Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
Summary and Key Points: Napoleon Bonaparte’s return from exile in 1815 remains one of history’s clearest examples of comeback politics: dramatic, consequential, and ultimately...
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On 8 July at the NATO summit in Ankara, Mark Carney confirmed Canada as the sixth nation to buy Kongsberg's Joint Strike Missile, a...
The curious, on-again-off-again US-Iran war of 2026 is a remarkable geopolitical outcome. For all its hard power, the US has been unable to force...
Since Khamenei took over in March, Iran's Supreme National Security Council has had three secretaries. Ali Larijani was killed in an airstrike a few...
Iran's strategy is to drag the war out. James Jay Carafano argues that protraction is the only card the IRGC holds, and that Trump...
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...
The second Trump administration is reviewing America's military footprint in Europe, and the worst-case outcome is a full withdrawal. Andrew Michta argues that would...
The US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding is being judged on whether it cools tensions in the Persian Gulf. Strategic-studies scholar Andrew Michta argues that's the...
Iran signed contracts for three Kilo-class submarines in 1988, while the Soviet Union still existed. The USSR dissolved three years later. The Russian Federation...
US Navy aircraft carriers have been out to sea longer and longer over the last year. USS Gerald R. Ford broke records and now...
Prewar estimates ranged from several thousand one-way attack drones to more than 10,000 Iranian Shaheds in storage. Those figures cannot be subtracted cleanly from...
Iranian missiles and drones did not hit a US carrier during Operation Epic Fury. They did not need to. The threat alone pushed the...
Washington redirected 55 commercial vessels away from Iranian ports as of Sunday, up from 35 a week earlier, while the Kpler intelligence firm counted...
Supply boats bring food and water. Wages arrive late or not at all. A union leader likens it to imprisonment, and one Indian sailor...
No vessel entered any of the three Ukrainian ports in the Odesa region on Wednesday, the first such day since the grain corridor opened...
Oil futures are signaling that traders expect prices to fall over the coming months, despite the war and the disruption around Hormuz. The bet...
Trump calls the strait "sort of open." Iran calls the arrangement "a new and different model." Last June, vague wording in a similar deal...
The war began on 28 February with little public explanation. The administration did not make a full case to Congress or to the country,...
The maximalists wanted regime change, the minimalists wanted nothing, and the doubters see only waffling. Carafano's answer: the victor gets to define victory —...
Reports indicate that American short-range ballistic missile inventories have been nearly exhausted and Tomahawk stockpiles badly depleted during the war with Iran. Patriot interceptors...
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.
North Korea has roughly 60 nuclear weapons and Kim Jong-un keeps demanding an exponential increase. Bruce Bennett works the problem backward, from Kim's objectives...
Xi's first Pyongyang visit in seven years, a ratified Russia pact, and a declaration that the arsenal is permanent: Andrew Latham on why the...
Last year North Korea's newest destroyer rolled over at its own launch, and the world assumed the program was finished for years. Instead Pyongyang...
Summary and Key Points: Napoleon Bonaparte’s return from exile in 1815 remains one of history’s clearest examples of comeback politics: dramatic, consequential, and ultimately...
Summary and Key Points: Chester W. Nimitz rose from a modest Texas upbringing to become one of America’s most consequential naval commanders in World...
Summary and Key Points: Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Missouri in 1835, rose from hardship after his father’s death to become one...
Article Summary and Key Points: Washington’s Iran war planning is built around limited political aims, not regime conquest. -It focuses on degrading nuclear and...
Summary and Key Points – Brandon J. Weichert, Senior National Security Editor at 19FortyFive, analyzes how China’s new Chengdu J-20S—the world’s first two-seat fifth-generation...
