Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
The battle for Bakhmut may best represent the stalemate that the war in Ukraine has become. What will happen now?
Hi, what are you looking for?
For all the talk of spending targets, the Ankara NATO summit's real work happened elsewhere. Europe is being handed responsibility for NATO's conventional defense...
Western analysts fixate on North Korea's missiles. The real danger is speed — a mass artillery-and-missile salvo in the war's first hours, backed by...
The second Trump administration is reviewing America's military footprint in Europe, and the worst-case outcome is a full withdrawal. Andrew Michta argues that would...
The US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding is being judged on whether it cools tensions in the Persian Gulf. Strategic-studies scholar Andrew Michta argues that's the...
The Soviets built it, SALT II banned it by name, and Moscow gave it up. In 2021, China flew it again — with a...
Feared on reputation, bought as defiance — and now possibly traded away in Ankara. The twenty-year arc of Russia's most consequential weapons export. Meet...
Tucked inside an answer about F-15s and F-16s was a price nobody requested: $15.9 million to make the A-10 a nuclear bomber. The memo...
She cost $285 million, made Thailand Southeast Asia's only carrier power, and hasn't launched a jet since 2006. The Chakri Naruebet is easy to...
Social Security’s funding gap is not a forecast — it is arithmetic. The size of the shortfall is known, the levers that can close...
The Memorandum of Understanding that paused the fighting has collapsed, Farley writes, because it never settled the status of the Strait of Hormuz or...
U.S. gas prices rose for the first time in eight weeks — 'Iran is the reason why,' per GasBuddy's Patrick De Haan — while...
Washington and Tehran can't agree whether the Strait of Hormuz is open — Trump declared it open under a new U.S. 'guardian' regime, while...
Growth at 0.4 percent and a blown deficit look like pressure toward peace. Latham's case: four years of war built a political economy with...
Tehran treats the Strait of Hormuz as non-negotiable, Holmes writes, and no air campaign eliminates every missile. That leaves four courses: walk away and...
Carafano argues Iran has lost its nuclear option, its missile mass, its proxy network, and its grip on the Strait of Hormuz all at...
Ukrainian drones set two major Russian refineries ablaze overnight — including Salavat in Bashkortostan, the last gas refinery untouched in 2026 — while Russia...
Last year North Korea's newest destroyer rolled over at its own launch, and the world assumed the program was finished for years. Instead Pyongyang...
The KN-23, North Korea's version the Russian Iskander missile, showed up to fight in the Ukraine war. And it isn't the same platform as...
On May 21, 2025, a brand-new North Korean destroyer rolled over and partially capsized at its own launch ceremony — with Kim Jong Un...
Fake Russian IDs, Orders Never to Be Captured, and 50% Casualties: Inside North Korea’s Secret War in Ukraine The Russian Army has sustained nearly...
The battle for Bakhmut may best represent the stalemate that the war in Ukraine has become. What will happen now?
July marked the 17th anniversary of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. For Hezbollah, the occasion was ripe for incitement. On July 12,...
Conventional Western thought tends to demonize Russia and promotes storylines that expose the Russian military’s errors, mistakes, and combat losses in Ukraine.
On day 524 of the war, the Russian forces continued to lose an average of around 500 men killed, wounded, or captured in Ukraine.
Back a few days ago, the forty-fifth president of the United States officially qualified under the standards of the Republican Party’s primary rules for...
