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Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation confirmed the new Su-57 prototype’s maiden flight, with test pilot and Hero of Russia Sergei Bogdan at the controls in a sortie described by officials as proceeding normally in accordance with its test plan. Denis Manturov, Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister, announced the milestone, describing the aircraft as a platform combining […]View the full article

American Rheinmetall recently brought the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory’s operators at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia through a week-long training course on the Fieldranger Remotely Controlled Weapon Station, culminating in day and night live-fire exercises against realistic mission scenarios. The training, which drew participants from both Fleet Marine Force combat units and the Supporting Establishment […]View the full article

Latvia has signed a multi-year framework agreement with Origin Robotics to secure a continuous supply of BLAZE autonomous interceptor drones, and structured the deal so other European nations can plug directly into it without running their own procurement from scratch. The Latvian Cabinet of Ministers approved the first contract under the framework on April 21, […]View the full article

Northrop Grumman’s YFQ-48A Talon Blue autonomous combat aircraft completed its first taxi test on May 14 at Mojave, California, moving under its own power for the first time and bringing the Air Force’s third designated drone wingman prototype within striking distance of its first flight. Crane Aerospace and Electronics, part of Connecticut-based Crane Company, supplied […]View the full article

GE Aerospace has secured a U.S. Air Force contract to advance the preliminary design of its GE426 engine, a propulsion system built specifically for the medium-thrust class of autonomous combat aircraft the Air Force is developing to operate alongside crewed fighters. The award marks the next development milestone for a program that passed its concept […]View the full article

A German autonomous systems company has demonstrated what it claims is the world’s first fully automatic drone launch and recovery system capable of operating from a moving vessel without any human intervention, and unveiled the commercial product at the Combined Naval Event in Farnborough, United Kingdom. CiS, a European developer of autonomous aerial systems, announced […]View the full article

AimLock and FN America unveiled a joint counter-drone weapon system at SOF Week 2026 in Tampa on May 19, combining AimLock’s artificial intelligence targeting technology with one of the most widely deployed remote weapon stations in the Western military market to create a system capable of detecting, tracking, and automatically calculating firing solutions against small […]View the full article

Taiwan’s state defense research institute publicly unveiled its next-generation anti-armor rocket, showing off a weapon significantly more capable than what Taiwanese infantry currently carry and explicitly designed to counter the armored vehicles a Chinese amphibious invasion force would land on Taiwan’s beaches. The National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, known as NCSIST and the […]View the full article

BAE Systems built an armored vehicle with drone-killing capabilities in ten months and put it in front of soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, for training — without waiting for a government contract to fund it. The AMPV-30, a version of the U.S. Army’s Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle fitted with a 30mm cannon and a radar system […]View the full article

We need to talk about an unpleasant subject. I briefly mentioned it last week, and talked about it a little on the latest Midrats Podcast, but that is enough fiddling around the topic. Time to man up and address the topic head-on. I think the DDG(X) program is a dead program walking. There could be an error, as there was with BBG-1 vs. BBGN-1 in the chart, but let’s look again at the latest Shipbuilding Plan. There is no DDG(X) in the plan…just Arleigh Burke DDGs being built, as the Salamander says, until the crack of doom. In the Shipbuilding Plan, it is mentioned only once in this paragraph. The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer (DDG 51) is the most capable surface combatant anywhere at sea, but we have reached the limits of its capacity. Even the planned DDG(X) program made undesirable capability and weapon system compromises. Our Fleet deserves and our national security requires the most comprehensive capability a surface combatant can provide, not just what we can make do with tradeoffs. The nuclear-powered Battleship is designed to provide the Fleet with a significant increase in combat power by longer endurance, higher speed, and accommodating advanced weapon systems required for modern warfare. Others have picked up on it as well. There is nothing official coming out, but I think it is clear—DDG(X) is going to be the price to get BBGN-1. If the DDG(X) ship look more promising and closer to cutting steel, perhaps it would be saved—but that did not happen. Remember my three proposed Flights of DDG(X) as a backup to BBGN-1 that I outlined last February? One way to stop that from even being an option is to take the entire class off the table. That leaves a hole in our fleet design that has to be filled. We don’t even have a “heavy frigate”. The FF(X) is a patrol frigate at best. We need a DDG, so… To the crack of doom, we shall build Arleigh Burkes. To the crack of doom. There is no other option but to keep producing a ship designed when the Soviet Union was still a threat. There’s a problem, though. This is what we’re leaving behind. Via the 2025 GAO Weapon Systems Annual Assessment: I’ll ignore the fact the image above does not have a main gun—which the last few years have proven its worth … but we are bypassing the ability to “…accommodate future capability growth…sufficient size and power margins…” that even the Flight IIA and III Arleigh Burkes simply can’t accommodate. Take a peek at the “Shakira Mod” to the USS Chung-Hoon (DDG 93) Arleigh Burke-class Flight IIA recently taken by the good people at San Diego Webcam. The Arleigh Burke is now at the muffin-top stage of modification, giving it a dorky look not seen since the Albany Class CG of the middle Cold War era. But, here we are. Perhaps it is not so much dead as in a medically induced coma? I don’t know, but we once again have proof that our Navy has not had a successful surface ship program after the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 came into effect—and all the backwash that came with it. Arleigh Burke Hull-1 was commissioned on July 4th, 1991, five months before the Soviet Union fell apart and half a decade since Goldwater-Nichols was signed into law, but make no mistake: Goldwater-Nichols had no impact on the design or the program by the time it started displacing water. Ever since then, with the accretions encumbered acquisition system that our Navy and Pentagon have labored under, we have failed with every new surface combatant program we have tried. I don’t want to even add up the billions of dollars spent that resulted in nothing useful to the deployed fleet. The opportunity cost is enough to drive an honest man insane. We may very well see an Arleigh Burke DDG serve until, when, 2065 if we keep building them nine more years? Looks like it. One must do what one must, but we need to be very sober about what we are looking at. We have lost two, almost three generations of ship design progress simply because we lack the people, leadership, and bureaucracy to build warships. That has a cost. It is a primary indication of a broken institution. Do we know that? In a few years, will we talk about a cancelled BBGN-1 program too? Then what? Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

A Romanian Air Force F-16 patrolling Baltic skies under NATO’s air policing mission shot down a suspected Ukrainian drone over southern Estonia on May 19, marking the first time NATO fighters have actively intercepted and destroyed a drone over the Baltic states rather than simply scrambling to track one. The incident unfolded around midday, with […]View the full article

From ABC news service https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-19/planned-upgrades-to-collins-class-submarines-scaled-back/106698460?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other

The U.S. State Department approved a potential $236 million sale of AGM-184 Joint Strike Missiles to the Belgian government on May 18, clearing the path for Brussels to arm its growing fleet of F-35A fighter jets with a weapon specifically designed to strike ships and hardened targets from well outside the range of enemy air […]View the full article

The U.S. State Department approved a potential $3 billion sale of 24 MH-60R Seahawk naval helicopters to South Korea on May 18, doubling Seoul’s fleet of the American-built submarine hunters just weeks after the country’s navy put its first two Seahawks into operational service. The MH-60R Seahawk, built by Sikorsky and supported through Lockheed Martin […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force has handed a $40 million contract to World Wide Technology, a St. Louis-based technology firm, to build an artificial intelligence-powered Security Operations Center — essentially a high-tech nerve center that will monitor the service’s networks around the clock for cyber intrusions, attacks, and threats. The award, announced May 18 and running […]View the full article

Lockheed Martin walked away from May 18 with an $879 million weapons contract, and this one has nothing to do with building new jets. The Naval Air Systems Command handed the Fort Worth defense giant a production order covering the missile launchers, bomb racks, gun systems, wing pylons, and adapter hardware that physically attach weapons […]View the full article

The code in AreaDefense loops thru the mounts from first to last looking for a valid weapon, not the optimal weapon. AreaDefense also tags the target missiles as crossing targets so that skips at least one range check (which doesn't take courses into account so would not have prevented the SAMs from firing. It is not a small undertaking to replace the AreaDefense logic. The ExportDLL interface allows it to be replaced without modifying the core game (which we can no longer do). In short, don't hold your breath on a fix for this one. The intriguing bit is that NewAreaDefense() which I wrote in the 2013 timeframe. It does check speed and bearings to see if an intercept is kinematically possible. NewAreaDefense was not completed.

Issue is in AreaDefense which is called by case 5: /* area defense */ if (dllexEffect05() == FALSE) { eff102(); #ifdef NEW_AREADEFENSE NewAreaDefense(); #endif } break;

Issue confirmed, I see the same behavior in 2025.025.

The game is implemented in such a way that it will pretty much max out one core of your CPU even when the game clock itself is not ticking. That's just a tight game loop that too my knowledge cannot be relaxed without the developers making a code change. The game also by default maxes out my GPU (where my fan noise originates. The minor difference I was able to achieve was using the Nvidia app (I have an NVidia GPU) to limit the Command.exe FPS to 30 and I turned on Vertical Sync. That brought my game idle GPU usage down from 97%+ to 83-93%. If you find a better solution, please let us know.

I wanted to start this week out with a hearty Bravo Zulu to the Ford Carrier Strike Group, but we started yesterday’s Midrats Podcast with that, and did a good job with it. So, if you’d like, give the episode a listen when you get a chance, but today I want to instead review the military balance sheet on our operations against Iran over the last few months. In the Ford Strike Group’s Presidential Unit Citation, some stats were put on the table: 125 Iranian warships destroyed 207 TLAM launched from 9 surface platforms 1,700 sorties hitting 700 targets We’re still conducting a blockade. Still trying to negotiate with a dead-ender government. The question is, what have we achieved with the expenditure of time, money and lives? I am using the written testimony to Congress of Admiral Cooper, USN—Commander, U.S. Central Command—for the below. He has the best information, so it is a solid place to base the discussion. In less than 40 days of major combat operations, USCENTCOM forces systematically dismantled what Iran spent four decades and tens of billions of dollars building. The capabilities on which the regime relied to threaten our forces, coerce our partners, and project power across the region have been substantially degraded. … Iran can no longer reliably arm or resupply Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, or militia groups in Iraq with advanced weapons. … We damaged or destroyed over 85 percent of Iran’s ballistic missile, drone, and naval defense industrial base. More than 1,450 strikes on weapons manufacturing facilities set the regime’s ability to build and stockpile ballistic missiles and long-range drones back by years. The factories and technical workforce that produced Iran’s ballistic missiles, long-range attack drones, and naval platforms have been degraded to the point that Iran cannot replace its lost capabilities in the near term. … In the air domain, Iran’s air and air defense forces are functionally and operationally irrelevant. Before OEF, the Iranian Air Force flew between 30 and 100 sorties each day. Today that number is zero. We destroyed or rendered non-mission-capable Iran’s fixed-wing airfields, hangars, fuel storage, and munitions stockpiles, and we knocked out 82 percent of its air defense missile systems along with the radar and command architecture that tied them together. At sea, we destroyed 161 vessels in total across 16 classes of warships, effectively crippling the regime’s ability to operate. We eliminated more than 90 percent of Iran’s once-massive inventory of over 8,000 naval mines, with more than 700 airstrikes on Iranian naval mine targets. In sum, Iran’s navy can no longer claim to be a maritime power, and it cannot project into the Gulf of Oman or the Indian Ocean. Iran retains nuisance capability – harassment, low-end drone and rocket attacks, and residual proxy support – but it no longer possesses the means to threaten major regional operations or to deter U.S. freedom of action in the air or maritime domains. As I have stated from the beginning: I support a punitive expedition and can live with the goals outlined by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff early on. In my preferred COA, we would have already decoupled…but facts on the ground change. I’ll repeat again what I have said often when we step into conflicts: war is a dark room. Once you step into it, you really don’t know what is waiting for you. We’re in it now, and at this stage—having taken away the Islamic Republic’s conventional heft and ability to maintain her proxies—we have to deal with the secondary effects—getting the free flow of goods at market prices out of the Strait of Hormuz choke point…while keeping pressure on the Islamic Republic. We are trying to find some agreement with the forces ruling the Islamic Republic that seem content to destroy Iran as long as they rule over the rubble, and impoverish everyone else as long as it helps support goal #1. They are more than happy to do that, just like they were happy threatening anyone with a nuclear weapon once they got it. This is a theocratic government hoping to bring about the end of the world. They are not rational actors in a conventional sense. Where we are now is something beyond a punitive expedition. Something that is starting to show characteristics somewhere between Western intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s and Libya in the 2010s. Not sure how to describe it. We can always step back a bit to the fundamentals of a punitive expedition if we cannot make better progress in our talks. From a military point of view, a core aspect of punitive expedition is that you leave the door open for additional attack should bad behavior continue. We have bad behavior continuing, so we have yet to declare victory and go home. That is a choice, and even if we declare victory and go home now, we will probably have to return later as long as the same cadre runs the Islamic Republic. In Cooper’s statement, he gives hints that he sees the same thing. …Iran cannot replace its lost capabilities in the near term. Iran retains nuisance capability … So, should the Islamic Republic retain its characteristics, expect that it will rebuild its ability to threaten its neighbors, as it always has. Not in the near term. We mowed the grass very short, but in the medium and long term, expect it to grow back. While it grows back, it will still show up to make trouble. Policy makers need to accept that unless they decide they are willing to make a long operation out of this. Not something I would recommend. The Islamic Republic is in a more weakened position than it has ever been due to the efforts of the U.S. and Israel. Its neighbors are now comfortable confronting them on their own if needed, and have grown closer to both the U.S. and Israel in the process. That is good. Iran and its proxies are even more isolated and weaker than they were before, but there will need to be “return visits” to keep them that way. The bombings will continue until behavior improves, so to speak. We should be OK with that. I am. We just don’t need to re-create another Operation Southern Watch. Some of the Smartest People in the Room™ will try to steer us in that direction. They should be ignored. Iran right now is not focused on supporting war via proxies across the globe. They are focused on the survival of the Islamic Republic. That in itself is progress. Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

REGENT Craft has demonstrated the ability to charge its Seaglider vessels entirely away from established port infrastructure, completing a milestone test in partnership with Schneider Electric and World4Solar that the company says unlocks distributed maritime operations in austere and remote environments where conventional charging networks do not exist. The demonstration validated a three-component charging architecture […]View the full article

A Czech drone company with Ukrainian roots has signed a contract to supply reconnaissance unmanned aerial systems to U.S. Army units stationed in Europe, the company announced, marking what appears to be the first confirmed international defense export contract for U&C UAS and placing a European-manufactured ISR drone into American military service on the continent […]View the full article

Britain’s Ministry of Defence has relaunched its search for a precision strike loitering munition under a new program name, issuing a fresh request for information in May 2026 under the designation Project INSTIGATOR, a renamed and restructured version of the Medium Range Precision Strike program that the MOD has been developing since late 2024 with […]View the full article

Ukraine has cleared its first domestically developed guided aerial bomb for combat use, with Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announcing that the weapon has completed all required testing and an initial experimental batch has already been procured by the Ministry of Defense, with pilots currently training on combat scenarios using the new munition. The bomb was […]View the full article