Author: Michael

Summary and Key Points: From space, the project seems to have no end: more than 80 new nuclear launch pads spread across thousands of square kilometers of Chinese desert, ringed by bunkers and command nodes.

-A Reuters investigation pulled it into the open, and the analysts who studied the satellite images came away unsettled — one said he’d never seen anything like it.

-The scale points to a shift in China’s entire nuclear posture, and a single, sobering goal aimed at Washington.

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When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in 2022, no one believed the war would reach Moscow, 500 kilometers away, behind dense air defenses. That assumption is dead. Over three years, Ukraine turned the occasional symbolic drone into a campaign that closes the capital’s airports, torches its suburbs, and burns its refineries. But the most revealing part isn’t what Ukraine has hit.

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A flight of the Marine Corps’ legendary AV-8B Harrier IIs, ground attack jets that can take off and land vertically, will make a final public flight this week to mark the aircraft’s retirement after more than four decades of service with the Corps.
The Harrier’s “sundown” ceremony is scheduled for Wednesday at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina. The Harriers being retired belong to Marine Attack Squadron 223. A detachment from the squadron deployed to the Caribbean last year as part of the U.S. military’s buildup in the region that culminated in the Jan.

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Russia is bleeding up to 1,500 men a day in the Ukraine war — enough that the army must rebuild a full division every two weeks just to stand still. A national mobilization would fix it, but that’s the one order Putin won’t give: last time he tried, hundreds of thousands fled. So he built something else — a quiet machine for finding bodies without ever signing the decree. It’s running out of room, and the day he’s been dodging only gets worse.

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Ukraine’s drone war has entered a phase its commanders call a ‘logistics lockdown,’ and it’s taking out things Russia can’t replace. The latest strike hit an aircraft plant inside Russia and destroyed two rare planes that sat in maintenance for over a decade. But it’s what one of them does that makes the loss sting: it’s part of the system Moscow uses to reach its nuclear-armed submarines at sea. Russia spent years getting it ready — Ukraine needed seconds.

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For many Americans, their first introduction to Bruce Crandall was his portrayal by Greg Kinnear in the 2002 film “We Were Soldiers.” While the film depicts the actions for which Crandall earned the Medal of Honor, the Army aviator had a distinguished career beyond his service in Vietnam.
Also Read: How to get a name rubbing from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall
Born in Olympia, Washington in February 1933, Crandall was an All-American high school athlete and played baseball at the University of Washington with MLB hopes.

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When China rolled the DF-17 through Beijing, it was unveiling a weapon built for one purpose: to sink American carriers before they get close. It flies too fast and turns too sharply for the defenses that stopped an earlier generation of missiles, and its reach covers nearly every U.S. base that matters in the Pacific. But the carrier-killer has a hidden weakness — and the Navy has built its defense around exploiting it. Whether that’s enough is the open question.

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