Seventeen Men the Cold War Erased
Share this story On the morning of 2 September 1958, a four-engined transport drones eastward through the clear sky near the Turkish-Soviet border. To anyone who glanced up, it is just a C-130 Hercules — an unglamorous cargo hauler. It is not. Tail number 60528...
The Flying Dorito That Cost $5 Billion
Share this story It is the morning of 7 January 1991, and Dick Cheney is about to do something a Defense Secretary almost never does. Standing at the Pentagon podium, the war in the Persian Gulf only days away, he announces that he is killing one of the Navy’s...
America’s Stealth Bomber Drops In on Australia
Share this story There are 21 B-2 Spirits in the world, and on any given day most of them are sitting in climate-controlled hangars in Missouri. So when one of these $2-billion flying wings turns up on the far side of the planet, it is never a coincidence. It is a...
A Ship-Killer That Fits Inside the F-35
Share this story For all its sophistication, the F-35 has carried an awkward secret: it could not sink a ship without compromising the one thing it is famous for. Any missile big enough to threaten a modern warship had to hang under the wings — and the moment it...
Wrong Airspace Over Maryland, Meet an F-16
Share this story Somewhere over western Maryland on Saturday, a private pilot was having an ordinary flight — right up until a fighter jet appeared off the wingtip. Around 12:20 p.m. on 20 June 2026, a small general-aviation aircraft wandered into a Temporary...
Britain’s New Spy Drone and Its Secret Pod
Share this story Most of what an air force does in secret stays secret. Occasionally, though, the secret taxis past a photographer in broad daylight. That is what happened at RAF Akrotiri, where the British Ministry of Defence has just released official photographs of...
Britain’s Cheap Deep-Strike Weapons Head to Ukraine
Share this story British defence programmes are not, as a rule, famous for speed. The Ajax armoured vehicle spent eight years mired in delay; the RAF’s Wedgetail radar aircraft arrived three years late. So when three new long-range strike weapons go from a sheet...
The Hypersonic Missile Built to Be Cheap
Share this story Here is America’s hypersonic problem in one sentence: the missiles work, but the factory doesn’t. The United States has spent years and billions proving it can build weapons that scream through the sky at more than five times the speed of...
A Submarine-Hunting Eurodrone, Built for Japan
Share this story Hunting a modern submarine is one of the most demanding tasks in military aviation. It means hours of patient, fuel-hungry orbits over empty ocean, listening for a contact that may never appear. It is precisely the kind of dull, exhausting,...
Hanoi’s Hard Choice: Rafale or Su-57
Share this story For sixty years, the answer to the question “what does Vietnam fly?” has been simple: whatever Moscow sold it. MiGs, then Sukhois — a proud, entirely Russian air force. In 2026, for the first time, that answer is genuinely in doubt,...
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