The War Zone

The Ukrainian Navy is claiming one of its uncrewed surface vessels (USV) sank a Russian USV, marking the first time one of these weapons, also known as drone boats, destroyed another. The engagement is the latest iteration in the use of combat drone boats, which Ukraine has employed to devastatin...

Saudi Arabia on Friday announced it had to temporarily shut down the key east-west pipeline after drone attacks on Thursday from an Iranian-backed militia group in Iraq. As we have explained in the past , the Kingdom has diverted millions of barrels of oil per day through pipelines to its Yanbu p...

25 years later, it’s still somber waking up on 9/11. Thinking about all those we lost on that terrible day and in the years of war that followed. Welcome to Bunker Talk. This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff ...

Earlier this year, an Iran-linked actor used Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence model to scrape and analyze data with the aim of helping target U.S. naval forces in the Middle East . A group in Yemen – very likely Iranian-backed Houthi militants – also used Claude to assist with wor...

Lockheed Martin and a team made up of Boeing and Anduril are now facing off head-to-head to supply a new middle-tier surface-to-air missile to the U.S. Army. The service wants a second interceptor for its new Enduring Shield system , which can already fire AIM-9X Sidewinders , to expand its capab...

France is accelerating work on the Rafale F5 standard, bringing forward development of a major new configuration of its combat aircraft at a time when the country’s planned next-generation fighter with Germany has effectively collapsed in its original form . The contracts cover the equipment judg...

Work at a specialized underground weapons test site in New Mexico, contracted earlier this year, was linked to planning for a potential new operation targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, according to a report from CNN . The U.S. military has notably left Iran’s hardest-to-reach site under ...

The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have captured Mokha – a key Red Sea port in southwestern Yemen near the Bab al-Mandab (BAM) Strait. There are also reports they seized two islands located in the Red Sea shipping lanes . These moves against the Saudi Arabian-backed forces that previously hel...

Ukraine has unveiled a new domestically developed surface-to-air missile system designed to turn a diverse collection of air-to-air missiles into a flexible ground-based air defense capability. Called Shershen, Ukrainian for hornet, the system combines a locally-developed command-and-control arch...

The Oregon Air National Guard’s 142nd Wing has taken another significant step toward turning the F-15EX Eagle II into a true multirole fighter , conducting the first live-bomb drops from operational F-15EXs during training at Nellis Air Force Base , Nevada. The milestone came during a roughly thr...

Recently released pictures have highlighted a particularly interesting feature on the U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Mustin : a piggy-backed point defense system with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on top of a 30mm chain gun. The Mk 38 Mod 4 Gun Weapon System (GWS) is inte...

A Russian gas plant more than 1,700 miles from the Ukrainian border was attacked by a drone on Wednesday, Ukrainian and Russian officials said . This is reportedly the longest-distance Ukrainian strike of the war and comes as Kyiv continues to target Moscow’s energy infrastructure .  “Today,...

The Navy says it is making a concerted effort to apply the hard lessons learned from the marathon deployments of the USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Abraham Lincoln , both in combat and in quality of life for the crew, according to a new video posted by the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Daryl Caudle...

Hermeus is developing an expendable ramjet-powered aircraft, Ramjet-X, which will be air-launched from its reusable, F-16-sized Quarterhorse high-speed drone. The result aims to create a two-vehicle architecture intended to make high-speed flight testing less dependent on expensive, single-use te...

General Atomics has given us the first look at its new Wildfire drone design . The company is developing this armed medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) uncrewed aircraft in response to new U.S. Air Force requirements for a lower-cost successor to the MQ-9A Reaper . A rendering of Wildfire was ...

Covenant, a previously little-known defense startup, has emerged with a new long-range strike weapon, named Anthem, which it says is intended to provide a cheaper, more readily producible alternative to existing cruise missiles. Already in testing with the U.S. Army, the missile reflects the grow...

The U.S. Navy has lost an advanced uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV), and it is now in Iranian hands. Here’s what we know about the Dive-LD drone and its apparent seizure, and its implications. Authorities in Iran said earlier today that they had retrieved a U.S. Dive-LD uncrewed underwater...

Just hours ago, the Saudi Aramco refinery at Jazan on the Red Sea was engulfed in flames after a Houthi missile and drone attack . Strikes at the heart of the Saudi’s energy infrastructure on the Red Sea, which acts as the remaining primary lifeline of energy exports out of the region, thre...

Poland has unveiled a full-sized demonstrator of a new heavy infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) intended to put more armor and firepower between mechanized troops and the increasingly lethal threats of the modern battlefield. The unveiling comes as Poland undertakes a sweeping modernization of its a...

President Donald Trump has threatened to pursue a ban on U.S. sales of aircraft from Canadian firm Bombardier unless they move production south of the border. American officials have not elaborated on how such a total prohibition on domestic sales could take shape, but there are potential ramific...

Russia is displaying some of its newest air-launched precision weapons in public for the first time at the El Alamein International Airshow in Egypt this week . The S-71K Kovyor and related S-71M Monokhrom , and the S8000 Banderol , reflect Russia’s effort to field larger numbers of relatively in...

A handful of aviation photographers got a suprise eyeful of a very sleek and large aircraft silhouette on Thursday night at Long Beach Airport. One of them was Ricky Schol, who saw the mysterious airframe emerge from a hangar, prompting a double take. It was the first time in his 16 years of avia...

Welcome to Bunker Talk. This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff that went on this week that we didn’t cover. We can also talk about the stuff we did or whatever else grabs your interest. In other words, it’s an off-t...

The U.S. Air Force is targeting an approximately $10 million unit price, excluding sensors and certain other systems, for a drone to succeed the MQ-9A Reaper. The cost of a fully kitted-out Reaper today is generally reported to be between $30 million and $50 million. The Air Force is also now pus...

After pulling into Thailand looking very much like it just spent 286 days at sea, the U.S. Navy’s supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln is now getting much-needed TLC. When the Lincoln arrived in the Thai port of Laem Chabang on Sept. 2, it had so-called “running rust” and algae caked all along the si...

New imagery appearing out of China provides the best look yet at one of the country’s most enigmatic aircraft: the very large, low-observable, flying-wing drone widely referred to as the WZ-X . Seen previously primarily in satellite imagery, TWZ broke the story of the existence of this monster hi...

The U.S. Air Force is seeking anti-aircraft gun system to help defend its air bases around the world from drones and cruise missiles. The Request for Information (RFI) about these systems, posted on the government’s contracting website on Thursday, is part of a larger Air Force effort to play a g...

Ukrainian crews operating Australian-supplied M1A1 Abrams tanks say the battlefield has become so saturated with Russian drones that their tanks cannot currently be used in combat, but they reject the idea that main battle tanks have become forever obsolete . Since receiving these tanks last year...

Three foreign frigates – Japan’s Mogami class , the South Korean Chungnam class , and the Istanbul class from Turkey – are reportedly included in a study of ships the U.S. Navy could procure. The Trump administration has been openly pushing to leverage ships designed in friendly countries t...

Ukraine carried out one of its farthest uncrewed surface vessel (USV) attacks from Ukrainian shores, striking the Nefrit , a multipurpose offshore vessel, in the Russian Black Sea resort city of Sochi. The seaside getaway is located about 350 miles on a direct line from the nearest Ukrainian-held...

The first F-15EX Eagle II destined for permanent assignment at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa departed Boeing’s St. Louis, Missouri, facility on August 28, 2026. The aircraft left St. Louis for the 142nd Wing at Portland Air National Guard Base , Oregon, where it will undergo final staging and integr...

It’s the dead of night when the buzz of the engines of a series of Shahed-136 one-way attack drones breaks the silence. Carrying their lethal payloads the drones slip into the darkness with a distant supply base as their target. Tracking, identifying, and then destroying this swarm of drones is n...

The United Kingdom is moving toward adding a flying-boom aerial refueling capability to the Royal Air Force (RAF), a requirement being driven in large part by the future  Tempest combat jet, being developed under the Global Combat Air Program (GCAP) initiative. In a written response to oppos...

Ukrainian F-16 pilots are facing such a severe shortage of air-to-air missiles that some daytime sorties have seen them rely solely on the fighters’ internal guns to engage Russian aerial threats, according to a journalist who recently spoke with a senior Ukrainian Air Force commander. Meanwhile,...

The latest flare-up of fighting between the U.S. and Iran has seen American forces strike two Iranian oil tankers in retaliation for Tehran’s attacks on ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. This new “tanker-for-tanker” targeting policy, first reported by Axios , marks a change from ...

As spades went into the ground to signal the start of construction of the new Building 47 at Lockheed Martin’s Munitions Production Center in Troy, Alabama, it marked a significant development in accelerating production of the company’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptor, better know...

The U.S. Navy’s supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln is now in Thailand for a much-deserved and highly publicized liberty port call. The carrier had gone 286 days without making such a stop, with much of that time spent executing grueling combat operations against Iran . The ship has been run v...

The German Navy has demonstrated the launch of Israel Aerospace Industries’ (IAI) LORA ballistic missile from an F125 frigate , with at least two missiles fired from the Sachsen-Anhalt during a test in the North Atlantic last night. The demonstration points to a potentially significant new long-r...

Chinese state-run shipping company COSCO has been using concealed systems on its vessels to gather signals intelligence around North American, European, and Asian coastlines for decades, it has been alleged. Similar claims have been made in the past, and overlap between nominally civilian enterpr...

Germany has now formally accused Russia of directing an attempted explosive-drone attack against Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle Airport, a story we previously reported on . At the same time, authorities are separately investigating a sophisticated sabotage attack against a critical pow...

Under heavy escort, the USS Abraham Lincoln transited the Strait of Malacca and Singapore Strait over the weekend, en route to Thailand for a highly publicized and much-needed liberty port call. Guided-missile cruiser USS Robert Smalls led the three-ship column, with guided-missile destroyer USS ...

The U.S. Navy’s newest stated requirements for its Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) effort point toward a drone that sounds very much like an advanced uncrewed combat air vehicle (UCAV), rather than a smaller and less capable autonomous ‘loyal wingman’ intended to economically augm...

American Rheinmetall and General Dynamics Land Systems have now delivered the first prototypes of their proposed XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle (MICV) designs to the U.S. Army. The XM30 program is the Army’s latest attempt to replace its fleet of Bradley Fighting Vehicles . The com...

For about a month, the United States had refrained from attacking Iranian targets as the Trump administration turned toward economic warfare against the Islamic Republic . However, that changed last night when U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) struck what it said were Iranian rocket launchers prepar...

A new Ukrainian intelligence report details the complex production chain behind Russia’s shadowy 3M22 Zircon missile and identifies U.S.-origin electronics inside one of Russia’s most advanced weapons. New details also add weight to the theory that the weapon is a maneuverable quasi-ballistic mis...

The first of Japan’s two new cruiser-sized Aegis System Equipped Vessels (ASEV) is continuing to take shape, recently receiving its huge main integrated mast, giving the vessel a new and remarkably imposing silhouette. The four very large fixed arrays for the ship’s powerful AN/SPY-7(V)1 ra...

Japan’s Ministry of Defense has included an intriguing description of the ASM-3 Kai missile in its record fiscal year 2027 defense budget request, referring to the weapon as an “air-to-surface/anti-air missile.” Until now, the ASM-3 family has been publicly associated with the air-launched anti-s...

Russia has suddenly ramped-up the number of attacks, and their duration, on Kyiv. Ukrainian officials state that there were a record number of waves of one-way attack drones on the capital on Thursday. This is in contrast to the typical Russian mass barrages that launch a larger number of missile...

Welcome to Bunker Talk. This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff that went on this week that we didn’t cover. We can also talk about the stuff we did or whatever else grabs your interest. In other words, it’s an off-t...

The U.S. Air Force has stood up a new squadron at Andrews Air Force Base to manage the arrival of HH-60W Jolly Green II helicopters to replace aging UH-1N Twin Hueys . Originally designed for combat search and rescue (CSAR) missions, the HH-60Ws assigned to the 5th Helicopter Squadron will be in ...