The United States is accelerating work on the development of the Golden Dome missile defence system specifically due to the Pentagon’s growing concerns regarding the capabilities of new Chinese and Russian hypersonic missile systems. Defence officials have increasingly warned that the current U.S. missile defence architectures were primarily designed to counter limited ballistic missile threats, namely the North Korean arsenal of the 2010s, with the far larger scale and more advanced Chinese and Russian arsenals requiring an entirely new approach.

When Shenyang rolled the FC-31 Gyrfalcon out of its hangar in 2012, nobody took it seriously. The aircraft had no customer, used Russian engines, and had lost the competition to the J-20. Fourteen years later, the same airframe has produced two operational variants — the carrier-based J-35B launching from China’s first EMALS aircraft carrier, and the land-based J-35A entering frontline PLA Air Force service. Pakistan looks set to take 40 planes. The Pentagon projects that 1,300 Chinese fifth-generation fighters will be in service by 2030.

The US Department of War has announced the withdrawal of a Brigade Combat Team, comprising at least 4,000 troops, from Europe.

Lithuania has one of the highest ratios of military spending as a proportion of GDP in Nato, at 4% in 2025.

In August 2004, a company of British soldiers f

This video describes the military situation in

The Republic of Korea Air Force has accelerated plans to retire its F-5E/F fighters from service, after these aircraft for decades formed the backbone of its fleet, bringing forward the date of retirement from the end of 2030, to the end of 2027. The accelerated retirement timeline was announced by Air Force Chief of Staff General Son Seok-rak, at a time when the KF-21 fifth generation fighter program has faced delays and cost overruns.

BrDef
The Navy currently utilizes a 36-month Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP), but leaders want to stretch it to 56 months

WarZone
The plan is to demonstrate a fully integrated, longer-range strike capability that could keep the AC-130 relevant in high-end conflicts.

CDR Salamander
…dead or in a medically induced coma?

Heckmann, NDM
The service is on a mission to replenish its supply in more affordable and more timely ways amid looming threats of future conflict

Ryan Finnerty, Flight Global
U.S.

Maintaining deterrence in the Indo-Pacific and around the world requires the U.S. Navy to change what it builds and how it fights. Sen. Roger Wicker observed in 2024 that the United States’ approach to fleet design and ship construction is “too small and too old.” The current model of naval power cannot scale at the speed modern war demands. The war with Iran is already exposing the limits. High-end ships are being consumed in sustained operations, munitions inventories are thinning, and replacement timelines for exquisite weapons stretch into years.

What if the next decisive intelligence advantage isn’t a recruited insider but a nation’s ability to model entire societies from its digital exhaust? Salt Typhoon’s multi-year cyber campaigns against U.S. telecommunications networks and critical infrastructure demonstrate China’s unparalleled focus on data-centric espionage: collect widely, analyze fast, and operationalize at scale — alongside continued investments in traditional intelligence disciplines. This approach reshapes how the United States has conventionally thought about intelligence advantage.

New footage released on Chinese social media has shown a J-20A fifth generation long range air superiority fighter still in yellow factory primary, indicating it has been produced recently, integrating twin WS-15 next generation turbofan engines. Video footage in December 2025 for the first time confirmed that the first batch of J-20s integrating twin WS-15 turbofan engines had completed serial production, with the first flight of a serial production aircraft with the engines reportedly having taken place on December 27.

A Colombian contractor hired to support the ongoing Ukrainian war effort against Russia has spoken of his time in the war zone, at a time when Latin American mercenaries have played an increasingly central and fast growing role on the frontlines to compensate for personnel shortages. William Andres Gallego Orozco, aged 23, recalled he had been promised approximately $3,200 per month, and had believed he would work as a cook for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He added that neither the pay nor the assignment matched what he had been told.

On the evening of the May 19, the Republic of China Ministry of National Defence announced that it had detected 22 Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fighter jets, as well as warships, moving out to sea to conduct joint combat readiness patrols. The ministry released several rare high-definition surveillance images, which indicate that the Republic of China Air Force’s F-16 fighters used infrared pods to monitor PLA J-16 fighters.

The Belarusian Armed Forces have invited large scale military exercises simulating the combat use of nuclear weapons, as well as associated logistical support, at a time of growing tensions between the country and NATO members.

After spending $13 billion on the USS Gerald R. Ford, the U.S. Navy deployed the most advanced aircraft carrier ever built to the Middle East. The ship suffered clogged toilets that forced a retreat from combat, a laundry fire that rendered crew quarters uninhabitable, weapons-elevator failures, a malfunctioning electromagnetic aircraft launch system, and deck plating that could not withstand the heat from F-35 jet exhaust. Some critics now compare the Ford to Russia’s Admiral Kuznetsov, once a symbol of Soviet ascendancy but ultimately a drain on Moscow’s resources.

The USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) was a unique class of supercarrier. Derived from the Kitty Hawk-class, she received several design modifications that made her truly one of a kind. Kennedy had a long and eventful service life, taking part in missions all across the globe and contributing to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. She was the last conventionally powered nuclear carrier in the U.S. Navy, and her eventual retirement marked the end of an era.

Kennedy’s Unusual Construction

USS Kitty Hawk of Kitty-Hawk-Class. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

The U.S.

Australia has committed another A$11 billion to extend the operational life of its six Collins-class submarines into the 2030s, Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Richard Marles confirmed this month. The decision is a hedge against the AUKUS submarine program, which is supposed to deliver three Virginia-class boats to Australia in the early 2030s before transitioning to the jointly developed SSN-AUKUS design with Britain. Some U.S. Virginia-class submarines are now arriving up to four years late, and American yards are building roughly 1.2 boats per year against a Navy target of 2.

France has officially named its next-generation nuclear-powered aircraft carrier France Libre, after the Free French resistance movement led by Charles de Gaulle in World War II. Displacing between 78,000 and 80,000 tons, France Libre will be the largest warship ever built in Europe. The carrier will be powered by two K22 nuclear reactors, equipped with General Atomics’ Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System and Advanced Arresting Gear, and carry more than 30 aircraft including Dassault Rafale M fighters and E-2D Advanced Hawkeyes. Cost runs around 11.6 billion U.S. dollars.

France’s four Le Triomphant-class ballistic-missile submarines carry the entire French nuclear deterrent. Each 14,000-ton boat is propelled by a nuclear reactor, can reach more than 25 knots submerged, and carries 16 M51 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Each M51 reportedly carries up to six independently targeted MIRV warheads and flies at roughly Mach 25. The upgraded M51.3, designed to beat modern missile defenses, entered service in late 2025.

The Pentagon’s counter-drone task force announced a $500 million contract award Monday to Perennial Autonomy, a defense company known for developing an interceptor that has downed thousands of Russian one-way attack drones over the last two years in Ukraine.
The Iran war, which has seen the same Tehran-variant drone known as the Shahed wreak havoc across the region, has also hastened the U.S. military’s push to down them.

The Light Armored Vehicle has served the Marine

The expectation for the troops in 2003 was that

The types of massive troop deployments of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are becoming dangerous as attack drones become a ubiquitous presence on battlefields, the head of U.S. Southern Command said on Tuesday.
“I think we need to make ourselves a smaller target,” said Marine Gen. Francis Donovan. “We have to be harder to be detected, hit.”
During both those wars, the U.S. military adopted the mantra that “more is better,” Donovan said during this year’s SOF Week exhibition in Tampa, Florida.
At the peak of both conflicts, roughly 100,000 U.S.

Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo has officially been named as director of the Space Development Agency and the new portfolio acquisition executive for Space Force’s missile warning and tracking programs, the agency announced Tuesday.
Previously SDA’s deputy director, Sandhoo has been leading the agency as acting director since September 2025, when Derek Tournear stepped down from the role. In the last few months, Sandhoo has overseen SDA begin the highly anticipated launch campaign of its foundational program — the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA).

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” — Admiral James Stockdale, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his leadership after spending seven years as a POW in Vietnam.

The U.S. Navy’s new Trump-class BBG(X) nuclear-powered battleship will cost roughly $17 billion per hull and displace between 30,000 and 40,000 tons, making it the largest American surface combatant since World War II. The Navy plans 15 ships between fiscal years 2028 and 2055. Early concept material referenced approximately 128 vertical launch cells plus 12 Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic tubes.

Navy leadership’s recent decision to make the future Trump-class battleship nuclear-powered introduced a new twist in the saga of one of the service’s most controversial programs.
President Donald Trump unveiled his vision for the platform in December when officials shared their desires to arm the vessel with a variety of high-tech weapons such lasers, railguns, hypersonic missiles and nukes.
The Pentagon plans to spend more than $17 billion on the lead ship in the class, according to budget documents released last month.
Earlier this year, Chief of Naval Operations Adm.

On September 26, 1983, Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on the midnight shift at the Serpukhov-15 command center when his early warning satellite reported five American intercontinental ballistic missiles inbound. Protocol required him to relay the warning to Moscow, which would have launched a full Soviet ICBM retaliation. Petrov refused. He reasoned that a real American strike would involve hundreds of missiles, not five. He waited 23 minutes. Nothing hit. It was later determined the satellite had mistaken sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds for missile exhaust.

On June 7, 1981, Israel launched Operation Opera. Eight F-16s and six F-15s flew more than 1,000 kilometers at low altitude across Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq to reach the French-built Osirak nuclear reactor outside Baghdad. The aircraft dropped 16 bombs and destroyed the reactor in minutes. Ten Iraqis and one French engineer were killed. Every Israeli pilot came home. The raid established what became known as the Begin Doctrine — Israel would not allow a hostile regional power to acquire nuclear weapons.

The Red Arrows will need a new jet by 2030 —

If IVAS ever makes it past a prototype stage, t

The Pentagon plans to procure 10,000 low-cost cruise missiles and 12,000 hypersonic missiles between 2027 and 2029 — a wartime-style scaling effort driven by lessons from Operation Epic Fury, where U.S. stand-off weapon stockpiles drained faster than the industrial base could refill them. The new Low-Cost Containerized Munitions program will fire from shipping-container launchers modeled on the Navy’s Mk 70. Anduril’s Barracuda-500M, Leidos’s AGM-190A derivative, CoAspire’s RAACM, and Zone 5’s Rusty Dagger are all in the lineup.

China’s missile arsenal now reaches every U.S. base in the Pacific. The DF-26, dubbed the Guam-Killer by U.S. analysts, is a conventionally armed intermediate-range ballistic missile that can sink an aircraft carrier or strike Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. The DF-17 carries a hypersonic glide vehicle, has performed extreme evasive maneuvers in testing, and ranges 1,800 to 2,500 kilometers. The DF-27, which the Pentagon has been tracking since 2021, ranges 5,000 to 8,000 kilometers — far enough to hit Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. West Coast.

The Pentagon is dramatically expanding its missile procurement strategy as planners increasingly warn that future wars against countries like China could rapidly exhaust America’s existing stockpiles of precision weapons – a problem that was recently seen in the weeks-long operations against Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury.

The French Rubis-class submarine is the smallest nuclear-powered attack submarine ever built by any major navy — just 240 feet long, displacing 2,700 tons, with a crew of about 70 sailors. It also “sank” two U.S. Navy nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in NATO and U.S. Navy wargames. Once in 1998 against USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. Once in 2015 against USS Theodore Roosevelt. Both times, the French boat slipped inside the carrier strike group’s defensive screen undetected and registered torpedo kills before the Americans knew it was there.

This video describes the military situation in

Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947 in the rocket-powered Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis. Three years earlier, a British Supermarine Spitfire Mark XI had already come within 11 percent of doing the same thing with a piston engine and a propeller. In 1944, RAF test pilot J.R. Tobin dove his Spitfire to 606 miles per hour — Mach 0.89. In a follow-up test, Anthony F. Martindale pushed the same airframe to 620 mph in a 45-degree dive. The propeller tore off, the tail-heavy aircraft climbed automatically, and Martindale woke at 40,000 feet to glide home.

NATO’s top military commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, assured allies Tuesday that the planned withdrawal of approximately 5,000 American troops from Europe will not weaken the alliance’s defense posture in the region.
Speaking to reporters after meetings with NATO military chiefs in Brussels, Gen. Grynkewich — who serves as both Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and head of U.S. European Command — described the move as part of a broader adjustment in U.S. force posture.

From May 14 to 15, U.S. President Donald Trump held a summit in Beijing with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In addition to pageantry, the summit featured discussions about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, Taiwan, and bilateral trade. Both Washington and Beijing emphasized a relationship based on “constructive strategic stability.”Many countries, particularly those in Asia, were watching closely to see how the two leaders got along, what they agreed on, and what divided them. We asked four experts to tell us about the reactions in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines.Read more below.

More than 300 years after the 150-foot-long Spanish galleon San José came to a grisly end off the coast of Colombia, the world’s most coveted shipwreck is again at the center of a bitter struggle over who has a right to its untapped wealth.

The Backstory
The San José sank near Colombia’s port city of Cartagena back on June 8, 1708, while carrying one of the richest cargoes ever assembled in the Americas. Often described as the “Holy Grail of shipwrecks,” the vessel is believed to have gone down with gold, silver, emeralds, Chinese porcelain, and other valuables.

The XM2001 Crusader was supposed to become the U.S. Army’s next-generation artillery system: a heavily automated 155mm self-propelled howitzer capable of firing faster, farther, and more accurately than the aging M109 Paladin fleet it was designed to replace.

Instead, it became one of the most famous canceled weapons programs in modern Pentagon history after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld abruptly killed the project in 2002 during the early months of the post-9/11 “military transformation” era.

NATO Artillery Test. Image Credit: NATO.

Has Ukraine just demonstrated a new phase of dr

The U.S. Navy commissioned three Midway-class aircraft carriers in 1945 — the USS Midway, USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, and USS Coral Sea — designed with heavily armored flight decks to survive the kamikaze attacks that had crippled the Essex-class. Each ship measured nearly 1,000 feet, produced 200,000 shaft horsepower, and carried more than 4,000 sailors. None saw World War II combat, but all three fought through the Cold War. The Midway launched strikes over Vietnam, evacuated Saigon in 1975, and struck Iraqi forces in Operation Desert Storm.

After his Beijing summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Donald Trump called Taiwan a ‘place’ rather than a country, cautioned Taipei against using the word ‘independence,’ and froze U.S. arms sales to the island. The shift is the consequence of the Iran War. Tehran has now closed the Strait of Hormuz, set up a permanent toll bureaucracy charging passing ships in yuan, bitcoin, or gold, and the U.S. Navy has not forced the waterway open.

As President Donald Trump’s delegation prepared to leave Beijing after a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, White House staff collected the Chinese-issued credentials, lanyards, delegation pins, and U.S.-issued burner phones from the trip and dumped them into a bin at the bottom of the Air Force One stairs. New York Post correspondent Emily Goodin reported that nothing from China was allowed onto the aircraft. AFP reporter Danny Kemp confirmed Chinese officials had asked for their red lapel badges back, and U.S. staff put them in the bin instead.

The USS Gerald R. Ford, the U.S. Navy’s lead Ford-class aircraft carrier, is heading into a major repair period after a 300-plus-day combat deployment — one of the longest in modern U.S. naval history. The damage list is long. The Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System and Advanced Arresting Gear need full inspection after sustained combat sortie generation. The vacuum waste system that left sailors unable to flush toilets may be redesigned outright. Berthing compartments damaged by a multi-hour laundry fire need refurbishment.