Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
Summary and Key Points: Footage circulating on TikTok appears to show Russia’s Su-57 flying over Algeria, offering early visual evidence that Moscow has secured...
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The B-52 Stratofortress has flown for about seventy years. With Iranian air defenses destroyed, it flew overland strike missions rather than standoff attacks.
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...
Defence Minister David McGuinty has confirmed that Canada's F-35 purchase is now part of what he called an extremely complex negotiation with Washington covering...
CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper says US forces have destroyed more than 100 Iranian naval vessels, pledging to "continue to rapidly deplete Iran's ability...
Coverage of Chinese support for Russia focuses on what one retired US intelligence official calls MDO — missiles, drones and oil. What Moscow is...
Satellite imagery shows Russia installing large overhead anti-drone nets across submarine berths at the Rybachiy nuclear submarine base on the Kamchatka Peninsula — the...
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...
Ukraine's long-range drone strikes on Russian refineries have spread the fuel crisis into the countryside just as harvest begins, one analyst argues, with farmers...
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...
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...
The KN-23, North Korea's version the Russian Iskander missile, showed up to fight in the Ukraine war. And it isn't the same platform as...
Summary and Key Points: Footage circulating on TikTok appears to show Russia’s Su-57 flying over Algeria, offering early visual evidence that Moscow has secured...
Summary and Key Points: The sinking of the nuclear-powered Kursk in August 2000 killed all 118 sailors and became an early test of Putin-era...
Summary and Key Points: As of February 13, 2026, the U.S. Air Force has officially denied reports that it received F-35 fighters with “empty...
Summary and Key Points: The USS Guitarro (SSN-665), a Sturgeon-class nuclear submarine, famously sank at its dock in May 1969 due to “culpable negligence”...
Summary and Key Points: America’s Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines anchor the most survivable leg of the nuclear triad—yet Washington delayed their replacement and is now...
