Good morning. The Houthis — a militia Iran backs — returned to the wartime theater in the wider Middle East yesterday. The group said it would impose a blockade on Saudi ships trying to enter the Red Sea. That could open a new front in the war. It’s a conflict that has largely been fought remotely, with drones and missiles. Since it began, an estimated 1,700 or more Iranian civilians have been killed. I want to start today, though, with the American dead.
Lives lostWe learned the names yesterday of two of the three American service members killed during the latest intense exchanges of fire with Iran. They were First Lt. Tyler James Feehan, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, of Carrollton, Texas. Feehan was 25, Gonzales just 19. They were both killed when Iran launched missiles at the military base in Jordan where they were serving, Gonzales on Friday and Feehan on Saturday. The Pentagon has not yet identified the third U.S. service member, who was also killed on Saturday, during the disposal of a downed Iranian drone in northern Iraq. Theirs were the 15th, 16th and 17th confirmed deaths of U.S. military personnel since the United States and Israel started fighting with Iran on Feb. 28. They left families shattered, as The Times discovered in Texas: On Monday morning, at a tidy brick home in the Dallas suburb of Carrollton where Private Gonzales grew up, her mother answered the door in tears. She was glad her daughter’s name had been made public, she said, but she was not ready to talk about her yet. An American flag hung from the front of the home. A few other people arrived to be with the family, including several children. “She was a soldier,” Private Gonzales’s uncle, Ricardo Moniz, said, before returning inside. “We’re going to remember her like that.”
Operational securityThe Pentagon’s protocol for publicly identifying slain service members is to wait 24 hours after the notification of their next of kin. The military shares the name, rank and not much else about the fallen. Nearly five months into the war, with the cease-fire collapsing, the Pentagon hasn’t said much about its current strategy. Officials last gave a major news briefing in May. The Trump administration hasn’t disclosed the extent to which the war has drained U.S. supplies of expensive weapons, nor discussed how Iran has kept or rebuilt its ability to launch missiles at U.S. bases in the region. And the Pentagon hasn’t released information about dozens of injured troops. They’re not required to, a U.S. military official told The Times, especially when the soldiers quickly return to duty. As ever in war, there’s a tension between the government’s need to keep operational details secret and obligation to update its constituents on how the conflict is going. Telling the American people where troops have been injured, another official said, could lead Iran to focus its ballistic missiles and drones on those bases.
Congressional undersightRepublicans in Congress aren’t happy about any of this. The collapse of the cease-fire and the resumption of a hot war have inflamed the debate over the president’s war powers at the very moment the administration seeks tens of billions of dollars to pay for the fighting. “That has presented Republicans with a political worst-case scenario months before midterm elections in which their majorities are at stake,” writes Robert Jimison, who covers Capitol Hill: “They are being asked to vote to fund an unpopular war over which they have had no meaningful oversight, and which they have never voted to approve.” Many have pledged to do just that, though. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, said on CNN last week: “We’re going to supply the needs for America’s national security.” “The greatest fighting force on the planet, the last great superpower must be fully equipped,” he said, “and that’s the job of Congress, to make sure it’s done.” President Trump, for his part, has ignored votes in both the House and the Senate that directed him to seek authorization for the war. Last week he told lawmakers that fighting had resumed under his direction as commander in chief. Yesterday afternoon he doubled down. “Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over!” he wrote on social media. More on the war
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