Boeing's X-32 first flew in September 2000 and made 66 flights in four months, demonstrating in-flight refuelling, weapons bay operations and supersonic flight in two variants. Test pilots liked it. Navy test pilot Commander Phillip "Rowdy" Yates told The War Zone that Boeing had leaned heavily on F/A-1...
The numbers from Desert Storm are the reason the F-117 changed how air forces think. It flew about 2 percent of the combat sorties and struck roughly 40 percent of the targets, carrying two bombs at a time in internal bays, subsonic, with no radar and no air-to-air weapons at all. It found what it wa...
By the early 1970s the M60 was falling behind the T-64 and T-72, and the tank that would answer them was still years from service. So the Army spent its money where it would return the most: not on armor, not on the engine, but on the gunsight. Earlier M60 gunners used an optical coincidence rangefinde...
YF-23: The familiar version of this story is that the Air Force chose comfort over vision. It is emotionally satisfying and it explains almost nothing. What the YF-23 actually brought was a different theory of air superiority - dominance achieved before contact rather than asserted through maneuver afte...
The People's Liberation Army Air Force operates around 300 J-20 stealth fighters, is accelerating the J-35, and has two sixth-generation designs in development that almost nothing is publicly known about. The F-47 and F/A-XX will take years to arrive in numbers. That arithmetic is why the Pentagon ha...
A Ford-class carrier costs about $13 billion and takes years to build. The threats being aimed at it are cheap: drones, cyber intrusion, space-based targeting. That imbalance is what makes the carrier such a magnet, because damaging a multibillion-dollar warship draws attention in a way that sinkin...