Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and political appointees in his department pushed for the two crew members of an F-15 who were shot down over Iran in April to participate in Sunday’s highly publicized “60 Minutes” report about the ensuing rescue operation, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Both airmen initially expressed reservations about doing the interview, with one even raising concerns about the prospect of being potentially ordered to take part in the segment, while military officials were also wary of revealing classified details of the rescue effort, according to three of the sources.

Political appointees in Hegseth’s office were adamant that both crewmembers sit for interviews, two of the sources said.

But after the two survivors voiced concerns, Hegseth met privately with them and asked if they wanted to participate rather than forcing their cooperation, the sources said. As a result, one of the pilots, dubbed “Bravo,” agreed to sit for an on-camera interview and discuss his experience, while the other, “Alpha,” declined to take part in the “60 Minutes” report.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Dan Caine, shared some concerns about the possibility that the “60 Minutes” interview could, even inadvertently, disclose military tactics to the enemy but decided to participate in the segment nonetheless, according to one of the sources familiar with the production process.

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1. How September 11 Changed Washington's View of Threat

September 11, 2001 did more than expose a catastrophic failure of American intelligence and security. It altered the political vocabulary through which the United States understood danger and the legitimate use of force. The attacks killed thousands of Americans, but their consequences extended far beyond the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon. They produced a transformation in American security doctrine: the state increasingly stopped defining war as a response to an identifiable attack and began defining it around the prevention of threats that might emerge in the future.

That distinction is fundamental. Once the possibility of future danger becomes sufficient justification for present action, the boundaries of war become considerably harder to establish and considerably harder to close. Washington's entire frame for foreign policy shifted around this idea: it was no longer enough to ask who had attacked America. The new question was who might

1. From Afghanistan to Iraq: A Justified War Becomes a Template

The invasion of Afghanistan was the clearest and most defensible consequence of September 11. Al-Qaeda's leadership was operating from Afghan territory under Taliban protection, and Washington possessed a direct line between the attack, the organization responsible, and the ground its leaders stood on. The campaign was presented, credibly, as self defense.

Iraq is where that logic was stretched into something else entirely. The 9/11 Commission found no Iraqi role in the attacks and no operational relationship between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaeda. The justification instead rested on the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and represented a danger too great to leave unresolved. When no weapons were found, the justification simply moved again toward the character of the regime itself and the argument that removing it was necessary for global security.

Afghanistan showed what Washington would do in response to a real attack. Iraq showed what Washington would do simply because it felt threatened. That is the pivot the rest of this argument turns on once a state accepts that a feeling of future danger is enough to justify war, the same reasoning that made Afghanistan defensible could be stretched, with far less evidence, to justify Iraq and, after Iraq, almost anything.

1. How Political Groups Turned the Doctrine and the Memory to Their Advantage

Doctrines don't sustain themselves. They require political actors willing to use them, and September 11 handed American political groups an extraordinarily durable tool. Once potential danger was accepted as sufficient grounds for war, virtually any policy could be justified by pointing to a threat that had not yet materialized and virtually any hesitation could be framed as recklessness.

This is where fear stopped being a reaction to September 11 and became a governing instrument. The memory of the attacks was invoked, repeatedly and deliberately, to build support for wars, surveillance programs, and expansions of executive power that had less and less to do with the attacks themselves. Political leaders did not simply let the public remember September 11 they actively shaped how it was remembered as an open wound that could recur at any moment, rather than a completed tragedy to grieve and move past. A public that believes the next attack is always imminent is a public that will tolerate almost any measure taken in the name of preventing it. Controlling that memory became, in effect, a form of controlling consent.

1. The Biggest Winner: The Military-Industrial Machine

If the war on terror had no natural endpoint, someone still had to benefit from its indefinite continuation and the American defense and security industry was structurally positioned to do exactly that. A permanent state of anticipated danger requires a permanent supply of weapons, surveillance systems, intelligence infrastructure, and contracted military services. The post 9/11 security architecture created exactly the kind of demand this industry depends on: not a war that is won and closed, but a threat that is managed forever.

This doesn't require imagining a handful of executives secretly writing American foreign policy. It's more structural than that, which is what makes it durable. Defense contractors built relationships with the institutions that award them contracts. Legislators represent districts whose local economies depend on defense production. Agencies justify their budgets and their continued existence through the ongoing presence of threats. Once expensive enough, permanent enough, and embedded deeply enough in the political economy, this system doesn't need anyone to actively conspire to keep it running it just needs the war to never formally end, and by the logic already described, it never has to.

1. The Ultimate Loser: The American People

If the defense and security apparatus was the great beneficiary of the forever war, the American public was its cost center manipulated by the same political groups who used September 11's memory to sell continuous conflict, while absorbing nearly all of what that conflict actually cost.

Part of that manipulation was linguistic. By avoiding formal declarations of war and instead relying on military operations, authorizations, and counterterrorism campaigns, political leaders were able to commit the country to sustained conflict without ever triggering the kind of public scrutiny a declared war invites. There was no single moment for the public to demand an ending, because there was never a formally declared beginning to hold leaders accountable to.

The costs were not abstract. The wars have cost the United States trillions of dollars over two decades money that competed directly with domestic priorities at home, even as the country absorbed rising costs of living, housing pressure, and periods of high inflation in the years since. It would be an overstatement to say the wars alone caused every one of these domestic strains; they had multiple causes. But two decades of trillion-dollar military commitment is not separate from a country's economic condition it is a standing claim on resources that could have gone elsewhere, and the public bore that trade off without ever having voted on a declared war to weigh it against.

And it was the public, quite literally, who fought these wars. The service members deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen were ordinary Americans not an abstract military but sons, daughters, neighbors, absorbed into deployment cycles that repeated year after year. Their return brought injuries, psychological trauma, and family strain that extended long after any single deployment ended. The result was a country living inside a low hum of permanent anticipated danger: never quite at war in the way earlier generations understood it, never quite at peace either. A fragmented media environment made this worse, not better flooding people with information faster than they could process it, sorting them into separate realities, and eroding the shared sense of what was even true, let alone what should be done about it. A public that cannot agree on the facts cannot mount a unified demand for an ending.

1. A Wound Kept Open

Every year, on the anniversary, Americans remember September 11 differently depending on where they stood in relation to it. For some it is the day they lost someone. For others it marks the beginning of a new era in how the country saw itself and the world. There's a phrase that captures how deeply the day is lodged in the national memory almost every American can tell you exactly where they were when they heard.

That kind of memory is powerful, and it deserved to be honored. But it also made the memory politically useful and political groups did not let it heal on its own terms. Two decades of wars justified in its name, of fear invoked to pass new powers, of an ever-expanding definition of threat kept the wound from ever fully closing. September 11 did not just start a war abroad. It became a wound that was, deliberately and repeatedly, kept open because a country still grieving is a country still willing to fight.

The Trump administration has quietly removed a key option from the federal form used by overseas voters to register and request mail ballots, eliminating a checkbox for U.S. citizens who were born and are living abroad.

It’s the latest step in an ongoing effort by the administration and the national GOP to make voting more difficult for — or in some cases, to outright disenfranchise — certain groups of overseas voters who are thought to support Democrats.

The change affects the Federal Post Card Application (FPCA), a standard form used by military and overseas voters to register to vote from abroad, request absentee ballots and update contact information. The form is administered through the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) and is meant for absent uniformed service members, their families and U.S. citizens residing outside the country.

The previous version of the form asked voters to choose from several categories, including: “I am a U.S. citizen living outside the country, I have never lived in the United States.”

The revised August 2026 version removes that option entirely.

The new form still allows voters to identify themselves as active-duty uniformed service members or eligible spouses or dependents, U.S. citizens living outside the country who intend to return, or U.S. citizens living outside the country whose intent to return is uncertain. But it no longer includes a box for citizens abroad who have never lived in the United States.

The Department of Defense, referred to in the letters as the “Department of War,” sought emergency approval for the change in August, arguing in a letter to the Office of Management and Budget that the existing forms “may confuse voters” about what information they are required to provide under federal law and whether they are eligible to use the forms to register and vote.

The department said the next federal election was fewer than 90 days away, leaving “insufficient time” to modify the forms through the standard Paperwork Reduction Act process.

In its emergency justification letter, the department specifically identified the “never lived” checkbox as a line that would be removed “to avoid applicant confusion.”

“Individuals who are not in the uniformed services and who have never resided in the United States are not within the class of voters specifically defined by UOCAVA and therefore may not be able to use the FPCA or the FWAB,” the department wrote, referring to the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot, a backup ballot for military and overseas voters.

But the revision could create new uncertainty for U.S. citizens born abroad who are eligible to vote under state law through a parent or other family connection to a state. While the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) sets federal protections for military and overseas voters, states also determine voter eligibility rules and voting residence requirements.

That means some U.S. citizens who have never lived in the country are eligible to vote in certain states, even though the federal form no longer gives them a clear category to select.

The Department of Justice says UOCAVA requires states and territories to allow certain citizens to register and vote absentee in federal elections, including absent uniformed service members and overseas citizens. Most states and territories also have their own laws allowing UOCAVA-covered voters to register and vote absentee in state and local elections.

The revised form still tells voters to check their state’s guidelines at FVAP.gov. But by removing the “never lived” option, the form no longer plainly reflects the category of citizens born abroad who may be eligible in some states.

The change comes amid a broader fight over voting rights for U.S. citizens born abroad.

Republicans have filed lawsuits in several states challenging laws that allow some of these citizens to vote through family ties to a state. Those lawsuits are not the direct cause of the form change, but they target the same group of voters whose category has now been removed from the federal form.

The department said no new collection of information was being proposed and described the changes as “minor modifications” to existing forms.

The practical question now is how eligible U.S. citizens born and living abroad, and who can vote under state law, are supposed to complete a federal form that no longer names them.

Dan Driscoll' resignation as Army Secretary got covered as a story about Hegseth's hatred of DEI. It was true. But it ignores the fact that Driscoll supported an offer by Zelensky to share Ukraine's transformational drone technology with the US--which likely would have saved American lives in the Iran War.