Two senior Biden administration officials opened the door May 29 to allowing Ukraine to use American-donated weapons to strike inside Russia. The move, if made, would come as European allies, lawmakers and Ukrainian officials exert pressure on the White House to lift the restrictions, and as Russia has made major advances on the battlefield.
Elon Musk aggressively elbowed his way into the space launch business over the past two decades, combining engineering genius and an entrepreneurial drive with a demand that the U.S. government stop favoring the big, slow-moving contractors that had long dominated the industry.
China isn’t just trying to intimidate Taiwan militarily, it’s also working harder than ever before to make Taiwan’s leadership appear corrupt, public institutions look fragile, and the military seem weak in order to undermine public confidence in the government. At the same time, China is stock-piling new cyber weapons that could potentially cripple Taiwan’s infrastructure in a time of crisis. The goal is essentially to achieve annexation without having to resort to a full military invasion, according to a new report from Booz Allen Hamilton.
Another U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone went down in Yemen, images purported to show May 29, as Yemen’s Houthi rebels continued attacks on shipping around the Red Sea over the Israel-Hamas war.
In what is likely her last interview as acting U.S. Air Force undersecretary, Kristyn Jones said May 29 that the Nunn-McCurdy review of the troubled Sentinel ICBM program has uncovered a lesson all Pentagon programs must bear in mind when building on an existing capability: Don’t assume there’s significantly less risk just because there’s an existing infrastructure.
A recent U.S. Space Force notice affirms that only Boeing and Northrop Grumman are qualified to build the service’s next generation of jam-resistant satellite communications payloads.
As the Air Force begins using new authorities from Congress to fund early development work on modernization efforts, the department wants to start fielding one of those capabilities for moving target indication in 2027, DefenseScoop has learned.
“Recently I had the opportunity to meet in Kyiv with key leaders of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, General Staff of the Armed Forces, and Air Force. Over three days, our discussions centered on optimizing the use of airpower in accomplishing the defense of Ukraine and ejecting Russian military forces. The Ukrainian security leadership’s frustration over restrictions on the use of weapons provided by the United States was palpable—and rightfully so,” writes retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
Newly released police records and phone calls from a Florida sheriff’s department raise more questions over how the deputy who shot and killed Senior Airman Roger Fortson in his home this month was led to the apartment by bystanders.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, released a white paper May 29 calling for an increase in defense spending to fund cutting-edge technologies, including U.S. Space Force capabilities to compete with China’s growing military presence in space.
The Swedish government will send new military equipment to Ukraine worth $1.3 billion to fill the country’s most urgent capability gaps, officials announced on May 29. The aid package will include the Saab-made airborne surveillance and control aircraft, known as ASC-890, which can track ships, drones, aircraft and missiles.
With Beijing investing heavily in artificial intelligence and the high-tech tools of what it calls “informationized” warfare, a worried Washington wants to catch a wave of innovation in AI, software, and other cutting-edge technologies. But the governments of the rival superpowers have very different relationships with their respective tech sectors. So how can the U.S. ensure it has the edge?
In the annals of the all-time biggest marketing snafus, few companies have made bigger or more high-profile errors than PepsiCo. ... Perhaps Pepsi’s most memorable disaster (in the U.S., anyway) was when it was nearly forced to buy a McDonnell Douglas AV-8B Harrier II fighter jet for one of its consumers. Remembering the Harrier fiasco, Liquid Death—the self-described “funny beverage company who hates corporate marketing as much as you do”—is poking fun at Pepsi’s biggest fail by giving away a Czech-made Aero L-39 Albatros trainer jet.