Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
Summary and Key Points: The USS Nimitz — laid down in 1968 and originally scheduled to begin decommissioning at Norfolk this month — has...
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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...
GCAP is the only European next-generation fighter program still standing. FCAS was supposed to replace the Rafale and the Eurofighter from around 2040, and...
The Varyag aircraft carrier had no propulsion and no crew, so it had to be dragged. Turkey refused passage through the Bosphorus for sixteen...
The four 1980s Iowa-class warships fired 1,083 sixteen-inch shells in the Gulf War — 759 from Missouri, 324 from Wisconsin. Against $1.7 billion in...
Two rotary launchers in the internal bay give the Tu-160 up to 12 cruise missiles. The armament list runs Kh-55SM, Kh-555, Kh-101/102, and the...
"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...
Summary and Key Points: The USS Nimitz — laid down in 1968 and originally scheduled to begin decommissioning at Norfolk this month — has...
The Gerald R. Ford-class carrier was supposed to be the evolutionary successor to the 50-year-old Nimitz, but instead of replacing one major system at...
With the USS Nimitz now in the Caribbean, the prospect of an American operation against Cuba has increased. And while Havana retains an air...
Summary and Key Points: At the 1985 Geneva Summit, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev issued a joint statement declaring that a...
France’s Charles de Gaulle (R91) is the only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier outside the U.S. fleet — half the size of a Nimitz-class but built...
