The seven Marines and one sailor who’ve been missing since their amphibious assault vehicle sank in the Pacific Ocean on Thursday are believed to be dead, ending an extensive 40-hour search-and-rescue mission.

Officials with the 15th Marine Corps Expeditionary Unit announced early Sunday that leadership determined little likelihood the service members survived the accident. Sixteen troops with that unit were in the AAV during amphibious training near San Clemente Island when their vehicle began filling with water off San Diego’s coast.

Eight of the 16 escaped, and one of those Marines later died. Two others remain hospitalized in critical condition.

“It is with a heavy heart, that I decided to conclude the search and rescue effort,” Col...

As a kid, art is how John Carrillo understood the world.

“One of the things I would do to escape was draw,” he says, adding that he’d draw anything he could lay his eyes on.

He eventually went on to be an illustrator in the Marines and now designs products for a nationwide home decor brand. He’s also involved in the Historic Fourth Avenue Coalition and owns the Oro Valley shop Rosie’s Barket with his high school sweetheart, Nicole Carrillo.

Not knowing how to pursue art as a career initially, Carrillo graduated from high school and joined the Navy in 1990.

“After two years, I was trying to think how can I do art, how can I do this in the military,” he says.

After four years in the Navy, Carrillo received his GI Bill and headed to art school...

WASHINGTON — The Army National Guard will move most of its brigades under the command of its eight division headquarters as it reorganizes its fighting formations to give the force more combat power and some soldiers new career opportunities, officials said.

The Guard move will mark a substantial increase in the number of fully manned divisions that the Army can deploy, as only the service’s 10 active-duty divisions are now filled out with subordinate units, said Lt. Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the director of the Army National Guard. The increase to 18 complete Army divisions comes at a time when service officials believe a major conflict with a near-peer rival — namely Russia or China — would require the employment of full divisions, he said.

For the last two decades, the Army has focused o...

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Afghan intelligence service says it has killed a high ranking official with the Islamic State affiliate in an operation in eastern Afghanistan.

A statement released by the National Directorate of Security late Saturday said Assadullah Orakzai was an intelligence leader for the Islamic State and special forces killed him near Jalalabad.

Orakzai was suspected of being involved in several deadly attacks against both military and civilian targets in Afghanistan.

Last week, a United Nations report said Afghanistan saw a 13% drop in the number of civilians killed and wounded in violence across the country in the first six months of the year, compared to the same period last year.

The report credited the drop in casualties in part to the reduction of operations ...

Iran said Saturday it has arrested the head of a U.S.-based “terrorist group” accused of being behind a deadly 2008 bombing in the southern city of Shiraz and of other abortive attacks.

The group’s “Jamshid Sharmahd, who was leading armed and sabotage operations inside Iran, is now in the powerful hands” of Iran’s security forces, state television said in a report citing a statement from the intelligence ministry.

The statement did not elaborate on where or when the leader of the opposition royalist group known as the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, or Tondar (Farsi for Thunder), was arrested.

According to the statement, he had orchestrated the April 12, 2008 bombing in a packed mosque in Shiraz that killed 14 people and wounded 215.

Iran hanged three men convicted of the bombing in 2009, say...

The Marine Corps amphibious vehicle involved in a deadly mishap Thursday has a long history and was set to be replaced a decade ago. However, defense budget cuts scrapped its multi-billion-dollar replacement in 2011.

Amphibious vehicles — commonly called “Amtracks” — have been part of the Marine Corps’ fighting force since World War II, when in 1943 they carried Marines onto the shores of Tarawa, a tiny island in the Pacific.

The modern version, the Assault Amphibious Vehicle, entered service in 1972.

The armored troop carriers can be armed with a .50 caliber machine gun and a grenade launcher. They deploy from Navy amphibious ships’ well decks to ferry troops to nearby beaches...

Complaints from an active-duty airman’s colleague landed the airman in front of her command leadership.

She was taking too many breaks while on duty, they said, and they recommended that she fix the problem on her own.

But the breaks she took were to pump milk for her newborn baby.

Read Next: Marine Corps Plan to Ditch Tanks Could Burden the Army, Experts Say

“It was a constant battle,” said the officer, who gave birth to her second child two years ago. She asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal, but said she works in health care at a Texas base.

Her coworkers began accusing her of “taking advantage of pumping time to avoid assignments or putting my own needs ahead of my patients,” she said in a recent interview with Military.com. “None of that was true.”

The Air Force has ...