Mr. Trump’s “strategic vision is correct” about the need to dramatically accelerate Navy shipbuilding capacity, says Mr. Montgomery, who joined this week’s Threat Status weekly podcast for an exclusive discussion on a range of issues, including what needs to be done to fix American shipbuilding.

“We need a Golden Fleet. We need an investment in the Navy. We need an investment in shipbuilding to make that Navy happen and, most specifically, we need investment in the surface forces,” says Mr. Montgomery, a top analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Where I part ways with the president is on the battleship. I just think in the end … it won’t happen.”

He says U.S. private shipyards could become more efficient if they are faced with healthy competition from Japanese and Korean companies doing increased business with Washington as part of Mr. Trump’s push. “We’re not going to be able to … incentivize the current five or six U.S. private yards into changing their behavior overnight,” Mr. Montgomery said. “They’ll change their behavior, but they’ll change it because it’s a competitive environment where they’re having to compete with Japanese and Korean companies that are kicking their backside.”

U.S. and Israeli strikes have killed more than four dozen senior members of Iran’s leadership and thousands of members of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps since the start of the war. Defense officials and military insiders believe the strikes at times have created organizational chaos inside the Iranian government.

Still, Iran has maintained its continuity of government. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is still alive. Iran’s Assembly of Experts successfully appointed a new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, just a week after his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in an airstrike.

Threat Status has published a who’s who list of those killed and what their relevance was to the Iranian regime. In a nationally televised address Wednesday night, Mr. Trump touted the success in eliminating top Iranian leaders, asserting that “their command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is being decimated as we speak.”

The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office is launching an initiative to wage cognitive warfare — nonkinetic military operations short of major destructive conflict. 

Sam Gray, chief technology officer in charge of autonomy and artificial intelligence at the office, says the goal is to “disrupt the cognition and the thinking ability of an adversary or person and influence” adversaries’ perceptions, senses and actions.

Mr. Gray discussed the initiative at a recent conference hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association in Honolulu, which was first reported by National Defense Magazine. The initiative is expected to produce, in three to five years, new cognitive warfare capabilities for confronting high-priority challenges.

National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz offers a deep dive on the situation, citing a recent presentation by China expert Andrew B. Jensen, who says China is engaged in a major cognitive warfare effort known as the “three warfares” — public opinion warfare, psychological warfare and legal warfare.

Mr. Hegseth has announced that U.S. service members will be able to request permission to carry their guns onto installations, possibly allowing troops to concealed carry at work. In a major change to existing regulations, commanders in charge of each government facility will be responsible for fielding those requests.

“Effectively, our bases across the country were gun-free zones,” Mr. Hegseth said Thursday. He emphasized that troops have been allowed to carry firearms only while actively training or assigned as military police.

The change in policy was also announced in a Pentagon memorandum. The memo itself had not been made public as of Thursday night. A posting on the Pentagon’s website said the document is titled: “Non-Official Personal Protection Arming on Department of War Property.”

Recent reporting suggests that Mr. Trump “may be willing to stop short of forcing a reopening of the strait and rely instead on diplomacy and partners to restore shipping,” writes Bradley Martin, a scholar with the Center for Strategic & International Studies, and Liram Koblentz-Stenzler, a visiting scholar at Brandeis University.  

“This isn’t just about how the war ends. It’s also about how it will be read in Tehran, in the Gulf states and beyond and what that will set into motion,” the two write in an op-ed for The Washington Times. “Tehran’s response to recent U.S. outreach makes its position clear. Iranian officials are not offering a compromise.

“They are setting conditions: removing American forces from the region, lifting sanctions, preserving their missile program and expanding control over the Strait of Hormuz,” Mr. Martin and Mr. Koblentz-Stenzler write. “Those demands would shift the balance of power in Iran’s favor.”

• April 6 — How the War in Iran is Impacting Global Energy Infrastructure, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• April 7 — U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on the Future of Trade Policy, Hudson Institute

• April 7 — U.S.-Turkish Defense Relations and the Upcoming NATO Summit, Atlantic Council

• April 7 — A Conversation with Portuguese Ambassador Duarte Lopes: Europe, North Africa and the Mediterranean, Stimson Center

• April 9 — Same Engine, New Fuel? China’s Economic Model and the AI Bet, Chatham House

• April 15 — Invisible Attacks: What’s Behind Havana Syndrome & Anomalous Health Incidents, Hayden Center