The specter of a “Red-Green Alliance” seems to be haunting the strategic elites not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world these days. 

The debate over this alliance between so-called Leftists and Islamists intensifies whenever a Muslim leader in the American Democratic Party secures an important nomination or an electoral victory.

It is not that these Muslim leaders in America are radical Islamists. They are essentially far-left in their political, economic, and global views and are being accepted as leaders within the Democratic Party. But they evoke apprehensions for their support of Islamists in all parts of the world on important global strategic issues.

The subject of the latest debate is Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive doctor and former Wayne County health director, who on August 4 won a historic victory in the Democratic primary in Michigan to join the Senatorial race in the upcoming November 2026 midterms.

If successful, he will be creating history as the first Muslim Senator in the history of the United States.

Of course, the Democratic Party has already seen elsewhere the rise of Muslim elected officials who often act as a bridge between progressives and Muslim advocacy groups. In the House of Representatives, there have been the likes of Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib.

At the local and State level, cities like Minneapolis, Dearborn, Hamtramck, and parts of New Jersey/New York now have Muslim mayors, councilors, and state legislators, many elected with support from both progressive and Muslim voter blocs.

Zohran Mamdani has taken office as New York City’s first Muslim mayor. Abdullah Hammoud is now the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan. Ghazala Hashmi has won the lieutenant governorship in Virginia.

Incidentally, the rise of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been portrayed by experts as showing that democratic socialism and hardline anti-Israel politics are no longer marginal in America’s largest city.

His national profile, and his demand that the federal government enforce an International Criminal Court warrant against Israel’s prime minister, have forced Democrats to reconsider their traditional stance on the Middle East in general and Israel in particular.

In other words, the strategic consequences of the Leftists sharing the global outlook with that of the Islamists outfits like Hamas or countries like Iran, or rising demands of Muslims in favor of their separate legal and social systems in many European countries, seem to be reshaping Western politics, traditional national security frameworks, and geopolitical alignments.

It is worth sharing in this context the thoughts of US Army veteran and human rights activist Mansoor Hussain Laghari, who had migrated from Pakistan. He strongly warns against the “Red-Green Alliance,” characterizing it as a dangerous and underappreciated ideological convergence between the revolutionary far left and political Islamism inside Western societies.

Using his unique background as a political refugee from Pakistan and experience in the US military, Leghari says that “Political Islamism” has nothing to do with ordinary Muslims or Islam as a faith. For him, it is something that seeks to place religious authority above democratic pluralism and civil law.

Laghari notes that while the radical Left (which claims to support secularism, feminism, and LGBTQ rights) and Islamists should be natural enemies, they cooperate because they share the same targets: American power, Western democratic institutions, capitalism, traditional faith, and Israel.

As he writes, “ These movements (Leftists and Islamists)  should be natural enemies. The radical Left presents itself as secular, feminist, and supportive of LGBTQ rights. Islamists often reject those principles. Yet alliances are not always built on shared values. They are often built on shared enemies.

“Both sides portray America as an imperial project rather than an imperfect constitutional republic. Both reduce complex societies to oppressors and oppressed. Both treat Western institutions as guilty until dismantled. Israel has become a powerful mobilizing symbol, but the deeper target is the political confidence and social cohesion of the United States.

“This ideology is no longer confined to campus seminars. It is entering mainstream political life. The Democratic Party remains broad, and many Democrats reject antisemitism, revolutionary socialism and political Islamism. But an increasingly influential progressive faction now treats these ideas as legitimate components of the party’s future”.

For Laghari, more than the rise of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the concern extends to “Ideas incubated in universities and activist networks (that) eventually influence city governments, congressional offices, public agencies and national-security institutions. Americans should debate these ideas openly but stop pretending that hostility toward the country’s constitutional and strategic foundations is merely youthful idealism.”

Laghari insists that Western societies must confront this Red- Green alliance with accountability and directness rather than comfortable denial, arguing that the constitutional protections of individual liberty over tribal obedience are actively worth defending.

“As a U.S. Army veteran, I learned that readiness is not measured only by weapons, aircraft or troop numbers. It also depends on national cohesion, public trust and citizens willing to serve. A military cannot remain fully effective if young Americans are taught that patriotism is shameful, service is complicity, and their country is uniquely evil.”

Many strategic analysts not only agree with Laghari but also discern the same pattern in European democracies and even India.

The following points in this regard they make are noteworthy:

One, after Trump’s victory in  2016 in the US, Brexit in the UK, the rise of the BJP in India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and right-populist governments in Europe, both Left-liberals and Islamist organizations found a common adversary and used  in their parlance terms like “right-wing nationalism,” “Islamophobia,” “majoritarianism,” and “fascism.”

Their alliance uses legal and academic frameworks in these democratic countries to label valid criticism of political Islamism or extreme Leftism for promoting terrorism or anarchy as “hate speech,” effectively silencing moderate and genuinely secular reformers.

Two, by infiltrating universities, local governments, and civil society organizations, the alliance shifts institutional policies toward anti-constitutional curricula and identity-driven governance. They popularize what is called “intersectionality” — placing Muslims, Palestinians, and refugees in the same “marginalized” category as racial minorities and LGBTQ communities.

This has created institutional incentives in universities and NGOs to platform Islamist speakers under the banner of “diversity” and “anti-racism.”

As a result, antisemitism is repackaged as mainstream progressive anti-imperialism, lowering the cultural barrier to targeted violence and exclusionary politics. And universal constitutional values are being replaced with tribal, identity-based loyalty, fracturing national unity.

Three, this collusion begins in universities and then feeds into media, NGOs, and politics. Progressive NGOs, left faculty, and Muslim student groups share funding, legal aid, and media training. And, university administrations, wary of being called “Islamophobic” or “racist,” often allow protests that would be shut down for other groups.

Politically, the collusion enables the sharing of an agenda with major political parties in the name of dissent,  protecting minorities, and expanding asylum/refugee programs. And that, in turn, generates narratives of state or police oppression and dangers of military modernization at the cost of social justice.

Then it becomes normal for progressives and Muslim politicians to vote and campaign together. They hold joint press conferences and share legal teams, and write joint petitions to global human rights bodies and the United Nations.

If Islamists find an ally in the Democratic Party in the US, in Europe one witnesses how Labour, Greens, and Left parties coordinate with Muslim community organizations on Gaza, policing, and counter-terror laws.

Apparently, European intelligence agencies have flagged that jihadist networks exploit progressive and anti-war protest spaces, such as climate and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, to recruit vulnerable individuals and gain mainstream legitimacy by aligning with broader, localized grievances.

The same pattern is also noticed in India.

Here,  sections of left and liberal parties,  student unions, liberal NGOs, and Islamist organizations have coordinated since 2019 on CAA-NRC ( Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register for Citizens), abrogation of Article 370 that had accorded special status to Kashmir, hijab cases, and “bulldozer” actions ( against the properties of hardened criminals and habitual law-breakers).

That is how domestic issues in Western democracies and countries like India are getting globalized as “human rights” issues, and hardline groups are gaining legitimacy by appearing next to mainstream left/liberals.

All this complicates a nation’s defense spending and foreign policy, forces strategic distractions, and weakens important partnerships. For instance,  on Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and the “war on terror,” Left-liberals critical of US/European/Indian foreign policy found common cause with Islamist groups who also oppose those policies.

When human rights language is used to defend individuals with extremist links, preventive policing becomes harder. Europe’s “returning fighters” problem and India’s experience with banned organizations show this. And the US, EU, and Indian foreign policy on the Middle East and counter-terror is now increasingly being constrained. Any action is immediately framed as “Islamophobic” or “imperialist”.

Viewed thus, the geopolitical alliance between Left/liberal elements and the votaries of political Islam that one sees across America, Europe, and India does present distinct challenges to the national security and social cohesion of each region. Its operational methods and societal impacts may vary from region to region based on local political landscapes, but its ideological foundation remains the same – shared opposition to the existing state apparatus.

Of course, experts point out that this alliance is “ironical” and could be “unstable” in the long run, given that Leftists and Islamists differ in their views on secularism and social rights. The Left wants progressive social change, emphasizing equality, social justice, and human rights. They are driven by secular and humanitarian concerns. But for conservative Islamists, it is traditional religious values and communal loyalty that are their principal motivations. Islamists often seek to establish states governed by Sharia.

However, despite their differences, at the moment, they are together on many aspects of global politics and are collaborating in unexpected ways. And that is said to be a matter of grave concern.

As Laghari says, “The question is no longer whether this ideological struggle has reached the United States. It has. The question is whether Americans will recognize it before the next generation inherits a country that no longer recognizes itself.”

What Laghari asks of Americans seems to be equally apt a question for Europeans and Indians as well.

• Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
• This is an Opinion Article
• CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com

The post Red-Green Alliance Begins To Hurt U.S, India & Others as Left-Islamist Affinity Reshapes Global Politics: OPED appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

In a first such experiment, the P-8A Poseidon was teamed with the MQ-4C Triton unmanned aerial vehicle, potentially laying the groundwork for a future manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T) for the US Navy and allied maritime patrol, reconnaissance, anti-submarine, and surface warfare.

Northrop Grumman and Boeing conducted the first automated, manned-unmanned mission control collaboration between the P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft and the MQ-4C Triton unmanned aerial vehicle in a laboratory environment, demonstrating how the two systems can share intelligence, mission planning, and execution.

“A P-8A operator issued machine-readable, machine-actionable mission tasking to a simulated MQ-4C Triton using UCI [Universal Command & Control Interface] formatted messages,” Boeing stated in an official press statement. “The P-8A cued the Triton transit to a specific area. After receiving the request, the Triton autonomously planned and executed a transit to the area, employed sensors per the tasking, processed findings onboard, and reported results back to the P-8A Poseidon.”

This approach could reduce operator workload, speed up decision-making in a contested environment, and enable more dynamic in-flight tasking without always routing through distant ground control.

Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman emphasized the broader value of the standardized approach: “Using this standardized interface, Triton can collaborate with other U.S. or allied assets sharing the same interface—cutting operator workload and accelerating commander decision-making, making integration across platforms quicker and more cost-effective. The Universal Command and Control Interface is a machine-to-machine collaboration standard based on Open Mission Systems and Autonomy – Government Reference Architecture.”

Notably, the MQ-4C Triton was originally designed to work closely with the P-8A. A maritime-optimized derivative of the RQ-4 Global Hawk, Triton offers 24-hour endurance and high-altitude, persistent surveillance over vast ocean areas with its 360° multi-function radar, electro-optical/infrared sensors, and other systems. It functions as an “unblinking eye” for continuous maritime domain awareness.

Meanwhile, the P-8A has comparatively shorter endurance but boasts higher speed and lower-altitude capability than the MQ-4C Triton. Furthermore, it is designed to conduct anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, investigate contacts of interest, support search-and-rescue, and assist in kinetic operations, among other things.

Together, the two platforms cover more ocean more persistently than either could alone, improve the common operating picture, shorten the sensor-to-shooter timeline, and make better use of limited manned aircraft and aircrew.

As a core element of the Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Force, Triton transmits real-time data via satellite to ships, aircraft, and shore stations.

MUMT Between Poseidon & Triton

Until now, the two platforms have operated in a complementary but in a relatively separate manner. Triton provides broad-area maritime ISR and cues contacts of interest, such as ships or potential submarines, prompting a P-8A to investigate, prosecute, or engage.

The coordination between them has normally flowed through ground control stations, introducing latency, especially when stations manage multiple missions, operate across time zones, or sit at the end of long satellite communications chains. However, the new automated capability could essentially allow a P-8A crew to issue commands directly to the Triton, after which the drone can autonomously plan and execute the task.

This would expedite the response to unanticipated changes, such as potential threats or seemingly transient targets of interest. Moreover, automation and onboard AI handling of data collection or processing would free crews, both in the air and on the ground, to focus on higher-level decisions rather than routine tasking or sifting through raw sensor feeds.

“The key idea of teaming them is to let each do what it does best while reducing the workload on human operators. Instead of both independently searching the same ocean, the Triton can detect something unusual and automatically cue the Poseidon. It would reduce operator workload, speed up decision-making, enable more flexible and responsive manned-unmanned teaming, and leverage their complementary strengths for broader, more efficient maritime ISR and related missions,” Air Marshal Anil Khosla (retd), Indian Air Force veteran and military commentator, told the EurAsian Times.

“Triton handles the long-endurance, broad-area “look” mission persistently. Poseidon handles responsive, close-in, multi-mission work. Automated teaming lets them operate more seamlessly as a unit rather than operating in relative isolation or with slower human-mediated coordination,” he added.

In a hypothetical scenario, one manned P-8 could also team with one or more Tritons at a time, stretching limited manned aircraft hours and freeing up the Poseidon for high-value missions, such as anti-submarine warfare and responsive strikes in combat.

Only the United States and Australia currently operate both the P-8A and MQ-4C Triton. The P-8A, however, has been acquired by a wider group of nations, including the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Norway, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Germany, Canada, Singapore, and Denmark.

The UCI architecture that enables the latest P-8-MQ-4C teaming could also potentially enable Poseidon teaming with other uncrewed assets, as Northrop stated

Indian Air Force (IAF) veteran Air Marshal Anil Chopra (retd) told the EurAsian Times: “All advanced militaries are focusing on data and sensor fusion, and rapidly working on facilitating integration between different platforms, ranging from manned-manned teaming to manned-unmanned teaming, across domains. The P-8A and Triton’s MUMT merely reflect that larger pattern. The same logic extends beyond air-to-air or air-to-surface pairings into surface, subsurface, land, and space sensors and effectors. The goal is a resilient “kill web” rather than linear kill chains, with data moving freely enough that any suitable shooter or sensor can contribute.”

“In the future, the maritime surveillance aircraft could be similarly teamed with other drones, such as the Sea Guardian,” he added.

The SeaGuardian, a variant of the MQ-9 Reaper, is also designed for maritime surveillance and reconnaissance, and could be teamed with the Poseidon aircraft with some tweaks.

Earlier work has already shown related possibilities. A Boeing-led team virtually demonstrated that the MQ-25’s architecture can support ISR and tanking missions by other aircraft within the mission airspace without conventional communications to a ship-based ground control station. That demonstration included the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, P-8A Poseidon, and F/A-18 Block III Super Hornet.

There are several other examples of the US military’s efforts aimed at manned-unmanned teaming between aircraft to perform a variety of tasks. In fact, sensor fusion, edge AI, open architectures, and seamless teaming are becoming baseline requirements for competitiveness in contested areas.

The P-8A–MQ-4C laboratory demonstration is clearly a step forward.

However, its actual impact in real conditions will probably depend on how quickly the capability moves from the lab to operational skies.

“MQ-4C Triton and P-8A are the backbone of the U.S. Navy’s maritime patrol and reconnaissance force, delivering complementary capabilities unmatched by any other platforms,” Jane Bishop, Vice President and General Manager of the Global Surveillance Division at Northrop Grumman, was quoted as saying in the official statement. “This demonstration underscores the flexibility of our systems, our unwavering industry investment, and the strength of our industry relationships. Our commitment to pushing the boundaries of advanced technology ensures that the U.S. and allied nations’ operators maintain an unparalleled edge against evolving maritime threats,” he added.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
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As the Trump administration weighs its next moves amid a fragile halt in hostilities, Iran has put on public display a selection of war trophies: wreckage from a downed F-15E Strike Eagle and what it claims are two nearly intact drones.

The US (in collaboration with Israel) launched “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran on February 28, hoping to decapitate the Iranian regime and destroy its military capabilities.

However, about six months later, the Iranian state media published images showing the wreckage of multiple US and Israeli aircraft that it managed to take down during the 40-day war.

This includes the debris of an F-15E Strike Eagle, Call Sign DUDE 44, a US Air Force (USAF) fighter jet now identified as airframe 00-3000.

On April 3, an F-15E Strike Eagle was downed by ground-based fire from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) while conducting a combat mission over southwestern Iran.

This marked the first confirmed loss of a manned US combat aircraft to Iranian fire over Iranian territory in the conflict, and triggered a 36-hour intense search and rescue operation for the Weapon Stations Officer (WSO) who went missing.

The USAF incurred additional losses during that operation, including the self-destruction of aircraft that became defunct, to deny sensitive material to the IRGC, as previously reported by the EurAsian Times.

From IRGC images.

Remains of Lakenheath-based USAF F-15E 00-3000 #AE178B, callsign DUDE44, which was shot down April 3rd over Iran.

DVIDS image from 2014 of F-15E 00-3000 over Afghanistan in 2008. pic.twitter.com/oAugzvAAyi

— Evergreen Intel (@vcdgf555) August 7, 2026

However, the F-15E shoot-down, which belonged to the 48th Fighter Wing from RAF Lakenheath, quickly became the centerpiece of Iranian narratives of successful air defense.

In fact, the Iranian media had released crash-site photos and video almost immediately, showing a vertical stabilizer section with USAFE markings, a red tail flash, and other features consistent with the aircraft.

The current exhibit includes the canopy and an ACES II ejection seat, the latter of which is among the more intact components recovered.

Additionally, some remains attributed to the C-130s abandoned and destroyed during the rescue are on display, though they are less visually prominent.

NEW:

Iran has recovered largely intact US MQ-9 Reaper and Israeli Hermes 900 drones.

IRGC engineers are expected to examine the captured systems, study their technologies and reverse-engineer key components to help develop advanced indigenous drone models. pic.twitter.com/3cOBvPVzNx

— Jackson Hinkle (@jacksonhinkle) August 8, 2026

The more striking trophies, however, are the two drones Iran claims to have recovered in largely intact condition during Operation Epic Fury: a US MQ-9 Reaper and an Israeli Elbit Systems Hermes 900 serial 923.

Iranian authorities assert the Reapers were intercepted by air defenses, and the Hermes 900 was brought down by electronic warfare.

It is worth mentioning that Iran managed to down at least 24 MQ-9 Reapers until the ceasefire, accounting for 57% of all USAF losses in the war. However, several more of this class of drones were downed in intermittent exchange of hostilities after the ceasefire, bringing the total to about 30, according to claims made by US officials in early July.

Despite the attrition, the Chief of Staff, Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach, endorsed the Reaper as the MVP of the Iran war, stating, “We’ve made many, many strikes” with Reapers.  “It’s an unmanned platform, so we get a lot of utility out of them, and don’t put our folks at risk,” Wilsbach said, as reported by the EurAsian Times at the time.

Separately, the open-source trackers documented at least four to five Israeli Hermes 900s lost during the main phase of the war with Iran, with some assessments running as high as eight. However, the EurAsian Times could not independently verify total losses.

Notably, while collecting and parading war trophies is fairly common—as done by Russia and Ukraine in their ongoing war—it has its own risks.

For example, Iran could exploit recovered drones primarily through technical intelligence (TECHINT), reverse engineering, and adaptation for its own programs.

These platforms are medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) UAVs used for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), and strike missions.

Iran could disassemble the drones and obtain key technologies, such as optics, detectors, stabilization, laser systems, and processing units, to improve its electro-optical or infrared (IR) packages, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) capabilities, and multi-sensor fusion for integration with its vast inventory of existing platforms.

Additionally, it could get access to satellite communications (SATCOM) for encrypted command and control, line-of-sight datalinks, beyond-line-of-sight control, and possible tactical links.

To improve the long-endurance capabilities of Iranian aircraft and payload integration, the IRGC might also investigate structural design, sensor vibration isolation, and modular bays.

In a hypothetical situation, even partial insights could enhance the day-and-night, all-weather ISR capabilities of current Iranian drones or provide guidance for electronic warfare, jamming, and air defense strategies against comparable Western weapons.

Furthermore, Iran could also choose to share its exploits with key partners like Russia, which has assisted Tehran in its military operations.

Iran, on its part, has demonstrated it could reverse-engineer Western drones.

When Iran Took Down & Reengineered A US Drone

Iran hit the jackpot on December 5, 2011, when its cyber warfare unit commandeered the US’ Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel UAV and forced it to land near the city of Kashmar in northeastern Iran, about 225–250 kilometers from the Afghanistan border.

The US officials later confirmed it was a CIA-operated unmanned aircraft involved in a reconnaissance mission, with reports indicating it was part of efforts monitoring Iranian nuclear and other military facilities.

At the time, Iran’s government announced that its cyberwarfare unit had detected the aircraft in Iranian airspace, commandeered it, and landed it with minimal damage rather than shooting it down. Iranian officials, including commanders from the IRGC Aerospace Force, claimed they jammed the drone’s satellite and control communications links, forcing it into an autopilot or lost-link mode, then used GPS spoofing to make the aircraft land. 

Some American analysts and officials expressed skepticism about Iran’s electronic-warfare claims, noting that the RQ-170 relies primarily on an inertial navigation system, which is harder to jam or spoof than pure GPS.

Interestingly, though, the relatively intact airframe fueled competing theories of a controlled recovery versus a soft crash after loss of control.

The former US President Barack Obama publicly acknowledged the incident and, on 12 December 2011, stated that the United States had formally requested the drone’s return.

However, Iran denied the US’s demands to return the UAV, and Iranian state television on December 8 broadcast footage of Iranian military officials inspecting what they identified as an RQ-170 Sentinel drone. Additionally, Tehran went so far as to claim that countries like China and Russia had approached it to get information on the drone.

The event exposed details of a previously highly classified surveillance operation over Iran and raised fears about possible technology transfer, constituting a major intelligence and technological defeat for the United States.

By 2012, the IRGC had claimed to have succeeded in gleaning data from the US drone and was building a process to create a replica of the aircraft. The Sentinel was then reverse-engineered to create what is now the Saeghe/Simorgh drone. 

Similarly, in 2012, Iranian state television showed images of what it said was a US ScanEagle drone in its airspace.

Iran has never denied. Instead, it has chosen to flaunt the fact that its UAVs have been reverse-engineered from US drones as a major victory.

It is safe to say that an adversary will almost always be able to obtain some degree of intelligence from an aircraft’s wreckage, regardless of the measures taken to prevent it. While this does put US and Israeli military technology at risk, it is an inevitable prospect that both countries were likely aware of when they embarked on this war with Tehran.

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Australia is poised to become the first international buyer of the AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile (JATM), one of the US Air Force’s (USAF) best-kept secrets and unarguably its longest-range air-to-air missile.

Speaking at the ongoing multi-national military drills, Exercise Pitch Black, Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said the country will invest “almost” $736 million AUD, or about $518 million USD, to acquire “up to 450” missiles for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF).

The missiles would be acquired through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) route.

“This announcement is the latest milestone in the delivery of long-range, high‑tech capabilities for our Defense Force,” Marles said in Darwin. “The Albanese government continues to deliver critical capabilities that will allow the ADF to strike at a longer range, deter any adversary, and protect our national interests. It is fitting to make this announcement at Exercise Pitch Black, which is an important demonstration of Australia’s commitment to the peace, stability, and security of our region.”

The AIM-260 is apparently designed to succeed the AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM), which is already extensively used by the RAAF.

The missile will initially be integrated on the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and later fielded on the F-35A and EA-18G Growler, according to the Australian Defense Department. However, there is speculation that the missile may eventually be fitted to the MQ-28 Ghost Bat, which has already test-fired an AIM-120 AMRAAM.

With this acquisition, Australia will officially become the first export customer of the JATM, even before allies like Israel.

Interestingly, the AIM-260 JATM purchase continues a pattern in which Australia serves as an early or exclusive partner for advanced US systems. For example, Canberra was the first international customer for the Super Hornet, the first and the only export customer for the EA-18G Growler, the first international buyer of the AGM-158 JASSM and AGM-158C LRASM long-range missiles, the first non-US customer for the MH-60R military helicopter, and only the second country (after the UK) approved to buy Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Australia is also the only nation outside the United States assembling GMLRS rockets, and one of only two countries (alongside the UK) granted access to highly restricted U.S. nuclear propulsion technology for submarines under AUKUS.

Moreover, the Australian Shadow ministers are proposing the purchase of the B-21 Raider bomber from the US to fill the capability gap until the AUKUS submarines arrive, a possibility first publicly examined by Marles in 2022 and referenced in the 2023 Defense Strategic Review, as previously reported by EurAsian Times.

Australia’s official announcement to purchase the AIM-260 JATM once again validates the strength of these strategic ties. “The acquisition of the AIM-260 JATM will provide Air Force platforms with a credible deterrent against airborne targets, complementing existing air-to-air missile capabilities and other surface-based missile capabilities across the Australian Defense Force (ADF). It will also further enhance Australia’s interoperability with the United States,” the Australian Department of Defense said in a statement.

More significantly, though, it marks a major improvement in the RAAF’s combat capacity in the face of China’s growing Indo-Pacific security threat. 

AIM-260 JATM Against China

Although the announcement did not name China, Australian strategic documents and officials consistently identify Beijing’s rapid military expansion as the primary security challenge in the Indo-Pacific.

The 2023 Defense Strategic Review described China’s build-up as “the largest and most ambitious of any country since the end of the Second World War,” conducted “without transparency or reassurance,” and noted that Chinese actions in the South China Sea undermine the rules-based order in ways that affect Australian interests.

Australian leaders have repeatedly flagged China’s coercive behavior in territorial disputes, unsafe intercepts of ships and aircraft, and growing Chinese influence in the South Pacific, which Canberra has historically considered its own sphere of influence.

Experts have also suggested that Australia may get dragged into a US-China conflict in the future. Although Canberra has never officially confirmed that it would join forces with the US military in a military contingency, it hosts several US military facilities that may come under attack by Chinese long-range missiles, as explained in detail by a previous EurAsian Times report.

Although ties between Australia and China have stabilized in recent times, Canberra has committed billions of dollars to acquire advanced, high-tech missiles as part of a broader strategy to safeguard the nation, deter potential adversaries, and defend national interests.

Marles had earlier highlighted that this involves turning Australia into a “porcupine island,” fully armed with deadly weapons to thwart any attacking nation. The acquisition of the AIM-120 JATM aligns with this approach, especially given that China has developed an array of long-range air-to-air missiles in recent years. 

The AIM-260 JATM is considered a response to the Chinese PL-15 air-to-air missile. China has purportedly produced and deployed at least 500 J-20 fighter jets, each capable of carrying up to 8 PL-15 missiles that have a range of 200 to 300 kilometers.

Additionally, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is developing very long-range air-to-air missiles (VLRAAM) that can strike targets. A previous Pentagon report stated that China already has the PL-17 VLRAAM and is working on a more advanced long-range missile, PL-XX or PL-21.

In contrast, the existing AIM-120 AMRAAM in the RAAF arsenal has a range of about 150-160 kilometers, even in its most advanced iteration.

With long-range, greater kinematic performance and improved guidance, the AIM-260 JATM will allow Australian fighters to engage threats earlier and from safer distances. Moreover, it could be integrated on multiple RAAF jets, giving the service a common advanced air-to-air weapon across its main combat aircraft.

The AIM-260 JATM Is Coming

The existence of the AIM-260 JATM was initially confirmed in 2019 during an Air Force Life Cycle Management Center industry conference. Due to its sensitivity, the AIM-260 JATM is classified as a Special Access Program (SAP), and details about the missile remain scarce.

In 2022, General Mark Kelly, the head of the United States Air Force’s Air Combat Command, shared an artist’s concept of the Lockheed Martin F-22 firing an AIM-260 JATM.

More recently, the US Navy publicly revealed the rendering of the missile in February 2025. At the time, experts inferred that it was comparable in appearance to the AIM-120 medium-range air-to-air missile, including in size.

Nonetheless, the AIM-260 appears to have a larger rocket motor section and no mid-body surfaces, unlike the AIM-120.

Although little is known about the covert missile, reports suggest it will be powered by dual-pulse rocket motors or ramjets to increase its range and performance.

Experts anticipate that the AIM-260 will have an advanced multi-mode seeker system that may include infrared imaging and active radar. They claim that the dual-seeker system will improve resilience to electronic warfare countermeasures and increase accuracy.

Like the AIM-120D-3 AMRAAM derivative, the AIM-260 is anticipated to have a two-way datalink. This feature would greatly increase the missile’s efficacy in networked battle by enabling mid-course targeting upgrades or re-targeting.

After initially being introduced with the USAF’s Raptor, the missile will eventually be fitted to the F-35 and the Navy’s F/A-18E/F. In fact, the AIM-260 JATM will also likely arm the US Navy’s F-47 sixth-generation combat aircraft, which is currently under development.

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Ukraine is staring down a new and deeply unsettling threat: a possible North Korean missile unit deployment to western Russia amid a lack of anti-ballistic interceptors in its arsenal. 

North Korea is preparing to deploy a missile unit to western Russia, according to a Ukrainian military intelligence official, marking a significant escalation in the conflict.

Andrii Cherniak of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) told Reuters that the deployment involves Russia’s 112th Guards Missile Brigade and about 90 North Korean personnel based in the Voronezh region, which borders Ukraine.

While the exact composition of missiles will be finalized during senior-level talks next month, Pyongyang has already sent a new batch of 40 KN-23 and KN-24 missiles and personnel ​to Russia, the GUR official claimed.

Further, he noted that the unit could eventually field up to 120 short-range ballistic missiles along with six launchers.

An informed source reportedly told Reuters that the United States was aware of the plan but did not provide further details.

Designed to evade missile defenses by flying on a lower, “depressed” trajectory that reduces radar detection, the KN-23—resembling the Russian Iskander—has a range of 800-900 kilometers.

Previous reports indicated that Moscow had allegedly modified the missile to enhance its accuracy.

Meanwhile, the KN-24 has a comparatively shorter range of about 410 kilometers and employs a quasi-ballistic or depressed trajectory with possible in-flight maneuvers, making it harder to intercept.

GUR’s claims could not be officially verified, and the Pentagon has not made a statement acknowledging any such intelligence reports. Nevertheless, the GUR’s assessment comes days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Russia used a North Korean missile for a strike on July 30, which killed five members of a family.

Although Russia has previously used North Korean ballistic missiles, the Ukrainian reports hinted that Moscow might have received a fresh supply.

Earlier, Pyongyang had reportedly delivered more than 100 short-range ballistic missiles (primarily KN-23 and KN-24), millions of artillery shells, over 120 long-range self-propelled artillery systems, and more than 120 multiple rocket launch systems. Additionally, it had deployed an estimated 11,000 troops for the Ukraine war, of whom approximately 2,300 were killed in combat.

While the US and NATO are on the ground in Ukraine, studying the realities of modern warfare and using those lessons to develop the next generation of military technology, North Korea, Iran, and China are also closely observing the conflict to refine their own weapons and military doctrines.

Why is Ukraine Alarmed

Russia has been exploiting gaps in Ukraine’s air defenses to launch frequent ballistic and hypersonic missile strikes.

On August 4, Russia conducted a major overnight attack with drones and ballistic missiles that killed 17 people. Ukrainian forces intercepted 98 of 115 drones but failed to shoot down even a single ballistic missile, as recently reported by the EurAsian Times

Having run out of Patriot interceptors, which are the only reliable defense against ballistic missiles, Ukraine is practically left defenseless.

Ukraine has been pleading with its allies to supply more Patriot batteries and interceptors, which remain among the few weapons capable of countering ballistic missile threats such as North Korea’s KN-23 and KN-24 and Russia’s Iskander.

“Ballistic missile interceptors could have saved the lives of those killed today,” Zelenskyy wrote on social media after the August 4 strike. “It is very important that our partners understand that delays in supplying them, or an unwillingness to provide anti-ballistic systems, lead directly to such horrific casualties and destruction.”

Notably, the US has been sending Patriot missiles to Ukraine, among other weapons and munitions—including through the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), a new system wherein NATO nations pay for the transfer of weapons from the US. However, recent reports suggest that the US has expended a massive chunk of its own Patriot interceptors in the Ukraine war, eroding any space to make fresh deliveries to Kyiv.

Meanwhile, other NATO allies remain wary of aiding Ukraine with Patriots amid heightened security threats and long production timelines.

The Patriot shortage has allowed Moscow to use ballistic missiles with near impunity, creating a dangerous “window of vulnerability” for Ukraine that will only expand with North Korea’s deployment. In fact, experts fear that the situation will get increasingly challenging as winter approaches, which is when Russia intensifies attacks on Ukraine’s power grids.

The expanding Russia-North Korea partnership also carries broader geopolitical implications for Ukraine after nearly five years of war.

“Kyiv is rattled not because North Korean missiles are more advanced than Russia’s Iskander, but because they signal a deeper, more dangerous geopolitical alignment—and their sheer volume and indiscriminate use are overwhelming Ukraine’s already strained defenses. This isn’t just about weapons—it’s about the normalization of new military collaboration and geopolitical alignment. Russia’s use of North Korean missiles also suggests Pyongyang has replenished Moscow’s arsenal, enabling intensified bombardments as Russia seeks to break Ukrainian morale. For Kyiv, each KN-23/24 impact is both a physical and symbolic blow,” Air Marshal G.S. Bedi (retd) told the EurAsian Times.

Notably, North Korea’s short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) are believed to be less accurate compared to their Russian counterparts. A previous Ukrainian state prosecutor’s report stated that about half of the KN-23s launched by Russia between late December 2023 and late February 2024 veered off course and sometimes exploded midair.

Moreover, strikes launched using these missiles have caused large-scale civilian casualties.

Nonetheless, the deployment of North Korean missiles will give Russia what it needs to overwhelm and batter Ukraine: volume.

This allows Moscow to reserve more precise systems such as the Iskander for high-value targets while using KN-23 and KN-24 missiles against population centers and infrastructure to increase pressure on Kyiv.

Interestingly, during a meeting of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reportedly announced that his country will destroy Russian missile launchers to reduce attacks on Ukrainian cities.

“Our military knows they must destroy the enemy’s launchers to reduce strikes on Ukraine, its critical infrastructure, and civilians. They are working on this and will continue to do so,” Zelenskyy said.

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Days after SpaceX’s Flight 13, the company is actively recovering Ship 40, the upper stage of its Starship vehicle, from the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX completed the test flight of its Starship megarocket on July 24, 2026, following an aborted launch attempt the previous week in which several Super Heavy engines failed to ignite. The test flight—Flight 13—achieved several key milestones before concluding with a controlled splashdown of the upper Starship spacecraft in the Indian Ocean.

After splashdown, Ship 40 has remained afloat for days, as confirmed through satellite imagery, including Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). 

Notably, SpaceX has been working to bring the upper spaceship back for a controlled landing after flight, eventually recovering and quickly reusing the vehicles, which may significantly reduce launch costs. However, for it to be reused, the ship must survive high-speed atmospheric reentry, flip from a belly-first attitude to a vertical landing orientation, and then perform a precise, powered landing burn. Reliable performance of these steps is essential for catching the vehicle with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, which is the planned path to rapid reuse and dramatically lower costs.

Interestingly, SpaceX had no plans to recover Ship 40. The vehicle, however, successfully completed all of the above steps and achieved an unusually soft splashdown.

SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot stated that Ship 40 demonstrated significant improvement over its predecessors by keeping its engines operating, maintaining control during aggressive reentry, and achieving its softest splashdown to date at the target landing site. Huot described the outcome as a “dream scenario” during the flight livestream.

The landing was soft enough that, unlike earlier prototypes, Ship 40 remained largely intact and afloat rather than sinking or breaking apart. In fact, the post-flight review conducted by SpaceX apparently indicated the landing position and control were precise enough that the tower arms could have theoretically caught it.

New satellite images of Ship 40 just dropped

Story with w/ @ThomasBordeaux7 https://t.co/XvVZz85NLp pic.twitter.com/lcXdgxRJms

— Jackie Wattles (@jackiewattles) August 3, 2026

Initially, a SpaceX recovery ship, named Go Australis, was stationed near the vehicle. However, the effort was joined by two Norwegian tugboats, Normand Ranger and Skimmer Tide, after Musk announced that the company would attempt recovery.

The recovery effort was seen in satellite images from the Colorado-based geospatial intelligence firm Vantor, which showed a small boat positioned near the Starship with a line fastened to its nose, as reported by CNN. MarineTraffic data on August 3 indicated Skimmer Tide and Normand Ranger moving at roughly one knot while broadcasting restricted maneuverability, while Go Australis was en route to Australia on its own.

More recent AIS data as of August 4 confirm that Normand Ranger has Ship 40 under tow (stern-to-aft) with flotation aids fitted near the base to keep the engines clearer of the water, at the time of writing this report.

SpaceX Wants Reusable Upper Spacecraft

SpaceX’s primary ambition for a reusable upper stage is embodied in Starship, the second stage of the Starship/Super Heavy system.

Unlike Falcon 9, where only the first-stage booster is routinely reused and the second stage is expendable, Starship is designed from the outset as a fully reusable orbital vehicle that can serve as a spacecraft for crew, cargo, tanker, and planetary landing roles.

The company’s declared objective is airline-like operations, which should ideally be measured in hours rather than days or weeks. These operations include launch, land, or catch, minimal inspection, refuel, and refly. In fact, Musk has described a long-term vision of flights more than once per hour, with costs potentially falling to a few million dollars, or lower, per flight once rapid full reusability and local propellant production are achieved.

Some of the challenges in achieving this center around a fully reusable orbital heat shield that survives multiple flights with little or no tile replacement, high-cycle engine reliability without significant refurbishment, and precise, reliable Ship catches after orbital reentry.

The company has indicated that solving these problems would enable massive Starlink deployments, large space telescopes, a lunar base, and Mars cargo or crew missions via orbital refueling with tanker Ships. A full reusability of the upper stage or spacecraft is presented as the critical breakthrough for making life multiplanetary.

It is pertinent to note that SpaceX has deliberately flown largely the same suborbital trajectory on successive tests that essentially includes launch from Starbase, hot-stage separation, booster return (initially soft splashdown, later tower-catch attempts), Ship continuing on a high-energy arc, payload or deployment tests, in-space engine relight(s), controlled reentry over the Indian Ocean, and targeted soft splashdown.

This consistent profile allows rapid iteration on the same failure modes and performance envelopes while collecting comparable data.

An important milestone in SpaceX’s efforts to recover and refly every component of the rocket was reached in 2024 when the company successfully guided the Super Heavy rocket booster to a safe landing in the enormous metal arms of its launch tower. However, two Starship spacecraft exploded near islands off the coast of Florida in 2025.

The campaign’s deliberate repetition of the same suborbital path has allowed SpaceX to treat each flight as a focused engineering experiment rather than a one-off demonstration. 

In line with the comprehensive effort, SpaceX has worked hard to examine Ship 40 at every stage of its journey to and from space.

In fact, it went so far as to postpone liftoff to ensure the weather was clear enough to capture high-resolution images of the spacecraft during launch.

SpaceX has been focusing on the vehicle’s heat shield, a layer of hexagon-shaped ceramic tiles intended to protect Starship from the intense heat spacecraft encounter as they reenter Earth’s atmosphere after reaching orbital velocities exceeding 17,500 miles per hour.  For now, while Musk has acknowledged that the heat shield’s performance has improved, SpaceX still faces significant engineering challenges in determining how to preserve the vehicle undamaged and ready for launch quickly.

No rocket currently in service has an upper stage that can be quickly reused. Following Flight 13’s success, Musk indicated that SpaceX may attempt to return a Starship to dry land or catch it with the tower on a future flight, contingent on data review. The date of the next flight has not been announced.

Even after SpaceX masters the recovery of the upper ship, additional challenges lie ahead, including figuring out how to refuel the vehicle while it sits in orbit. But, for now, things seem to be working out for Elon Musk and his reusable launch system program.

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China’s state broadcaster recently released the first footage showing multiple DF-17 hypersonic missiles in a single frame, in what appears to be a deliberate power-projection message. The display comes at a time when hypersonic weapons have proven their lethality and ability to penetrate air defenses in the Ukraine and Iran wars.

On August 3, state-owned CCTV aired video from the PLA documentary series Zhìshèng (“Victory”) featuring at least six DF-17 transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) together.

Military affairs expert Zhang Junshe told the Global Times that the display indicates the system has been mass-deployed and is reliably placed on combat duty.

Zhang emphasized that the DF-17 is a vital weapon that can alter the rules of modern air defense warfare, as it can precisely hit adversary forward air defense installations and strategic command targets by leveraging its hypersonic penetration advantage.

Typically, hypersonic weapons are very hard to intercept by conventional missile defense systems due to two main reasons: 1) these weapons travel faster than Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, equivalent to approximately 100 kilometers (60 miles) per minute; 2) these are highly maneuverable weapons that follow an unpredictable trajectory.

Only a few countries have developed and combat-deployed hypersonic weapons, including China, Russia, and sanctioned countries like Iran and North Korea.

Of these, both Russia and Iran have used these weapons in combat with Ukraine and the United States, respectively.

On its part, Ukraine has intercepted some Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missiles with Patriot batteries.

However, these hypersonic missiles have been wreaking havoc on Ukrainian cities in recent weeks, as earlier reported by the EurAsian Times. Moscow purportedly exploits a gap in its air defense coverage and launches Kinzhal and Tsirkon hypersonic missiles to cause devastation in the embattled country. Additionally, Moscow has struck Ukraine with the Oreshnik hypersonic missile, which Ukraine has been unable to shoot down so far.

Meanwhile, Iran claimed to have fired hypersonic missiles (Fattah-class) on Israeli cities and US military bases across the Middle East during the hostilities earlier this year.

However, independent verification of claimed terminal speeds, maneuver performance, and interception rates remains limited. Previous video footage from Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities showed Iranian missiles dodging as many as 10 interceptor missiles and hitting their targets at hypersonic speeds.

Notably, the latest footage comes more than a month after CCTV published footage of a DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle missile launch in June 2026. At the time, analysts noted that China was sending a deterrence message by emphasizing its strike capability to the United States, particularly amid tensions in the Taiwan Strait, the First Island Chain, and the South China Sea.

The same argument may apply to the latest footage, particularly since the DF-17 is the world’s first medium-range missile to field a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV).

China has amassed a variety of deadly hypersonic missiles, including the DF-17, DF-27, YJ-21, and YJ-20. These weapons are part of the formidable Chinese A2/AD (Anti-Access/Area Denial) network along its coastline.

Chinese experts believe that even the most advanced missile defenses in the US, including the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Air Defense) and PAC-3 Patriot, are not effective against hypersonic weapons.

“Existing US missile defenses can theoretically intercept some hypersonic weapons in their final stage, but high speed, maneuverability, and stealth make it very difficult,” read a previous Chinese paper titled “Tactical Missile Technology” on the ability of US missile defense systems to intercept hypersonic weapons.

The US and allied forces are developing countermeasures, including improved sensors, the Glide Phase Interceptor, SM-6 variants, and other technologies, but substantial challenges remain in tracking and engaging maneuvering hypersonic vehicles at scale for now.

Chinese experts have noted that the DF-17 is a potent strategic deterrent because it is a conventional, medium-range missile capable of reaching important targets in the first island chain—stretching from the Japanese archipelago through Taiwan to the Philippines—including strategic sites in Japan and other areas.

Chinese experts have previously noted that the missile may reach as far as parts of the Second Island Chain, extending from Japan through Guam, Micronesia, and Palau. They believe that coordinated multi-vehicle salvo launches may play a crucial role in both launch site security and strike effectiveness—compounding the threats faced by the US military forces in the Indo-Pacific region.

DF-17’s Mass Deployment

The DF-17 is China’s first operational road-mobile medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV).

With a range of 1,800–2,500 kilometers, it is Beijing’s most operationally mature hypersonic strike system and is widely regarded as capable of penetrating nearly any missile defense network worldwide.

Like ICBMs, hypersonic glide weapons are launched by rockets high into the atmosphere. However, unlike ICBMs, whose warheads rely primarily on gravity once they begin their descent, hypersonic glide weapons dive back toward Earth sooner, then flatten their flight path. They make continuous course corrections to stay on target while traveling at speeds up to 12 times the speed of sound, using onboard navigation systems, making them much harder to detect by the adversary and allowing them to suppress enemy missile defenses at an early stage, clearing the way for follow-on strikes.

The DF-17 made its public debut in October 2019 at a military parade that marked the 70th anniversary of Communist Party rule in China.

In 2021, the PLA conducted its first known hypersonic test involving the DF-17 glide vehicle, rattling the United States. Later, the Pentagon published the China’s Military Power 2022 report, referring to the DF-17 as a critical threat in the Western Pacific.

“The DF-17 passed several tests successfully and is deployed operationally. While the DF-17 is primarily a conventional platform, it may be equipped with nuclear warheads,” the report added.

Zhang pointed out that the DF-17 can avoid adversary targeting and reconnaissance because it does not depend on fixed launch silos.

Moreover, DF-17’s powerful anti-jamming and precision strike capabilities greatly increase its battlefield survivability and make it well-suited for a variety of complex field combat scenarios, as it is difficult for adversary satellites to detect its operational patterns.

“In addition to a longer vehicle body and more wheels [of the TEL], the biggest change in the DF-17 is the shape of the missile itself. Unlike the cone-shaped warhead we are familiar with from past models, the DF-17’s warhead has undergone significant changes and now features four wings and a tail fin,” Gong Chunyu, a training staff officer from the DF-17 conventional missile formation, was quoted as saying by CCTV earlier. 

“This design reflects a more scientific and advanced concept, with the missile capable of flexible and varied flight trajectories and greatly enhanced penetration capabilities,” he added.

It may be noted that China’s public releases of multiple TELs in formation and field launches demonstrate that the system is no longer experimental or small-scale, and it signifies distributed, mobile, ready forces that could hunt US-based targets quickly.

The missile’s range and penetration capability are repeatedly linked to targets in the western Pacific. Analysts interpret this as reinforcing China’s ability to hold at risk U.S. and allied bases, airfields, command nodes, and surface ships in a Taiwan or regional contingency—raising the cost of a US intervention.

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The United States and South Korea have joined hands to locate the wreckage of two World War-era aircraft that crashed into the sea more than seven decades ago, during the height of the Korean War.

The two allies began a combined underwater excavation project on August 3 in waters off South Korea’s eastern coast in an effort to locate the wreckage of American aircraft that went down during the 1950–53 Korean War, Seoul’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) stated.

The effort, which involves the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and the ministry’s Agency for KIA Recovery & Identification, will be carried out in Gangneung and Yangyang in Gangwon until August 28.

The MoD noted that about 40 people would be sent for the project, including members of the Korean Navy’s First Fleet and the Air Force’s 18th Fighter Wing, as well as American underwater planners and divers.

The divers will try locating the wreckage of a US F4U Corsair fighter that reportedly crashed in waters off Yangyang County in February 1952 while escorting another damaged attack aircraft.

Following this, the research team will focus on recovering the wreckage of the Curtiss C-46 Commando, a US military transport aircraft that crashed twice in the Gangneung area in October and November of 1952, as reported by Yonhap News Agency.

In the first instance, the plane crash left 17 people missing, while in the November incident, two people were found dead and seven were reported missing.

It is noteworthy that the F4U Corsair played a major role as a fighter-bomber and close air support (CAS) aircraft for the US Navy and Marine Corps during the Korean War, despite being a piston-engine design in the early jet age. Corsairs scored a modest number of aerial victories—around 10 total credited to Navy and Marine pilots—according to some accounts. However, the Corsairs also unfortunately suffered significant losses, primarily due to intense anti-aircraft fire at low altitude during their CAS role.

According to some sources, a F4U-4B Corsair of the Fighter Squadron 53 crashed into the sea on 21 February, 1952 while escorting a flak-damaged US aircraft toward Sokcho-ri Airfield (K-50). The pilot was purportedly flying through a snowstorm, which caused disorientation, and the aircraft suddenly swerved and crashed into the sea, killing the pilot.

Separately, the Curtiss C-46 Commando—a twin-engine, heavy-lift cargo and troop carrier that had already proven itself in World War II—was extensively used to transport men and materiel during the Korean War.

Although the reports did not identify the exact aircraft the researchers are looking for, some sources note that a C-46D-10-CU (serial 44-77538) crashed into the sea a few kilometers offshore on October 16, 1952, shortly after takeoff from Kangnung (K-18) en route to Pohang. Meanwhile, a second C-46D-15-CU (serial 44-78114) crashed approximately 200 yards past the end of the runway on November 15, 1952, after an engine failure during a courier flight on the same route.

The EurAsian Times, however, could not verify the exact aircraft the US and South Korean teams are searching for or the cause of their crashes.

The combined survey team will use maritime unmanned systems and underwater detection equipment to carry out the search. Once potential sites are identified, divers or remote sensing technology will examine the locations, the Korean media reported.

The initiative to find the old relics is significant but not rare.  Several archaic World War II aircraft, aircraft carriers, and ship wrecks lost in combat have been recovered by US entities, including the US Navy, the DPAA, Project Recover, and private American recovery groups.  These efforts often focus on accounting for missing aircrew, in line with the US military’s motto—“Leave no one behind.”  However, some recoveries are meant for historical preservation or museum restoration. 

Discoveries In Recent Years

Earlier this year, a team of maritime and naval conservation organizations embarked on a quest to recover a World War II torpedo bomber—TBD-1 Devastator— from the sea floor, where it has rested for more than 80 years.

The US Naval History and Heritage Command partnered with the Air and Sea Heritage Foundation to recover the aircraft that ditched off Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands in February 1942 from the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier. 

Similarly, a B-17 Flying Fortress that went down in the Baltic Sea in 1943 during intense fighting against the Nazis was located and recovered by researchers from Texas A&M University near Denmark in February 2026. 

In 2017, Project Recover located the debris of the B-24 bomber that was shot down by anti-aircraft fire in 1944 near Hansa Bay, Papua New Guinea. In 2023, DPAA conducted its deepest underwater recovery mission to date, with elite US Navy divers descending about 200 feet underwater in a pressurized bell. They recovered some remains, dog tags, a bombardier’s ring, and other items, according to reports.

In 2019, researchers managed to locate the final resting place of the USS Hornet, the World War II aircraft carrier sunk in a 1942 battle with the Japanese Navy. The research ship R/V Petrel reportedly discovered the carrier in waters off the Solomon Islands at a depth of about 17,500 feet. The carrier was seen lying upright and almost undamaged on the deep and barren ocean below in overhead sonar photos

In 2018, a search team headed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen discovered wreckage from the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier that sank during World War II, in the Coral Sea. The R/V Petrel, the team’s research vessel, discovered the wreckage approximately 800 kilometers off the eastern coast of Australia, at a depth of 3,000 meters.

More recently, the US  managed to find the wreckage of a civilian aircraft, Pan Am “Clipper Endeavor”, which mysteriously crashed in Puerto Rico in 1952, killing 52 people. The operation was led by the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation, in partnership with others, including Discovery Channel’s “Expedition Unknown.” 

It is worth noting that these are just a few of many notable discoveries that the US has made in collaboration with other agencies and partners from sea beds far from its own shores, and do not encapsulate the whole picture of these efforts.

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If anything, Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh’s call on August 3 for greater “military-civil integration” to create “a robust defense ecosystem to tackle emerging challenges” implies that there is still a structural mismatch between generalist bureaucrats (critically called Babus) and uniformed personnel within the Ministry of Defense (MoD). 

In other words, in India’s higher defense reforms, integration between the military and civil components of the Ministry of Defense (MoD) is being seen as important as greater jointness among the three armed services (army, air force, and navy).

For decades, the relationship between civilian staff and military personnel within the MoD has been described by experts as both a strength and a fault line, particularly at the level of defense management.

Therefore, as India moves toward theatre commands, self-reliance under the “Atmanirbhar Bharat” (Self-reliant India) scheme, and faster procurement of defense components, the question is: how has this synergy worked in retrospect, and what should it look like in the future?

Addressing the 85th Armed Forces Headquarters (AFHQ) Civilian Services Day celebrations in New Delhi on Monday,  Singh emphasised that both the uniformed and civil services cannot proceed along separate paths, adding that, as joint and integrated structures develop, there will be a need for continuity and expertise across all areas – policy, administration, human resource management, financial processes, logistics, and institutional knowledge.

He highlighted the importance of further enhancing structured cross-exposure between civilian and military officers, suggesting joint training programs and developmental assignments for both sides to learn from each other’s experiences.

“Military officers bring operational experience, a command perspective, and an understanding of warfare, while civilian officers contribute through administrative continuity, policy experience, an understanding of government processes, and institutional memory. When these strengths combine, decision-making becomes more informed, balanced, and effective,” stated the Defense Minister.

As things stand today, there are nine major participating groups dealing with India’s defence – three military services, and the non-military six – Department of Defence(DoD), the Department of Military Affairs(DMA), the Department of Defence Production ( DDP), the Department of Defence Research and Development (DDR&D), the Department of Ex-Servicemen Welfare (DESW), and Defence Finance.

While these nine groups are — three military services, and the non-military six – inside the MoD, there are three others outside the domain having considerable influence on defense matters – the Ministry of Finance (controlling the defense spending), the Cabinet Secretariat (policy matters that have implications for other ministries) and the Prime Minister’s Office (which can always intervene or arbitrate selectively).

However, we will focus here only on the MoD, particularly on the integration of the military services with the non-military ones.

To begin with, one is reminded of what late Vice Admiral Verghese Koithara had said: each of the major participating groups in Indian defense is known for  “jealously guarding its turf and mistrustful of the others”.

Incidentally, the Admiral was talking of eight groups, because the DMA was a later creation. But the spirit behind his comment remains intact.

It may be noted that the total workforce under the MoD stands at approximately 2.92 million (29.2 lakh) personnel, making it the largest employer in the world. Expenditure on salaries and pensions for both civilian and non-civilian personnel is fully integrated into the official MoD budget.

The total strength encompasses active military personnel, reservists, and defense civilians. Approximately 1.43 million active-duty personnel serving across the Army, Navy, and Air Force are complemented by roughly 1 million reserve personnel.

Approximately 400,000 defense civilians are distributed across administrative services. They come mainly from the Indian Defense Accounts Service, Indian Ordnance Factories Service, Defense Research & Development Organization scientists, and the Armed Forces Headquarters Civil Service, the Defense Accounts Department (DAD), Border Roads Organization (BRO), DRDO, and top bureaucracy.

The apex bureaucratic positions like the Defense Secretary, Secretary (Defense Production), and Secretary (Ex-Servicemen Welfare) are often held by IAS officers.

The last 5 years have seen some important defense reforms in India. For the first time, a serving 4-star General became Secretary in MoD as Chief of Defense Staff. DMA handles procurement, tri-service matters, and jointness. This is said to have broken the wall between the civilian secretariat and the military.

Service HQs have been integrated with the HQ of MoD. Joint Secretaries from the military now sit in the MoD and sign files. This means operational officers are now part of the procurement and policy process.

Before this reform, the MoD was entirely dominated by generalist civilian bureaucrats under the Department of Defense (DoD), led by the Defense Secretary. The Army, Navy, and Air Force headquarters operated merely as “attached offices,” meaning military files had to be routed through junior civilian desk officers for approval.

However, there are still well-documented latent and reported mutual resentment between military and civilian personnel in the MoD, which analysts and scholars refer to as “civil-military dissonance”.

The friction does not stem from opposition to the constitutional principle of political/democratic civilian control, which the military fully accepts. Instead, the resentment focuses on “bureaucratic control,” where career civil servants are perceived to act as a barrier between the uniformed leadership and the political executive.

A primary driver of public friction involves rank parity and protocol equivalence between military officers and civilian cadres. As Admiral Arun Prakash points out, the three Chiefs have been accorded “no locus standi in the structure of the GoI, so much so that the Secretary of the Department of Defense is deemed to represent the three Services in most forums”.

According to the “Government of India Allocation of Business Rules” (AoB Rules) and the “Government of India Transaction of Business Rules” (ToB Rules), the Secretary of DoD (a IAS officer) is allocated the responsibilities of “(a) Defence of India and every part thereof including preparation for defence and all such acts as may be conducive in times of war to its prosecution and after its termination to effective Demobilisation; (b) The Armed Forces of the Union, namely, Army, Navy and Air Force; (c) Integrated Headquarters of the Ministry of Defence comprising of Army Headquarters, Naval Headquarters, Air Headquarters and Defence Staff Headquarters”.

This looks particularly strange as, in terms of protocol, the Defense Secretary ranks at 23 in the order of preference, along with “Army Commanders/ Vice-Chief of the Army Staff or equivalent in other services”. In contrast, a Service Chief of Staff holding the rank of full General or equivalent rank is at number 12.

Even at 16, Officiating Chiefs of Staff holding the rank of Lieutenant General or equivalent rank are higher in protocol than the Defense Secretary.

Similarly, the Military officers are said to have resented the equation of lower-tier civilian administrative posts of Joint Secretary with senior military ranks like Major Generals. It is argued that a Major General has significantly more operational responsibility and seniority (often over 32 years of service) compared to an IAS officer reaching Joint Secretary level in roughly 18 years.

Military officials often point out that allowances, non-functional financial upgrades, and pension structures have favored civilian bureaucracies over the unique hazards of military service. Successive Central Pay Commission awards have frequently triggered military dissatisfaction.

In other words, there is an underlying perception of hierarchical degradation that persists within the armed forces.

Secondly, there are gaps between the military and civilian officials over what is called “Policies vs Operations”. While civilians are accused of lacking operational understanding, the military is accused of not understanding procurement rules. This really leads to delays in equipment purchase.

Perhaps, realizing these deep-seated systemic silos, Defense Minister Singh said on Monday that the military and civilian wings can no longer afford to operate in isolated silos to build an effective national defense ecosystem.

As he underscored, the civilian officials should read  Indian military history, examining it from a civilian perspective, thereby fostering fresh ideas and new perspectives. He called upon the Civilian Services to evolve into the “strategic brain” of India’s defence management architecture by developing a comprehensive understanding of the defence sector, functioning effectively in a joint environment, and continuously enhancing its expertise to face the emerging challenges.

Notably, when one talks of dissonance between the military and civilian officers, it is perhaps more to do with purely civilians like IAS and other central services within the MoD rather than the non-military technical and scientific personnel.

There has been relatively smoother synergy in areas like defense production and infrastructure building. For instance, Defence Public Sector Undertakings like the HAL, BEL, BDL and OFB, which are run with a mix of civilian managers, engineers, scientists and military users, have produced platforms and ammunition like Tejas, Arjun, BrahMos.  succeeded because civilian scientists in DRDO worked with military feedback loops.

Similarly, the BRO, a civilian-led organization with military engineers, has built highly acclaimed critical roads in the country’s northern and north-eastern border (Line of Actual Control) with China.

However, it is with the civilian officials working within the MoD that military officials have some issues, such as policy decisions, pay, and ranks.

But then, it is also to be noted that while services may all agree on their fight against the civilians,  when it comes to “promoting jointness” in military matters, they do not have the same ideas.  There is an intense rivalry amongst them. Although the situation has improved of late,  there are differences over whether the country should have theater commands, and if it will have them, then how those will be operated.

In other words, there are, overall,  challenges in building better “Civil-Military Synergy”. There seem to be merits when some experts argue that National Defense College (NDC) and the College of Defense Management (CDM) could bridge strategic and administrative silos, fostering deeper synergy, mutual understanding, and coordinated policy-making between senior civilian bureaucrats and military leadership.

There are also ideas like extending the DMA model to have military officers in all key procurement and policy wings, and civilian officers in Integrated Theatre Commands. Defense civilians should have tenures in field formations and military officers in  MoD finance and policy.

Another interesting suggestion is to extend the synergy beyond the MoD and involve the private sector, startups, academia and state governments. Of course, in a way this is happening with projects like defence corridors, and through collaboration in the space, cyber and AI  sectors.

Viewed thus, the core challenge to the synergy that the Defense Minister has talked about is removing what is said to be the “Trust Deficit” between the civilian and military wings within the MoD, due to decades of suspicion.

The synergy does not mean the dilution of civilian supremacy at the policy-making level, be it the MoD, or the Union cabinet, or the Parliament.   But it means the military’s voice is heard in policy-making.  The military does not grudge civilian control; it opposes “the bureaucratic control”.

Synergy does not imply that civilians are made into soldiers, or soldiers into ‘babus’. Its goal is to make both into “defense managers”

• Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
• CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com

The post Biggest Weakness Emerges in India’s Military Setup: Rank, Power & Toxic Rift Between “Babus” & Soldiers appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

One of the two US Air Force’s KC-135R Stratotankers that collided mid-air earlier this year during hostilities with Iran is now flying with a replacement vertical stabilizer sourced from another aircraft.

During the height of the clash between the US and Iran, two USAF KC-135 refuellers collided mid-air in friendly airspace in Iraq in a freak accident on March 12, 2026. 

One of these tankers, call sign Zeus 95, was unable to recover from the impact and crashed close to Turaibil on the border between Iraq and Jordan. Meanwhile, the other aircraft managed to steer away and land safely at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel—the hub of USAF’s aerial refueling capability during the conflict—despite sustaining damage to its vertical stabilizer, or tail, as previously reported by the EurAsian Times.

“U.S. Central Command is aware of the loss of a U.S. KC-135 refueling aircraft. The incident occurred in friendly airspace during Operation Epic Fury, and rescue efforts are ongoing. Two aircraft were involved in the incident. One of the aircraft went down in western Iraq, and the second landed safely. This was not due to hostile fire or friendly fire,” the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement on the day of the tragic accident.

As it turns out, the surviving KC-135 has been repaired by cannibalizing the vertical stabilizer from another aircraft of the type. It was spotted at RAF Mildenhall, UK, during its transit from Israel to the continental US, featuring two distinct serial numbers: although the fuselage itself carried 63-8017, the original serial number, the tail bore 63-8002, as seen in photos shared by UK-based aviation photographer Havoc Aviation.

The U.S. Air Force KC-135 "Stratotanker" that survived the fatal midair collision with another KC-135 over Iraq in March is now en route towards the United Kingdom, likely beginning its return to the United States.

Based on the extensive structural damage sustained in the… pic.twitter.com/1aHcRvPXhg

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) August 2, 2026

According to reports, the donor aircraft had previously served with the 22nd Air Refueling Wing and was last noted at the KC-135 depot at Tinker AFB, Oklahoma, where it appears to have entered retirement or storage. The repair work was apparently carried out at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, which recently made headlines for refusing to accommodate additional USAF tankers amid overcrowding.

This repair approach—using a donor component from another airframe—is an established practice for returning heavily damaged aircraft to service.

Earlier, the USAF successfully reassembled two damaged F-35 stealth fighters into one Frankenbird. One of the F-35s was damaged in a catastrophic engine fire at Eglin Air Force Base in 2014, whereas the other was damaged in a nose-gear collapse at Hill Air Force Base in Utah in 2020. The team developed specialized tooling, supports, and other equipment to assemble and connect the aircraft components, as you can read about here.

Similarly, the B-2 Spirit of Georgia, whose wing composite was severely damaged after it suffered a landing-gear collapse at Whiteman AFB in 2021, was later repaired by equipping it with an 8×4-foot donor composite skin panel from Test Article 0998.

Nevertheless, the KC-135 with two different numbers at RAF Mildenhall remains a unique sighting, particularly as the mid-air crash occurred during intense combat and killed six crew members.

Iran’s proxies in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack as soon as the crash was announced by official channels. 

“In defense of our country’s sovereignty and its airspace violated by the aircraft of the occupation forces, the mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq targeted, with appropriate weaponry during the past twenty-four hours, a second aircraft of the KC-135 type belonging to the American occupation in western Iraq. Its crew managed to escape with it after it was hit, and it made an emergency landing at one of the enemy’s airports,” the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI), an umbrella group of Iran-backed Iraqi militias, said in a statement at the time. 

The claim was unsurprisingly amplified by Iranian state media and others, though CENTCOM immediately refuted it. 

USAF Has Lost Many KC-135 Tankers 

The KC-135, introduced nearly 70 years ago, remains the most numerous aerial-refueling aircraft in US service and the backbone of the tanker force. It enables long-range operations by fighters, bombers, and other aircraft of the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and allied nations.

Ben Gurion Airport became a major forward operating location for both KC-135s and newer KC-46 Pegasus tankers before and during Operation Epic Fury. The concentration of refueling and cargo aircraft there grew substantially as the conflict continued past the April ceasefire, at one point reaching 70–75 aircraft and prompting Israeli authorities to press for a drawdown to protect commercial airline operations.

However, for the one KC-135 that the USAF managed to restore, it has lost many others during its high-tempo war with Tehran.

Following the fatal accident on March 12, media sources on March 14 stated that an Iranian missile and drone attack had destroyed five KC-135s while they were on the ground at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The refuellers were parked in the open on the apron, making them “sitting ducks” for Iranian missiles and drones, because the base, which is roughly 600 kilometers from Iran, lacked shelters for large planes like the KC-135.

Due to a lack of clear information from CENTCOM, the extent of damage to each tanker remains unknown. 

In fact, the latest arrival of the KC-135 at RAF Mildenhall was the third of a damaged tanker at the British facility, according to reports.

The Mildenhall transit of 63-8017 marks at least the third appearance of a battle-damaged KC-135 at the British base.

On April 12, 2026, KC-135R 59-1444 arrived covered in temporary battle-damage-repair patches before continuing to the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex at Tinker AFB. On May 23, 2026, Alaska Air National Guard KC-135R 63-8028 of the 168th Wing arrived with shrapnel repairs on its tail and flaps and without its refueling boom.

The substantial damage to the USAF’s KC-135 aircraft in the Middle East has spurred discussion about the attrition and pressure on the aging tanker fleet during high-tempo operations. As of now, parts cannibalized from boneyard-decommissioned aircraft are essential to the KC-135 fleet.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
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Britain’s far-right, anti-immigration party, Reform UK, has announced that it would stop immigrants from France with the biggest military operation in the English Channel since the Second World War. 

Unveiling the proposal, dubbed “Operation Fortress”, Reform leader Nigel Farage said at a press conference that asylum seekers arriving in small boats from France will be detained and sent back.

“Under a Reform government, within a fortnight, there would be no more boats,” Farage declared, claiming the plan would render Britain’s borders “impenetrable.”

Farage, whose party has recently lost its lead in national opinion polls for the first time in more than a year amid controversies over donations and gifts to senior figures, pointed to the recent migrant surge into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta.

Roughly 60,000 people crossed from Morocco over a few days in late July, with at least 72 deaths from drownings and crushes at the breakwater barriers. “What happened in Ceuta over the weekend shows you just how serious this situation is,” he told reporters.

The Reform UK party has reportedly proposed a joint military command drawing units from the British Army, Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and RAF, supported by a specialized surveillance command to track vessels. The military would stop unauthorized boats, hold those on board, and return them on navy ships. The party said it would introduce emergency legislation “as necessary” to give the command any extra powers required.

“When you think about it, what is the Royal Navy for? If the Royal Navy is not there to protect this country from invasion, then, frankly, I can’t see what its purpose is,” Farage said at the press conference.

Reform UK has said it wants to launch “the largest military operation in the English Channel since World War Two” to stop small boat arrivals.

A Nigel Farage-led government would send the Royal Navy to intercept migrant boats there and return them to France or Belgium.

Labour… pic.twitter.com/TA081Ig5QS

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) August 3, 2026

The French Interior Ministry condemned the plan, telling AFP it “would be a violation of French sovereignty as well as a violation of maritime law and international law.”

While the ruling Labor Party vociferously opposed the Reform proposal, Prime Minister Andy Burnham pledged to make “relentless” efforts to halt asylum seekers after new data revealed that over 2,000 people had entered Britain since he took office two weeks ago.

Several former service personnel, particularly ex-Royal Navy officers, have strongly criticized and dismissed Reform UK’s “Operation Fortress” proposal.

The Royal Navy is there to protect this country from invasion and that is what I intend to use it for. pic.twitter.com/jbvTUTEzZR

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) August 3, 2026

For example, Retired Royal Navy Commander Tom Sharpe questioned the “substance” of the concept, adding that the navy lacks ships to conduct the operation. “A billion-pound warship that’s configured for anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare, which are both threats to the UK, is not best used ferrying people around. You’re better off using an actual ferry,” Sharpe told BBC Radio 4’s Today program.

The concept “sounds magnificent, provided you know nothing about ships, sailors, France, or the law,” said Andrew Fox, a former paratrooper and senior associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society think tank. He noted that London won’t be able to ​move warships into French territorial waters, seize ​boats, or disembark passengers without French permission.

Ben Obese-Jecty, a Conservative MP and former British army officer, dismissed the proposal as “ridiculous”, adding that Reform had announced this ridiculous idea before. Additionally, he pointed out in a post on X that Reform UK’s “Operation Fortress” poster uses the image of HMS Ocean, which was sold to Brazil in 2018.

Meanwhile, Former Royal Navy officer John Foreman CBE dismissed the plan bluntly as “a crock of shit,” in a post on X.

Undeterred by the criticism, Farage justified his proposal, saying, ”humanitarian missions do not violate maritime or international law,” and the party defiantly vowed to “stand up for British interests,” whether French President Emmanuel Macron “likes it or not.”

While experts from both the military and legal domains believe that the proposal is unfeasible, Farage’s call for “the largest military operation” after World War II has created quite a stir and brought back memories of the actual biggest military operations in the channel that changed the face of the WW2 and reversed Germany’s fortunes.

The Largest Operation In The English Channel 

The English Channel saw intense, sustained naval warfare throughout the Second World War. However, two operations in particular stand out for sheer scale and are the clear historical benchmarks that Farage invoked.

One of these operations came to be known as Operation Dynamo, or Dunkirk Evacuation, which took place between May 26, 1940, and June 4, 1940.

In May 1940, German forces invaded the Low Countries and France using Blitzkrieg tactics. They rapidly advanced, cutting off the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and large numbers of French and Belgian troops. Thus, the Allies were driven back towards the English Channel and found themselves trapped in a shrinking pocket around the port of Dunkirk, with their backs to the sea and the prospect of annihilation or capture.

This necessitated an evacuation. Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay directed the rescue operation from the tunnels beneath Dover Castle.

The Dunkirk harbor was heavily damaged by Luftwaffe bombing, rendering its inner docks unusable. This meant that larger warships could not approach the shallow beaches stretching roughly ten miles east. So, a plan was hatched: two-thirds of the rescued troops boarded destroyers, minesweepers, and other ships from the East Mole, a 1,400-yard breakwater that extended into deeper water. Meanwhile, the remaining one-third were lifted from the open beaches at Malo-les-Bains, Bray-Dunes, and La Panne by small ships.

Nearly a thousand vessels, including Royal Navy destroyers, minesweepers, and merchant ships, formed the backbone of the effort, while hundreds of civilian “little ships” such as yachts, fishing boats, pleasure craft, and lifeboats, ferried men from the shallow beaches to the larger ships waiting offshore or carried them all the way to England. 

The Luftwaffe subjected the harbor, beaches, and shipping to intense bombing, while the RAF fought to provide air cover at considerable cost.

Planners initially expected to save only about 45,000 men over a couple of days. However, as the operation progressed, roughly 338,000 troops, including around 224,000 British and some 120,000 French and other Allied soldiers, were brought safely across the Channel.

And, by the time the operation ended on 4 June, the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force had been saved.

The second major operation in the Channel was Operation Neptune, the codename for the naval and amphibious assault phase of the Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. This operation apparently formed the seaborne component of the larger Operation Overlord, the plan to liberate north-west Europe from German occupation, and remains the largest seaborne invasion in history.

Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay of the Royal Navy commanded the Allied Naval Expeditionary Force. The fleet was organized into two task forces: the Western Task Force for the American beaches and the Eastern Task Force for the British and Canadian beaches.

Allied forces assembled in ports along the southern coast of England, then crossed the English Channel overnight on 5–6 June 1944 to land on the beaches of Normandy in German-occupied France. The distance varied by route and beach but was typically between about 60 and 100 miles.

The naval armada of nearly 7,000 vessels transported troops, vehicles, and supplies through these waters under the protection of warships and air cover.

The successful execution of Neptune opened the long-awaited second front in Western Europe and marked the beginning of the final campaign against Nazi Germany.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
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Composição: Amor, bem-estar, escutar-se, partilha, amizade, 5 minutos, proximidade emocional, escuta. Sobredosagem: Família, autorregulação, comunicação. Procedimento adotado nas Leituras Furiosas: Rasurar a palavra «bênção» da coluna de palavras relativas à ideia de «família» foi um erro, aponta LCMarola — um moço que se lê como uma mota com desejo de rugir a sua aceleração sobre a paisagem. Cuidado, diz-nos o Lunatic, a rapidez é pouco amiga da atenção e da escuta. Diz-nos que (…)

Composição: Amor, bem-estar, escutar-se, partilha, amizade, 5 minutos, proximidade emocional, escuta. Sobredosagem: Família, autorregulação, comunicação. Procedimento adotado nas Leituras Furiosas: Rasurar a palavra «bênção» da coluna de palavras relativas à ideia de «família» foi um erro, aponta LCMarola — um moço que se lê como uma mota com desejo de rugir a sua aceleração sobre a paisagem. Cuidado, diz-nos o Lunatic, a rapidez é pouco amiga da atenção e da escuta. Diz-nos que (…)

The Indian Air Force (IAF) held a week-long counter-drone exercise to strengthen its capabilities against low-cost unmanned aerial systems.

The primary goal of the exercise, dubbed “Rotor Clap-III”, was reportedly to assess and refine operational principles to address emerging aerial threats from unmanned systems. The exercise concluded on August 2.

The Counter-Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) drill was held at the Pokhran Field Firing Range in the Thar Desert.

The site is best known as the location of India’s nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998, but its vast, sparsely populated expanse near the India-Pakistan border supports secure live-fire practice, helicopter operations, and high-intensity training while closely matching the terrain, climate, and conditions of the western theatre.

The drills were also aimed at improving the IAF’s helicopter fleet’s operational capabilities against threats posed by drones.

#IAF Helicopters undertook, Exercise ROTOR CLAP III themed "Counter-UAS" in Rajasthan.

The exercise brought together helicopter units of the #IndianAirForce to validate operational concepts against emerging aerial threats#ExerciseRotorClapIII #CounterUAS@DefenceMinIndia… pic.twitter.com/8nFwAQGm5T

— Indian Air Force (@IAF_MCC) August 1, 2026

Several IAF helicopter units participated in the exercise, conducting tactical missions such as coordinated actions against both aerial and ground-based threats, soldier insertion, reconnaissance, precision attacks, battlefield support, and casualty evacuation.

The drills evaluated integrated helicopter tactics, procedures, and coordination in simulated combat conditions.

Moreover, the aircrew and operational units had the opportunity to test and validate mission planning, inter-unit coordination, quick response, and cooperative operations in near-war scenarios throughout the exercise. According to reports, special emphasis was placed on ensuring smooth coordination among multiple helicopters in the desert terrain.

Notably, helicopters are increasingly being employed worldwide in counter-UAS roles, especially against slower, low-cost loitering munitions and reconnaissance drones. Russia and Ukraine, for example, routinely use military helicopters for this purpose, whereas Gulf countries have recently started deploying their own choppers to down Iranian drones.

In general, helicopters make good counter-UAS platforms because many of them cruise at speeds similar to those of propeller-driven drones such as the Shahed class, enabling them to close the distance, match altitude, and make repeated engagement passes—advantages not available to fast jets, which are limited to a single high-speed pass.

Typically, helicopters can also operate from dispersed or improvised sites, fly low and slow, and loiter over threat areas. Equipped with thermal or electro-optical sensors and night-vision systems, they are effective at detecting and engaging low-flying drones after dark.

Once the helicopter matches the drone’s path, gunners or automated systems use proximity-fuzed rockets or brief bursts of cannon or machine-gun fire to neutralize a drone.

Therefore, these armed helicopters form one mobile layer alongside ground-based guns, electronic warfare, interceptor drones, and high-end surface-to-air missiles (SAM).

Using helicopters as counter-drone platforms is also cost-effective, given that machine guns, cannons, and rockets are far cheaper per engagement than surface-to-air missiles or fighter sorties. In fact, the US has now integrated its Apache helicopters with APWKS laser rockets to further reduce the cost of hunting drones.

The IAF operates a range of different military choppers—AH-64 Apache, the aging Mi-25 and Mi-35 attack helicopters, the LCH Prachand, Chinook Heavy-lift transport helicopter, the Mi-17 Medium utility helicopter, and the ALH Dhruv

Sources said the exercise reaffirmed the IAF’s commitment to high operational readiness and adaptation to new security challenges. It forms part of India’s broader push to strengthen counter-UAS capabilities at a time when inexpensive small drones, loitering munitions, and sophisticated unmanned systems have upended the cost calculus of conflict and changed the face of conventional warfare that India has participated in.

India’s Counter-Drone Effort Inspired By Op Sindoor

India’s heightened focus on counter-drone measures is driven by global trends, persistent cross-border drone activity, and, most significantly, experience gained during Operation Sindoor in May 2025, which it launched against Pakistan-based terror infrastructure.

Pakistan retaliated almost instantly and employed large numbers of drones as a core element of its response codenamed Operation Bunyan al-Marsus.

Indian official briefings stated that Pakistan launched swarms of drones in major coordinated waves. According to the Government of India’s official press briefing, Pakistan launched 400–500 drones in a coordinated reconnaissance and SIGINT (Signal Intelligence) operation. These were intended to clutter Indian radars, force air-defense systems to expend ammunition and attention, probe for gaps, and mask the presence of a smaller number of more capable surveillance or attack drones.

Pakistan has invested heavily in drone manufacture using indigenous capabilities acquired from allies like Turkey and China, as previously explained in detail by the EurAsian Times. During the conflict, it used Turkish Asisguard Songar, Turkish Yiha-III, Bayraktar TB2 drone, and Chinese drones like the CH-4 and Wing Loong II, to name a few.

India stated that the large majority of incoming drones were neutralized by a combination of kinetic systems (anti-aircraft guns, including the L-70, ZU-23, and Schilka, as well as surface-to-air missiles such as Akash), and non-kinetic measures (spoofing and jamming).

While India has significantly expanded its own inventory of drones, many of which were used successfully and decisively against Pakistani targets during the war, the intensity of drone use by the Pakistani military during the four-day intense conflict has accelerated Indian investment in counter-drone programs and tactics.

For example, counter-drone grids are being incorporated into Mission Sudarshan Chakra, a long-term, AI-enabled, multi-layered national air-defense shield announced last year.

In early July 2026, the Defense Acquisition Council granted Acceptance of Necessity for procurement proposals worth approximately ₹52,000 crore. These include the indigenous Akash Tarang anti-UAV electronic-warfare system for the Army, Very Short-Range Air Defense Systems (V-SHORADS) to bolster low-altitude defense against drones, and jet-powered kamikaze drones, underscoring the priority now attached to both unmanned systems and counter-UAS capabilities

A range of new counter-drone systems developed jointly by public- and private-sector entities are at various stages of testing.

Last year, for instance, India’s Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) unveiled the D4 (Drone Detect, Deter, Destroy) anti-drone system, which is now being deployed along key border areas. This integrated counter-drone solution is designed to detect and neutralize rogue unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with precision.

Earlier this year, the Indian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced the completion of development trials of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Launched Precision Guided Missile-V3 (ULPGM-V3) in air-to-ground and air-to-air modes. The ULPGM is designed for UAV integration to destroy soft and hard targets, on the ground and in the air.

Similarly, India-based Zen Technologies launched an enhanced variant of its counter-unmanned aircraft system (C-UAS) that is already in service with the Indian Armed Forces in May 2026. The new variant of the system reportedly has increased detection and jamming ranges and is integrated with AI for improved threat detection.

These are just a few examples of India’s counter-drone effort.

The armed forces are also conducting dedicated counter-drone exercises based on lessons from Operation Sindoor. In October 2025, for instance, India’s largest drone and counter-drone warfare drill, Exercise Cold Start, was conducted in Madhya Pradesh to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing air defense

Therefore, the recently concluded Rotor Clap-III, focused on the IAF’s helicopter fleet, is another step in preparing for operations on a battlefield increasingly dominated by drones.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
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Nearly 50,000 of the 60,000 young Moroccans who had entered  Ceuta, Spain’s 7.5-square-mile enclave on Africa’s coast, on July 29-30, 2026, by swimming around border barriers, may have returned to their country. But the global headlines they were responsible for have had geopolitical impacts on the rest of Europe and the United States. 

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of Spain called the event  “a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity”. But then the fact remains that his left-wing government’s series of liberal migration policies, coupled with the Spanish Supreme Court’s ruling last month that migrants arriving by sea could not be summarily returned, prompted such a massive migration, for which the country was perhaps not ready.

Of course, this was not the first surge from Morocco. As many as 10,000 from Morocco were said to have entered Spain in 2021. But the scale on July 29-30 made it the largest not only in Spain but also in the history of the European Union(EU).

After all, Ceuta, the small Spanish exclave on the North African coast, has a permanent population of just 84,000. Obviously, swarms of 60,000 outsiders totally overwhelmed the locals.

The crisis forces 3 questions: What drove it? What does Spain’s approach mean geopolitically? And how does the debate over religion, demography and identity shape it? 

As pointed out above, the influx was possibly triggered by a ruling by Spain’s Supreme Court that a law allowing the prompt handing back of migrants who breach frontier barriers at Ceuta and Melilla, another Spanish exclave, does not apply to those who arrive by sea. (Those who swim, the court reasoned, do not technically breach frontier barriers, since there are none in the water.) Word of this got around on social media in Morocco, prompting the stream of swimmers.

It may be noted that historically, Morocco has contested Spanish sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla, just 13 to 14 kilometers from its shores through the Strait of Gibraltar. This has led some analysts to believe that  Rabat  “deliberately did little to prevent the crossings”.

They cite the similar opening that was made in 2021. But this is a minority view, given that Morocco has already facilitated the return of 50,000 of its people and is doing so even now.

The 2021 episode was a little different. That time Morocco allowed its people to wade into Ceuta, as an expression of its anger that Spain had allowed the leader of Polisario, a group that has long fought for the independence of Western Sahara, to come to Madrid for medical treatment. Morocco, incidentally, had annexed two-thirds of Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, in 1975.

However, over the last four years, diplomatic parleys between Madrid and Rabat have stabilized the bilateral ties. Spain now backs Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara in exchange for Rabat policing the coast and taking back illegal migrants.

In 2024,  Spain started a program to legalize 900,000 undocumented migrants already in Spain (most of them Moroccans)  to bring them into the tax and social security. It decided to issue  “Labor visas”, under which fast-track permits to address Spain’s rapidly falling population.

The Sanchez regime has tried to legalize immigration as much as possible under what it calls a “human rights and labor needs” approach that envisages expanded regularization programs, bilateral cooperation with Rabat, and faster work permits for migrants in agriculture, tourism, and elder care.

Apparently, Spain has become the EU’s largest entry point for irregular migration, overtaking Italy and Greece. The vast majority of arrivals were from Morocco and the likes of Malians and Senegalese, who crossed through  Morocco by sea. So much so that Spain now has the largest Moroccan diaspora in the EU — over 800,000 people of Moroccan origin, as per Spanish data.

Reportedly, the UN projects Spain needs 200,000 net migrants per year to maintain workforce size. And 10 million foreign-born people for the first time in Spain’s history; they now constitute a fifth of the country’s total population, about 50 million.

At 1.1 million, Moroccans happen to be the largest single nationality of all the foreign nationalities. Birth rates among Moroccan-origin residents are said to be higher than those of native Spaniards, but converge to the Spanish average of 1.6 percent by the second generation, per demographic studies.

In other words,  Spain’s population would be shrinking without immigration.

However, the geopolitical reactions to what happened in Spain are quite different, particularly on both sides of the Atlantic.

The incident provided armor to President Donald Trump and all his supporters in their fight against what they say is illegal immigration into the US.

As images spread, Trump posted that the Ceuta scenes “vindicated” his wall and deportation policies, arguing Europe was now facing what the US faced in 2019. US conservative media amplified the Ceuta footage as evidence for border closure.

“I saw Spain yesterday, and I watched the catastrophe that took place,” Trump told a meeting of his cabinet at the presidential Camp David retreat in Maryland. “It looks like an invasion of a country by hundreds of thousands of people, and that same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse, much bigger.”

Tech billionaire Elon Musk also commented on the situation in Spain, writing on X that “Spain’s entire budget will be destroyed by illegal migrants” and arguing that offering benefits to migrants would create a “forcing function” for large-scale migration.

There were similar reactions from right-wing parties and EU centrists across Europe, demanding tougher immigration policies.

Far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-leader Alice Weidel claimed in an X post that “Ceuta was left in ruins overnight” by the mass influx from Morocco. She argued that Germany is “likely the destination for most of these migrants”, adding “Germany must prepare itself: borders must be secured and rejections rigorously enforced”.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described the scenes in Ceuta as evidence that “uncontrolled illegal immigration poses a concrete threat to the security of Europe’s borders,” saying Italy was prepared to take “extraordinary measures” to defend its borders and the safety of its citizens, including the possible suspension of the Schengen Area with Spain.

The right-wing ruling coalition in Finland also called for excluding Spain from the European visa-free zone as a result of the situation. Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said the Ceuta situation was caused by Spain’s policy of offering hundreds of thousands of migrants already in the country a legal status.

In fact, the weekend incident in Spain is said to have accentuated the political turbulence in Europe and strengthened forces, including even conservatives and liberals, to end what was hitherto a “Liberal Consensus” on a liberal immigration policy.

That explains why on Saturday, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and Italian Premier Meloni initiated a letter that got signed by 22 member states, calling for immediate EU action.

“The bloc cannot allow uncontrolled mass crossings, the instrumentalization of migration or other hybrid threats to create the perception that illegal entry into the European Union is possible,” they wrote.

It may be noted here that for years Germany was the face of liberal asylum policy under Chancellor Angela Merkel. Now it has really reversed that under immense political pressure.

The AfD nearly doubled its vote share, especially in eastern Germany, by campaigning on immigration and crime linked to asylum seekers. As a result, the new CDU-SPD coalition started last year the policy of  “Stricter border checks” and a “de facto entry ban” for undocumented migrants,  including asylum seekers.

Even the British leadership labeled the developments in Spain deeply concerning while highlighting that the UK’s own restrictive operational measures are yielding lower overall small-boat crossing numbers compared to prior tracking periods.

Moving away from past perceptions of a liberal framework to stem the rise of populist Reform Party UK,  the ruling Labour Party is now systematically tightening rules through higher salary thresholds, bans on dependents for most students, restrictions on overseas care worker recruitment, and shorter temporary protection grants for refugees.

And still its government is facing intense but growing popular pressure for mass deportations, rigorous enforcement and digital pre-departure checks.

Incidentally, the growing fears in Europe over uncontrolled and illegal immigration seem to have an angle of the fear of “Islamisation”. It may not be the main driver of policy changes, but it is a major factor in the political turbulence around immigration, particularly in Germany, the UK, and France.

There is a growing Muslim population in these countries due to immigration and higher birth rates among the immigrants.

Reportedly,  there are 5.5 to 6.5 million Muslims in France, making it the largest Muslim minority in Western Europe. This group makes up about 8% to 10% of the country’s total population. The majority of them have roots in North Africa (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia), with smaller groups from Turkey and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Germany’s Muslim population is estimated to be between 5.5 and 7 million, which makes up roughly 6.5% to 8.5% of the country’s total population. The largest group has Turkish heritage, dating back to the guest worker program in the 1960s. Recent growth comes from refugees and migrants arriving from countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The Muslim population in the United Kingdom is approximately 4 million people, making up about 6.0% to 6.5% of the total population. Islam is the second-largest religion in the country.

The largest share, as much as 66 percent, of British Muslims trace their family roots to the Indian subcontinent, with many arriving in waves during the 1950s and 1960s to fill postwar labor shortages. The rest came mainly from Somalia, Nigeria, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and Cyprus.

In these three leading countries, considered to be the engines of Europe, the Muslim immigrants have created what are called economic, cultural, and political concerns over their running parallel societies, sharia law, religious schools, mosques, headscarves, and value clashes over free speech, gender, and LGBTQ issues.

Besides, there are problems relating to issues concerning economics, housing, asylum backlog, crime (the rise of extremism in Islam), and border control.

As it is, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark have already passed laws on face veils, foreign funding of mosques, and “ghetto” laws. Denmark’s Social Democrats explicitly said they wanted “fewer Muslims” to protect their welfare state.

But then, as seen in Spain, these countries also face acute labor shortages, for filling up which most of these Muslims, like others, migrate. In any case, apart from the UK, in no country have Muslims become politically active to endanger the native whites. They do not have high-paying jobs like the skilled and highly educated immigrants, though they are doing very well in the sporting arena.

Therefore, if they are being seen with suspicion, it is because of the changes they have made to mainstream culture.

For many center-right and working-class voters in Europe, that includes concerns about mosques, religious schools, and values. That is why even left-wing parties like UK Labour and German SPD are now tightening controls. They have realized that if one does not address the cultural anxiety, one loses to parties who do or will.

In sum, what the weekend’s episode in Spain seems to have done is raise two questions: whether a liberal-immigration model of Europe will survive by combining open labor markets with credible borders; and whether Europe will still debate culture without dehumanizing people.

• Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
• CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com

The post Trump Calls It “Invasion,” Musk Says Budget “Destroyed”: Moroccan Surge in Spain Rattles U.S. & Europe and Reignites “Islamic Fear” appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

President Donald Trump said the US and Israel had decided to hold off on new strikes on Iran — provided that a deal to end the ongoing conflict is reached quickly.

Meanwhile, a report published by a US-based think tank recently warned that American inventories of key air defense interceptors have fallen sharply, raising the prospect that US and coalition forces may need to accept greater risks in future missile defense operations.

When the US launched Operation Epic Fury in February 2026, President Donald Trump said the hostilities would last only a few days, a deadline that was subsequently moved to a few weeks. However, five months later, there is no end in sight to the war, which has now spilled over into much of West Asia. 

During the war, the US has severely drawn down its air defense interceptors, as documented by the US-based think tank CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies). The CSIS report estimates that stockpiles of the Patriot and THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) have been greatly reduced in the ongoing conflict.

Published on July 27, 2026, the report—“Renewed Iran War Would Test Diminished Interceptor Inventories” authored by Mark F. Cancian and Chris H. Park—updates an earlier CSIS assessment released around the ceasefire agreed to by both sides on April 8, 2026.

“The air defense campaign has been largely successful with high—though not perfect—interception rates. While some Iranian attacks got past defenses, causing casualties and extensive base damage, these attacks have been unable to diminish U.S. and coalition operations. This has required extensive use of interceptors, with Patriot inventories now under 1,000 and THAAD inventories at about 250,” states the report.

The previous report had estimated that the US Patriot interceptor inventory shrank by 55%. However, the updated figures suggest the stockpile has further shrunk by an additional 10% since the truce, and that approximately 65% of US Patriots have now been lost since the war began.

The report estimates that Patriot inventories now stand at under 1,000 (the most recent figures place the range at 759–827) and that THAAD inventories stand at about 250 (the latest figures put it at roughly 234–278).

Both systems have been heavily used to defend US bases, Gulf partners, and Israel against Iranian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and related threats. CSIS apparently draws its estimates from publicly available legislative and Pentagon budget documents, supplemented by open-source data on rounds expended in the Gulf.

“Diminished stockpiles may force the United States and its coalition partners to take more risks with interceptions. There are no good alternatives to Patriot and THAAD for ballistic missile defense. Navy ships, with Standard Missiles that can intercept such threats, generally are too far away,” the report warned.

Notably, an NBC report recently stated that US commanders are choosing not to take down Iranian projectiles that are headed into uninhabited regions of US sites in the vicinity because they do not want to squander their interceptor missiles.

This alleged tactic, if true, marks a shift from previous air and missile defense procedures in the region, such as when a US-manned Patriot detachment protected a mostly evacuated Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar from a barrage of Iranian ballistic missiles in response to Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025.

Despite a dearth in air defense interceptors, the US has vowed to hit Iran very hard, a move that will almost certainly trigger Iranian retaliation and further cause depletion in Patriot and THAAD interceptors. The situation may become dire, given that the production of these missiles takes woefully long—Lockheed delivered just about 600 interceptors in 2025, and only 96  THAAD interceptors are manufactured per year. 

The United States is therefore consuming its most valuable air-defense munitions far faster than industry can replace them. Some analysts have suggested that depleting offensive and defensive stockpiles contributed to the Trump administration’s decision to accept a ceasefire, including the latest one where the U.S. and Israel agreed to hold off on new strikes on Iran.

Other reports indicate Trump may have changed the offensive plans after talking with Saudi Arabia and after Iran also spoke to Riyadh, besides Pakistan and Turkey.

Trump insisted the US was still “locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” but added that Tehran and other Middle Eastern countries had asked him to hold off on fresh strikes. “Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.

Meanwhile, Strategists also warn that the shortages create near- to medium-term risks for U.S. readiness in other theaters, particularly a potential conflict with China in the western Pacific.  “Expended munitions create a near- to medium-term risk for U.S. readiness to fight a war against China in the western Pacific,” the report stated.

In the near term, Washington is unlikely to spare Patriots for Ukraine, which continues to face intense Russian attacks and has repeatedly requested additional interceptors. Russia has been exploiting the vacuum in air defense coverage to strike Kyiv with lethal ballistic and hypersonic missiles, as the EurAsian Times reported.

Pentagon Boosting Interceptor Production

Noteworthy steps have been taken in 2026 to rapidly expand production of Patriot (primarily PAC-3 MSE) and THAAD interceptors.

These efforts use a new “Acquisition Transformation Strategy” approach that emphasizes multi-year framework agreements, undefinitized contract actions (UCAs), long-term demand signals, and parallel investments in facilities, the workforce, and bottleneck components.

For instance, the US Army awarded Lockheed Martin a contract on July 29 worth up to $58.6 billion to produce Patriot interceptor missiles.

This comes after the US awarded Lockheed Martin a $4.7 billion contract in April 2026 to accelerate the production of the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptors. The agreement stipulated that the annual output of PAC-3 MSE interceptors would be increased from nearly 600 to 2,000 units.

The Army states that the latest contract establishes a multiyear procurement strategy for the interceptors from fiscal 2026 through 2032 by converting a prior one-year deal awarded in April into a seven-year draft agreement.

The Pentagon Munitions Acceleration Council (MAC) also reportedly signed an emergency procurement agreement with key vendors to boost production.

Meanwhile, Lockheed has stated that it is investing $8–9 billion through 2030 across more than 20 sites in the United States.

Additionally, the US has agreed to grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriot interceptors, making it the latest European country to manufacture these prized munitions, alongside Germany, Romania, and Poland.

Not just that, Lockheed Martin announced the introduction of the PAC-3 Adapted Capability Effector (PAC-3 ACE), a low-cost interceptor built to defeat a wide range of threats for less than half the cost of a PAC-3 MSE.

As for THAAD, the Pentagon signed a framework with Lockheed Martin to quadruple annual production from 96 to 400 interceptors.

The framework was intended to lead to a formal contract award (subject to congressional appropriations). This was later executed in June 2026 with an undefinitized contract action (UCA) valued at up to $35 billion to increase manufacturing through 2030. 

The Pentagon, in collaboration with L3Harris and Lockheed Martin, announced two historic seven-year framework agreements earlier this week to increase production capacity for critical components of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptors.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
• Follow EurAsian Times on Google News

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Lt. Col. William Henry Rankin was a decorated US Marine Corps fighter pilot who flew combat missions in World War II and the Korean War. His greatest ordeal, however, came in peacetime.

On July 26, 1959, he ejected from an F-8 Crusader straight into a massive thunderstorm. And he lived to tell the tale.

The Vought F-8 Crusader was a single-engine, supersonic, carrier-based air-superiority fighter designed for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Known as the “Last of the Gunfighters,” it was the final American fighter built with guns as its primary armament at a time when missiles were rapidly taking over. The aircraft entered service in 1957.

In May 1957, Rankin took command of Marine Fighter Squadron 122 (VMF-122). The following year, it became the first Marine squadron to operate the F-8 Crusader.

In 1959, he catapulted to fame for surviving what seemed like an impossible incident with the Crusader.

The Story Of Rankin’s Riding A Thunderstorm

On the afternoon of July 26, 1959, Rankin led a two-ship flight with wingman Lt. Herbert Nolan from Naval Air Station South Weymouth, Massachusetts, back to Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina.

During the flight, the pilots encountered a large cumulonimbus thunderstorm.

Typically, thunderstorms pose severe threats to fighter jets, including extreme turbulence, powerful updrafts and downdrafts, hail, lightning, icing, and torrential rain. So, fighter pilots are trained to climb above the storm to prevent damage to their aircraft.

The F-8 Crusader’s strong climb performance and high service ceiling of about 50,000 feet made this a practical choice for Rankin on that fateful day.

Rankin climbed his F-8 fighter jet to 47,000 feet at a speed of Mach 0.82 over a massive cumulonimbus cloud that peaked at about 45,000 feet.

While on this quest, he suddenly heard a loud, unprecedented bump and rumble from the aircraft’s engine. He instantly knew something was wrong with his jet. 

The engine immediately stopped producing power, a bit of bad news that was delivered to Rankin by a bright fire warning light.

Acting swiftly to arrest the threat, Rankin immediately pulled the lever to deploy auxiliary power, but instead of saving his jet, it snapped in his hand.

At this point, Lt. Col Rankin knew he had to eject, which was a formidable challenge without a pressure suit at that altitude.

As soon as he ejected and touched what is believed to be -58 to -60 degree air, his body started to fail. The veteran fighter pilot who had braved enemies in the wars he fought through his career was now struggling for survival—he suffered frostbite, the decompression caused his stomach to bloat, and he started to bleed from his mouth, nose, and ears. The only respite, at least initially, was that he had an emergency oxygen supply. 

The chances of survival were grim, something Rankin was fully aware of.

“I was convinced I would not survive; no human could”, Rankin later wrote in his book “The Man Who Rode the Thunder”. 

“The pain of ‘explosive’ decompression was unbearable,” he recalled in his book, which has been widely read by aviation enthusiasts globally. “I could feel my abdomen distending, stretching, stretching, stretching, until I thought it would burst. My eyes felt as though they were being ripped from their sockets, my head as if it were splitting into several parts, my ears bursting inside, and throughout my entire body, there were severe cramps.”

However, he also bravely emphasizes, “I was terrified, but not petrified. It’s a brave distinction of terms.”

After roughly five minutes of free fall, Rankin realized his parachute had not opened. The system was designed to deploy automatically at about 10,000 feet via a barometric switch, allowing the pilot to reach denser, breathable air before the canopy opened. The already disoriented pilot began to worry that the parachute’s auto-deployment system may have been broken, causing his only chance at survival to fail.

Unfortunately, though, he was now in for a completely different kind of challenge.

As he was passing through a massive thunderstorm with zero visibility, the parachute opened prematurely as the violent pressure fluctuations, updrafts, and turbulence inside the cumulonimbus cloud “fooled” the barometric sensor.

Once under the open canopy of the parachute, Rankin was far more vulnerable to the storm’s powerful vertical currents. The long descent increased the risk of his death from cold or asphyxiation. Additionally, it meant that he was dangerously caught in the up-and-down draft of the storm system, which buffeted the pilot thousands of feet into the air before dragging him back down. And that’s exactly what happened.

Ten minutes into the ordeal, he began vomiting from the violent spinning and pounding even as lightning flashed around him—later described as blue blades several feet thick.

The rain was so dense that he repeatedly inhaled or swallowed water with every breath and had to hold his breath to avoid choking. “Gasping for air, swollen, bleeding, and battered by hail, it was as though I were under a swimming pool, and I had held my breath several times,” wrote Rankin.

For Rankin, this was akin to “drowning in the sky.”

For about forty minutes, he was battered by hail, nearly drowned by torrential rain, and subjected to lightning and extreme turbulence.

“I didn’t hear the thunder, I felt it,” Rankin wrote in his book.

Thankfully, the storm’s intensity eventually decreased, allowing the pilot to finally avoid its drafts. Then, the rain that had threatened to drown him gave way to a comforting summer shower, and the air got substantially warmer.

Soon, he approached the forests of North Carolina’s backcountry, got entangled in a tree, cut away from it, and landed on the ground.

Battered, frostbitten, bleeding, rain-soaked, and covered in vomit, he stumbled through the woods using a search pattern until he found a country road. “Lying on my left side. I simply could not believe that I was on the earth—that I had survived,” he later wrote.

Several cars passed before a motorist stopped, drove him to a nearby country store, and allowed him to call for an ambulance. He collapsed while waiting and was taken to a hospital in Ahoskie, North Carolina. Rankin spent several weeks recovering but sustained no permanent long-term injuries from the forty-minute ordeal and soon returned to duty.

Rankin gained widespread recognition for his iconic and unbelievable battle with the thunderstorm after he returned to active service. 

Having survived a 40-minute thunderstorm in the air, he lived for 50 more years before passing away at 89 in 2009.

Nevertheless, Lt. Col Rankin is still remembered—nearly 70 years after the incident—as the only man who defeated a thunderstorm.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
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Turkey has startled the world with its rapid rise in military technology, particularly in drone warfare. However, it is now charging full steam ahead with the development and testing of the KAAN combat aircraft, a move that will place it in the elite group of nations with stealth fighters

Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) recently released a video of KAAN’s new prototype performing powered taxi testing, suggesting that the first flight may be imminent. The video, posted on X, shows the aircraft moving on its own, verifying the functionality of the engine, brakes, steering, and flight control systems prior to flight clearance.

The new prototype, known as P1, is based on the original P0, which flew for the first time in February 2024, as EurAsian Times reported at the time.

However, the P1 is considered a more mature aircraft that will be crucial to the fighter development and testing campaign. The P0 prototype was constructed to confirm the aircraft’s fundamental flight characteristics, flight control system, and core platform. The P1, by contrast, incorporates a more advanced systems architecture and is intended to carry the bulk of performance, avionics, and mission-systems validation.

Notably, a second prototype, P2, remains in parallel production and integration, with the goal of having both aircraft flying by the end of 2026 to accelerate the test campaign through concurrent work.

#KAAN pic.twitter.com/wWXXweP4af

— Türk Havacılık Uzay Sanayii (@TUSAS_TR) July 31, 2026

TAI CEO Mehmet Demiroğlu earlier stated e that the company hopes to see KAAN airborne within a few months and aims to have the second aircraft flying by year-end. “We hope to see KAAN in the sky within a few months. We also aim to fly the second aircraft by the end of the year. Our goal is to have two KAANs flying one after the other, or side by side, at year-end,” Demiroglu said at the Farnborough Airshow in the UK last month

Turkey plans three pre-production prototypes followed by series production of 250 aircraft. A deal was reportedly signed last month for 20 units of the original Block 10 KAAN

Notably, the P1 symbolizes the Kaan program’s evolution from a technology demonstrator into a developmental test fleet. It demonstrates that the program is proceeding at a speed to match the aspirational schedule of delivering the jets to the Turkish Air Force by 2028.

In addition to accelerated development and testing, the KAAN received another big boost last month when the US cleared for export the General Electric-made F110 engines initially destined to power the plane, removing a major roadblock in the program. Simultaneously, TAI is advancing work on the indigenous TF35000, which will power the aircraft in the long run, as EurAsian Times reported earlier.

The induction of the KAAN fighter will transform the Turkish Air Force, which has been operating aging F-16s since Ankara’s removal from the F-35 program in 2019 over its purchase of Russia’s S-400. The expulsion pushed Turkey to develop its own advanced fighter, aiming to achieve technological sovereignty and reduce dependence on the US.

More significantly, KAAN is Turkey’s most ambitious defense project in decades, positioning the country among the select group of nations that have independently designed and built a fifth-generation stealth aircraft. This progress aligns with Ankara’s broader emergence as a major defense producer and innovator, most notably in drones.

Turkey seems to be overtly prioritizing stealth, as evidenced by the development of KAAN. The KAAN is a twin-engine, single-seat stealth fighter featuring internal weapons bays, low-observable shape, and composite materials that improve stealth by lowering weight and radar signature.  Furthermore, it carries a range of weapons internally, including air-to-air and air-to-ground munitions, such as indigenous Gökdoğan (BVR) and Bozdoğan (WVR) missiles, to bolster lethality while preserving stealth.

Alongside the manned fighter, Turkey continues advancing stealth unmanned systems.  This includes the Anka-3, the first flying-wing, deep-strike drone developed by Turkish Aerospace Industries. According to reports, this stealthy unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) is currently advancing toward serial production, with design upgrades to intakes, exhausts, antennas, and other components.

More importantly, Turkey’s list of unmanned stealth aircraft prominently features the Kizilelma, an unmanned fighter jet expected to conduct a wide range of military operations.

The Bayraktar Kızılelma incorporates low-observable design features. It is routinely described by Baykar and Turkish defense officials as a low-RCS (radar cross-section) unmanned fighter. In fact, the Kizilelma recently conducted a weapons-firing test that further added to its stealth characteristics.

Stealthy Kizilelma Fired From Internal Weapons Bay

Last month, Kizilelma successfully conducted its first live-fire tests from its internal weapons bay, achieving direct hits. The test was reportedly conducted at the Corlu Flight Training and Test Center in the northwestern province of Tekirdag, using the production model with tail number S2 and Roketsan’s TEBER-82 munition and TOLUN munitions. 

Baykar hailed the test as a historic milestone that confirms the jet’s ability to attack with precision while maintaining a low radar signature.

It is worth mentioning that external weapons, pylons, and the cavities they create dramatically increase an aircraft’s RCS. In fact, even a well-shaped low-observable airframe loses much of its stealth advantage once munitions are hung outside.

By successfully firing precision-guided munitions from the internal bay on the serial prototype, Kızılelma demonstrated that it can carry and release weapons without compromising its clean, low-RCS airframe, conduct stand-in or penetrating attacks in contested airspace while remaining harder to detect, and maintain higher speed and better aerodynamic efficiency.

“Thanks to its internal weapons bay, Kizilelma will be able to penetrate deep into hostile territory and strike using indigenous munitions while maintaining a low radar signature,” Baykar said, adding that internal carriage allows it to function “more effectively in areas with dense air defense coverage.

#KIZILELMA

TEBER-82 & TOLUN-P Munition Firing Test from the Internal Weapons Bay

Bull’s Eye#Baykar @Roketsan @Aselsan#NationalTechnologyInitiative pic.twitter.com/hw6ukagjGU

— BAYKAR (@BaykarTech) July 30, 2026

The Kizilelma is a stealthy multi-role unmanned platform designed for air-to-air combat, air-to-ground strikes, ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance), close air support (CAS), missile strikes, suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD), and destruction of enemy air defenses (DEAD), among other things.

“Bayraktar Kizilelma made its first flight in 2022. Since then, intensive flight activities have continued. Serial production was completed last year, and our goal this year is to place Kizilelma into service for Türkiye,” Bayraktar said at SAHA 2026.

The platform integrates Artificial Intelligence and can be operated out of aircraft carriers, according to the manufacturer, although those capabilities are still being refined. Moreover, it can fly alongside KAAN in a manned-unmanned teaming configuration (MUMT), adding what is referred to as “affordable mass” and substantially reducing the risk to manned fighters in contested environments,

If the current trajectory holds, KAAN and stealthy unmanned platforms will strengthen Turkish airpower and advance Ankara’s goal of self-reliance.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 24, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

A Republican-controlled House committee passed legislation earlier this week that would prevent the US Labor Department from enacting federal standards to protect workers from extreme heat, a move that came amid sweltering heat across the country.

The Heat Workforce Standards Act, led by Rep. Mark Messmer (R-Ind.), passed the House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday in a 18-15 vote along party lines. If enacted, the legislation would bar the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from implementing nationwide heat protections for workers—including those proposed by the Biden administration in 2024.

The Biden Labor Department estimated that its proposed rules would protect around 36 million workers. Trump’s Labor Department has done nothing to move forward with the Biden-era proposal.

The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the US, has condemned the GOP bill, noting that “extreme heat is one of the deadliest workplace hazards in America.”

“House lawmakers are considering legislation that would block OSHA from issuing or enforcing a federal heat safety standard,” the labor group said earlier this week. “That’s the wrong direction when workers’ lives are on the line.”

Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, a coalition of labor unions and advocacy groups wrote in a letter to members of Congress that the Republican legislation “would permanently remove the federal government’s authority to address a workplace hazard that is already resulting in worker fatalities.”

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 55 worker deaths from heat exposure in 2023, a number that safety researchers widely consider to be an undercount due to frequent misclassification or underreporting of heat-related illnesses and fatalities,” the coalition wrote. “More broadly, heat-related deaths in the United States have more than doubled since 1999, and extreme heat now claims more lives each year than any other weather-related hazard.”

“Workers have no control over extreme heat, and many are unable to refuse hazardous assignments without jeopardizing their livelihoods,” the groups added. “Congress should not respond to an escalating occupational hazard by permanently removing the Department of Labor’s authority to address it.”

The Groundwork Collaborative, Workshop, and Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy estimated in a report published earlier this year that basic, federal workplace heat protections could save up to 1,500 lives annually. The report observed that major industry groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce, have mobilized against proposed national heat protections.

“Companies like Amazon and the United Parcel Service (UPS) that employ hundreds of thousands of workers subjected to extreme workplace temperatures make public statements about their commitments to worker safety while actively lobbying to weaken or block heat regulations,” the report noted. “As extreme heat intensifies, the cost of inaction will be measured in lives lost. The question facing policymakers is no longer whether effective protections exist, but whether they have the political will to stand up to those unscrupulous employers lobbying hard to block them.”

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on July 21, 2026. It is shared here with permission.

In December 2023, former State Department official, Josh Paul told CNN anchor, Christiane Amanpour that during his tenure in the foreign service, he learned of the rape of a 13-year old boy by Israeli officers while in captivity. In response to U.S. inquiries, the Israeli Government designated the Defense for Children International, the Palestinian organization that documented the abuse, a terrorist organization.

Since then, multiple Palestinian testimonies have emerged, enough to fill the pages of reports by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Among the most harrowing incidents was a leaked video of five Israeli officers gang raping a Palestinian detainee in Sde Teiman prison. An Israeli court not only acquitted the officers, but Israeli society celebrated them as heroes and protested their trial in infamous “right-to-rape” rallies. Still, when American journalist Nicholas Kristof published his opinion essay bemoaning impunity for the systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli captivity in The New York Times, he insisted that there was “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” (The Israeli government threatened to sue the paper of record for blood libel nonetheless.)

While Kristof, the UN, and human rights organizations are right to scrutinize the lack of concern and accountability for the sexual abuse of Palestinians, they have rarely asked how sexualized violence has functioned within Israel’s wider system of conquest, occupation and domination.

On June 30, 2026, the Palestinian Feminist Collective released a report that helps rectify that elision with meticulous research and painstaking documentation.  A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence against Palestinians lays out a decades-long pattern of Israeli sexual aggression against Palestinian children, women, and men.  Harrowing as the 200-page report is, it is necessary reading for anyone concerned with human rights and gender justice. The report’s historic sweep, from the early days of the Zionist militia attacks on terrorized Palestinians, to the present day sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons, should lay to rest any attempt to rationalize the current horrors as a response to the alleged rapes by Hamas militants of Israeli citizens or worse, an issue of a few rogue soldiers. Instead, the PFC report makes clear that such violence advances the genocide of the Palestinian people.

The report revisits a 1949 case, revealed in Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s own diary, in which he describes how a platoon of Israeli soldiers kidnapped a young Bedouin girl, “in her mid-teens.” When their commanding officer gave them the choice between using her as kitchen staff or a sex slave, the Israeli officers opted for the latter. They cut her hair and washed it with kerosene, then gang raped her so violently that on the next morning the officer in charge, Second Lieutenant Moshe, “saw fit to remove her from the world.”

Gendered violence is an inherent tool of settler colonialism and is not unique to Israel. Here in the United States, another settler colonial state, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement has highlighted the impunity surrounding the sexual assault of indigenous women on reservations where overlapping US and native criminal jurisdictions have made indigenous women particularly vulnerable to sexual assault. That it remains a significantly under-resourced and unaddressed crisis is not an accident.

Similarly, Zionist ideology, as a nation-making enterprise, necessitates the dispossession of Palestinian land and, ultimately, Palestinian elimination through juridical negation — denying their right to self determination, forced removal, containment, and/or destruction.  Sexual violence is central to that effort as it both advances ethnic cleansing ambitions and shatters the social cohesion of those Palestinians who remain.

Israeli historian Benny Morris, who bemoans the fact that the 1948 Nakba did not go far enough in ethnically cleansing Palestine, noted many reported instances of rape dating to the founding of the Zionist state. He observed that “because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.” The sexual violence, like other forms of violence enacted throughout and since the Nakba, aimed  to terrorize Palestinians and compel them to leave their towns and villages in search of safety.  Official records show that the highest-ranking Israeli officials were fully aware of these abuses. The PFC report traces this history from before the establishment of Israel, into the present and intensified genocide in Gaza, to illustrate how Israel has always relied on sexual violence to advance its colonial plans. In it, we learn about the rape of civilians during the 1948 Nakba, the sexual torture of innocent prisoners in administrative detention during and in the aftermath of the 1967 War, and the rape of grassroots organizers during the Intifada, all the way to 2023–that is, before the October 7, 2023. The report also provides an analysis of the unfounded mass rape accusations against Hamas militants to demonstrate how such narratives work to further racialize Palestinian society as uncivilized and unworthy of life. 

From being used as a method to expel Palestinians from their land in 1948 to the use of gendered sexualized violence to torture Palestinian detainees and prisoners in the wake of the 1967 War, and beyond, the report shows that while sexualized violence has changed frequency and form, it has remained a feature of settler-colonial displacement and oppression.

The United States cannot treat this as someone else’s crime. US officials have been told about these abuses. US weapons and diplomatic support continue to shield the system in which they occur. Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.