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Dutch intelligence warns Russian hackers are hijacking Signal and WhatsApp accounts using fake support bots and verification code scams targeting officials and journalists.
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Wearable biometrics, improved science, and more data are changing U.S. Army attitudes toward human performance—particularly how soldiers adapt to the risks of overheating.
The U.S. military has been studying the effects of heat on troops for almost a century, dating to the 1927 establishment of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory at the military's request. Still, soldiers’ and commanders’ approach to core physical tasks—think timed runs, strenuous outdoor activity, or environmental exposure—lags the growing body of science about heat risks, sometimes by years or decades. That may finally be changing under new initiatives to expand research into human performance.
Lt. Col. David deGroot, who directs the Army Heat Center, told Defense One that new wearable devices—which track metrics like heart rate and body temperature—are providing military trainers and soldiers with a new window into how their bodies interact with the environment. This data offers insights well before physical symptoms of overheating appear. That timing is key: by the time a soldier experiences heat exhaustion or the first symptoms of a far more severe heat stroke, it is often too late to prevent a health incident that could sideline them from training or worse.
“We've got some still-evolving, non-invasive, wearable technologies that are going to be able to, not necessarily prevent a heat stroke, but detect it much, much sooner”—as many as 12 minutes sooner, giving time to reduce its severity, deGroot said on the sidelines of the March 4 Heat Forum at Fort Benning, Georgia. (Disclosure: the event was staged by FBC, a Defense One sister brand.)
New data also reveals the costs to units and individuals when they push too hard under the assumption that suffering makes a soldier tougher. The idea that ignoring discomfort is the hallmark of "good soldiering" goes back centuries, but deGroot argues it needs an update.
Too often, he said, it is the soldiers themselves, particularly those trying to qualify for Ranger School, who exhibit a specific risk factor for heat-related illness: a trait that might look good on a resume as being “highly motivated.” Troops who push themselves to attain a new personal best in every physical task run a much higher risk of suffering a heat stroke and taking themselves out of commission.
DeGroot is on a mission to remind soldiers, trainers, and commanders that it doesn’t make sense to attempt a personal record during every march or run; sometimes, it is best to simply hit the acceptable threshold and save the record-breaking for another day. He also clarified that simply drinking water is not a shield against heat sickness. In fact, he noted, 80 percent of heat stroke victims are actually well-hydrated.
“If you successfully hydrate, congratulations: you have successfully mitigated the risk of dehydration. But if you are sick, if you are not acclimatized, if you are overweight, or if you are excessively motivated, those risks still exist despite appropriate hydration,” he said.
He added that trainers too often confuse periods of physical rest with "inactivity" and grumble about science-backed ratio tables that dictate appropriate activity levels based on external factors.
“When you look at those tables, they're not as restrictive as you think they might be,” he said. “There are a lot of things you can still be doing that are productive training or operational activities.”
The new science on heat isn’t just slowing training down. In some ways, it is speeding it up. Take research on acclimatization—the process of adjusting to different temperatures. Previous thinking suggested that soldiers needed as long as eight days to adjust to a new climate. However, research published last year showed a different approach. Researchers compared a standardized eight-day acclimatization group (90 minutes a day) against a group that performed four 90-minute bouts in one day and four more the next. Both groups reached the same level of acclimatization.
“When I read it, I was excited about it," deGroot said. "This is a fascinating idea that I never even thought of.”
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Anthropic is suing more than a dozen federal agencies and government leaders such as iDefense Secretary Pete Hegseth, claiming that the federal government's blacklist is illegal retaliation.
In a March 9 court filing with the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, Anthropic claims that defendants named in the lawsuit are illegally punishing Anthropic for its decision not to change the terms of use for its AI product to work with the Department of Defense.
The court filing offers background into Anthropic’s product, the large language model Claude, and its extensive work within the federal government, particularly within the Pentagon.
It discusses the events that unfolded in the disagreement about Claude use cases within DOD, particularly surrounding uses to surveil U.S. citizens and control autonomous weapons. Anthropic asserts that the government's actions after this disagreement — primarily the designation of the company as a supply-chain risk and alleged violations of its right to due process through a lack of “core requirements” such as “adequate notice and a meaningful hearing” — are illegal and “are harming Anthropic irreparably.”
“These actions are unprecedented and unlawful,” the lawsuit reads. “The Constitution does not allow the government to wield its enormous power to punish a company for its protected speech. No federal statute authorizes the actions taken here. Anthropic turns to the judiciary as a last resort to vindicate its rights and halt the Executive’s unlawful campaign of retaliation.”
The lawsuit alleges that the Trump administration’s actions against Anthropic are based on pure ideological disagreement and are not due to “any legitimate procurement or security concern.” Anthropic further claims that it even attempted to support the Pentagon’s shift from Anthropic software to other, more compatible systems, further underscoring the “viewpoint-based” actions taken against the company.
“Indeed, while operating under the terms of the Usage Policy, the Department [of Defense] never previously raised any issues with its use of Claude or concerns about Anthropic’s potential interference,” the document reads. “Anthropic had only ever received positive feedback about Claude’s capabilities from its government customers.”
A separate lawsuit, filed in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, further requests a judicial review of the supply chain risk label, citing provisions in the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018.
“Anthropic petitions this Court for review because the Department of War’s actions are, among other things, a pretextual form of retaliation in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution; arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion; unsupported by the administrative record; not in accord with procedures required by law; and in excess of statutory authority,” the second filing states.
Anthropic and DOD's failure to reach an agreement on the use of the former’s technology and the resulting governmentwide actions — namely President Donald Trump’s order for all federal agencies to cease using the technology and the Pentagon designating it as a supply chain risk — have fallen under scrutiny.
A current defense official told Defense One that it will not be easy to shift systems that had relied on Anthropic’s technologies to those of another vendor, and experts like Anthony Kuhn, a managing partner at the New York law firm Tully Rinckey, predicted that the supply chain risk designation in particular could open the Pentagon to lawsuits.
In response to the lawsuit, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said the Trump administration’s goal is for the military to operate under the U.S. Constitution, “not any woke AI company’s terms of service.”
President Trump will never allow a radical left, woke company to jeopardize our national security by dictating how the greatest and most powerful military in the world operates,” Huston said in a statement to Nextgov/FCW. “The President and Secretary of War are ensuring America’s courageous warfighters have the appropriate tools they need to be successful and will guarantee that they are never held hostage by the ideological whims of any Big Tech leaders.”
Nextgov/FCW has reached out to Anthropic and the Commerce Department for comment. GSA and the Pentagon declined to comment on ongoing litigation.
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The Defense Department is reupping its search for civilian employees to deploy to the southwest border to participate in immigration-enforcement operations—and asking supervisors to solicit volunteers.
The Pentagon first asked its civilian workers to consider volunteering for assignments to the Homeland Security Department last year. On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth upped the pressure.
“I expect every supervisor to encourage their civilian employees to volunteer,” Hegseth said in a memo distributed to department leaders. “Leadership must continue to promote this detail program and educate their civilian employees on its importance.”
Detailed Defense employees are supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection for up to 180 days, according to existing postings on the federal jobs board website. Duties include data entry, developing operational plans for raids and patrols, providing logistics support for moving officers and agents and their equipment and managing the flow of detained migrants. The Defense employees do not carry out law-enforcement responsibilities.
DHS is currently shut down after its funding lapsed last month, though its law-enforcement functions and employees remain largely unaffected. Neither it nor the Pentagon immediately responded to inquiries on the new directive.
One Army civilian said several supervisors sent Hegseth’s memorandum on Monday, without providing any additional context. A command-wide email did offer some additional information.
“DHS has a vital mission to safeguard and secure the homeland,” an Army official wrote in the email. “With the potential for increased numbers of migrants in the interior of the United States territory and across the southwest border, DHS needs volunteers to assist in its commitment to ensuring a safe and orderly immigration system.”
It was not immediately clear why the number of migrants entering the country might increase. The Trump administration has boasted that it has reduced the flow of migrants to levels unseen for decades, including from Venezuela, whose leader was recently captured on Trump's order, and from Cuba, whose leaders Trump has recently talked about deposing.
Hegseth encouraged “all who are interested” to volunteer for the detail, calling the work “vital to the national security of the United States.” All supervisors will approve the volunteer requests unless a deployment would conflict with mission-essential functions. Any disapproval must be signed off by a flag officer or Senior Executive Service employee, the secretary said.
The same Army civilian said there has not been any discussion of the detail opportunities since Hegseth first announced them last summer and the employee did not know of anyone who accepted such a role.
“We all think it’s absurd,” the civilian said. The timing of the new push seemed to be a “bad look,” the person added, given the war the U.S. is currently waging against Iran.
The memo is dated Feb. 19, more than a week before the U.S. and Israel began the war in Iran, though it was delivered to employees on Monday.
The detailing out of staff could create additional hardships for the department, which recently shed more than 60,000 employees, or 8% of its civilian workforce. In a January memo, Army Undersecretary David Fitzgerald said the service is still looking for ways to shed employees and is maintaining significant hiring restrictions so as to not “sacrifice this generational opportunity to fix ourselves and remove the bottlenecks that plague our daily operations.”
The Army has not yet “received meaningful optimization,” Fitzgerald said, despite many commands having realized “significant personnel reductions through [the deferred resignation program] and otherwise.”
Meghann Myers contributed to this report.
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The end of a dictator like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a good thing and freedom for Iranians is an admirable goal. But as U.S. regime wars in the Middle East since 9/11 have shown, removing leaders is one thing, while strategic successes are quite another. The longer the strikes continue, the greater the chances that more U.S. troops will die and the United States will be dragged into a bigger war.
The Trump administration has offered handfuls of reasons for launching the strikes, but none that is vital to U.S. national security. There is no intelligence showing Iran is anywhere close to developing missiles that can hit the United States. Iran’s nuclear program has been “obliterated,” according to President Trump, and regardless is not a direct threat to the United States. The U.S. doesn’t depend on oil from Iran or the Middle East.
Trump needs to take the victory of killing Khamenei and wind down military force against Iran. The American experience in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan have shown that taking out leaders is the easy part; it’s what follows that turns into a disaster.
Despite the Bush administration’s detailed plans for a new government in Iraq, that country descended into sectarian chaos after U.S. forces removed Saddam Hussein from power in 2003. The war became a nightmare for the United States, leading to a long military occupation (U.S. troops are still there today) and the rise of ISIS, among other problems.
Wanting to avoid Bush’s mistakes, Barack Obama tried a different strategy in Libya. Rather than put boots on the ground, he just bombed from the air, like Trump is doing today with Iran. The strategy unseated the dictator Moammar Gaddafi, but it unleashed chaos across North and West Africa. Libya became a failed state and a hotbed for international terrorism.
There are no indications that regime change in Iran will go any better. There are a couple of likely scenarios here, neither of them good.
First, Iran might spin into the same kind of chaos as Iraq and Libya. Due to five decades of harsh repression (which was on full display with Iranian protests in January), there is no organized opposition to take power if the regime collapses. Like in Libya, government collapse would likely bring civil war and a failed state, only this time there would be highly enriched uranium added to the mix.
Second, regime collapse might bring to power, as U.S. intelligence agencies predict, an even more radical, hardline government led most likely by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Whether this is happening now in the wake of Khamenei’s death remains to be seen, but signs of a more hardline position from Tehran are already showing up.
Since Khamenei’s killing, Iran has unleashed a torrent of missiles, striking elevencountries across the Middle East. This stands in sharp contrast to its delayed, highly choreographed, and restrained military response in last summer’s 12-Day War.
Tehran’s current strategy is to inflict pain on the United States and its allies to get them to back down. Six U.S. servicemembers have already died, a number Trump expects to grow.
As that happens, pressure for the United States to go even bigger—perhaps with boots on the ground in Iran—will grow intense inside the Trump administration. Trump has already said he’s not ruled out a full invasion of Iran.
The Trump administration has repeatedly acknowledged that the United States has few strategic interests in the Middle East and needs to pivot out of the region. Trump’s Iran war is setting the stage for even deeper U.S. engagement in the Middle East for decades to come.
Reports indicate Trump has no idea how to finish his Iran war, but he actually does know what to do. Last year, he vowed to “completely annihilate” the Houthis, but after burning through munitions—as the U.S. is doing today in Iran—and realizing that he’d need U.S. ground troops to do so, Trump smartly declared victory and brokered a ceasefire to end the conflict.
Killing Khamenei is a big win. Trump should take that win and cut a deal to end this war. Americans will thank him for that. They didn’t want this war before it started and haven’t rallied in support of it since it began. Today, 59 percent oppose what Trump is doing.
If he’s smart, Trump will stop this war before it spins into something disastrous that no one – including the president—wants.
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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious npm package that masquerades as an OpenClaw installer to deploy a remote access trojan (RAT) and steal sensitive data from compromised hosts. The package, named “@openclaw-ai/openclawai,” was uploaded to the registry by a user named “openclaw-ai” on March 3, 2026. It has been downloaded 178 times to date. The library is still available for
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Researchers warn of a fake CleanMyMac site using a ClickFix attack to install SHub Stealer on macOS and steal passwords and crypto wallets.
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Philadelphia, PA, United States, March 9th, 2026, CyberNewswire Security Risk Advisors (SRA) is proud to announce the release of its inaugural report, The Purple Perspective 2026. This comprehensive analysis examines real-world detection and prevention performance against a curated set of high-priority adversary techniques, providing actionable insights to improve cybersecurity defenses. The report is based on the […]
The post Security Risk Advisors Releases “The Purple Perspective 2026” Report appeared first on GBHackers Security | #1 Globally Trusted Cyber Security News Platform.
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US-Israeli war on Iran, day 10: Eight American troops have died in the Middle East since the war on Iran began more than a week ago. U.S. and Israeli air and naval strikes continue in Iran and Lebanon; Iranian drone attacks continue in response. U.S. military officials on Sunday announced the seventh soldier to perish from the war’s initial attack and retaliation waves last weekend.“The service member was seriously wounded at the scene of an attack on U.S. troops in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on March 1,” Central Command officials said in a statement Sunday. After nearly six days of treatment, that service member passed away Saturday evening. His name is Army Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington, age 26, from Glendale, Ky., and he was assigned to 1st Space Battalion, 1st Space Brigade, based in Fort Carson, Colo.
The eighth American to perish was a National Guard soldier that officials said Sunday “died in a health-related incident in Kuwait on March 6 during a medical emergency.” Their cause of death is “under review,” CENTCOM said.
Update: Close scrutiny of available footage shows a Tomahawk missile striking Iranian facilities immediately near an elementary school where 175 people were reportedly killed, including children, on the war’s first day. “The footage would appear to contradict US President Donald Trump’s claim that it was an Iranian missile that hit the school,” Bellingcat reported Sunday.
“The US is the only participant in the war that is known to have Tomahawk missiles. Israel is not known to have Tomahawk missiles,” Bellingcat’s Carlos Gonzales writes—adding to reporting from Reuters Thursday that “U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible” for the strike on the school.
Pentagon reax: “We’re investigating that. We, of course, never target civilian targets. But we’re taking a look and investigating that,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday at the Pentagon. Just two days earlier, he told reporters the U.S. military “is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history” with “No stupid rules of engagement” because, he said, “We fight to win, and we don't waste time or lives.”
Developing: Elements of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division are on alert after its headquarters unit was unexpectedly pulled from a major training exercise, which is “fueling speculation within the Defense Department that soldiers specializing in ground combat and a range of other missions may be sent to the Middle East as the conflict with Iran widens,” Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported Friday. Military officials declined to comment.
White House reaction to possible U.S. boots on the ground in Iran: “President Trump wisely does not remove options off of the table,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox TV on Sunday.
Related reading: “At least 13 hospitals and health facilities hit during attacks on Iran, WHO says,” the Guardian reported Thursday.
New: Iran announced a new leader over the weekend: Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the country’s former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He’s 56 years old, and is thought to be “considerably more violent and ideological than his father,” according to Graeme Wood of The Atlantic.
He is not a religious scholar, but that may not matter, Wood says and speculates—based on the intensity and intention of Israeli attacks—“whoever leads Iran next will have a life expectancy measured in weeks or even days.”
Like Israel, Trump already wants him dead so he can find someone else to run Iran. But the U.S. president has had a particularly hard time speaking clearly about why he joined this conflict, which has upended global markets and sent the price of oil over $119 per barrel for the first time since the pandemic. The Wall Street Journal calls the current conditions “the most severe energy crisis since the 1970s.”
Trump aims to profit off a changed Iran by appointing “a strongman who will cooperate with him on a peace deal and perhaps give the U.S. a slice of Iran’s oil industry,” Thomas Wright of Brookings writes for The Atlantic.
Israel, on the other hand, “is seeking a far more sweeping transformation” and wants “to dismantle the regime entirely,” Wright writes. But the longer the conflict drags on, the less likely Trump will reach his goal while Israel’s aims might still endure relatively intact through persistent degradation.
“The Trump administration initially reassured [Turkey] that the war would last only four days,” according to Aslı Aydıntaşbaş of the Brookings Institution.
By the way: NATO air defenses just intercepted another ballistic missile over Turkish airspace, officials announced Monday. Some debris fell onto Turkish territory but no one was harmed, Ankara’s defense minister said on social media. The shootdown was the second of its kind for NATO and Turkey in the past five days.
Related: “France to deploy almost a dozen warships, mulls Hormuz mission, Macron says,” Reuters reported Monday.
Why is the U.S. at war? Over six days, Trump gave 10 different rationales for joining Israel’s full-scale attack on Tehran, by the count of Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl on Friday for The Atlantic.
His reasons so far have included: Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. (though in conversations with lawmakers, U.S. intelligence agencies did not agree); to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon; to stop Iranian-backed militias across the Middle East; to implement regime change in Tehran; because of Iranian election interference; for world peace; for later generations; to preemptively attack before Iran attacks the U.S.; to fulfill an alleged religious purpose; and because the Israelis forced Trump’s hand.
Read more:
- Judd Legum of Popular Information documented “at least 17 different responses about why the war began” from White House officials since Feb. 28;
- See also this chronological account of the administration’s various public justifications for war via a timeline curated Saturday by Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian.
Analysis: “Trump is the first president in modern times to take the United States to war without the backing of the public,” Peter Baker of the New York Times reported Friday. “Given that wars tend to grow less popular over time, the initial negative response portends political challenges for Mr. Trump and his fellow Republicans the longer the fighting continues.”
Also notable: There are several similarities between the White House’s war rhetoric and Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, Anton Troianovski of the Times noticed on Sunday—and isolated at least five glaring instances just in the first week of war.
Warning from Ukraine: Trump’s Iran war “will be short only if Washington quietly scales down its goals, gives up on regime change in Iran, and sells a much smaller outcome as victory,” former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on social media Friday.
“We’re marching through the world,” Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., declared on Fox TV Sunday. “Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago. He is the greatest commander in chief of all time. Our military is the best of all time.”
“Iran is going down, and Cuba is next,” Graham said, adding to rumors first reported by the Wall Street Journal in January then later Politico early last week. Now Justice Department officials are reportedly looking for ways to charge Cuban officials with crimes, according to NBC News, reporting Friday. Such charges “could ratchet up public pressure on the country and be used as the basis to levy additional economic sanctions” since “Trump has been talking about Cuba’s government increasingly since the raid on Venezuela.” Trump himself said Saturday, “They want to negotiate, and they are negotiating with [Secretary of State Marco Rubio] and myself and some others, and I would think a deal would be made very easily with Cuba.”
Additional reading:
- “Massive war price tag could be a massive problem for GOP leaders,” Politico reported Friday;
- “Oil prices soar after Iran names Mojtaba Khamenei the new supreme leader,” the Associated Press reported Monday;
- “Stocks Slide as Oil Hits Highest Price Since 2022,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday;
- “How to war-proof your budget before regular gas hits $4 a gallon,” via the Washington Post reporting Saturday.
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Merrimeck faced off in the first battle between ironclad warships.
Around the Defense Department
Meet the startups trying to build military-specific AI. “The battle between AI model builder Anthropic and the Pentagon has exposed a huge gap between what AI tools the military wants and what companies like Anthropic, xAI, and OpenAI actually make: AI tools for use by everyone, not specifically for the military,” reports Defense One’s Patrick Tucker. “A handful of veteran-run or -financed startups aim to fill that gap.” Read on, here.
Trump says missile makers agreed to “quadruple” production after a White House meeting on Friday, but it’s not clear whether that’s news, a reflection of earlier agreements, or not true at all. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports off statements by the White House and several of the companies that sent their CEOs, here.
OpenAI hardware chief resigns after deal with Pentagon. On Saturday, Caitlin Kalinowski announced her resignation on social media, saying that the company’s Feb. 27 deal to provide unrestricted service to the Defense Department shouldn’t have been signed “with the guardrails undefined.” Echoing the sentiments that got Anthropic declared a “national supply-chain risk,” Kalinowski wrote, “AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.” Reuters has more, here.
And lastly: what if ordinary citizens get unbreakable codes? The latest edition of Fictional Intelligence ponders a future in which quantum science takes an unexpected turn. Read that, from Peter Singer and August Cole, here.
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