Space Force On-Orbit Weapons: America Admits It Has Them
Share this story For decades the American position on weapons in orbit was a careful non-answer. Officials talked about resilience, about protecting assets, about counter-space capability in the abstract. Nobody said the United States had put weapons up there. On...
Swarm Aero Gamera: A $10 Million Drone That Carries Bomber Missiles
Share this story The United States bought 337 MQ-9 Reapers over the nineteen-year life of the programme. After the fighting with Iran, the Air Force has roughly 135 left, against a floor it says should be 189. That is the arithmetic behind everything that happened on...
Lockheed Vectis: Four More Prototypes, First Flight 2027
Share this story The model on the show floor at National Harbor is 34 feet long and you can walk all the way around it. There is no cockpit, no canopy, no windscreen, nothing for a human head to sit behind. What there is, on top of the fuselage where an intake has no...
The Little Bird the Pentagon Blurred in the Dude 44 Rescue Video
Share this story When the backseater known as Dude 44 Bravo broke his silence on 60 Minutes, most of the coverage went to what he said. The more durable part of the broadcast was what it showed. Alongside the interview, CBS aired video of both rescues that had not...
Lackland’s Airbase Range: Air Force Recruits Now Rearm an F-16
Share this story Air Force basic training now includes a task that would have been unthinkable for a recruit ten years ago: walk up to a fighter, hang a missile on it, and do it as a team you organised yourself. The Air Base Training Range at Joint Base San...
AV-8B Harrier: The Last One Built for the Marines Goes to a Museum
Share this story There was no flypast for this one. No water cannon, no speeches, no crowd on the ramp at Cherry Point. Marines took the wings off it, pulled the classified boxes out, put it on a flatbed and drove it to Florida. The aircraft is BuNo 166288, modex...
RAF Fairford: A Business Jet Landed at the Bomber Base by Mistake
Share this story Just after nine on Saturday morning, a nine-seat business jet greased onto a runway built for heavy bombers. The pilot had been aiming for a quiet private airfield in the Cotswolds. He got the United States Air Force instead. The aircraft was D-CJMK,...
KC-46A Exports: America Just Tripled Its Tanker Sales Ceiling
Share this story The US Air Force has just raised the spending ceiling on its Boeing KC-46A export contract from $5.7 billion to $19.1 billion. No aircraft were ordered. No money changed hands. It is, on paper, one of the least dramatic $13.4 billion announcements you...
Northrop X-21A: The Plane With 800,000 Slots in Its Wings
Share this story Drag is the tax every aircraft pays for existing. On a transport aircraft in cruise, about half of that drag is nothing more than friction between the skin and the air. In the early 1960s Northrop and the United States Air Force went after that tax...
USAF Seeks Medium-Caliber Guns to Defend Its Air Bases
Share this story For thirty years the United States Air Force has fought wars in which nothing much threatened its airfields. Aircraft were parked in neat rows in the open because nobody could reach them. That assumption is gone. And the Air Force’s response is...
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