Share this story The Kuwait theatre, early 1991, after dark. Two F-111Fs circle at medium altitude over a sixty-by-thirty-mile box of desert. In the right seat, a weapon systems officer stares at a small black-and-white screen where the sand has gone cool and grey and...
Share this story On the morning of 5 January 1943, four Japanese dive bombers jumped an American task force off Guadalcanal. One of them hit the New Zealand cruiser Achilles, and the group broke away. As they pulled off, the gunners of the light cruiser USS Helena...
Share this story Twenty-seven years ago today, on 9 October 1999, a black aeroplane with NASA 844 on its fin took off from Edwards Air Force Base for an open-house display and landed again. Nobody knew it was the last flight any SR-71 Blackbird would ever make. The...
Share this story Ten years ago tonight, at about seven in the evening on 9 October 2016, the destroyer USS Mason was north of the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea when two missiles came off the Houthi-held coast of Yemen. Mason fired two SM-2s and an Evolved...
Share this story Every F-35 carries a small, fast-spinning turbomachine that most people never hear about. It starts the engine, cools the radar, pressurises the cockpit and, if the main generators fail, keeps the flight controls alive. When one of those machines...
Share this story Shortly after midday on 7 May 1942, a radio crackled in the flag plot of a US carrier task force somewhere south of the Louisiade Archipelago. The voice belonged to Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Dixon, leading the dive bombers of Lexington’s Scouting...
Share this story “¡Drones Reaper: los nuevos cazadores del narcotráfico!” The post from Ecuador’s Ministry of Defence this week did not bother with subtlety. Reaper drones, it announced, are the new hunters of drug trafficking. Defence Minister Gian Carlo Loffredo...
Share this story Somewhere in a Sikorsky hangar in Connecticut sits a Black Hawk with no cockpit. Where the pilots used to sit there are two clamshell doors and a loading ramp. Before the end of 2026, if Sikorsky keeps its word, it will lift off with nobody on board...
Share this story A column of buses stops beside a bomb-damaged hangar at Gia Lam Airport, Hanoi, just after noon on 12 February 1973. Inside are 116 American prisoners of war in identical new jackets that their captors issued a few days earlier. Most of them have...
Share this story Seven months ago a counter-drone laser fired near Fort Bliss and the Federal Aviation Administration shut the sky over El Paso. On Monday 5 October the Pentagon answered that embarrassment with a shopping list: three high-energy lasers and one...
Share this story The document is three paragraphs long, posted to a federal contracting website at 12:50 UTC on Tuesday 7 October. It names no price and no delivery date. What it does name is a bomber that first flew in 1952 and a missile built to find a warship on...
Share this story Diplomats usually leave the sales talk to the manufacturers. Not this time. At a joint press conference in the Palácio das Necessidades in Lisbon on 8 October, a reporter asked US Secretary of State Marco Rubio which jet Portugal should buy to replace...
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