Air & Space Forces Magazine
In This Issue
Air & Space Forces Magazine July/August 2025 issue.
WORLD: Operation Midnight Hammer
Smackdown in Iran ‘15 years of incredible work’—the inside story of Operation Midnight Hammer. By Chris Gordon The 36-hour operation to fly deep into Iranian airspace in June and destroy three heavily fortified nuclear complexes began more than 15 years...
A Budget Season Like No Other
By the time the 2026 defense budget request arrived on Capitol Hill in June, Congress was closing in on passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, a massive tax-and-spending bill that included some $150 billion for defense. The budget reconciliation measure narrowly passed the House on July 3 and was signed into law by President Donald Trump on the nation’s 249th birthday. Now comes the hard part: The House and Senate are still hashing out their versions of the 2026 defense policy and spending bills.
Drone Hype and Airpower Amnesia
The proliferation of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has shaken up the military world, fueling concern that UAVs could revolutionize airpower concepts and even negate the need for air superiority as a fundamental objective of airpower strategy. These perspectives suffer from a collective airpower amnesia acquired over a 30-year period in which American airpower reigned supreme against a series of nonpeer rivals.
Strategy & Policy: NATO Members Sign Up for More Spending
NATO appears to be getting serious about spending enough on defense to keep Russia and other threats at bay. In the June NATO summit at The Hague, Netherlands, members vaulted past the alliance’s longstanding goal—never quite achieved—of all members spending at least 2 percent of their gross domestic products on defense. Instead, member states committed to spend 5 percent of GDP over the next 10 years. The bar could be set even higher in the future.
Disconnected by Design: A New Way to Employ 5th-Gen Jets
Disaggregated Collaborative Air Operations offers a creative responseto China’s focus on disrupting U.S. combat networks. By J. Michael Dahm The U.S. Air Force operational concepts for penetrating into contested areas assume that U.S. forces can maintain highly networked connectivity and...
Editorial: Global Reach, Global Power
“Top Gun: Maverick” captured movie audiences with a plot built around the mission to destroy a fictional country’s uranium enrichment facility hidden deep in a remote mountain range. ... In June, we saw the remake: The Air Force executed the real thing as seven B-2 bombers, guided by Air Force stealth fighters, glided invisibly into Iranian airspace and delivered 210 tons of perfectly engineered ordnance on two remote nuclear sites.