Turkey’s increasingly autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is an erstwhile NATO ally. Turkey flies F-16s and is a partner in the F-35 program. But Erdogan has committed his country to buying Russia’s reportedly excellent surface to air missile system, the S-400. This op-ed by Bradley Bowman, former aide to Sen. Todd Young of the Senate… Keep reading →

Republican Senators erupted in outrage, and there are some indications that Turkey pushed Trump to withdraw support from its traditional foes, the Kurds. The British government issued an equivocal statement, while the Kremlin applauded the move.

The United States signed off on arms exports worth $192.3 billion over the past year, a full 13 percent increase from the previous year — even as the Trump administration keeps pushing hard to sell more weapons, more quickly, to more allies overseas.

AUSA: The Army is investing more and more money in lasers to defeat incoming rockets and enemy drones. Across the Air & Missile Defense (AMD) portfolio, “we put over 50 percent of our S&T (Science and Technology) money going towards directed energy projects,” up from about a third previously, said the AMD modernization director, Brig. Gen.… Keep reading →

Hollywood gives us the idea that US troops control their weapons with the latest video game-style graphics in glorious, full-color 3D. The reality is more like Pong — only with life and death at stake.

Chief of Staff Mark Milley declared air and missile defense the Army’s No. 5 priority — one of the Big Six which the service is pushing to accelerate, if necessary at the expense of everything else in their budget.

Japan and South Korea are getting new generations of sub-hunting and intelligence-gathering aircraft as China, North Korea, and Russia continue to push more assets into the waters of the Pacific.

“There’s a real capability that can be deployed as soon as the government says it can be,” Northrop Grumman’s Rob Jassey told me, possibly even in “months.”

Allies from Norway to Romania are buying big-ticket weapons systems produced by the American defense industry, and more NATO countries are inching toward agreed-upon defense spending goals. But is it enough?

Figure 1: Launch of a Yemeni Burkan 2-H missile on December 19th 2017. DEN HELDER, Netherlands: The Saudi and US governments have accused Iran of manufacturing ballistic missile used in attacks by Houthis against targets in Saudi Arabia. The longest-ranged flights reached Riyadh, a distance of roughly 950 km, with a missile called the Burkan 2-H… Keep reading →