For U.S. special operations personnel, conducting high-altitude parachute jumps are pretty much par for the course. Yet doing so with a nuclear bomb strapped between your legs is on an entirely different level.
That’s exactly what can be seen in the top shot above. Here, a U.S. Army Special Forces paratrooper is pictured free-falling during a training exercise with a Special Atomic Demolition Munition, or SADM, harnessed to them. A form of atomic demolition munition (ADM), SADMs were man-portable nuclear weapons, also known as “backpack nukes.
Author: Michael
The Russian military is performing better than expected in the opening phases of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
The post Ukraine’s counteroffensive hits strong Russian resistance first appeared on Sandboxx.
The post Ukraine’s counteroffensive hits strong Russian resistance appeared first on Sandboxx.
A New York-based university submitted a special request to the Pentagon for permission to continue operations of a controversial Chinese government-linked academic institute while receiving funding from the Defense Department, DefenseScoop has learned.
This request comes shortly after Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., chairman of the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), penned separate letters to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Alfred University President Mark Zupan earlier this month.
The French military has awarded Naval Group a new contract to study the design of a future unmanned armed underwater vehicle, the company announced on June 8.
The nine-month study will allow Naval Group to examine key use cases and develop system architectures for an Unmanned Combat Underwater Vehicle, or UCUV. Their missions would include intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), with the idea of helping the French military “dominate” the seabed, according to Naval Group.
USAF
U.S. satellites with very high-fidelity infrared sensors detected what appears to have been an explosion at Ukraine’s Nova Khakovka dam right before it failed earlier this week, according to a new report. You can read more about what else is known about this incident, over which Ukrainian and Russian authorities continue to trade accusations, in The War Zone‘s earlier reporting.
The New York Times first reported earlier today on the U.S.
Russian troops defending the front lines against the Ukrainian advance are discovering a lurking danger that threatens to make their positions more precarious.
“The enemy is remotely undermining our rear, ammunition supply routes and reserves,” Alexander Sladkov, a leading pro-Russian military blogger, wrote in a Telegram post on Thursday.
Sladkov wrote that Ukrainian forces were firing the Remote Anti-Armor Mine System, a US-made artillery shell that lays anti-tank mines by dropping them over the front line.
Independent government auditors have found that the Navy’s Virginia-class fast attack submarine program continues to “degrade” and that problems with “staffing estimates and labor efficiency” will take each Block V ship an average of “two years more than was reported last year.”
“Due to the delays, program officials are developing a new, more realistic schedule for Block V. They said they hope to complete this process by early 2023,” according to a new Government Accountability Office report outlining the status of several of the Pentagon’s major weapons systems programs.
On Tuesday, Korea Aerospace Industries fired the first shot of an IRIS-T missile from the new KF-21 Boramae platform. The European short-range air-to-air missile (identification AIM-2000), with its unrivaled close combat and interception capabilities, has been chosen to be integrated into the Korean indigenous fighter.
Just 10 months after the first flight, the fighter program fired the first live shot.
Turkey’s first Bayraktar Kızılelma unmanned combat aircraft, developed by Baykar Technologies, is moving towards serial production, with plans to start in 2024.
Baykar, a leading Turkish defense company, achieved a major milestone when the Kızılelma rolled off the production line in November 2022. A series of ground tests were then successfully completed at the flight training and test center of the northwestern province of Tekirdağ, in the district of Çorlu.
The next target is to start serial production of the warplane in 2024.
U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. James Merriman)
The U.S. Navy’s Infrared Search And Track System, or IRST, intended for its F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter jets, is still to join the fleet, more than four years after it entered production. The podded IRST, seen as a critical tool to retain the Navy’s air-to-air advantage over potential adversaries, was first flown on a Super Hornet in late 2019, but operational testing is not now expected to begin until early next year.
The U.S.