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...
286 Days at Sea: The Rusty US Carrier That Broke the Internet
Share this story One of the most powerful warships on Earth just limped into a Thai port looking like a scrapyard find. After 286 days at sea, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has pulled into Laem Chabang near Pattaya streaked with rust —...
South Korea Reaches for a 6th-Generation Stealth Fighter
Share this story South Korea has barely finished building its first home-grown fighter, and it is already reaching for the next one — and this time it wants to skip a generation. Seoul has formally launched the concept study for a sixth-generation stealth...
COSCO Spy Ships? China’s Cargo Fleet Accused of Signals Intelligence
Share this story The most valuable spy near a naval exercise may not be a submarine or a satellite. It may be the container ship steaming quietly past on the horizon, stacked with boxes and bristling with antennas that look exactly like every other merchant vessel...
Navy CCA RFI: The Service Wants Its X-47B Combat Drone Back
Share this story Ten years ago the U.S. Navy had a stealthy, carrier-capable combat drone flying off the deck of a supercarrier — and then it walked away from it. This week the service quietly admitted it wants that aircraft back.On August 31, Naval Air Systems...
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