Lakenheath F-15E Wears 1986 Libya-Raid Camo
The F-15E Strike Eagle has worn the same paint scheme since 1988. Three shades of grey, low-visibility national insignia, and the squadron’s tail flash. It looks the way fighter jets are supposed to look — neutral, businesslike, slightly bored. This week, that...
Air Force Cuts BACN, Bets Everything on Starshield
For 18 years, somewhere over Afghanistan, Iraq, or — more recently — the Black Sea, an unremarkable-looking Bombardier business jet has been flying loops at 45,000 feet doing the most important job in modern American air combat: making everyone talk to everyone. The...
Germany’s STARK Drones Now Hunt as a Pack
STARK is a Munich-based defence start-up nobody had heard of three years ago. Today it makes one of Germany’s most important loitering munitions — and as of this week, those drones can hunt in coordinated AI-driven packs. The Bundeswehr confirmed Tuesday that it...
ARRW Rises From the Dead — USAF Revives Its Mach-20 Missile
The AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon was supposed to be America’s first operational air-launched hypersonic missile. It was killed in March 2023 after three consecutive failed flight tests, a programme cost overrun, and a Pentagon decision that...
Argentina Buys KC-135s — Vipers Now Reach the Falklands
Argentina has not had real combat air power since 1982. Forty-four years after the Falklands, the country flew its last operational Mirage in 2015 and has been making do with subsonic A-4 Skyhawks and IA-63 Pampa trainers ever since. That is finally over: the F-16...
China is Turning 1958 MiGs Into Suicide Drones
The Shenyang J-6 first flew in 1958. It was a Soviet-designed swept-wing day-fighter that hit Mach 1.45 if you held your nose right and didn’t mind a fuel range of about 700 kilometres. The Chinese kept building it until 1981, retired the last from front-line...
RAF Typhoons Get £30K Drone-Killer Rockets
For thirty thousand pounds you can buy a used Mini Cooper. You can also, it turns out, buy a single shot of Britain’s newest fighter-jet drone-killer — and the Royal Air Force has just proved that the maths works. BAE Systems confirmed this week that an RAF...
Russia Stations Full Combat Aviation Group in Mali
The grass strip outside Bamako has been busy. Russian transport aircraft have been touching down for weeks, off-loading equipment, fuel pallets, and crates that locals say are too heavy to be hand luggage. Now satellite imagery has confirmed what defence analysts had...
AFRL Just Got a Pentagon-Mandated Makeover
The Air Force Research Laboratory — the organisation that, over the decades, has pushed everything from the F-117 stealth shape to the X-51 hypersonic scramjet test vehicle into existence — is being restructured. The Pentagon confirmed this week that AFRL will be...
70th Hawkeye Delivered: The Navy’s Eyes Get a New Pair
Northrop Grumman has just delivered the seventieth E-2D Advanced Hawkeye to the U.S. Navy. The aircraft itself looks essentially identical to the seventieth Hawkeye built — the same twin-turboprop, the same enormous radar dome on the back, the same boxy fuselage that...
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