Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign
Ukraine’s long-range drone and missile strike campaign against Russia is still expanding, even as Moscow seeks to take advantage of Kyiv’s shortage of Patriot interceptors with its own long-range ballistic missile campaign.
Ukraine’s devastating strikes against Russian infrastructure are beginning to create problems that the Kremlin is being forced to address at the national level.
The Russian Aerospace Forces on August 19-20 deployed its most heavily armed aircraft, the Tu-160 and Tu-95MSM strategic bombers, to support a large-scale strike against targets in the Kiev region, as the country’s combat aviation has played an increasingly central role in its air campaign. The two bomber types between them are reported to have launched over 40 cruise missiles. The strikes targeted a series of facilities in Kiev involved in the production, assembly and storage of unmanned systems.
The Government Accountability Office released a report Thursday flagging a lack of schedule and cost data for the Army’s network modernization efforts, warning that it creates uncertainty about the service’s ability to scale new capabilities and puts soldiers at risk of not having reliable access to communication tools on modern battlefields.
A small number of gamblers have made $8 million placing military and defense-related bets on the Polymarket prediction site, most placed by about 150 accounts that almost always bet correctly. The researchers say they suspect the accounts are linked to military insiders who could be flagged for law enforcement as “the most likely potential insiders,” researchers said in a new report.
When the most successful of those accounts bet on unlikely military events, researchers found, they won virtually every single time.
Russia Pounds Ukraine: Devastation caused by ongoing Russian missile strikes and Ukraine’s shortage of interceptors continues, with at least 16 people left dead in the Ukrainian capital and surrounding region overnight. The overnight strikes, which took place over a roughly nine-hour period, involved dozens of Russian cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic missiles that were launched alongside 168 drones.
Ukrainian air defenses destroyed nearly 90% of the drones and most of the cruise missiles, but Kyiv’s defenses were considerably less effective against the faster ballistic weapons.
Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that Israel struck an air base in Northwestern Syria, reportedly to prevent Turkey from deploying there. It was seen, the report said, as part of a struggle between Israel and Turkey over influence in Syria.
The base is the Abu Duhur air base in Idlib, which was hit eight times, per the AP story. There were no casualties. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani denounced “Israeli aggression,” which he called “an unjustified provocation, a violation of Syria’s sovereignty, and a direct threat to regional and global stability.
The U.S. Navy is investigating a serious engineering failure that left the Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold without power for four days while operating in the South China Sea. The destroyer suffered what the Navy described as an “engineering casualty involving its generators” on July 24, forcing the ship to remain without normal electrical power, forcing it to be towed to Subic Bay in the Philippines for repairs.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force has deployed its J-16 heavyweight fighters outside Asia for the first time with at least six of the aircraft having been identified as part of the deployment for the Eagles of Civilisation 2026 China-Egypt air exercise, which is scheduled to run from mid-August into early September. The deployment represents an important step up from last year’s China-Egypt exercise.
U.S. ‘Stealthily’ Moves Oil in War-Torn Strait of Hormuz – The United States military is quietly moving millions of barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz every day, despite Iran’s bid to strangle shipping in the strategic waterway.
Axios said the U.S. military has established a protected shipping corridor along the southern side of the strait, close to Oman. Two U.S. officials said between 15 and 20 tankers have been entering and leaving the Gulf through the route each night in recent weeks, moving close to 10 million barrels of oil per day.
The Secret U.S. Hormuz Route That Appears To Be Working – Two unnamed American officials told Axios this week that the U.S. military has established a shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz that is successfully challenging Tehran’s claim over the waterway and moving millions of barrels of oil each day. The claim comes as reports suggest that Iran is losing control over the strategic waterway, but amid ongoing traffic disruptions that are causing global economic pain.
What Axios Claims
Littoral Combat Ship. Image Credit: Creative Commons.