The coveted “Best of What’s New” for the year awards from Popular Science include, for 2006, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II and the recently de-cloaked Polecat unmanned aerial vehicle. Popular Science evaluates thousands of products each year to find those new products that “change the way we think about the future,” said Editor Mark Jannot, per a company news release. Lockheed Martin just unveiled the Polecat, a product of the secretive Skunk Works, this past summer.
House lawmakers unveiled a new reconciliation package July 15 with $60 billion for defense, $290 billion less than the Pentagon has been seeking, a day after a Senate vote to advance the annual defense policy bill failed—developments that show the perilous state of the Pentagon’s ambitious plans for fiscal 2027.