Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
The U.S. Air Force spent years planning to retire the B-1 and B-2. Now it's pouring $1.7 billion into keeping both airborne into the...
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A modern Arleigh Burke Flight III destroyer costs about $3 billion. At $23.4 billion, USS Defiant represents nearly eight of them. Pursuing the battleship...
The maximalists wanted regime change, the minimalists wanted nothing, and the doubters see only waffling. Carafano's answer: the victor gets to define victory —...
Reports indicate that American short-range ballistic missile inventories have been nearly exhausted and Tomahawk stockpiles badly depleted during the war with Iran. Patriot interceptors...
A peace settlement would have to resolve occupied territory, Ukraine's relationship with the West and sanctions, and neither government is close enough to the...
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...
USS Constellation was decommissioned in August 2003 after 42 years and later sold for scrapping — the fate of most conventionally powered US carriers.
Preparing USS Oriskany for the seafloor took years and roughly $20 million. More than 150 workers opened and cleaned over 500 tanks, stripping fuel,...
Boeing's conventional X-32A first flew on 18 September 2000 and completed 66 flights, demonstrating aerial refuelling, weapons-bay operations and supersonic performance. The short-takeoff X-32B...
Kyiv stood up the world's first dedicated drone service in 2024. Two years later, the Kremlin is doing the same — while its own...
No vessel entered any of the three Ukrainian ports in the Odesa region on Wednesday, the first such day since the grain corridor opened...
Oil futures are signaling that traders expect prices to fall over the coming months, despite the war and the disruption around Hormuz. The bet...
Ukraine's long-range drone strikes on Russian refineries have spread the fuel crisis into the countryside just as harvest begins, one analyst argues, with farmers...
Two tankers loaded with Saudi crude reversed course in the Red Sea — without being fired on — after the Houthis threatened any ship...
Ukraine on Tuesday executed a series of drone strikes on an industrial zone near Moscow, and across the whole country, strikes on three warehouses...
On July 20, a China Coast Guard team in a small boat closed on Philippine sailors near Second Thomas Shoal and repeatedly struck one...
A cruise missile came down about 90 kilometers inside Poland and hurt no one. That incident will be logged and forgotten. The question underneath...
Getting to Somaliland used to be simple. Then Somaliland refused more than a quarter of a billion dollars to drop Taiwan, and the routes...
North Korea has roughly 60 nuclear weapons and Kim Jong-un keeps demanding an exponential increase. Bruce Bennett works the problem backward, from Kim's objectives...
Xi's first Pyongyang visit in seven years, a ratified Russia pact, and a declaration that the arsenal is permanent: Andrew Latham on why the...
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...
The U.S. Air Force spent years planning to retire the B-1 and B-2. Now it's pouring $1.7 billion into keeping both airborne into the...
The MiG 1.44 was meant to be the Soviet Union's F-22 — a supercruising, internally-armed fighter to dominate 21st-century air combat. Instead it became...
The Northrop F-20 Tigershark wasn't a flawed fighter — it was fast, affordable, reliable, and easy to maintain, everything defense planners now say America...
The debate over China's J-20 has always been whether it can beat the F-22 or F-35 in a fight. This analysis argues that's the...
On May 21, 2025, a brand-new North Korean destroyer rolled over and partially capsized at its own launch ceremony — with Kim Jong Un...
