Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
Summary and Key Points: The JH-XX (or JH-36) represents China’s ambitious move into medium-range stealth strike capability, designed to complement the strategic H-20. -First...
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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...
More than 42 US military aircraft have been damaged or destroyed during the war with Iran, including aircraft caught on the ground at air...
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 spent more than two years converting the South Korean-built container ship Perarin into Shahid Bagheri, a 41,978-ton drone carrier for the Revolutionary Guard...
A 2016 US Army threat report listed 150 Iranian M60A1s, and roughly the same figure was still in use when the Soleiman-402 was unveiled...
Iran's Ghadir min-submarine is roughly 29 meters long, displaces about 125 tons submerged and carries a crew of seven. Two bow-mounted 533mm tubes are...
The B-52 Stratofortress has flown for about seventy years. With Iranian air defenses destroyed, it flew overland strike missions rather than standoff attacks.
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...
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: The JH-XX (or JH-36) represents China’s ambitious move into medium-range stealth strike capability, designed to complement the strategic H-20. -First...
Summary and Key Points: Finland is officially transitioning into a fifth-generation power with the rollout of 65 F-35A Lightning II fighters. Replacing the legacy...
Summary and Key Points: Japan’s 2026 defense overhaul centers on the induction of 105 F-35A and F-35B stealth fighters. -This reinvigorated “First Island Chain”...
Summary and Key Points: The F/A-18 Hornet emerged in 1983 to solve the Navy’s “hyper-specialization” crisis, replacing the F-4 and A-7 with a single,...
Summary and Key Points: The A-12 Avenger II was the U.S. Navy’s ambitious attempt to bring carrier-borne stealth to the frontline, but it famously...
