19FortyFive

Summary and Key Points: An Iowa-class battleship’s main battery threw a 2,700-pound armor-piercing shell roughly 24 miles. That was the state of the art in 1944, and it was still the state of the art in 1980, which was the problem. So the US Navy removed four of the 5-inch gun mounts and bolted on 8 armored box launchers carrying 32 BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles — each with a 992-pound warhead, a range of 1,553 miles, and a price tag of $2,000,000.

Summary and Key Points: When something breaks on a Ukrainian F-16, Ukrainians do not fix it. An American team removes the faulty component; it leaves the country; a replacement eventually arrives, and an American contractor installs that too. “We are not effectively allowed to do much at all with the airplane,” said the deputy director of one of Ukraine’s leading defense firms at the Kielce arms show this week. The Swedish approach to the Gripen is the opposite.

Summary and Key Points: Dassault puts the Rafale’s cost at roughly $16,500 per flight hour. An F-35A runs about $42,000 — roughly 2.5 times more. That gap is the entire argument for an aircraft that entered service in 2001, has no meaningful stealth, and is currently selling better than at any point in its history. Its radar cross-section is estimated at 0.05 to 0.1 square meters against about 0.005 for the F-35, which is the difference between a small bird and a golf ball on a radar screen.

Over the past few days, much media attention has focused on the trip to Moscow and Kyiv by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. The two Trump administration envoys held a three-hour session with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, followed by several hours of talks with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. Predictably, no breakthrough was achieved, although they reportedly arrived with several fresh proposals intended to prompt the two sides to agree to a cessation of hostilities.

Summary and Key Points: HMS Illustrious knew the submarine was coming. That was the point of the exercise. In September 2013, in the Gulf of Oman, the 22,000-ton Royal Navy carrier moved through a narrow stretch of water screened by the Type 23 frigate HMS Westminster, the American destroyer USS Bulkeley, and 2 support ships, with 3 anti-submarine helicopters in the air — Merlins with dipping sonar off the carrier, a Seahawk off the Bulkeley, a Lynx off the Westminster.

Summary and Key Points: The F-22 Raptor was built so that American pilots could kill enemy fighters before those pilots ever saw them, at nearly $143,000,000 per aircraft. In 2009 at Nellis Air Force Base, a US Navy EA-18G Growler — a fourth-generation electronic attack jet costing about $68,000,000 — scored a simulated AIM-120 kill on one. The Growler pilot painted an F-22 silhouette on the side of his cockpit. F-22 vs. EA-18G Growler: Who Wins?

Summary and Key Points: An EA-18G Growler airframe costs about $67,000,000, and it buys an aircraft that cannot do the job it was designed for. What makes a Growler a Growler is hung underneath it: a 2024 Raytheon contract for 13 ship sets of AN/ALQ-249 Next Generation Jammer pods came to $590,800,000, which works out to roughly $45,000,000 per set. Add them together, and a single combat-ready Growler passes $112,000,000 before a weapon, a spare part, or an hour of training is counted.

Summary and Key Points: A Chinese Chengdu J-20 was filmed flying with 8 PL-15 air-to-air missiles hanging off its external hardpoints. Inside its bays, the aircraft carries up to 4 more PL-15s and 2 short-range PL-10s, which puts a fully loaded J-20 at 14 missiles. The configuration has a name — “beast mode,” coined by Lockheed Martin’s marketing for the F-35 and since applied to everything else — and it involves a straightforward trade.

Summary and Key Points: Turkey built a fifth-generation fighter to reduce dependence on the United States, and it uses 2 American engines. Ankara was expelled from the F-35 program in 2019 after buying the Russian S-400 air defense system, and responded by accelerating the development of the aircraft that became the TAI Kaan — intended to be the first fifth-generation fighter produced anywhere outside the United States, China, or Russia.

On Sunday, Trump posted a cartoon of Mark Carney getting knocked down at a hockey game, captioned “Get Up, Governor.” The next morning, he posted a map of North America with the American flag stretched across the entire continent, Canada included. Most people read it as a joke. Legally, it was meaningless. Strategically, it landed in a relationship that has long depended on neither government exploiting it.