Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
Synopsis: Japan has doubled down on its next-generation GCAP fighter, confirming a 2035 in-service target after a fresh review of budgets, design work and...
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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...
The Iran Missile Deal: Weinberger opposed it. Shultz opposed it. Reagan, McFarlane and Casey went ahead anyway. Three hostages came home and three more...
By the mid-1980s only a few dozen of the Shah's 225 F-4 Phantoms could still get airborne. Each flight hour is estimated to have...
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 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: Japan has doubled down on its next-generation GCAP fighter, confirming a 2035 in-service target after a fresh review of budgets, design work and...
Synopsis: This piece traces the rise and fall of the Soviet Kirov-class battlecruisers, enormous nuclear-powered “Sea Eagles” built to intimidate NATO carrier groups and...
Synopsis: This piece examines Russia’s planned Laika- or “Husky”-class submarine, a fifth-generation design meant to restore Moscow’s undersea edge despite wartime strain. -Projected to...
Key Points and Summary – The loss of the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) submarine remains one of the U.S. Navy’s most haunting unsolved mysteries, claiming...
Synopsis: This piece explores how the outcome of the Ukraine war will shape Vladimir Putin’s political future and Russia’s trajectory. -A frozen conflict or armistice...
