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It’s 1990, a fictional New York street cop has recently taught a generation to fear a gun that did not actually exist.
Bruce Willis, playing John McClane in “Die Hard 2,” warned that terrorists were carrying a “Glock 7,” a porcelain pistol made in Germany that slipped right past airport X-ray machines and cost one month’s paycheck to produce.
Also Read: The fascinating history of the military duffel bags we know and love
Not one word of that was true, of course. No such gun has ever existed; our real Glocks are full of steel, and they light up a scanner like a Christmas tree.

Ukraine’s F-16 Scored Its First Air-to-Air Kill. The Russian Jet Was Likely an Su-35: Ukraine has recorded the first publicly acknowledged air-to-air victory by one of its Western-supplied F-16 fighters. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators that a Ukrainian F-16 recently shot down a Russian fighter, according to reporting on his July 21 testimony.

Caine did not identify the Russian aircraft, weapon, location, or engagement range.

Iran Rejected Iraq’s Ceasefire Proposal Because Hormuz Was Left Unresolved: Iran rejected a U.S. ceasefire proposal carried to Tehran by Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, according to Iranian and Iraqi officials cited by The New York Times. Al-Zaidi delivered the offer after meeting President Donald Trump in Washington, giving Iraq a direct role in the latest attempt to halt nearly two weeks of renewed American and Iranian strikes.

The proposal’s full terms have not been made public.

Ukraine Hit Russia’s Amazon for the Fifth Time in a Week, and on Friday the Smoke Was Over St. Petersburg: Drones struck Wildberries logistics centers near Russia’s second city, in Tver, and in occupied Crimea overnight. Three people were hurt, and the country’s largest online retailer has now lost close to a tenth of its warehouse capacity in seven days.

Residents of St. Petersburg woke on Friday morning to two columns of black smoke rising over the city’s eastern outskirts.

Russia Fired About 12 Missiles at Kyiv in a Rare Daytime Attack: Russia launched a rare daytime ballistic-missile attack on Kyiv shortly after 11:20 a.m. on July 24, sending residents toward shelters during a normal workday as air defenses engaged high-speed targets over the capital. A developing account from Kyiv placed the preliminary launch total at around a dozen and reported smoke over the city.

Ukraine’s Air Force warned that several missiles were approaching from the north.

Iran has begun restoring military infrastructure damaged during months of American and Israeli airstrikes. A satellite-imagery review published July 24 found repair work at missile bases, ports, bridges, roads, and production facilities.

Images from a missile complex north of Kermanshah showed crews repairing access roads and clearing collapsed tunnel entrances. Other imagery showed work at military and maritime sites. The pictures do not establish that every facility has returned to full operation, but they show that Iran can restore access and basic functions quickly.

Amid global shortages of interceptor missiles for the Patriot Air and Missile Defense System, Lockheed Martin (LM) has unveiled the Advanced Capability Effector (ACE) missile.

The new missile, dubbed the “baby Patriot”, will, by some estimates, cost less than half as much as the standard PAC-3 MSE missile.

Patriot Missile Interceptor Test. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

The Army test fires a Patriot missile in a recent test.

U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine has informed the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee that the Ukrainian F-16 fleet achieved its first confirmed air-to-air victory against manned aircraft by shooting down a Russian fighter. While Caine did not specify the kind of aircraft that was targeted, hisstatement was widely interpreted by Western sources to indicate that the loss of a Russian Aerospace Forces Su-35 on July 8 was the result of such a shootdown.

Let’s not start picking out uniforms just yet. The chorus calling for a Cyber Force continues to grow by the day, but the debate has its priorities backward. In June, an amendment from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) calling for the creation of a cyber service within the Department of the Army failed in the Senate Armed Services Committee by a single vote. Support is popular on both sides of the aisle, with Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) quoted as saying that a “Cyber Force is inevitable.

Following the release of footage on July 23 confirming the flight testing of the fifth prototype of the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation’s sixth generation fighter, questions have been raised regarding whether a prototype observed days prior may have been the same aircraft. The prototype in question appears different from its predecessors, but the image quality has made it challenging to discern whether this may be due to the angle of the image, or whether it has new distinct features that would make it the fifth prototype.