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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An executive order issued on 13 August 2026 directs the Navy to replace the electromagnetic launch system on the fourth Ford-class carrier with steam...
Canada's Army modernization strategy, Inflection Point 2025, states that the Army's sole remaining armoured regiment has a single squadron of tanks that are both...
In April 1997, President Roman Herzog told Germany it needed a Ruck — a jolt — to break out of national lethargy and undertake...
The Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative emerged from US Army Europe and Africa and NATO's Allied Land Command as a concept for restoring deterrence by...
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...
Tacit Blue made its first flight at Area 51 on 5 February 1982 under the Battlefield Surveillance Aircraft-Experimental programme. The programme ended in 1985...
On 26 October 2006, a Chinese Song-class diesel-electric attack submarine surfaced within five miles of the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk near Okinawa. A...
Moscow stopped producing the missiles Ukraine had learned to intercept and shifted components into Iskander-Ms and hypersonics instead. More than 100 a month now...
US Air Force requirements called for Mach 3 performance, a combat radius near 1,000 nautical miles on internal fuel and an operational ceiling above...
Of the 1.5 billion barrels in emergency stocks, the IEA cannot order the commercial half released, leaving governments under a billion. The American reserve...
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...
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...
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...
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...
