Key Points and Summary – Roughly 15 years ago, the U.S. Navy surfaced three Ohio-class SSGN missile submarines in a warning to China. However powerful a message that was over a decade ago, the military balance between Washington and Beijing has shifted.
-The strategic landscape beneath the Indo-Pacific is changing, with China’s growing submarine fleet becoming increasingly capable and visible, challenging decades of U.S. undersea dominance.
Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Wash. (Aug.
In the Fall of 2023, a brigade of the 10th Mountain Division became the first large unit of U.S. soldiers to face waves of long-distance one-way attack drones. The “Commandos” of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team were the primary defense force for coalition bases across Iraq and Syria, during a time when troops in the region faced 170 attacks from one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and ballistic missiles fired by Iranian-backed militias.
The unit’s top leaders had seen years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On October 21, 2025, Shield AI unveiled its X-BAT stealth fighter drone. As one would expect from a company specializing in artificial intelligence, the X-BAT is also an autonomous aircraft that the company plans to fly with its in-house autonomy software. As if that weren’t enough, Shield AI celebrated “Back to the Future” Day and said, “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need… roads.”
Or, apparently, runways.
Shield AI is a San Diego-based aerospace and defense tech startup.
Mark W. Castillon, RealClearDefense
For generations, America’s combat arms thrived on a hard edge—dark humor, vulgar cadences, and rough rites that forged trust under fire.
The British Royal Navy Type 45 class destroyer HMS Duncan has conducted a forty-eight-hour shadowing mission of the Russian Udaloy class destroyer Vice Admiral Kulakov between the North Sea and the English Channel. The incident occurred at a time of particularly high tensions between Russia and the Western Bloc, and represented the first time a Royal Navy surface combatant operating under NATO control in UK national waters during a third party passage.
This video describes the military situation in
When it comes to missiles, America lacks the magazine depth for a long fight, especially against a peer competitor like China. A major part of the problem: traditional U.S. missiles are simply too costly to produce at scale. Ryan sits down with three industry leaders working to change that. Listen to Ethan Thornton (Mach Industries), Sean Pitt (Castelion), and Steve Milano (Anduril) as they explain how they aim to produce different kinds of missiles at scale at costs orders of magnitude lower than the primes.
Like tectonic plates, TRICARE is shifting again. If you’re a military spouse or family member trying to keep track of what’s changing and what it means for your family’s actual care, it might feel like a 7.5 earthquake. Between coverage adjustments in 2025 and the launch of a new demonstration project in 2026, the headlines may not always clearly explain how these moves impact day-to-day access, costs, and peace of mind. However, this community has been addressing this issue for a long time.
If educators do not learn to embrace AI, they risk being left behind. Yet the question before professional military education institutions is not whether they should embrace this new technology, but how to do so in a way that prepares their students for the future. As educators examine the road ahead, they must find a way to incorporate AI into professional military education without undermining the intellectual development that is the cornerstone of their mission.
The A-10 Thunderbolt II is often lovingly referred to as the “grunt of the skies,” alluding to the nickname given to U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps infantry troops. If the A-10 is the Air Force’s grunt, then its pilots are gonna need some things broken down “Barney-style”—that is to say, into as few basic instructions as possible.
Have no fear, the U.S. Air Force did just that for pilots who might have encountered the Soviet Union’s T-62 main battle tank.
