AFRL Wants a Cheap Hypersonic Cruise Missile It Can Buy in Bulk
Share this story Hypersonic weapons have a problem that has nothing to do with physics. They work. They are also so expensive that nobody can afford to fire very many of them, which in a serious war is the same thing as not having them. On 1 September the Air Force...
B-52 Bombers Land at RAAF Base Tindal in Northern Australia
Share this story On 1 September, a formation of very old, very large aeroplanes settled onto a runway in the Northern Territory of Australia, 4,000 kilometres from the nearest American base and comfortably beyond the reach of most of China’s missile force. That was...
F-35 Price 2026: What Each Variant Really Costs Now
Share this story For years the standard defence of the F-35 went like this: yes, the development was a nightmare, but the unit price kept falling, and eventually a stealth fighter would cost about what a fourth-generation jet costs. That argument has now run out of...
F-15EX Eagle II: The Pentagon’s Warning on Doubling the Buy
Share this story Buying more of a good fighter sounds like an easy win. The Pentagon has just published the fine print, and it is a reminder that in defence procurement, doubling an order is never simply a matter of writing a bigger cheque. Earlier this year the U.S....
EC-130H Compass Call: The Last Hercules Jammer Retires
Share this story At about seven in the morning on 2 September, a grey four-engined Hercules bristling with antennas rolled down the runway at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona and climbed into the desert haze. Its callsign was VOLT01. Six hours later it came...
Frank Kendall Calls Hegseth’s Pentagon ‘Dysfunctional’
Share this story Frank Kendall, who served as US Secretary of the Air Force from July 2021 to January 2025, spent three days at the start of September 2026 making the same argument in three places: an opinion piece in The New York Times on 1 September, an interview on...
GAL Hamilcar: The Glider That Carried a Tank Into Battle
Share this story Inside the glider, in the dark, the tank crew sat in their tank with the engine running. The exhaust was ducted out through the side of the aircraft. When the glider stopped moving, the driver pulled a lanyard to release the shackles and drove...
Douglas World Cruisers: The First Flight Around the World, 1924
Share this story Four open-cockpit biplanes left Seattle on 6 April 1924 to fly around the world. They had no radios. Their engines were surplus wartime Liberty V-12s. Their crews navigated by map, compass and coastline, and when they needed to cross an ocean they...
US Approves $800M Bell 412 and 407M Helicopter Sale to Iraq
Share this story Iraq already flies the Bell 407. On 31 August 2026 the U.S. State Department cleared it to buy a great many more of them, along with a bigger stablemate and enough guns, rockets and sensors to turn utility helicopters into armed scouts. The approval,...
Iran Strikes Kuwait Again as US Bases Come Under Missile Attack
Share this story Kuwaitis woke before dawn on Wednesday to the sound their government had already warned them to expect: air defence interceptors going up. For the second time in three days, Iran had fired missiles and drones at American bases on Kuwaiti soil. The...
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