Russian missiles blasted cities across Ukraine on July 8, damaging the country’s largest children’s hospital and other buildings in a fierce assault that interrupted heart surgeries and forced young cancer patients to take their treatments outdoors. At least 31 people were killed, officials said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is targeting the end of 2024 for Congress to pass a “significant” package of legislation aimed at curbing China, he said July 8. In a wide-ranging speech laying out his foreign policy priorities, Johnson called China “the greatest threat to global peace,” which Congress must counter “with every tool at our disposal.”
The yen’s collapse this year to a nearly four-decade low is undermining Japan’s plans for its largest military buildup in postwar history. The government has slashed orders for aircraft, and officials warn that further cuts may be imminent. Japan buys much of its military equipment from American companies, in transactions done in dollars. The government’s purchasing power has been drastically eroded by the yen’s diminishing value.
Beyond unveiling plans to expand military and financial support for Ukraine at NATO’s summit in Washington this week, the 32 nations that now make up the transatlantic alliance will host their Indo-Pacific partners to discuss new projects on cybersecurity, disruptive technologies and deterring China, senior U.S. government officials told reporters ahead of the multiday event.
A Defense Innovation Unit project to link the Pentagon’s high-performance computers with cloud-based services could soon bring real-time, high-speed data processing to military users around the world. DIU, whose mission is to help the U.S. Department of Defense better leverage commercial technology, worked with two computing firms on the 18-month effort: Rescale, headquartered in San Francisco, and Parallel Works, based out of Chicago.
With three full months left in the fiscal year for military recruiting, the services already are developing a sense of whether they’ll make their target recruiting mission or end up short. ... The Air Force and the Army, which have struggled in the past two years to meet recruiting goals, have indicated they’re on track to make mission.
Ukraine’s unorthodox efforts to develop ways of defeating Russian drones have taken an apparent new turn, with the appearance of a ultralight airplane carrying a sharpshooter to intercept uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). At this stage, few details about the concept are available, but it’s notable that the aircraft in question—the Ukrainian-made Aeroprakt A-22—is a type that we have seen in the past adapted as a one-way attack drone.
A former employee at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia has been arrested by the federal government and is accused of obstructing an investigation into a deadly 2017 aircraft crash in Mississippi that killed 15 Marines and one Sailor. James Michael Fisher, 67, was arrested July 2, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Mississippi.
The Office of Space Commerce is finally on the cusp of beta testing its Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), a U.S. government initiative six years in the making. The upcoming test will be a moment of truth for TraCSS, a cloud-based system being developed to provide basic space situational awareness and space traffic coordination services for civil and commercial space operators. The TraCSS project has lagged behind initial timelines, and according to a senior OSC official, its biggest challenges lie not in the complexities of orbital tracking, but in navigating the maze of government bureaucracy.
Armed with a marker and a white board, Estonia’s chief of defense jotted out what looked like gibberish, but to his mind was a simple algorithm that held the future of his country in the balance—a “formula,” Gen. Martin Herem said, for “when Russia is coming.”
Tapping out her husband Clive was a moment Gillian described as “Butterflies running through my whole body.” The couple, who'd been married for just over a year, had been apart for months while Clive was away for Air Force training. Tapping out is an Air Force tradition in which graduates remain at attention until a family member or friend taps them on the shoulder.