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Intercepts has a new home, nestled snugly in our revamped defensenews.com. Find us at http://www.defensenews.com/intercepts/.
Intercepts has a new home, nestled snugly in our revamped defensenews.com. Find us at http://www.defensenews.com/intercepts/.
Like the offspring of the Great Eye of Sauron and the lovable Goodyear blimp, the JLENS aerostat carries systems that can surveil and track objects, like cruise missiles, in an area as large as Texas, staying aloft for up to 30 days. The US Army announced that on Friday, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) plans…
A British dad has trumped the school bus, ferrying his teenage sons to school in his 17-ton tank, Caters News Agency reports. Nick Mead is the 53-year-old wonder of Tanks A Lot Ltd, which owns a 120-vehicle fleet of vehicles available for rent. Customers can rent an armored vehicle to, say, pick up their prom date,…
The announcement Dec. 11 by the senior leadership of the Pentagon and US Navy that the Small Surface Combatant (SSC) will be a modified version of existing Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) was no surprise to most followers of this saga. What was surprising was the absence of any major changes to the ships. Here are…
(Photo from Twitter) Legislative crises have becoming a Holiday Season tradition in Washington right up there with powerful officials mingling with other powerful officials at invitation-only parties. But, thankfully, a snarky soul has created a Twitter account to help us all cope. On Tuesday evening, senior lawmakers rolled out what’s called a “cromnibus.” You may…
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — a stealthy, high-tech, fifth-generation strike fighter — may also become a major player in close-air support (CAS) missions. Last week, we talked with the US Air Force general who is leading the testing and preparation for the CAS mission. Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way: the military aviation community is…
Robert Gates was the Republican holdover and bureaucratic ninja. Leon Panetta deserved the secretary of defense post after a much-ballyhooed stint at the CIA. But Chuck Hagel was supposed to — finally — be Barack Obama’s man at the Pentagon.
Danes have a well-deserved reputation for designing and building efficient, effective ships on tight budgets. In line with the government’s desire to provide meaningful contributions to coalition and expeditionary forces, their newest ships have been designed to deploy well beyond Europe. In recent years the Danish Navy has commissioned five impressive, modern warships fitted with…
It was a dark and stormy night – – really — on the evening of November 13-14 in Bath, Maine, home of shipbuilders Bath Iron Works. Rain turned to snow as the shipyard prepared to execute one of the trickiest maneuvers in the construction of DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyers – placing the prefabricated deckhouse onto the…
Iran has released video of what it claims to be a reverse-engineered version of a captured RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aircraft. The jet — pretty loud jet at that — is seen flying overhead multiple times. The two-minute thirteen second video then shows numerous air-to-air views of the aircraft, apparently from a helicopter chase plane. The…
Mystery solved! In October, Intercepts wrote about the F-117 Nighthawk and how recent photos had shown the stealth jet flying from Tonopah Test Range in Nevada — despite the plane having been retired in 2008. Given the secretive history of the Nighthawk, speculation immediately arose as to what the jets could be doing. General consensus was that…
With US Navy test pilot Commander Tony Wilson at the controls, an F-35C Lightning II of Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 23 (VX-23) lined up on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the California coast early Monday afternoon and swooped in to make the first arrested carrier landing of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) carrier variant. It…
The F-35 joint strike fighter is scheduled to achieve initial operational capability (IOC) for the Air Force in August of 2016. And for the first time, the man in charge of the F-35 program is warning that date looks unlikely. “I am very worried now that my promise to [the Air Force] to give them all…
On Oct. 23, Intercepts traveled to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico as part of a media tour. Holloman is notable as the training hub for the pilots and sensor operators who fly the Air Force’s MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) fleets — known more colloquially, and to the great chagrin of…
The US Army has found what it believes to be a great deal on a group of paintings, and has been approved to spend $600,000 in order to add them to its already huge collection of art. The service filed an “Unusual and compelling urgency” notice on Oct. 16 to pull the funds from its…