Israel launched more strikes it said targeted Hezbollah in Lebanon and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told troops to keep fighting at full force, casting doubt on diplomatic efforts to establish a cease-fire and head off a possible Israeli ground invasion. The Israeli military said it had hit some 220 targets since late Sept. 25 in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley area and the country’s south—both areas where the militant group has a strong presence—including weapons-storage facilities, launchers, and militants.
U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Russia is likely to retaliate with greater force against the United States and its coalition partners, possibly with lethal attacks, if they agree to give the Ukrainians permission to employ U.S., British, and French-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia, U.S. officials said.
On the exhibit floor of the Air Force’s biggest conference last week, two full-sized models of next-generation combat drones squared off amid a maze of defense contractor booths, drawing crowds that included the head of the Air Force. On one side, the Fury, built by defense tech startup Anduril. On the other, a variant of the Gambit family of drones built by General Atomics, a pioneer of the unmanned systems industry.
After several very difficult years and a swath of new programs and enticements, the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and Space Force will all meet their recruiting goals by the end of this month and the Navy will come very close, the military services say.
To protect against threats from Russia and China, U.S. Space Command needs more advanced tools to track what’s happening in space as well as satellites that can move freely in the domain by 2027, according to its commander, Gen. Stephen Whiting.
Lawmakers have rejected a request by the Air Force to acquire a second C-40 aircraft, Breaking Defense recently learned, adding another setback in the service’s bid to expand the airlift fleet that transports top U.S. officials. Alongside a call for one C-40 aircraft in the fiscal 2025 budget submission, the Air Force additionally asked Congress to rearrange FY24 funds to procure a second aircraft, the service confirmed to Breaking Defense.
The U.S. Marine Corps says it has demonstrated new capabilities for operating future drones with high degrees of autonomy in expeditionary operations with another test flight of one of its stealthy XQ-58 Valkyries. Newly added capabilities leveraging the popular Link 16 network were central to the test.
Amid a growing focus on low Earth orbit satellites, the U.S. Space Force is making strides in a more traditional space-based capability: large missile-warning satellites. The Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next-Gen OPIR) program, with an estimated cost of $14 billion, is among the most expensive satellite procurement efforts in the Space Force today.
The AUKUS alliance is open to further expanding its Pillar 2 capability areas to encompass more emerging technology categories for strategic acceleration, two senior defense officials told DefenseScoop. The news comes as defense leaders from the U.S., U.K., and Australia gathered in London to participate in the trilateral security partnership’s third official ministerial meetings, since its launch in 2021.
The Air Force is bringing industry into command, control, communications and battle management experiments to help current or potential contractors understand the warfighter's operational needs. The next exercise businesses can take part in will focus on dynamic targeting and kill chain automation for the Advanced Battle Management System, which is the Air Force’s contribution to Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control, according to a notice for the December industry day.
The Netherlands has declared full operational capability with its Lockheed Martin F-35A Joint Strike Fighters as the country prepares for the imminent retirement of the long-serving F-16.
Remember February 2023? It was a wild time. There were cocaine-addled bears, mushroom zombies, and Air Force fighters shooting sketchy, inflatable objects out of the sky left and right. That month began with a Chinese balloon ... drifting across much of the contiguous United States and igniting a furor. That was before it was blowed up real good—the technical terminology—by an F-22 off the coast of South Carolina. U.S. pilots soon shot down three more mystery objects over Alaska, Canada’s Yukon territory and Lake Huron in as many days. None of those subsequent objects were ever recovered, with the official line indicating they were probably hobbyist or research balloons. But one grainy image—it’s always a grainy image, isn’t it?—of the object shot down over the Yukon has now emerged, and it’s giving significant “I want to believe” vibes.
