Share this story For thirty years, a JDAM was a dumb bomb with a brain bolted on: cheap, accurate, and useful only if you flew almost directly over the target. The Air Force just bought a version that can hit something more than 300 miles away. On August 5, 2026, the...
Share this story For about ninety seconds on Tuesday afternoon, the most protected passenger in the world and a planeload of holidaymakers bound for Florida were sharing a narrow slice of Washington sky that the rules say they never should have. On August 4, 2026,...
Share this story A U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II was built to kill tanks. Late last month it was flying cover for something far more valuable than any tank column: a submarine carrying enough firepower to end a war. On July 28, 2026, the Navy photographed one of...
Share this story Somewhere above your head, right now, there is a small robotic spaceplane that the United States has been flying for more than fifteen years — and the government will not tell you what it does. It looks like a Space Shuttle that shrank in the...
Share this story The finale of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Nine parts brought the bomb from a London traffic light to Nagasaki. The last part answers the question Washington asked in September 1949: how did Stalin get it so fast? Somewhere...
Share this story It was never glamorous. It never dropped a bomb, never dogfought, never broke the sound barrier. But for 32 years the T-1A Jayhawk did the quiet, essential job of turning student pilots into the people who fly America’s tankers and transports...
Share this story An artificial-intelligence agent just strapped into a fighter, stared at an enemy jet through an infrared eye, and ran it down twenty-seven times — and no human touched the stick.Lockheed Martin Skunk Works pulled the curtain back on August 4,...
Share this story Big American weapons programs have a reputation, and it is not for finishing early. So when the general in charge of the two most important jets in the U.S. Air Force’s future stands up and says both are running ahead of schedule, it is worth a second...
Share this story For decades, if you wanted to put an engine in an American F-15 or F-16, you had exactly two phone numbers to call: Pratt & Whitney and GE. That cozy arrangement may be about to end. On August 4 the U.S. Air Force went public with a Request for...
Share this story Look closely at the KC-135 that touched down at RAF Mildenhall on the afternoon of August 2 and something does not add up. The fuselage wears the serial 63-8017. The tail wears a different one: 63-8002. This is one airframe stitched together from two...
Share this story Just after midnight on Sunday, the busiest travel weekend of the Canadian summer fell silent. Roughly 150 WestJet aircraft that should have been shuttling holidaymakers between Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and a long list of sun destinations stayed...
Share this story For decades Japan built warships bristling with missile cells and used them only to shoot things down. That just changed. On Jul. 29, 2026, the destroyer JS Chōkai fired a Tomahawk cruise missile into the Pacific — the first time a Japanese...
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