The Olympics have a long history of countries and participants using the games as a platform to build soft power, promote propaganda, advance diplomacy, and highlight political causes. These efforts can take hopeful forms, such as the 2016 creation of the Refugee Olympic Team and the role of the 2018 Olympics in boosting diplomacy between North Korea and South Korea. Sometimes, these events can be very dark, such as Nazi Germany’s shrewd use of propaganda while hosting the 1936 games and the 1972 terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team.

Summary and Key Points: China’s expanding aircraft carrier fleet is a major step in Beijing’s push for a true blue-water navy, with the Fujian marking its most advanced carrier yet.

-The ship signals real progress, especially with EMALS-style catapults, but major limits remain, including conventional propulsion and deck-layout constraints that could reduce sortie efficiency.

China Aircraft Carrier on the High Seas. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

-The broader takeaway is clear: China’s carriers may not yet match U.S. Navy supercarriers, but they can still pressure U.S.

Public Domain

Washington, D.C. – In the dark skies above Yemen on March 27, 2025, two U.S. Air Force F-16 pilots came within seconds of catastrophe when Houthi rebels launched a deadly surface-to-air missile ambush. Lt. Col. William “Skate” Parks and Maj. Michael “Danger” Blea, flying “Wild Weasel” jets specialized in suppressing enemy air defenses, survived a harrowing 15-minute ordeal that earned them the Silver Star—the military’s third-highest valor award.

What do a Norwegian dam, a Baltic Sea telecoms

Summary and Key Points: The SR-71 Blackbird remains one of the most remarkable aircraft ever built, combining extreme speed, altitude, and survivability in a way no other spy plane could match.

-A famous Kadena-based flight story captures its legend: a crew departed Japan on Saturday and reached California in time for Friday happy hour, thanks to time zones and Mach 3-plus speed.

SR-71 Blackbird National Security Journal Photo by Dr. Brent M. Eastwood.

SR-71 Blackbird National Security Journal Photo Collection.

Battle Talk: A Para’s View of Ukraine is a gr

Theodore Roosevelt led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, survived an assassination attempt, and almost died while exploring the Amazon.
Roosevelt did what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it. And what he wanted to do on August 25, 1905, was to go underneath the surface of Long Island Sound in New York aboard the USS Plunger, one of the U.S. Navy’s first submarines.
Related: Teddy Roosevelt is the reason for military PT tests
It was a stormy day, but bad weather (or anything else, for that matter) rarely stopped the nation’s 26th president.

Hundreds of National Guard service members from several states along the East Coast are responding to the “bomb cyclone” winter storm that dumped record levels of snow across the northeast over the weekend. In military vehicles built for high-water and roadless terrain, Guardsmen are responding to emergency calls where even the beefiest of civilian vehicles cannot.
One team of four Massachusetts Guardsmen responded to dozens of calls for help Monday night in the small town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, where 30 or more inches of snow were reported from several nearby weather stations.

American forces fought for three weeks during the bloody and costly Meuse-Argonne Offensive. They suffered 100,000 casualties to reach the objectives that were planned for the first day of fighting.
One of those objectives was a large, well-defended hill. Douglas MacArthur was ordered to either capture it or spend 5,000 lives in the failure. MacArthur took the challenge, promising his name would be on that list if he failed.
MacArthur was a brigadier general at the time.

Summary and Key Points: In the 1981 Ocean Venture NATO exercise, the Canadian Oberon-class submarine HMCS Okanagan (or a sister boat) achieved the unthinkable: a simulated “kill” on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.

-Running almost silently on battery power, the Canadian crew exploited “quiet spaces” in the carrier’s acoustic screen, slipped past a fortress of destroyers, and registered a confirmed torpedo hit.

-This “David vs. Goliath” moment proved that low-cost diesel-electric submarines, operated by skilled crews, remain a primary threat to high-value nuclear platforms.

NO RETREAT — Built for the Breaking Point | M

Summary and Key Points: The U.S. Army has ended a decades-old uniform distinction by requiring all drill sergeants to wear the same campaign hat, replacing the bush hat previously worn by women in the role.

-The change took effect January 2, 2026, and applies across active-duty and reserve formations. Army leaders say the move reflects a single standard for certification and service, while also addressing long-running manufacturing and quality-control problems tied to the bush hat.

Teaching World War II effectively means resisting the temptation to begin with explosions, battles, and December 7, 1941.
For my U.S. history students, the real story starts much earlier during the fragile years between the two world wars, when economic collapse, political instability, and wounded national pride created the conditions that allowed dictators to rise. Long before the United States entered World War II, warning signs were flashing across Europe and Asia, and Americans themselves were deeply divided over how to respond.

Patria has delivered the first five CAVS 6×6 armoured vehicles to the Bundeswehr under the Common Armoured Vehicle System (CAVS) programme.

Summary and Key Points: The F-22 Raptor remains one of the most capable fighters in the world, but a 2012 training matchup with German Eurofighter Typhoons showed even elite aircraft can be caught out by tactics and geometry.

-During Red Flag drills, Luftwaffe pilots claimed notional kills on Raptors in visual-range engagements, later joking about having “Raptor salad for lunch.”

An Air Force F-22 Raptor executes a supersonic fly by over the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. John C.

Summary and Key Points: France’s Charles de Gaulle remains one of the world’s most important aircraft carriers and the only operational nuclear-powered carrier outside the United States.

-Despite early delays and technical issues, the ship matured into a proven combat platform with deployments supporting operations in Afghanistan, Libya, and against ISIS.

-Its air wing, catapult system, and cross-deck interoperability with U.S. Navy aircraft make it a serious force multiplier.

Summary and Key Points: RIMPAC 2024 delivered a powerful demonstration of U.S. and allied maritime strike capability when the retired USS Dubuque and USS Tarawa were sunk in separate SINKEX events near Hawaii.

-The exercises showcased realistic live-fire training, interoperability, and the use of modern anti-ship weapons, including LRASM and the QUICKSINK munition.

-A B-2 Spirit and an AC-130 also contributed to the broader testing effort, highlighting joint-force maritime strike options.
-Beyond training value, the sinkings underscored a strategic message aimed at China: U.S.

Defense One
A look at new tech efforts in the Pentagon’s $151 billion reconciliation allocation plan.

S. Freedberg, Breaking Defense
Known as Project Overwatch, the AI is trained to distinguish different types of emissions, autonomously identifying the source for the human pilot.

Global Defense News
The U.S.

FGlobal
The U.S. Air Force has issued initial development contracts for a new class of engines meant to power the emerging Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).

J. Trevithick, WarZone
The USAF says its Collaborative Combat Aircraft drone program has entered the weapons integration and captive carry testing phase.

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Agentic AI is quickly moving from demo to deployment inside the Department of Defense. But what does it actually mean to give AI “agency” — and what does it take to make those systems work on real military networks?In this episode, Ryan sits down with Ben Van Roo, co-founder and CEO of Legion Intelligence, Jags Kandasamy, co-founder and CEO of Latent AI, and Aaron Brown, co-founder and CEO of Lumbra AI, to discuss why the real challenge is not just building smart models but getting AI agents to run on military networks and inside operational workflows.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has purged dozens of senior People’s Liberation Army officers since mid-2023, including two in January, but will this increase the risk of war? The loss of experienced officers could make Xi less confident in how his military would perform, but his increased power could also provide him greater latitude to order troops into combat to achieve what might be a key legacy for him — the long-elusive unification of China with Taiwan. As political scientists recognize, competent leadership is a key ingredient of battlefield effectiveness.

When U.S. President Donald Trump floated the possibility of taking Greenland by force, European leaders reacted with outrage — and then, almost immediately, with relief once he backed down. Wolfgang Ischinger, the doyen of the Munich Security Conference, expressed similar relief when he described Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech there — chock full of conditionality on immigration and culture war tropes — as “reassuring.”That sentiment may prove far more dangerous than any threats from Washington.The trans-Atlantic partnership of days past no longer exists.

HMS Anson, an Astute-class attack submarine, do

“I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
Well, that’s one way to make a memorable speech.
That line was part of a famous speech Gen. George S. Patton would deliver to troops before a battle, a screed historian Terry Brighton called “the greatest motivational speech of the war and perhaps of all time” in his book “Patton, Montgomery, Rommel: Masters of War.”
The general would always deliver the speech without notes, so it changed slightly each time.

The Army dubbed seven soldiers champions of its first drone competition Friday, each taking home accolades in various categories as the service looks to build-out its unmanned aerial systems repertoire.
Dubbed the “Best Drone Warfighter Competition,” the three-day event in Huntsville, Alabama last week brought more than 100 soldiers from across the Army — including the National Guard and Reserve — to vie for the three top titles and a chance to join the service’s competitive UAS team.

Since October, an intelligence battalion in the 82nd Airborne Division has been using home-grown AI tools that unit leaders say reduce staff work and make it easier to support the “All American” requirement of being able to deploy anywhere across the globe within 18 hours.
Officials told DefenseScoop in a recent interview that they’ve used the capabilities — created in Maven Smart System — to aggregate personnel, equipment and property management information across the unit, reducing “the amount of monotonous staff work” for soldiers, according to Maj.

At first, U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Kenneth Rice did not know what to make of the bright orange and green flash.
A block away from where an atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, Rice was a prisoner of war at the time of the catastrophic explosion.
Related: Why Hiroshima and Nagasaki are safe, but Chernobyl isn’t
“We were accustomed to B-29 bombers making attacks during the day and firebombing at night,” Rice recalled years later to The Record, a newspaper in his home state of Michigan. “But this was different, and a lot of us were confused and scared.

The Space Development Agency announced Monday that AST SpaceMobile has received a contract to conduct an on-orbit demonstration of commercial-based tactical satellite communications capabilities.
The $30 million other transaction agreement was awarded via SDA’s Hybrid Acquisition for Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (HALO) program that focuses on rapidly testing commercial space tools for defense applications. Under the deal, the Texas-headquartered company will put its broadband technology through its paces for high-speed tactical SATCOM.

Watch players from the Inter Services Rugby Cha

A top Department of Veterans Affairs official said the VA has no plans to implement a new rule that veterans advocates fiercely resisted when it was announced last week.
“Our intentions were to put out a rule, which we thought would clarify our processes,” VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence said on Sunday while addressing a conference held by Disabled American Veterans, or DAV. “But obviously, it did not. So we withdrew the rule. And candidly, we have no intention of ever doing anything or talking about it ever again.

Former British Army Major Andrew Fox joins BFBS

Four military working dogs died over a three-year period at bases across the country because they were housed in aging kennels that were not kept in good condition, a Pentagon report found. Kennels at bases around the U.S. did not protect dogs “from extreme weather conditions, kennel mold issues, or manage quarantine and isolation areas,” a report from The DoD Inspector General found.
The IG also found conditions of neglect at the military-wide hub for dog training, the Air Force’s 341st Training Base at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas. 
The U.S.

Type 45 destroyer HMS Dragon will undergo essen

Australia has taken delivery of two AH-64E Apache attack helicopters from the US as part of a Foreign Military Sales agreement.

In 1862, the Union Army was in striking distance of Richmond, the Confederate capital.
The Union commander hoped to wrap up the entire war with just a few more engagements. However, surprising aggression by the Army of Northern Virginia’s new commander caused a Union defeat, leading to two more years of warfare.
In May 1862, Gen. George B. McClellan, a railroad man turned military officer, was the Union’s top officer. While McClelland had many drawbacks, his organizational skills were top-notch.

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How much can $100 million in gold buy?
A year after World War II ended, President Harry Truman’s administration thought that was a fair price to purchase Greenland.
As you might have guessed, the offer was either ignored or outright ejected. Otherwise, 80 years later, President Donald Trump wouldn’t be so gung-ho about acquiring the world’s largest island “one way or the other.”
Related: That time Russia tried to join NATO
Nevermind that Greenland is part of the kingdom of Denmark, which, like the United States, belongs to NATO.

BAE Systems has unveiled the CV9035 MkIV infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) intended for the Armed Forces of the Slovak Republic.

An attack in the western city of Lviv has raised concerns over the prospect of a growing terror threat in Ukrainian cities.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Didn’t Darth Vader have a lightsaber, and was that a Magnum P.I. reference?” Yes and yes.
Darth Vader used a red lightsaber, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age (never mind the mass murder he committed with it), and Tom Selleck is the man.
On the topic of legendary actors, the late James Earl Jones voiced the iconic Sith Lord from the first Star Wars film in 1977 until 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker” (he granted permission to use AI to generate Vader’s voice in “Kenobi”)—and it’s his revolver that’s up for sale.

The UK has joined a pan-European air defence programme known as LEAP, intended to detect and intercept hostile small drones.

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French sources have reported that India has been refused access to the source code governing the Rafale fighter’s main electronic systems and its electronic warfare suite, including the SPECTRA defensive aids package, as the sale of up to 114 of the aircraft remains under discussion. This follows India’s cancellation of a prior agreement to procure 126 Rafale fighters in the 2010s in large part due to the limits of the technology transfers which French negotiators were willing to offer, with only 36 fighters having been ordered.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that the country will continue to treat the modernisation of its nuclear triad as an “unconditional priority” in broader efforts to strengthen the capabilities of the armed forces and tech sector. ”The development of the nuclear triad, which guarantees Russia’s security and enables us to effectively ensure strategic deterrence and balance of power in the world, remains our unconditional priority,” he stated.