The conferenced version of the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act would require the Pentagon to brief lawmakers on operations since 2004 involving any unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) intercepts conducted by the integrated military commands that share leadership and a focus on defending North America.
This mandate marks one of three provisions associated with UAP — or the modern term for UFOs and other mysterious transmedium objects — that made it into the annual defense policy legislation.
It also comes as North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S.

We can build bigger ships now than we’ve

The United States Navy is the most powerful in history. For decades, it has dominated the seas, and at the heart of that domination, at least through World War II, was the battleship. But today, the U.S. Navy’s only battleships are floating museums, and its largest warships, aircraft carriers, have few guns on their decks. So what happened? How did the once-prolific warship fade into history and why hasn’t it been reinvented?
The short answer is that modern warfare killed the battleship concept.

This video describes the military situation in

In December 1944, the United States was still very much in the middle of World War II. The June 6 landings in Normandy were fresh in the minds of troops on the ground and Americans back home, but setbacks throughout Europe and bloody battles in the Pacific Theater left a nation fatigued by the strains of war.
As the casualty counts increased and the war waged on, the air in America felt heavy. But for a moment in December, there was one thing taking everyone’s mind off the fighting: the Army-Navy game.
Army was ranked #1 and Navy, #2.

In 2018, Andrew Grotto wrote, “Cyber Security Derailed? Recommendations for Smarter Investments in Infrastructure,” where he argued that as the United States modernizes its infrastructure and transportation networks, cybersecurity measures to protect them must be front and center. Seven years later, amidst a changing security landscape, we asked Andrew to revisit his argument.Image: Ben Schumin via Wikimedia CommonsIn your article, “Cyber Security Derailed? Recommendations for Smarter Investments in Infrastructure,” published in 2018, you argued that the U.S.

Army prosecutors preferred charges against an OB-GYN doctor at a Fort Hood, Texas, hospital for recording patients, officials said.
There are 44 victims in this case, Army officials said Tuesday. The Office of Special Trial Counsel preferred four charges and 61 specifications against Maj. Blaine McGraw, 47, an OB-GYN doctor assigned to the Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood.

The Black Seminoles emerged as one of the most remarkable Afro-Indigenous communities in North American history. Their story is one of survival, adaptation, and unity forged during some of the most turbulent chapters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These men, women, and families were originally Africans who escaped from slavery in Georgia and the Carolinas and found refuge among the Seminole Indians of Florida. Over time, the shared experience of resisting oppression shaped a powerful cultural bond. Their unity was not simply a matter of coexistence.

The final draft of the annual defense policy bill tasks the Pentagon with conducting a psychological study on troops and Defense Department civilians who use or support unmanned aircraft systems in combat.
The study would assess the prevalence of post traumatic stress, depression, anxiety, burnout, moral injury — a term that gained popularity during the Global War on Terror used to describe a distressing ethical contradiction in the aftermath of a traumatic event — and other mental health conditions among drone operators and analysts.

For military families, the promise of comprehensive reproductive healthcare has long felt like a mirage, always visible on the horizon but forever dissolving as you approach. For the past year, beneficiaries have been led to believe that relief is finally inbound. The Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act included bipartisan language that would have required Tricare to cover In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) for all active-duty service members, finally modernizing a benefit stuck in the Cold War era for decades.
But as the final conference report dropped on Dec.

Heads up, Letter Senders! With Christmas and New Year’s quickly approaching, we want to make sure you’re aware of upcoming base mailroom closures and the shipping deadlines for Sandboxx Letters. Below, you’ll find the recommended send-by dates for each base to help ensure your letter arrives in time for the holidays.
Please remember that holiday mail processing can be unpredictable. Staff shortages, increased mailroom volume, and other unexpected delays may occur, so we strongly recommend sending your letters as early as possible.

AI and ML applications has intensified thermal demands, but active cooling will protect defence computing platforms.

DALO has agreed with KNDS Deutschland for the delivery of three Leguan bridge-laying systems mounted on a Tatra 10×10 wheeled chassis.

Anduril UK and GKN Aerospace are set to work together on the British Army’s Project NYX and the UK MoD’s ACP programme.

L Todd Wood and Pete Blaber give the latest information on Ukraine. The propaganda continues to keep the killing going.
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When we spent the long winters away from our loved ones, we saw dark days and anxious winds. But here today, looking ahead to the holiday season, we don’t see the chilling dark. We don’t see the stress. We see you.
We see men and women who have stood on that wall. We see people who have woken up, day after day, far from home, doing the hard work so the rest of the world can sleep in. You have lived the long days. You have weathered the storms. You have endured the repetition. And no matter what happens tomorrow, or the rest of your life, we are happy now… because we have this list.

C.

DefOne
Appropriators and other lawmakers have pushed for the Navy’s next-gen fighter, but the latest NDAA offers only enough to keep the nascent program warm..

Sam LaGrone, USNI News
The Navy’s four public shipyards and two unidentified private shipyards are working with Palantir for a program the service is calling “Ship OS”

The WarZone
Loitering munitions are already revolutionizing the battlefield, and the U.S. Army is finally testing launching them from its main battle tank.

Jangoulun Singsit, Airforce Technology
The demonstration involved the MQ-28 Ghost Bat operating with a RAAF E-7A Wedgetail and an F/A-18F Super Hornet to destroy a fighter-class target…

Ukrainian ‘bounty hunters’ have been snatching men and boys off the street across the country for months now as reports indicated Kyiv losing 9,000 men a week on the front in the war with Russia.
The public has had enough as the meat grinder continues and Zelenskiy refuses to make peace with President Trump’s plan.
Now, citizens on the street attack the bounty hunters and release the ‘recruits’.
AFP has documented this phenomenon for months.
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This video describes the military situation in

The United States Armed Forces on December 10 landed personnel on a civilian tanker in international waters, seizing the vessel which was transporting Venezuelan oil for export. Footage showed heavily armed personnel descending onto the ship, with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing regarding the operation: “Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran.

Foreign policy communities in open societies love to debate their own relevance. Analysts quarrel over whether their insights inform statecraft or merely decorate it, and governments alternately embrace and ignore them depending on the moment. One might assume that in China this dynamic hardly exists, that an authoritarian system simply compels its experts to fall in line and rewards those who echo the leadership’s priorities.The reality is more complicated. China’s foreign policy experts neither operate in lockstep with the state nor stand wholly apart from it.

Peru and South Korea have formalised a framework for the procurement of 54 K2 Black Panther main battle tanks and 141 K808 16 wheeled armoured vehicles, marking the first sale of the K2 in the Americas. The Peruvian state-owned factory FAME S.A.C. will make limited contributions to production, while the contract will expand Peru’s domestic capacity for production, maintenance, and modernisation activities both types of vehicles.

Reports from media outlets based on Taiwan have reported that the Japanese military leadership has been highly unsettled, to the point of being “freaked out” in the exact words used in one report, by the results of two engagements between Chinese J-15B and Japanese F-15 fighters on December 6. Citing senior Japanese defence sources, it was reported that after J-15Bs operating from the aircraft carrier Liaoning locked onto F-15Js, the American-supplied aircraft’s radar warning receivers were only able to notify pilot of the threat after a weapons lock had already been formed.

The Japan Air Self-Defense Force has scrambled a large number of F-2 fighters from Tsuiki Air Base equipped with ASM-2 air-to-ship missiles. The aircraft were reported by a number of sources to be participating in simulated strikes against the Chinese carrier strike group led by the aircraft carrier Liaoning, which is conducting exercises near Japanese waters.

Officials at U.S. Southern Command posted a photo collage Tuesday, illustrating Marines fast roping from a helicopter and a masked infantryman wearing his helmet, NVGs, a plate carrier, and armed with his rifle.
But the Marine, some noted, was out of uniform.
The black and white collage features a Marine with the Jerusalem Cross patch fixed prominently on their helmet. The Marines appear to have been assigned to the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is currently deployed to the Caribbean as part of Operation Southern Spear, the Pentagon’s stated mission to dismantle drug cartels.

The Defense Department is writing an updated version of its zero-trust strategy that will outline new cybersecurity frameworks for systems beyond information technology.
“We’re prepping the [ZT] strategy 2.0, estimating that it will be publicly available … around March 2026,” Randy Resnick, senior advisor for the Pentagon’s Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office, said Tuesday during a keynote at DefenseTalks hosted by DefenseScoop.

The seniors playing in this weekend’s Army-Navy football game all know where they are headed after graduation.
Navy’s star quarterback, Blake Horvath, will be off to Naval flight school in Florida. His favorite receiver, Eli Heidenreich, will spend a year training as a Marine Corps ground officer.
Army linebacker Kalib Fortner, the team’s defensive captain who as a sophomore was named the 2023 Army-Navy game MVP, is headed to the infantry, one of eight Army senior cadets who will serve in that branch, the same number who will train in artillery.

The Norwegian frigate HNoMS Roald Amundsen has

Scale your business with ease with Odoo!

At the end of the movie “Black Hawk Down,” Chief Warrant Officer Mike Durant (played by actor Ron Eldard) is sitting in a dark room as a prisoner of the Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, as a helicopter flies by overhead. From the passing bird comes a voice as the sun goes down:
“Mike Durant, we won’t leave you behind.”
This makes for an agonizing scene, with Durant suffering from a broken cheekbone, eye socket, back, femur, and nose from his fight with Somalis near the crash site of Super Six-Four.

Rob Evans, an Army veteran who created a popular Yelp-like app to report problems with enlisted barracks, has now built a new website that allows veterans to provide anonymous reviews of Department of Veterans Affairs medical facilities.
VetStats allows veterans to rate VA clinics and medical centers in terms of service quality, facilities and amenities, mental healthcare access, care access, and wait times, said Evans, who is not working with the VA on the effort.

Which film nails military realism?

The Russo-Ukrainian War has elevated the global importance of the Black Sea region and demonstrated the wide-ranging impacts that conflict there can have on the world. As the sea’s littoral states struggle to cope with international, regional, and domestic challenges, we asked five experts to offer insights into what events or trends to watch in the region over the next year.Read more below.

A serving member of the UK military has died in an accident in Ukraine while observing testing of “a new defensive capability”.

From converted Black Hawks to Chinook lookalike

The Pentagon is rolling out a purpose-built platform — GenAI.mil — to deliver commercial artificial intelligence options directly to its almost entire workforce, with Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government products the first to be housed and available in the new asset.
“For the first time ever, by the end of this week, 3 million employees, warfighters, and contractors are going to have AI on their desktop, every single one,” Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael announced on Tuesday.

A new congressional measure could require that the military services assign blast safety officers to help enforce safety rules and teach troops about the health risks of blast overpressure caused by heavy weapons during training.
The measure comes as the mental health and physical safety risks of repeated exposures to blasts from heavy artillery and explosives have caught the attention of Congress and the Department of Defense. In August 2024, military officials released new rules with recommended safe distances for troops firing mortars, howitzers, rifles and breaching explosives.

The U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command is built on a lineage of air commandos who show up where the odds are worst, and the margin for error is zero. From hacking improvised airstrips out of the Burmese jungle to flying lumbering gunships that can put a single round on a single truck in the dead of night, these airmen exist to solve problems no one else can.
They move special operations forces, pull the wounded out of places no helicopter should be, and turn the sky itself into close air support, often under fire and far from help.

The annual Army-Navy Game is one of college football’s biggest rivalries, and there’s a lot of history around the game, not only because of the 125-plus games the Midshipmen and Black Knights have played over the years, but also because of one man who might show up to watch: the President of the United States.
Related: 7 of the coolest things to watch for during the Army-Navy Game
No matter who occupies the Oval Office, the Commander-in-Chief showing up to watch these two service academy football teams on the gridiron is a big deal.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last week quietly ordered a name change to the military entity charged with influencing foreign audiences, reverting its title back to one used 15 years ago.
Since 2010, military activities designed to manipulate the behavior of foreign governments, combatants and even individuals have fallen under the unassuming title of “military information support operations,” or MISO. Now, those efforts will once again be part of “psychological operations,” or PSYOP, according to a memorandum Hegseth signed Dec. 2.

This video describes the military situation in

Since World War II, America’s universities have been part of the nation’s arsenal, forging the ideas, technology, and talent that underpin national defense. That engine of innovation never stopped running. John Beieler and John Paul Sawyer of the University of Maryland join Ryan to talk about the power of public–private partnerships in defense tech, quantum science, and AI, and how that work keeps American innovation humming just outside Washington. Image: Blacktupelo via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Building an Academic Arsenal appeared first on War on the Rocks.

The Royal Netherlands Army’s AMLC has awarded Renk Test System (RTS), a contract to supply a suite of test systems for military vehicles.

Rolls-Royce has secured an order from defence company KNDS to deliver more than 300 mtu MB 873 Ka-501 engines for new Leopard 2 battle tanks.

The Moment You Choose Strength — Military Mot

For its annual fitness competition, the Space Force has “Guardian Arena,” which tests both brains and brawn to measure the service’s unique requirements. It’s essentially the Army’s Best Squad competition, but for the most cerebral military branch.
And they are unique, with the Space Force being one of the few branches where one might need to triangulate the position of a satellite while in the middle of the combat zone in the Middle East or the Pacific under austere conditions.