Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
The U.S. Space Force’s X-37B just completed its eighth mission after spending over 900 days in orbit with a shuttered payload bay doing classified...
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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...
USS Tripoli struck an Iraqi LUGM contact mine in the Persian Gulf on the morning of 18 February 1991, taking a 25-by-25-foot hole in...
Twelve angled launch tubes run along each side of an Oscar II, outside the pressure hull, carrying 24 P-700 Granit missiles. Each weighs about...
In 2019 the MiG-41 design was reported complete and undergoing wind-tunnel testing. In 2021 Rostec announced that the PAK DP had entered its development...
K-222 reached 44.7 knots submerged, roughly 51 miles per hour, from two reactors and 80,000 shaft horsepower. No crewed submarine has publicly surpassed it....
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...
The U.S. Space Force’s X-37B just completed its eighth mission after spending over 900 days in orbit with a shuttered payload bay doing classified...
The Soviet Union’s top admiral begged Stalin for aircraft carriers. Stalin gave him zero, and seven decades later, Russia still hasn’t built a single...
Iran Opened the Strait to Make Payroll. Not to Make Peace.
A Swedish diesel submarine costing a fraction of an American supercarrier repeatedly penetrated a carrier strike group’s defenses and ‘sank’ the carrier during exercises...
China is the only country besides America with two operational stealth fighters. The J-20 entered service in 2017. The J-35 joined in 2025. Neither...
