C-17s Over Caracas: When Earthquakes Call, the Air Force Answers
When twin earthquakes ripped through northern Venezuela on 24 June — a magnitude 7.2 foreshock followed 39 seconds later by a catastrophic magnitude 7.5 mainshock — the country’s fragile infrastructure collapsed in minutes. Buildings pancaked across Caracas....
Edwards Resumes Flying After Deadliest B-52 Crash in 44 Years
Edwards Air Force Base is flying again. The question everyone at the desert test centre is still asking is why it had to stop. On 15 June, B-52H tail number 60-0061 — call sign Torch 11 — crashed moments after takeoff from Edwards, killing all eight people aboard. It...
Iran Strikes Back: IRGC Hits US Bases Across the Gulf
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps struck American military installations across the Persian Gulf on Sunday, launching ballistic missiles and armed drones at bases in Kuwait and Bahrain in what Tehran called a direct response to US strikes on Iranian targets near...
Russia and China Fly Largest Joint Bomber Patrol Yet
Fifteen warplanes. Two nuclear powers. One very pointed message. On 27 June, Russia and China flew their largest joint strategic bomber patrol to date — a six-hour formation sweep through the Sea of Japan, East China Sea, and into the western Pacific. The 11th such...
The Air Force Wants a 1,000-Mile Missile — and It Changes Everything
The United States Air Force has quietly dropped one of the most ambitious weapons requirements in recent memory: a new air-to-air missile capable of killing targets at a minimum distance of 1,000 nautical miles — roughly 1,150 statute miles. That is approximately ten...
Serbia Buys Chinese HQ-9: Beijing’s Missiles in NATO’s Backyard
Two hundred miles from the nearest NATO border, Serbia is building an air defence network that Beijing designed and no Western alliance approved. On 28 June, President Aleksandar Vucic confirmed what defence analysts had suspected for months: Belgrade is moving...
Ghost Bat Goes to War: MQ-28 Debuts at Valiant Shield
The future of air combat just landed on a tiny Pacific island. Boeing’s MQ-28A Ghost Bat — the autonomous combat drone that could change everything about how wars are fought in the air — touched down at a remote airfield on Rota in the Northern Mariana Islands...
France Turns a Cargo Plane Into a War Brain
It begins, as these things often do, not with a missile but with a laptop. Somewhere in the cavernous cargo hold of a French A400M Atlas — a hold built to swallow a helicopter or a 37-tonne armoured vehicle — an operator will soon sit at a console, watching sensor...
A Robot Boat Just Rescued Two Downed Pilots
Somewhere off the coast of Oman, in the dark, two U.S. Army aviators are treading water. Their AH-64 Apache is gone — minutes ago it was flying a patrol near the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, and now it is at the bottom of the Gulf. They are alive, but they are in...
Guard Generals to Congress: 100 Fighters a Year
Two-star generals do not usually gang up on Congress. This spring, twenty-two of them did. In a single letter to the House and Senate appropriators, every adjutant general who commands an Air National Guard fighter unit signed the same blunt verdict: the United States...
Recent Comments