervisors were aware of the issues, yet chose not to report them to security officials until months into his activities, according to an investigation released Monday.

“Had any of these members come forward, security officials would likely have facilitated restricting systems/facility access and alerted the appropriate authorities, reducing the length and depth of the unauthorized and unlawful disclosures by several months,” the report reads.

The investigation also found that workspaces were inadequately inspected and there was inconsistent guidance for reporting security breaches. Further, there was reportedly a lack of supervision and insufficient understanding among the command of who could access sensitive information.

The investigation specifically calls out the 102nd Intelligence Support Squadron for a weekly intelligence briefing it provided, saying it created “ambiguity” around whether these tech support airmen were meant to be accessing classified material.

Teixeira’s job did not involve handling intelligence but did allow him to access it due to his maintenance of the computer systems on which it was stored and transmitted.

The Massachusetts guardsman is facing six federal criminal charges of unauthorized disclosure under the Espionage Act, to which he’s pleaded not guilty. A trial date has not been set.

Intelligence-seeking

A coworker first observed Teixeira on a top secret-sensitive compartmented information website in the summer of 2022. His supervisor did not document the incident in writing. In September, another coworker saw Teixeira on the site while he wrote notes on a Post-it. Teixeira was confronted and told to shred the note, but no one checked to see what the note contained or verified that it was shredded, the investigation found.

While Teixeira received a memorandum for record telling him to stop such activities, the incidents were still not reported to security officials.

Then in late October, during one of the now-scrutinized intelligence briefings, Teixeira asked detailed questions and discussed select top-secret information “he did not have a need to know,” the investigation found. There was another memorandum for record drafted, but the incident once again was not reported.

In January 2023, after another coworker observed Teixera accessing intelligence, another memorandum was drawn up and security officials were finally notified, but with a “substantially minimized version of the concerns,” the report said.

Though Teixeira had been regulated at work, his superiors were unaware that he had been posting information he’d accessed on a Discord server called Thug Shaker Central for six months.

That changed in late February, when the information started showing up on other Discord servers, making its way to X, formerly Twitter, in March.

The Pentagon acknowledged in early April it had a serious leak on its hands, and the FBI arrested Teixeira days later.

‘Compliant but lacking’

Teixeira’s unit environment contributed to his ability to remove and leak classified information, the investigation found.

The 15 disciplined airmen included Cols. Sean Riley and Enrique Dovalo — the wing and group commanders relieved of duty in April, soon after Texeira’s arrest — as well as more junior officers and noncommissioned officers.

The investigation found that the intelligence oversight program in the wing overall was “compliant but lacking,” noting many airmen had yet to complete IO training and supervisors were not consistent with reporting violations or enforcing them.

The 102nd Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group, Teixeira’s unit, is no longer handling sensitive information, the Air Force said in a release Monday.

The Osprey takes off and lands like a helicopter but can tilt its propellers horizontally to fly like an airplane. That unique and complex design has allowed the Osprey to speed troops to the battlefield. The U.S. Marine Corps, which operates the vast majority of the hundreds of Ospreys in service, calls it a “game-changing assault support platform.”

But on Wednesday, the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps grounded all Ospreys after a preliminary investigation of last week’s crash indicated that a materiel failure — that something went wrong with the aircraft — led to the deaths of all eight Air Force Special Operations Command airmen on board.

And it’s not the first time. There have been persistent questions about a mechanical problem with the clutch that has troubled the program for more than a decade. There also have been questions as to whether all parts of the Osprey have been manufactured according to safety specifications and, as those parts age, whether they remain strong enough to withstand the significant forces created by the Osprey’s unique structure and dynamics of tiltrotor flight.

The government of Japan, which is the only international partner flying the Osprey, had already grounded its aircraft after the Nov. 29 crash.

“It’s good they grounded the fleet,” said Rex Rivolo, a retired Air Force pilot who analyzed the Osprey for the Pentagon’s test and evaluation office from 1992 to 2007 as an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses, and who previously warned military officials that the aircraft wasn’t safe. “At this point, they had no choice.”

The Osprey has become a workhorse for the Marine Corps and Air Force Special Operations Command and was in the process of being adopted by the Navy to replace its C-2 Greyhound propeller planes, which transport personnel on and off at-sea aircraft carriers.

Marine Corps Ospreys also have been used to transport White House staff, press and security personnel accompanying the president. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said they also are subject to the standdown.

While the Ospreys are grounded, Air Force Special Operations Command said it will work to mitigate the impact to operations, training and readiness. The command will continue to fly other aircraft and Osprey crews will continue to train on simulators, spokeswoman Lt. Col. Becky Heyse said.

It was not immediately clear how the other services will adapt their missions.

Questions about the clutch

The first Ospreys only became operational in 2007 after decades of testing. But more than 50 troops have died either flight testing the Osprey or conducting training flights over the program’s lifespan, including 20 deaths in four crashes over the past 20 months.

In July, the Marine Corps for the first time blamed one of the fatal Osprey crashes on a fleet-wide problem that has been known for years but for which there’s still no good fix. It’s known as hard clutch engagement, or HCE.

The Osprey’s two engines are linked by an interconnected drive shaft that runs inside the length of the wings. On each tip, by the engines, a component called a sprag clutch transfers torque, or power, from one proprotor to the other to make sure both rotors are spinning at the same speed. That keeps the Osprey’s flight in balance. If one of the two engines fails, the sprag clutch is also a safety feature: It will transfer power from the working side to the failing engine’s side to keep both rotors going.

But sprag clutches have also become a worrying element. As the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps began looking at HCE events following incidents in 2022, they determined that the clutches may be wearing out faster than anticipated.

Since 2010, Osprey clutches have slipped at least 15 times. As the system re-engages, hard clutch engagement occurs. In just fractions of a second, an HCE event creates a power spike that surges power to the other engine, which can throw the Osprey into an uncontrolled roll or slide. A power spike can also destroy a sprag clutch, essentially severing the interconnected drive shaft. That could result in the complete loss of aircraft control with little or no time for the pilots to react and save their Osprey or crew, Rivolo said.

In the 2022 crash of a Marine Corps MV-22 in California that killed five Marines, hard clutch engagement created an “unrecoverable, catastrophic mechanical failure,” the investigation found. The fire was so intense it destroyed the Osprey’s flight data recorder — another issue the Marines have pushed to fix, by requiring new flight data recorders to be better able to survive a crash.

Ospreys have been grounded before

After Air Force Special Operations Command experienced two hard clutch engagement incidents within six weeks in 2022, the commander, Lt. Gen. James Slife, grounded all of its Ospreys for two weeks. An undisclosed number of Ospreys across the military were grounded again in February 2023 as work began on clutch replacements.

But getting replacements to all the aircraft at the time depended on their availability, Slife said in 2022.

And even that replacement may not be the fix. Neither the services nor defense contractors Bell Textron or Boeing, which jointly produce the Osprey, have found a root cause. The clutch “may be the manifestation of the problem,” but not the root cause, Slife said.

In last week’s crash, Japanese media outlet NHK reported that an eyewitness saw the Osprey inverted with an engine on fire before it went down in the sea. If eyewitness accounts are correct, Rivolo said, clutch failure and a catastrophic failure of the interconnected drive shaft should be investigated as a potential cause.

After its investigation of the 2022 crash, the Marine Corps made several recommendations, including designing a new quill assembly, which is a component that mitigates clutch slippage and hard clutch engagement, and requiring that all drivetrain component materiel be strengthened.

That work is ongoing, according to the V-22 Joint Program Office, which is responsible for the development and production of the aircraft. A new quill assembly design is being finalized and testing of a prototype should begin early next year, it said.

When asked what inspections the JPO will conduct on the fleet while they are grounded, the office told Military Times that’s still unknown.

“The mishap investigation will ensure a thorough look into the casual factors, which will help identify recommendations to address any issues uncovered,” Marcia Hart, a spokesperson for Naval Air Systems Command, said Thursday.

Whistleblower questions

Materiel strength was the subject of a whistleblower lawsuit that Boeing settled with the Justice Department in September for $8.1 million. Two former Boeing V-22 composites fabricators had come forward with allegations that Boeing was falsifying records certifying that it had performed the testing necessary to ensure it maintained uniform temperatures required to ensure the Osprey’s composite parts were strengthened according to DOD specifications.

A certain temperature was needed for uniform molecular bonding of the composite surface. Without that bond, “the components will contain resin voids, linear porosity, and other defects that are not visible to the eye; which compromise the strength and other characteristics of the material, and which can cause catastrophic structural failures,” the lawsuit alleged.

In its settlement, the Justice Department contended Boeing did not meet the Pentagon’s manufacturing standards from 2007 to 2018; the whistleblowers contended in their lawsuit that this affected more than 80 Ospreys that were delivered in that time frame.

In a statement to The Associated Press, Boeing said it entered into the settlement agreement with the Justice Department and Navy “to resolve certain False Claims Act allegations, without admission of liability.”

Boeing said while composites are used throughout the V-22, the parts that were questioned in the lawsuit were “all non-critical parts that do not implicate flight safety.”

“Boeing is in compliance with its curing processes for composite parts,” the company said. “Additionally, we would stress that the cause of the accident in Japan is currently unknown. We are standing by to provide any requested support.”

Ongoing fixes

The V-22 Joint Program Office said that since the 2022 incidents, significant progress has been made toward identifying the cause of the hard clutch engagement.

“While the definitive root cause has not yet been determined, the joint government and industry team has narrowed down the scope of the investigation to a leading theory,” it said in a statement to the AP. “The leading theory involves a partial engagement of some clutches which have been installed for a lengthy period of time. This has not yet been definitively proven, but the data acquired thus far support this theory.”

Bell assembles the Osprey in a partnership with Boeing in its facilities in Amarillo, Texas. Bell would not comment on last week’s crash, but said it works with the services when an accident occurs. “The level of support is determined by the service branch safety center in charge of the investigation,” Bell spokesman Jay Hernandez said.

In its report on the fatal 2022 crash, the Marine Corps forewarned that more accidents were possible because neither the military nor manufacturers have been able to isolate a root cause. It said future incidents were “impossible to prevent without improvements to flight control system software, drivetrain component material strength, and robust inspection requirements.”

Air Force Times Editor Rachel S. Cohen contributed to this story.