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A U.S. Army soldier will spend five years in prison for smuggling $1 million in cash from Afghanistan battlefields and using it to fund vacations, plastic surgery and an 18-wheel tractor trailer for herself, a judge ordered.

Tonya Long, 30, of Fayetteville, N.C., was sentenced Monday in smuggling scheme, which prosecutors said she ran during her deployment as a customs inspector in Afghanistan from January 2008 to April 2009, The Associated Press reported.

The appointment of the first woman to command the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs marks another breach of the "brass ceiling" that keeps women from top assignments in the military.

An advocacy group says Maj. Gen. Michelle Johnson's appointment is significant because few women achieve her rank. But Anu Bhagwati of Service Women's Action Network says putting women into top assignments won't by itself address unequal treatment and sexual assault of women in the military.

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Two US sailors have been sentenced to prison for the rape of a Japanese woman in Okinawa, in a case that has generated strong anti-American feeling.

The Naha district court handed Christopher Browning 10 years in jail and Skyler Dozierwalker nine years. In his verdict, the judge said the men were "contemptible and violent".The incident in October 2012 exacerbated resentment of the US military presence on the island and resulted in a curfew for US troops.

Bradley Manning, the solider accused of the biggest unauthorised disclosure of state secrets in US history, has admitted for the first time to being the source of the leak, telling a military court that he passed the information to a whistleblowing website because he believed the American people had a right to know the "true costs of war".

At a pre-trial hearing on a Maryland military base, Manning, 25, who faces spending the rest of his life in military custody, read out a 35-page statement in which he gave an impassioned account of his motives for transmitting classified documents and videos he had obtained while working as an intelligence analyst outside Baghdad.

The US government is planning to call 141 witnesses to the trial of Bradley Manning, including 15 people who would testify that the information he passed to WikiLeaks caused harm to US national interests.

The gigantic scale of the prosecution plans were revealed during pre-trial legal argument over how sensitive secret information would be handled. The trial, scheduled to start on 3 June and pencilled in for 12 weeks, is the most prominent prosecution of the source of an official leak for at least a generation.

The US government is planning to call an American, possibly one of the 22 Navy Seals involved in the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to give evidence at the trial of Bradley Manning about how he discovered digital material later revealed to contain WikiLeaks disclosures, a military court heard on Tuesday.

Prosecutors intend to bring to the witness stand an anonymous man they are calling "John Doe" who would testify how he entered a room in the al-Qaida leader's hideout in Pakistan, grabbed three items of digital media and removed it. Later, four separate files of information were off-loaded with WikiLeaks contents on them.