“Get our troops out now before we suffer a mass casualty attack.” That was the blunt message former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent posted to X on Sunday afternoon, hours after U.S. Central Command confirmed a third American service member had died in the widening war with Iran and disclosed that unidentified remains had been recovered at the site of Friday’s missile and drone strike in Jordan.
Kent’s post, published at 4:02 p.m. on July 19, did not mince words. “Break the escalation trap,” he wrote, arguing that President Trump “still has the political strength at home to declare victory & have it resonate,” but warned that “that ability will be lost if we suffer more casualties.” He closed with a direct appeal: “Now is the time to leave, immediately.”
The full post read:
“Get our troops out now before we suffer a mass casualty attack. Break the escalation trap. Trump still has the political strength at home to declare victory & have it resonate, that ability will be lost if we suffer more casualties. Now is the time to leave, immediately.”
A Voice With Firsthand Authority on the Cost of War
Kent’s warning carries particular weight because of who is delivering it. He led the National Counterterrorism Center under President Trump before resigning in March, telling the president in a resignation letter that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States and that the administration had been pushed into war by pressure from Israel. The resignation made him the highest-profile figure inside the Trump administration to publicly break with the war effort, and it came as the conflict — which began with a joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran in late February — was still in its early weeks.
Kent’s opposition to the war is also personal. His first wife, Navy Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, was killed in 2019 in a suicide bombing while deployed to Syria as part of the counter-ISIS mission — a loss that has repeatedly informed his public skepticism of open-ended American military commitments in the Middle East. That history has made him one of the most closely watched voices among the war’s critics, someone who speaks from both a policymaker’s chair and a grieving spouse’s experience with what these deployments cost.
The Weekend That Prompted the Warning
Kent’s Sunday post came directly on the heels of CENTCOM’s latest release. The command had announced Saturday that two U.S. service members were killed in action on July 17 defending against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks on a base in Jordan, with a third service member listed as missing. On Sunday, CENTCOM said searchers had found unidentified remains at that site, though identification was still being verified. In a separate incident, CENTCOM disclosed that a service member in northern Iraq was killed July 18 during a controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian drone, with a second service member wounded. Multiple outlets, including NBC News and NPR, reported that the toll brought the number of American deaths since the war began in late February to at least 16 or 17, depending on the count.
CENTCOM has withheld the identities of the fallen and missing service members until 24 hours after next-of-kin notification, in keeping with standard Defense Department protocol.
Escalation Without an Endpoint, Kent Argues
Kent’s central argument — that continued U.S. involvement risks a “mass casualty attack” that could erase whatever political room Trump currently has to end the war on his own terms — reflects concerns he has voiced since leaving government. His resignation letter in March argued that the war lacked a clear rationale rooted in an imminent Iranian threat, a claim the White House disputed at the time, saying Trump had evidence Iran was preparing to strike first. Trump, for his part, dismissed Kent following his departure as having been “weak on security.”
Five months later, with American casualties mounting on two fronts — Jordan and Iraq — and CENTCOM confirming an eighth consecutive night of U.S. airstrikes on Iranian targets, Kent’s Sunday post reads as a renewed and more urgent version of the case he made when he resigned: that the war carries diminishing political and human returns the longer it continues.
A Widening Toll
The service member killed in northern Iraq marks the third American death disclosed by CENTCOM in three days, following the two killed in Jordan on July 17. A fourth service member remains hospitalized with a minor injury from the Iraq incident. CENTCOM’s Sunday statement did not provide additional details on the identity of the missing service member in Jordan or a timeline for confirming the recovered remains, citing the ongoing notification process for the families involved.
Kent’s call to withdraw immediately places him at odds with the current trajectory of U.S. policy, which has featured consecutive nights of American airstrikes on Iranian military and Revolutionary Guard targets. Whether his warning gains traction inside the administration remains to be seen, but his history — as the war’s most senior administration defector and as someone who has personally buried a spouse lost to Middle East combat operations — ensures his voice carries further than most.