Aftermath of an Iranian missile strike in the occupied territories
Phillip Nietto – Daily Mail July 29, 2026
Donald Trump’s top commander overseeing the Iran war has launched a crackdown on troops sharing cellphone footage of Iranian attacks on US bases.
In a letter, Admiral Brad Cooper said Iran was monitoring such videos in near real time to gauge whether its strikes had hit their targets.
Personnel deployed across the Middle East could soon be ordered to hand over their phones, despite thousands of troops relying on mobile devices to stay in touch with family and loved ones, according to Reuters.
‘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,’ Cooper wrote to the troops in letter dated July 28.
Sources report that troops stationed in Jordan, which has become a frequent target of Iranian drone and missile attacks, could have their phones confiscated within days.
Cooper’s warning comes as the military seeks to restrict information that could help Iran inflict more casualties on US forces. It follows the deaths of four US troops in recent weeks, after fighting with Iran resumed with the collapse of Trump’s ceasefire.
A video posted online this month showed a service member filming as troops ran for shelter during the deadly July 17 Iranian attack on a base in Jordan. Cooper appeared to cite that clip in his letter, noting it was recorded on camera-equipped Meta smart glasses and posted to Instagram, revealing where and how the wearer had evacuated to a bunker.
Without such posts, Cooper said, US electronic jamming and other battlefield countermeasures would leave Iran largely unable to assess whether its strikes had worked.
‘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,’ Cooper wrote in the letter.
He continued, ‘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.’
Eighteen US troops have been killed and more than 600 wounded since the conflict with Iran began in February.
Public support for the war has also collapsed, with just one in three Americans endorsing the fighting.
It is common that most troops must lock their devices away, and phones can be banned outright on sensitive missions, such as those run by special operations forces.
But the prospect of confiscation has unsettled some family members, already on edge in recent months as they read Iranian claims of deadly strikes on bases across the Middle East.
Pentagon officials have warned for years that mobile applications, such as fitness trackers, can expose location data that adversaries exploit for targeting.
Commercially available location data collected from smartphones has been used to monitor and strike US forces abroad.
Cooper concluded in his letter that allowing Iran to judge whether its strikes had succeeded could prompt it to launch ‘a secondary, much more devastating wave of attacks.’