Free Republic

On July 23, Volodymyr Zelensky told Ukrainians that Raytheon wanted to help produce Patriot interceptors on Ukrainian-linked lines. Five days later, Lockheed Martin signed a second license, this one for the PAC-3 MSE — the hit-to-kill missile that has spent three years picking Russian ballistic warheads out of the sky over Kyiv. For a moment it looked like a watershed: the United States handing a country still absorbing nightly missile and drone barrages the blueprint to build its own air defense. Then, within days, the story came apart in public. US Ambassador Matthew Whitaker said Washington would not allow Ukraine...

House Republicans are asking Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to explain reports about the Biden administration having purchased a device allegedly linked to "Havana Syndrome." House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Andrew Garbarino led six subcommittee chairmen in sending a letter on Wednesday to Noem and her agency in which they ask for a detailed explanation of how the device was acquired, its cost, the results of the year-long testing period of the device and what specific analytical or operational purpose the department had for obtaining the device. [snip] More recently, there has been at least one news report in which...

On February 12, 2010, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) used the Airborne Laser Test Bed (ALTB) mounted on a Boeing B-747 jumbo jet to shoot down a liquid-propellant and a solid-propellant target missile. The ALTB project is one of the MDA's most ambitious and long-term programs. Washington launched its initial research in this sphere in the 1970s. At that time, an NKC-135-ALL aircraft, a modified version of the KC-135 Stratotanker, was built and used as an airborne laboratory. United Technologies built a 10-ton, 04-0.5-MWt CO2 laser system for the program. The NKC-135-ALL was involved in a series of tests...