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American auto manufacturers are preparing to shut down production lines. Defense manufacturers may not be far behind. The tit-for-tat tariff escalation between the United States and China dominated headlines throughout March and April, but the real escalation happened quietly. On April 4, Beijing restricted exports of seven rare earth elements and rare earth permanent magnets — key components in everything from automatic transmissions to missiles.

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The recent decision by the Secretary of Defense to effectively terminate the FA-XX Navy aircraft was a bold and decisive move to fixing the Navy, not just because it stops the Navy from spending money on an aircraft it probably does not need, but because it potentially breaks the hold that naval aviators have on the Navy.  Now the political leadership within the Defense Department must make another bold and decisive move to change the way the Navy builds ships.
America’s shipbuilding enterprise is at a critical inflection point.

Welp, another day, another military plane appears to have drawn another dick in the sky.
Two of them, actually, and we kinda want to say that these two — sketched by a Coast Guard HC-130J over the Pacific Ocean Monday night — indicate that military sky drawings of male genitalia are getting “better,” but then we’d be calling them a good thing, and we aren’t doing that.
“Funnier,” maybe. Definitely more detailed.
It’s not even certain that this set of airborne phallic symbols was intentional.

The Navy’s budget request for the 2026 fiscal year is its most ambitious shipbuilding push in years. After asking Congress for just six new ships in the last fiscal year, and nine in the one before that, the service now wants 19 more. That includes attack submarines, destroyers, amphibious ships, and support vessels totaling about $47.3 billion. 
At $292.2 billion, the Navy’s proposed budget request is $11 billion more than last year. It includes new emphasis on developing hypersonic missiles, directed energy weapons, unmanned systems, and undersea capabilities.

Food during World War II was in a category all its own. Although the United States had emerged from the Great Depression, the need for war materials sparked a system of rationing, which in turn led to a patriotic food culture designed to support the men fighting the global war. Nothing, it seemed, was safe from sweeping changes.
Everything Americans ate during World War II became slightly adulterated, highly substituted, or heavily rebranded. The goal was to make everything last a little bit longer and stretch a little bit further.

The Silicon Valley-headquartered Defense Innovation Unit released a new solicitation Wednesday for unmanned underwater vehicles, including “one-way attack” systems.
Via its commercial solutions opening contracting mechanism, DIU is trying to find solutions that meet the U.S. military’s need for undersea kamikaze drones and UUVs that can be launched from submarines.
To address the first challenge, the organization is looking for hunter-killer systems that can be deployed from a government-provided platform or pier.

In their 2022 article “Moving on After AUKUS: Working with France in the Indo-Pacific,” Gesine Weber and Edgar Tam argued that despite AUKUS roiling France’s relationship with the United States, France had meaningful contributions to offer to the Indo-Pacific region and the non-nuclear aspects of the AUKUS partnership. Three years on, we asked them to reassess their argument.

The Marine Corps wants $58 million in fiscal 2026 to support the next phase of its collaborative combat aircraft initiative, according to budget documents.
Nearly $20 million would go to air vehicle development and about $15 million to mission systems development and integration. The rest of the funding would be allotted for systems engineering, control segment development and integration, and development support.
Officials noted that the spending plan for 2026 increased since the last budget submission.

The Army’s science and technology hub, through its own work and collaboration with industry, is developing a command and control architecture to counter drones as well as transition static systems into vehicle-mounted capabilities to defeat threats on the move.
While the organization’s counter-unmanned aerial system (C-UAS) efforts date back several years, the work by the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Center is part of Project Flytrap taking place in Europe.

In early June, Lee Jae-myung — the Democratic Party’s candidate — won South Korea’s presidential elections. He took office after several months of political turbulence that followed President Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed attempt to impose martial law. Lee’s election raised questions about the future of South Korean security and foreign policy.