Ukraine’s 426-Drone Night: Kstovo Refinery and a Wildberries Hub Burn
Share this story Shortly after one in the morning on 26 August, residents of Kotovsk — a small town in Russia’s Tambov Oblast, some 430 kilometres southeast of Moscow — counted at least ten explosions. By dawn a smoke column stood over the town, and...
F-35 Costs Jump $51 Billion: What the New Estimate Actually Says
Share this story The number that follows the F-35 around got bigger again. In a fresh accounting delivered to Congress and confirmed by the programme office, the cost of buying America’s stealth fighter fleet has climbed by roughly $51 billion since late 2023 —...
Chinese Fighter Exports: The Car Industry Parallel, Tested
Share this story Walk the halls of the IAA motor show in Munich and the story writes itself. Chinese cars everywhere, priced below anything a European maker can build, arriving in a market that spent a century assuming it owned the category.Now look at Jakarta, Dhaka,...
B-52 Radar Modernization: $766 Million and Still Testing
Share this story The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that Raytheon and Boeing had picked up contracts worth up to a combined $766 million tied to the B-52 Radar Modernization Program.It is a substantial sum for a programme whose central task is replacing one radar with...
Storm Shadow: Britain Clears Missile Assembly in Ukraine
Share this story Britain has spent three years shipping Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine. It has now agreed to something rather more consequential: letting Ukraine help build them.Ahead of Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s visit to Kyiv on 24 August, London...
Bangladesh J-10CE Deal: 20 Chinese Fighters for $2.3 Billion
Share this story On Tuesday afternoon in Dhaka, a government adviser stood up at the Secretariat and confirmed that a committee had finished drafting the agreement. Bangladesh intends to buy the Chengdu J-10.Twenty aircraft. A headline figure of $2.302 billion. And a...
Poland and the F-15EX: Warsaw Denies a $131 Billion Hint
Share this story Buried in a routine American contract announcement on Monday was a single word that set the European defence press moving: Poland.The US Department of War confirmed that Boeing had been awarded an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for...
J-20 Mystery Shapes Solved: China’s Fire-Training Mock-Ups
Share this story For four years, one of the more entertaining puzzles in open-source intelligence has been a set of aircraft-shaped objects sitting on Chinese ramps. They looked a bit like the Chengdu J-20. They also looked a bit wrong. Analysts squinted at satellite...
Blackbeard on the Super Hornet: Hypersonic Testing Begins
Share this story Somebody at the Tailhook Association convention this past weekend was holding a camera when the U.S. Navy put a particular slide on the screen. On it: a pair of Castelion Blackbeard test articles hanging under the right wing of an F/A-18E/F Super...
The Nimitz Tic Tac: What the Navy Aircrew Actually Reported
Share this story On 14 November 2004, a US Navy F/A-18F on a routine training intercept off southern California was vectored onto something the cruiser USS Princeton had been tracking for days. The squadron commander who flew that intercept has described what he saw...
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