war

The statistics are sobering — so sobering that Defense Department officials refuse to confirm, deny or discuss them.

From Feb. 28 through July, the first five months of the war with Iraq, U.S. forces burned through almost 60% of the nation’s advanced defensive missiles — the Patriot and THAAD interceptors that protect American troops.

When the war began, the Pentagon had almost 2,800 Patriot and THAAD missiles in its worldwide inventory, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent think tank. By the end of July, that number had dropped to about 1,100, CSIS reported. Almost two-thirds of the Patriots and almost 40% of the longer-range THAAD were gone.

“This is a generational annihilation of our theater missile defense capability,” said Tom Karako, director of CSIS’s Missile Defense Project. “There’s no way you can look at this and not see it’s a setback.”

The White House and the Pentagon have not challenged the CSIS figures, although they have issued sweeping denials that any shortage exists.

“We have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need,” President Trump said in July.

That’s true, but misleading. The U.S. military still holds vast inventories of short-range offensive missiles. But the sophisticated defensive missiles that protect U.S. troops no longer are abundant — as even Trump has acknowledged.

“We have certain types of munitions [of which] we have unlimited, virtual unlimited supply,” he said last month. “We have others where it’s a little bit tighter.”

The result is a squeeze that has prompted U.S. commanders to husband Patriot and THAAD interceptors as scarce assets.

For much of August, when a frayed de facto ceasefire was in effect, U.S. forces did not respond with high-end missiles when Iran attacked oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.

But when Iran launched rockets against U.S. bases in Jordan last week, Patriots reportedly were used to knock the incoming missiles down. (The Pentagon has declined to confirm or deny those reports.)

The U.S. weapons arsenal “no longer has the capacity to deter a Chinese attack against Taiwan,” the Council on Foreign Relations warned in a report last month. Defense planners share the same concern over a potential Russian assault on the Baltic states.

The conservative Heritage Foundation has forecast that the Pentagon’s inventory of missiles would run out “within the first week of a Taiwan conflict.”

In Europe, a U.S. defense official told the Associated Press last month that the shortfall was “beyond critical.” If Russia attacked a NATO country, the official said, U.S. forces in the area would “take punch after punch in the mouth.”

The core question is whether the United States has so few missiles that it cannot credibly deter China or Russia from attacking their neighbors.

“You’ve got to be strong enough to send a clear message that our enemies should not try anything because we’re a credible force,” said Leon Panetta, President Obama’s former defense secretary. “Now we’re losing a lot of that credibility — and that’s dangerous.”

Knowing that U.S. forces have been left without thousands of weapons needed to deter conflict, Karako said, could in itself be provocative. “It could tempt an aggressor to do something, knowing that we have fewer [missiles] to thwart them.”

The obvious remedy is to build more interceptors — a process Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered even before the war began. But ramping up missile production won’t immediately replenish the stockpile.

Before the Iran war, defense contractors were producing only about 620 Patriots and 96 THAAD each year — fewer than half the number expended during a few weeks this spring.

At current production rates, it will take at least three years to return the Patriot inventory to its prewar level, and at least four years for THAAD, CSIS reported.

Defense experts warn that the stocks need to be even larger than they were before the war to credibly deter China or Russia.

Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and principal author of the CSIS estimates, says most analysts believe it will take years after replenishing the stocks expended in the Persian Gulf to build a credible deterrent against China.

The Pentagon has enough munitions, both offensive and defensive, to continue fighting the campaign against Iran, he added — but some of those less-sophisticated weapons can be used only at shorter ranges, which means placing more troops in harm’s way.

Cancian said the CSIS figures were based on publicly available Pentagon budget and acquisition documents, updated in some cases from recent press reports — but not from leaks of classified information.

The roots of the missile shortage began long before the war with Iran. Trump and Hegseth are not the only ones to blame, although their belief that Iran would quickly capitulate appears to have been a major factor.

Nor did former President Biden cause the shortage, as Trump has claimed Biden gave several hundred Patriots to Ukraine, but the shortfall is far larger than that.

The underlying problem, defense experts say, is that the United States designed its missile defense programs for a world in which only a few major powers like China and Russia posed serious threats.

But the landscape of military technology has changed. Missiles and drones have become cheaper and easier to acquire, and countries like Iran can strike targets at great distances without making a huge investment in weaponry.

That’s a transformational change — and the Pentagon has been behind the curve, argues Michael C. Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This is the kind of situation in which great-power militaries like the United States struggle,” he said.

So the Trump administration faces several challenges. It needs to replenish its depleted stores of advanced defensive missiles — a process that has only just begun, and which Congress has not yet funded. Meanwhile, Horowitz and others argue, it also needs to build less expensive missile and drone systems to fill the multiyear gap before Patriot and THAAD inventories can be restored.

The Pentagon has begun that process, deploying several relatively inexpensive anti-drone missile systems.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year included $7.7 billion for low-cost missile and drone programs, but 13 months later, more than 90% of the money remains unspent, Horowitz said.

Saturday’s talks in Moscow lasted three hours and were held behind closed doors in Putin’s official residence in the heart of the Russian capital, according to Russian state media.

Details are still emerging, but both sides have given broadly positive remarks without going into specifics.

Putin adviser Yuri Ushakov described the talks as “constructive, extremely frank”.

“The talks were not limited to an exchange of views on resolving the Ukrainian crisis – economic issues and potential major, mutually beneficial Russian-American projects were discussed in considerable detail,” he said.

Ushakov also said “note was made of the Russian army’s tangible advances in the combat zone” and that there was acknowledgement that talks needed to address “the root causes of the conflict”.

Despite an escalation of Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian cities including Kyiv, Russian ground forces have made very slow advances for most of the conflict, incurring enormous casualties. Russia still controls about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory – areas that it seized back in 2022.

Kushner and Witkoff have visited Russia several times but given Ukraine’s airspace has been closed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, it is not clear how they will be travelling to Kyiv from Moscow.

The talks come after Russia and Ukraine have intensified aerial attacks in recent months.

Ukraine says it has struggled to repel ballistic missile attacks due to a lack of interceptor missiles, while Kyiv has focused its strikes on Russian economic infrastructure targets, notably oil installations.

Both Russia and Ukraine vow not to strike each other’s capitals for three days during talks in Moscow and Kyiv.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun talks with United States envoys on ending more than four years of war in Ukraine, ahead of their first visit to Kyiv expected on Sunday.

Putin met Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – respectively President Donald Trump’s special envoy and business ally, and his son-in-law – at the Kremlin on Saturday.

“Dear colleagues, I warmly welcome you to Moscow. The situation is, of course, not simple,” Putin told the envoys in a grand Kremlin hall in footage aired by Russian TV.

Both Russia and Ukraine vowed not to strike each other’s capitals for three days during the negotiations, as Washington tries to revive US-led talks to end Europe’s worst conflict since World War II.

Trump earlier said Kushner and Witkoff were bringing “a proposal to end the war”.

In Putin’s address to the two men, he said: “I would like to ask everyone to convey their best wishes and words of gratitude to US President Mr Trump”.

Witkoff said Trump had sent his best wishes to Putin and ⁠thanked him for ⁠the limited ceasefire during the delegation’s visit. Putin said ⁠Russia would do its ⁠utmost to ensure ⁠the safety of the mediators.

‘Refrain from strikes’

The talks come as the grinding war – which began with a Russian invasion in 2022 – has seen increasing civilian deaths and attacks this summer.

Putin has repeatedly said Moscow intends to seize the rest of east Ukraine.

Russian strikes on Ukraine on Saturday killed at least seven people, including in the Kyiv suburbs, Ukrainian officials said.

The Kremlin said it would not strike Kyiv from midnight on Saturday, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he would halt strikes on Moscow “from now” until Monday.

“The Russian president, the commander-in-chief, has given the order from midnight tonight not to strike Kyiv for three days,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Zelensky – who had offered a truce during the US visits – later said he had spoken to the US envoys and also promised Kyiv would not strike Moscow.

“From now through the end of Saturday, as well as on Sunday and Monday, Ukraine is ready to refrain from strikes on Moscow,” Zelensky said on social media.

The Ukrainian leader said he had spoken to the US officials and that he expected them in Kyiv on Sunday.

It will be the first time that Witkoff and Kushner visit Kyiv since Trump returned to office last year with a pledge to resolve the conflict.

ITV are screening this war film based on one of the most significant battles of all time, with a huge historic figure at the centre of it all

History was turned into a legendary piece of storytelling when this film made its way to the big screen in 1970, retelling the real life events of war and now its set to appear on TV’s tonight.

Regarded as one of the great original epic war films, this movie helps to maintain the legacy of the decisive battle of the Napoleonic Wars, in the 1800s.

Waterloo is a sweeping historical movie which remains one of the most powerful entries in the genre, with acclaimed director Peter Jackson even crediting it as a key influence on his work on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

It is a film that depicts the real-life Battle of Waterloo, focusing not solely on the conflict itself but also on the pivotal days leading up to the campaign, widely known as the Hundred Days.

It charts Napoleon Bonaparte’s downfall and his return from exile ahead of his crushing defeat at the 1815 battle. Following his comeback, the French military swiftly rallies to his cause, prompting alarmed European powers to forge a new coalition, and war inevitably follows.

Many have praised the film for its historical accuracy, with one viewer writing on Rotten Tomatoes that it is “the most accurate historical film ever”, which is enough to make history buffs want to watch it.

The grand-scale production was a joint venture between Italy and the Soviet Union, helmed by director Sergei Bondarchuk and featuring Rod Steiger in the role of the legendary Emperor Napoleon I.

Following a viewing of the film, one audience member posted a review on Rotten Tomatoes, saying: “This is a classic, and Rod Steiger is immense, making the new Napoleon movie look like an amateur nightmare.”

Another wrote: “remarkable film. One for the ages. A film like it will never be made again.”

It features a number of historical figures played by actors such as Jack Hawkins as General Sir Thomas Picton, Virginia McKenna as the Duchess of Richmond and Orson Welles as the famed Louis XVIII of France.

The film’s most striking element is undoubtedly the combat sequences, which deployed an astonishing 17,000 authentically costumed extras. The battle scenes were meticulously recreated to achieve maximum realism, using genuine numbers and eschewing special effects, establishing a record that remains unbroken for the largest number of costumed extras in any film.

This commitment helped secure multiple accolades, including two BAFTAs for Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction. It’s the director’s unwavering dedication to crafting these teeming, lifelike scenes that continues to strike a chord with audiences.

One viewer wrote: “Easily one of the best movies ever made. Actual soldiers given a Napoleonic battle training playing the extras, one of the most historically accurate film ever made.

“It allows one to immerse oneself in the battle and provides excellent viewing. With brilliant casting this film remains one of my favourites of all time.”

Yet despite the film’s critical acclaim, it struggled to recoup the costs of these monumental scenes at the North American box office. Consequently, its disappointing financial performance triggered a significant industry-wide decline in backing for large-scale practical effects, driven by commercial anxieties.

You can catch the historical drama on ITV4 tonight at 7.40pm. Alternatively, the film is available to stream on ITVX at your convenience.

WASHINGTON — The widow of an airman killed on a combat mission in the Middle East said it took a viral social media post to get resolution from the Pentagon on issues related to her husband’s benefits and basic pay months after his death.

Maj. Alex Klinner, 33, was one of six crew members of a KC-135 refueling aircraft that crashed in western Iraq in March while supporting operations against Iran. He’s one of 18 U.S. service members killed, along with 790 wounded, since the war began more than six months ago.

The Air Force reached out to his widow, Libby Klinner, this week to clarify that his final paycheck would include hazard pay and combat-related tax breaks. This occurred after she voiced frustration on social media at being told by a military officer assigned to support her after her husband’s death that he was ineligible for those benefits because “we were not at war.”

“My husband lost his life because we’re in a war, and then I was told that because it’s not technically a war, we lose out on something,” Klinner told the Associated Press. “It all comes down to principle.”

Trump administration is rejecting the ‘war’ label for current Iran operations

Her post, made over the weekend, gained national attention. Vice President JD Vance promised to look into her case after being asked about it during a White House briefing on Thursday.

“We want to be as helpful as we can and ensure she gets everything that she is entitled to,” Vance said. “My message to her would be, ‘We love ya, we’re grateful for the sacrifice and we very much take very seriously our commitment to get you what you need to get.’”

In response to a separate question, Vance rejected the use of the word “war” to characterize U.S. fighting in Iran, saying that “there is no active shooting.” The military has launched strikes against targets in Iran twice this week, and Iran has retaliated by firing on U.S. allies in the Gulf.

On Friday, President Trump called U.S. strikes “intermittent” and defended Vance’s comments.

“I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

In late July, the Trump administration created a new, separate category in the Pentagon’s casualty count system for those killed and wounded in renewed U.S.-Iran fighting. Pentagon officials said the change was necessary because “Operation Epic Fury,” the original name for combat operations against Tehran, had ended. Since July 7, all U.S. casualties in the Middle East have been tallied under “Overseas Operations.”

Widow says the Air Force has clarified the issues about her husband’s pay

Libby Klinner said Air Force officials contacted her this week to say they were initiating a review of her husband’s pay. The Air Force acknowledged to her Thursday that it had initially provided inaccurate information and clarified that she was receiving the full pay and benefits her husband was owed, she said.

She said she was told that her husband’s paycheck had already included but incorrectly itemized the combat-related hazard pay and tax breaks.

The pay incentives commonly known as “combat pay” are $225 per month and are conditioned not on a formal war declaration, but on the service member being in an area where there is “grave danger of physical injury” or of being “killed, injured, or wounded by a hostile fire event,” according to a military website.

Alex Klinner’s final paycheck would have included half that amount since troops are paid twice per month. It is difficult to calculate how much in federal tax breaks Klinner would have been receiving without more information.

Klinner declined to specify the amount of money she was initially told her husband, an eight-year Air Force veteran from Birmingham, Ala., would be ineligible to receive.

The Air Force says it’s committed to offering information and support

The Air Force said officials spoke with Klinner this week to “ensure all her questions are fully addressed” and confirmed that “all eligible combat theater benefits were included” in her husband’s pay.

“We remain committed to providing clear information and continued support to Mrs. Klinner, as well as all the families of the Airmen who died in the KC-135 crash,” the Air Force added.

Broadly, errors in pay in the military are very common because service members can often gain or lose eligibility for a variety of payments depending on their deployment status, duty location or even family factors. As a result, unlike their civilian counterparts, some troops can see their paychecks change many times a year, depending on many factors — something that also increases the likelihood of errors.

A GoFundMe for Libby Klinner and her three young children, launched in the days after her husband’s death, has raised more than $1.5 million.

Klinner said she hoped that by speaking out, she could ensure other grieving families receive clear information from the outset.

“I am very fortunate to have a significant support system around us and a platform to advocate for myself and for my kids. Other families may not have those resources,” she said. “If I can do anything to make this awful situation a little bit easier for someone else to navigate, then I am more than willing to do so.”

Brook and Toropin write for the Associated Press. Brook reported from New Orleans.

Sept. 4 (UPI) — President Donald Trump on Friday said the Iran war was “small potatoes” and “not a big thing.”

Trump was responding to questions about comments by Vice President J.D. Vance, who had said a day earlier that the conflict wasn’t a war.

“A lot of people don’t call it a war,” Trump told reporters. “I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us.

“It’s not a big thing. We did Venezuela, and we did this.”

Trump described the war as intermittent and a flare-up, USA Today reported.

Hours earlier, on his Truth Social platform, Trump explicitly called the conflict “the War in Iran.”

“The Radical Left Lunatics, Dumocrats, and Communists would rather have us LOSE the War in Iran, than have President Donald J. Trump WIN the War for America,” he wrote early Friday afternoon.

A day earlier, Vance told reporters there had been “no active shooting” and downplayed the severity of the war.

“I wouldn’t call it a war,” Vance told reporters at the White House.

Trump agreed with his vice president.

“I would say it’s a military conflict, if you want,” Trump said on Friday. “I don’t think it matters what you call it.

“What matters is the fact that we have had tremendous success.”