Share this story At dawn on 5 July 1943, before the first German tank rolled forward, large formations of Soviet bombers, Shturmoviks and fighters headed for the Luftwaffe airfields around Kharkov and Belgorod. The plan was simple: catch the German air fleet on the...
Share this story A ballistic missile submarine on patrol wants to stay deep and silent. That makes it hard to talk to: ordinary radio waves barely penetrate seawater. The US Navy’s answer, since the 1960s, has been an aircraft that unreels a wire antenna several...
Share this story In the early hours of 24 October 2026, UTC, a single B-52H Stratofortress using the callsign HUSH 11 left Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and pointed its nose at the Atlantic. Flight trackers listening to its HF position reports watched it...
Share this story Somewhere over Southern California, instrumented “red” fighters played the enemy, airliners went about their business and ships moved at sea. Watching them at the same time, from long range, was not a big radar jet full of operators. It...
Share this story A hypersonic glide vehicle gives a defender very little time and even less certainty. It flies inside the atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound and can change course on the way in. Europe wants an interceptor designed specifically for...
Share this story For six years, China’s reusable spaceplane has been one of spaceflight’s best-kept secrets. It launches on a rocket, stays in orbit for months, releases small objects, lands on a runway in the desert, and Beijing says almost nothing about...
Share this story Russia’s jet-powered Geran-4 drones were built to outrun the cheap defences that tamed the propeller Shahed. On Monday 27 October, Ukraine’s General Staff published a number that suggests the gap is starting to close: over the past three...
Share this story It took a string of defence ministers on both sides of the Pacific and a little more than two years, but the AIM-120 AMRAAM is finally getting a Japanese address. On Wednesday 28 October in Cebu, in the Philippines, Japan’s Defense Minister...
Share this story The photographs look like any official handover: dark suits, a red rope barrier, a framed certificate held up for the cameras. Behind the smiling delegation, though, stands a grey-and-white fighter with the Ethiopian tricolour on its twin tails. On...
Share this story A cheap drone is a hard thing to stop. It is small, slow and low, which makes it difficult to see on radar, and it is so inexpensive that firing a conventional air defence missile at it is a losing trade. Since 2022 the war in Ukraine has turned that...
Share this story On 19 August 1942, while Canadian soldiers died on the shingle beaches of Dieppe, the sky above them filled with more fighters than anyone had seen over France. By nightfall the Royal Air Force and its Allied squadrons had lost about 106 aircraft,...
Share this story On the afternoon of 22 September 1980, Iraqi jets swept across the border and bombed Iranian air bases, including Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. The aim was to destroy Iran’s air force on the ground. It did not work. Iranian hardened shelters...
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