Ukrainian one-way attack drones have become Kyiv’s primary equalizer against Russia, accounting for roughly 80% of Russian battlefield casualties and striking oil and gas infrastructure as far as 2,000 kilometers from the front. About 70% of the Russian population now lives within range of Ukrainian drone attacks. A Gazpromneft refinery in southern Moscow has halted oil processing for fear of strikes. The Lukoil-Nizhegorodnefteorgsintez refinery at Kstovo — Russia’s fourth-largest by volume — has been hit.

The Defence Research & Development Organisation has completed final trials of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Launched Precision Guided Missile.

Britain’s four Vanguard-class ballistic-missile submarines carry the entire United Kingdom nuclear deterrent. Each 15,900-ton boat is powered by a Rolls-Royce PWR2 nuclear reactor, runs at more than 25 knots submerged, and carries up to 16 American-made Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The class — HMS Vanguard, HMS Victorious, HMS Vigilant, and HMS Vengeance — entered service between 1993 and 1999. The Royal Navy has kept at least one of them on patrol every single day since 1969.

In March 1996, Bill Clinton sent two U.S. aircraft carriers — the USS Nimitz and USS Independence — into the Taiwan Strait to intimidate China during the island’s first direct presidential election. Beijing had no military answer. China backed down. That single humiliation became the organizing principle of thirty years of Chinese military investment in one thing above all else: missiles, and lots of them.

Little Debbie snacks, once an indirect victim of the COVID-19 pandemic, are finally back in Commissaries. Soccer teams and lunch boxes everywhere, rejoice. For those unfamiliar with the beloved, shelf-stable baked treats, Little Debbie is the brand that brings us Nutty Buddy, Oatmeal Creme Pies, Honey Buns, and of course, pure childhood joy.
Also Read: American troops drank 2 million energy drinks during Operation Epic Fury
In 2022, family-owned McKee Foods Corp., makers of the Little Debbie line of prepackaged sweets, couldn’t keep their products on Commissary shelves due to supply costs.

Defence technology firms Echodyne and Moog have completed testing of counter-UAS systems designed to identify and engage small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) in battlefield conditions.

The USS Gerald R. Ford returned to Naval Station Norfolk on May 16, 2026, after a 326-day deployment — the longest American carrier deployment since the USS Coral Sea spent 329 days at sea in 1965. The Ford was scheduled for seven months but stretched to eleven across operations against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and the opening of the air campaign against Iran. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle has openly opposed deployment extensions, telling the Surface Navy Association the practice disrupts funerals, marriages, and family planning.

The Pentagon selected Shield AI to integrate swarm technology onto the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS), a one-way attack drone the U.S. military cloned from an Iranian variant, according to the company.
U.S. Central Command said it used the LUCAS for the first time in combat against Iran during Operation Epic Fury, though the military produced just dozens of the systems initially, according to the Pentagon’s chief technology officer in March.

Russia has become the most important enabler of North Korea’s nuclear program, according to a 38North assessment published May 13. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi told Seoul that Pyongyang is probably adding a new uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon. North Korea is estimated to possess roughly 50 nuclear warheads but still lacks a reliable ballistic missile delivery system.

Iran never aimed to close the Strait of Hormuz, Dr. Andrew Latham argues. Tehran built something far more useful — permanent uncertainty. Mines, shore-based anti-ship missiles, fast attack craft, and cheap drones make every transit a calculation rather than a routine. Global oil inventories dropped 250 million barrels across March and April. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve stood at roughly 384 million barrels in early May. The IEA projects Q2 drawdowns averaging 8.5 million barrels a day.

After a suggestion that AI might be the “holy grail” of future special operations, the general in charge of the U.S. military’s most elite combat forces had another pre-modern metaphor for the technology.
“This extends all the way back from the first stone thrown from the first sling,” Navy Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, told an audience at SOF Week Tuesday in Tampa, Florida.

U.S. Undersecretary of War Elbridge Colby announced May 18 that the Pentagon was pausing its participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defense, the 86-year-old advisory body that has coordinated North American continental defense since 1940. Washington cited Canada’s failure to meet NATO’s 5% GDP defense spending target and incomplete progress on its commitment to buy 88 F-35s. Ottawa has so far ordered only 16 and is reviewing the remaining purchase amid trade tensions.

Russia is heading toward a crippling shortage of working-age men to fill both military ranks and defense factory lines, according to Alexander Kolyandr of the Center for European Policy Analysis. The natural Russian population has declined every year since 1992, resulting in a cumulative decline of 16.8 million people. The workforce aged 25 to 29 fell by more than 720,000 in 2022 alone. Russia’s economically active population could shrink by as many as 23 million — roughly a quarter — by 2050. The late American demographer Dr. Murray Feshbach predicted the trajectory in 1983.

The U.S. Air Force has been spotted integrating hypersonic weapons onto the B-1B Lancer, with footage from Edwards Air Force Base released in late April showing Lockheed Martin’s AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon mounted externally beneath the bomber. The ARRW is a boost-glide weapon that flies at speeds exceeding Mach 5 and was previously only seen on the B-52H. The B-1B can carry up to 75,000 pounds of weapons and exceed Mach 1.2 — the fastest bomber in U.S. inventory. Boeing has discussed equipping the aircraft with up to six external LAM pylons.

This video describes the military situation in

After a drone attack injured dozens inside the Tower 22 outpost in Jordan, Army National Guard doctor Maj. Erika Page suddenly found herself in charge of a small team of doctors and medics treating dozens of injured soldiers. For hours, she and her team diagnosed traumatic brain injuries in the field and made calls on which troops would be evacuated for serious medical care and who could stay in the camp and help.
Three soldiers died in the attack, the most Americans killed in a single strike in the region prior to the start of the Iran War.

A crowd of more than 5,000 people arrived at Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1868, with a purpose.
They came to place flowers on the graves of soldiers who fought so valiantly on the first Decoration Day, which later became Memorial Day. Before the crowd paid their respects, James Garfield rose to speak.
Also Read: Widow’s powerful response to Army general goes viral on Memorial DayBefore serving as the 20th president of the United States, Garfield was a congressman from Ohio. He also served as a major general in the Union army.

New footage has shown the J-35 fifth generation fighter in a new configuration with externally mounted weaponry, namely with four PL-15 long range radar-guided air-to-air missiles under its wings. Combined with the six missiles the fighter can accommodate in its internal weapons bays, this provides considerable firepower for engagements with other aircraft. The J-35 was developed under a joint program between the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force and the Navy, with variants developed for both services confirmed to have entered service in 2025.

The Chengdu J-20 made its maiden flight on January 11, 2011, deliberately timed to coincide with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Beijing that same morning. The flight was a diplomatic message. What the West did not know was how much of the aircraft had been stolen — from Lockheed Martin’s F-35 program, from Boeing’s F-22 files, from the wreckage of an F-117 shot down over Serbia, and from Russia’s canceled MiG 1.44. Sixteen years later, more than 300 J-20s are in PLAAF service, and 1,000 are projected by 2030.

Footage released by the Russian Defence Ministry has shown road-mobile cruise missile launchers from the Iskander-K system taking part in large-scale nuclear war exercises, which are being conducted jointly with Belarus. The Iskander-K has gained growing publicity for its role in the Russian Ukrainian War, and after entering service in the mid-2010s, it was enhanced in the early 2020s with the new 9M729 cruise missile providing a much extended 1,500-2,000 kilometre engagement range.

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

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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.