Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
Key Points and Summary – This piece explores whether Donald Trump’s proposed Trump-class battleships make more sense as high-end battlefield sensors than as traditional...
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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 contract was signed in 1986 for six boats. Sections built in Sweden arrived with bad welds, the hull had to be reshaped to...
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 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...
Key Points and Summary – This piece explores whether Donald Trump’s proposed Trump-class battleships make more sense as high-end battlefield sensors than as traditional...
Key Points and Summary – The F-22 Raptor is widely regarded as the world’s premier air-superiority fighter, yet the U.S. will never build more...
Key Points and Summary – Turkey’s failed 2016 “coup” became the pretext for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to remake the Turkish military and crush...
Missouri is nicknamed “The Show-Me State” (along the way inspiring the name of a sports bar & grill that’s a regional competitor with Hooters),...
Key Points and Summary – The Iowa-class battleships were the greatest gun platforms ever to sail, but on paper their planned successors—the Montana-class—were even...
