BALTIMORE — The Defense Information Systems Agency is deploying capabilities within U.S. Indo-Pacific Command that will create a secure space for the Pentagon to share information with its international partners and allies.
After months of testing capabilities for an effort known as the Coalition Information Environment (CIE), the agency is now preparing to demonstrate the new technology during the joint force’s Olympus Fires exercise in Indopacom, according to Lt. Col. David Courter, DISA’s chief of combatant command plan integration.

Shashank Joshi is the incoming Washington Bureau Chief for The Economist, according to his X profile. He has been involved in a running verbal gun battle on X with an active U.S. Army officer in the Pentagon who goes by @infantryDort.
@InfantryDort wrote a Substack which highlighted the obviously very real phenomenon of the great replacement for Western Christian society. The agenda is far along in Britain, where explosive anger is manifesting over the ‘White George Floyd‘ moment that happened recently.

The commanding officer, executive officer and senior enlisted leader of a Navy ship repair facility in Yokosuka, Japan, have been fired, service officials announced on Wednesday.
Capt. Wendel Penetrante, Capt. Edwin Catubig and Master Chief Petty Officer Thomas Dean Howell were relieved of their duties on Wednesday as commanding officer, executive officer, and command master chief, respectively, a Navy news release says.
They were all assigned to the U.S.

Battling intense snow storms and scarce visibil

The Harrier has served the Marines for over 50

With U.S. military supply chains facing a growing risk of adversary attack, senior defense officials are keen on using AI and other advanced technologies to address the challenges associated with contested logistics.
Supply chains face a variety of potential threats, including kinetic strikes, cyberattacks, geopolitical instability and infrastructure vulnerabilities.

This video describes the military situation in

L Todd Wood talks with Alex from Kyiv on the moving front in Donbass and the collapsing Ukrainian lines.
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Summary and Key Points: So far, the Iran War has hit Americans where they expected: at the gas pump, where prices have jumped 35% to a four-year high. By one estimate, it’s already drained around $100 billion from U.S. households — roughly $750 each — and the tax refunds that quietly softened the blow stopped covering it in mid-May. But economists say the real squeeze is still coming, somewhere less obvious: the grocery store. The Strait of Hormuz doesn’t just carry oil — it carries the natural gas from which the world’s fertilizer is made.

Summary and Key Points: For more than a decade, the U.S. military ran war game after war game simulating a conflict with Iran, and almost every one ended the same way: Tehran blockades the Strait of Hormuz and sends the global economy reeling. One infamous 2002 simulation went further, with Iran defeating the United States outright. What’s unfolding now was among the most foreseeable outcomes imaginable, which makes the real puzzle how it caught Washington flat-footed.

It was an emotional farewell to Lance Bombardie

Summary and Key Points: It looks almost comical — a squat white dome sailors nicknamed “R2-D2.” But the Phalanx is one of the deadliest defensive weapons afloat: a radar-guided Gatling gun that fires 4,500 rounds a minute and decides on its own when to shoot, no human required. It’s a warship’s last line of defense — and in the Red Sea, it shredded a Houthi missile that had slipped past a destroyer’s Aegis shield to within a mile. But the autonomy that makes it lethal has a dark side: once, a Phalanx locked onto the wrong target and opened fire on a friendly American jet.

Summary and Key Points: At first glance, it was a display of raw power: in one night, Russia hurled 656 drones and 73 missiles at cities across Ukraine, one of its largest barrages of the war. But a growing chorus of European officials and Western spy chiefs reads it the opposite way — as a sign of weakness, even desperation. Four years into a war meant to last weeks, Russia has barely advanced past the lines it held in 2014, and one spy chief warns, “time is not in Russia’s favor.

China’s crude oil imports have collapsed since the Iran War began, but global oil markets have so far avoided the supply shock many analysts predicted. Prices at the pump are elevated, but not as high as some predictions, and crude price per barrel continues to fluctuate every time the White House indicates that a deal could be on the way. But the reason for the optimism is not that demand has fallen, or that supply isn’t short – it is, in part, because China and other economies are drawing from strategic reserves in the hope that the problem will be rectified soon.

Summary and Key Points: There’s a single island in the Persian Gulf through which Iran ships 90 percent of its oil — and planners call it the Achilles’ heel of the Iranian economy. Take Kharg out of the equation, the thinking goes, and Tehran would have to sue for peace. It’s one of several ways Washington could force the Strait of Hormuz open — from mining Iran’s waters to choking off the oil it sends to China. But each carries a cost in dollars and blood, and the war’s price has already climbed toward $100 billion.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has mandated that “joint warfighting ability” be one of the criteria considered when officers and noncommissioned officers are evaluated for promotions, according to a recent memo.
“To that end, I am directing the creation of an additional metric for our officer and non-commissioned officer evaluation processes,” Hegseth wrote in the May 20 memo, which was shared on Reddit. “The effort to create objective, data-driven metrics for measuring and identifying warfighting ability is not a bureaucratic exercise; it is a warfighting imperative.

Summary and Key Points: It was intended as a demonstration of American power. Instead, argues national-security editor Brandon Weichert, it’s becoming a lesson in its limits. Months after the U.S. set out to topple Iran’s regime, strip its nuclear program, and obliterate its navy, the ayatollah still rules, the missiles still fly, and the Strait of Hormuz stays in Tehran’s grip. The ceasefire the president insists is holding has already shattered — and the longer the war grinds on, Weichert contends, the more it resembles the one war no American wants it compared to: Vietnam.

In 2024, Michael Swaine wrote, “How to Stop the United States and China from Sliding into War,” where he identified areas that could increase the possibility of an armed conflict between the United States and China. Two years later, after recent talks between President Trump and President Xi, we asked Michael to revisit his arguments.Image: U.S. Department of StateIn your 2024 article, you flagged a rising possibility of major armed conflict between China and the United States. That was before American forces became militarily involved in Iran.

The Navy wants enlisted sailors to be able to use their meal cards at restaurants on base — including chains like McDonald’s or Panera Bread.
The service is currently testing a pilot program at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, Washington where sailors can swipe their meal cards at Navy-branded food spots like Bombers Fresh Mex, which is the “equivalent of a Chipotle,” Vice Adm. Scott Gray, commander of Navy Installations Command, told reporters on Wednesday. The hope is to expand this program and eventually allow sailors to use their meal entitlements at chain restaurants on post.

Summary and Key Points: It weighs 35 pounds, a single soldier can fire it, and it has terrorized the Russian air force across two wars and two generations. When the CIA slipped the FIM-92 Stinger to Afghan fighters in 1986, five missiles downed three Soviet gunships on the first outing — and within a year, half of Afghanistan’s sky was swept clear. Decades later, analysts wrote it off as obsolete. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the same missile, newly upgraded to kill drones, sent Russian helicopters fleeing for altitude all over again.

Ukraine has carried out a wave of drone strikes

Summary and Key Points: It sounds invented, but it actually flew. In the 1930s, the U.S. Navy built two enormous airships — the Akron and the Macon — that doubled as flying aircraft carriers, each nearly 800 feet long and carrying its own fighter planes. The planes dropped away on a trapeze hook, then hooked back on in mid-flight. The Navy believed these leviathans would change warfare forever. Then they began falling out of the sky — and one crash killed more people than the Hindenburg the world still remembers.

The UK wants to spend more on defence but is hamstrung by budget difficulties and a lack of strategic direction from Whitehall.

Summary and Key Points: It was so small they nicknamed it the “Tinker Toy.” But the A-4 Skyhawk (see our original photos below) would do almost everything a warplane could. It set a world speed record in 1959, flew more missions over Vietnam than any other Navy jet, and was so reliable the Blue Angels flew it for a dozen years. It carried a young John McCain over Hanoi the day he was shot down, fought for 20 nations, and earned one pilot a posthumous Medal of Honor after a feat that still defies belief. For a little jet, it cast an enormous shadow.

Iran has time on its side — and every week the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, the danger to the global economy grows. A new analysis lays out three ways this ends. The best case: a deal reopens the strait within weeks and the world dodges disaster. The darker paths are alarming — $200 oil, negative growth across the U.S. and Europe, a recession by the fourth quarter, an economy “scarred” beyond repair. And a single summer hurricane hitting a U.S. refinery could double prices overnight. Which path the world takes may come down to one deadline — and Tehran knows it.

Summary and Key Points: It’s remembered for one world-altering act: the B-29 Superfortress (check out our original photos below) remains the only aircraft ever to drop a nuclear weapon in combat, ending World War II over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But that overshadows how astonishing the machine itself was. In an age of open cockpits and hand-aimed guns, it flew with a pressurized cabin and an analog computer that aimed its turrets automatically — technology that wouldn’t be common for years.

Summary and Key Points: Every party in the Middle East says it wants the war to end — the U.S., Israel, Iran, and the Gulf states are all at the table. Yet a deal drifts further out of reach with each round, because every player holds a demand no one else will grant. Iran won’t surrender its enriched uranium. Israel won’t stop in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia wants a Palestinian state. Washington is swinging for the biggest bargain the region has ever seen.

The Iran War and Beyond 

A U.S. Navy EA-18G Growler prepares to refuel from a U.S. Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker over the U.S.

Summary and Key Points: On paper, it shouldn’t have stood a chance. France’s Rubis-class is among the smallest nuclear attack submarines ever built — barely 240 feet long, 70 sailors, dwarfed by the American and Soviet boats of its day. Yet in a 2015 exercise off Florida, one of them slipped through the defenses of an entire U.S. carrier strike group and scored a simulated kill on the supercarrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. How a sub that small got past the world’s most powerful navy comes down to one upgrade that changed everything.

Since the early days of the war in Ukraine, man

CONCORD, Calif. — U.S. military officials who run strategic port operations and deployment logistics on the West Coast hosted a maritime technology demonstration last month to prove out the feasibility of using a commercial unmanned surface vessel to investigate watercraft of interest without jeopardizing the security of crewed patrols.
Senior military personnel from Army Combat Capabilities Development Command and the 834th Transportation Battalion, who led the demo in mid-May, discussed their top takeaways from that showcase with U.S. Transportation Command leaders on Tuesday.

Summary and Key Points: Millennium Challenge 2002 was supposed to prove the future of U.S. network-centric warfare. Instead, it became a warning about overconfidence. Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, leading the Red Force (most likely Iran), used low-tech communications, small boats, and missile barrages to overwhelm a U.S. naval task force, “sinking” an aircraft carrier, cruisers, and amphibious ships early in the exercise. The decision to refloat the ships and restrict Red Force tactics fueled accusations that the war game had been scripted to protect favored Pentagon concepts.

Under growing pressure from Ukrainian drone strikes on its own territory, Russia launched one of its largest air attacks against Ukraine overnight on June 2. Reports described how Russian forces launched 656 drones and 73 missiles at targets across the country, with officials claiming that at least 22 were killed and more than 100 were injured. Major strikes were reported in Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Poltava, and Zaporizhzhia.

The scale of the attack has drawn a great deal of media attention for obvious reasons.

On the same day that William McRaven graduated from the University of Texas in 1977 with a degree in journalism, he received his commission into the United States Navy.
That day was a highlight of McRaven’s young life. Many more followed as McRaven became a four-star admiral and commander of United States Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2014.
Also Read: Mike Vining on Vietnam, Delta Force, and the sardines he never ate
A few months before McRaven’s time leading USSOCOM ended, he returned to his alma mater and delivered the spring commencement address.

The Royal Thai Navy have chosen C295 to complement the Army and Air Force, which GlobalData claim will cut down on ancillary costs.

A fragile ceasefire between Iran and the United States is under even more pressure as both sides traded attacks overnight on June 3. U.S. Central Command said it launched more “self-defense” strikes against Iran. The Americans had to shoot down missiles and drones fired by Iran that were traveling toward ships and targets in Gulf allied countries.

The United States conducted its retaliatory strikes on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz, the BBC reported. Central Command revealed that Iran fired two missiles at Kuwait and three at Bahrain.

Summary and Key Points: It stretched nearly two football fields and carried twenty ballistic missiles tipped with as many as 200 nuclear warheads — all, by one account, once aimed at the United States. The Soviet Typhoon remains the largest submarine ever built and one of the most feared weapons of the Cold War. Yet for all its menace, it was quietly outmatched by an American rival with even more firepower. And stranger still, despite its size, it could run quieter than boats a fraction as large. What finally sank the giant wasn’t a torpedo — it was a budget.

Face down in the dirt, with his hands held behind his back, Sgt. Maj. Russell Hull inched his body up a hill. It was around that time that he started to rethink the choices that led him to that moment.
“That was miserable,” said Hull, who graduated from the Army’s Sapper Leader Course in the Spring. “There was a few minutes where I wanted to quit, because I was just like, ‘What am I doing? I’m 43 years old. I’ve been in the Army over 20 years.

Summary and Key Points: Top Gun: Maverick reminded the world why the F-14 Tomcat is the most beloved fighter the Navy ever flew. What the film leaves out: there was supposed to be an even deadlier one. The Super Tomcat 21 would have super-cruised at Mach 1.3 without afterburners, added thrust-vectoring and a glass cockpit, and flown farther than the original — a jet one expert believes might have been the most maneuverable fighter on Earth for decades. The Navy had its chance. It said no, and the reason had nothing to do with the airplane.

Summary and Key Points: He broke the sound barrier — and in his 1986 memoir, Chuck Yeager called it the finest fighter in the world. The F-20 Tigershark was supersonic, deadly, easy to fly, and far cheaper than the F-16 it was built to rival. By every measure that mattered, it was a winner. Yet the U.S. never bought a single one, and the jet vanished before it reached a squadron. What killed it wasn’t a design flaw or even the two fatal crashes investigators blamed on the pilots. It was something else.

The F-20 Tigershark Explained 

F-20 Tigershark Model at Western Museum of Flight.

Donald Trump took the United States to war with Iran on February 28 to prove that American power still wrote the rules of the Middle East, and that meant Tehran would never get nuclear weapons. If the war ends the way it now looks like it might, with Tehran left controlling the Strait of Hormuz and the rest of the world paying for the privilege of passing through it, he will have proved something close to the opposite.

Right now, a meaningful share of the oil that keeps the global economy moving is not being pumped from the ground. It is being drained out of emergency reserves that governments spent decades filling for exactly this kind of catastrophe, and those reserves are running down at a pace that gives the world a hard deadline.

A standardised engine family is powering a new generation of heavier, smarter and more connected armoured vehicles.

This video describes the military situation in

I.E.

CIMSEC
To fulfill its mandate, the Commission must resolve five foundational issues.

WSJ
Officials say software restrictions on weapons and radar systems slowed down efforts to detect incoming drones and missiles

Trevithick, WarZone
The U.S.

A&SF M.

Summary and Key Points: For weeks, the story has been sanctions, enrichment, and inspections. But the thing most likely to sink Trump’s Iran diplomacy may have nothing to do with any of them — and everything to do with a city several hundred miles west of Tehran. In a move few saw coming, Trump reportedly stopped Netanyahu from striking Beirut to keep the talks alive. Even that may not be enough: the problem facing these negotiations is one no deal can solve at the table — and a war in Lebanon could decide it.

Summary and Key Points: It sounds impossible: the U.S. pumps more oil than any country ever has, and is a net exporter — yet it still imports millions of barrels of foreign crude every day, and record drilling can’t change it. The reason is a structural mismatch that most commentators miss, one that has been hiding in plain sight for nearly half a century. As the Strait of Hormuz stays closed and America’s reserves drain toward empty, that weakness is about to surface at the worst possible moment — and “drill, baby, drill” won’t be the answer.