The Reaper Ran Out of Sky. What Comes Next?

The Reaper Ran Out of Sky. What Comes Next?

For twenty years the MQ-9 Reaper ruled the skies over places where nobody could shoot back. It loitered for a day at a time, watched everything, and struck without warning. It was the defining weapon of an entire era of American war. And then it met an enemy that...
Pentagon Buries Its Own F-35 Report Card

Pentagon Buries Its Own F-35 Report Card

For two decades, the taxpayers who foot the bill for the most expensive weapon in human history got one honest annual accounting of it: the Government Accountability Office’s yearly review of the F-35. This year, the Pentagon locked it in a drawer. The GAO confirmed...
America’s Drone Boats Just Went to War

America’s Drone Boats Just Went to War

Three specks of grainy black-and-white video streak across a harbour, each ringed in red, each trailing a white wake toward a pier. Then the screen goes white. That 25-second clip, released by U.S. Central Command on 13 July, is the moment the American military...
France Commits 16 Rafales to Ukraine

France Commits 16 Rafales to Ukraine

It was fitting that the promise came in Paris. On 14 July — France’s national day — President Emmanuel Macron stood alongside Volodymyr Zelensky at the close of a “Coalition of the Willing” summit and announced that Ukraine had agreed a plan to acquire 16 Rafale...
Germany’s First Quadriga Eurofighter Flies

Germany’s First Quadriga Eurofighter Flies

At 34 minutes past the hour on 14 July, a single-seat Eurofighter in plain grey primer rolled down the runway at Airbus’s Manching site in Bavaria, lit its two EJ200 engines and climbed away. The aircraft carried the German military registration 34+02. It was the...
A European Bastille Day Over Paris

A European Bastille Day Over Paris

At 10:25 on the morning of 14 July, the Patrouille de France swept over the Arc de Triomphe and unrolled three ribbons of blue, white and red down the length of the Champs-Élysées. Behind them came a river of jets. And for the first time in the long history of...
The Orlando Flight That Went Nowhere

The Orlando Flight That Went Nowhere

The passengers on Virgin Atlantic flight VS135 boarded at Heathrow on Monday afternoon expecting palm trees and theme parks. Five hours later they climbed down the same set of stairs at the same London airport, no closer to Orlando than when they started — but a good...
The Record No Carrier Wanted to Break

The Record No Carrier Wanted to Break

Somewhere in the northern Arabian Sea, a 100,000-ton nuclear-powered supercarrier is doing something no American warship has done in the modern era: it simply will not stop. The USS Abraham Lincoln left San Diego before Christmas, touched a pier exactly once, and has...