What to Follow Right Now: Drone Money, Media Discipline, and the Expanding Price of War

War profiteering, media pressure, and the fallout getting harder to hide

As always, Mary nailed it in her roundup this morning. This afternoon, Mary and I will be watching the places where the war starts functioning as a business opportunity, a messaging campaign, and a justification for still more escalation.

Start with the drone money. The cleanest line to follow right now is Powerus, the drone company backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as it moves toward Pentagon business. AP reports that the company is partly owned by the president’s two oldest sons and is chasing a share of the Pentagon’s push to build out domestic armed-drone production. ABC and Defense News both report that the company is tied to a merger with Aureus Greenway, a golf-course holding company backed by the brothers. That is more than a quirky side story. It is a clear test of how openly family money can sit next to public policy before anyone is forced to admit what they are looking at.

Then watch the campaign against independent coverage. Pete Hegseth used his March 13 briefing not just to boast about the war, but to complain that the press was insufficiently supportive, calling for what he described as an “actual patriotic press” and taking a swipe at CNN by saying, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” That matters because when officials start treating journalism as a loyalty test, the story is no longer only about what is happening abroad. It is also about what kind of political culture the war is being used to normalize at home.

Follow the Strait of Hormuz because that is where the war turns into a lived economic story. Reporting indicates that roughly 2,500 Marines and the USS Tripoli are being sent toward the Middle East as the administration tries to answer Iranian attacks on shipping and move toward reopening the waterway. At the same time, Trump has been urging other countries to send ships to help keep the strait open. That makes Hormuz the place where swagger collides with logistics, oil markets, and the possibility of a much wider confrontation.

Keep one eye on the price tag, because this war is already eating through money and munitions fast. The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon spent about $5.6 billion on munitions in just the first two days of strikes, and Reuters separately reported that the administration delivered that estimate to congressional committees as lawmakers brace for additional funding requests. That means the next phase of this story is not just military. It is fiscal. Watch Congress, watch readiness, and watch how quickly “temporary action” turns into a new open-ended claim on public money.

And do not ignore the World Cup angle, because that is where the war spills into global legitimacy. Iran’s national team has publicly pushed back on Trump’s comments about whether it should appear in the 2026 men’s World Cup, saying “no one can exclude” it and stressing that FIFA, not the U.S. president, governs participation. That makes this more than a sports oddity. It is now a live test of whether the administration’s regional chaos can start rearranging supposedly global, neutral institutions too.

The bigger pattern here is pretty simple: money is clustering around the war, pressure is building on the press, troop commitments are growing, the costs are rising, and the fallout is spreading into places that were supposed to sit outside the conflict. That is the real “what to follow right now” frame. Not whether the administration still sounds confident, but where the consequences are starting to show up in ways that are harder to spin.