President Donald Trump is authorizing the U.S. military to take jurisdiction over federal lands along the southern border to help enforce his immigration agenda. Trump issued a memorandum to the secretaries of Defense, Interior, Agriculture and Homeland Security late April 11. ... The order directs the secretaries to facilitate the transfer of jurisdiction over federal land along the border so military activity along the border can "occur on a military installation under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense."
Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting that Beijing was behind a widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring how hostilities between the two superpowers are continuing to escalate.
Iran and the United States will hold more negotiations next week over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, Iranian state television reported April 12 at the end of the first round of talks between the two countries since President Donald Trump returned to the White House.
The Finnish Defense Forces sent out an urgent message: We are being invaded. We need help. Hundreds of American troops—part of a new Arctic division—boarded planes in Fairbanks, Alaska. Their flight curved over the North Pole and landed at Rovaniemi Airport, in northern Finland. ... This was all just a drill, launched in mid-February. But the scenario is believed to be increasingly possible.
The Air Force Academy has axed affirmative action in its admissions, the government said in a recent court filing. Students for Fair Admissions, which won the Supreme Court case in 2023 that took away race-conscious admissions in public universities, sued the military academies after the justices said their ruling does not apply to those institutions.
A new report by Taiwan’s government pledges to refocus military training on realistic threat scenarios, as the island nation contends with fresh Chinese saber-rattling close to home.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signed a memo April 10 ordering the termination of several IT services contracts and directing the Pentagon’s chief information officer to draw up plans for in-sourcing, among other measures.
As the Air Force develops the operational construct for Collaborative Combat Aircraft, Doug Birkey and retired Brig. Gen. Houston Cantwell urge the service to tap into two decades of lessons learned flying highly sophisticated uncrewed aircraft like the MQ-1 Predator, MQ-9 Reaper, RQ-4 Global Hawk, and RQ-170.
Calls to overhaul the Pentagon’s buying process go back decades—to the Revolutionary War, one former congressman joked—from defense secretaries from William Perry to Donald Rumsfeld to Robert Gates to Ash Carter. An executive order signed late April 9 is the latest, perhaps the most ambitious—and just maybe, the one with the best chance for success.
Led by the U.K. and Germany, the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG) has committed to an extraordinary wave of new military aid packages for Kyiv, collectively valued at over €21 billion ($23.8 billion).
The Pentagon’s newest push to trim its workforce and spending could mean that on-base grocery stores and shops designed to save service members and their families money could ultimately be sold off to the private sector.
A coalition of female military veterans in Congress is calling on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to answer for an abrupt reversal of a policy change that allowed female Air Force pilots the chance to fly for more of their pregnancy, calling the move “purely political” and warning that it threatened combat capability and military readiness in the already undermanned pilot community.
The promise of artificial intelligence has been a staple of government technology roadmaps for decades. But too often, AI has remained an aspirational concept—more a collection of PowerPoint slides than a tangible operational capability. However, recent developments suggest that the gap between AI’s theoretical potential and its practical applications is finally narrowing.
The Hypersonic Air Launched Offensive (HALO) missile in development for the U.S. Navy’s high priority Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare Increment 2 (OASuW Inc 2) program has been cancelled, according to a statement given to Naval News by a U.S. Navy spokesperson familiar with the matter.
The oldest known survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor died this week. Vaughn P. Drake, Jr. was 106. Drake passed away on April 7, in his home in Kentucky. He was born Nov. 6, 1918 in Winchester, Ky., only days before the end of World War I. He would be present at the start of the U.S. entry into World War II.
