The Wild Weasels Barely Unpacked
Two weeks ago the story was aircraft going home. Raptors leaving the Gulf for England, squadrons rotating out, a ceasefire holding well enough that the US Air Force felt comfortable thinning out its presence in the region. That lasted about as long as it took to write...
The Rocket-Powered Hercules Built to Land in a Stadium
In the autumn of 1980, American engineers strapped thirty rockets to a C-130 Hercules. The plan was insane and deadly serious: fly the four-engine transport into a soccer stadium in the middle of Tehran, stop it inside the length of the pitch, load fifty-two American...
A Startup Just Won $500M to Flood the Army With FPV Drones
Three years ago, Neros was two former teenage drone racers in a workshop. This week the U.S. Army handed the startup a contract worth up to $500 million to build first-person-view attack drones — the cheap, expendable weapons that have rewritten the rules of war in...
No Robot at the Controls: The B-21 Keeps Two Pilots
For years, one of the more futuristic rumours about America’s new stealth bomber was that it might not need much of a crew at all — that the B-21 Raider could fly with a single pilot, or eventually none. This month the Air Force put that speculation to rest with a...
America’s $175 Billion “Golden Dome” Gets Its General
The most expensive defence project in American history now has a single name attached to it. On 17 July 2026, the Senate confirmed Space Force General Michael A. Guetlein to run Golden Dome — President Trump’s plan to throw a missile shield over the entire United...
America’s Air War to Keep Hormuz Open
A commercial oil tanker was steaming through international waters toward Iran when a U.S. aircraft put Hellfire missiles into its smokestack. The ship stopped. It was, in the plainest terms, a blockade being enforced with air power — and it is happening every...
Cheap Cruise Missiles, Dropped From Cargo Planes
The Pentagon has decided the next war will be won by arithmetic. Not by a handful of exquisite, million-dollar missiles, but by thousands of cheap ones — enough to swamp any air defence ever built.On 16 July the Department of War signed multiyear framework...
DARPA’s AI Just Flew a Real F-16
For two years the jets sat in a hangar at Eglin Air Force Base while engineers tore into their airframes and taught them to think. This week one of them finally flew — and for stretches of that flight, no human was flying it.The U.S. Air Force and DARPA have put...
America’s Robot Wingman Fires Its First Missile
Somewhere over the Mojave Desert this month, an aircraft with no pilot, no ejection seat and no name stenciled under a canopy did something no American drone had ever done. It fired an air-to-air missile at a target. The jet was Anduril’s YFQ-44A Fury. The weapon was...
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...
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