DARPA’s AI Just Flew a Real F-16
Share this story For two years the jets sat in a hangar at Eglin Air Force Base while engineers tore into their airframes and taught them to think. This week one of them finally flew — and for stretches of that flight, no human was flying it.The U.S. Air Force...
Gliders, a Dictator, and an Impossible Takeoff
Share this story On the afternoon of 12 September 1943, a string of flimsy plywood gliders scraped down onto a boulder-strewn plateau high in the Italian Apennines, right outside a mountaintop ski hotel. Out of them poured German paratroopers and SS commandos. Within...
He Couldn’t Shoot Them Down
Share this story At 27,000 feet over Germany, the air was minus 60 degrees and Charlie Brown’s bomber was dying. Half its engines were gone or failing. The nose was blown open to the wind. The tail gunner was dead, other crewmen were bleeding on the freezing deck, and...
Canada Gets a Front-Row Seat to GCAP
Share this story Canada already knows what its next fighter looks like: the F-35A, dozens of which are on order. And yet Ottawa has just reached for a very different aircraft — one being designed in London, Rome and Tokyo. Reporting on July 15 said Canada has agreed...
America’s Robot Wingman Fires Its First Missile
Share this story Somewhere over the Mojave Desert this month, an aircraft with no pilot, no ejection seat and no name stenciled under a canopy did something no American drone had ever done. It fired an air-to-air missile at a target. The jet was Anduril’s YFQ-44A...
The Reaper Ran Out of Sky. What Comes Next?
Share this story For twenty years the MQ-9 Reaper ruled the skies over places where nobody could shoot back. It loitered for a day at a time, watched everything, and struck without warning. It was the defining weapon of an entire era of American war. And then it met...
Checkmate: Russia’s Budget Stealth Bet Against the World
Share this story When Russia rolled a sleek single-engine stealth fighter onto the tarmac at the 2021 MAKS air show — complete with an aggressive marketing blitz and a signature perfume — the Su-75 Checkmate looked like Moscow’s answer to the F-35. Five years later,...
China Drills a Deck Crew for Its Newest Carrier
Share this story A carrier is only as capable as the people who work its deck. On 14 July 2026, the People’s Liberation Army Navy released imagery that made this point plainly: J-15-family fighters running full-cycle takeoff and landing training on land, methodically...
South Korea Hardens 59 F-15Ks Against the Missile
Share this story South Korea just made its most battle-tested fighter a great deal harder to shoot down — and it did so not with a shiny new jet, but with a box of very clever electronics bolted deep inside the ones it already flies. On 13 July 2026, BAE Systems...
Pentagon Buries Its Own F-35 Report Card
Share this story For two decades, the taxpayers who foot the bill for the most expensive weapon in human history got one honest annual accounting of it: the Government Accountability Office’s yearly review of the F-35. This year, the Pentagon locked it in a drawer....
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