While military conscription — colloquially known as the draft — effectively ended in 1973, all U.S. males aged 18 to 25 are required to register with the U.S. Selective Service in case the draft ever needs to be revived. The House passage of its version of the annual defense policy bill this month included a provision that would make Selective Service enrollment automatic. That, combined with comments by Chris Miller, the former acting defense secretary, about his interest in implementing mandatory service have again spurred curiosity and concern over the possibility of a future draft.

Against that backdrop, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) released a report this week about what it would take to do just that. The 35-page document, titled “Back to the Drafting Board,” contains 11 recommendations pulled from a tabletop exercise run by the think tank to simulate the mobilization of conscripts in a military crisis. While the U.S. military has run its own mobilization exercises in the wake of the draft — the memorably named exercise Nifty Nugget was run in 1978, followed by Proud Spirit and Proud Saber in 1980 and 1982 — no full test of U.S. mobilization capacity has been executed in the last 50 years, the report states. And the four teams tasked by CNAS with meeting the U.S. Selective Service System planning criteria of being able to produce 100,000 new military inductees within 193 days, found they couldn’t meet those benchmarks. In fact, no team even came close.

The new report emphasizes that a military draft should still be considered a measure of last resort, not a tool for meeting peacetime military needs or a way to encourage national service or close the civil-military divide, which refers to the gap in understanding between the civilian population and the all-volunteer professional military. The tabletop exercise provides such a scenario: it posits that the U.S. is in a hot war with China following either a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or of the U.S. West Coast. These scenarios drive home just how dire national security circumstances would have to be to bring back the draft: one figure highlighted in the report shows casualty rates on the order of hundreds per day at the start of the conflict. While there’s no guarantee that future draft would be instituted under the conditions the exercise CNAS assumed, the think tank sought realism by involving uniformed and civilian Defense Department personnel, legal experts, and Selective Service staff.

One of the four teams, which operated under best-case assumptions about current policy and response to draft notices, had the best outcome: it was able to mobilize 100,000 conscripts in 211 days, and just over 53,000 by the target 193-day mark. Another team, which made realistic assumptions about current conditions, took 402 days to conscript 100,000 troops. The third team, which took on worst-case assumptions for variables, took 1,336 days, or more than three-and-a-half years, to reach 100,000 conscripts. The final team, which assumed that the Selective Service System had been abolished and had to be restarted before conscription could begin, did surprisingly well, taking 223 days to reach the conscription target.

Based on the exercise, it appears that American culture and resistance to the draft in its historical form may present a major obstacle, the report shows. The U.S. public has to believe that the draft is enforceable for mobilization to work, the report’s authors found, and social media messaging could amplify perceptions of inequity or perpetuate disinformation from adversaries.

“The credibility on Day One is really going to matter for proper implementation if we ever have to enact a draft,” Katherine Kuzminski, the report’s primary author, told Military Times. “There’s a lot of ability to sow confusion.”

A viral video of a pop star ripping up a draft notice, or a social media allegation that a local draft board is racist, for example, could quickly turn the tide of public opinion against drafting authorities. She suggested, on the other hand, that enlisting well-known sports figures or celebrities to promote responding to the draft as a civic duty could help the Defense Department and the Selective Service get in front of these obstacles.

Other problems surfaced in the tabletop exercise included the likelihood of legal challenges to the current all-male draft mobilization model, which would likely create “significant delays” in building an emergency force of conscripts. Declining trust in institutions, exercise participants found, would also likely result in historically high rates of deferment, conscientious objector requests, and draft-dodging, raising the possible need for more muscular enforcement mechanisms.

Alongside cultural obstacles are practical ones. The report also found the military services would likely need to relax military entry standards to accommodate a conscripted force of young people who largely don’t meet fitness, education, and mental health standards.

In 1940, Selective Service rejection rates were around 30%, according to the report. Under current models, and assuming only 23% of the draftable population is eligible to serve without a waiver, the military could run out of prospective draftees in just seven rounds, the report found. In addition, the professional all-volunteer force isn’t ready to accept conscripts into the ranks, the report shows. The military, it indicates, would have to plan and prepare to accept draftees in a way that emphasizes their skills and contributions and does not create the perception they’re “cannon fodder,” or simply bodies brought in to inflate the size of the force. Even the Military Entrance Processing Stations, or MEPS, which are now facing delays in recruit in-processing due to health record screening through the new GENESIS platform, would have to get staffed up, potentially with drafted medical professionals, to process a new round of inductees.

The report recommends that the Defense Department create an “executive agent for national mobilization” position to prepare for and address future issues raised in the report. This position was actually required by the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act but remains unfilled, the report notes. It also calls for the National Security Council to return to full-scale mobilization exercises across the government every two years to highlight preparation needs for a future draft.

For the president, the report recommends considering starting a potential future draft round by calling up older conscripts first — those at the upper end of the 18-25 eligible range. Current plans call for mobilizations of those turning 20 at the time of the draft.

“Operational requirements in a future combat environment may mean that individuals with more experience or technical proficiency are needed,” the report states.

While the prospect of a return to the military draft remains politically unpopular, making it an unlikely scenario in all but the most extreme of circumstances, the ability to call up conscripts quickly and build up military strength and technology can send a deterrent message of its own to the enemy, Kuzminski said.

“The ability to signal that we can be in it for the long haul, and that we have the ability to sustain that, can serve as a deterrent value when it comes to what [China’s] decision calculus is,” Kuzminski said. “They don’t want to start a war that could end up being protracted.”

Photos and video uploaded to social media show reservists with the Israel Defense Forces operating a trebuchet, a catapult-type tool used in the Middle Ages, throwing fireballs over the concrete barrier separating Israel from Lebanon.

Reservists who recently spoke to the Israeli press on the condition of anonymity said they had been using the weapon since October with the purpose of revealing hidden militant positions and infiltration routes in the thicket bushes near the border. On Oct. 7, the Gaza-based militant group Hamas launched a fatal attack on Israel and took people hostage, with the Israeli government in turn launching a war against the organization in the southern territory.

Guy Stiebel a military archeology expert at Tel Aviv University, who specializes in military archeology and gives lectures as part of an IDF program, said he knows the soldier who helped built the trebuchet and confirmed to Defense News the use of the tool.

“There is a whole field in archeology called experimental archeology, which restores and builds tools such as the trebuchet for research purposes” Stiebel noted. “Among the IDF reserves there is an expert on the period and on this kind of weaponry used then, who found a solution to meet the goals set by his command.”

The weapon’s purpose is to launch beyond fortifications, like that separating the neighboring countries, which Stiebel said can reach 7-9 meters (23-30 feet).

“The trebuchet shown in the pictures is not a particularly large model of the ancient instrument, and its throwing distances were of up [to] about 50 or 60 meters,” he added. “It should be noted that advanced technology cannot always provide solutions, but although there are ancient simple ones that can do the job like the trebuchet, the latter was not been adopted by the Israeli Artillery Corps.”

When contacted by Defense News, the IDF did not deny the existence of the trebuchet nor its use by reservists in the north, but it also declined to comment on the topic.

Stout’s bunker position came under heavy enemy mortar fire and ground attack, the Army’s acquisition chief told reporters during a recent press briefing.

“As the attack subsided, an enemy grenade was thrown into the bunker. Sgt. Stout ran to the grenade, picked it up, held it close to his body and started to get out of the bunker. Upon reaching the door, the grenade exploded,” Doug Bush said.

Sgt. Stout is the only Army air defense artilleryman in history to be awarded the Medal of Honor.

“The heroism of this soldier demonstrates the Army’s exact need for the Sgt. Stout vehicle,” Bush added.

Record pace

Seven years ago, then-head of U.S. Army Europe, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, was sounding the alarm over the lack of short-range air defense capability on the continent. In an interview flying over the Polish countryside, Hodges told Defense News he was worried about traditional threats but also new ones like drone swarms.

He said air defense was one of the biggest capability gaps and was desperately needed to counter possible threats from an increasingly aggressive Russia.

Some Avenger air defense systems from the U.S. Army National Guard could be spotted around exercises in Eastern Europe in 2016 and 2017, but assets overall were scant, even among the armed forces of European countries.

The Army heeded the warnings from commanders in the European theater, and the Sgt. Stout SHORAD system’s development took place in record time. The service identified an urgent operational need in theater in 2016, received the requirement to build the system in February 2018, and then took 19 months to select an integration team and deliver prototypes for testing in the first quarter of 2020.

The first platoon to receive the Sgt. Stout, a Stryker combat vehicle-based platform that includes a mission equipment package designed by Leonardo DRS with Moog’s Reconfigurable Integrated-weapons Platform and RTX’s Stinger vehicle missile launcher, deployed to Europe in 2021.

The Army is now fielding its third Sgt. Stout battalion at Fort Cavazos, Texas. The first battalion remains in Germany, and the second is based at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

The Army plans to begin fielding its fourth Sgt. Stout battalion at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, in the third quarter of fiscal 2025 and is aiming to complete it by the second quarter of FY26, Brig. Gen. Frank Lozano, the Army’s program executive officer for missiles and space, said in the media briefing.

The service’s potential acquisition objective is 361 systems, Lozano said. The Army approved a directive requirement for the first 162 vehicles that outfits the first four battalions and allows for some training battalion assets at Fort Sill, he added.

Another four battalions could eventually be on order for the National Guard, Lozano said. “That will likely occur over the next [program objective memorandum] cycle.”

The Army is “now well into production and fielding in a very short time,” Bush said. “Those early decisions were made before the war in Ukraine, and it’s really good that they were because we now are actually fielding short-range air defense systems that, among other things, provides counter-[unmanned aircraft system] capability to forward forces, which everyone can see are in increasing danger from UAS and other threats. I think we really got this one right, and we did it really fast.”

Evolving capability

Two more variants of Sgt. Stout vehicles are coming. The Army has concurrently been working on a 50-kilowatt laser weapon version and deployed a Stryker-based capability to U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility recently.

Bush would not detail how it is performing, but noted there are “challenges” when it comes to putting a high-kilowatt laser on a moving vehicle as opposed to a fixed site. And he said the Army is still considering the right platform and the right power levels to go with the maneuver force.

A decision on what a directed-energy SHORAD capability might look like is expected sometime across the next five fiscal years, he added.

Another variant would focus on providing a next-generation Stinger missile and a 30mm proximity fuse ammunition, which will help gain capability within the counter-drone space.

The service wants the Stinger missile replacement for SHORAD to be faster, survive jamming and more easily hit tougher targets like drones, Lozano told Defense News last fall.

In September 2023, the Army awarded RTX and Lockheed Martin contracts to competitively develop the Stinger replacement.

The Army is conducting efforts for the improved Stinger and proximity fuse ammunition using a rapid prototyping strategy; the service is roughly one year into the program.

The intent is to carry a couple of vendors forward for the next two years to get to a shoot-off, Lozano said. “Then based on affordability aspects that have yet to be determined, we may continue to carry two vendors, or we may downselect to one and go into a three-year, very intense, aggressive developmental effort to try to get to a material solution that I can transition into potentially a major capability acquisition pathway.”

The Army anticipates it will reach the decision point for production in the second quarter of FY28, Bush noted.

A fourth increment for the system is also under consideration. The Army released a request for information this year asking for ideas on how to evolve the capability for lighter forces.

“We’re really in the infancy of understanding what that program increment might look like,” Lozano said, with the goal of making a lighter force more “effective, but also as agile as they need to be on tomorrow’s battlefield.”

Jeffersson Arango Castellanos, along with two other individuals, targeted the soldiers and robbed them of their valuables on the evening of March 5, 2020, according to the Department of Justice.

Castellanos was extradited from Colombia to the United States on May 5, 2023, and pled guilty to kidnapping and assaulting the soldiers on Jan. 26 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs, the Criminal Division’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section’s Judicial Attaché Office in Bogota, and the U.S. Marshals Service worked with Colombian law enforcement to arrest and extradite Castellanos, according to the Department of Justice.

On the night of the assault, the soldiers went to watch a soccer game at a bar and were approached in the early morning hours by Castellanos, according to a Colombian National Police investigation that analyzed video surveillance and was described in court documents.

Though unclear when it occurred, the investigation determined that Castellanos at some point laced the soldiers’ drinks with benzodiazepines, a class of drugs that produces drowsiness and incapacitation.

As one of the soldiers approached a woman at the bar around 1:46 a.m., Castellanos intervened, placing his hand on the soldier’s shoulder and leading him to the back of the bar.

Roughly 20 minutes later, the soldier stumbled toward the pub’s exit with Castellanos behind him.

Castellanos went back to the bar around 2:24 a.m. to escort the similarly drugged second soldier out of the bar with two other individuals.

One of the individuals, along with the two soldiers, got into a vehicle while Castellanos visited multiple ATM booths to withdraw cash from the soldiers’ debit cards, which he had stolen.

Castellanos and his partners eventually let the soldiers go, one on the street, where he stumbled and fell on his face. Eventually, law enforcement arrived and transported the soldier to a medical clinic. The other soldier made it back to his apartment but had no recollection of how he arrived there.

During the investigation, the Colombian National Police began surveilling Castellanos’ phone messages and calls and learned that this wasn’t the first time he and his co-conspirators had committed these crimes. They had an ongoing operation in which they frequented bars and identified individuals to drug and rob.

In one call, investigators overheard Castellanos expressing his frustration that the COVID-19 pandemic had shut down bars and made it harder for him to conduct his criminal business.

Staff Sgt. Joel Strickland and Spc. Desany Jacques with the New York National Guard dressed the wound with a trauma kit to stop the bleeding and stabilize the victim on May 20, according to the service.

The two soldiers were deployed to the subway as part of a citywide effort to assist the New York Police Department with bag checks. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul deployed 750 National Guard soldiers on March 6 after the city was rocked by a series of shovings, slashings, and shootings, some fatal and some captured on video.

Arrests on the subway are up almost 53% from 2023, according to a New York Police Department news release.

The two soldiers were convening with police officers around 2 p.m. at a subway security checkpoint, where they perform bag inspections. They overheard a loud noise and looked up to see a shirtless man yelling obscenities and fighting with two other people.

The police intervened and detained the instigator while the soldiers tended to the two individuals who had been attacked, one of whom had a large stab wound in his back.

They called an ambulance, but in the interim staunched the excessive bleeding by packing the wound with gauze, effectively saving the man’s life.

Both Strickland and Jacques have military medical training and are volunteer first responders outside of the National Guard.

Strickland lives in Manhattan and is a medic assigned to the 42nd Infantry Division, where he has served in Joint Task Force Empire Shield, New York state’s military affairs organization, since 2020.

Jacques, a Long Island resident, is a supply specialist assigned to the 102nd Military Police Company.

“These two soldiers were able to react without hesitation,” Capt. Caleb Jean, a company commander in Joint Task Force Empire Shield, said in a statement. “I am extremely impressed with how they handled the situation.”

Jacques said responding quickly to an unforeseen circumstance is something soldiers assigned to the task force must be prepared for.

“Every day is something new on post for us,” Jacques said in a statement.

Sgt. Chase Coburn, 28, and Sgt. Mitchell Jensen, 27, intervened on the April 14 flight after noticing a man behaving suspiciously and pacing up and down the aisle.

The two infantrymen were returning to Camp Humphreys, South Korea from the 2024 Army International Sniper Competition at Fort Moore, Georgia. They were on their way home after a layover in San Francisco when the incident occurred.

Coburn is a sniper section leader and Jensen is a sniper team leader. They’re both assigned to Sabre Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment, with the Korea Rotational Force.

The incident began about five hours into their 12:52 p.m. flight when the soldiers noticed a man in a United Air maintenance shirt walking up and down the aisle. They figured at first that he was an air marshal or employee of the plane and was performing a check-up, said Jensen.

But after he continued to wander, Jensen became concerned. He consulted with Coburn who was two seats back to see if he clocked the strange behavior. He did.

Flight attendants began talking to the man and recording him, with one asking a passenger near the soldiers to help. Hearing this, Coburn and Jensen interjected and volunteered their assistance.

She told them to wait five minutes.

During that time, the flight crew was stopping the unruly passenger from entering the first-class section of the plane, when he suddenly charged to the front of the aircraft.

The soldiers saw this, flagged down the flight attendant, and asked her if they needed the soldiers’ help immediately.

She said yes and quickly led them to the back of the plane, where she briefed them on how to employ hand and body restraints.

Coburn and Jensen then rushed to the front to intercept the man.

“He’s at the door, like the loading, unloading door, where you enter and exit the plane, and he’s, like, reaching out,” said Coburn, recalling the moment when the man tried to open the exit door. Despite an initial struggle, they got ahold of him and placed both restraints on him.

“I need to die,” the man then said, adding that the air was bad and that he needed to get off the plane, according to Coburn.

Once restrained, they escorted him to the back of the plane and sat him down, where another American passenger monitored him.

Things seemed to have settled down and the soldiers returned to their seats.

But 3 to 4 hours later, the soldiers noticed a tussle between the unruly passenger and the passenger guarding him.

The man had broken free from his restraints, so the soldiers intervened once again, reapplied the restraints and helped get the situation back in hand.

After the plane landed, the passenger was taken into police custody.

“During the flight, the disruptive passenger who was seated in economy attempted on several occasions to enter the premium class cabins and continued to demand to enter the cockpit,” said Korean Air in an emailed statement. “The passenger insisted he had an anxiety disorder.”

After the incident, Coburn and Jensen received a flight voucher from Korean Air. They also received a thank you letter from Yoo Jong-seok, Executive Vice President and Head of Safety and Security at Korean Air.

“Even though it is tough for passengers to willingly help the flight attendant in the event of an inflight disturbance, their prompt response to the flight attendant’s request for assistance made all of our staff deeply moved and grateful,” reads the letter.

“We saw an opportunity to help and we wanted to help. So that’s just what we did,” said Jensen.

Coburn said it was natural for both of them and stemmed from their sense of service.

“We joined the Army to do things right,” said Coburn.

The attorneys representing the family of Spc. Maria Martinez say they’ve redoubled efforts to bullet-proof the case with new expert testimony and endorsement in an effort not only to achieve a victory for her, but also to pave the way for reform of a system they say is opaque and unaccountable.

Martinez died in December 2021 after a two-year battle with advanced breast cancer. According to her family and legal documents, she had requested — and was denied by military providers — a medical screening for breast cancer in January 2019. Even though Martinez possessed the BRCA2 gene mutation, which is a strong indicator for breast cancer and had a family history of cancer that included her mother, according to documents, her TRICARE military medical insurance would not cover a diagnostic MRI screening, saying she didn’t meet necessary criteria. In follow-up appointments over the spring and summer, she was diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma to explain symptoms that included nausea and vomiting. Admitted to the emergency room at Fort Bliss, Texas that October with shortness of breath, providers found the cancer, which by then had progressed to Stage IV. Martinez, with the support of her father, Army Lt. Col. Eduardo Larumbe, filed a medical malpractice claim the month before she died. But the Army Tort Claims Division, which evaluates these kinds of complaints, found the statute of limitations had rendered the claim invalid.

The soldier’s case saw a major victory last October, when a judge for U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied the Army’s motion to dismiss, saying Martinez’s status as an active-duty service member “tolled” the statute of limitations, and thus pauses the clock, per the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, a law intended to protect troops from certain financial and legal liabilities incurred during service. In late February, the case was dealt another win, when the same judge, Rudolph Contreras, ordered the case be resubmitted to the Army Claims Service rather than remaining in district court. For Martinez’s family, this means the Army will be forced, for the first time, to evaluate the young soldier’s case on its merits and render a decision.

Asked for comment about this case, Defense Department officials have said the department does not comment on pending litigation.

A ruling from the Army Tort Claims Division is still likely months away, Martinez’s lawyers say. And the odds for these kinds of lawsuits are extremely poor. Master Sgt. Richard Stayskal, the soldier whose lung cancer case prompted legislation allowing troops to file medical malpractice lawsuits, had his own claim denied last year.

“We don’t know who is behind the curtain, and that is one of the frustrating things about this,” David Sheldon, the lead attorney for the family, told Army Times. “It’s just inconceivable that you present these cases, you know, 800, 900 cases, and the military decides that three or four should be compensated.”

As of 2022, the military services had settled a total of 11 medical malpractice lawsuits, for a success rate of 2%. Before 2021, such suits were prohibited under the Feres Doctrine, a law that protects the government from being sued by service members. Last October, the Defense Department increased the maximum amount of damages troops can be awarded if their suits are successful, from $600,000 to $750,000.

Two factors give Sheldon and collaborating attorney Dylan Thayer hope that their lawsuit will beat the odds. The first is the testimony of Kenneth Pennington, a retired medical oncologist with a large body of published work.

In a three-page review of Martinez’s case, Pennington said that skin irregularities the soldier had that persisted even after a course of steroids were cancer indicators that should have been caught at her first medical encounter in January 2019. At follow-up appointments, he added, providers did not even perform a simple breast exam on her, despite her family history and genes predisposing her to cancer. A chest X-ray from the time that came back normal, Pennington said, indicates that her cancer was then in the very early stages — unlike the incurable Stage IV condition that was ultimately diagnosed in October.

“It is my opinion, within a degree of medical certainty, that the failure to expedite diagnostic studies that would have led to the detection of cancer at a much earlier time was a violation of the standard of care,” Pennington wrote. “This act of negligence deprived [Martinez] of a chance for [a] cure.”

Martinez’s mother, Luisa Larumbe, told Army Times that her daughter had observed Luisa’s fight with cancer and took note of the advice she was given: If you notice a rash, or an inverted nipple, or abnormal skin condition, get checked out. But because Martinez was just 24 when symptoms first presented, Larumbe said, she was denied the tests she sought.

“She did exactly what she was told to do,” she said.

The other factor that makes the legal team bullish is the prior involvement of Contreras and U.S. District Court, even as the issue is back within the Army’s purview. To Sheldon, that creates a perception of outside oversight that he hopes will make the claims board more circumspect.

“They’re still back there, if you will,” he said. “I think that that also sends a message to the Army.”

That aspect of judicial review, Sheldon and Thayer say, created a degree of external accountability that is ensconced in the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) protecting other government employees, but is much narrower for troops seeking redress from the military. They believe that a win in this case could create a platform for Congress to create a law that further aligns the military tort claims process with the FTCA.

“If you add judicial review, it will improve the system, because it will force the military to deal with bad acts and bad outcomes,” Sheldon said.

Lt. Col. Larumbe, who is completing a tour at U.S. Africa Command, said he’s in the process of retiring from the Army. The emotional toll of caring for and then grieving Martinez has affected his career, he said, and he now seeks time for him and his wife to “reinvent ourselves.”

But, he said, he wants to lay the groundwork for the kind of lobbying push for policy change that Sheldon described.

“That is something that we have to take on,” he said. “How do we further help other soldiers who might be going through this, so that they don’t receive the same mistreatment, or lack of treatment, that Maria did.”

Christopher Arthur, 40, was convicted in North Carolina last year on nine counts of providing explosives training and possessing unregistered weapons, including a short-barreled rifle, silencer, improvised hand grenades and an improvised claymore mine. According to court documents, Arthur owned Tackleberry Solutions, which sold training manuals on making explosives. The brand also had a YouTube channel, where Arthur posted a three-part series about how to overthrow the government, in addition to hundreds of other videos that the FBI described as militaristic.

Arthur was arrested after the FBI received recordings from a confidential informant who underwent training at Arthur’s North Carolina residence. The informant had first reached out to Arthur, claiming that officers with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had confiscated weapons from their house. The informant asked for help to prepare in case more officers returned.

Arthur taught the informant a home defense strategy he called “the spiderweb,” a tactic he described as “stupid lethal.” It included surrounding a residence with IEDs and remote-activated firearms.

He also instructed the informant about how to evade arrest after killing law enforcement officers, and he provided the trainee with several components to construct an IED, court documents say.

The jury took only an hour to deliberate before convicting Arthur in July 2023, the Associated Press reported. His charges carried a maximum sentence between 14 and 18 years, but an enhancement for terrorism extended the possible maximum to life in prison. U.S. District Court Judge James C. Dever decided on 25 years, saying he took Arthur’s military service into account.

“Violence directed towards police, judges, and public servants will never be tolerated in a free society,” U.S. Attorney Michael Easley said in a statement. “This defendant’s property was wired with IEDs, the same design he sold to help others kill American law enforcement. Anyone teaching bomb-making to target American heroes gets a lesson today: 25 years in federal prison.”

Before sentencing, the defense pointed to Arthur’s military service as a reason he should receive a lighter sentence. Arthur enlisted in 2007 and served as an infantryman. According to court records, he deployed twice to Iraq in 2007 and 2008. His unit sustained several casualties and saw mortar attacks and suicide bombings, wrote G. Alan Dubois, Arthur’s public defender.

The second deployment changed Arthur’s trajectory and served as the beginning of his “descent into paranoid beliefs,” court records say.

“His military service has impacted Mr. Arthur immensely. He constantly reflects on his experiences and acknowledges that those experiences played a role in his appearance before this court today,” Dubois wrote in a sentencing memorandum.

Arthur separated honorably as a specialist in 2019. Federal law enforcement learned of Tackleberry Solutions just one year later, after Virginia trucker Joshua Blessed led police on a high-speed chase through multiple counties in upstate New York. Blessed was killed during a gunfight with police. He was later described by law enforcement as a “militia extremist.”

During searches of Blessed’s car and home, officers found multiple instruction manuals from Tackleberry Solutions, including one titled “Quick Reaction Force-Modern Day Minutemen-Improvised Explosives.” They also found emails between Blessed and Arthur about styles of claymore mines, as well as evidence that Blessed had attended training with Tackleberry Solutions in North Carolina earlier that year.

“At a time when law enforcement officers are being feloniously killed at an alarming rate, it is appalling to know what Christopher Arthur did,” said FBI Special Agent Robert DeWitt. “He made a living training people how to kill or injure those who proudly wear the badge. Now he will spend time in federal prison for his dangerous and deadly lessons.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

Staff Sgt. William Rivers, 55, pleaded guilty to charges he sexually abused his stepdaughter over multiple years in Hawaii and Florida prior to his military retirement in 2017, according to a release from the Army Office of Special Trial Counsel.

The Army stood up the special trial counsel office in late 2023 with independent authority separate from command authority for serious Uniform Code of Military Justice offenses.

“The outcome of this case shows that the Army will pursue justice even after an offender retires from the service,” said Maj. Steven Poland, lead prosecutor, Second Circuit, Army Office of Special Trial Counsel.

“While the process may take a significant amount of time and resources, it is important for victims to know that we will do everything in our power to hold their abusers accountable for their actions,” Poland said. “The victim in this case was strong and patient, I am glad she was able to seek justice and hope she continues to heal.”

Authorities arrested Rivers at Camp Humphreys, South Korea in December 2023 where he worked as a government contractor, according to the release. He has remained in custody near Fort Moore, Georgia since his arrest.

On May 8, Rivers pleaded guilty to five specifications of sexual abuse of a child. He must serve at least 80 months of his sentence based on the terms of his plea agreement. Rivers was reduced in rank to private and given a bad conduct discharge.

A Fort Liberty Army officer was convicted at trial last week of smuggling weapons to West Africa and lying to a grand jury.

When sentenced in June, Kojo Owusu Dartey, 42, faces a maximum penalty of 20 months in federal prison after being found guilty April 23 of dealing in firearms without a license, delivering firearms without notice to the carrier, smuggling goods from the United States, illegally exporting firearms without a license, making false statements made to an agency of the United States, making false declarations before the court, and conspiracy.

After four days of testimony, the jury found him not guilty of impeding the due administration of justice and five counts of knowingly making a false statement to firearms dealers.

According to the U.S. Attorney Michael Easley for the Eastern District of North Carolina, between June 28 and July 2, 2021, Dartey purchased seven firearms in the Fort Liberty area and tasked a U.S. Army staff sergeant at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to purchase three firearms there and send them to Dartey in North Carolina.

The indictment alleges the staff sergeant purchased the weapons from the Fort Campbell PX and Dartey, also known as Killa K, purchased weapons at the Fort Liberty PX as well as at gun and pawn shops in Fayetteville.

Dartey then hid all the firearms, including multiple handguns, an AR15, 50-round magazines, suppressors and a combat shotgun at the bottom of blue barrels containing rice and household goods and smuggled the barrels out of the Port of Baltimore, Maryland, on a container ship to the Port of Tema in Ghana.

Ghanaian officials recovered the firearms and reported the seizure to the DEA attache in Ghana and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Baltimore, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

At the same time, Dartey was a witness in a case that involved a 16-defendant marriage fraud scheme between soldiers on Fort Liberty and foreign nationals from Ghana that Dartey had tipped off officials to.

In preparation for the trial, Dartey lied to federal law enforcement about his sexual relationship with a defense witness and lied on the stand and under oath about the relationship, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

Dartey was indicted and arrested in May 2023. The charges against his alleged co-conspirator, George Archer, are still pending.