Cheap Cruise Missiles, Dropped From Cargo Planes
The Pentagon has decided the next war will be won by arithmetic. Not by a handful of exquisite, million-dollar missiles, but by thousands of cheap ones — enough to swamp any air defence ever built.On 16 July the Department of War signed multiyear framework...
DARPA’s AI Just Flew a Real F-16
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 and DARPA have put...
America’s Robot Wingman Fires Its First Missile
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 Fury. The weapon was...
The Reaper Ran Out of Sky. What Comes Next?
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 an enemy that...
Pentagon Buries Its Own F-35 Report Card
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. The GAO confirmed...
America’s Drone Boats Just Went to War
Three specks of grainy black-and-white video streak across a harbour, each ringed in red, each trailing a white wake toward a pier. Then the screen goes white. That 25-second clip, released by U.S. Central Command on 13 July, is the moment the American military...
The Record No Carrier Wanted to Break
Somewhere in the northern Arabian Sea, a 100,000-ton nuclear-powered supercarrier is doing something no American warship has done in the modern era: it simply will not stop. The USS Abraham Lincoln left San Diego before Christmas, touched a pier exactly once, and has...
Ten Battered Raptors Come Home From Iran
Just after first light on July 10, ten F-22 Raptors dropped out of the English sky and rolled onto the runway at RAF Fairford under the callsign TREND. They looked like they had been to war. That is because they had. These were the 1st Fighter Wing’s jets from Joint...
The Eagle That Outlived Its Own Replacement
Here is a riddle the Pentagon wrote by accident and never quite solved. In December 2005 the U.S. Air Force fielded the most fearsome air superiority fighter ever built — the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor — expressly to retire the aging McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. Two...
The F-35’s Killer Upgrade Keeps Slipping
The F-35 you see on the flight line today is not the F-35 its makers keep promising. The one they keep promising — the one bristling with new sensors, electronic-warfare gear and more than a dozen additional weapons — lives inside a modernization program called Block...
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