Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
China, despite aggressively exporting a wide variety of military hardware, is unlikely to ever export the J-20 Mighty Dragon stealth fighter. While international interest...
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The consequences of 9/11 ran straight into the procurement system. The Navy, unable to explain its role in a war on terror, committed to...
Michael Rubin's argument at 25 years is that almost nothing was learned. The hijackers were neither poor nor occupied, yet the assumption that grievance...
Twenty-five years on, the familiar verdict is that American intelligence agencies failed to warn. Lieutenant General Wallace "Chip" Gregson argues the failure was broader...
The Witkoff-Kushner shuttle between Moscow and Kyiv ended, predictably, without a breakthrough — and Andrew Michta argues the failure reveals something deeper than bad...
German Foreign Minister Wadephul's fourth Kyiv visit — two days before Ukraine's Independence Day — capped an accelerating shift: Berlin is becoming Ukraine's principal...
The Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative emerged from US Army Europe and Africa and NATO's Allied Land Command as a concept for restoring deterrence by...
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...
Perseverance and Curiosity have spent years on Mars choosing targets and repositioning instruments. Venera 14 had under an hour before Venus destroyed it. Every...
Ninety miles in half a minute. The X-43D would have been an unmanned, hydrogen-fueled scramjet demonstrator built by NASA and Boeing, with active cooling...
Cadmium-plated steel tools embrittled titanium on contact, so Lockheed had to build new tools out of titanium for the SR-71 Blackbird. Parts washed in...
The Navy historically allowed six months for a Planned Incremental Availability. The Carl Vinson's latest ran seven, from November 2025 to June 12, 2026....
"Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has,...
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has unveiled Operation Economic Outcast: secondary sanctions across five sectors and more than sixty targets, with no relief attached. Iran's...
Rezaei's threat goes beyond the strait: no oil leaving the Gulf by any route if neighbors cooperate. In practice that would mean strikes on...
Of the 1.5 billion barrels in emergency stocks, the IEA cannot order the commercial half released, leaving governments under a billion. The American reserve...
The US and Canada have 3 unsettled maritime disputes: the Beaufort Sea, the Northwest Passage, and a rock in the Bay of Fundy. None...
Splitting Russia into 4 or 5 states would be neither unprecedented nor strange. There are more than 20 Arab countries. Somalis live across 5....
Wars rarely win elections. George H.W. Bush ended the Cold War, won the most decisive American military victory in modern history, and lost in...
Speaking in Baghdad on August 20, Iran's parliament speaker warned that military power counts for nothing if the people are hungry. Four days later...
American doctrine promises that any North Korean nuclear attack will end the Kim regime. The Iran war has just tested that assumption. The United...
Trump ordered Ulchi Freedom Shield cut from eleven days to five before Kim Jong-un had agreed to anything in return. Kim Yo-jong dismissed the...
As President Trump downsizes the Ulchi Freedom Shield war games after South Korea declined to help with Iran, one uncomfortable fact goes almost completely...
Russia has used North Korean ballistic missiles in Ukraine since late 2023. The early shots missed by kilometers. Later ones did not. That combat...
China, despite aggressively exporting a wide variety of military hardware, is unlikely to ever export the J-20 Mighty Dragon stealth fighter. While international interest...
An aircraft carrier's reach is its air wing's combat radius — and China's missiles now outrange it. To strike, a carrier must sail into...
The B-2 Spirit is the most capable bomber ever built — and the only aircraft that can drop the 30,000-pound bunker-buster that struck Iran's...
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...
