As he waited for the man he came to kill, Capt. Mathew Golsteyn felt a rising sense of dread. He wasn’t supposed to be out here hiding by the road in insurgent-held terrain in Marja, in southern Afghanistan, with just a single teammate. He was putting his career as a Special Forces officer in jeopardy, along with their lives.

A thin figure dressed in black came into view, walking toward him, unarmed: Rasoul. Until earlier that morning in February 2010, the man had been his prisoner. Golsteyn was convinced that he was a Taliban operative responsible for a bomb that killed two of his men. But in this guerrilla war, the enemy didn’t wear uniforms, and Rasoul had refused to talk.

In an interview this spring, Golsteyn recounted what happened next. He called in a crucial ally from a local tribe that opposed the Taliban, who confirmed his suspicions about Rasoul. But according to Golsteyn, the Green Berets made a terrible mistake. They had inadvertently allowed Rasoul to see the informant, who, terrified, told Golsteyn: “If he leaves here, me and my family are dead.”

Golsteyn said he faced a dilemma. By that point, American forces were under instructions to try to avoid holding prisoners and instead hand them off to their allied Afghan forces. But the Afghan partners who were with Golsteyn had no way to transfer Rasoul from the front lines to a detention center — and even if they did, Golsteyn knew, there was a good chance he would be released by the corrupt and ineffective Afghan judicial system. The support of the informant’s tribe was essential to the Green Berets’ safety and the success of their operation. “That was the mission,” Golsteyn said. “The whole mission.”

And so, he decided, Rasoul had to die. But he couldn’t just shoot him in handcuffs, he told me. Not only would it incriminate the others at their makeshift base — it also just felt wrong. Was setting him free just to ambush him while he was defenseless so different? Golsteyn reasoned that it was.

He told his men to release the detainee from the main gate; he and another Special Forces operator, meanwhile, slipped out and waited on Rasoul’s path down the road. Golsteyn watched him come closer; when his target was 15 yards away, he stepped out and raised his rifle. For a moment, the two men looked at each other. Then Golsteyn pulled the trigger.

Every war produces its own kind of hero. World War II had the everyman G.I.; Korea, its fighter-jet ace. The Persian Gulf war is remembered for best-and-brightest generals like Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell. During the 20 years of warfare waged in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere around the world, the operator became the iconic American fighter.

In response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, teams of Special Forces and C.I.A. operatives rode through Afghanistan on horseback, rallying local militias and calling in airstrikes to swiftly topple the Taliban and scatter Al Qaeda. It was a moment of glory in the long cultural and political ascent of U.S. Special Operations. Although they constituted only 3 percent of the armed forces, the operators would shoulder a disproportionate share of the fighting over the course of America’s longest war, at one point accounting for half of all casualties. Their exploits, often classified yet at times heavily publicized by the military, would permeate the nation’s culture, inspiring Hollywood blockbusters like “American Sniper,” “Lone Survivor” and “Zero Dark Thirty.” The weapons and tactics they favored were picked up by law enforcement and used to market an industry of podcasts, fitness programs and paramilitary gear.

But there was a dark side to that heroism: the legal and moral lines the operators had to approach, or even cross, in their battle with the terrorists. “We do bad things to bad people,” went the motto of one Special Forces battalion. This vigilante streak is what most distinguishes the operators from previous generations of heroes and sets them at odds with the military’s traditional insistence on discipline and law.

Golsteyn was one of the operators who was held up as an American icon; after his mission in Marja, he was decorated for valor and praised in a best-selling book. Then, in 2011, the Army learned of the killing and began an investigation that led to Golsteyn being reprimanded and kicked out of the Special Forces. Believing that his punishment was unjust, Golsteyn decided to go public. In 2016, he admitted to the killing in a TV interview and argued that it was justified. In response, the Army moved to court-martial him. His case, along with others like that of Edward Gallagher, a member of the Navy SEALs who was accused and acquitted of murdering a detainee, became the subject of national controversy. Eventually, they would be taken up as a cause célèbre by conservative activists, who viewed the men as heroes who eliminated terrorists only to be persecuted by self-serving generals and a broken legal system.

As Golsteyn’s case illustrates, this outlaw ethos emerged from the murky terrain of irregular warfare. Often fighting deep in enemy territory, at remote firebases far from the eye of headquarters or the public, many operators came to embrace the idea that rule-breaking could be justified by the higher good of getting the mission done.

During our conversation at his house in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, Golsteyn told me that he still viewed his decision to kill Rasoul as just. “You’ve got to be able to look in the mirror, right?” he said. “I believe I did the right thing.”

Many people agreed. Foremost among them was a Fox News host named Pete Hegseth, who rose to prominence at the network in part through his outspoken defense of service members like Golsteyn and Gallagher. “They’re not war criminals,” Hegseth told his co-hosts on “Fox & Friends.” “They’re warriors.” As the Army moved to court-martial Golsteyn in 2019, Hegseth urged President Trump to issue pardons. It wasn’t just the right thing to do, he said on his show; it was smart politics in a nation that had come to venerate the special operator. “To the people in Middle America who respect the troops and the tough calls they make,” Hegseth said, “they’re gonna love this.”

For Trump, it was his first major clash with military leaders, who were adamant that Golsteyn should be held accountable. Lawful warfare was at the heart of American values, they argued. But to Trump, the operators fought not only the enemy but also a corrupt system. Over the generals’ objections, the president pardoned Golsteyn and several others.

“I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state,” Trump said at a campaign rally that year.

In retrospect, these war-crimes pardons were the first steps in a bigger struggle over legal limits on the military. In Trump’s second term, with Hegseth as head of what the administration now calls the Department of War, he has aggressively tested those limits by purging the military’s top lawyers, deploying armed troops on the streets of American cities and ordering the killings of foreign drug-smuggling suspects designated as “narco-terrorists.” In contrast to the resistance Trump faced from the military leadership during his first term, Hegseth has been a vocal cheerleader for these efforts. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” he said at an Oval Office ceremony in September celebrating his department’s new name. “Violent effect, not politically correct.”

“Our secretary of war is serious about having the backs of our war fighters and wants them to engage with clarity on the battlefield,” Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in response to a request for comment for this article.

Today the vigilante figure of the operator, whose battle against evil requires him to act outside the law, has become a model for unrestrained force both abroad and at home. Golsteyn’s case is essential to understand because it illuminates how the seeds of this cultural and political shift were sown during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when a pattern of rule-breaking and outright criminality arose within America’s elite forces.

Golsteyn’s unit, the Third Special Forces Group, was one of the most heavily deployed and decorated of the war in Afghanistan. But its soldiers have also been implicated in unlawful killings, multimillion-dollar fraud and an airstrike that destroyed a hospital full of civilians. Those involved often escaped serious consequences as their leaders closed investigations without charges, reversed administrative punishments and protected careers. Such misconduct also spread to the United States: In recent years, there has been an alarming wave of crimes committed by members of Army Special Operations, including drug trafficking, murder and, in January, a bombing by a Green Beret in Las Vegas.

Although some of these incidents have been previously reported, their connection to systemic failures in military accountability has not. As infamous as Golsteyn’s story became, there is much about it that has never been made public — including the second part of the Army’s criminal investigation, which contains graphic evidence about the killing and shows that commanders made extensive efforts to turn his former teammates against him.

But even as Army Special Operations leaders fought to bring Golsteyn to trial, they quietly closed another war-crimes case involving the same Special Forces unit, when a team deployed to an Afghan district called Nerkh in 2012 was accused of abusing and killing nine captives. Both criminal investigations lasted for nearly a decade, and contrasting their previously unreported histories offers a window on how impunity functioned within the Army’s elite units.

In order to fit these pieces together, over the past four years I have interviewed two dozen current and former members of Army Special Operations, including senior Third Group officers. Some staunchly defended their organization; others would offer criticism only anonymously. Indeed, it is highly unusual for those who served in elite Army units to make accusations in the news media; those who violate what is seen as the Green Beret code of silence face being ostracized by the brotherhood. Yet a handful of former operators I spoke to were willing to go on the record about the crimes and cover-ups they claimed to have witnessed during their careers, in some cases after they had been disciplined for their own professional failings.

To corroborate these accounts, I cross-referenced them with public records and previously unpublished military documents. Under the Freedom of Information Act, The Times filed dozens of requests and three lawsuits that yielded thousands of pages of declassified personnel records, detainee files and military investigations. I also made multiple trips through rural stretches of Afghanistan to locate and interview scores of witnesses; in the United States, I combed through court and vital records and interviewed former law-enforcement officers and military lawyers.

What emerges from this reporting is that actions like Golsteyn’s, far from being aberrations, were a product of an irregular war full of moral and legal contradictions. Other militaries that deployed to Afghanistan have encountered systemic problems with war crimes. In recent years, government inquiries in Britain and Australia have shown how their special-operations forces, when faced with equivalent pressures in Afghanistan, engaged in tactics that escalated into outright murder — men shot in handcuffs or pushed off cliffs — and were covered up by commanders. In Britain, operators are facing criminal charges; in Australia, an entire squadron was disbanded.

No similar reckoning has happened in the United States, and without one, the true extent of such practices by Special Operations forces is most likely unknowable. Just this September, Trump nominated Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, the Army Special Operations commander since 2021, for promotion to head of the Joint Special Operations Command, which undertakes the military’s highest-priority classified missions. In response to The Times’s detailed questions for this article, a spokeswoman for Braga defended Army Special Operations’ record. “We have fully investigated and adjudicated the cases you cover,” wrote the spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Allie Scott. “We are confident our actions stand up to the strictest scrutiny.”

To date, a public accounting of these cases has been stymied by the Army’s intense secrecy around its elite units. This project sheds light on a shadowy but central reality of the war and shows how its consequences continue in our present day — how impunity for such units continues to function, how our armed forces will approach future wars and how, under the leadership of Trump and Hegseth, they may be wielded in the United States.

Golsteyn had always carried himself with a polarizing self-assurance. To some, it signaled integrity; to others, arrogance. He was a precocious student, and in high school in Florida he came across a line in William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” that puzzled him: “Every man is the arbiter of his own virtues.” Why would you have to choose between them, he wondered. In that line, he sensed a world of moral ambiguity that lay outside the bounds of his sheltered childhood — one he was eager to explore.

His father, Jerry, had been an N.F.L. quarterback, and like him, Golsteyn had been a big kid, but he stopped growing in eighth grade, somewhat shy of 5-foot-9, something he’s quick to joke about. His passion was baseball, and he earned a sports scholarship to West Point. When he arrived at the Army academy in 1998, he told me, he was without any particular career ambitions and found the rituals and people at times pompous and silly. Soon, however, he was intrigued by the challenges promised in the infantry, especially its grueling Ranger School. “You want to test yourself,” he said. “I wanted to see it.” He was a senior when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred; his country was under attack, and he and his classmates were going to war. “I look at it like, My timing is impeccable,” he said.

He deployed to Iraq as a platoon leader with the 82nd Airborne Division in 2003, during the lull between the U.S. invasion and the outbreak of the civil war. There, he grew frustrated with what he saw as the Army’s blind adherence to rules and authority even at the expense of the mission or soldiers’ welfare. He seemed congenitally unable to keep from challenging his superiors when he thought they were wrong. Eventually, one of his more experienced sergeants advised him to try out for Special Operations.

After he returned from Iraq to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where both the 82nd Airborne and the Army’s Special Operations Command are based, Golsteyn tried out and was selected for the Special Forces. “I had found my tribe,” he said.

While there are a variety of Special Operations units in the U.S. military, including the Navy SEALs, the term “Special Forces” refers specifically to the elite Army regiment whose soldiers, also known as Green Berets, train and fight alongside foreign allies. The Special Forces were established during the Cold War, when their units supported anti-Communist forces from Central America to Southeast Asia, whether guerrillas or governments that were trying to suppress them. It was this kind of grinding local counterinsurgency — rather than flashy helicopter raids like the one by SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 — that made up the bulk of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Green Berets specialize in what the military calls unconventional warfare, a type of fighting very different from the battles between uniformed armies in Europe from which the contemporary laws of war evolved. Until 1949, the Geneva Conventions excluded civil wars from their purview, and summarily executing captured guerrillas was a common practice. The massacres, hostage-taking and reprisals that have characterized irregular conflicts since the dawn of civilization is what has earned them the moniker “dirty wars”; political scientists like Stathis Kalyvas have argued that violence against civilians is in fact an intrinsic part of their logic, as rivals fight for control not only over terrain but also over the population itself. As a result, winning such wars can pose a profound challenge to liberal democratic values.

A key part of the Green Berets’ training is to prepare them for the dilemmas they will face at the bleeding edge of U.S. foreign policy. At the end of his Special Forces course, Golsteyn took part in the capstone exercise called Robin Sage, in which students infiltrate the fictional nation Pineland, spread across North Carolina, and link up with guerrillas battling a foreign occupation. Golsteyn’s main instructor was Maj. Jim Gant, an officer who was legendary for his exploits in Afghanistan, and he said Gant put his trainees in situations where they witnessed war crimes by their insurgent allies. (Gant would later be kicked out of the Special Forces for drug use and other misconduct while deployed; he did not respond to a request for comment.) Golsteyn was so unfazed by one execution, he told me, that the other instructors wanted to fail him, until he was cleared by a psychologist. To Golsteyn, it was simply an error to apply domestic values abroad. “I’m not in America. I’m not a cop. I’m not here to judge you,” he said. “I am an imperial stormtrooper. Let’s get it done.”

After he graduated in 2008, Golsteyn was transferred to Gant’s former unit: Third Group, which is based at Fort Bragg. Each of the five active-duty Special Forces groups, which total about 21,000 personnel, is assigned to a different region of the world. Third Group deploys to Africa and the Caribbean and as a result, before 2001, was considered a backwater by many within the regiment. But after Third Group was called on to spearhead much of the first decade of the war in Afghanistan, the unit grew in stature and influence. Several of its leaders rose to senior positions in the Army, and its men racked up valor awards — but it also paid the price, with 64 dead and many more wounded.

The operators of Third Group deployed on a relentless cycle: Even though Army units were supposed to spend at least twice as much time resting and training as they did deployed, in practice Third Group soldiers were often spending a full half of each year overseas.

Within Third Group, its First Battalion, known as the Desert Eagles, was particularly renowned for the battles it fought in the Taliban’s stronghold of southern Afghanistan. Each battalion had three line companies of around 70 operators, and the Desert Eagles’ Bravo Company was seen as the most combat-hardened. Golsteyn had heard wild tales from the remote mountains of Uruzgan Province, where Bravo was deployed at isolated firebases with names like Anaconda and Cobra.

“That’s where the heroes were,” Golsteyn said. “It’s almost like Achilles and the Myrmidons.”

When he was assigned to Bravo, he was thrilled. He would soon find himself at the front line of the operators’ war.

As a new Special Forces captain, Golsteyn was assigned to lead one of Bravo Company’s six Operational Detachment Alphas, also known as O.D.A.s or A Teams. Composed of 12 operators specializing in roles like engineering, intelligence and communications, the O.D.A. was the basic building block of the Special Forces. Each team was its own little world, its members dependent on one another for survival and bound by a code of brotherhood and silence.

During Golsteyn’s first deployment with O.D.A. 3121 in 2009, the team advised commandos from the Afghan National Army as they went on raids around the country, often seeing heavy combat. The following year, Golsteyn and his men were assigned to mentor an entire Afghan battalion in Uruzgan and as a result would get drawn into a high-profile mission that would expose them to the war’s political contradictions.

Under the newly elected president, Barack Obama, the U.S. war in Afghanistan was undergoing a drastic change. Previously, it had been a secondary effort to the conflict in Iraq, one fought primarily by operators like the Green Berets. But the Taliban were growing stronger, and Obama, pressured by his generals, had ordered a surge in troops and money, leading to a spike in violence and casualties.

To justify an increasingly unpopular war, the president and much of the U.S. national-security establishment embraced two flawed beliefs. The first was that the counterinsurgency campaign they were waging in Afghanistan, far from being part of an inherently brutal civil war, was a benevolent exercise in winning hearts and minds, one in which violence against civilians was counterproductive. Yet even as the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, restricted airstrikes and constrained regular troops, he accelerated the same kind of classified manhunting operations that he presided over in Iraq — an onslaught of drones and special operators who killed in the shadows. At the same time, the United States backed allies like Gen. Abdul Raziq, whose men committed extensive abuses, including torture and disappearances.

The second article of faith was that Afghanistan’s army and police force would be able to take over the fight and stand on their own. As time went on, both beliefs became increasingly untenable, and yet the leadership in Washington and at the Pentagon held to them. The need to reconcile what was presented to the public with the reality on the ground in turn led to a pervasive culture of dishonesty in the military, one that weighed on frontline commanders like Golsteyn.

In early 2010, the centerpiece of McChrystal’s strategy was an assault aimed at the Taliban stronghold of Marja that was to be a joint effort of the Afghan government forces and the Marines in southern Afghanistan. Called Operation Moshtarak, which means “together,” it was, in reality, a mission run by the Marines, who struggled to find Afghan forces capable of joining them. The Marines asked for a battalion, and the Afghan Army leadership picked the unit that Golsteyn was mentoring, which was assigned the southernmost sector while the Marines assaulted to the north. Suddenly, Golsteyn and his team were thrust into a mission of national importance, a starring role that he relished.

Once the operation got underway, Golsteyn told me, the Green Berets had to navigate the contradictions between political constraints and the reality of what they needed to do to accomplish the mission. To get air support in the face of McChrystal’s restrictions, he said, he often had to be creative in how he described the situation. “How do I get the resources?” he said. “How do I get bombs to fall?”

The Afghan battalion he was working with had no functioning supply system, and so Golsteyn broke rules to use his own funds to provide them with food and other supplies. “My Afghans ate gravel,” he said. “Some days they ate lumber.” His superiors often understood what was really going on, he said, and he learned to play along with the wink-and-nod culture that permeated the mission. “I have an incredible discomfort with lying,” he said. “I had to get good at it.”

After fighting their way into their sector of Marja, Golsteyn and his joint force of Green Berets, Marines and the Afghan Army set up a makeshift base in a large compound they called the Thunderdome. As they pushed to clear the mine-infested fields and roads to their north, Golsteyn and his men waged gun battles against an entrenched enemy. “We fought sunup to sundown,” Golsteyn said. “We were alone.”

Far from higher command and isolated from friendly forces, the Green Berets now had a degree of autonomy that had become rare by that stage in the war. “The gloves were kind of taken off,” Kevin Kilgore, who was a Special Forces staff sergeant on Golsteyn’s team, told me. Out on missions, they assumed that any military-age men they encountered were likely to be hostile. Back at their outpost, the team brewed beer and drank black-market booze, despite alcohol being forbidden on deployment. “We were all running wild,” Kilgore said.

On Feb. 18, Kilgore was part of a force led by the team’s senior enlisted operator, Master Sgt. Grady DeWitt, that came under attack. DeWitt led a counterassault, overrunning the insurgents’ position. As they searched the area, the Green Berets had two local men open the shops in the bazaar. A booby trap exploded, killing the Afghans and two young Marines who had been assigned to Golsteyn’s force.

The death of two of his men was devastating for Golsteyn. That night, he gave a moving speech to the Green Berets and Marines under his command as he passed around a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “The Marines all started telling stories about the guys who were killed,” Kilgore said. “That was a time when leadership was needed, and he did what was necessary.”

Golsteyn promised his men that he would find the insurgent who was responsible. Kilgore, who was handling intelligence and interrogation for the team, said that a few days later the Green Berets captured Rasoul. (Golsteyn said it was the same day as the bombing.) Kilgore — who was discharged from the Army years later after struggling with addiction — said he was skeptical of Golsteyn’s tribal informant and never saw evidence that Rasoul was the bombmaker. Golsteyn told me he was confident that the man was guilty.

Regardless, Kilgore said that he had gone along with the plan to release the man only to have Golsteyn ambush him down the road. “It wasn’t even questioned,” he said.

Golsteyn refused to discuss the roles of any of his fellow Green Berets in the killing, but I was able to cross-reference publicly available information with military service records and previously unreleased files from the criminal investigation. His teammates’ testimony reveals how several of them helped him. One was his team sergeant, DeWitt, who accompanied Golsteyn on the ambush. (DeWitt did not respond to a request for comment.) Working hastily, the two men buried Rasoul in a shallow grave in a nearby field and returned to base. Golsteyn told me he was worried about the body being discovered by the insurgents and used as propaganda. “What would have happened if the Taliban got a hold of it?” Golsteyn said. “They knew he was missing.”

Later that night, while Golsteyn remained at the base, DeWitt and three other teammates drove back to the grave in an armored vehicle. They unearthed the body and took it back to the base, where, according to the case file, they dismembered it and fed the pieces into a burn barrel.

After finishing their mission in Marja and returning to the United States, Golsteyn and his team were praised as heroes. In a best-selling book called “The Wrong War,” the author Bing West, who embedded with U.S. forces in Marja, called Golsteyn a dedicated leader, describing him as “the Energizer bunny with a scruffy beard” and painting him as a man unafraid to break the rules — as when he toasted the two fallen Marines with a bottle of contraband whiskey.

By contrast, West, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, was harshly critical of the leadership’s rosy hearts-and-minds vision of counterinsurgency, a “metaphysical evasion” that he argued was at odds with how such wars had always been won: “When generals bemoaned killing, they were trying to make themselves seem morally and intellectually enlightened, while indicating their shallow understanding of what their own grunts were doing day after day.”

Despite all the attention, Golsteyn managed to keep the killing secret. He and his teammates were decorated for valor; he received the Silver Star and was approved for an upgrade to the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award. He was promoted to major, and his mentor, Gant, who was working at the Pentagon, told him his name was everywhere in Washington’s military circles. His career in the Special Forces was on a fast track, but Golsteyn wanted to stay in the field, not ascend to headquarters.

Thanks to a reference from West, Golsteyn was recruited for a coveted job with the C.I.A.’s Ground Branch, which conducts covert paramilitary operations around the world. (A C.I.A. spokesperson declined to comment.) On Sept. 6, 2011, he arrived for an interview at the agency. There he would make an admission that would cost him his career and pitch him into a bitter fight with the Army.

For all his self-assurance, on some level Golsteyn sought vindication in the eyes of others. Something had bothered him about the killing from the very beginning, he told me. It wasn’t the act itself; as a soldier, he felt neither sadness nor joy in taking a man’s life when it was necessary. “It’s not good or bad,” he said. “It just is.”

Rather, it was that he had to lie about it. That felt like the culmination of a dishonesty that had pervaded the war from the start and had alienated him from his own command. Would he be viewed as a renegade, a vigilante, for what he did? “It was the sense that your tribe, the people you trust, may not back you, right?” he told me. “That makes it harder.”

Golsteyn should have been on his guard that day as he walked into the agency. “I was very naïve,” he said. “I thought we were still playing on the same team.”

He was wrong. To understand what happened, I obtained a previously unpublished partial transcript of Golsteyn’s interview and spoke to a military official who watched it on video. After an initial, flattering chat about his military service and psychological profile in which the interviewer established a rapport, Golsteyn was hooked to a polygraph machine. The interviewer kept acting as if the machine were detecting deception. What was going on? Was there something he should know? Gently, he coaxed Golsteyn into telling him what was on his mind, promising him that they would get through it together. Finally, with a sigh, Golsteyn told him about the killing.

The C.I.A. interviewer had him run through the details twice, reassuring him that the agency had heard much worse from successful candidates: “I’ve had people come in and talk to me about the field decisions they’ve made to — I don’t want to use the word ‘massacre,’ but there’s no other word — to commit nonjudicial kills of entire tribes in Africa.”

Although he refused to name them, Golsteyn admitted that teammates had helped by burning the body. He explained why he thought the killing was the right thing to do. “So by the letter of the law, I’m wrong,” he said. But he told the interviewer he saw the man as a combatant, because he would surely have rejoined the insurgency.

“What letter of the law do you feel you violated?” the interviewer asked.

“You can’t assassinate people,” Golsteyn replied.

At a certain point, Golsteyn told me, he had a sinking feeling: The interview had become an interrogation. He had made a terrible mistake. He knew he was in trouble, but he had no idea just how far it would go.

Camille Baker and Victor J. Blue contributed reporting.

Matthieu Aikins is a contributing writer for the magazine and a fellow at Type Media Center.

Victor J. Blue is a photographer and a 2024 New America Future Security fellow.