Israeli sources said the Saudis had no clue something might happen. “It seems that the Americans were also in the dark, which is very worrying. A greater cause for worry, is if Washington knew and did not share the data in time with the Saudis” one source said.

TEL AVIV: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, still trying to form a new government, said Israel must increase its defense spending by “many billions immediately and then many billions every year” as the threat from Iran “has intensified in recent weeks. Israel, he said yesterday, faces a significantly growing threat from Iran. The Israeli military recently attacked… Keep reading →

“We’ve seen this coming,” but governments “haven’t been preparing to go after not only UAS but cruise missiles.”

Instead of building a 100-kilowatt weapon, the Army now plans to leap straight to 250 or even 300 kW — which could shoot down much tougher targets.

The US could develop more than a dozen different land-based weapons for $7 to $12 billion, thinktank CSBA estimates.

Let a hundred hypersonic flowers bloom, Pentagon officials say, instead of a single cumbersome mega-program.

The new approach will focus on an urgent but largely unmet threat: Russian and Chinese cruise missiles.

“These are engines that would fit on your tabletop,” said Kratos exec Stacey Rock. “We don’t want hundreds of ‘em, we want thousands [of drones] to overwhelm the threat.”

The Pentagon has almost completed a study of how to shoot down hypersonic missiles. It’s also developing new offensive weapons — conventional, not nuclear — whose deployment will become legal with the end of the INF Treaty.

“For far too long, Russia has violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with impunity,” a statement from the White House said. Moscow has refused to admit that it has for years been “covertly developing and fielding a prohibited missile system that poses a direct threat to our allies and troops abroad.”