Admiral Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, warned troops in a July 28 letter that cellphone videos shared online can help Iran target American bases, while sources said some deployed personnel could soon be ordered to surrender their phones. That’s the state’s answer to a war fought in public: more secrecy, more control, less room for ordinary people to see what’s being done in their name.
The State Wants the Feed Cut
Cooper said Iran was benefiting from being able to see the success or failure of its strikes in near real time by searching news reports or online posts by journalists referencing “reactions, photos, and footage from the cellphones of our troops.” He wrote that “the direct, unavoidable cost of this open-source intelligence could be measured in the lives of American service members and civilian residents in targeted Gulf countries,” and called on troops to “redouble our focus on operational security,” without prescribing specific steps in the memo. The language is familiar military housekeeping: protect the machine, manage the optics, keep the public at arm’s length.
A US Central Command spokesperson, Captain Timothy Hawkins, said: “The message is a general reminder to our service members on the importance of maintaining operational security. This is one of many opportunities Admiral Cooper has used to convey operational priorities.” That’s the bureaucratic voice of empire, neat and bloodless, even as the war keeps chewing through bodies and infrastructure.
In Jordan, which has been a frequent target of Iranian strikes, some troops have been told their phones will be confiscated in the coming days, two sources familiar with the matter said. A third source said such a move was being considered in the region because of operational security concerns but did not present the confiscation as certain. The possible seizure of phones has stoked anxiety among some family members, already on edge in recent months as they read Iranian claims of deadly strikes on bases throughout the Middle East, two of the sources said. The people closest to the soldiers get the fear; the institutions get the protocols.
War, Surveillance, and Managed Information
Cooper said a video posted online this month showed a US service member recording soldiers running for shelter during a deadly Iranian attack on the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan on July 17. He said the footage had been recorded on Meta smart glasses with a built-in camera. “Video captured from a service member's Meta glasses was posted on Instagram showing where and how the individual had evacuated to a bunker during an Iranian missile and drone attack,” Cooper wrote. The war now runs through phones, glasses, and platforms built to circulate everything except accountability.
He said Iran would normally have a tough time determining the success or failure of its strikes because of US military electronic jamming or other tactics used in war zones. “Iran knows the weapons were fired; however, their forces do not know if they missed by 50 meters, hit an empty tarmac, or successfully struck a crowded facility,” he wrote. “Detailed lists, descriptions, and analyses of what was hit, openly published by news outlets, are essentially performing Iran’s Battle Damage Assessment (BDA) for them, free of charge,” Cooper said. He added that “detailed public disclosures can become an immediate green light for Iranian forces to launch a secondary, much more devastating wave of attacks.”
That’s the logic of the security state in plain English: information is tolerated until it becomes inconvenient, then it’s treated like contraband. The public gets fragments. The military gets the rest.
The warning came amid mounting tensions between real-time news reporting on the war, often aided by satellite imagery and first-person accounts, and the US military’s desire to restrict information that could aid Iran as it tries to kill and wound US troops. Some 18 US troops have died in the conflict with Iran that started on February 28, and more than 600 have been wounded in the fighting, casualties that have deepened Americans’ concerns about a war that just one in three Americans support. The war has already produced its own ledger of dead and wounded, while the institutions running it argue over how much the public should be allowed to know.
The Public Pays, the Institutions Manage
Democratic lawmakers have called for more information about the war, including details about damage to US infrastructure on bases including radar towers, barracks and aircraft hangars. They have also called for the release of a US military investigation into a likely US strike on a girls’ school in Iran, first reported by Reuters, on the opening day of the war on Feb. 28. Even here, the dispute stays inside the state system: one set of officials asking another set for more disclosure, while the war itself keeps moving through bases, schools, and civilian lives.
US officials have cautioned for years that certain applications on mobile devices, like fitness applications, can be exploited by adversaries to aid adversary targeting because of location data. Reuters reported in May that commercially available location data harvested from smartphones or other devices has been used to target or surveil US forces. At the same time, the Pentagon has sought to carefully control the release of information because of what it says are operational security concerns, often declining to comment on Iran's attack claims or detail individual incidents that led to injuries of US troops.
So the machinery tightens its grip. Phones may be seized. Posts may be scrubbed. Families may keep waiting for news they’re not meant to see. The war goes on, and the institutions around it keep calling that order.