Aviation

If you don’t own the air at five hundred feet and fifty yards, you’re not maneuvering—you’re waiting your turn on the casualty list.

I’ve seen Agency birds parked in plain sight; these two Basler BT-67s in Tullahoma—matte-gray, unmarked, and papered to a Delaware cutout—fit the pattern.

A Navy F‑35C crashed near NAS Lemoore on July 30, prompting a temporary grounding of the entire F‑35 fleet as investigators search for answers.

Never before in history has any fighter jet carried an arsenal of up to 50 precision-guided air-to-air missiles—until now, as the U.S. Air Force transforms its frontline warbirds into drone-slaying platforms armed to the teeth with AGR-20F FALCOs.

Auterion’s 33,000 Skynode kits aren’t just hardware—they’re the raw code of a new kind of warfare, where cheap drones think, hunt, and strike faster than any Russian general can blink.

It wasn’t war, weather, or mechanical failure that nearly brought down Flight 3788—it was a blind sky, a bomber on autopilot, and a rural system running on hope and habit.

About as sexy as a cardboard box and built for the mud, Taiwan’s micro-drones aren’t headline grabbers—they’re battlefield bloodhounds sniffing out trouble before it starts.

Pete Hegseth just kicked the Pentagon’s red tape into a shallow grave and basically told America’s warfighters: “Get drones, get lethal, and get moving.”

One man’s mad dash onto the Milan runway did more than end up in a jet propelled horror show—it exposed a security system flimsier than a paper umbrella in a monsoon.

Robin Olds roared into combat with a handlebar mustache, a middle finger to bureaucracy, and a brain wired for turning aerial warfare into an art form.

Drones aren’t the future of warfare—they’re the present, and anyone not paying attention is already a step behind.

As Iran buries its war dead, Israel pounds Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, the U.S. Air Force fast-tracks the A-10’s retirement, and Republicans hit a wall trying to deregulate gun suppressors—reminding us that whether it’s on the battlefield or Capitol Hill, the fight never really ends. Here is your SOFREP Saturday Evening Brief for June 28th, 2025.