One was a general who had commanded Chinese forces arrayed against Taiwan. Another was an officer who had led the People’s Liberation Army’s training department and been praised for modernizing combat drills. A third had long served as the chief military aide to China’s leader, Xi Jinping. These men are among dozens of once-rising senior military officers who have been detained, dismissed or simply disappeared from view without explanation over the last four years.
The Pentagon will nearly double its innovation arm, expand the industrial base for cheap maritime and aerial drones, and develop new ways to ensure supplies of critical minerals, according to an unclassified spending strategy for the $151 billion in funding from last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei until Feb. 27 to comply with the Pentagon’s demands on using its artificial-intelligence models or face cancellation of the company’s contract, people familiar with the matter said.
Jeff Schrader, Vice President of Strategy & Business Development for Lockheed Martin Space, sits down with Air & Space Forces Magazine to highlight how space is foundational to integrated defense and how space-based architectures enable speed, resilience, and decision advantage in today’s complex and contested threat environment.
A political battle over legislation that safety advocates say would have prevented a deadly crash between a civilian passenger jet and an Army helicopter last year appears to have stalled in Congress. A Senate bill that would’ve mandated military aircraft be equipped with specific signaling technology failed to pass the House.
Startup Ursa Major this week is unveiling a new hypersonic missile system dubbed HAVOC that the company plans to mostly manufacture in-house, the firm’s newly minted CEO Chris Spagnoletti said in an exclusive interview with Breaking Defense.
In a surprise move, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, who until recently was running the space acquisition shop at the Department of the Air Force, has been shifted out of that office to serve as “senior advisor” to Secretary Troy Meink.
The military’s aggressive drone crusade over the last year has produced flashy images of experimental systems spinning tiny rotors toward distant targets, urgent requests for cheap unmanned platforms built by the hundreds of thousands, and numerous organizational changes that are pushing the tech into fundamental parts of the force. Any one of those efforts alone might signal just how institutional small drones are becoming to the U.S. military. But the gradual, often understated introduction of sUAS skills to early training for rank-and-file troops illustrates how some services are attempting to grow a new generation of drone-savvy forces from the root.
Lockheed Martin has presented a scale model of the new-look F-22 Raptor fitted with stealthy external fuel tanks and underwing infrared sensor pods. Up to this point, the fuel tanks had been seen in renderings as well as at least one long-distance photo that revealed little in the way of details. The sensor pods, or mockups thereof, had previously been seen at closer quarters during flight testing.
The Air Force gave the U.S. men's hockey team a ride to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland before they visited the White House and posed for a photo op with President Donald Trump ahead of his Feb. 24 State of the Union address. ... “At the request of the President,” the athletes caught an Air Force C-32 aircraft assigned to the 89th Airlift Wing from Miami to the Maryland base on Feb. 24, the Air Force said in a statement.
