Italy Turns Away U.S. Bombers Mid-Flight

Italy Turns Away U.S. Bombers Mid-Flight

Related: Spain Bans American Warplanes from Its Skies Somewhere over the Atlantic, a group of U.S. bombers received a message no American military pilot expects to hear from a NATO ally: permission to land denied. Italy had blocked them from touching down at Sigonella...
Rheinmetall Signs Up for Ghost Bat

Rheinmetall Signs Up for Ghost Bat

Related: Germany’s Loyal Wingman Race Heats Up Four days ago, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius stood on a tarmac in Australia and said the words Boeing had been waiting years to hear: the MQ-28 Ghost Bat was “under consideration” for the...
Korea vs. Italy: Southeast Asia’s Trainer War

Korea vs. Italy: Southeast Asia’s Trainer War

Two T-50i Golden Eagles arrived at Iswahjudi Air Base in East Java in early March, flown in pieces inside a Boeing 747 freighter and reassembled on the ground. Fuselage, wings, vertical tail, engine — each component traveled separately across more than 700 kilometers...
Two-Kilo Missile Downs a Kamikaze Drone

Two-Kilo Missile Downs a Kamikaze Drone

Somewhere in northern Germany on March 30, a small drone the size of a dinner table locked onto a kamikaze UAV streaking toward its target. Without any human input, it classified the threat, selected a weapon, and fired. The missile — weighing less than two kilograms...
Spain Bans American Warplanes from Its Skies

Spain Bans American Warplanes from Its Skies

Fifteen U.S. military aircraft lifted off from southern Spain on Sunday and scattered across Europe. Nine KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refueling planes flew north to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Two flights headed for southern France. Four more simply disappeared from...
Mining Iran’s Missile Cities from the Air

Mining Iran’s Missile Cities from the Air

A nighttime photograph released by the Israeli Air Force on March 29 shows a pair of F-16I Sufas taxiing for another strike mission against Iran. The jets are loaded heavy. But the weapons hanging under their wings aren’t the precision-guided JDAMs or Rampage...
Dozens of Warthogs Gear Up for Iran

Dozens of Warthogs Gear Up for Iran

Flight trackers lit up over the weekend as a formation of A-10C Thunderbolt IIs — callsign TABOR 71 — crossed the Atlantic toward RAF Lakenheath in England. Behind them, three KC-135 Stratotankers from RAF Mildenhall held station, feeding fuel to the tank-killers on...
Hellfire Launchers Hidden in Shipping Containers

Hellfire Launchers Hidden in Shipping Containers

It looks like a shipping container. The kind you see stacked on cargo ships, loaded onto flatbed trucks, sitting in industrial lots from Rotterdam to Riyadh. Ten feet long, standard Tricon ISO spec, unremarkable in every visible way. Inside it is a Hellfire missile...