Crafted by architect Kengo Kuma in partnership with the Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation, the memorial’s design is the culmination of eight years of input from 20,000 Americans, including veterans from every branch of service and every conflict since World War II, according to a foundation release.

According to the memorial’s description, visitors will first encounter steel and stone relics recovered from the 9/11 attacks at each of the site’s three entrances, “marking where the journey began,” the release states.

In a primary section coined “the embrace,” a classically inspired amphitheater rises over the path below and features an arch made of reclaimed steel from the era’s combat operations.

The arch, which will also be adorned with native vegetation, is designed to filter light and will be oriented to align with Section 60 in Arlington National Cemetery, the resting place of roughly 1,000 service members killed in the post-9/11 wars.

Below the arch, a predominantly marble “path of honor” includes embedded boot prints “that represent the weight of war and the varied experiences of those who served and their families,” the release says. The path will also connect to adjacent memorials on the National Mall.

Extending from the footprint paths are shallow reflecting pools in which visitors can dip their feet before stepping back onto the stone to leave footprints of their own, an “interactive component [that] offers visitors the chance to walk alongside a loved one once more,” the foundation says.

“This design was shaped by history and held sacred from the beginning — forged by sacrifice and informed by the voices of warriors and their families,” Michael “Rod” Rodriguez, president and CEO of the Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation and a retired U.S. Army Green Beret, said in the release.

“Throughout history, societies have built sacred places to welcome their warriors home, places where a grateful people can say, ‘We see you. We honor you. You are not forgotten.’” Rodriguez added. “The GWOT generations deserve that same enduring tribute. Today, we take one step closer to welcoming them home.”

In addition to input gathered since 2018, a 23-member advisory council comprising Gold Star family members, veterans and their families worked alongside designers to craft what the foundation has called a “living place … that will illuminate at night and invite reflection, healing and unity for generations to come.”

As the site’s architect, Kuma’s work on the memorial resonated on a deeply personal level, he said in a recent interview. The artist lost his close friend Yoichi Sugiyama, who worked for Fuji Bank, in the Sept. 11 attack at the World Trade Center.

“This memorial is not an abstract commission for our team, it is a sacred responsibility,” Kuma said in the release. “Our role was not to impose a design, but to listen. The voices of those who served and the families who stood beside them became our source of inspiration. We wanted to create a place of reflection and connection, a living memorial where nature, light and the materials of this war come together as an embrace for a grateful nation.”

Foundation officials are slated to meet over the coming months with various city planning commissions to finalize design approval, according to the foundation’s proposed timeline.

With approval, the foundation is aiming for a 2027 groundbreaking and a project completion date of late 2028.

The contract, which follows a framework agreement announced in January, will allow Lockheed to “deliver record numbers of combat-proven interceptors for American and allied forces this year,” the company announced Friday.

“Our investments in our facilities, workforce and supply chain ensure we can deliver at scale and with speed,” Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said in a release. “With the right tools, proven processes and skilled employees in place, we are positioned to deliver a record number of munitions in support of the warfighter and our allies.”

The PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement works by identifying and tracking a range of threats — using Boeing-made PAC-3 seekers — from ballistic missiles and hypersonics to hostile air platforms.

Once the seeker identifies the target, the highly maneuverable all-up interceptor round, which uses a two-pulse solid rocket motor, engages and eliminates threats via direct body-to-body contact.

Boeing earlier this month announced it had reached a framework agreement with the Defense Department to triple production of its PAC-3 seekers.

Lockheed’s framework agreement announced in January included a target of increasing annual PAC-3 interceptor production from approximately 600 to 2,000 over a span of seven years.

Recent contract announcements come as the U.S. military’s reliance on costly interceptors against cheap munitions, particularly those deployed by Iran during Operation Epic Fury, has come under increased scrutiny.

Contrast the $35,000 average cost of an Iranian Shahed drone with an estimated $4 million price tag of a PAC-3, and the cost exchange, if successfully engaged, is 114-1 in favor of Iran.

Despite the lopsided cost exchange, the Pentagon in March also announced a deal with BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin to quadruple production of infrared seekers for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptor.

That deal aligns with a contract agreement in January between the Pentagon and Lockheed to quadruple the company’s annual production of THAAD interceptors from 96 to 400.

The sea service reached an agreement with the Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, the company confirmed Tuesday, to deploy tech capable of streamlining repairs and reducing maintenance delays for a surface fleet that continues to be stretched thin.

The contract will begin as a 5-year, $54 million indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity deal that will soon see Gecko begin work on 18 ships assigned to the Navy’s U.S. Pacific Fleet.

To expedite what has in recent years become a headache for naval readiness, Gecko uses drones, wall-climbing robots and fixed sensors to gather data on components, decks, welds and hulls.

That information, paired with AI tools, is used to identify current and potential structural issues that may remain hidden to the naked eye.

“A single robotic evaluation and digital rendering of a flight deck eliminated over three months of potential maintenance delay days,” the company release stated about one such procedure.

These measures have expedited maintenance “up to 50 times faster and more accurately than manual methods,” the company added.

“Readiness isn’t just a metric, it’s all that matters,” Jake Loosararian, co-founder and CEO of Gecko, said in the release. “This growing partnership is about unfair advantages Gecko is deploying to our Navy; and how prediction, through our robotics and AI products, ensure our brave men and women are the most advantaged in the world in their fight to defend freedom.”

In fall 2024, then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti unveiled a goal of having 80% of the Navy’s fleet ready to deploy at any given time by 2027.

Obstacles to reaching that goal materialized quickly, however, with a Government Accountability Office report in December 2024 highlighting a readiness rate among the Navy’s amphibious warfare ships of just 46% between 2011 and 2020. This rate, in turn, significantly hindered Marine Corps deployment and training plans.

In August 2025, that rate reportedly dipped to just 41%, resulting in a more than five-month gap in Marine Expeditionary Unit deployments that year and further straining resources amid the Trump administration’s push to counter the illicit drug trade in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The 80% plan, meanwhile, was picked up by Franchetti’s successor, Adm. Daryl Caudle, who called the rate “an ambitious but essential readiness goal.”

“Achieving this requires shorter maintenance cycles, increased spare-parts availability, improved training pipelines and targeted upgrades across the fleet,” Caudle wrote for Military Times in December.

“Readiness is not a budget line — it is a promise to the American people that their Navy will never arrive late to a fight.”

For many who have donned the uniform, the phrase elicits myriad awkward responses. Some vets simply have no reply chambered and instead offer nonsensical returns like “You too,” “Thanks for your support” or “The son of man did not come to be served, but to serve,” before launching into a “Stomp the Yard” dance routine.

And while authentic sentiment and genuine gratitude no doubt have merit, “Thank you for your service” has lost its appeal to many who served in America’s 21st-century wars.

But precisely how much today’s veterans shun the phrase has remained largely unquantified — at least until now.

Thanks to a survey produced and sourced over September and October by USAA, Endeavor Analytics and YouGov, there exists concrete evidence that veterans are indeed tired of the withering barrage of thanks.

All told, half of the 1,639 veterans and military personnel surveyed said “Thank you for your service” makes them feel downright “uncomfortable or awkward.”

That number, however, climbs to nearly 70 percent when it comes to veterans between the ages of 18 and 29. Only veterans 65 and over responded that the phrase is favorably received.

On the civilian side, meanwhile, one recent proposition to inject new life into the tired phrase was to alter the language in a way that … well, quite frankly, would only exacerbate the cringe.

Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., filed a non-binding legislation last year aimed at replacing the phrase “Thank you for your service” with “Thank you for our freedom.”

Bergman, a retired Marine Reserve three-star general who oozes medically concerning amounts of motivation, said at the time that the “resolution will help ensure those of us blessed to call America home understand the personal importance of our servicemen and women’s sacrifice for our Nation.”

Though Bergman’s legislation had virtually no chance of becoming law, his particular example of unbridled, all-inclusive appreciation is one of many that have helped spawn the notorious “Vet Bro,” a mythical Florida Man of the military draped in tactical gear, Punisher stickers, and shirts replete with eye-melting slogans and sleeves elongated during manufacturing just to accommodate colossal flag prints.

Are there adequate alternatives to “Thank you for your service,” opportunities to connect beyond small talk, to educate, to honor those who embodied selfless service? Surely. Such one-on-one connections could even help close the perceived chasm between American troops and civilians. Better understanding between those who serve and those who take an oath to protect seems more needed now than ever before.

After all, the USAA survey notes that more than a quarter of civilians polled indicated they had no clue why Veterans Day was even celebrated.

Thank you for your survey.

Army Times reporter Davis Winkie contributed to this story.

The “prepare to deploy” order by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “increases DoD’s ability to respond quickly to the evolving security environment in the Middle East,” Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said in a release Tuesday. “No decisions have been made to deploy any forces at this time. The Secretary will continue to assess our force posture and remain in close contact with allies and partners.”

If preparations do lead to a deployment, U.S. personnel from various units based across the Middle East and Europe are expected to assume support roles. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on the potential deployment.

The Pentagon did not specify how many troops, if any, would be deployed inside Israel’s borders or whether personnel would occupy locations outside the country. Direct involvement in combat by U.S. infantry is not expected at this time, according to the WSJ.

Austin’s orders come as droves of Palestinians continue to flee south from the Gaza Strip ahead of an expected Israeli ground invasion, one aimed at eliminating Hamas in retaliation for the group’s Oct. 7 attack in Israel that killed 1,400 people, the majority of whom were civilians.

Numerous aid groups, meanwhile, continue to warn that the impending invasion could compound what is quickly becoming a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, a densely populated strip of land — between Israel and Egypt — home to approximately 2.3 million people.

The attack by Hamas, a militant group that has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union, kicked off what quickly became the bloodiest conflict between Palestine and Israel since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. More than 4,000 people have now died in the conflict, with the Gaza Health Ministry claiming 2,750 Palestinians have been killed and 9,700 wounded.

In addition to the 1,400 Israelis killed in the attack, at least 199 others, including children and elderly citizens, were captured by Hamas and taken as hostages into Gaza, Israeli officials have reported.

With support from U.S. Navy warships and air assets, Israeli forces have been amassing along Gaza’s border and drilling for what Israel said would be a broad campaign to dismantle the militant group. A week of blistering airstrikes in Gaza by Israeli aircraft have demolished entire neighborhoods, but have failed to prevent further rocket attacks into Israel by Hamas.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has renewed pledges of American support for Israel in its war against Hamas, and discussed U.S. efforts with the U.N. and others to provide hostage rescue assistance as well as humanitarian aid for civilians.

The White House announced Monday that President Joe Biden is expected to travel to Israel on Wednesday “to demonstrate his steadfast support for Israel in the face of Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack and to consult on next steps.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The nine-episode miniseries, starring Oscar-nominees Austin Butler (“Elvis”) and Barry Keoghan (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), is slated to launch with a two-episode debut on January 26, 2024, and will continue with one episode per week until March 15.

Based on Donald L. Miller’s book of the same name, “Masters of the Air” follows American bomber pilots of the Eighth Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group, also known as the Bloody Hundredth, who repeatedly risked flying at 25,000 feet in frigid temperatures — in broad daylight — to bring the fight to Hitler’s doorstep.

Three years — 1942 to 1945 — of death-defying bombing runs by the Eighth’s Flying Fortresses over cities like Berlin, Dresden and Hanover were, for much of the war, the only battles Allied forces waged inside the territorial borders of Nazi Germany.

But the missions proved deadly. So much so that the odds of a B-17 crewman surviving the 25 missions required to complete a tour were only one in four. Until the 1944 introduction of the P-51 Mustang to the air war over Europe, the B-17′s impressive distance capabilities meant daylight bombing runs over Germany would have to be done without fighter escorts, leaving inexperienced B-17 crews to fend for themselves against more seasoned German pilots of the Luftwaffe.

The Eighth’s effort to pry Europe from the claws of the Third Reich — one that included unleashing 697,000 tons of bombs — proved to be overwhelmingly costly. By war’s end, over 47,000 of the 115,000 U.S. Army Air Force casualties were from the Eighth.

“When we were preparing to go overseas our commanding officer called us together and said, ‘Look at the man on either side of you. Only one of you will be coming back. You’re all going to be killed and you might as well accept it,’” World War II B-17 bomber pilot John “Lucky” Luckadoo told Military Times. “That was the mindset that we were supposed to take into combat. That our chances of coming back were so minimal that we should accept our fate and just do the best that we could, for as long as we could. … The sheer terror that we confronted was so devastating that it left a mark on us for life.”

Development of “Masters of the Air” was originally confirmed by HBO back in January 2013, but delays and budget considerations led to the project being dropped. Eventually picked up as an Apple TV+ production, filming was once again shelved in 2020 due to COVID-19 restrictions.

The long wait, however, is now over.

Director Cary Fukunaga, the Emmy award-winning director behind the masterful first season of HBO’s “True Detective,” is credited with helming four of the nine episodes.

Reuniting with Spielberg and Hanks on the series is “Band of Brothers” writer John Orloff, who also served as a consultant on “The Pacific.”

Newly released photos of “Masters of the Air” are featured below.

HistoryNet editor Claire Barrett contributed to this story.

Sophisticated artificial intelligence is capable of drastically altering how cancer is diagnosed and treated by learning to distinguish imagery of tissue containing cancerous cells from pictures of healthy tissue, a recent study in the Federal Practitioner journal claims.

“Based on a set of images selected to represent a specific tissue or disease process, the computer can be trained to evaluate and recognize new and unique images from patients and render a diagnosis,” the study’s authors wrote.

To test machine learning software, researchers uploaded hundreds of microscopic images of commonly diagnosed forms of the disease, such as lung or colon cancer, along with pictures of non-cancerous cells. At the conclusion of the test, the software — both Google- and Apple-based versions were tested — not only distinguished cancerous cells from non-cancerous tissue with a success rate of better than 90 percent, but it also indicated the exact form of cancer it was analyzing.

The ability of user-friendly machine learning software to learn and efficiently perform traditional human tasks in less time will alleviate some of the demand on medical practitioners who are already being stretched thin, the authors claim.

By coupling AI with a growing list of telehealth options, specialists have the potential to reach patients from anywhere in the world. Greater accessibility would especially benefit the millions of patients in the VA’s healthcare system, many of whom live in remote, rural areas where specialists or facilities needed to treat unique diseases are scarce at best.

A collaborative doctor-AI system can also diminish patient wait times and effectively eliminate the time-consuming paperwork analysis that has always bogged down practitioners. What it won’t do, according to one of the study’s authors, is replace its Homo sapien counterparts.

“Our ultimate goal would be to create programs that can be rolled out in the entire VA system so that pathologists who are working solo, or maybe there are two pathologists in some small VAs, would have the benefit of having something that is helping them become more productive, help them prioritize the workload and improve quality,” Dr. Andrew Borkowski said in a VA release.

And while the hope of machine learning enthusiasts is to eventually apply AI-assisted healthcare on a global scale, early testing using the VA’s expansive patient base allows for the mining of data from a seemingly limitless source.

The myriad imagery generated from the nearly 50,000 cancer diagnoses of veterans each year, for example, will enable AI software to analyze more data, learn faster, and expand application to other demographics and diseases at a pace other healthcare systems cannot match.

All this is not to say there won’t be obstacles to overcome before AI can be considered entirely viable — ensuring the impeccable accuracy of its decision-making paramount among them.

In 2019, Google-run AI software was fed hundreds of images and tested to determine whether it could predict the early onset of a deadly kidney disease. Two of every three AI-generated results yielded false positives. Significant diagnostic errors like that can be detrimental to practitioners who then follow up on phantom diseases using valuable time that could be spent treating patients in dire need, Mildred Cho, associate director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, told WUSF News.

Continued success in machine learning trials like the one at the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital, however, bode well for AI’s future implementation into healthcare. Researchers hope continuously evolving software, such as Apple-produced AI that is now capable of recognizing images that have been rotated, flipped, or cropped, will help alleviate a glaring industry-wide trend.

The “number of pathologists in the U.S. is dramatically decreasing, and many other countries have marked physician shortages, especially in fields of specialized training such as pathology,” the study’s authors wrote. “These models could readily assist physicians in underserved countries and impact shortages of pathologists elsewhere by providing more specific diagnoses in an expedited manner.”

Future application of machine learning AI, the study concluded, will be immeasurably beneficial in diagnosing and documenting everything from various forms of cancer to non-cancerous diseases, brain hemorrhages, blood disorders, infections, and inflammatory issues.

“The potential of these technologies to improve health care delivery to veteran patients seems to be limited only by the imagination of the user.”

“What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington?” she writes in the book, set for a Nov. 13 release. “What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.”

The former first lady goes on to describe the president’s so-called birther comments as “crazy and mean-spirited … its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.”

Outside the White House Friday, President Trump was asked by reporters about the scathing comments in Obama’s new book, and he was quick to fire back.

“Oh, Michelle Obama said that, I haven’t seen it,” the president said. “I guess she wrote a book. She got paid a lot of money to write a book, and they always insist that you come up with controversial — Well, I’ll give you a little controversy back. I’ll never forgive [Barack Obama] for what he did to our United States military.”

Military spending has been a key focus for Trump before and after his election, with 2018′s soaring defense budget of $700 billion expected to rise even more to $716 billion next year, far more than China and Russia spend on defense.

The two-year defense-spending spike is necessary to return the U.S. military to a superior, combat-ready fighting force, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said earlier this year. Under Trump, the military is also receiving its biggest pay raise in nearly 10 years.

“I cannot overstate the negative impact to our troops’ and families’ morale from all this budget uncertainty,” he said in February. “Obviously, a lot of work goes into the execution, then the quality of the training. But you can count on us. We’ll earn your trust on this. We will spend the money wisely.”

Not spending enough on defense under Obama, Trump continued Friday, put the safety of the country at risk.

“By not funding [the military] properly, it was depleted,” he said. “Everything was old and tired and I came in and I had to fix it, and I’m in the process of spending tremendous amounts of money. So, I’ll never forgive him for what he did to our military. I’ll never forgive him for what he did in many other ways, which I’ll talk to you about in the future.”

“What he did — ’cause [Michelle Obama] talked about safety — what he did to our military made this country very unsafe for you and you and you,” the president concluded, pointing at various reporters in the gaggle.

Watch the exchange below.