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...
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...
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....
America’s Drone Boats Just Went to War
Share this story 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...
The Record No Carrier Wanted to Break
Share this story 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...
Ten Battered Raptors Come Home From Iran
Share this story 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...
The Eagle That Outlived Its Own Replacement
Share this story 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...
The F-35’s Killer Upgrade Keeps Slipping
Share this story 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...
The Air Force Goes Shopping for New Ways to Kill Drones
Share this story The aircraft that worries American air base commanders most in 2026 is not a Chinese stealth fighter or a Russian bomber. It is a battery-powered quadcopter that costs less than a used laptop, and there is nothing to stop a hostile one from buzzing...
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