Authorities said Jan. 2 they have found “no definitive link” between the New Orleans attack on New Year's Day and the explosion in a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. ... New Orleans suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, who died in a subsequent gunfight with police, was a U.S. national, a Texas resident, and an Army veteran. He worked in the military’s human resources and information technology departments from 2006 to 2020, including a deployment to Afghanistan in 2009. Matthew Alan Livelsberger, the man who died in the Las Vegas Trump tower blast, also had military experience, two law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation said.
Hoping to bolster the resolve of a nation whose heart “is covered in scars” after more than 1,000 days of unrelenting Russian assaults, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in his New Year’s address on Jan. 1 that he believed the United States would continue to stand with Kyiv in “compelling Russia into a just peace.”
China started the year with a broadside against U.S. defense contractors, responding to recently ramped-up Taiwan arms sales by the Biden administration and laying down a fresh warning to President-elect Donald Trump of tools Beijing can use to protect national interests.
In a March briefing with reporters outlining the service’s fiscal 2025 budget, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall issued a warning: Although spending limits imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act are set to expire by FY26, leaders would still have to make “tough choices” about big priorities that year. The FY26 budget is now (almost) here, and decisions within it are in the hands of the incoming Trump administration.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elicited some snickers back in 2002 with his famous quote about “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns” bedeviling U.S. intelligence about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. But those words seem pretty appropriate when trying to prognosticate what 2025 will look like for the U.S. Space Force.
A half dozen years after abandoning Kobani, U.S. forces are reportedly building a base in this northern Syrian city on the Turkish border that has been riven by strife between Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Turkish-backed forces. This all comes as a new Syrian government is trying to establish control over the country after ousting Bashar al-Assad.
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency may soon launch a new program to develop more robust quantum sensors that can be integrated onto U.S. military platforms, according to a special notice.
The Israeli government has established a new office at the Ministry of Defense tasked with overseeing technology development in the fields of artificial intelligence and autonomy, according to a government announcement.
The differing responses of current and incoming administration officials to the unprecedented intensity of Chinese cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure illustrate how the Biden team’s focus on regulation and intelligence-sharing may change under a successor more focused on retribution.
Florida’s Space Coast capped off a record-breaking year with 93 launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, up from 74 launches in 2023. Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, commander of the Eastern Range and Space Delta 45, credited the accelerated pace to innovations by both Space Launch Delta 45 and the private sector. “We’ve been able to reach these crazy numbers by leveraging automation, modernizing infrastructure, and streamlining processes,” Panzenhagen told SpaceNews.
In the decades following World War II, numerous fighter pilots have emerged from the record books to belatedly receive an honor long denied them: credit for downing five enemy aircraft and recognition as an ace. Many of them were “discovered” and their records corrected by the American Fighter Aces Association. Arguably, the last such man is James McCubbin, a North American P-51D Mustang pilot of the Eighth Air Force who is currently under consideration—at 103 years old.
