Resigned Counterterror Official Knows Well the Cost of War

Joe Kent's departure from the National Counterterrorism Center this week came with a pointed critique of US policy on Iran—and a deeply personal reminder of the cost of war. In his resignation letter, Kent invoked his first wife, Navy linguist Shannon Kent, who was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria in January 2019. It was her first deployment since having children, Kent explained in a 2024 podcast interview, highlighted by the New York Times. A New York native who joined the military after the Sept. 11 attacks, the 35-year-old was a cryptologic warfare chief petty officer assigned to a Navy unit that supports the National Security Agency and special operations forces.

Shannon's easy rapport and language skills, including fluency in Iraqi Arabic, made her especially effective in questioning Iraqis and gathering human intelligence for SEAL and other special operations missions. Joe Kent, a retired Army Special Forces officer with six Bronze Stars across 11 combat deployments, met her briefly in Baghdad in 2007, when she delivered a targeting briefing on an Iranian militant, per the Times. They crossed paths again in 2013 during a yearlong selection course for a classified intelligence unit and soon married, eventually settling near Annapolis with their children. Shannon was then shipped off to Syria in late 2018, where she continued work linked to the NSA.

On Jan. 16, 2019, while meeting a source in Manbij, she and three other Americans were killed by a suicide bomber. Kent has since argued she "should have been out of Syria" following President Trump's December 2018 withdrawal order and has criticized what he calls "the administrative state ... desperately trying to keep us in these conflicts." In his resignation letter, he said he could not support "sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people" and accused the US of caving to Israeli pressure to go to war with Iran. Some lawmakers accused him of antisemitism. Trump said Tuesday "it's a good thing that he's out" because he was "very weak on security" and wrong in his assertion that Iran did not pose an imminent threat to the US, per USA Today.