#military-budgets

#military-budgets

Instead of fighting over a 21-mile-wide bottleneck forever, we cut a new channel through friendly territory. A dozen thermonuclear detonations and you've got a waterway wider than the Panama Canal, deeper than the Suez, and safe from Iranian attacks.

In 2021, when Olga Rudenko and other journalists launched the Kyiv Independent, they were committed to making a publication that wouldn't face political pressure from an owner. A few months later, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the Independent began reporting breaking news from the front lines.

"War is terrible, war is terrible, war is terrible," he intones, holding my gaze and giving voice to a universal chorus.

When I brought up the drones that Ukraine has used so effectively against Russian tanks, the company's chairman and CEO, Armin Papperger, was withering in his dismissal. 'This is how to play with Legos,' he told me.

The Space Force's formal acceptance of the ground system from RTX last year marked a turning point for OCX after years of blunders. The handover allowed military teams to validate the new control software and upgraded ground facilities before declaring the system ready for operational service.

"To accelerate current weapons development timelines, DARPA is considering an alternative development paradigm to increase the nation's magazine depth and breadth."

The White House is seeking a 10 percent cut to nondefense spending, proposing a reduction of $73 billion from federal programs outside the military, targeting environmental initiatives.

Hegseth's financial broker inquired about a multimillion-dollar investment in BlackRock's Defense Industrials Active ETF, which invests in global defense and security-related companies.

The January 3rd Operation Absolute Resolve ousted Venezuelan Dictator Nicholas Maduro, marking a significant shift in US policy towards countering adversarial influence in the western hemisphere.

The provocative military activity has led to speculative conversation about what it would take to invade a country twice the population and three times the territory of Iraq.

Our war fighters are leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools. These systems help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds so our leaders can cut through the noise and make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react. Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot, but advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.

We've got no shortage of munitions. Our stockpiles of defensive and offensive weapons allow us to sustain this campaign as long as we need. Iran is hoping that we cannot sustain this, which is a really bad miscalculation.

The U.S. military has fired more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles in four weeks of war with Iran, burning through the precision weapons at a rate that has alarmed some Pentagon officials.

For some weapons, the hardest fight wasn't against the enemy, in fact it was more so against wear and time. Advanced technology has delivered decisive advantages but in some cases has imposed relentless upkeep on crews and logistics chains. Here, 24/7 Wall St. is taking a closer look at how these systems became a maintenance nightmare for the U.S. Military.

But logistical consistency, like coherence and gravitas, does not characterize the new NDS. It is a document that supposedly nests within the National Security Strategy, explaining at greater length the implications of overall policy for the armed forces. The 2026 version does not do that. Rather, it restates some of the basic priorities of the Trump administration but for the most part confines itself to flattery of the president, insults, and bombast.