Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
Earlier this week on 19FortyFive, we published a story on the XM25 25x40mm grenade launcher aka the “Punisher,” an ill-fated joint venture between Heckler...
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Splitting Russia into 4 or 5 states would be neither unprecedented nor strange. There are more than 20 Arab countries. Somalis live across 5....
Iran does not yet have a reconnaissance-strike complex capable of putting a US Navy aircraft carrier battlegroup in serious danger. Finding warships, tracking them,...
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...
American doctrine promises that any North Korean nuclear attack will end the Kim regime. The Iran war has just tested that assumption. The United...
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...
General Dynamics took the lightweight F-16, gave it a cranked-arrow delta wing with 120 percent more area, raised the hardpoint count from 9 to...
Vice Admiral Thomas Connolly flew the F-111B himself and then told a congressional committee there was not enough thrust in all Christendom to make...
The F-22 Raptor entered service in 2005 and the line shut down in 2011, which means every dollar of the $10,900,000,000 modernization contract Lockheed...
The Navy's FY2027 shipbuilding book gave the reason in the flattest language a budget document allows: construction-footprint constraints. There is not enough physical space...
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 Houthis have no warships. It doesn't need any. A blockade holds if shipowners and insurers decide the passage is not worth the risk,...
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 forces struck Iranian positions preparing to fire mine-carrying missiles into the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran answered with a handful of missiles that reportedly...
Analysts dismissed American control of the Strait of Hormuz as a near-impossible task. The US government now says it has been helping tankers move...
Drones reached Moscow on three of the last five nights. A ballistic missile would not extend Ukraine's reach so much as compress Russia's warning...
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...
Iran's Shahab-1 came from the Scud-B and reached 300km. The Khorramshahr, derived from North Korea's Musudan, reaches 2,000km — a 6.7-fold increase in reach.
Earlier this week on 19FortyFive, we published a story on the XM25 25x40mm grenade launcher aka the “Punisher,” an ill-fated joint venture between Heckler...
World War II was the largest and most deadly conflict in human history. It involved the majority of the world’s nations, including all of the...
China may have the world’s most impressive fleets of heavily armed amphibious armored fighting vehicles—and it’s no secret why: Taiwan. Beijing has made it...
Was Afghanistan Winnable? As we approach the one-year anniversary of the collapse of the Afghan government and army to a relatively weak Taliban army, there...
One of the more frustrating aspects of U.S. foreign policy is the ritual hand-holding of Europe. Since the end of World War II, through...
