Flight trackers have spotted a fleet of US air tankers crossing the Atlantic just as former President Donald Trump prepares to meet with generals and admirals on Tuesday.
Around a dozen KC-135R/T Stratotankers were making the journey on Sunday night, with several en route to RAF Mildenhall, a major Air Force base in England, open-source intelligence (OSINT) accounts reported on X. The presence of air tankers can indicate that the US or NATO is addressing an urgent military requirement for fighter jet refueling capacity.
The deployment carries ominous weight, according to three Defense Department sources—two former and one current—who spoke to the Daily Mail on condition of anonymity. The last time the US moved tankers in comparable numbers was five days before American warplanes struck Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Trump is scheduled to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday. Meanwhile, the movement of the Stratotankers coincides with preparations by Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to hold a shadowy meeting of the nation’s top military leaders at Quantico, Virginia, on Tuesday.
This unprecedented meeting, first reported by the Washington Post last week, has raised alarm across defense circles. Hundreds of generals and admirals, including those in active conflict zones, have been summoned from around the world with no details released about what will be discussed at the summit.
Behnam Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Daily Mail that while “correlation is not causation,” he can’t help but recall the last time there was a mass tanker deployment by the United States.
“Soon after that, something went boom in the Middle East. Critically, in Operation Midnight Hammer, the Trump administration executed a decoy or deception effort to mask the flight of the B-2 bombers to Iran,” Taleblu said. He emphasized that Trump is the only US president in two decades to deploy overt military force against Iranian nuclear facilities. “Big military movements on his watch are something to keep an eye on,” he added.
A former State Department diplomacy consultant offered another perspective, suggesting the US might be responding to increased Russian aerial and drone probes in the Baltic Sea, particularly near Denmark—just days after Denmark had to close its largest airport.
“Denmark’s inability to defend its own airspace underscores White House concerns that it is unable to protect and defend its far larger and more distant Greenland territory from increasing Chinese and Russian joint air and naval patrols in the emerging Arctic theater of strategic competition,” said John Sitilides, national security senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
The ongoing US military movements may also be linked to Exercise Cobra Warrior 25-2, a large-scale NATO training event running from September 12 to October 2 over the North Sea. This biannual operation could explain the visible surge in aerial activity as allied forces train for integrated military operations.
Ultimately, the timing of these deployments is raising eyebrows, aligning with Hegseth’s unexpected meeting in Quantico with top military officials in northern Virginia tomorrow. A source close to Hegseth revealed that even the generals and admirals involved do not know the meeting’s agenda, entering the discussions blind just a day before the roundtable.
A former Pentagon official assessed that the meeting “could be anything from a pushup contest to a meeting on national security.”
Trump announced on Sunday that he will attend the quickly organized global summit of the nation’s top military commanders. This decision sets the stage for a rare and potentially consequential interaction between the former president and senior US military leadership, even though Trump framed it as a “nice meeting” with a “good message.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15145231