Sabiha Gökçen: Daughter of the Turkish Sky
The morning of 5 May 1935 smelled of dust, spring grass and engine oil. On a new airfield outside Ankara, the young Turkish Republic was opening a flight school with the kind of ceremony it loved best: gliders wheeling against the Anatolian sky, foreign parachutists...
Desert One: The Night Everything Went Wrong
At 22:47 on 24 April 1980, a blacked-out MC-130 thumped down on a salt flat 200 miles (320 km) southeast of Tehran, and the most secret mission in America promptly met the public. Headlights. A Mercedes bus, forty-plus Iranian civilians aboard, rolling straight...
Praying Mantis: The Navy’s One-Day War
At 07:55 on the morning of 18 April 1988, a voice crackled from the destroyer USS Merrill across the VHF band, first in Farsi, then in English: the occupants of the Sassan gas and oil separation platform had five minutes to leave. On the steel decks above the green...
Ford’s Super Hornets Wear Their War Paint
Fighter jets keep diaries. They keep them in stencilled paint, just below the cockpit rail, and if you know how to read them they will tell you exactly what kind of year the crews have had. On the Fourth of July, as the Super Hornets of Carrier Air Wing 8 recovered at...
T-7A Full-Rate Production Slips to 2029
Last week we walked you through the sustainment data fight simmering between Boeing and the Air Force over the T-7A Red Hawk. Seven days later, the Government Accountability Office showed up with receipts. GAO’s Weapon Systems Annual Assessment, released July 2...
Rectangle Silos Rise at China’s Jilantai Test Base
Commercial satellite imagery has revealed two hardened structures of an unfamiliar type at China’s most important missile test and training complex, and their geometry does not match anything previously catalogued there. The structures, at the People’s...
Ten GlobalEyes, Five Tritons, One Shared Airlift
When we wrote last week that NATO’s next radar jet would be Swedish, the news still wore the modest clothing of a Reuters exclusive. On Tuesday in Ankara, it acquired numbers, signatures and a price tag. Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed that the Alliance...
Sirens at Dawn: Iran Answers America’s Strikes
The sirens came before the sunrise. In Manama’s old quarters and along Kuwait City’s waterfront towers, the same rising wail that Gulf residents have learned by heart this year pulled families out of bed and into stairwells in the small hours of Wednesday...
Trump Dangles the F-35 in Ankara
Six years ago the United States took Turkey’s F-35s away. The jets Ankara had already paid for went into storage in the Arizona desert, Turkish pilots were sent home from Luke Air Force Base, and roughly 100 stealth fighters on order evaporated. On Tuesday,...
CENTCOM Hits 80 Targets in Overnight Iran Blitz
Eighty targets. One night. That is CENTCOM’s answer to Iran shooting at oil tankers again. Overnight into Wednesday, US forces worked their way down a target list across southern Iran: air defense systems, command-and-control networks, coastal radar sites,...
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