Author: Dan Lamothe

In a dark room of bunk beds at Marine Corps boot camp came a cry for help: “Recruit down! Recruit down!” Zachary Boland, 18, was convulsing uncontrollably in his bunk, and could not be resuscitated. He was declared dead about 45 minutes later at a nearby hospital. The Nov. 4 death of the former high…

An F-16 fighter jet that was on a training mission crashed Wednesday morning in Maryland, and a pilot parachuted out of the plane, authorities said. Officials for Joint Base Andrews said in a statement that the plane was an F-16C fighter jet from the Air National Guard’s 113th Fighter Wing. The crash happened around 9:15…

The U.S. Air Force, faced with a potentially protracted war against the Islamic State, aging fighter jets and a shrinking force of pilots, is examining the adoption of a new fleet of “light-attack” planes that are both a throwback to earlier U.S. operations and a current staple of militaries in South America and the Middle…

A Chinese military aircraft crossed near the nose of a Navy P-3C Orion anti-submarine and surveillance plane Wednesday, flying within about 1,000 feet in an encounter the Pentagon identified as unsafe, but probably unintentional. The incident occurred late in the morning in international airspace over the South China Sea near Scarborough Shoal, said Navy Capt.…

The Trump administration has drafted an executive order stating the president will significantly grow the U.S. military, spending money on everything from additional Special Operations forces to the modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal while cutting projects that are not considered the “highest priority operations.” The three-page document, obtained by The Washington Post, calls for…

The Pentagon is reviewing how to resolve the cases of thousands of Army National Guard members who collectively received at least $30 million, only to be told later that the money wasn’t really theirs and must be repaid. About 10,000 members of the California Army National Guard could be affected, said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis,…

The Navy’s Blue Angels stunt team will stop performing the aerial maneuver that a pilot attempted during a fatal crash in June, and the team will implement a variety of other changes after an investigation found the pilot’s errors caused the crash, Navy officials said Thursday. Marine Capt. Jeffrey Kuss, 32, was killed June 2…

The drowning death of a U.S. sailor in Navy SEAL training has been ruled a homicide, with a medical examiner determining that a SEAL instructor dunked the sailor in a swimming pool at least twice despite prohibitions against doing so. Seaman James Derek Lovelace, 21, of Crestview, Fla., died May 6 during the famously difficult…

Chelsea Manning, the U.S. soldier sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment for her role in the publication of a vast trove of classified information by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, was hospitalized early Tuesday after what media reports characterized as a suicide attempt. Manning, 28, was taken to the hospital and has since been returned to confinement,…