A JASDF Eagle Landed at Naha, Facing the Wrong Way
It is one thing to bring a fighter home in one piece. It is another to bring it home facing the wrong way. On the morning of Aug. 18, 2026, a Japan Air Self-Defense Force F-15J Eagle touched down on Runway 36L at Naha Airport, on the island of Okinawa, and the left...
SPART: The 21-Year-Old’s $10,000 Answer to the Shahed
Somewhere over Ukraine tonight, a lawnmower engine bolted to a warhead is droning toward a city. It is called a Shahed-136, Russia stamps out its own copies as the Geran-2, and it costs somewhere between twenty and fifty thousand dollars. The problem has never been...
France’s Arms Ledger Stays at Altitude: €21 Billion, and the Rafale Still Leads
The number barely moved, and that is precisely the point. France booked €21.24 billion in new arms-export orders in 2025, its Ministry of the Armed Forces told Parliament in the annual report published on 13 August. A shade below 2024’s €21.59 billion,...
India’s Titanium Bottleneck: The Metal That Could Ground Tejas and AMCA
India’s fighter problem used to be a problem you could count. Dozens of finished Tejas Mk1A airframes have sat on Hindustan Aeronautics Limited’s (HAL) lines in Nashik and Bengaluru, waiting on a single missing part, the General Electric F404 engine, from...
Romanian F-16 Guns Down a Sea Drone
Every drone story from NATO’s eastern flank this summer has ended the same way: something falls out of the sky. On 20 August 2026, Romania rewrote the script. This time the target was not overhead. It was in the water, drifting toward a gas platform packed with...
Operation Wooden Leg: 2,000 Kilometres to Tunis
The men on the beach at Hammam al-Shatt heard the sea before they heard the sky. It was a clear Tuesday morning, just after ten, the first of October 1985, and the Tunisian coast south of Tunis was doing what it always did at that hour, fishermen, a few children, the...
Send Everything That Can Fly: The Airlift That Saved Israel
On the morning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, the sirens came before the prayers were finished. It was 6 October 1973, and along the Suez Canal and across the Golan Heights, Egyptian and Syrian armies were pouring over Israel’s lines....
The Fighter That Lived Inside a Bomber
Imagine hanging in space, five miles up, strapped into a single-seat jet that is not flying. It is dangling. Above your canopy, filling the entire sky, is the underside of the largest bomber the world has ever built, six propellers and four jets of it, roaring and...
Egypt Joins the KAAN, and a New Fifth-Gen Axis Takes Shape
There is a particular elegance to watching a country refuse to choose sides. For half a century Egypt bought its wings where the politics of the moment allowed, Soviet MiGs, then American Falcons, then French Rafales, always a client, never a builder. Now Cairo...
Rafale for Ukraine: France Firms Up Its Fighter Pledge
There is a quiet satisfaction, for anyone raised on the sight of the delta-winged chasse française, in watching the Rafale finally take its place in the fight it was arguably designed for. France’s most senior voices are no longer hedging. A French...
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