Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
Fighting in the Donbas region in Ukraine has become so desperate that President Volodymyr Zelensky is calling it “just hell.” This is a matter...
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Dr. James Holmes, the last gunnery officer to fire a battleship's guns in anger, recalls USS Wisconsin's 1988 return from mothballs: parts scavenged from...
Iran and Russia have both demonstrated that a mediocre power can absorb enormous punishment without surrendering, and that doing so buys almost nothing strategically....
Reagan's AWACS package looked inflated in 1981 and nobody explained why. Nine years later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, American forces flew into Saudi air...
The Navy commissioned USS Cleveland, the sixteenth and last Freedom-class littoral combat ship, on May 16. Ten weeks later it decommissioned USS Fort Worth...
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...
He was raised in Richland, Washington, in a house without a television, by a nuclear engineer who worked at the plant that supplied fissile...
The Royal Navy's Queen-Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers do have some impressive states and can carry F-35B stealth fighters. But all is not well.
Russia's T-14 Armata and the US Army's M1 Abrams SEPv3 are considered two of the best tanks on Earth in 2026. What does a...
The US Navy's Nimitz-class aircraft carriers are in big demand with the Iran war not exactly over and global tensions spiking. The fleet will...
Four ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz Thursday against a 10-day average of 16. Iran said it hit tanker Trend on Friday. Brent is...
Jobs dropped out of Reed College and stayed on as what he called a "drop-in," sitting in on classes that interested him. One was...
"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...
The Duma is a rubber-stamp parliament and United Russia is not going to lose it. The election still matters to Putin, for two reasons...
On the morning of September 14, a Russian drone exploded beside a train carrying delegates home from the Yalta European Strategy summit, about 1.2...
Russia's negotiating position has not shifted across eight visits to Moscow by Steve Witkoff, and Putin's precondition remains the whole of Donetsk oblast —...
Two shortfalls are converging on Ukraine before winter. The first is fiscal: a $27 billion defense funding gap, roughly $4 billion in European Union...
Trump is reportedly considering another meeting with Kim Jong Un. The last round produced Singapore, Hanoi, and the DMZ, and by 2020 the status...
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...
Fighting in the Donbas region in Ukraine has become so desperate that President Volodymyr Zelensky is calling it “just hell.” This is a matter...
The northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv was hit by multiple Russian strikes on Tuesday night, with people on the ground sharing reports and videos...
![Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken participates in the virtual U.S.-Iraq Strategic Dialogue, from the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. on April 7, 2021. [State Department Photo by Freddie Everett/ Public Domain]](https://www.19fortyfive.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Somalia-600x337.jpg)
![Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken participates in the virtual U.S.-Iraq Strategic Dialogue, from the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. on April 7, 2021. [State Department Photo by Freddie Everett/ Public Domain]](https://www.19fortyfive.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Somalia-100x100.jpg)
Azerbaijan has renewed its attack on Armenians in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. The Azeri attack comes less than a month after Secretary of State...
Last month, the U.S. Air Force revealed a series of photographs from its Whiteman Base in Missouri on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service...
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has left Taiwan after a day of meetings with Taiwanese officials. Despite several warnings, including assessments that Pelosi’s...
