Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security
Key Points and Summary – The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier was meant to usher in a new era of U.S. naval power,...
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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...
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...
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 RAH-66 Comanche promised a stealthy armed scout able to find targets for Apaches under hostile air defenses. The Army spent $6.9 billion, completed...
The First Sea Lord warned in 2023 that the Royal Navy had spent eighty years getting smaller and now had to grow. Docks are...
The Pentagon's own drone program expects to have ordered just under 200,000 aircraft by February 2027. Ukraine is producing roughly half a million small...
HMS Vanguard's overhaul was originally scheduled for about three years and ran past 2,700 days. The contract was not fixed-price, and the final bill...
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 – The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier was meant to usher in a new era of U.S. naval power,...
Key Points and Summary – China’s J-35 stealth fighter’s recent launch from the catapult carrier Fujian marks a real shift: Beijing is moving from...
Key Points and Summary – For a decade, the MiG-25 Foxbat was the West’s worst-case nightmare: a titanium Mach-3 super-fighter that seemed to outclass...
Key Points and Summary – NASA’s Hyper-X program proved hydrogen-fueled scramjet flight with the X-43A at Mach 7–10, but its planned follow-on, the Mach...
Key Points and Summary – Congress has gutted the U.S. Navy’s F/A-XX sixth-generation fighter program, approving just $74 million for FY 2026—an 84 percent...
