The U.S. military launched its eighth strike against an alleged drug-carrying vessel, killing two people in the waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Oct. 22, marking an expansion of the Trump administration’s campaign against drug trafficking in South America.
Sweden has signed a letter of intent that could see it supply up to 150 of its domestically produced Gripen fighter jets to Ukraine, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Oct. 22 after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Islamic State, now a decentralized mobile insurgency, is exploiting a reduced American presence and the collapse of Bashar-al Assad’s regime in Syria to enlist new recruits and widen its reach, said U.S. and Kurdish military commanders.
In theory, the fact that the United States and Europe fly many of the same jets should be a blessing. Common aircraft models—such as the F-35 and F-16—should mean common spare parts, ground support equipment and mechanics who can fix similar planes from different nations. But the reality is more complicated.
Satellite imaging company Vantor—formerly Maxar Intelligence—has signed a contract with the U.S. Space Force to help run a “neighborhood watch” in space to monitor for space-based threats like rogue satellites or debris that ground sensors may miss.
Artificial intelligence is the future of the military, or so Pentagon leaders keep saying. But is it the future—or is that future already here? That’s the question we tackle as Breaking Defense kicks off a new roundtable series looking at military AI.
The U.S. Army has picked AeroVironment to supply a new anti-air interceptor, primarily to provide an additional layer of defense against longer-range one-way attack drones and other similarly sized uncrewed aerial systems. Designed to be relatively low-cost and easy to produce, the Freedom Eagle-1 missile could also be employed against other aerial threats, including subsonic cruise missiles, in certain circumstances.
The U.S. Air Force is enlisting the private sector to help devise a blueprint for automating military aircraft. Merlin Labs—the developer of a platform-agnostic, “takeoff-to-touchdown” aircraft autonomy system—on Wednesday deepened its relationship with the Air Force, which has contracted it to explore the automation of its entire tanker fleet.
“The Department of the Air Force chief information officer announced a new policy change by sharing a post from a contractor, with the tag, ‘Strategic shift, operational clarity.’ It is neither,” writes Noah Sheinbaum, founder of research and advisory company Frontdoor Defense.
Between June 15 and July 29, 1945, six Army Air Forces pilots flying experimental Sikorsky helicopters evacuated between 75 and 94 wounded American soldiers from the Philippine jungles while under Japanese fire. Their mission was to transport aircraft parts, not casualties, but the pilots felt differently.
