Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
Synopsis: The Alaska-class emerged from a pre–World War II scramble to counter rival “pocket battleships” and super-cruiser threats with a fast, hard-hitting “tweener.” -On...
Hi, what are you looking for?
Dr. Michael Rubin argues that Israel's targeted killing campaign against Palestinian militants a quarter of a century ago ultimately produced two decades of relative...
More economic pressure by itself is unlikely to break Iranian resistance, because whether Iran can be made to fold turns less on how much...
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...
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...
Contracts already signed, sections already under construction, termination penalties, lost economies of scale and a tax bill payable on a ship nobody finished. The...
The fleet it replaces was built for Britain's Royal Navy during the Cold War and bought secondhand in 1998. When the German yard was...
The German “pocket battleship” was an unofficial term used by the British press to describe the Deutschland-class cruisers (Panzerschiffe) built by Nazi Germany in...
The US Navy Had A Big Idea: In the late 1970s, proposals were made to convert the Iowa-class battleships into "battlecarriers" with a flight...
The Houthis have no warships. It doesn't need any. A blockade holds if shipowners and insurers decide the passage is not worth the risk,...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
Synopsis: The Alaska-class emerged from a pre–World War II scramble to counter rival “pocket battleships” and super-cruiser threats with a fast, hard-hitting “tweener.” -On...
Summary and Key Points: We compare the proposed Trump-class “USS Defiant” concept with the Iowa-class ships built for World War II. -The Trump-class is...
Summary and Key Points: Russia’s Aerospace Forces have taken steep losses since February 2022 in the Ukraine war, leaving a smaller, aging fleet that...
Summary and Key Points: After being docked since the summer of 2023, the lead Zumwalt-class destroyer returned to sea trials following a major modernization...
Summary and Key Points: China’s J-20 family is becoming a production story as much as a capability story. Estimates cited from RUSI suggest the...
