Author: Defenceline Webdesk

The United States would run out of the interceptors it needs to take down Chinese missiles “within days” of a conflict, according to a new report from the Heritage Foundation—the latest in a series of warnings from experts and commanders highlighting a critical inventory gap. The White House, Congress, and defense contractors have taken steps to address it. But the ongoing war with Iran has exposed those efforts as insufficient, experts say.It’s not a new problem. A CSIS report from 2023 concluded that the U.S. would deplete inventories of key missiles, such as Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancements, Terminal High…

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Terumi Tanaka was 13 when on one fine day the sky above Nagasaki was suddenly flooded with blinding white glare; “a blazing inferno” he would recall years later. At 97 now, he still carries memories of sitting next to the window. His home was hit suddenly by a flash, then thunder, followed by an unbearable silence. Within moments, his city was reduced to ash.  “It was literally hell,” he said in his eyewitness account. With the average age of the hibakusha (atomic bombing survivors) reaching 87, there will soon be no one left to provide such first-person testimony. As humanity…

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WASHINGTON — The first Trump-class battleship could cost $23.4 billion, with the 14 subsequent ships the Navy plans to purchase averaging $18 billion, a new Congressional Budget Office report released today said.  This would bring the battleship program total to $275 billion for 15 nuclear-powered battleships, each weighing roughly 35,000 tons, the report said. A 35,000-ton battleship would clock in as the biggest surface combatant in the world at roughly three and half times the size of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, all while adding “considerable firepower to the Navy’s fleet,” according to the report.   However, the Navy’s budget request justification…

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Rocket Lab’s announcement that it would launch suborbital rockets from Alaska could ultimately give the Pentagon a much-needed new option for national-security launches, the company and space experts told Defense One.Last week, the Space Force’s acquisitions arm announced a $266 million, multi-launch contract with the California-based rocket company. That will cover 12 to 18 launches, which will start this year and “primarily take place from a new Rocket Lab location at the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska (PSCA) in Kodiak,” the company said. These missile-defense missions will be handled by the company’s HASTE rocket, a suborbital variant of its Electron. Both rockets “use the…

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