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Ryan Evans talks with Philip Zelikow about his recent article for TNSR, “Confronting Another Axis? History, Humility, and Wishful Thinking.” Their wide-ranging and insightful conversation covers everything from Zelikow’s career as a high-level foreign policy practitioner and as an historian, his experience directing the 9/11 Commission, his argument that we are in an exceptionally volatile time in global politics, and more. Image: ChatGPT
The post Mitigating Risks in a Volatile World: A Conversation with Philip Zelikow appeared first on War on the Rocks.

Omar ‘Crispy’ Avila tried smoking a couple of times as a teen, but he didn’t like it. But when he joined the Army after high school, it seemed like he was ‘smoking and joking’ with his fellow infantrymen overnight.
“I was so focused on sports in high school that I didn’t really care for it. But after joining the military, I think the training goes hand in hand with nicotine and caffeine,” Avila said. “I just kind of picked it up and smoked ever since I was in — drinking a lot of coffee and smoking cigarettes to stay awake, especially during night missions.

A 14-year-old was killed and three other minors injured at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia earlier this week, officials said, when a wall collapsed in the locker room of the base pool.
The fatal incident took place at the Georgia base’s Heritage Club Pool men’s locker room on July 22, Air Force officials said in a release. One minor was treated on scene and released. Three minors were brought to local hospitals, where one of them died.
“Our hearts are broken for these individuals and their families.

The Pentagon’s top supplier of commercial electro-optical imagery, Maxar, debuted the first images captured by its second, next-generation WorldView Legion satellite exclusively with DefenseScoop on Thursday.
These extremely high-resolution pictures of precise locations in Singapore, South Africa, Spain and Brazil — as well as never-before shared images of the Pentagon from the first WorldView Legion — demonstrate what Maxar’s newest, still-growing constellation of cutting-edge satellites offer to the Defense Department and Intelligence Community in the near term.

Three different types of U.S. and Canadian fighter aircraft were dispatched to intercept a rare joint formation of Russian and Chinese bombers as they buzzed near Alaskan airspace Wednesday, according to the Defense Department.
Russian bombers are no stranger to Alaskan air defenders, but Wednesday marked the first appearance of Chinese aircraft in the Alaska ADIZ, a defense official said.

In 2020, Walker D. Mills and Dylan “Joose” Phillips-Levine wrote “The Future of Tactical Airlift is Here and it’s Vertical,” where they explore tactical airlift use in the U.S. military and argue that rotary-wing and tilt-rotor aircrafts should have a significant role in the future. Four years later, we invited them back to discuss how tactical airlift has evolved.  Read more below. Image: U.S. Air Force (Photo by Staff Sgt.

Frank Lazzara, Director of Advanced Vertical Lift Systems Sales and Strategy at Bell, discloses advances and future goals for FLRAA.

Supply chain problems in the UK will reportedly see spares from European countries redirected to the UK programme.

Public Domain

As a former USAF pilot who was stationed at Elmendorf AFB, Alaska in the 1980s, and has flown all over Alaska, the current ‘reporting’ on the ‘scramble’ to intercept Russian and Chinese bombers off the Alaskan coastline, air defense zone (ADIZ), is both absurd and ignorant.
Probing of Alaskan air space has been going on for decades and decades by the Russian Federation, then Soviet Union in the ’80s, and now the People’s Liberation Army has entered the game.
It is nothing new.
It is not a serious situation, nor was it a scramble.

The Defense Department wants to see whether industry’s drone killers can get the job done while operating in a contested electromagnetic environment.
The technical demonstration, slated to be conducted early next year, will be overseen by the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO), according to a new sources-sought notice.
The event is being planned as concerns grow about the threats posed by enemy drones and electronic warfare arsenals. While the U.S.