Two Air Force B-1 bombers from Texas flew near Venezuela in international air space on Oct. 23, the latest effort by the Trump administration to pressure the country’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, to leave his nation, said two U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
The Senate failed to pass a stand-alone bill on Oct. 23 that would pay troops, leaving service members once again with no clear idea of where their next paycheck will come from next week.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Oct. 22 directed drills of the country’s strategic nuclear forces that featured practice missile launches, an exercise that came as his planned summit on Ukraine with U.S. President Donald Trump was put on hold.
Since the early days of the Cold War, the early warning radars on Greenland have been a linchpin for defending North America against nuclear attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles. But the radars themselves are vulnerable to attack by hypersonic missiles, critics warn. U.S. bases in Greenland can neither detect those missiles, nor shoot them down.
President Donald Trump will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in South Korea on Oct. 30, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Oct. 23.
Eight months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Air Force’s top lawyer, the judge advocate general tasked with those duties has stepped down. No one has yet been nominated to permanently fill either of the service’s top legal jobs.
The Defense Information Systems Agency is inviting vendors to showcase innovative artificial intelligence capabilities that can help manage and gain insights from the agency’s data.
European defense giants Airbus, Leonardo and Thales signed a pact Oct. 23 to bring their space businesses together, under a long-planned merger that could eventually compete in the heavens with the American incumbent heavyweight SpaceX.
Kim Jong Un is growing his nuclear arsenal but curbing his missile tests. The 41-year-old dictator has sharply reduced the number of missile tests but signaled a more confident era for North Korea. Now an increasingly prominent actor alongside Russia and China, Pyongyang’s focus is on solidifying its nuclear status, shifting away from seeking global attention with a flurry of missile launches.
The A-10 Thunderbolt II is often lovingly referred to as the “grunt of the skies,” alluding to the nickname given to U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps infantry troops. If the A-10 is the Air Force’s grunt, then its pilots are gonna need some things broken down “Barney-style”—that is to say, into as few basic instructions as possible.
