There is a quiet satisfaction, for anyone raised on the sight of the delta-winged chasse française, in watching the Rafale finally take its place in the fight it was arguably designed for. France’s most senior voices are no longer hedging. A French...
A month ago, Donald Trump stood next to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara and all but handed Turkey the keys to the F-35. Sanctions? Gone, he suggested. The stealth jet Ankara was thrown out of buying? Back on the table. It was the kind of moment that makes...
Five days. That is how long Ulchi Freedom Shield lasted before somebody pulled the plug. The largest combined military exercise on the Korean Peninsula was built to run eleven, 17 August through 27. Instead the United States and South Korea are shutting it down...
The most consequential upgrade the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye has ever received will not change how the aircraft looks. No new wing, no new rotodome, no obvious external clue. What changes sits behind the fuselage skin: the computers, the software, the cockpit and the...
On 17 August 2026, in a New Delhi government building most people have never heard of, India signed a contract to rent two robotic aircraft for the price of a small skyscraper. The deal, worth about Rs 1,943 crore (roughly US$200 million), leases two more MQ-9B...
The U.S. Navy just handed Shield AI roughly $50 million to build a jet that doesn’t need a runway, and the U.S. Air Force declined to chip in a single dollar. One service sees the future. The other sees a very expensive question mark and a wallet that’s...
Peru has quietly filled in one of the most important blanks on its future fighter. On 19 August 2026, L3Harris confirmed it had been selected to supply the AN/ALQ-254(V)1 Viper Shield electronic-warfare suite for the F-16 Block 70s destined for the Fuerza Aérea del...
In December 2025, a man in a minivan with Massachusetts plates parked near the fence line at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and pointed a camera at the B-2 Spirit stealth bombers on the ramp. He had been warned off once already. He came back. This month he was...
The arms race before 1914 is the go-to analogy for today’s military build-up. We compared the actual spending data from 1913, 1938 and 2025.
A U.S. Air Force transport took off from New Zealand on Tuesday morning bound for Antarctica, flew south for more than an hour, and then did something aircrews almost never do on that route: it turned around and went home. The reason was not weather, and it was not a...
A Marine walks out of the woods with a bloodied face and a phone in his hand, 911 already dialled. A county deputy, not quite sure what he is looking at, asks the obvious question: what kind of jet is that? The pilot glances back toward the column of black smoke on...
India can build fighter airframes. What it has never managed to build is a fighter engine. That single gap has hobbled Indian air power for decades — and on 14 August 2026, the country’s richest man announced a plan to close it. Reliance Industries, the...
The world’s air forces are racing to build the fighter that will replace the stealth jets of today — the so-called sixth generation. These aircraft promise tailless all-aspect stealth, artificial intelligence, adaptive engines, and the ability to command...
Somewhere over the Baltic this summer, a French Rafale slid into formation beside a Russian jet that almost never lets itself be seen. The aircraft was a Tupolev Tu-214PU — a rare, specially-equipped command aircraft that open-source analysts link to Russia's FSB...
Switzerland's first F-35A Lightning II is no longer a set of drawings and contracts. It is now metal. In a hall at Cameri, in the Italian region of Piedmont, the first fuselage section of a Swiss jet has been mated to its first wing — the earliest physical sign of a...
Ask most people to picture "the world's aircraft" and they imagine airliners — rows of jets at a busy airport. Yet airliners are a tiny slice of the real total. Add up everything with wings and an engine, from a two-seat trainer at a grass strip to a stealth bomber,...
Munich Airport has had a nervous week. On the evening of 17 August 2026, a Lufthansa Airbus A380 arriving from San Francisco touched down short of its runway and ploughed through the approach lighting at the threshold. All 351 people on board were unhurt, and the...