President Trump told The Post on March 2 that he’s not ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary”—adding that Operation Epic Fury was “way ahead of schedule” after taking out dozens of Tehran’s top officials. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground—like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump said after launching strikes Feb. 28 to decapitate Iran’s military and political leadership. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”
The Trump administration, in pressing its case for war with Iran, has made a number of accusations about the regime’s threats to its neighbors, U.S. troops, and even the American homeland itself. However, U.S. officials and lawmakers with access to classified information, along with experts who have spent their careers poring over public data and government reports, say the administration’s assertions are incomplete, unsubstantiated, or flat-out wrong.
The first U.S. service members to die in the conflict between the US and Iran were killed by a direct Iranian strike on a makeshift operations center at a civilian port in Kuwait on the morning of March 1, a source familiar with the situation told CNN.
Qatar shot down two Su-24 fighter jets coming from Iran, the Qatari defense ministry said on March 2. It did not provide further details on the incident. Arab states in the Gulf, all close U.S. allies, have come under Iranian drone and missile attack since the United States and Israel launched airstrikes on Feb. 28.
Within minutes of arriving at a security conference with U.S. defense and intelligence officials in December, Palmer Luckey was stopped by a military officer who wanted to talk about killer robots. Clad in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts, Mr. Luckey nodded as the officer gushed over artificial-intelligence-backed drones and submarines made by Mr. Luckey’s defense-technology start-up, Anduril.
President Emmanuel Macron of France outlined a major evolution in France’s nuclear deterrent doctrine, including an increase in the overall number of nuclear weapons controlled by Paris—a move he described as necessary in this period of “ambient animosity” that “justifies a toughening of our [defense] model.”
When Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine briefed reporters March 2 on the U.S. military operation against Iran, he made a point to say that US Cyber Command and US Space Command were the “first movers … layering non-kinetic effects, disrupting and degrading and blinding Iran’s ability to see, communicate and respond.”
Tehran-linked hackers are stepping up digital reconnaissance and preparing for potentially disruptive cyber activity following recent U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, cyber intelligence firms warn.
In his first message as the new director of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, Owen West stated that the organization’s efforts will focus on fielding emerging technologies that can keep warfighters out of harm’s way and be quickly scaled at low cost.
Satellite imagery shows extensive damage to Iran’s naval base at Bandar Abbas, including depicting the IRINS Makran sea base-type ship on fire, following strikes as part of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli campaign. In addition to being the main headquarters for the Iranian Navy, Bandar Abbas is a key installation when it comes to Iran’s aims at controlling the Strait of Hormuz.
Two years after the Apple TV+ miniseries Masters of the Air reignited interest in the WWII “Bloody Hundredth,” the book that inspired it is getting a deluxe collector’s upgrade. On March 3, 2026, The Folio Society will release a premium illustrated edition of Donald L. Miller’s “Masters of the Air: How the Bomber Boys Broke Down the Nazi War Machine.”
