Kurds — Good Guys in a Bad Neighborhood Wherein I ask Robert Caruso about the crisis in Iraq With American jets and drones flying top cover, Kurdish Peshmerga forces have launched counter-attacks aimed at retaking territory they lost to Islamic State militants in northern Iraq in June, July and August. I spoke with... Read more
Why Can’t America Build a Decent Landing Craft Any More?
In recent decades, the Pentagon has spent billions of dollars trying, and failing, to solve a straightforward military problem. How to haul people and equipment between ships at sea … and beachheads on land. The Defense Department’s “surface-connector” shortfall illuminates fundamental flaws in the political-industrial-military system. In theory, these institutions... Read more
Submarine Aircraft Carriers and Submersible Planes
If submarines possessed the high vision and quick speed of aircraft, they could dramatically extend their reach. If aircraft took off and landed from underwater platforms, their staging and strikes would be stealthier and more secure. But combining the two epoch-making weapons has proved difficult. Only one country really... Read more
Big, Boxy & Cheap, Naval Seabases Are All the Rage
When most people think “warship,” they imagine a sleek, speedy, heavily-armed vessel. A destroyer, cruiser, submarine or aircraft carrier. But arguably the most important naval vessels in coming years are the very opposite of sleek, speedy and heavily-armed. They’re blocky, slow and equipped only with a few weapons for... Read more
Cold War Stories Dad Told Me
Dad didn’t save the Free World or create The Next Big Thing, but he loves to recall his brushes with the folks who did. His twice-told tales bind the 20th century to the present through one man’s life and memory. Now in his sunset years, Dad needs a little... Read more
How Underground Nuke Tests Inspired Radical New Spaceship Designs
America’s first underground nuclear tests put on quite a show. The experiments—dating to the 1950s—not only revealed new information about the feasibility of storing nukes underground, but they spawned some radical new designs for space travel, including a nuclear bomb-powered spaceship theoretically capable of traveling to Mars. The story... Read more
What Are the Chinese Doing in Orbit?
Months after its scheduled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere—and a surprise cameo appearance in hit space flick Gravity—China’s first space station boosted into a higher orbit. It still speeds around the planet, doing … what, exactly? No one outside of China’s popular but opaque space program seems to know. Tiangong, or... Read more
Dreaming of Genie, America’s Anti-Aircraft Nuke
The Cold War was full of crazy ideas. No nuclear weapon was too big. No munition was too small. They were even used as warheads for anti-aircraft missiles. Beginning in the 1950s, the Air Force developed nuclear anti-air missiles that would be built by the thousands. The result—the MB-1/AIR-2... Read more
I Built My Own Flying Leafblower of Death
The Convair Model 49 was part plane, part helicopter—and one of the strangest aircraft designs in American aviation history. A little too strange, in fact. The Model 49 never made it past the concept stage. And 50 years later it still boggles the mind. So of course I had... Read more
Why NASA Is Getting Some of the Military’s Hand-Me-Down Armored Trucks
Going up into a space is dangerous work. But being an astronaut on the ground can be just as lethal if your rocket, you know, blows up. Rest assured that NASA has an escape option. In December, the agency’s launch site at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida received... Read more