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Summary and Key Points: Brent M. Eastwood, PhD, a defense expert and former US Army Infantry officer, recounts the legendary “time-travel” flight of SR-71 pilot David Peters.
-Flying from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa to Beale Air Force Base in California, Peters and co-pilot Ed Bethert utilized the Blackbird’s Mach 3.32 speed and the International Date Line to land 17.5 hours before their scheduled departure time.
Confusion reigns in UK defence as the government lurches from crisis to crisis, amid never-ending delays to the Defence Investment Plan.
The cost to maintain the British Army’s Watchkeeper fleet will be nearly 75% the value of the budget assigned for its replacement.
“A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.” The characters in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? fine-tune their mental and emotional states with the “Penfield Mood Organ,” a device named after neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, known for his research on electrical brain stimulation. This fictional apparatus remarkably resembles modern non-invasive transcranial brain stimulation (neuromodulation) and its potential for cognitive enhancement.
Is publicly confronting the likely next prime minister of Iraq the right strategy for the United States? The nomination of Nouri al Maliki by the Coordination Framework, the organizing body of Shiite politics in Iraq, on Jan. 24, and the blunt and public objection by President Donald Trump three days later, have exposed a growing political crisis with major implications for U.S. interests in Iraq and the broader Middle East.
The head of the U.S. Space Force Combat Forces Command Lieutenant General Gregory Gagnon has stressed the importance of being able to attack and destroy Chinese satellites and other space assets, as a core part of achieving what he referred to as “space superiority.” “Protecting and defending satellites can’t simply be done by protect and defend. You can’t run away from a bully forever. Sometimes you got to turn around and punch,” he stated, adding: “protect and defend, although necessary is insufficient to deliver space control.
Following reports on February 2 that the last of 108 Abrams tanks on ordered for the Republic of China Army had completed production, it was reported that the final batch of 28 vehicles would be delivered in March. The latest reports have indicated that delivery is now expected in April, with the tanks set to be unloaded at Taipei Port, and made fully operational by May. Although this delay alone is relatively minor, broader delays to U.S. arms deliveries have caused a major scandal in Taipei, with outstanding backlogs of arms sales having reached over $21.45 billion by late 2025.
The Army dismissed a cadet from West Point after he was convicted of extortion and indecent conduct earlier this month for using generative artificial intelligence to create fake nude images of a woman, according to the academy and service court records.
Ex-cadet Cayden Cork threatened to publicly release the deepfakes of the woman if she did not send actual nude photos of herself, according to a charge sheet obtained by DefenseScoop Thursday. Cork pleaded guilty to the charges on Feb. 10 and a military judge sentenced him to be reprimanded, forfeit all pay and dismissed from the Army.
The Pentagon is looking to purchase AI-powered coding assets that can deploy at the edge and facilitate multipart engineering tasks with little human intervention, according to a recently published call for solutions.
In partnership with the Army, the Defense Department’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) intends to equip military and civilian developers with more commercial-grade AI options to enhance the quality and speed of software delivery for modern operations.
Under new Marine Corps body composition rules released on Thursday, Marines now must be slightly skinnier than Pentagon standards announced in January. For Marines of fairly average height, that will mean keeping their waistlines somewhere between 2 and 3 inches below the military-wide requirement.
“This change to body composition program will help us balance the health and performance of our Marines,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said in a statement.