Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
A senior U.S. Navy official just delivered a brutal warning about the Pentagon’s most consequential August 2026 decision: failing to fund the F/A-XX sixth-generation...
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The war began on 28 February with little public explanation. The administration did not make a full case to Congress or to the country,...
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...
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...
Handley Page built 86 Victors in total. The last was withdrawn in 1993, ending Britain's V-Force and thirty-five years of airborne nuclear and refuelling...
Ten years after the T-14 Armata stalled during its own debut parade in Red Square, the arithmetic is in: roughly twenty tanks built against...
The Navy will lose 1,316 Tomahawk-capable launch positions from seven cruisers and three Ohio SSGNs before new Virginia SSGNs arrive.
Two hours of destruction at Pearl Harbor bought Japan far less than the burning fleet suggested. Six of the eight battleships came back, five...
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...
Trump calls the strait "sort of open." Iran calls the arrangement "a new and different model." Last June, vague wording in a similar deal...
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...
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...
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...
A senior U.S. Navy official just delivered a brutal warning about the Pentagon’s most consequential August 2026 decision: failing to fund the F/A-XX sixth-generation...
General George S. Patton said it best: “To be a successful soldier, you must know history.” The legendary “Old Blood and Guts” believed his...
This practice by China was supposed to be a strategic masterstroke. In order to enforce Beijing’s flimsy claims of territorial ownership in the First...
After undergoing an extended period of maintenance, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) is officially back in business. The carrier had been undergoing a...
Summary and Key Points: The U.S. Navy planned to build 29 Seawolf-class attack submarines—the most lethal undersea predators ever designed—but ended up with just...
