Summary and Key Points: It sounds invented, but it actually flew. In the 1930s, the U.S. Navy built two enormous airships — the Akron and the Macon — that doubled as flying aircraft carriers, each nearly 800 feet long and carrying its own fighter planes. The planes dropped away on a trapeze hook, then hooked back on in mid-flight. The Navy believed these leviathans would change warfare forever. Then they began falling out of the sky — and one crash killed more people than the Hindenburg the world still remembers.
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FN, a brand of FN Browning Group’s Defence & Security division, has expanded its rifle portfolio with the introduction of the FN ARKA.
The UK wants to spend more on defence but is hamstrung by budget difficulties and a lack of strategic direction from Whitehall.
Summary and Key Points: It was so small they nicknamed it the “Tinker Toy.” But the A-4 Skyhawk (see our original photos below) would do almost everything a warplane could. It set a world speed record in 1959, flew more missions over Vietnam than any other Navy jet, and was so reliable the Blue Angels flew it for a dozen years. It carried a young John McCain over Hanoi the day he was shot down, fought for 20 nations, and earned one pilot a posthumous Medal of Honor after a feat that still defies belief. For a little jet, it cast an enormous shadow.
Iran has time on its side — and every week the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, the danger to the global economy grows. A new analysis lays out three ways this ends. The best case: a deal reopens the strait within weeks and the world dodges disaster. The darker paths are alarming — $200 oil, negative growth across the U.S. and Europe, a recession by the fourth quarter, an economy “scarred” beyond repair. And a single summer hurricane hitting a U.S. refinery could double prices overnight. Which path the world takes may come down to one deadline — and Tehran knows it.
Summary and Key Points: It’s remembered for one world-altering act: the B-29 Superfortress (check out our original photos below) remains the only aircraft ever to drop a nuclear weapon in combat, ending World War II over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But that overshadows how astonishing the machine itself was. In an age of open cockpits and hand-aimed guns, it flew with a pressurized cabin and an analog computer that aimed its turrets automatically — technology that wouldn’t be common for years.
Summary and Key Points: Every party in the Middle East says it wants the war to end — the U.S., Israel, Iran, and the Gulf states are all at the table. Yet a deal drifts further out of reach with each round, because every player holds a demand no one else will grant. Iran won’t surrender its enriched uranium. Israel won’t stop in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia wants a Palestinian state. Washington is swinging for the biggest bargain the region has ever seen.
The Iran War and Beyond
A U.S. Navy EA-18G Growler prepares to refuel from a U.S. Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker over the U.S.
Summary and Key Points: On paper, it shouldn’t have stood a chance. France’s Rubis-class is among the smallest nuclear attack submarines ever built — barely 240 feet long, 70 sailors, dwarfed by the American and Soviet boats of its day. Yet in a 2015 exercise off Florida, one of them slipped through the defenses of an entire U.S. carrier strike group and scored a simulated kill on the supercarrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. How a sub that small got past the world’s most powerful navy comes down to one upgrade that changed everything.
CONCORD, Calif. — U.S. military officials who run strategic port operations and deployment logistics on the West Coast hosted a maritime technology demonstration last month to prove out the feasibility of using a commercial unmanned surface vessel to investigate watercraft of interest without jeopardizing the security of crewed patrols.
Senior military personnel from Army Combat Capabilities Development Command and the 834th Transportation Battalion, who led the demo in mid-May, discussed their top takeaways from that showcase with U.S. Transportation Command leaders on Tuesday.
Summary and Key Points: Millennium Challenge 2002 was supposed to prove the future of U.S. network-centric warfare. Instead, it became a warning about overconfidence. Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, leading the Red Force (most likely Iran), used low-tech communications, small boats, and missile barrages to overwhelm a U.S. naval task force, “sinking” an aircraft carrier, cruisers, and amphibious ships early in the exercise. The decision to refloat the ships and restrict Red Force tactics fueled accusations that the war game had been scripted to protect favored Pentagon concepts.