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Summary and Key Points: Ukraine is now one of the most heavily mined countries on earth. Current U.S. and international estimates put contaminated territory at approximately 139,000 square kilometers — more than a fifth of Ukraine, larger than Greece, and roughly the size of North Carolina.

-The mines include antipersonnel mines, anti-tank mines, cluster munitions, unexploded artillery shells, drone-dropped munitions, and booby traps.

-One estimate has put the cost to Ukraine at more than $11 billion in lost annual GDP.

Lockheed Martin broke ground on its new Munitions Production Center in Troy, Alabama, on 21 May 2026, to meet increase customer demand.

The U.S. Navy decommissioned all four Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships from Bahrain in September 2025 — USS Devastator, USS Dextrous, USS Gladiator, and USS Sentry — six months before Iran mined the Strait of Hormuz. Four additional Avengers remained at Sasebo, Japan. When the crisis hit, USS Chief and USS Pioneer departed Singapore on April 10, weeks after Iran had already mined the Strait. On April 11, CENTCOM sent the Arleigh Burke guided-missile destroyers USS Frank E. Petersen Jr.

The Dassault Rafale is a French-built multirole fighter aircraft developed by Dassault Aviation to fulfill a wide variety of combat missions within a single platform. Conceived in the late 1970s to replace multiple legacy aircraft types, the Rafale was designed as an “omnirole” fighter capable of conducting air-superiority, ground-attack, reconnaissance, anti-ship warfare, and nuclear-deterrence missions with minimal reconfiguration.

U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio told reporters this week that Cuba poses a national security threat to the United States and said the likelihood of a peaceful agreement with Havana is not high. The comments came one day after the U.S. Justice Department charged former Cuban president and military chief Raúl Castro with the murder of U.S. nationals.

War with Cuba Coming Soon? 

President Donald Trump plays golf in the Senior Club Championship at Trump National Golf Club Jupiter, Sunday, April 6, 2025, in Jupiter, Florida.

Service members are required to take annual suicide prevention training each year, so they can learn about the warning signs and mental health resources available to them. However, a new federal watchdog report found that the majority of military services do not “effectively monitor training completion” for annual suicide prevention courses, with the exception of the Air Force.

Memorial Day means so much more than a day off work.
This is just not another long weekend. Memorial Day is not just about recognizing the unofficial start of summer when we fire up the barbecue grill, reconnect with friends and family, and start to work on your tan again. Full stop: There is nothing wrong with that.
But how many Americans truly devote more than a passing thought to why we have Memorial Day in the first place? Our guess is not as many as they should.
Related: How Ronald Reagan healed scars from Vietnam on Memorial Day in 1984
It doesn’t have to be that way.

We all know that China’s primary geopolitical objective is to reunite Taiwan with the Mainland, either by peaceful means or by force. Part of this effort is to keep the United States out of the Taiwan Strait and stop the Americans from interfering. This means that the Chinese want to play defense against the United States, and they have created a new “Great Wall” of anti-ship missiles to keep the Americans and their aircraft carriers down and out in East Asia.

Keeping the Americans Down and Out in the Indo-Pacific

ATLANTIC OCEAN (Sept.

The Eurofighter Typhoon’s CAPTOR-E AESA radar is mounted on a pivoting mechanism that gives the aircraft a wider field of view than any rival fighter. The Tranche 4 aircraft recently unveiled by Germany received the ECRS Mk 1 AESA radar, developed jointly by Italy, the UK and Germany. The Tranche 5 — still under development — will reach operational status in the 2030s. Phase 1 Enhancements turned the Typhoon from an air superiority fighter into a multirole aircraft capable of air-to-air and air-to-ground missions in the same sortie.

Ukraine’s June 2025 Operation Spiderweb destroyed roughly 7 Russian Tu-95 strategic bombers and damaged 2 others in a single coordinated strike — the worst Russian bomber loss since the Second World War. Ukrainian first-person view drones were smuggled deep inside Russia in hidden compartments atop commercial transport trucks and struck Olenya, Belaya, and other air bases at the same time. Across the war, Ukraine has damaged or destroyed about a dozen Russian Tu-95s.