Deep

The rescue of the F-15E weapon systems officer (WSO) missing in Iran after his fighter was shot down was one of the most complex and dangerous missions the U.S. military can undertake. These kinds of operations can come in many forms. In this case, before the WSO was finally recovered from the mountain crevice where he was hiding, a forward arming and refueling point (FARP) deep inside enemy territory had to be rapidly set up and secured so that it could act as a staging area for the aircraft, equipment and troops taking part in the mission. This is an exact mission set U.S. special operations forces train for extensively.

To get more insights about how such a FARP would be set up and operated, we reached out to Kyle Rempfer, a former Special Tactics Squadron (STS) airman who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. STS units are an elite cadre of operators who work to control aircraft in the air, including from airfields they establish deep inside contested territory, and direct airpower onto the enemy, among other duties, including rescuing personnel trapped behind enemy lines. They are often paired with special operations units, such as SEALs, Delta Force and Rangers, to bring their unique skills to their missions.

Air Force Special Tactics – the Air Force’s ONLY Special Operations Ground Force

Rempfer, a journalist and former colleague of the author at Military Times, offered unique insights into the process as someone who trained for these missions.

Some of the questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

Q: What happens in the Special Tactics Squadron level when the word comes out that there’s an aircraft down deep into enemy territory? 

A: By this point in the campaign, Air Force Special Tactics teams – which are made up of combat controllers (CCTs) and pararescue jumpers (PJs) – would have surveyed or identified scores of Iranian runways and austere airfields that can be used for landing zones or drop zones down the line. Even if CCTs hadn’t set foot on these sites, they’d have pulled imagery of the locations and started using tools like AutoCAD, a surveying and mapping software, to sketch out the dimensions of an airfield and identify what type of aircraft could land there. Is this a site that could only work for a light short take off and landing (STOL) aircraft, or could we land something bigger like a C-17? Those types of questions are on their minds. And since this event appears to have happened near the Isfahan nuclear facility, it can be assumed that Special Tactics has been scoping out landing zones in that area since at least this war started, maybe far earlier. 

For this mission, the Special Tactics team just needed someplace to land a couple of MC-130J Commando IIs. Those are designed to infiltrate and exfiltrate special operations troops into and out of the hinterlands, so an agricultural runway intended for crop-spraying planes would fit the bill in terms of dimensions. But on the ground, the soil strength might not hold up for repeat landings, or perhaps the recent weather has eroded the area or left it muddy. That can have an impact, and there are tools like dynamic cone penetrometers that Special Tactics teams use to assess soil strength. They’ve used those and a host of other tools to scout airfields all around potential conflict zones in Africa, northern Iraq, Syria, etc., but given the tight security in Iran, that probably was not feasible to do in advance here. So the soil strength might have been a known-unknown going in. 

Q: What would happen once the FARP is set up?

A: They can do these fast. Everything is prestaged, even inside the MC-130. AH-6 Little Bird helicopters were probably offloaded and taking off within minutes, not hours, and beaming toward the WSO’s beacon. At that point, the team at the FARP site is pulling security and talking to all the aircraft overhead. Those pilots and aircrews are using sensors to monitor all the roadways that plausibly lead to the site, and potentially even putting warheads on those roadways to make them unusable. We know there were some diversionary bomb drops as part of the rescue, so they could also take that time to put big potholes in the roads.

Q: Can you talk about what systems, personnel and equipment would have secured the site?

A: The people who are surveying and setting up the landing zone and FARP are probably CCTs [Combat Control Teams] from the 24th Special Tactics Squadron. They would have had imagery to look at ahead of the mission, but you might not know what level of stress the ground can take until you physically get there. CCTs are trained to inspect that, blow up obstacles on the runway if needed, scan enemy activity around the landing site, etc., and then set up the austere airfield to start accepting planes and helos. They might not have had time to do a full-on reconnaissance mission, of course. 

CCTs have dirt bikes, something like a Kawasaki KLR 250, that they can drive up and down the airstrip for quickly setting up lights and visually inspecting the terrain. The lights they’d use to create the airstrip would be set up to infrared mode so only people with night vision devices can see them. This isn’t the early days of Afghanistan, though, and night vision devices have proliferated to such a degree that infrared lights are no longer the game changer they once were. However, it still prevents civilians from seeing the operation at night, and that is important given reports that Iranian state media was mobilizing the population to look for the downed airman. 

Q: Who would be brought in for force protection?

A: The CCTs of course are not alone at the landing zone. They had DEVGRU (SEAL Team 6) for security and dozens of aircraft backing them up with an absolutely jarring amount of aerial firepower. CCTs are usually also certified JTACs so they can manage the aircraft stacks not just for landing the MC-130s and AH-6s returning from the WSO rescue, but also the dozens of aircraft overhead that can fire at targets as necessary.

Q: Reports indicate that the WSO climbed up a 7,000 foot crevice and hid out there with intermittent communications while the Iranians were looking for him. How does that complicate things? And what would the team on the ground be doing?

A: I imagine that all the communications would have been encrypted – not anything that the Iranians could listen in on. For the guys on the ground, the biggest situation is monitoring to make sure that other forces aren’t approaching the area and protecting that forward arming and refueling site, because while it’s not a base, for all intensive purposes it is the center of mass of the most U.S. forces, the safest zone you have. So basically probably just protected that site. 

Q: What would be happening in the air?

A: You would have ISR assets that would be scanning the area, and not just the immediate area, but probably any roads and highways leading up to where that FARP site was set up. They would be watching anyone who could possibly be approaching. 

That whole area would just be soaked with ISR assets, and I know the Iranians knocked out two Reaper drones during the operation. So presumably, there was plenty of ISR. 

There would be a mix of attack and surveillance aircraft. There would be dozens of aircraft available for this mission. That is great for the team on the ground, but just like an air traffic control tower at Ronald Reagan Airport in DC can be overburdened, so will the JTAC who’s on the ground controlling all these different pilots and aircrews calling in to report threats they’ve spotted, relay their fuel or munitions status, report radio chatter they’re picking up from the ground, etc. This could require multiple JTACs on the ground, and probably also pilots in A-10s or F-35s who can act as an extra layer of forward air control in the sky, handling aircraft check-ins and keeping track of specific assets so the JTACs on the ground aren’t losing their minds mind handling a massive air stack behind enemy lines. 

Most CCTs also have a JTAC certification, so they can help call in airstrikes as needed to protect the FARP site. And attack aircraft, like A-10s, or multi-role fighters, like F-35s, also have pilots who are certified as Forward Air Controller (Airborne) — or FAC(A). The E-3 can also provide a command and control function to help manage this complex battlespace. 

Q: How difficult is a mission like this? What are the dangers?

A: This would have been a hot refueling site, with engines running refueling, and you’re doing all that blacked out, and you have to probably keep the amount of radio chatter on the ground to a minimum because you don’t know if maybe Iran does have something where they can break through the encryption. 

So I would imagine that the danger is even more than just the IRGC coming in and shooting at you. The danger is  the technicalities that you’re dealing with, with the forward  arming and refueling sites and all these aircraft moving around under night vision in blacked out conditions in a tight area. It’s a small airfield, you have to keep your signature low.

Thankfully, they were able to get more aircraft in to usher everyone out. But that just shows how even what they were dealing with, the runway probably wasn’t built to handle these kinds of aircraft, or not maintained. 

Clearly this kind of operation – where you’re coming in, setting up an airfield, whether it’s for a follow-on parachute jump or even just air landing more troops and supplies – would be repeated in most of the other scenarios people are talking about. For instance, going in and digging out Iran’s enriched uranium. I think it would have to be pretty similar. You would send in a special tactics team with some Ranger recce guys, and the Ranger reconnaissance company would maybe parachute in, and check out the airfield, and they would start bringing in the MC-130s. It’s going to be a remote, austere airfield. It’s not going to be easy to land aircraft there, it’s not going to be well maintained, and you’re going to run into a lot of problems on the ground with aircraft. 

In addition to the fixed-wing planes, the U.S. also destroyed a reported four Little Birds on the way out. Imagine if you’re trying to do sustained operations bringing aircraft in, that all those aircraft are wearing down that obscure runway as you’re coming in, and you’re having more and more troops flow in. Your signature is going to be bigger and it’s going to be there for a longer time. 

So this is how you create a window into a country to conduct follow-on operations. In this case, it was just to look for one guy and pick him up. But, they’re obviously looking at runways and airfields all across the country, whether they’re actual runways that are in use by the Iranian government or municipal governments, or if they’re just like roads that they can use or dirt fields that they think they can land on. So this rescue mission was probably a snapshot into larger operational planning.

Q: After the rescue of the pilot, the search for the WSO seemed to turn fairly quickly from a traditional PJ mission to a Tier One rescue operation. Can you talk about that transition and how those two fit together?

A: That’s right. From my understanding, there were two missions. The first was a traditional CSAR mission that was launched in daylight immediately after the F-15E went down. This likely involved the PJs from a rescue squadron that was on standby. They were aboard HH-60W Jolly Greens and had refueling support from an HC-130J. That mission is obviously very risky and time sensitive. They’re flying low and slow, in daylight, and vulnerable to ground fire. We saw people shooting at them with small arms, which probably won’t do much barring really lucky shots, but the crews are still exposed to man portable air defense systems (MANPADS).

You can see Iranians firing small arms at the CSAR aircraft in the following video.

This initial CSAR package successfully recovered the F-15E pilot, who would have had a beacon and survival radio. But obviously the WSO was still at large. Perhaps they knew his location but couldn’t get to him before the region came alive like a bees’ nest – with everyone from locals to actual security forces scouring the scene. At that point, it appears the mission shifted from a more traditional CSAR operation conducted by a rescue squadron to something we’re actually more familiar with from Afghanistan and Iraq – Tier One raids into denied territory. This makes sense to me because this was the single most important mission going on, and it makes sense to flood this with assets to successfully pull off a second pick up. In a bigger war, I doubt downed aircrew can expect JSOC rescue parties every time one of them goes down. 

A lot of people were surprised that MC-130s and AH-6s were used for this, but it actually reminds me a lot of the early Afghanistan missions Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted in fall 2001, before the Taliban fell. At least one of these involved Air Force Special Tactics CCTs parachuting into a remote part of Afghanistan, setting up a dirt airstrip, landing two MC-130s, off-loading a couple of Little Birds and then flying those around all night striking Taliban targets.

This rescue raid isn’t too different. It sounds like Air Force Special Tactics CCTs surveyed the airfield in advance – maybe in person, maybe just using satellite imagery – and then brought in the MC-130s that held the AH-6s to actually conduct the rescue that grabbed the WSO. This sort of scheme makes sense given the distance inside Iran. The MC-130s can bring extra fuel and ammunition to set up a mini-special ops refueling and re-arming site.

One thing to note here is why the commandos reportedly blew up the MC-130s on the way out. If the government’s version of events is accurate, this might have been because the runway was not suitable for the MC-130s and those planes got stuck or damaged landing there. The CCTs may have known this was a possibility but determined it was the least bad option. There’s also the possibility the aircraft were more damaged by enemy fire than we’ve been told. We may never know. 

Q: What would be the biggest danger from the Iranians? Indirect fire like artillery? Drones?

A: Hard for me to say. If the team had the element of surprise, which it seemed to, then the Iranians would have been caught off guard enough that they didn’t have time to stage artillery or have drones already scanning the area. In that case, I could see the biggest threat being local police or civilians stumbling upon the site early in the mission. As the operation gets underway, the noise signature would probably attract more and more attention. And then you have IRGC teams speeding to the scene. If they’re moving fast, they might only have small arms, maybe some belt-fed machine guns, small caliber mortars, and potentially MANPADs. The longer the U.S. team was on the ground, the more time Iran had to rush forces to the scene and that’s when things appeared to get dicey, the Army’s Delta Force reportedly had to blow in place the MC-130s and call in a quick reaction force (QRF) for pickup. 

Because people keep asking, the WSO was extracted on little birds flying STS and DEVGRU. Smoke checked 9 EKIA on tgt. The QRF that got called in for the FARP was from Delta. https://t.co/mmCbzrRjys

— Jack Murphy (@JackMurphyRGR) April 5, 2026

This is also why having so many aircraft overhead would be useful. Not only are those planes there to strike targets, they can listen to enemy communications and local civilian radio chatter, they can use their sensors to scan all the routes leading up to the airfield, and they can use jamming and spoofing to befuddle the Iranian response. All that helps buy time. 

Q: What kinds of geospatial tools would have been used to find and prep the site and carry out the mission?

A: I imagine in advance of this mission the airfields and runways in this area were pre-scouted using satellite imagery. I’m probably too out of date to go into specifics even if I wanted to, but we have very high resolution satellite imagery that’s available in the commercial space and is very impressive. Additionally, aircraft can fly over sites and scan the terrain using LIDAR to build 3D maps of the environment. Suffice to say, the CCTs would have a great picture of the environment before going in, but being physically on the ground shows new problems — can the soil hold up to landing an MC-130? How fine is the sand? When the AH-6s take off, are they creating a brown-out environment? 

In an ideal scenario, the CCTs could parachute in before the main mission, conducting a high-altitude, high-opening (HAHO) jump and then confirming on the ground that the site will work to land an MC-130. We don’t know if that’s what happened, but if the reporting is accurate that an MC-130 got stuck and had to be blown up in place, then perhaps they made a mistake or – my bet – they knew the runway was rough and accepted the risk.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

PHILADELPHIA — Besides carrying on the UCLA legacy, which Mick Cronin says is an honor in itself, he’s got an extra incentive here this weekend that has nothing to do with finding the best cheesesteak in town.

“We’ve got to win two games,” said Cronin, whose Bruins will start off going against Central Florida, whose coach, Johnny Dawkins, knows all too well from the years they squared off when he was at Cincinnati in the American Athletic Conference. “My daughter goes to American [University.]

“I’ll see her Monday. But I would like to spend a week with her.”

That’s because the East Region will be held in Washington, where AU is located. But for the Bruins to advance to past a Sunday showdown most likely against powerful Connecticut, Cronin says they’ll first need to contain Central Florida’s potent attack.

UCLA coach Mick Cronin talks with guard Trent Perry during the Bruins’ game at Michigan on Feb. 14.

(Lon Horwedel / Associated Press)

“Central Florida can score,” he explained of the 21-11 Knights, who’ve successfully made the transition from the AAC to the Big 12. “They’re athletic.

“[Themus] Fulks [averaging 14.1 points and 6.7 assists] keeps me up at night because he can get in the lane whenever he wants. He’s great off the pick and roll. He makes good reads and he’s a problem.

“I’ve seen Riley Kugel [14.4 points] since high school. He played for a friend of mine, so I know he’s a very good player and has gotten better as he’s gotten older.

“They can shoot it. They’ve struggled of late which means law of averages, that’s going to flip. They’re an athletic, aggressive team.”

On the other hand Dawkins, back in the city where he played for five years and won an NBA Eastern Conference title while playing alongside Charles Barkley, knows what he’s up against.

“Mick does a great job with his team,” said Dawkins, who before coming to Central Florida went 156-115 coaching eight years at Stanford, following a decade serving as Mike Krzyzewski’s assistant at his alma mater, Duke. “Of course. UCLA is a storied program of all college basketball.

“What an amazing history they’ve had there. and, of course, Coach Cronin is a coach I have known from the American as well. I know his team is going to be really, really talented.

“They’re very skilled and they’re tough.”

Speaking of that legacy, which includes a 1976 Final Four appearance here under John Wooden’s replacement, Gene Bartow, Cronin’s players knew what they were signing up for when they decided to come to Westwood.

“It’s definitely a blessing just to be part of this, to be part of the history, part of the tradition,” said senior guard Skyy Clark, averaging 11.7 points per game. “It’s a lot to carry for sure, but it motivates us to go out there and just do what we can.”

UCLA forward Tyler Bilodeau is congratulated by fans after beating USC at the Galen Center on March 7.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

“Yeah, a lot comes with these four letters we wear on our chest,” added second-leading scorer and top playmaker Donovan Dent (13.5, 7.6 assists). “We just want to make our names and the history of it.

“I wouldn’t say there’s extra pressure, but we know there’s definitely a standard that needs to be held.”

UCLA forward Tyler Bilodeau and Dent were injured during the Bruins’ Big Ten tournament run, but Cronin said Thursday “they looked good today [during practice,] so knock on wood.”

Maintaining the standard first set by Wooden is what lured Cronin from Cincinnati, where he won 296 games in 13 years and took them to the NCAA tournament nine times.

“I had a great job and was close to being the winningest coach ever at Cincinnati,” said Cronin, who’ll be making his fourth tourney appearance with the Bruins, including dropping a 2022 Sweet Sixteen game to North Carolina in this building. “But I left to sit in Coach Wooden’s chair and coach at the best university in the country, arguably the world, and everything that goes with it.

“It’s tremendous. I’ve been very fortunate. To coach at my alma mater, Cincinnati, and to be the head basketball coach at UCLA following so many.”

On Friday night, Cronin and the Bruins will take on the challenge of Central Florida and his longtime adversary Dawkins, mindful there are no gimmes once you get this far. No. 5 seed Wisconsin learned that during a loss to No. 12 High Point on Thursday and top-ranked Duke nearly did, having to rally from 13 points down to survive No. 16 Siena.

“You got to have players,” he said. “If you can’t coach, you’re not going to be in those tournaments. “The better players you have, the further you go.

That’s the whole key to getting in these things and advancing in them. Perseverance.”

WASHINGTON — In the escalating war in Iran, the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs would ordinarily be at the center of the geopolitical fray.

Typically led by a veteran diplomat, the bureau’s role would be to coordinate U.S. foreign policy across an 18-country region, much of which has become a chaotic battlefield scarred by drone and missile strikes as the U.S. and Israel remain locked in conflict with Iran.

The Trump administration for a time put Mora Namdar, a lawyer of Iranian descent with limited management experience, in charge before later moving her to a different post. One of her credentials was her contribution to Project 2025, a conservative think tank’s blueprint for the second Trump administration. Namdar’s last Senate-confirmed predecessor was a longtime Middle East expert who had been with the department since 1984 and had served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.

Now that bureau is also working with far fewer resources. The administration’s most recent budget proposed a 40% cut to the bureau, though Congress eventually enacted less dramatic cuts. The administration also eliminated the dedicated Iran office, merging it with the Iraq office.

Staff reductions and management choices hamper emergency response

These kinds of personnel and management choices — coupled with President Trump’s moves to shrink government and confine decision-making to a tight circle — are limiting the ability of the United States to handle a global emergency, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials, many of whom recently left government.

In divisions of the State Department that typically would handle the Iran response, numerous veteran diplomats with decades of collective experience were fired, retired or were reassigned — replaced by more junior officials or political appointees. The administration cut more than 80 staffers in Near Eastern Affairs, according to numbers compiled by a State Department employee who was terminated last year based on surveys of colleagues. (The department does not release official figures on Foreign Service officer staffing levels but did not dispute the number.)

The Trump administration has left the assistant secretary position in charge of Near Eastern Affairs vacant, along with key ambassadorships in the Middle East. Four of the five supervisors in the bureau have temporary titles.

The current and former officials, some of whom asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters during an active conflict, paint a portrait of an understaffed government workforce struggling to execute the president’s agenda. Those who remain tell colleagues that their analysis, recommendations and advice go unheeded.

The State Department vigorously disputed those assessments.

“As far as we can tell, AP’s entire ‘report’ on the evacuations does not include any conversations with people actually involved. Instead, it relies on ‘outside’ or ‘former official’ sources that have no idea what they are talking about. We walked AP through specific inaccuracy after specific inaccuracy — indeed how the whole premise was wrong,” State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said.

More than 3,800 State Dept. employees departed since Trump took office

The State Department saw a departure of more than 3,800 employees since President Trump took office through a combination of reductions in force, staffers taking the Fork in the Road deferred resignation plan and ordinary retirements. According to estimates by the American Foreign Service Association, the labor union that represents foreign service officers, senior foreign service ranks were disproportionately represented in the layoffs compared to their share of the overall workforce.

“He’s making choices without the larger expertise of the United States government that would flag issues of consequence,” said Max Stier, CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that studies federal workforce issues. “Sometimes government is slow-moving because there are a lot of different factors that need to be balanced against each other.”

For instance, the administration appears to have been caught off guard by what would happen once the U.S. struck Iran — something Trump himself acknowledged this week when he expressed surprise that Tehran retaliated with strikes on American allies in the region. “Nobody expected that. We were shocked. They fought back,” Trump told reporters this week.

Pigott said staffing reductions “are not having any negative impact on our ability to respond to this operation, our ability to plan, and our ability to execute in service to Americans.” He added that the department “rejects the premise that key decisions were made without meaningful input from experienced professionals.”

But Iranian retaliation on U.S. allies was predictable, according to former officials, as well as previous war games and conflict models run by both the U.S. military and private organizations. The National Security Council, which Trump has pared, typically would have presented the president with analysis from experts within the bureaucracy.

Instead, decisions are made by a small group of officials close to the president without the planning or coordination of the larger machinery of government, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as the president’s national security adviser.

“In the Trump Administration, decisions are made by President Trump and senior administration officials and not by no-name bureaucrat leakers who whine to the press about not being consulted about highly classified operations,” White House spokesperson Dylan Johnson said.

Advice from career officials often went unheeded

“In the time that I was there, there was no policy process to speak of,” said Chris Backemeyer, who served in Near Eastern Affairs as a deputy assistant secretary of state before resigning last year. Backemeyer was a major proponent of the Iran deal that Trump abandoned. He recently left government to run for Congress as a Democrat in Nebraska.

“They did not want to hear any advice from career people,” said Backemeyer.

Namdar was later moved to be the head of Consular Affairs, the part of the department responsible for providing assistance to American citizens overseas and issuing visas to foreign visitors.

When the U.S. made the decision to strike Iran, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee offered embassy staff in Jerusalem the opportunity to evacuate — a sign that he knew strikes were coming. But some other embassies in the region did not make similar arrangements — leaving nonessential personnel and their families stranded in a war zone.

The department said it has been issuing travel warnings since January and was fully staffed to handle the crisis the moment the strikes were launched.

Evacuation planning was chaotic

Still, little planning appears to have gone into how to evacuate the Americans who were living, working, visiting or studying in many of the countries that became engulfed in the conflict — in part because the White House seems to have underestimated the possibility of the strikes expanding into a prolonged multi-country war, as evidenced by Trump’s own remarks.

After Iranian attacks on allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, the State Department began calling for Americans to leave the region. But numerous former Consular Affairs staffers say such planning should have begun long before U.S. strikes started.

In a statement posted to social media, Namdar only told Americans to evacuate several days into the conflict, when airspace was largely closed and many commercial flights were unavailable.

“The messaging that went out to American citizens — after the U.S. struck Iran — was woefully late and, initially, confusing,” said Yael Lempert, who served as U.S. ambassador to Jordan until 2025. Lempert is one of five former ambassadors expected to speak about the department’s failures at an event Thursday at the American Academy of Diplomacy in Washington.

Other poorly executed evacuations, such the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, have drawn criticism.

But this time they’re compounded by the loss of experienced people, officials say. Consular Affairs has lost more than 150 jobs in the Trump administration due to a combination of reductions in force, dismissals of probationary employees and retirements, according to a U.S. official who asked for anonymity — though other parts of the department were hit much harder.

The department notes that it has offered assistance to nearly 50,000 Americans impacted by the conflict, with more than 60 flights evacuating citizens from the region. In total, the department says more than 70,000 Americans have been able to return home since the outbreak of hostilities on Feb. 28.

Democrat says personnel reduction imperiled safety

“The loss of experienced personnel through these RIFs has clearly undermined the Bureau of Consular Affairs’ ability to fulfill its most important mission, to protect Americans abroad,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.

Language skills at the department are also atrophying. Thirteen Arabic speakers and four Farsi speakers, all trained at taxpayer expense, were among employees let go, according to a draft letter being circulated by former foreign service officers.

It can cost $200,000 to train a foreign service officer in a language. The letter estimates that the total number of people fired by the State Department in the name of efficiency received more than $35 million in taxpayer-funded language training and more than $100 million in total training and other career development.

The State Department has set up two temporary task forces to deal with the crisis in the Middle East. One aims to bolster the capacities of Near East Affairs and another is aimed at helping Consular Affairs evacuate Americans.

A group of more than 250 Foreign Service officers were part of the administration’s reduction-in-force last year but still remain on the State Department’s payroll. Many have volunteered to return to the department to work on either a task force or do any other job that needs to be done with the outbreak of a global crisis.

“I haven’t been given any separation paperwork. I still have an active clearance. I could go back to the department tomorrow, either to backfill or staff a task force,” said one foreign service officer who asked for anonymity because they are still technically on the department’s payroll and are not authorized to speak to the press. “I will do the scutwork jobs.”

The department hasn’t responded to their offer but said in a statement that the task force is “fully staffed.”

Tau writes for the Associated Press.

Greek divers surface around me shouting about “megalo” groupers. I’m surrounded by enormous grins above the water and big fish below. A happy place to be. A bunch of us, divers and snorkellers, are hanging around Agios Petros reef off the island of Alonissos, and there’s a reason the groupers are big here. The National Marine Park of Alonissos Northern Sporades, established in 1992, is Greece’s largest working marine protected area (MPA) – two bigger MPAs have just been created, but are not yet operational. The protective measures appear to be working, judging by the size, abundance and diversity of marine life – glassy waters teeming with colourful fish and precious shells make swimming here an absolute dream.

For those who like to go deeper, Alonissos is the site of Greece’s first underwater archaeological park and museum – the impressive Peristera wreck, with its giant cargo of amphorae preserved from the 5th century BC. This one is for certified divers descending with accredited local dive centres. I’m with one of those schools, Ikion Diving, but today we’re doing something more accessible. We’re in the village of Steni Vala for the launch of a citizen science project, the Highly Protected Mediterranean Initiative (much more fun than it sounds). Ikion is partnering with the universities of Thessaloniki and the Aegean to offer free snorkelling and diving trips logging native and alien species. I’m worried about my fish ID skills, but the effervescent biologist Katerina Konsta runs a great briefing and we’re given dive slates with images to mark (imparting a childish delight at playing scientist).