Summary and Key Points: In the early days of the invasion, Ukrainian soldiers were dropping grenades through tank hatches using drones anyone could buy online. Four years later, the country builds them by the millions — and they now carry out the overwhelming majority of every successful strike against Russian forces. The transformation has rewritten the rules of the war: cheap, swarming drones now do the work once reserved for artillery, attack helicopters, and Western missiles that Ukraine could never get enough of.

How Millions Of Ukrainian Drones Have Changed the War

Tu-95.

Is the Kuwait Airport Attack a Turning Point in the Iran War?: The purported ceasefire crafted between President Donald Trump and the Islamic Republic of Iran has entered a new, bizarre place. On the one hand, Trump continues waxing eloquent about his beautiful deal with the Iranians. Meanwhile, the other two parties in the war, the US ally of Israel and Iran, keep shadow boxing.

You see, Iran has insisted that the ceasefire include Israel and Lebanon.

This video describes the military situation in

Were you diagnosed as neurodivergent while serv

Summary and Key Points: Vladimir Putin still tells his country that victory in Ukraine is coming. But the war has now lasted longer than World War II did for Russia, and the people best positioned to know — including one of Russia’s own top academics — have quietly reached the opposite conclusion: this war cannot be won, not without an occupation that is simply impossible.

The Ukraine War and a Look to History 

U.S. Army Pvt.

Kremlin Warns Of “New Paradigm” In Ukraine War: Here’s What That Means: As Ukraine finds its feet as a drone operator, conducting deeper and deeper strikes into Russian territory using inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the Kremlin is now claiming that the war has entered an “entirely different paradigm.”

The warning comes after Russia launched one of its largest aerial attacks of the war so far, firing 656 drones and 73 missiles at targets across the country overnight. The strikes hit Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Poltava, and Zaporizhzhia.

When Ukraine’s parliament confirmed its new defense minister this January, it made a bet almost no country at war would dare: it handed its military to a tech entrepreneur who has never served in uniform. But Mykhailo Fedorov is no ordinary bureaucrat — years before he ran a ministry, he ran the digital campaign that put Zelensky in office. And after Russia invaded, he pulled off what may be the single most important non-combat move of the war: persuading Elon Musk to flood Ukraine with Starlink, then, later, to switch the Russians off, stalling one of their advances.

The greatest danger facing the United States in its war of choice against the Islamic Republic of Iran is not a sudden decision by President Donald Trump to launch a full-scale invasion of the country populated by more than 90 million people. It’s what’s known as “escalation-by-exhaustion.”

Currently, there’s little evidence in Trump’s repertoire that he is chomping at the bit to repeat the same mistakes as former Republican President George W. Bush: invading an ancient Mideast country with insufficient troop levels, a lack of political will, and no plan for any fallout.

The United States is drawing down both its emergency oil reserves and commercial stockpiles as the war with Iran continues. In an effort to stabilize global energy markets, the United States is depleting its own reserves while Washington works to secure a lasting deal that would see the Strait of Hormuz reopened and Iran prevented from obtaining a nuclear weapon. New data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) showed another major decline in U.S.

Summary and Key Points: On paper, the Iran war is winding down: Trump says a deal could come within days, and his secretary of state says Tehran is suddenly willing to discuss things it called off-limits weeks ago. On the ground, it looks like the opposite. This week a drone-and-missile strike tore into Kuwait’s international airport — dragging a country that had stayed out of the war directly into it — while the Strait of Hormuz remains choked shut months after a ceasefire was meant to reopen it.

The JH-XX or J-36 is an American designation for a suspected Chinese regional stealth bomber, reportedly developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation (CAC). It is suspected that the J-36, the first of China’s sixth-generation aircraft, was the stealth fighter-bomber that Western intelligence agencies have been tracking for some time. The J-36 is a highly unusual aircraft with a trijet configuration and a tailless, diamond delta wing layout. Its overall role in the PLAAF remains ambiguous, although its size suggests it is a multi-role strike aircraft.

How Long Can Russia Last in the War Against Ukraine?: The Russo-Ukrainian war is in its final stages. I predict that an extended ceasefire and peace talks will occur in about three months. Russia will not be negotiating from a position of strength, but Ukraine will. The defenders have put up a valiant fight and have decimated Russia’s best troops and military hardware. Ukraine is also winning with adroit psychological warfare. They just launched a flight of one-way drones to frightfully disrupt an economic conference in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin’s hometown.

Summary and Key Points: On the surface, the Iran war has stalled into a tense ceasefire. Underneath, the regime is coming apart: prices are soaring, exports have collapsed, and a government can no longer reliably pay the troops it’s counting on. Iran is using the lull to rebuild — but the same pause has handed Washington a menu of ways to push the regime past the edge, short of the ground war the headlines keep warning about.

America Has Options When It Comes to Iran 

F-22 Raptor Elephant Walk. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

A U.S.

The long delayed Defence Investment Plan, to tu

Oshkosh Defense, a business of Oshkosh Corporation, has received orders worth $142m for its Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV) A2 platform from customers in the US and overseas.

Attention to orders: The commander of the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing has promoted the beloved feline assigned to Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, widely known as “Pizza Cat” to serve in the next higher grade of Senior Meowster Sergeant.
The cat, who earned her moniker for regularly being spotted near the on-base Pizza Hut, has a very large fanbase on social media — so much so that military officials had to issue a memo last year debunking rumors that she had been ordered to be put down.
Also known as the “Queen of the Deid,” the cat has long raised morale at the sprawling U.S.

The Pentagon launched a website this week to support a new initiative that helps servicemembers, military spouses and civilians explore jobs and career development opportunities.
The effort is part of what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is calling Project Patriot Pipeline.
The new portal, which can be found at mypatriotcareer.mil, includes links to resources and information about national defense-related jobs, resume building, education opportunities, credentialing, career counseling, the SkillBridge program, and other topics.

Ukrainian and Norwegian leaders complain that Europe mustdevelop its own fully fledged anti-ballistic missile capability to rival the US.

💡The Government isn’t sure that using

After four years of fighting in Ukraine, one of the biggest surprises of the war is that Russia’s economy never collapsed fully in the way Western observers expected. Russian GDP growth even remained positive at times during the war, with factories churning out products and, of course, military production humming, while unemployment remained relatively low. But that production and that employment were a superficial gloss that hid a deeper reality of stagnation.

When is the risk of war the highest? And what should the United States be doing about it? One of the most important but underappreciated questions in international politics is how states think about the future balance of power. Countries that believe their position is improving often choose patience. Those who fear their position is deteriorating may feel pressure to act before their advantages disappear. In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dean Cheng, Mira Rapp-Hooper, and Amanda Hsiao to explore how Chinese leaders may be thinking about time, power, and Taiwan.

Summary and Key Points: Ask most people what an oil shortage looks like, and they’ll say expensive gas. They won’t say a bakery asking you to bring your own container, or a snack bag, suddenly printed in black and white. But that’s exactly what’s happening in Japan. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has choked off the crude Japan turns into naphtha — the unglamorous petroleum derivative behind nearly all plastic, from packaging to medical supplies to the inks on a candy wrapper.

The Strait of Hormuz Crisis Expands 

F-22 Raptor Reverse. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

In what is a clear slap in the face to Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainians have attacked his hometown of St. Petersburg. Drones from Ukraine pounced on the city overnight on June 3, which hit some buildings and injured a handful of citizens. This was more of a symbolic strike than one that could be decisive in the war, but Putin is likely seething in frustration.

Ukraine timed the attack to cause maximum confusion in a daring raid during one of Putin’s showcase events. He was planning to hold an economic forum in St. Petersburg, and Ukraine’s strike showed that nobody is safe in Russia.

ARX Robotics has outlined a series of expansion initiatives, including the establishment of a new headquarters and production facility in Munich, Germany.

Summary and Key Points: The Avro Vulcan was designed as a bomber, but it was never defined so tightly in practice. Britain’s great delta-winged V-bomber handled like a fighter, and at 45,000 feet it humbled them — Mirages, Phantoms, Starfighters, Lightnings all climbed up to take it on, and its pilots swear not one ever beat a Vulcan in a turning fight. It had a low radar signature and countermeasures that let it slip past defenses decades before anyone used the word “stealth.

This video describes the military situation in

Though the Army adopted the SIG M7 rifle and M8 carbine, the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) decided not to follow suit. Similarly, the Marine Corps also rejected the new weapon platform and its 6.8x51mm cartridge, electing instead to stick with its M27 IARs and NATO standard 5.56mm ammo.
In addition to adopting new Medium Range Gas Guns, chambered in 7.62mm NATO or 6.5mm Creedmoor for the assaulter and sniper roles, SOCOM’s latest procurement plan seems to indicate that the command has aversion to the SIG.

Summary and Key Points: Strip away the politics, and Trump’s war on Iran reads like two completely different stories. In one, it’s a stunning military success: Iran’s air force, navy, and missile brigades shattered, its nuclear program crippled, its supreme leader dead. In the other, it’s a looming disaster — illegal in critics’ eyes, opposed by most Americans, fought without allies, and unable to deliver the one thing that would justify it: a real peace. Dr. Brent Eastwood lays both ledgers side by side and reaches an uncomfortable conclusion.

Can Trump Extricate Himself from the Iran War?: When President George W. Bush ordered U.S. troops to invade Iraq almost a quarter century ago, he was giddy: His own father had defeated Iraq just 12 years previously in just 100 hours, forcing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein into a humiliating withdrawal from Iraq. For a generation of Middle Easterners, the so-called “highway of death” became synonymous with American power. The war led Donald Rumsfeld to embrace “fourth generation warfare,” placing technology above manpower.

Many Americans today consider the 2003 Iraq war a quagmire.

Summary and Key Points: Almost every conversation about the Iran War points the same way — toward Tehran, the Strait of Hormuz, the warships in the Gulf. Dr. Andrew Latham thinks the real story is unfolding where nobody’s looking: inside China’s oil storage tanks. For years, Beijing quietly stockpiled crude on a massive scale, for reasons that seemed unremarkable at the time. Now those reserves are why China — alone among the great powers — isn’t scrambling. But stockpiles only buy time; they don’t remove pressure.

The Iran War Comes for China 

China’s Xi Jinping.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump has found himself in a mess, or perhaps it is better to say he has created one for himself. America and Iran continue to maintain a shaky ceasefire, characterized by a double blockade and punctuated by occasional airstrikes and missile exchanges. The United States is substantially short of the status quo ante, the position that it enjoyed before the war began. Worse, there is no clear way out of the conflict.

The Military Situation with Iran

U.S.

FlGlobal
Wednesday 3 June marked a seminal milestone in the aviation world: the end of Harrier jump jet operations in the USA.

BrDefense
The Air Force has picked GE Aerospace…

Greg Hadley, Air & Space Forces Magazine
Air Force

D’urso, Aviationist
A thermal image captured near Area 51 allegedly shows a previously unseen next-generation aircraft design with cranked-kite wings and canards, which is now spurring many…

GDN
The U.S.

Summary and Key Points: Here’s a thought experiment one national security analyst can’t shake: what if the Strait of Hormuz simply stays closed — not for weeks, but until Christmas? For a month or two, reserves and rerouting paper over the damage. After that, the buffers run dry — and analysts say America hits that wall right around its 250th birthday on July 4. From there, the scenario gets stranger than a gas crisis. The fuel that does the real damage isn’t the one in your tank; it’s the one moving the nation’s food, freight, and machinery.

Chinese state media outlets predict America’s sixth-generation fighter, the F-47, will be an expensive boondoggle, though there are signs the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is, at least at some level, taking the threat it poses seriously.
In April, the U.S. Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI) published a round-up of early reactions to the F-47 from official state media sources. The U.S. government considers China a rival superpower, and CASI regularly samples CCP state media to gauge how party leaders react to new information on U.S. weapon programs.

Wearing his survival suit, Ryan Shuck floated in the icy water of the Bering Sea, doing whatever he could to survive.
It wasn’t easy. Shuck struggled in the freezing water as swells up to 20 feet and snow squalls battered him. He was one of 47 people aboard the Alaska Ranger who abandoned the 189-foot-long fishing boat after it lost control of its rudder and flooded on March 23, 2008.
Also Read: How the Navy and Coast Guard frantically searched for Amelia Earhart
Shuck didn’t have the benefit of a life raft, so he had no protection against the frigid cold or the turbulent seas.

Summary and Key Points: For one week a year, St. Petersburg belongs to Vladimir Putin — host to a glittering economic forum built to remind the world of Russia’s wealth and reach. This year, the curtain went up on a column of black smoke: hours earlier, Ukrainian drones had slammed into the city’s oil terminal, a refinery, and a naval base, the haze drifting into view of the forum itself.

An Expanding Trend of Ukrainian Drone Strikes

A Swedish Air Force Saab JAS 39 Gripen climbs during the 2019 Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford, England, July 20, 2019.

Summary and Key Points: There’s no harder place on earth to take an honest poll than wartime Russia. Answers come wrapped in fear, censorship, and the instinct to repeat the safe official line — many Russians won’t even give their last names to a Western reporter. Which is why a recent finding from one of Russia’s most respected pollsters carries weight: by one measure, the public’s appetite for continuing the war just hit its lowest point since the invasion began in 2022.

Exclusive footage obtained by CNN and released on June 4 has shown extensive fire damage aboard the U.S. Navy’s most advanced nuclear powered supercarrier USS Gerald Ford, following a major fire that occurred when the ship was deployed to support an assault against Iran from February 28. The carrier’s fire-control system reportedly failed to operate as intended, forcing the crew to manually combat the fire. It took approximately 30 hours to fully extinguish the fire, with the incident impacting the accommodations for around 600 sailors. Although U.S.

The United States has been effectively defeated by Iran in this year’s war. US President Donald Trump has been unable to coerce acceptable terms from Tehran. Tehran continues to drag out the negotiations, insisting on conditions – such as control of the Straits of Hormuz – which Trump cannot accept because of massive political opposition back home.

Trump himself likely does not care about these details. His passion is domestic affairs and his various Washington refurbishment projects. He clearly wants to get out of the war, even claiming that he is now ‘bored’ by the whole thing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has laid out a potential plan for the joint future development of the Su-57 fifth generation fighter by Russia and India, following multiple reports from officials in both countries that cooperation on the program is currently under negotiation. Speaking at a press conference on June 4, the president observed:
“As far as the Su-57 goes, at one point we proposed to our Indian friends to work together on this technology. It’s fifth generation technology I think it’s the best in the world as of now.

This video describes the military situation in

China’s plan to become a world leader in AI by 2030 is a fixture of practically every Congressional briefing and expert commentary on Beijing’s AI ambitions. The plan’s logic — introduced in 2017 — was simple and alarming: Beijing would direct capital, mobilize its firms, recruit talent, and execute with the strategic patience of a state-led innovation ecosystem. Nearly a decade later, that frame has only hardened.

The Battle of Midway has assumed a place in American naval lore that has put it on par with other great battles in world naval history. What Salamis was for the Greeks, Trafalgar for the British Royal Navy, and Tsushima for the Japanese, the clash northwest of Midway Island on June 4, 1942, represents for the U.S. Navy. It was a moment of heroism, professional skill, and victory, which came to define how the Navy viewed itself for the rest of the 20th century and beyond.Unlike those other great battles, however, Midway was a decidedly modern naval operation.

When President Donald Trump repeatedly pressed regional leaders on Abraham Accords expansion late last month — framing Arab-Israeli normalization as a debt owed and a condition for a settlement to end the Iran war — he apparently commented there had been silence on the other end of the line.Arab and Muslim states are not silent because they lack a position on normalization. Indeed, collectively they have already articulated one through the Arab Peace Initiative ­— the 2002 proposal that offered normalized relations between Israel and over 50 countries.

The RAF Aces ice hockey team demolished the Bri

Following confirmation that the Russian Navy had deployed the heavy nuclear-powered cruiser Admiral Nakhimov for the final phase of its sea trials, significant attention has drawn to the uniquely large and powerful warship’s capability to influence the balance of power in the Arctic, where it will primarily be deployed. Following the ship’s re-floating on July 25, 2025,for the first time in 28 years began to set sail under its own power the following month, after a very extensive refit replace the vessel’s electronics and weaponry to transform its combat potential.