About Armed Forces News

A Publication Built for Those Who Serve — By Someone Who Did

Our Story

Some publications are built from the outside looking in. ArmedForcesNews.com was not.

When Dustin Reed Terry first encountered ArmedForcesNews.com, he was on active duty in the United States military, serving between 2005 and 2007. He found the publication the way most service members did — by searching for serious, reliable news about the Armed Forces and the policies shaping them. What he found was a site that spoke to him as a service member, not at him as an audience demographic. It was authoritative. It was specific. It covered the military world with the kind of insider understanding that only comes from journalism that respects its readers' intelligence and experience.

That impression stayed with him.

Years later, Terry — now a media entrepreneur and the founder of Citizen Investigative Media, LLC — learned that ArmedForcesNews.com had been built and operated by the editorial team at FedWeek.com, one of the most credible names in federal government journalism. During one of the most consequential periods in modern American military history, FedWeek's journalists had used this brand to produce serious coverage of U.S. Armed Forces affairs: wars on multiple fronts, landmark VA reform efforts, defense budget battles, and the policies that shaped the lives of millions of service members and veterans.

At some point, FedWeek consolidated its operations, folding the military coverage into its flagship brand rather than continuing to develop ArmedForcesNews.com as a standalone publication. It was a business decision. But for Terry, who had watched that consolidation from the outside and understood what it meant for the military community, it was also an opportunity — and an obligation.

He pursued the acquisition. Through Citizen Investigative Media, LLC, Terry secured ArmedForcesNews.com and immediately set about restoring and expanding what had made it valuable in the first place.

The Vision

Dustin Reed Terry's vision for ArmedForcesNews.com is specific and unambiguous: to rebuild this publication into the authoritative, independent military news outlet it once was — and to make it something larger and more comprehensive than it has ever been before.

That means coverage that serves every member of the military community. Not just officers. Not just combat veterans. Not just one branch or one era of service. ArmedForcesNews.com exists to serve:

• Active duty service members in all six branches of the U.S. Armed Forces
• Veterans of every era and every theater of service
• National Guard and Reserve members whose service too often goes uncovered by military media
• Military families — the spouses, children, and parents who serve alongside their loved ones without wearing a uniform
• Defense professionals and policymakers who need rigorous, independent reporting on the issues they work within every day

The publication is independently owned and operated. It has no corporate parent, no government affiliation, and no institutional agenda. Its only obligation is to the readers it serves and the journalistic standards it upholds.

Editorial Standards and Our Commitment to Accuracy

ArmedForcesNews.com is committed to journalism that meets the highest standards of accuracy, transparency, and accountability. Every article published on this site is researched using primary sources — official government releases, Department of Defense statements, congressional records, peer-reviewed research, and direct reporting from credible news organizations — before being reviewed for accuracy and editorial integrity.

We do not publish rumors. We do not amplify unverified claims. Where information is contested or uncertain, we say so clearly. When we make mistakes, we correct them promptly and transparently.

Our coverage is informed by lived experience inside the military community. Dustin Reed Terry's time in uniform — serving from 2005 to 2007 during one of the most operationally intensive periods in modern American military history — gives ArmedForcesNews.com something that no amount of outside reporting can replicate: an understanding of what it actually means to be a service member, and what the military community actually needs from journalism that covers its world.

Who We Cover and Why It Matters

The United States Armed Forces comprise more than 1.3 million active duty service members, approximately 800,000 National Guard and Reserve personnel, and more than 18 million veterans living in every state and territory in the country. Military families extend that community to tens of millions more.

This is not a niche audience. It is one of the largest, most geographically distributed, and most underserved communities in American public life.

Military people know when they are being covered well and when they are not. They know the difference between a journalist who understands their world and one who is passing through it. They have seen publications that treat their issues as a specialty vertical alongside celebrity news and sports scores — and they have seen what serious, dedicated military journalism looks like.

ArmedForcesNews.com is built to be the latter. Every editorial decision we make — what stories to cover, how deeply to report them, whose voices to include, what context to provide — is made with active duty service members, veterans, Guard and Reserve members, and military families as the primary audience. Not as an afterthought. Not as a traffic metric. As the reason this publication exists.

Our Coverage

Since relaunch, ArmedForcesNews.com has published in-depth, extensively researched reporting on the stories that matter most to the military community, including:

• U.S. combat operations in the Strait of Hormuz and the ongoing Iran conflict
• The state of Iran's nuclear program following Operation Epic Fury
• DARPA's autonomous containerized drone swarm constellation program
• The Pentagon's directed-energy counter-drone deployment at five U.S. military installations
• The Marine Corps' establishment of its first permanent Arctic rotational force under Campaign – Alaska
• The FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act — F-35 procurement decisions, missile stockpile replenishment, and the defense industrial base crisis
• The Pentagon's Low-Cost Containerized Missiles program and the Arsenal of Freedom strategy
• The $108 million FrankenSAM HAWK sustainment package for Ukraine
• A comprehensive, step-by-step guide to VA benefits for transitioning service members

This is the depth and seriousness we intend to maintain — and build upon.

About Dustin Reed Terry

From the Flight Line to the Front Page

How Air Force Veteran Dustin Reed Terry Turned Military Discipline into a Career Exposing What Others Won't

By the ArmedForcesNews.com Editorial Staff

“The Air Force didn’t just teach me how to work on aircraft. It taught me what integrity actually costs — and what it costs you when you abandon it.”

— Dustin Reed Terry

Before the Uniform: Working-Class Roots and a Work Ethic That Stuck

Long before Dustin Reed Terry ever set foot on a flight line, he was learning something most people take for granted: how to show up. Growing up in the kind of American household where nobody handed you a career or a purpose, Terry did what a generation of young men and women did — he got to work.

Like millions of teenagers across the country, one of his first jobs was behind the counter at McDonald’s. It’s the kind of employment that gets glossed over in formal biographies, but Terry has never been the type to gloss over anything. Those early years in fast food — the repetition, the accountability of every order, the customer-facing pressure to perform under stress — laid a foundation of practical discipline that would serve him well in uniform and far beyond it.

He also worked as a forklift operator for Kmart — another chapter in a blue-collar education that placed a premium on precision, physical awareness, and the quiet dignity of honest labor. Anyone who has ever operated heavy equipment in a warehouse environment understands the stakes: a moment of inattention can be catastrophic. It is not glamorous work. But it builds the kind of person who does not flinch when things get hard.

These are the years that shaped Dustin Reed Terry before the Air Force shaped him — and they matter.

Into the Air Force: The F-117A Nighthawk and the Weight of Classified Work

In 2005, Dustin Reed Terry enlisted in the United States Air Force. What came next was not the kind of military service that gets celebrated loudly at ballgames or written about in hometown newspapers. His assignment placed him in direct contact with one of the most consequential aircraft in American military history: the F-117A Nighthawk.

The Nighthawk was the world’s first operational stealth aircraft. Developed under a veil of deep classification, the F-117A was the tip of the spear during Operation Desert Storm, striking high-value targets with surgical precision while remaining effectively invisible to radar. By the time Terry arrived at his post in 2005, the aircraft was nearing the end of its operational life — it would be formally retired by the Air Force in 2008 — but the work of maintaining it remained as demanding and security-conscious as ever.

Working on a classified aircraft system instills something in a person that is difficult to describe to those who haven’t experienced it. Every procedure matters. Every inspection has consequences. There is no room for ego, no tolerance for shortcuts, and no acceptable margin for dishonesty — not in the technical documentation, not in the maintenance logs, not in reporting a discrepancy up the chain. The culture of meticulous accountability that surrounds any aircraft maintenance operation is amplified tenfold when the aircraft itself is classified.

Terry served in this environment from 2005 to 2007. Two years in the Air Force working on the F-117A. In the world of military biography, that is a compact entry. But the values it forged — precision, integrity, the understanding that telling the truth even when it is inconvenient is non-negotiable — have defined everything Terry has done in the civilian world since.

“There is a reason military people tend to make good journalists. We were trained in environments where a false report had real consequences. That muscle memory never goes away.”

After Service: From Flight Lines to the Digital Battlefield of Cyber Intelligence

When Terry transitioned out of active duty, he did not drift. Veterans who have served in highly technical roles often find that the civilian world undervalues the depth of their operational experience — but Terry found an application for his skills in a field that was still taking shape: cyber intelligence.

Working as a cyberthreat analyst, Terry entered the world of digital adversarial investigation at a time when most Americans had barely begun to understand what a cyberattack was. The post-9/11 era had sharpened the United States’ awareness of asymmetric threats, and the digital domain was rapidly becoming a primary theater of conflict — from nation-state espionage to criminal networks operating across jurisdictions that made traditional law enforcement nearly powerless.

The skill set Terry developed in cyber intelligence — the ability to follow a digital trail, identify patterns obscured by deliberate obfuscation, and assemble a coherent picture from fragmentary evidence — is not so different from what a good investigative journalist does. The methods are complementary. The instincts are the same. You are looking for the truth that someone else is working hard to conceal.

This chapter of Terry’s professional life would quietly but profoundly shape his approach to investigative media in the years to come.

A Name, A Change, and A Man Who Defines Himself on His Own Terms

There is a detail in Dustin Terry’s biography that deserves direct acknowledgment rather than quiet omission: he was born Dustin Reed DeMoss and legally changed his name to Dustin Reed Terry. He is straightforward about it.

Name changes are personal decisions. They happen for a range of reasons — marriage, divorce, estrangement, reinvention, or simply a man’s decision to choose the name he moves through the world with. In Terry’s case, it reflects a broader pattern in his life: he does not operate on other people’s terms. He makes deliberate choices about who he is and where he is going, and he moves forward without apology.

That willingness to own his own story — including the complicated parts — is, in the view of those who know him, one of his defining characteristics.

Civic Service: The National Mental Health Nonprofit and a Veteran’s Conscience

Military service changes a person’s relationship to civic responsibility. For many veterans, the instinct to serve does not end at discharge. It redirects. For Dustin Terry, one of the channels it found was nonprofit leadership: he served on the board of directors of a national mental health nonprofit.

The intersection of military service and mental health is not an abstract policy issue. It is personal for a generation of veterans who know what it looks like when someone who has carried enormous weight comes home to a system that is not equipped to help them carry it. The veteran suicide crisis, the gaps in VA mental health resources, the cultural stigma within the military community around seeking help — these are not talking points. They are realities that Terry, like any veteran with open eyes, has witnessed firsthand.

Serving on a nonprofit board requires a different kind of discipline than the military — the ability to navigate consensus-driven organizations, to translate mission into strategy, and to hold leadership accountable to the people the organization exists to serve. That Terry sought out this kind of service speaks to a consistent through line in his biography: he is drawn toward accountability structures, whether wearing a uniform or sitting in a boardroom.

The Saudi Lobby Exposure: 28 Pages, Foreign Influence, and the Price of Asking Hard Questions

Of all the chapters in Dustin Terry’s professional biography, this one carries the most weight for the national security community — and it is the one he is most reluctant to frame as a personal triumph.

Terry was involved in work connected to 28pages.org, the advocacy organization that spent years pushing for the declassification of the infamous “28 pages” — the classified section of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the September 11 attacks that detailed alleged connections between Saudi government officials and some of the hijackers. The campaign around those pages became one of the most significant transparency battles in post-9/11 American history, ultimately resulting in partial declassification in 2016.

Terry’s role in that effort involved the exposure of a Saudi lobbying campaign — the kind of quiet, high-dollar influence operation that foreign governments routinely deploy in Washington to shape American public discourse and policy in their favor. Foreign lobbying is legal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but the opacity surrounding it, and the ways it can intersect with questions of national security, make it a legitimate area of journalistic scrutiny.

For a veteran who worked on one of America’s most sensitive classified aircraft programs, the issue of foreign governments using money and access to shape the narrative around American national security failures is not an abstract concern. It is personal. Every man and woman who has served carries the understanding that the political decisions made in Washington — shaped, in part, by lobbying and influence operations — have direct consequences for the people who put on the uniform.

“When you’ve worn the uniform, foreign influence operations aren’t a think-tank abstraction. They are a betrayal of everyone who served.”

Huffington Post and the Making of a Journalist: 2014–2017

Between 2014 and 2017, Dustin Terry served as a contributor to The Huffington Post — at the time one of the most widely read digital news platforms in the world. This was not a vanity arrangement. Contributing to HuffPost during that era required pitching, writing, and editing work that held up to editorial scrutiny in a competitive media environment.

Terry’s journalism background extends beyond that platform. He has worked as a reporter for a local newspaper — the kind of community journalism that most Americans take for granted but that serves as the essential connective tissue of civic life. County commission meetings. School board votes. Local crime. The coverage that no national outlet will do but that matters enormously to the people living inside those communities.

He has also developed deep expertise in search engine optimization — the technical discipline of making information findable on the internet. In an era when the distribution of information is itself a form of power, understanding how content surfaces and why is not a peripheral skill for a journalist. It is a strategic one.

These threads — cybersecurity, investigative reporting, SEO strategy, national security transparency advocacy — converge in the work Terry is now doing as the founder of Citizen Investigative Media, LLC.

Citizen Investigative Media: Building an Empire of Accountability Journalism

Based in Gainesville, Florida, Citizen Investigative Media, LLC — formerly TheColdCases.com LLC — is Dustin Terry’s answer to the question he has been circling his entire adult life: how do you hold power accountable at scale?

Under that banner, Terry operates a growing network of digital media properties. TheColdCases.com covers unsolved homicides and missing persons cases with the kind of granular attention that families of victims often say they cannot find anywhere else. PublicCrime.com extends that accountability journalism into the broader criminal justice space. EastOklahoma.com has become a platform for in-depth investigative reporting on land use corruption, municipal annexation irregularities, and the intersection of political power and development money in Green Country, Oklahoma.

He has also acquired and is developing PoliceOfficials.com — a flagship civic media property positioned to serve as a trade publication, professional resource, and accountability platform for law enforcement leadership across the United States. For a veteran who understands both the nobility and the complexity of public service, it is a natural fit.

Terry does not think in single-publication terms. He thinks in media architectures. His portfolio reflects the belief that the local and regional accountability journalism gap — the void left by the collapse of local newspapers across the country — is not just a crisis but an opportunity. Someone needs to cover what the big platforms will not. He intends to be that someone.

Faith, Character, and the Company He Keeps

Dustin Terry is, by his own description, a man of deep Christian faith. It is not a political branding exercise or a tagline. For Terry, faith in God is the organizing principle beneath everything else — the reason integrity matters, the reason accountability journalism matters, the reason that exposing a Saudi lobbying campaign or an Oklahoma land deal is worth the professional risk.

He has met Tim Tebow — the former NFL quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner whose Christian witness has made him a figure of genuine cultural significance in faith communities across the country. He has also crossed paths with members of the Robertson family of Duck Dynasty fame, whose unapologetic public Christianity resonated with millions of Americans during the height of the show’s cultural prominence.

These are not name-drops in the conventional sense. They are markers of a community — a network of people for whom faith is not compartmentalized from professional life, public service, or the pursuit of truth. Terry belongs to that community, and it shapes how he sees his work.

The military gave him the structure to act on his values under pressure. Faith gave him the foundation to know what those values were in the first place.

The Through Line: Integrity as a Non-Negotiable

When you look at the totality of Dustin Reed Terry’s biography — the blue-collar work ethic, the technical precision of F-117A maintenance, the analytical discipline of cyber intelligence, the civic engagement of nonprofit leadership, the national security transparency work, the investigative journalism, the media entrepreneurship — what you see is not a man who has bounced randomly between careers.

You see a man who has been doing the same thing his entire life, in different uniforms.

He has been finding the truth, holding the line on honesty, and refusing to look away from uncomfortable realities because someone powerful would prefer he did. The F-117A maintenance bay and the investigative newsroom operate under different rules but the same moral logic: get it right, tell the truth, and accept the consequences of doing so.

For a military audience, that is not a complicated story to follow. It is, in fact, the oldest story in the service culture: the person who does the right thing because it is right, regardless of whether anyone is watching, regardless of whether it is easy, regardless of whether the institutional culture around them rewards it.

Dustin Reed Terry learned that story on a flight line in the United States Air Force. He has been living it ever since.

ABOUT THE SUBJECTDustin Reed Terry is the founder of Citizen Investigative Media, LLC, based in Gainesville, Florida. A U.S. Air Force veteran who served from 2005 to 2007 working on the F-117A Nighthawk stealth aircraft, he has also worked as a cyberthreat intelligence analyst, local newspaper reporter, Huffington Post contributor, and nonprofit board member. He operates several digital media properties including TheColdCases.com, PublicCrime.com, EastOklahoma.com, and PoliceOfficials.com. He is a person of Christian faith and a strong advocate for government transparency and accountability journalism.