Singapore Joins the F-35 Club: Four Jets by December
By December, Singapore will have its first F-35s. Four F-35B short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing variants are scheduled for delivery before year’s end, making the Republic of Singapore Air Force the fourth Asia-Pacific operator of the world’s most advanced...
India’s $39 Billion Rafale Bet: 114 Jets, One Factory, and a Squadron Gap to Close
India has chosen the Rafale. Again. But this time, the numbers are staggering: 114 aircraft, $39 billion, and a production line in Nagpur that will make India one of the largest Rafale operators on Earth. The Defence Acquisition Council approved the purchase in...
Born in 1982, Still Nuclear: The Cruise Missile That Won’t Retire
The AGM-86B entered service in 1982. Ronald Reagan was president. The Space Shuttle had flown exactly three times. Top Gun was four years from release. And the Air Force fully expected this nuclear cruise missile to be retired within two decades. It is 2026, and the...
The Small Disc Keeping F-15Es Alive Over Iran
A small circular disc on the dorsal spine of an F-15E Strike Eagle, just aft of the speed brake — that is the most significant piece of new hardware photographed on an American combat aircraft in months. The disc is a Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna, or CRPA, and...
GCAP Clears Its Biggest Hurdle: £686 Million and a Unified Design Team
On the first of April — no joke intended — the United Kingdom, Japan, and Italy signed the most significant European-Asian defence contract in a generation. The Global Combat Air Programme, or GCAP, awarded £686 million to Edgewing, the newly created trinational...
$1 Billion for Drone Wingmen: The Air Force Places Its First Order
For the first time, the U.S. Air Force is asking Congress for money to actually buy — not just develop — autonomous combat drones designed to fly alongside human pilots. The number: $996.5 million. The year: fiscal 2027. The programme: Collaborative Combat Aircraft,...
Three Carriers, One Strait: The Biggest Naval Buildup Since Iraq
Somewhere in the eastern Atlantic, the USS George H.W. Bush is making 30 knots toward the Mediterranean. Behind her steam three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and a Ticonderoga-class cruiser. Ahead of her, already on station in the Arabian Sea and the Gulf, sit the...
850 Tomahawks in 30 Days — and the Factory Builds 90 a Year
The number is 850. That’s how many Tomahawk cruise missiles the United States has fired at Iran in roughly thirty days of war. Each one costs about $2 million. Each one is irreplaceable in the short term. And the Pentagon is running out. The U.S. military...
Patched, Pressurised, Flown Home: The Tanker Iran Couldn’t Kill
The photographs are jarring. A KC-135R Stratotanker — the aircraft that keeps every American warplane in the sky — sits on the apron at RAF Mildenhall, England, covered nose to tail in metal patches. Dozens of them. Each one marks a shrapnel hole punched by an Iranian...
21 Hours of Talks, Then a Blockade
For twenty-one hours, diplomats talked. Vice President JD Vance sat across from Iranian and Pakistani negotiators in Islamabad, working through the night on what was supposed to be a path out of the war. By Sunday morning, the path was gone. The sticking point —...
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