Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
A problem in recent public commentary on tensions between China and Taiwan has been a conflation of what we know and what we fear....
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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...
Soviet bombers were gaining long-range anti-ship missiles, and the Navy needed to kill them before they could launch. That requirement produced the Hughes AN/AWG-9...
Supercruise is not just engine power. The F-22 carries its weapons internally rather than hung under the wings, so nothing is sitting in the...
Raytheon and the Navy are now examining whether all three ships can swap their AN/SPY-3 radars for the AN/SPY-6(V)3 already going into the rest...
The SR-71 Blackbird did not dodge missiles so much as it made the intercept mathematically unaffordable, arriving and departing faster than the defense could...
"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...
A problem in recent public commentary on tensions between China and Taiwan has been a conflation of what we know and what we fear....
President Joe Biden took the U.S. out of Afghanistan, ending the desultory 20-year conflict. Although deadly and costly, it was, by World War II...
The unfolding crisis in the Indo-Pacific and continued Russian geostrategic assertiveness along the country’s Western periphery should serve as a wake-up call for Europe’s...
Turkish President Recep Erdogan has dug himself into a deep currency crisis hole through his eccentric economic policy views. Yet, judging by last week’s...
Last week, the White House yet again corrected President Joe Biden for misstating his own Taiwan policy. The day after saying America had a...
