Police reportedly use batons and stun grenades to disperse demonstrators; dozens of protesters and officers injured during demonstration

The ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party would abstain from votes rather than join the coalition, according to Channel 12; military draft remains major obstacle to agreement

Ukraine’s Navy said on 29 October that it destroyed two Russian Su-34 fighter-bombers in a Neptune missile strike on Marinovka airfield in Russia’s Volgograd Oblast.

The reported strike targets aircraft Russia uses to launch guided aerial bombs against Ukrainian cities, military positions, and frontline communities. Destroying the two jets would reduce Russia’s capacity to carry out these attacks.

Neptune strike hits Russian military airfield

According to the Ukrainian Navy, its units struck the site where Russian aircraft were stationed at Marinovka airfield using a Neptune coastal missile system.

The Navy said the strike destroyed two Su-34 fighter-bombers belonging to Russia’s 11th Mixed Aviation Regiment, based near the settlement of Oktyabrsky in Volgograd Oblast. The regiment is part of the 4th Mixed Aviation Division of Russia’s 4th Air and Air Defense Forces Army.

The Ukrainian Navy did not provide further details about the strike.

Su-34s are key to Russia’s guided bomb attacks

Russia uses Su-34 fighter-bombers to launch guided aerial bombs, known as KABs, against Ukrainian military positions and settlements, particularly in frontline areas. These attacks threaten both Ukrainian troops and civilians in communities near the front.

According to Ukrinform, Russia’s Aerospace Forces had approximately 140 Su-34 aircraft of various modifications in service as of 22 October.

The Ukrainian Navy said it would continue striking Russian military targets to weaken Moscow’s ability to wage war against Ukraine.

Two of the top teachers unions in the unions have spent more than $900 million over the last decade on far-left groups, political activism, and lobbying, according to a new education watchdog report. 

The post Report: Filings Show Top Teachers’ Unions Dumped $900M into Political Activism appeared first on Breitbart.

The estimate through Oct. 16 shows that bombs, missiles and other munitions accounted for more than 60 percent of expenses.

© Ed Ou/Reuters

Many members of the ultra-Orthodox community see casting a ballot as a religious duty, even as some denounce the process: 'Whatever happens is in God's hands'

Imagine how Russia would fare against 32 Ukraines.

French and US maritime patrol planes are watching the western Black Sea, where drones keep hitting merchant ships, Romanian outlet Curs de Guvernare reported on 19 October, citing flight-tracking data. Romania blames Russia for the attacks, while Bulgaria says it cannot prove who launched them.

Ukraine’s three small Danube ports have kept its grain exports from collapsing further, and Russia has pounded those ports since the summer. The ships serving them are now being hit in the economic zones of two NATO members. Many were anchored near or heading to the Sulina Canal, which links the Danube to the sea. That puts the allied patrols over these waters in the middle of the fight over Ukraine’s grain trade.

Two patrol planes over the western Black Sea

A French Navy Atlantique 2 maritime patrol plane arrived in Constanța, Romania’s main Black Sea port, on the evening of 18 October, Curs de Guvernare said. On 24 October, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said in the Bulgarian port of Varna that a French patrol plane had been operating in the area under NATO for two weeks and had contributed to rescue operations.

Meanwhile, a US Navy P-8A Poseidon flew into Varna from Sicily on 18 October, AFP reported, citing flight-tracking data. Two days later, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said it had begun reconnaissance patrols after Sofia asked allies for help, and that some allies had responded quickly. Bulgarian Defense Minister Dimitar Stoyanov called the deployment a joint decision of Bulgaria and NATO. He said the plane cannot strike targets and passes its data to NATO, Anadolu Agency reported.

NATO promises more

On 20 October, NATO’s North Atlantic Council met at Romania’s request. Afterward, the alliance said it would send more maritime patrol aircraft, radar systems, and drones to the Black Sea. NATO military spokesman Col. Martin O’Donnell added that allies have sent or will send intelligence personnel and explosives-forensics teams. NATO itself has not attributed the attacks to any country.

Romania names Russia, Bulgaria hedges

Romania has been blunter. On 15 October, after four merchant ships were hit within a day, acting Foreign Minister Oana Țoiu wrote on X that “Russia bears full responsibility for these developments.” On 17 October, Romanian F-16s shot down two jet-powered Russian Geran drones near Sulina, Romania’s Defense Ministry said.

Unitățile aeriene și navale ale Gărzii de Coastă (GdC/MAI) și ale Inspectoratului General pentru Situații de Urgență (IGSU/MAI) sunt implicate activ în operațiunile de căutare și salvare, în vederea găsirii membrilor dați dispăruți ai echipajului navei care a fost atacată în…

— Toiu Oana (@oana_toiu) October 15, 2026

On 23 October, a drone sank the cargo ship Khoryv off Constanța, killing a Ukrainian sailor, and President Nicușor Dan blamed Russia too. “It is part of Russia’s escalation process in its war in Ukraine,” Dan said.

Bulgaria is more cautious. Radev told parliament on 14 October that the attacks worked in Russia’s favor but that Sofia could not prove it. Since taking office in May, he has sought a thaw in ties with Moscow.

The U.S. Army is training Apache pilots to shoot down drones as militaries around the world assess the efficacy of 20th-century technologies in a new era.

© Lena Mucha for The New York Times

General Atomics has tapped Spirit Defense, a subsidiary of Boeing, to help produce FQ-42A Vengeance Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones. This follows the U.S. Air Force’s announcement last month that it wants to have at least 500 CCAs in inventory by 2032. Years ago, TWZ highlighted the likelihood that industrial partnerships like this would be required to meet the service’s aggressive volume and schedule goals for the CCA program.

General Atomics’ Aeronautical Systems, Inc. division (GA-ASI) announced the team-up with Spirit on FQ-42 production earlier today. The Vengenace is one of two designs the Air Force has ordered into production under the first phase, or Increment 1, of its CCA program. The other is Anduril’s FQ-44A Fury. The 500-drone target the Air Force has laid out covers a mixed fleet of both FQ-42s and FQ-44s. The service is still planning to acquire additional CCAs, potentially with completely different designs, through a follow-on Increment 2.

When it comes to FQ-42 production, “Spirit Defense’s role as a fuselage design-build partner brings together the company’s engineering and advanced manufacturing capabilities to support the program from design through production,” according to a GA-ASI release. “Partnering with Spirit Defense is a strength multiplier for the company and the nation, offering manufacturing capacity and industrial depth to scale CCA production faster, while strengthening production resilience, and reducing the risk of single points of failure.”

“We’re excited to be working with Spirit Defense,” David R. Alexander, GA-ASI’s President, said in an accompanying statement. “We’ve established our proven design, development, and manufacturing capability for the FQ-42. With Spirit Defense, we add capacity, which is exactly the kind of production resilience our U.S. Air Force customer is looking for with its CCA ramp-up. This kind of partnership represents the scalable industrial base the Air Force and the U.S. Department of War are looking for from industry.”

“The intent for them [the Air Force] is to go up to as many as 500 aircraft by 2032,” Mike Shortsleeve, Vice President for Strategy Business Development at GA-ASI, also told TWZ’s Jamie Hunter on the floor of the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference in September. “We’re ready to do that production.”

At the conference, Shortsleeve highlighted investments in additive manufacturing and advanced robotics, along with efforts to build out the company’s skilled workforce, to help meet those production demands.

General Atomics is already an established drone maker with significant serial airframe production experience of its own. At the same time, the company is seeing growing demand for its MQ-9B series of drones, including a sale to the U.S. Coast Guard announced earlier this month. The MQ-9B design builds on the highly successful MQ-9A Reaper. It is also pursuing a host of other opportunities in the U.S. and abroad that could add production demands.

Mike Atwood, GA-ASI’s Vice President of Advanced Aircraft Programs, notably acknowledged potential hurdles for meeting CCA production demands, specifically, in the past.

“We have basically a hot production line where I can take an MQ-9 out and put a Collaborative Combat Aircraft in,” Atwood said on an edition of The Merge podcast back in 2024. “We were able to essentially take Reaper parts out of stock rooms and build the first [CCA] aircraft.”

“Composites are inherently expensive … they’re really for high-performance applications where you need certain strength and stiffness,” he also noted at that time. “When you look at Collaborative Combat Aircraft … we’re actually falling back on more metallic – what we call hybrid structures, metal frames with composite skins.”

The production of advanced composites and hybrid structures is Spirit’s main business. The company also has a well-established history of working as a subcontractor on military aerospace projects, including in support of bleed-edge programs like the B-21 Raider bomber.

It is also important to note here that, before its founding as an independent company in 2005, Spirit was actually a division of Boeing. By the early 2020s, Spirit had been suffering from significant financial losses and quality control lapses. Boeing subsequently decided to reacquire it in a multi-billion-dollar deal. The acquisition process began in 2024 and was finalized last year. Since then, Boeing has faced continued challenges in getting the firm back on track.

In 2024, when General Atomics and Anduril were selected to move ahead in the Increment 1 phase of the Air Force’s CCA program, TWZ explicitly raised the prospect of both companies bringing in help, especially to meet future production demands. At the time, the focus was more on Anduril, which was not a major airframer at the time and had yet to establish significant production facilities of its own for Fury. It was also unclear then whether the Air Force might pick a single winning Increment 1 drone rather than go the route it ultimately chose of ordering batches of both designs.

However, as we wrote at the time: “No matter who is selected in the end as the prime contractor, a large pool of manufacturer partners will likely be key to meeting the Air Force’s production volume and schedule goals.”

As an aside, Boeing is already in the CCA business itself, with the MQ-28 Ghost Bat developed originally through a separate subsidary in Australia. The company has been working to expand its own production capacity to build those drones in recent years.

Generally speaking, the ability of defense contractors to rapidly scale production to meet U.S. military demands, and do so affordably, is steadily becoming a more common point of discussion across all major acquisition programs. Being able to acquire and field CCAs in relatively large volumes and at a price that makes sense is absolutely central to the whole concept being these drones.

“The nuance here that probably is overlooked, is the fact that they’re [the Air Force] recognizing with 500 that they require, the factory floor is now becoming part of the battle space,” General Atomics’ Shortsleeve had told TWZ at the AFA conference last month. “So the ability for companies to be able to manufacture and produce those aircraft in numbers that are needed for the fight rapidly is going to be a key part to going forward in the future.”

The Air Force is otherwise still very much laying the rest of the groundwork for fielding its future CCAs operationally toward the end of the decade. A full playbook for deploying, launching, recovering, supporting, and otherwise operating CCA-type drones on a day-to-day basis, let alone employing them tactically, still has yet to be written. Answering these questions will be important for other CCA programs across the U.S. military and elsewhere globally.

General Atomics’ new partnership with Spirit Defense underscores how production of Increment 1 CCAs is ramping up already in reponse to the Air Force’s current CCA program goals.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post General Atomics FQ-42 CCA Drone Production Ramp Up To Be Boosted By Boeing Subsidiary appeared first on TWZ.

The U.S. Army wants to infuse new autonomous capabilities into its current and future fleets of amphibious landing ships and other watercraft. The service is also aiming to acquire up to 100 new purpose-built uncrewed surface vessels (USV). The maritime assets the service has now, often referred to as ‘the Army’s Navy,’ are obscure and generally underappreciated. However, the small force offers an important additional set of naval logistics capabilities, especially for any future fight in the Pacific, which could be further bolstered with optionally-crewed or entirely uncrewed platforms.

Army Maj. Gen. Frederick Crist, head of 8th Theater Sustainment Command (TSC), issued plans for future autonomous watercraft capabilities during a talk last week during a talk at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual symposium. 8th TSC, which has its main headquarters at Fort Shafter in Hawaii, is one of the top formations tasked with managing U.S. military logistics across the Pacific.

“In order to be able to increase theater distribution, we have the two composite watercraft companies, at end state there, west of the IDL [International Date Line],” Crist explained, referring to the Army’s future planned maritime force posture in the Pacific. “We continue partnering with industry to be able to move into autonomous watercraft systems to be able to conduct other means of maritime distribution.”

To take a step back quickly, as part of its broader regional role, 8th TSC also has forward-deployed elements in Japan. This includes the 5th Transportation Company, which is currently organized as what the Army calls a composite watercraft company. As of 2024, the unit had a pair of General Frank S. Besson class Logistics Support Vessels (LSV), as well as 10 smaller Landing Craft Utility (LCU) type vessels and four small tugs, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The Army has eight LSVs, in total, and these are by far its largest and most capable ships. The two youngest LSVs, which were acquired in the mid-2000s, also form a distinct subclass, and their design is optimized for long-distance open-ocean operations, as you can read more about here. It’s not immediately clear which LSVs are currently assigned to the 5th Transportation Company. The unit is also set to receive new Maneuver Support Vessel (Light) landing craft.

Until very recently, the 10th Support Group (Regional), headquartered in Okinawa, was more directly responsible for overseeing forward-deployed Army logistics units in Japan. Earlier this month, the Army performed a so-called ‘reflagging’ of that formation, a largely administrative process that transformed it into the 45th Sustainment Brigade.

As part of the reflagging of the 10th Support Group into the 45th Sustainment Brigade, the Army has also been pushing ahead with plans for “the standup of a second composite watercraft company in Yokohama North Dock,” in the port city of the same name on the Japanese home island of Honshu, Maj. Gen. Crist explained last week. “That end state will have two composite water[craft] companies west of the IDL [International Date Line] under the command and control of the 45th Sustainment Brigade.”

When it comes to the watercraft assigned to these units, “we’re also moving into the autonomous lane,” Crist added. “Just in August, USARPAC [U.S. Army Pacific] had an opportunity to conduct an experiment by retrofitting an existing commercial vessel, the HOS Resolute [sic; HOS Resolution], with a kit to provide autonomous navigation.”

Maritime autonomy firm Sea Machines was able to integrate its SM300 software package on the HOS Resolution in just nine days for this demonstration. The ship is a 257-foot-long offshore support vessel more typically used to support oil and gas rigs. However, it features a stern ramp and four jack-up legs that also make it well suited to loading and unloading cargo at remote beaches.

For years now, the U.S. Marine Corps has also been experimenting with the HOS Resolution and other similar ships more generally. That service has been using the vessels to help refine its new expeditionary and distributed concepts of operations, which are themselves heavily centered on future conflict scenarios in the Pacific. The Marines have brought those capabilities to Army demonstration exercises in the past, as well.

The Army sees the August experiment as a potential stepping stone to integrating increasing degrees into its existing watercraft fleets.

“You could increase the fleet of autonomous vessels by tapping into the existing manned fleet,” Maj. Gen. Crist said. “Put on retrofitting kits to be able to conduct navigation, and then eventually propulsion and engine room activities, and eventually get to a fully autonomous system.”

Even just adding in autonomous navigation capabilities could help reduce the workload for the human crews on Army vessels and provide added margins of safety. Blending autonomy with “propulsion and engine room activities” could improve reliability and reduce maintenance demands. Being able to operate those ships in a fully uncrewed mode, if desired, would open up additional operational possibilities, including just for repositioning ships across the broad expanses of the Pacific.

Reduced manning requirements could be especially attractive for the Army’s ‘Navy,’ which is already a very small part of the service’s overall force structure. Last week, Maj. Gen. Crist also talked about further leveraging traditional crewed vessels owned and/or operated by contractors.

“It’s going to be a broad portfolio of systems of systems,” he said of the overall watercraft vision for the Pacific. “Army watercraft with Army Mariners will be, of course, one aspect of it. We also look for the opportunity to be able to leverage USTRANSCOM’s (U.S. Transportation Command) contracting capability to leverage operational support vessels that are commercially owned and commercially operated. We’re considering ways of being able to have commercial vessels that become manned by Army mariners.”

It is also interesting to note here how extremely similar this all sounds to the modifications the U.S. Navy made to the Spearhead class Expeditionary Fast Transport USNS Apalachicola ahead of its commissioning in 2023. However, despite tens of millions of dollars spent and successful demonstration of autonomous capabilities, the Navy curiously decided to put the Apalachicola into service without any plan to make use of these features operationally. There does not appear to have been any effort to integrate these capabilities more broadly within the Spearhead class since then, either.

Last year, the Navy struck the four oldest Spearhead class ships from its rolls entirely and has put several others on reduced operating status, ostensibly as a cost-saving measure. The service is still acquiring new Expeditionary Fast Transports, including members of the Expeditionary Medical Ship subclass that feature expanded medical facilities. The Spearhead class was born out of a program specifically to meet Army and Marine Corps requirements, and the ships are regularly used to support those services in the Pacific and elsewhere globally.

The Army also wants to expand its fleets of purpose-built uncrewed surface vessels (USV) for use in the Pacific, as well as elsewhere globally. Just earlier this year, Army Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner, who preceded Maj. Gen. Crist as head of the 8th Theater Sustainment Command, said he wanted to rapidly acquire as many as 100 drone boats. His vision included larger USVs capable of carrying eight to 10 standardized shipping containers.

“I could see those operating in the U.S. PACOM area of responsibility,” Gardner told reporters at a roundtable in June, according to Military Times. “I think that gives you a ton of operations, inventory in motion, easy to respond. And then because they’re autonomous, and we can work with our partner nations forward, you have those berthed up everywhere from Korea to Japan, the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, etc.”

“Clearly, [the autonomous vessels] would be forward in the theater, kind of moving supplies, because we have a constant demand for Army watercraft time now, to deliver equipment and supplies forward in the theater,” Gardner added at that time.

One of the inherent benefits of the Army watercraft fleets, and its LSVs in particular, is their ability to help alleviate the need for the U.S. Navy to meet more localized littoral logistics needs, if they are even available to help in the first place. Navy amphibious and military sealift ships would already be heavily strained by high demand during any major conflict in the Pacific or elsewhere globally. This could easily be further exacerbated by threats to those supply lines. All of this has already been underscored this year by pressure on maritime logistics chains in the context of the war with Iran. The Army’s ‘Navy’ also offers valuable additional capabilities and capacity in non-combat contingencies, such as responding to natural disasters.

More generally, the Army has been working to expand its use of smaller USVs, including speedboat-like designs, in various roles. The service has clearly been paying close attention to Ukraine’s very successful use of drone boats in one-way kamikaze attacks, as well as ones armed with guns and rockets and examples configured as launch platforms for surface-to-air missiles and weaponized uncrewed aerial systems (UAS).

The 7th Infantry Division, one of the Army’s main maneuver combat formations in the Pacific, just recently experimented with a Ukrainian-developed Magura-series USV during an exercise in Michigan. That particular USV was configured to launch a quadcopter-type drone. Another member of the Magura family was observed being used in a one-way-attack configuration by U.S. Army Green Berets from the 1st Special Forces Group during the annual Balikatan exercise in the Philippines earlier this year.

The Army has also been experimenting with American-designed USVs. The aforementioned recent exercise in Michigan also featured a Saronic Corsair, the same type of USV that the Navy used to rescue the crew of an Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopter that went down in the Gulf of Oman in June. Explosive-laden Corsairs were also used to carry out the first known U.S. kamikaze USV attack, which was launched against a coastal target in Iran in July.

During another separate exercise in the Philippines this year, Salaknib 2026, Army forces used unarmed Rampage USVs from U.S. firm Havoc, as seen below. As part of that exercise, the USVs escorted a crewed General Frank S. Besson class LSV to its destination, heading out in front to help spot potential hazards.

“There’s all the work that the Department’s already doing with autonomy and autonomous systems that we look to take advantage of in the [Pacific] theater, as well,” Maj. Gen. Crist said at AUSA.

The Navy and the Marine Corps have both been working to grow their operational fleets of smaller USVs, as well as larger ones, in recent years. At the same time, the Navy has suffered years of setbacks and shakeups in its efforts to operationalize bigger and more capable designs. The service awarded contracts for a total of 30 new medium-sized USVs last month in its latest attempt to reverse that trend.

In September, Secretary Pete Hegseth also announced several new initiatives aimed at further expanding use of uncrewed platforms and advanced autonomous capabilities across the U.S. military and all domains. The Pentagon is presently laying the groundwork for the establishment of an all-new top-level Autonomous Warfare Command (AUTOWARCOM), which it hopes to see come to fruition next year.

What is clear now is that the Army’s vision for future watercraft operations, especially in the Pacific, is increasingly autonomous.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post How The U.S. Army’s ‘Navy’ Aims To Go More Autonomous With Its Vessels In The Pacific appeared first on TWZ.

O ator americano Michael Forest, conhecido por interpretar o deus grego Apolo na série “Jornada nas Estrelas”, morreu aos 97 anos, na última quarta-feira. A causa da morte não foi informada.

Ele nasceu Gerald Michael Charlebois em Dakota do Norte, nos Estados Unidos, em 1929, e vivia numa instituição de repouso para idosos em Nevada nos últimos anos. A morte foi confirmada por um amigo numa publicação no Facebook.

Forest era conhecido como um homem de porte atlético e tinha um currículo extenso como ator coadjuvante no cinema e televisão, que iniciou na década de 1950.

Carreira no cinema e na televisão

Além de participações em séries e novelas que inclui ainda “Além da Imaginação” e “The Dick Van Dyke Show”, atuou em diversos filmes do ator e diretor Roger Corman e emprestou a voz a projetos de animação, animes e videogames.

Como dublador, participou de títulos como “Power Rangers” e “World of Warcraft”. Ele era fluente em italiano e dublou centenas de filmes nos anos em que morou em Roma, além de atuar em produções de outros países da Europa.

Entre seus inúmeros papéis, estão particapações em “A Besta da Caverna Assombrada”, “Atlas” e “Náufrago”.

Vida pessoal

Forest foi casado com a atriz Diane Hale por 52 anos, até a morte dela, em 2022. Não há informações se eles tiveram filhos juntos.

The post Morre Michael Forest, ator de “Jornada nas Estrelas”, aos 97 anos appeared first on Diário da Manhã - O Jornal do leitor Inteligente.

A recent breakthrough in airborne drone control has offered a tangible glimpse into the future of US air combat, signaling the US Air Force’s accelerating push to integrate autonomous wingmen alongside frontline fighters. This month, The War Zone (TWZ) reported that a US Air Force F-22 Raptor pilot successfully controlled an uncrewed YFQ-44A Fury fighter […]

The post US racing to field drone wingmen to close fighter gap with China appeared first on Asia Times.

A pilot flying an F-22 Raptor fighter has issued commands to a YFQ-44A Fury Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drone in a first-of-its-kind test. This is an important development for the U.S. Air Force’s CCA program, as its F-22s are set to be the first aerial ‘quarterbacks’ for these uncrewed aircraft once they enter operational service.

The Air Force and Anduril, Fury’s prime contractor, announced the “airborne tactical-control demonstration” today, but it occurred sometime earlier this month. An Anduril spokesperson confirmed directly to TWZ that this was a first for an F-22 and a pre-production YFQ-44A. Last month, the company disclosed tests involving Fury flying in formation with F-35 fighters, but stressed that the latter were not yet issuing commands to the former in mid-air. A Fury drone also launched an AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) for the first time earlier this year.

The Air Force has orders in now for production of FQ-44As, as well as General Atomics’ FQ-42A Vengeance drones, under the first phase, or Increment 1, of its CCA program. The service is still planning to acquire additional CCAs, which could be of entirely different types, through a follow-on Increment 2. The goal now is to have a fleet of at least 500 Increment 1 CCAs by 2032. The recent test is part of efforts to lay the groundwork for an initial tranche of CCAs to start entering operational service around the end of the decade.

“During the demonstration, an F-22 pilot served as an airborne ‘quarterback,’ issuing high-level tactical directives to a single YFQ-44A,” according to a press release from the Air Force. “The aircraft’s onboard autonomy software interpreted and executed those directives in real time, conducting dynamic flight maneuvers and simulated combat tasks.”

“The event brought together personnel from the 412th Test Wing, 422nd Test and Evaluation Squadron, 309th Software Engineering Group, Experimental Operations Unit, F-22 System Program Office and the CCA Software Autonomy and Teaming Branch,” according to the Air Force release.

The Experimental Operations Unit (EOU) mentioned here is based at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada and has been leading efforts to pave the way for future Air Force CCA operations.

The “Fury and an F-22 both took off [from] Edwards AFB [Air Force Base in California] and joined up midair,” according to a separate release from Anduril. “While in flight, the Raptor pilot sent an updated mission plan to Fury using a tactical data link, commanding Fury through operationally-relevant maneuvers from the cockpit of the crewed quarterback.”

Neither the Air Force nor Anduril provided further details on how the F-22 was configured for this test. Past Air Force budget documents have mentioned the need to integrate “tablets, cables, and associated materials” onto the Raptor for this purpose. A single Raptor is also expected to be able to manage multiple CCA drones simultaneously.

The Raptor’s prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, has certainly been working with the Air Force to develop the relevant control architectures and user interfaces for that fighter, as well as the F-35. In terms of in-cockpit user interfaces for controlling drones, known work to date has centered largely on the use of touchscreen tablet-like devices, but this is understood to just be a starting point. Though tablet-based interfaces are a workable option, questions and criticisms about increased workload, especially for pilots in single-seat fighters, have been raised in the past.

It is also worth noting here that General Atomics announced a similar demonstration involving a Raptor and an MQ-20 Avenger back in November 2025. General Atomics has been using the MQ-20 as a CCA surrogate in various types of testing. What the plan might be now to demonstrate the F-22’s ability to control an FQ-42A in flight is unclear. General Atomics has previously released a picture of a Vengeance drone flying in formation with, though not being directly controlled by, Air Force fighters.

In addition, Fury and Vengeance are set to make their debut in a large-scale exercise before the end of the year. Bringing the CCAs to the next iteration of Exercise Emerald Flag will give the Air Force further opportunity to test them in a more operationally relevant context alongside crewed fighters.

“We have not yet done a LFE [large-force employment exercise] with these [CCAs], for real. The first one is going to be Emerald Flag. That’s in December,” Lt. Col. Lyndon “OTTO” Bartlett, the EOU’s Director of Operations, said during a panel at the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference in September, at which TWZ was in attendance. “That’ll be our first tip [sic] dip of the toe in an actual force integration.”

The EOU, working together with other Air Force elements and industry partners, still has to answer a host of other outstanding questions unrelated to tactical operations. CCAs will be deployed, launched, recovered, supported, and otherwise operated in ways that are distinct from their crewed counterparts, and for which new policies and procedures will need to be developed. Just making sure human pilots have trust in their uncrewed wingmen operating as expected will be critical, underscoring the specific importance of the demonstration disclosed today. All of this applies equally to the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy CCA programs, which are being run in very close coordination with the Air Force’s efforts.

When it comes to the recent test involving the F-22 and the YFQ-44A, “this achievement demonstrates what is possible when we are aligned with industry on a shared imperative: delivering capability to the warfighter at unprecedented speed,” Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said in a statement today. “We are driving urgency into every part of acquisition from rapid integration and flight learning to disciplined assessment, so we can turn promising technology into combat capability at the pace the threat demands.”

“This flight shows the power of crewed-uncrewed teaming and the advantage it provides our warfighters,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach also said. “We must test often, learn fast, and give commanders what they need, when they need it.”

“The U.S. Air Force’s CCA program is the fastest moving, most mature CCA program anywhere in the world, and will be the first to field operational aircraft,” Mark Shushnar, Anduril’s Vice President of Autonomous Airpower, said as well. “Getting there demands that Anduril and the U.S. Air Force work together to prove out the capability, define the operational procedures, and build trust between operators and their semi-autonomous wingmen.”

With all this in mind, an F-22 issuing orders to a YFQ-44A in mid-air is an important new sign of what is on the horizon for the U.S. Air Force, though there is still work to be done.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post F-22 Pilot Controls FQ-44 Fighter Drone From The Cockpit For The First Time appeared first on TWZ.

Shield AI says it is on track to roll out the first prototypes of its X-BAT jet-powered stealth ‘fighter’ drone by the end of this month. Flight testing of this uncrewed aircraft, which is designed to take off and land vertically from a tail-sitting position, is still scheduled to kick off before the end of the year. X-BAT’s core concept was already highly ambitious, but an extremely aggressive timeline to reach some degree of operational capability through the U.S. Navy’s Runway Independent Maritime Expeditionary Strike (RIMES) program has now been disclosed.

TWZ got an update on X-BAT, which we were first to report on in-depth last year, in an interview yesterday with Shield AI’s Armor Harris, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the company’s aircraft division. This came ahead of today’s announcement that the company has received an additional $150 million in funding from the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment through its Defense Exportability Features program via the Navy. This is on top of the $50 million investment the Navy, in cooperation with the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, made in X-BAT’s development earlier this year as part of the RIMES effort. Shield AI has committed an equivalent amount of internal funding, for a combined total of $400 million.

“In broad strokes, the last year has been a bunch of collaborative risk reduction with the Navy. So, wind tunnel testing, engine testing, thermal testing, all kinds of stuff to basically take the major risks in the program, [and] burn them down, so we can move confidently into the production design,” Shield AI’s Harris told us. “The last culmination of the risk reduction is the flight testing of the two full-scale prototypes. The first one of those will be done at the end of October.”

“That’s a full-scale vehicle,” he continued. “It’s got the outer mold line, it’s got the F110 engine, the full propulsion path, everything in it.”

To date, Shield AI has only shown models of the X-BAT publicly. A new one displayed at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space 2026 exposition in April revealed major changes to the core design. This included a complete reworking of the planform from a ‘cranked kite’ type arrangement to one with a distinctly different arrowhead-shaped profile featuring a straight leading edge with a more dramatic sweep.

The video below includes clips showing the original X-BAT design and the current one.

The aforementioned “propulsion path,” testing of which has already been conducted on the ground, primarily consists of the General Electric F110 paired with an Axisymmetric Vectoring Exhaust Nozzle (AVEN). The nozzle was originally developed in the 1990s for an experimental thrust-vectoring F-16 fighter. Shield AI is using the original AVEN, which had been in storage for decades, to support development of X-BAT. The nozzle will provide pitch and yaw control, with roll control for the drone coming from bleed air routed through thrusters in the drone’s wings.

No runway, no problem.

Shield AI and @GE_Aerospace just cleared a critical path to vertical flight, completing engine light-off testing of the Axisymmetric Vectoring Exhaust Nozzle (AVEN) for X-BAT.

Engineers from both companies integrated the AVEN into GE Aerospace's… pic.twitter.com/OxV3y3sRKB

— Shield AI (@shieldaitech) July 20, 2026

Shield AI has previously said that the roughly fighter-sized X-BAT will have a maximum range of 2,000 nautical miles and a service ceiling of around 50,000 feet. The company has also said in the past it is targeting an effective combat radius roughly twice that of the F-35, or around 1,340 nautical miles, but also that it could be closer to 1,000 nautical miles. Space has been made within the X-BAT design for a potential in-flight refueling capability, but there is no active work yet to integrate that feature.

In terms of payload, X-BAT’s design includes internal weapons bays roughly the same size as those on the F-35, as well as two external hardpoints under the wings. Those hardpoints are plumbed, meaning that range-extending drop tanks, or even buddy refueling stores to allow the drone to act as a tanker, could be carried. Baked-in modularity and open-architecture mission systems are intended to make it easier to fit various sensors, data links, and other capabilities down the line.

“X-BAT’s really designed to be a multi-role capability, and, if you look out at the 10-20 year time horizon, it’s hard to predict what the future fight is going to look like,” Shield AI’s Harris noted. “We fundamentally believe that multi-role capabilities are critically important. And, so, X-BAT, the reason why it’s sized to where it is is [sic] to be able to carry serious strike weapons internally and externally, in addition to being able to do air-to-air [combat], electronic warfare, and other mission sets.

“You could think of it as like X-35 versus F-35,” he also said yesterday when asked about any expectations now for further changes between the initial pair of prototypes and the final production design.

Lockheed Martin’s X-35 demonstrators are, in very broad strokes, similar to, but distinct from any of the resulting variants of the Joint Strike Fighter. Shield AI has notably already talked in the past about integrating more low-observable (stealthy) attributes to the exhaust end of the design down the line.

“Then we’ll get into flight testing around the end of this year,” Harris added. “We’ll be doing vertical takeoff and landing testing with that [the initial prototypes] to actually prove out and develop the VTOL [vertical takeoff and landing] technology for X-BAT.”

Shield AI’s X-Forge 2 facility at the Newton City-County Airport in Kansas is set to be the main flight testing hub for X-BAT, as well as the focal point for sustainment of the drones. A production facility, X-Forge 3, is also being built in Des Moines, Washington. The company’s original site, X-Forge 1, is in Frisco, Texas.

In terms of the actual flight test campaign, “you remember the X-BAT system has the air vehicle and the launch and recovery vehicle, which is the trailer that it launches and lands from,” Harris said. “Basically, the way the testing works is, we start with the vehicle horizontal, sitting on that launch and recovery vehicle, running the engine. Then we bring it up vertical, run the engine vertically, run the vehicle vertically.”

“Then we have one of the biggest cranes in the world that’s getting set up at our test site in Kansas right now, and we hang the vehicle suspended from that crane and do a bunch of testing while it’s hanging from the crane in free flight,” he continued. “Then we take the crane away, and then we do the actual untethered flights.”

Shield AI’s goal is to fly a fully missionized X-BAT in 2028 and start series production the following year.

On top of that, “the way that the [RIMES] program has been structured is getting to an early operational capability in 2029 is the end goal,” Shield AI’s Harris said.

When asked if this meant that RIMES is aiming “to eventually arrive at not just a demonstration of capability, but a real operationalized capability,” he said that was “correct.”

We will come back to this more later on, but suffice it to say up front, the prospect of X-BAT reaching an operational level of maturity within three years is extraordinarily ambitious, to say the least.

In the meantime, Shield AI has already been testing the mechanisms to “latch and unlatch” X-BAT to the launch and recovery system using an unpowered “battleship” test article, according to Harris. The design of the launch and recovery system has also evolved, and it is now self-propelled, at least to a degree, rather than just being a towed trailer.

“The launch and recovery vehicle is actually critical to the operation of the X-BAT weapon system because it enables survivability on the ground. So when you’re operating in a land-based environment, it enables basically shoot-and-scoot tactics,” Harris also noted. “Enemy transporter-erector-launchers [for missiles] are like pretty hard to find because they’re constantly moving around. Just like X-BAT, when it’s mated onto the launch and recovery vehicle, [it] is always moving around, makes it hard to track, hard to find, hard to destroy.”

The plan now is to “build the one-to-one launch and recovery vehicles to air vehicles. So the air vehicle is always on the trailer. It never comes off of it,” he continued. “Even maintenance to the air vehicle is done while it’s sitting on that launch and recovery vehicle.”

“In fact, we’re actually planning on building more than one-to-one of the launch and recovery vehicles, so that way you can preposition them around different islands, different places in the theater, and have multiple places the aircraft can lily pad from,” he added. “But you’re never putting multiple aircraft onto one launcher and launching them or something like that.”

“When you typically operate a jet, there’s a whole bunch of ground carts and stuff that you bring, like the ground power cart, the ground cooling cart, the air start cart, etc,” Harris further elaborated. “So we’ve moved a lot of those systems onto [the] launch and recovery vehicles, so you don’t have all these separate carts, which is pretty critical when you’re trying to do expeditionary operations.”

“The model for land-based operations is kind of a hub-and-spoke type model. So the squadrons are based at air bases. All the fuel and the weapons are generally based at the air bases, as well. But then you can distribute the aircraft all over the airfield,” he continued. “So, you think about what the enemy’s doing, they’re targeting the runways, they’re targeting the tarmacs, but you can disperse the aircraft around the perimeter of the airfield. You can launch them from the golf course. You can launch them from empty space in the taxiway, etc.”

Harris said that another “spoke” could be X-BATs operating from forward arming and refueling points (FARP). All of this is part of larger concepts of operations for the drone that Shield has been envisioning, and that are not at all limited to deployments at locations on land. Harris noted during the interview that the self-propelled nature of the current launch and recovery system would also help with moving the drones around on virtually any ship with sufficient deck space. This is where the RIMES program, which is separate and distinct from the U.S. Navy’s carrier-based Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drone ambitions, really comes in.

“I’ll say the fundamental value proposition of RIMES is that if you have a carrier-based CCA, you’re fundamentally constrained by the square footage of the deck of the aircraft carrier,” Harris explained. “So if you are taking an F-18 or an F-35 off, you better be replacing it with better capability per square foot of deck space than the thing that you’re taking off.”

“So, F/A-XX [the Navy’s sixth-generation carrier-based fighter, now to be built by Boeing] is a huge leap in capability, right? Which is why that program makes a lot of sense,” he continued. “The challenge with CCA is: Does it really make sense to take a manned aircraft off of an aircraft carrier and replace it with an unmanned aircraft?”

Shield AI’s argument here is that X-BAT disrupts this core equation by opening the door to a CCA-like capability, or even something more capable, that can be employed in a ship-based mode without sacrificing any crewed aircraft capacity on an aircraft carrier. Shield AI envisions dozens of X-BATs being employed from amphibious assault ships, as well as other kinds of amphibious warfare ships, including expeditionary sea base type vessels, as seen at the top of this story.

“So when you think about the number of carrier air wings that the Navy has to deploy, deploying X-BAT across all these other ships basically significantly increases the number of carrier air wings,” Harris said.

As already mentioned, the current structure of the RIMES includes a target for an early operational capability in 2029, according to Harris. “We have a program defined to get there, and there’s basically milestone-based payments along the way, so as Shield performs and hits milestones, then the Navy kicks in additional funding,” he added.

“I don’t want to get ahead of the Navy, and give you a specific number, but like hundreds to low thousands,” he also said when asked if there was even a very rough planning figure for the eventual size of the RIMES drone fleet.

Many questions remain about X-BAT, which still has to demonstrate the viability of its vertical takeoff and landing capability, which underpins everything else. As we noted in our original in-depth report on this design, the core concept here is not new, and there have been many unsuccessful attempts to operationalize it in the past. There has been skepticism that Shield AI’s effort will succeed where others have failed. The company is of the view that groundwork has now been more firmly laid, including through its own work with its much smaller internal combustion-engine-powered V-BAT tail-sitting VTOL drone, to truly realize a design of this kind.

The performance and capabilities that Shield AI expects from X-BAT once it is flying at all are also ambitious. A high degree of autonomy is also part of the full planned package, which will leverage the company’s already extensive work in this domain with its Hivemind software.

There are also questions about the Navy’s exact plans for RIMES, as well as its broader future drone fleets. Just this year, the service has issued several contracting notices pointing to rapidly evolving views about future carrier-based strike drones and other uncrewed aircraft. New requirements that Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) released in August ostensibly for future CCA-type drones notably pointed more toward something that sounded very much like an advanced uncrewed combat air vehicle (UCAV), as you can read more about here.

Whether the 2029 operational timeframe the Navy is said to be aiming for under RIMES is firm, or even realistic in any way, remains to be seen. The actual definition of what constitutes an “early operational capability” could be very flexible, as well. It is also worth noting here that Shield AI is not the only company currently conducting work under RIMES. Whether the Navy might be planning to acquire more than one design through this program is unclear. We have reached out to the service for more information.

Other services could be interested in any operational capability produced through the RIMES effort, too. TWZ regularly highlights how runway-independent drones would be particularly well-suited to the U.S. Marine Corps’ new expeditionary and distributed concepts of operations. That service is already in the process of acquiring MQ-58B Valkyrie drones from Kratos that will be able to operate from conventional runways. They will also be capable of runway-independent launches, though they will still have to land conventionally. The baseline Valkyrie design lands via parachute.

Aviation Week has reported separately today that Shield AI is looking to pitch the X-BAT to the U.S. Army as a successor to that service’s fleet of MQ-1C Gray Eagle armed drones.

In general, runway independence is of growing interest elsewhere across the U.S. military as threats to large, established bases continue to expand in scale and scope. The proliferation of various tiers of weaponized drones is a particularly significant factor in this, as TWZ just examined in detail this week in the context of the recent withdrawal of B-1 bombers from RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom. Ever more capable cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic missiles are also part of the full threat picture.

The conflict with Iran has also underscored the limits of what can be gained survivability-wise by dispersing traditional fixed-wing aircraft, especially within an existing airbase. As highlighted earlier, X-BAT could be dispersed very differently to nearly anywhere within a facility that can handle the thrust from the F110 engine in hover.

As it stands now, we are set to get our first view of a full-sized X-BAT prototype within the next few weeks as Shield AI continues to gear up for the start of actual flight testing before the end of the year.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post Navy Doubles Down On X-BAT VTOL ‘Fighter’ Drone Development appeared first on TWZ.

At least two of Bryan’s band members were also wearing Palestine jerseys. Drummer Nate Head bore a jersey with Palestine on the front & on the back, the name “Hind Rajab”, a 5-year-old girl in Gaza killed by the Israel

We have a significant update on the fast-moving world of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) out of Mojave, California, today. Northrop Grumman’s Talon Blue, which now has the official designation YFQ-48A, has taken to the skies for the first time. The existence of Talon Blue was first officially disclosed in December of 2025 at a media event in Mojave that we attended.

The uncrewed aircraft took to the skies over Mojave Air and Space Port, home of famed ‘bleeding-edge’ airframer and Northrop Grumman subsidiary Scaled Composites, which built the aircraft. A release from Northrop Grumman reads:

“MOJAVE, Calif. – Oct. 3, 2026 – Northrop Grumman’s (NYSE: NOC) YFQ-48A Talon Blue completed its first fully autonomous flight, including taxi, takeoff, in-flight maneuvers, and landing. Developed through company investment, Talon Blue combines modular design and advanced manufacturing to lower cost and support faster production without compromising mission capability. The flight builds on Northrop Grumman’s seven decades of autonomy experience and more than 500,000 autonomous flight hours, with lessons from Talon Blue informing future autonomous systems. 

Details on YFQ-48A Talon Blue:  

• Talon Blue is part of Northrop Grumman’s internally-funded Project Talon portfolio focused on accelerating the development of mission-ready autonomous airpower capabilities.  
• Manufacturing and design innovations cut part count and overall weight, lowering cost and enabling faster production to meet growing demand for autonomous systems.  
• Designed with flexible operational concepts in mind, Talon Blue’s high air intake, wide wheelbase and integrated weapons bay support a wide variety of mission needs for U.S. and allied partners.

Craig Woolston, vice president and general manager, research and advanced design, Northrop Grumman: “Our customers made it clear they need autonomous systems that can be fielded faster and more affordably without sacrificing mission effectiveness. We listened. Talon Blue’s first flight is one step toward a new generation of autonomous capabilities. Every flight and lesson strengthens our broader autonomy work and sharpens what comes next.” 

While the Talon Blue aircraft draws most of the attention, Northrop Grumman has put great emphasis on its back-end autonomy development ecosystem, which includes its purpose-built Model 437 demonstrator aircraft, now under the Talon IQ badge (formerly Beacon).

Talon Blue is entering a growing field of CCA offerings, with extremely intense competition, that are primarily aimed at equipping the USAF with its next CCA acquisition of hundreds of aircraft known as Increment 2, for which the requirements remain undefined. Currently, the USAF has moved its YFQ-44 from Anduril and its YFQ-42 from General Atomics, both of which are deep in flight testing, into production. Boeing’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat is another serious CCA contender and perhaps the most mature of all, while Lockheed Martin has its tailless Vectis, and on the lower end, Kratos’ FQ-58 Valkyrie continues to evolve and rack-up flight hours. Many more types are on the horizon, including those from new players and globally from foreign manufacturers.

With the loss of the F/A-XX next-generation naval fighter program to Boeing, Northrop Grumman winning a contract from the U.S. services for Talon Blue has become more important. Doing so would get the company back into the Pentagon’s tactical air combat portfolio. As we have discussed for years, advanced uncrewed tactical systems are set to be less risky and potentially more lucrative than traditional fighter programs as air combat rotates to predominantly uncrewed capabilities and mass production of them. Beyond U.S. needs, the demand for CCAs is likely to explode internationally in the coming years, so programs like Talon Blue could find success elsewhere if the Pentagon goes another direction, but getting the U.S. armed services’ stamp of approval and the scale of production that comes with it would surely help there too.

Author’s note: A big thanks to our friend @Task_Force23 for providing us with great photos for this story.

Contact the author: Tyler@twz.com

The post Northrop Grumman’s Talon Blue Collaborative Combat Aircraft Has Flown appeared first on TWZ.

Earl Swift was a reporter for The Virginia Pilot and has contributed to Outside. He’s been nominated for a Pulitzer eight times. Among other books, he wrote Chesapeake Requiem, a New York Times bestseller that chronicles a year in the life of Tangier Island, located 12 miles out in the middle of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. There, a dozen miles from shore, residents live a life with “one foot in the twenty-first century and another in times long passed,” he writes.

Swift spoke with Brendan O’Meara, host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, about reporting and writing his new book, Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail. Swift hiked the 2,000-mile trail twice, 30 years apart, in order to write the book. He talks with O’Meara about story structure, getting close to the truth, and why it’s important to remove the speedbumps that might cause a reader to abandon your story before the end. 

This conversation has been edited for pacing and flow. 

—Krista Stevens

---

Brendan: Much has been written about the Appalachian Trail, and you’ve brought a different kind of sensibility to it. How do you make your book fresh and immediate and yet able to sit alongside all the other titles about the trail?

Earl: I’m lucky, in the sense that probably the two best books about trail hikes were written by people who didn’t finish them. Bill Bryson was one and Cheryl Strayed was the other. Most trail accounts are self-published and unedited, written by folks with relatively little writing experience. Not to sound highfalutin, but it shows. I also knew I had a story to tell with Molly and Jeff and what had happened there. [Ed: to say more about Molly and Jeff here would spoil the plot of Swift’s book.] I felt I was pretty well-suited to tell that story. The opportunity was to be that one rare book about a trail journey that stands apart, and I figured it was worth the risk to try to write that book.

Brendan: As you hiked south, getting into Georgia, you started to experience congestion, more people. You noticed a generational divide at Low Gap and other campsites. Younger hikers seem predisposed to tenting, no matter what. Even in the middle of a downpour, they’ll choose their individual shelter over the communal. You also noticed isolation and phones, something you wouldn’t see 30 years ago.

Earl: You didn’t see it 30 years ago because there were no phones. We forget that the smartphone didn’t come along until 2007, a full 17 years after I did that first hike. It was a very different environment back then. This was eight years before Bill Bryson wrote A Walk in the Woods. The trail did not occupy a spot in the collective consciousness. It was not part of American culture the way it has become since, and so you were dealing with people who were drawn from a much narrower band of society. There were people who were already outdoorsy, and that’s not necessarily the case now. All walks [of life] attempt a thru hike these days, but back then it tended to be people who were already part of the fraternity. If you wanted to make a call, you hitchhiked to the nearest town and went to a payphone. There was no other option. If you wanted a pizza, you had to hitch into town. Now you have people who will get on their phones when they’re two miles from the nearest road crossing, and they’ll arrange for a pizza joint to deliver a pie at the road crossing when they arrive, which would have been science fiction. 

Brendan: There’s a balance in what to include, so that it doesn’t feel repetitive. You need to pick high intensity moments, be it the physical experience of a gnarly section of trail, or the three siblings from Kentucky who are assholes with no etiquette. You pick these moments so it’s not front-loaded or middle-loaded or back-loaded. There is a delicacy in how you deploy various elements throughout.

Earl: For any storyteller, proportionality is the key ingredient. You must figure out how much of each piece you share with the reader. If there’s one fatal flaw in most trail chronicles, it’s that writers don’t make enough of a distinction between telling moments and untelling moments. They just throw everything at you, and it gets boring. 

There are relatively few classic books about the Appalachian Trail, but one of them came in the late ’70s. It’s this two-volume, 1,000-page book called Hiking the Appalachian Trail. It gives you first-person accounts of the first 50 or so thru hikes. By 100 pages into the first volume, you’ve gone numb because every story is exactly the same. Part of the problem is that the whole tenor of the story is This happened, and then this happened. There’s never a moment’s pause to reflect on what it means and why I should care as a reader. Everything’s treated as equally important, and therefore nothing is important.

Job one, for anybody writing a book—for anybody writing a story of any kind, of any length—is to get the reader to that last word. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter which pretty words you drop in the middle of the story.

Brendan: You’re the tour guide and you’re going to point to what matters. That degree of authorial authority is integral to any narrative, especially something like this, because otherwise it would just be so rote and boring. You have to imbue it with a pulse.

Earl: Job one, for anybody writing a book—for anybody writing a story of any kind, of any length—is to get the reader to that last word. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter which pretty words you drop in the middle of the story. It doesn’t matter how brilliantly conceived it is. The story has failed because you have failed to get the reader to the end, to the finish line. 

The whole process of structuring a story, and strategizing about a story comes down to, How do I remove all the speed bumps that will encourage the reader to set this aside? If you can do that effectively, then you win, you get the reader to finish the story. The reader can badmouth the story after the fact. If the reader’s reached the end, you as the writer have achieved what you set out to do. All you can ask is for them to finish the story. You can’t ask them to like it. That’s up to them. But you can get them to finish it if you do it right.

We make decisions about what we include and what we leave out. We decide where we start a story, which is not always at the beginning. We decide where we’re going to end it, which is not always at the ending. You hope that in making those decisions, you get the reader to the truth, or pretty damn close to it, as close as you can, given the facts that you’re working with. But it is a construct, and it is your responsibility. Structure your story in such a way that the story will achieve what it sets out to do. That it will succeed in terms of incorporating enough propulsion to get the reader to the end. 

I probably spent three months doing nothing but cutting. Most of the writing of this book was cutting. I wrote a journal while I was hiking, and then I did nothing but cut when it came to writing the book. 

Brendan: In what ways did the hike change you?

Earl: In 1990, the big takeaway for me was that I could do anything. It boosted my confidence to the point where I’m sure I was pretty obnoxious in the months immediately after. God knows I must have been difficult to deal with. I could do anything! It made me Superman. Part of that was seeing something demonstrated daily that my dad had been saying to me for years. He was always big on saying, “How do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time.” It had just been “dad talk” to me until this hike, when I realized part of being able to do anything is knowing how to bust it up into its components, and then bust those components up into their individual ingredients. How to take each little bite-sized fragment in sequence, and pretty soon you’ve accomplished the whole thing. 

That dictated my approach to big assignments at the paper and in magazines, and certainly it has informed every book effort. It’s a stupid amount of work to write a book. I wouldn’t recommend this line of work to anybody. It’s a ridiculous way to try to make a living. So uncertain, so filled with terror, and so potentially without reward of any kind. But breaking the 2,200 miles into daily doses of 14 to 17 miles describes perfectly how I go about writing a book now. You don’t sit down to write 105,000 words. You sit down to write 1,200 words a day. That’s my daily quota. Do that over enough days, and pretty soon you have the 105,000 words.

Brendan: How did you settle on 1,200?

Earl: Early on, with my first couple of books, it was 2,000, and I just whacked it down. My first hike, I had no trouble banging out 17 to 20 miles a day. Now, 14 miles feels like a pretty tough day at the office, a long day. 

It’s the same with writing. Twelve hundred words takes as much out of me now as 2,000 used to. I’ll probably drop it down to 1,100, maybe even 1,000 with the next book. I’d like to think that the words are better than they used to be. I still find that I spend the first hour or two every morning, in the middle of a book project, going back through what I thought were perfect words laid down the day before. Invariably, when I wake up, I find that they weren’t so perfect after all. In fact, they need a lot of fixing and so I do repair for the first couple of hours, and then try to make something out of the rest of the day with new stuff. 

Listen to the full conversation below.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has left something of a mystery hanging in the air after showing the silhouette of an aircraft that immediately drew comparisons to the famed SR-71 Blackbird during a recent speech. Isaacman pushed back on a direct link to the SR-71, but said his agency is working hard to get “back in the business of flying high and fast again.”

The silhouette, accompanied by the tagline “Rebuilding our X-plane portfolio,” was among the backdrops for Isaacman’s remarks at the annual All-In Summit in Los Angeles, California, last week.

The SR-71’s iconic shape is defined by its long, sword-like profile, pronounced chines, and deeply swept wings, and huge spiked engine nacelles with canted fins on top. Its distinctive geometry is reflected in the silhouette, which shows a broad, highly blended aircraft from an unusual head-on angle.

“In the service of the first A [aeronautics] in NASA, we are rebuilding our X-plane fleet. The X-59 is researching quiet supersonic flight, but it’s just the beginning,” the head of NASA told attendees. “As NASA recommits to flight test and works alongside industry to push the boundaries of airframe and propulsion design, it will not be long before NASA once again is flying as high and as fast as we had in decades past, and then even more.”

Isaacman’s full speech at the All-In Summit, as well as his remarks during a live interview that followed immediately afterward, are contained in the video below. The high-speed aircraft silhouette is first seen at around the 12:40-mark in the runtime, and is then further discussed at around the 28:39-mark.

Chamath Palihapitiya, co-host of the All-In Podcast and one of the hosts of the summit, asked Isaacman directly about the silhouette during the fireside chat after his speech.

“You showed a picture of the [SR-71] Blackbird up there,” Palihapitiya said at one point, before Isaacman interjected.

“You sure that’s a Blackbird?” Isaacman said.

“Well, ok. What was that picture you showed up there?” Palihapitiya asked.

“Like I said, NASA is getting back in the business of flying high and fast again,” Isaacman said in response, and declined to further elaborate.

Whether or not the silhouette reflects a real design that is in development now is unclear. TWZ has reached out to NASA for more information.

Though the Mach-3+-capable SR-71 is primarily remembered as a Cold War-era intelligence-gathering aircraft, NASA operated several Blackbirds in support of aeronautical research efforts for years. The agency was actually the last operator of the type, flying SR-71s until 1999.

Lockheed Martin openly pitched a successor to the SR-71, dubbed the SR-72, in the late 2010s. There was even talk of building a flying fighter jet-sized demonstrator to prove out key technologies.

Discussion about the SR-72, or a further evolution of that concept, resurfaced in the early 2020s after Lockheed Martin helped craft a fictional hypersonic aircraft called Darkstar for the blockbuster movie Top Gun: Maverick.

Exactly where Lockheed’s SR-72 ambitions sit today is unclear. After talking constantly about the potential program for a number of years, it went silent, which could indicate the program had moved forward deep in classification.

NASA has worked with other supersonic and hypersonic X-planes in the past, as well. This includes reusable space planes, as well as aircraft designed to fly within the Earth’s atmosphere.

“I mean, that doesn’t seem like a space vehicle. It seems like an Earth-air vehicle,” All-In’s Palihapitiya noted during his chat with Isaacman about the silhouette he showed.

“Yeah. The first ‘A’ in NASA is our aeronautics portfolio,” Isaacman said in response, before highlighting a host of contributions his agency has made to advanced military and commercial developments over the years. “You know what I want to do? I want to get back to the radical airframe and engine designs like we were always supposed to do.”

As mentioned, Isaacman also highlighted the X-59 Quiet Supersonic Technology experimental test aircraft, or QueSST, at the summit, but made clear the goal is to go well beyond that design. The QueSST jet is the centerpiece of a program now to investigate technologies that could eventually enable commercial supersonic flight over land with a substantially reduced sonic boom.

The X-59 conducted its first supersonic test flight, reaching Mach 1.1, in June. NASA’s test program aims to eventually push the aircraft up to a speed of Mach 1.4. This is significantly below the record-breaking mark of approximately Mach 3.3 that the SR-71 clocked back in the mid-1970s, but it was never designed for extreme speed as testing its sonic signature was its primary goal.

As for bringing a Blackbird back into operation for high-speed testing, which is now at the forefront of military aeronautics (and civilian to a lesser degree) after decades of being sidelined, that would be a very challenging operation. The SR-71s are long retired and have been placed in museums and other display areas. While the Pentagon could technically claw some of them back from their ‘on loan’ status, reconstituting even one of them would be a major undertaking as the entire support ecosystem that once sustained them has been gone for decades. Still, having a Mach 3+ capable jet for testing would be a highly relevant tool in a new age of high-speed flight exploration.

On the other hand, building a new test aircraft that aims higher and faster than the SR-71, but may be based on its ‘DNA,’ is certainly possible. Such an aircraft could leverage material science, avionics, flight controls, and engines that are seven decades more modern than its progenitor. Technology demonstrators in this class could also already exist in the classified domain. NASA could possibly assume ownership of one after the Pentagon declassifies it, as well.

Regardless of how such an exotic aircraft is obtained, one of the biggest differentiating factors could be that a NASA aircraft is piloted by a human onboard, instead of it being a drone, but an uncrewed aircraft is possible too.

Isaacman has been very open about its interest in and support for new X-plane developments. On only his second day on the job, in December of last year, he called for revamping the agency’s aeronautics program and stated that “I’d love to see an expanded X-plane portfolio” during a town hall with NASA staff.

“If NASA has a healthy X-plane portfolio, we should be flying experimental aircraft so routinely that the second flight of a single X-plane is not newsworthy,” he wrote in a post on X in March of this year. “For example, the two NASA X-29 aircraft flew 422 flights between 1984 and 1991. That period also overlapped with the development of two X-31 aircraft, which together flew about 580 times.”

NASA’s proposed FY2027 budget also spelled out rapid, cost-effective flight experimentation as an explicit priority. Budget documents specifically highlight work toward new advances in supersonic and hypersonic flight technologies “that will revolutionize air transportation, strengthen national security capabilities, and position America to lead the future of high-speed flight,” as well.

Furthermore, in April, NASA outlined a new Aeronautics Flight Accelerator (AFA) initiative. At that time, the agency put out a call for “input on technologies, concepts, and flight test campaigns suitable for cost shared maturation leading to flight within the next three years.” Stated areas of interest included “subsonic (including vertical lift), supersonic, and hypersonic flight technologies.”

It is important to reiterate that we still do not know whether the silhouette Isaacman showed at the All-In Summit represents an active development effort and, if so, how mature it might be. Government agencies and contractors routinely use concept art to illustrate an area of research or communicate a future vision. Such artwork does not necessarily correspond to a funded aircraft, an active prototype, or even a specific configuration.

At the same time, under Isaacman, NASA is clearly pushing toward new X-planes. NASA’s X-plane programs have historically served as a way to investigate technologies that conventional aircraft programs were not prepared to risk. The resulting aircraft have explored everything from supersonic and hypersonic flight to unconventional configurations and new propulsion concepts.

At the very least, evoking the visual legacy of the SR-71 Blackbird, coupled with Isaacman’s comments, provides a clear indication that NASA is interested in returning to the high-speed flight regime as part of its future plans.

Update: 2:04 PM ET –

NASA has now provided TWZ with the following statement in response to our queries for more information:

“NASA has a long history of building and flying experimental aircraft that push the boundaries of what is possible. As Administrator Isaacman has said, we want to see more X-planes flying in the years ahead, developing the technologies that will allow us to fly higher, farther, and faster than we have in decades. We look forward to sharing more as those efforts progress.“

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The post Did NASA’s Administrator Just Tease An SR-71 Blackbird Follow-On X-Plane? (Updated) appeared first on TWZ.

General Atomics has given us the first look at its FQ-42 Vengeance Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drone flying in formation with crewed fighters. The U.S. Air Force is continuing to expand crewed-uncrewed teaming and other testing of the FQ-42, as well as Anduril’s FQ-44 Fury, as it aims to start fielding both types around the end of the decade.

The newly released picture from General Atomics’ Aeronautical Systems, Inc. division (GA-ASI), seen at the top of this story, shows an FQ-42 in flight together with an F-35A Joint Strike Fighter and an F-15E Strike Eagle. The company has also disclosed the delivery of another Vengeance drone to the Air Force, this time to the service’s main drone operations hub at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

“The FQ-42 that arrived at Creech will continue regular test and evaluation operations with the Air Force aimed at experimentation with the new aircraft,” according to a press release GA-ASI put out today. “Previous efforts with Vengeance and other GA-ASI jets, including [the] XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station and MQ-20 Avenger – have found the trio of combat jets flying in various scenarios that push the boundaries of combat aviation. GA-ASI’s jets have flown semi-autonomously and autonomously with various AI pilots and under collaborative control of human fighter pilots operating F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II jets.”

GA-ASI has previously confirmed that the XQ-67A, an earlier experimental drone TWZ was first to report on, served as a prototype for the development of the FQ-42. The Air Force’s F-22s also look set to be the first operational airborne controllers for USAF CCAs.

As mentioned, the Air Force is steadily working to broaden the scale and scope of testing involving the FQ-42 and FQ-44 to include more and more operationally relevant scenarios. Both types are set to make their first appearance at a large-force employment (LFE) exercise in December, offering a valuable new opportunity for deeper and more realistic integration with crewed fighters.

The Air Force otherwise continues to lay the groundwork for future CCA operations, including through a major round of testing at Creech in July, which TWZ was first to report on. The service is heavily focused now just on figuring out how the drones will be deployed, launched, recovered, supported, and otherwise operated on a day-to-day basis. A dedicated test squadron called the Experimental Operations Unit (EOU), established at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, has been leading those efforts.

Work is also underway to demonstrate tactical capabilities, such as the FQ-44 launching an AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) for the first time earlier this year.

New test footage: first missile shot from YFQ-44A.

YFQ-44A executed an end-to-end, beyond-line-of-sight strike against a simulated target.

The test, executed out of @EdwardsAFB, represents an important step in turning CCA into an operational capability. pic.twitter.com/70cRIs6uXJ

— Anduril Industries (@anduriltech) July 15, 2026

“We’re on path right now to do our air-to-air shot coming up here in the near future,” Mike Shortsleeve, Vice President for Strategy Business Development at GA-ASI, told TWZ‘s Jamie Hunter on the floor of the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference last week.

Last week, GA-ASI separately announced a new demonstration of semi-autonomous air-to-air combat capability involving crewed F-5AT Advanced Tiger jets belonging to private adversary air contractor Tactical Air Support, Inc. and an unspecified “CCA test aircraft.” The company did use a picture of an Avenger drone to illustrate the press release. The F-5s and the CCA surrogate were equipped with infrared search-and-track sensors (IRST) during the testing.

“The live exercise proved that a CCA and a manned fighter can collaborate to fuse sensor data from AMS-GRA-compliant sensors to track, engage, and eliminate an airborne target while using a Beyond Line of Sight (BLOS) data link to accomplish seamless coordination between the two aircraft,” according to the GA-ASI release.

“The demonstration utilized BLOS communication between the CCA and the airborne F-5, enabling the Advanced Tiger to send data about targets from an AMS-GRA-compatible system. These commands were relayed to the CCA’s TacACE [Tactical Autonomy Ecosystem software] system,” the release added. “This flight showed that many companies’ platforms can interoperate using the plug-and-play government reference architectures ecosystem. The U.S. Air Force isn’t locked into using a single vendor or system.”

GA-ASI has previously demonstrated the ability of MQ-20s flying with podded IRSTs to detect and track aerial targets semi-automatically. Generally speaking, IRSTs look set to be an important sensor for future CCAs, and are particularly relevant in the air-to-air role. As we have written in the past:

IRSTs are especially valuable for helping spot stealthy targets with features designed to reduce their radar cross-sections since they detect and track infrared emissions. By extension, IRSTs are also immune to radio frequency electronic warfare jamming. As passive sensors, they do not emit their own signals that could alert a target to the fact they are being tracked, either. IRSTs can still be used to cue or otherwise be linked to other sensors, including active electronically-scanned array radars. Fusing data from multiple sources can provide higher fidelity tracks of multiple targets, as well as improved situational awareness overall.

Air-to-air combat is expected to be the primary mission set, at least initially, for Air Force CCAs. At the same time, an air-to-ground role for the FQ-42 and FQ-44, and/or other future CCA-type drones the Air Force might acquire, is emerging on the horizon. Anduril has already fit-checked a variety of air-to-ground ordnance on Fury.

As it stands now, the Air Force is looking to have its first operational CCAs in service toward the end of the decade. The service is also presently aiming to have a total fleet of at least 500 CCAs of all types by 2032.

“If we can’t be ready, then certainly you’re not going to have the forces that you need and the numbers that you need going forward. This signifies that mass is certainly important again, but also autonomy is just as important,” General Atomics’ Shortsleeve told us last week in talking about the Air Force’s CCA fleet size target. “So the ability to have these autonomous systems, whether they’re bringing in additional weapons, sensing capability, whatever it is, all of those working in a collaborative environment, whether it’s manned, unmanned teaming, or unmanned and unmanned capabilities, that right there is what’s going to help the warfighter in the future.”

“And when we say autonomy, it’s not just strictly this is going to go off and do its own thing. It’s going to be directed,” he added. “Whether it’s on the ground, in the air, [it] makes no difference to the system itself. It’s going to work hand-in-hand [with humans]. So that human-machine teaming, that’s what they’re really focusing on. There is figuring out how to best use this capability in the advancement of actually having to employ it in [the] real world.”

Though just flying in formation is very different from collaboration with a high degree of autonomy, the new picture of the FQ-42 together with the F-35A and the F-15E is a window into the future teamed operations the Air Force is hoping to build.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

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