Author: Michael

The J-15 Fighter in One Word: Heavy – The Shenyang J-15 “Flying Shark” is among the heaviest fighters ever flown from the deck of a ship, and every argument anyone has had about this aircraft for twelve years traces back to that one fact.

The J-15: Explained 
The weight is inherited. The J-15 was reverse-engineered from an unfinished Su-33 prototype that China acquired from Ukraine in the early 2000s, and the Su-33 is the naval branch of the Sukhoi Flanker, a big, long-ranged, twin-engine air-superiority design that was never small to begin with.

On Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posted a video to social media, stating that Russia had launched “one of the largest Russian ballistic missile attacks to date.”

“Kyiv and the Kyiv region were the Russians’ primary targets. They had been preparing this attack for several days, stockpiling missiles,” the Ukrainian leader said in the post.

Neptune Missile from Ukraine Creative Commons Image

Neptune Cruise Missile Ukraine Government Photo

“The threat, of course, remains even now, and this must be taken into account.

The H-6 Bomber in One Word: New. That is not a typo, and it is not a joke about relative ages.

The H-6 descends from the Tupolev Tu-16, which first flew in April 1952. But China stopped building H-6s in the early 1990s, when the design was plainly obsolete, and then restarted the production line around 2006. The bulk of the modern force, the K and N models that make up China’s front-line bomber strength, was built after that restart. The outline is seventy years old.

The Department of Defense identified two of the three U.S. troops killed last week in an Iranian attack on a base in Jordan.
The two active duty soldiers were killed when Iranian drones and missiles targeted the base on Friday, July 17. The attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base was part of a wider wave of strikes on installations in the Middle East used by American troops, part of days of back-and-forth fighting between the U.S. and Iran. 
Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, was killed July 17, and 1st Lt.

Ukrainian Drone Attacks Continue to Hammer Moscow: Ukraine continued with its massive, coordinated attack on the Russian capital over the weekend, launching more than 400 drones toward the region.

The strikes—one of the largest of the war—targeted logistics centers, oil and gas facilities, and warehouses, killing several people and wounding dozens, while setting multiple buildings ablaze.

B.

Kris Osborn, Warrior Maven
Decoupling software from hardware allows the Pentagon to rapidly upgrade stealth bombers and fighters, breaking proprietary barriers to ensure seamless data…

Eve Sampson, Air Force Times
. . . one defense company is betting that the workload of fighter pilots will swell far beyond flying an aircraft to include directing swarms of drones.

T. Novelly, Defense One
The defense firm unveiled work on an autonomous tiltrotor just weeks after winning Air Force’s CCA contract.

Trevithick, TWZ
Issues tied to Zumwalt’s hugely powerful hybrid-electric power plant and other factors have set back its return to the fleet.