Free Republic

In June 1981, the Soviet Union began building a huge, nuclear-powered reconnaissance ship specifically designed to sail thousands of miles to the U.S. missile test site at the remote Kwajalein Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There, the vessel would sit for months, hoovering up electronic data in order to determine what America’s most secretive weapons could do. But the spy ship Ural, completed in May 1983, sailed only once—from the Baltic shipyard where she was built to her home port of Vladivostok—and never went anywhere near Kwajalein. Hobbled by faulty hardware, cursed with bad luck and starved...

In 1989, the Chinese Chengdu Aerospace Corporation unveiled a major upgrade for its locally-made F-7 jet fighter, a licensed copy of the classic Soviet MiG-21. The new F-7 variant moved the engine air intake from the nose tip to the sides of the fuselage, making room in the nose for a more powerful radar. Twenty-one years later, this upgrade—now named JF-17 Thunder—is flying combat missions with the Pakistani air force, so far its sole user. Further enhanced with a new wing, a cutting-edge intake design and a new, more powerful engine, the JF-17 is Pakistan’s most important front-line fighter—and a...

Possible missile cruiser could outweigh rival surface combatants There is evidence that China is in the early stages of building a positively enormous missile cruiser—one that could be bigger and potentially more powerful than any equivalent American or Japanese vessel. On April 6, China Defense Blog—an Internet forum for close observers of Chinese military developments—republished a series of photographs that recently circulated on China’s firewalled national Internet. The photos, reportedly snapped at the Wuhan Technical College of Communication, depict what appears to be a mock-up of a large surface warship—the kind of mock-up used for testing radars and other sensors....

In one of most bizarre moments of the bizarre Aug. 6 debate between Republican presidential candidates, Mike Huckabee — the 59-year-old former Arkansas governor — blasted U.S. president Barack Obama for, Huckabee claimed, allowing America’s military might to decay. And Huckabee decided the U.S. Air Force’s B-52 bomber best represented this supposedly sad state of affairs. Actually, the Air Force owns 76 B-52Hs. It used to have 94, but in 2008 then-president George W. Bush — yes, a Republican — cut the fleet by 18. One of the 76 active airframes suffered an accident recently and Obama’s Air Force brought...

Americans should be worried. The U.S. military has grounded all its new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters following an incident on June 23, when one of the high-tech warplanes caught fire on the runway of a Florida air base. The no-fly order — which affects at least 50 F-35s at training and test bases in Florida, Arizona, California and Maryland — began on the evening of July 3 and continued through July 11. To be fair, the Pentagon routinely grounds warplanes on a temporary basis following accidents and malfunctions to buy investigators time to identify problems and to give engineers time...

India’s refurbished Soviet-made aircraft carrier Vikramaditya suffered a boiler failure during her 42-day trip from Russia’s Sevmash shipyard, where she was rebuilt, to the Indian Karwar naval base on the country’s west coast starting in late November. Like many Cold War-era warships, Vikramaditya is powered by complex steam boilers that can be unreliable and even dangerous. The Indian flattop had suffered an earlier boiler problem in 2012 during sea trials off the Russian coast—the ceramic insulating tiles failed, causing a boiler to overheat and shut down.

The U.K. Ministry of Defense has released an accounting of all the aircraft in Royal Air Force, Royal Navy and British Army service — and the overall tally is tiny … and getting tinier. As of March this year, the air forces of the United Kingdom possessed no more than 362 combat-ready warplanes and drones plus 249 helicopters — a mere 611 military aircraft. Britain’s air force, navy and army together have another 93 planes and copters that are in deep maintenance or rework plus 18 that are in storage. None of these 111 aircraft are immediately available for combat. It’s worth noting that...

Photo Op of the year: PLAN's 1st Carrier Battle Group (CVBG) CV Liaoning and her "entourage" return to Qingdao after a 37-day training exercise at sea. Note the company of three Shang class nuclear attack subs among this over-the-top photo o

Today just three countries operate long-range heavy bombers. Russia has 170 or so Bears, Backfires and Blackjacks. America fields 160 swing-wing B-1s, radar-evading B-2s and stalwart B-52s. China’s bomber force is smaller with around 130 H-6s. And most of the H-6s, copies of Russia’s Cold War Tu-16, lack the long range and heavy payload that many of the Russian and American bombers boast. But that’s changing. After years of work, the Chinese air force has reportedly outfitted two regiments—together possessing around 36 bombers — with a new, much more capable “K” version of the H-6. The H-6K is Beijing’s B-52 — a far-flying, fuel-efficient...

Moscow’s new active-array missile could be the most accurate ever By combining two existing technologies, Russian engineers have devised what could be the world’s deadliest air-to-air missile. And the U.S. military doesn’t have anything like it … or adequate defenses. Designers at the Detal bureau, part of the state-owned Tactical Missile Munitions Corporation, added an active electronically-scanned array radar—a so-called “AESA”—to the nose of a long-range R-77 missile to produce the K-77M model. Thanks to its new guidance sensors, the K-77M is way more accurate than other missiles. How accurate? Flying 40 miles or more, the K-77M should be able...

Russian media reported in early 2015 that the Kremlin is preparing blueprints for a huge new aircraft carrier to replace the Russian navy’s current flattop, the relatively small and aged Admiral Kuznetsov. But Moscow’s new carrier is likely to remain a paper concept. A quarter-century after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia lacks the money, expertise and industrial capacity to build aircraft carriers. A new flattop could boost Russia’s military power by providing air cover to warships sailing far from Russian shores and by giving Moscow another option for launching air strikes on distant enemies — a particular concern for the...

Austria is a tiny, politically neutral country with no nearby enemies. And yet the Austrian air force possesses 15 high-performance Typhoon jet fighters. Not only are the twin-engine, supersonic warplanes arguably unnecessary in light of Vienna’s defense needs—they’re also too expensive for the government’s modest military budget. The 15 Typhoons rarely fly. And when they do, they carry only a tiny fraction of the weaponry that other Typhoon operators—the U.K., Germany, Spain, Italy and Saudi Arabia—routinely hang on the high-tech fighters. And in stark contrast to other countries—which usually employ twice as many pilots as they have fighters, thus ensuring...

After decades of decline, the Argentine air force — once one of the most powerful air arms in South America — has finally given up. In August 2015, the Fuerza Aérea Argentina retired its 16 Mirage supersonic fighters, fewer than 10 of which were actually in flyable condition at the time. That leaves the FAA with just subsonic jet fighters — 25 A-4s and 18 IA-63s. Buenos Aires has made noise about buying new Gripens from the United Kingdom and Sweden via Brazil, JF-17s from China and Kfirs from Israel, but the U.K. vetoed the Gripen idea and the JF-17s...

The Russian air force conducted another massive strategic bomber raid on Daesh targets in Syria yesterday. As before, the Tupolev Tu-160 Blackjack and Tu-95MS bombers played a prominent role, however, the supersonic Tu-22M3 Backfire bombers conducted the majority of the attacks. “A squadron of Tu-22M3 long-range bombers made airstrikes against six ISIS facilities in the provinces of Raqqah and Deir Ezzor. They engaged depots with weapons and ammunition, mass concentrations of military hardware, training camps and workshops producing explosives,” reads a statement from the Russian defense ministry.

Buenos Aires has bigger air power problems Argentina has expressed interest in buying 24 Gripen E fighters from Brazil, which has just inked a licensing deal with Sweden permitting the South American country to manufacture its own copies of Saab’s new single-engine fighter. “Our willingness to cooperate with Argentina, our neighbor and ally, is total,” Brazilian defense minister Celso Amorim said. If you’re British and you’re worried—don’t be. A few Gripens will barely begin to restore the badly-depleted Argentine air arm, which lost up to a third of its 409 warplanes during two months of brutal fighting with U.K. forces...

On April 9, 1972, Iraq and the Soviet Union signed an historic agreement. The USSR committed to arming the Arab republic with the latest weaponry. In return for sending Baghdad guns, tanks and jet fighters, Moscow got just one thing — influence … in a region that held most of the world’s accessible oil. In neighboring Iran, news of Iraq’s alliance with the Soviets exploded like a bomb. Ethnically Persian and predominately Shia, Iran was — and still is — a bitter rival of Iraq’s Sunni Arab establishment, which during the 1970s dominated the country’s politics. In Tehran, King Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi — the “shah” — moved quickly to...

Angola’s bizarre, rumored aircraft carrier ambition David Axe in War is Boring Angola is in the process of acquiring the recently-decommissioned Spanish aircraft carrier Principe de Asturias, according to one news report. The entire Angolan navy has just 1,000 sailors. The 643-foot-long Principe de Asturias needs 830 sailors to fully function. No, this does not make a lot of sense. After all, Angola has no overseas military alliances and no major naval rivals. But if true, it is consistent with the country’s ongoing re-armament, which also includes a squadron of Russian-made heavy jet fighters formerly used by India. Necessary or...

On July 9, the U.S. Air Force formally launched the competition to build America’s next stealth bomber. But a July 2 report from the Congressional Research Service questions the flying branch’s official narrative. According to CRS’ Jeremiah Gertler, it appears the Air Force already has new bomber prototypes in the air—and the competition could be a sham. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gertler’s skepticism comes just four months after civilians glimpsed what appeared to be previously unknown stealth warplanes flying over Texas.

In 1976, the British Royal Air Force had a problem. In the event of war, Soviet Backfire bombers flying from Europe could have devastated resupply convoys sailing from the United States to Europe. The RAF needed a warplane with enough range to patrol the vast Atlantic — and enough payload to haul long-range, bomber-killing missiles. Plane-maker Hawker Siddeley suggested adding 12 U.S.-made Phoenix missiles to the Avro Vulcan bomber. The addition would have required extensive modifications to the Vulcan’s radar. Blueprint via @AvroVulcan617 In any event, the RAF dropped the idea. To defeat the Backfires, the U.S. Navy deployed carrier-based...

The terms of the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I prohibited Germany from joining Great Britain, France and other major powers in developing tanks — those heavily-armed, thickly-armored tracked vehicles that had debuted late in the conflict and had helped to break the stalemate of trench warfare. But the tank ban didn’t actually stop Nazi Germany from inventing new tanks and refining tactics for their use. Instead, the treaty limitations pushed German armored vehicle development into the military-industrial shadows. In the decades before Panzers swept across Europe and the Soviet Union, the Panzerwaffe armored corps evolved in secrecy.