Raw Intel

On Thursday, we were reminded what the word exceptional actually means. Three were awarded the Medal of Honor. I tried to find a copy of the text of their citations, but they are not posted yet that I could find. Retired Marine Corps Maj. James Capers Jr.: Recognized for his exceptional bravery and leadership while leading a rescue mission while severely wounded during the Vietnam War. Retired Army Maj. Nicholas Dockery: Awarded for his courageous actions and for defending his platoon while under heavy attack in the Kapisa Province of Afghanistan. Late Marine Corps Col. John W. Ripley (Posthumous): Honored for his extraordinary heroism during the Vietnam War, where he ex…

Every time an F-35 lands, its brakes absorb an enormous amount of heat. The world’s most advanced stealth fighter weighs more than 29,000 pounds fully loaded, lands at speeds exceeding 150 miles per hour, and stops using a braking system that has to dissipate that kinetic energy within the length of a runway. When the […]View the full article

Sweden announced on May 28 that it will donate 16 Gripen C/D fighter jets to Ukraine and enable the purchase of up to 20 newer Gripen E/F aircraft funded through a 2.5 billion euro ($2.90 billion) EU loan, with long-term ambitions to deliver between 100 and 150 Gripen aircraft to Kyiv and training of Ukrainian […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force’s VC-25B Bridge aircraft, the interim replacement for the aging Air Force One fleet, has completed modification and flight testing and is now being painted in a new red, white and blue livery, with a public rollout scheduled for this summer. The Department of War accepted a head-of-state configured Boeing 747-8i from […]View the full article

Canada’s Royal Canadian Navy will equip its next generation of warships with the same submarine-hunting sonar system that the British Royal Navy operates, after Thales Canada secured a contract from Lockheed Martin Canada to supply the S2087 towed array sonar for the future River-class destroyers. The award makes Canada the 20th navy worldwide to select […]View the full article

A drone equipped with an airborne signals intelligence system successfully detected, classified, and geolocated every high-priority radio frequency emitter in a French military exercise earlier this month, demonstrating a capability that could fundamentally change how ground forces find and track adversary communications equipment, drone operators, and jammers without putting soldiers within range of the threats […]View the full article

A Netherlands-based command and control platform led one of four competing teams at NATO’s largest counter-drone interoperability exercise in May, fusing sensor data from 13 countries into a single operational picture and receiving an official certification from NATO’s communications agency confirming it successfully connected with 46 separate counter-drone nodes across two tiers of the alliance’s […]View the full article

Every warship in the U.S. Navy practices shooting down the kind of supersonic cruise missiles that China and Russia have spent decades perfecting, and the Navy paid nearly $100 million to keep that practice running for another five years with the only American target missile that can actually replicate what those weapons do. The Naval […]View the full article

Ukraine has mounted interceptor drone launchers on a Mi-8 helicopter, with footage of the system shown in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Independence Day address, Militarnyi reported. The footage shows an interceptor launching from beneath one of the helicopter’s hardpoints, using simple metal launch rails mounted under the airframe. The drone is likely controlled either from inside […]View the full article

From New England to Puerto Rico, across the Gulf of America, skipping over the desert to the West Coast…the vast American coastline is littered with closed and abandoned shipyards. They surround us like ghosts haunting the ruins of a once great empire, whispering of what once was. Some have been repurposed so much it would require a national emergency to claw back the waterfront. Others only a bit, and another cohort almost frozen in aspic from the day they were closed. Every time there is a proposal to do something as straightforward as reviving Charleston or something more ambitious like Jan Sramek’s Solano Shipyard, those trying to make forward progress have to swim t…

A Calgary startup has built a missile that weighs about as much as a housecat, and it might end up deciding whether a $100,000 drone attack on a power plant succeeds or fails. North Vector Dynamics, a Canadian defense technology company based in Calgary, posted on social media on July 27, 2026, introducing the CM-70, […]View the full article

A spinning umbrella built to save armored vehicles from a kamikaze drone sounds like something out of a cartoon, but Russia’s military has patented exactly that. The Combined Arms Order of Zhukov Academy, one of the Russian Armed Forces’ premier officer training institutions, has designed and patented a rotating cartridge launcher meant to protect vehicles […]View the full article

A Belgian military transport aircraft spent an entire day flying protective weapons systems from Canadian military stocks to Ukraine, in a priority delivery that Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken announced on Sunday with enough detail to confirm the mission happened but not enough to reveal what was actually delivered. The deliberate opacity around the cargo […]View the full article

As U.S. forces confront a growing wave of low-cost drone attacks that have exposed a fundamental flaw in how America stocks and prices its air defense arsenal, the Army has tapped a rocket technology startup to scale a more affordable answer: a laser-guided version of one of the most proven rockets in the American inventory. […]View the full article

At some point in the next decade, a historian is going to look at the first quarter of the 21st century from the perspective of the national security establishment and the blessings it had as it rose to global power status, and will publish the foundational reference book for those trying to understand that moment in time. Its primary rivals distracted and drained themselves in unnecessary quixotic quasi-imperial police actions, one in Central and Southwest Asia (U.S.A.), the other bled itself white attempting to reconstruct at least part of its predecessor’s empire (Russia). All the while, its economy grew, its diplomatic influence expanded, and its military became an i…

An Israeli drone manufacturer whose production facility was struck by an Iranian ballistic missile just two months ago has announced that its G3 reconnaissance drone platform completed operational readiness and training activities with unnamed security organizations over the past two weeks, with photographs showing the aircraft carrying blurred external payloads that were obscured, apparently for […]View the full article

A matte-black Mitsubishi Delica D:5 minivan bearing no license plates, no unit markings, and a rooftop loaded with cameras, sensors, antennas, and a loudspeaker was photographed operating near Japan’s largest Ground Self-Defense Force live-fire exercise in Shizuoka Prefecture on June 7, 2026, according to Japanese military photo journalist Masaya Takewaka, writing for Transport News. The […]View the full article

Two of Europe’s largest defense companies are about to put their first jointly developed main battle tank on public display, revealing a new chapter in European armored warfare that has been building since the Italian Army decided its aging Ariete tank could no longer carry the weight of the country’s ground combat ambitions. Leonardo Rheinmetall […]View the full article

Last night I bumped into something I wrote in my second month of blogging in August 2004 about a contemporary article by Eliot Cohen in WaPo titled, The Thin Red Line, Getting Thinner. It was about Tony Blair’s expected cuts announced that year. What happens to the military in Great Britain matters not just to them, but to the U.S.A. and the entire Western security system. What Cohen said almost 22 years ago rings even more true today. …the real significance of this erosion of British strength, and the stake the United States has in stopping it. First, Britain is the only considerable state that can send substantial forces in the field to operate alongside ours. Others -…

U.S. Central Command finished its third round of airstrikes against Iran in a single week on July 11, hitting roughly 140 military targets after Iranian forces attacked another commercial vessel transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that carries a fifth of the world’s oil out of the Persian Gulf every day. The strikes, […]View the full article