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The $1 Trillion Black Box

By
Jesse Coburn
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The $1 Trillion Black Box

The sums are vast, but the explanations for the spending range from vague to inscrutable. Consider these items in the law that funded the Department of Defense this year:

For “Other Procurement, Air Force”: $32.6 billion. For “Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-Wide”: $35.2 billion. And for “supplies and associated support services” related to U.S. Code Title 10 Section 3601 subsection(c)(3)(B) clauses (i) through (iv): a mere $650 million.

Determining what, exactly, all this public money is paying for requires cross-referencing thousands of pages of financial tables, accounting records and congressional committee documents that will leave all but the most determined budgeting sleuth at a loss. Yet this is how the U.S. government explains its funding decisions for the most expensive military in the world. And the cost is growing.

“There’s no way that you can follow the money, because it keeps getting twisted like a Rubik’s Cube,” said John Ferrari, a retired Army major general and now a nonresident  senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “None of it is set up to be transparent.”

ProPublica is setting out to untwist this Rubik’s Cube in a series of investigative articles, and we’re asking for your help. In the months to come, we will grapple with how President Donald Trump is spending taxpayer money at the Department of Defense (or the Department of War, as his administration calls it). With your assistance, we hope to emerge with vital, previously untold investigative stories. 

While accounting is rarely the stuff of action thrillers, the black box that is the Pentagon budget contains a world of grandiose plans and staggering consequences, from extraordinarily expensive jets, ships and missiles, to high-stakes projects gone terribly awry, to closed-door dealmaking with the world’s most powerful arms sellers. (Consider our first story in this series, about the epic dysfunction of an artillery factory bankrolled by $533 million from the U.S. Army.)

The scale is hard to fathom. Congress appropriated $1 trillion for defense this year, more than the combined appropriations for agencies overseeing health, veterans affairs, education, housing, agriculture and justice — twice as much, in fact. If the president prevails in his priorities for next year’s budget, defense spending will soar dramatically higher still, to $1.5 trillion. That would be more, adjusted for inflation, than the country spent annually on defense during the height of World War II. The Pentagon’s balance sheets are opaque even to the Pentagon itself: The agency as a whole has never received a passing grade on a comprehensive financial audit. (The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.)

One thing is clear: Vast sums are funneled into developing costly weapons systems that often come in over budget, get delivered behind schedule or are rendered obsolete by the time they’re finished — if they’re finished at all.

These poor outcomes follow grand promises. The Zumwalt class of naval destroyers was lauded for its “affordable and flexible design.” A ground-control system for GPS satellites called Next Generation Operational Control System was billed the “best-value GPS control system for the future.” And the F-35 jet was promised as “a truly remarkable, capable and affordable multirole fighter” that would be built “on schedule and on cost.”

Each of these programs went years past their original delivery deadlines and cost far more than originally budgeted. In 1998, the price tag for Zumwalts was estimated at $1.5 billion per ship, according to the Government Accountability Office. Now the expected price exceeds $10 billion per ship (in part because the Navy reduced the quantity it ordered). Expected costs for the GPS control system increased from $4.5 billion to over $7.5 billion. And developing, producing and maintaining the F-35 is anticipated to require $2 trillion, making it the DOD’s most expensive weapon system in history, according to the GAO. (A Lockheed Martin spokesperson called the jet “a critical capability for the United States and our allies” and said the company “is proud to serve as its prime contractor.”)

Estimates include research and development costs. The Zumwalt increase was in part because the program was reduced from 32 ships to three. All numbers are in 2024 dollars.

After the delays and cost increases, these projects have not exactly delivered reliable marvels. Only three of the originally expected 32 Zumwalts have been built. The GPS system was canceled — after 16 years and $6.27 billion in program costs, including payments to defense contractor RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies). And F-35s are able to perform all of their missions only a quarter of the time. 

Experts in defense spending cite many systemic causes for such outcomes, including the Pentagon’s frequent preference for complex designs, its habit of starting production before the design has been finalized and, not least, its dependency on companies operating virtual monopolies over niche defense products. There are few lasting consequences for contractors who fail to deliver, the experts said. “Industry just says, ‘Shucks, write us another check,’” said one defense congressional staffer, who requested anonymity to speak about internal defense spending deliberations. “Congress just throws cash at the problem.”

Other types of notable figures abound, like the $7 million that the Pentagon reportedly spent on lobster tail in one month last year, the thousands of pages of regulations that would-be Pentagon contractors must navigate, the 4,000% by which a company was found to be marking up products sold to the DOD and the $111 million that RTX fraudulently extracted from the Pentagon by misleading the agency, according to the Department of Justice. (In 2024, RTX admitted to engaging in two schemes to defraud the Pentagon, including for Patriot missile systems, and paid over $950 million to resolve federal investigations. RTX did not respond to a request for comment.)

Those in positions to reform U.S. military spending can benefit from the high-spending status quo. Former four-star generals, Pentagon officials and congressional staffers alike find a welcome reception in the industry they once oversaw. Defense spending bills present excellent opportunities for members of Congress to direct jobs to their districts. And the largest defense firms enjoy annual profits in the billions of dollars.

This windfall ends up in the hands of a powerful few. From 2020 to 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, RTX and Northrop Grumman — received DOD contracts worth a combined $771 billion. (General Dynamics and Boeing declined to comment. Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin did not respond to requests for comment on the value of their DOD contracts.)

None of this is a secret. It was four decades ago, during another military buildup under a Republican president, that reports of the Pentagon paying $400 for a hammer led a presidential commission to study wasteful defense spending. It’s because this dynamic has been allowed to persist (despite periodic reform efforts) that ProPublica believes the topic deserves renewed attention. 

The current administration, for its part, says that it is undertaking its own reforms, limiting stock buybacks by defense contractors, boosting new entrants to the defense industry and promising new financial accountability. Yet some fear Pentagon spending is becoming even more unrestrained in the second Trump era. Two of Trump’s marquee Pentagon programs, panned by some as boondoggles, are estimated to collectively cost more than $1 trillion. Companies connected to the president’s family and appointees have scooped up numerous DOD deals. The administration gutted the office that tests weapons systems for safety and efficacy. All in all, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet told investors in April: “This is a golden opportunity right now based on who’s in government.”

Not everyone views U.S. military spending as excessive — some defense hawks have spent years clamoring for more of it. Measured as a percentage of gross domestic product, they note, U.S. defense spending has fallen from previous highs. A large chunk of the defense budget goes toward paying the salaries of service members. And even if they take longer and cost more than expected, American defense products are sought after the world over. “Weapons are expensive because our standards are high,” said longtime defense lobbyist Jim Dyer. “The outcomes are good.”

ProPublica is setting out to examine military spending and its outcomes. If you have worked in the world of defense budgeting, spending or contracting, we’d like to hear from you.

Trump’s North Korea gambit is really about everyone else

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IwPost
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Trump’s North Korea gambit is really about everyone else

There is a familiar rhythm to these moments, and Washington’s foreign policy establishment keeps forgetting the tune:

A president tires of an alliance relationship that isn’t paying the dividends he expected, reaches for the most disruptive lever available and the commentariat responds with alarm about “chaos” and “unpredictability” rather than asking the more interesting question: What did the old arrangement actually accomplish, and for whom?

President Trump’s decision to order the Pentagon to scale back the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises with South Korea, paired with his claim that Kim Jong Un has responded “very positively” to renewed outreach, is being read in most of the trade press as a nostalgia play — a sequel to the Singapore-Hanoi-DMZ trilogy of his first term.

That reading misses the actual mechanics of what’s happening. This is not primarily a North Korea policy. It is a South Korea policy, wearing North Korea’s clothes.

The alliance as leverage, not commitment

Trump has been explicit, if characteristically indirect, about the connective tissue here: his irritation that Seoul declined to lend support during the Iran episode, his framing of the drills as “costly” and “inappropriate” and his broader argument — repeated across multiple theaters, from NATO to Japan — that the United States has been subsidizing the security of wealthy allies who then decline to reciprocate when Washington wants something.

Whatever one thinks of the tactic, the underlying diagnosis is not crazy. South Korea is a developed, technologically formidable state with a GDP many times North Korea’s, fielding a capable military, sitting under an extended-deterrence umbrella that was designed for a 1953 balance of power and never seriously renegotiated for a 2026 one.

Treating the drills, and by extension the alliance, as a bargaining chip rather than a sacred commitment is jarring to the foreign policy establishment precisely because that establishment has never wanted to ask what these commitments cost relative to what they buy.

Engagement doesn’t require illusions

None of this requires believing Kim Jong Un is a reformed actor or that a summit forecloses the North’s weapons programs. It doesn’t. Pyongyang used the intervening years to expand its arsenal, deepen its dependence on Moscow and Beijing and, per its own recent congress, commit explicitly to further nuclear buildout.

Foreign Minister Cho Hyun’s framing of the overture as a “turning point” is the kind of hopeful language governments produce when they need domestic cover for an ally’s unilateralism — worth noting, not worth believing outright.

But the standard Washington critique — that talking to Kim “legitimizes” him, that drills reduction is “unilateral concession,” that only maximum pressure works — has been tested for three decades against a regime that has only grown stronger, more nuclear, and more entrenched with its patrons in Moscow and Beijing.

Sanctions regimes and joint exercises did not stop a single warhead. If the alternative to periodic, transactional, low-expectation dialogue is permanent stalemate plus an unexamined subsidy to Seoul’s defense budget, the case for trying something else is not radical. It’s just adult accounting.

The real audience is Beijing

The more revealing detail in this episode is not Pyongyang’s coyness but Wang Yi’s trip to Seoul — China inserting itself into the North Korea file just as Washington signals openness to bypass the pressure track. That is the actual chessboard. North Korea’s utility to Kim, to Xi, and to Putin has increasingly been as a wedge issue among Washington’s Asian commitments, not as a negotiating partner desperate for sanctions relief.

A Trump-Kim meeting on the sidelines of APEC in Shenzhen — should it happen — would occur inside China’s diplomatic space, which ought to unsettle Seoul and Tokyo rather more than a truncated set of joint drills does. Analysts quoted this week captured the asymmetry well: Kim has “nothing to lose” from engaging Trump precisely because he no longer needs American goodwill to survive. Moscow and Beijing already provide the insurance.

What realism actually counsels

A genuinely realist posture toward the peninsula doesn’t romanticize engagement or treat drills reduction as betrayal. It asks what a still-dominant but increasingly overextended power should prioritize.

The honest answer is that North Korea, absent an actual crisis, is a second-order problem next to the structural competition with China — and that treating every regional ally relationship as an immovable tripwire, rather than a negotiable partnership subject to burden-sharing, has left Washington with commitments it can’t easily scale to its actual interests.

Trump’s method is transactional to the point of crudeness, and his rhetoric about Kim’s “respect” reliably substitutes for substance. But the impulse to treat the drills, the alliance and the diplomacy as variables rather than constants is closer to how a great power in relative decline ought to be thinking than the reflexive alarm it has generated.

The question worth asking isn’t whether Trump is “cozying up” to a dictator. It’s why so few in Washington ever ask whether the alternative — permanent confrontation with no leverage to show for it — was ever a strategy at all.

This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.

Flight attendants freaked out that Google is buying tons of Spirit employee data

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IwPost
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Flight attendants freaked out that Google is buying tons of Spirit employee data

Last Friday, Google won an auction to acquire a huge amount of Spirit Airlines data.

The data doesn’t include personal information or customer data, but instead nearly covers the airline’s entire employment and workplace record.

To ensure that no individual can be identified in the dataset, Google agreed to use a court-appointed ombudsman to oversee a process to strip any personally identifying information (PII) from the data before it’s transferred to Google. Under the deal, Google agreed to maintain the data in this de-identified form and to never intentionally re-identify the data. And if Google sells access to the data, third parties would supposedly be bound by the same terms.

It may sound like a solid plan if you ever flew on Spirit Airlines and interacted with an employee by email or chat. However, Google’s privacy commitments protecting Spirit customers don’t seem to extend to former Spirit workers. Panicked by the deal, former flight attendants are now rushing to object, worried that Google has not agreed to strip confidential information that workers fear could possibly be used by Google or a third party to link them to scrubbed data.

In a court filing Tuesday, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), a collective bargaining unit that represents Spirit workers, argued that Google relied on consumer protection laws to guarantee the data wouldn’t contain personally identifying information (PII). However, those laws do not cover worker confidentiality, and that allegedly leaves a huge privacy loophole in Google’s deal, especially when you consider that the tech giant is buying worker data, not consumer data.

“The privacy architecture of this transaction is consumer-facing; its payload is disproportionately employee-facing,” the AFA argued. “Hence, the employee data is far more confidential than the customer data, yet receives far less protection than the customer data.”

The sale comes after Spirit Airlines went bankrupt and decided to auction off a massive dataset to the highest bidder. A privacy litigation director for a digital rights nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Adam Schwartz, told Ars that the sale alarmed privacy advocates.

“EFF opposes using a person’s data for a new purpose without first getting their consent, which does not happen when a bankrupt company sells its employees’ emails to become AI training data,” Schwartz said.

Google wins the auction

At the auction, Spirit debtors seemingly prioritized choosing a buyer with a plan that would least frustrate the customers it lost when the airline abruptly shuttered on May 2.

The virtual auction was described beat for beat in a court filing supporting the data sale to Google from Dylan Friesner, the vice president of PJT Partners LP, which is Spirit Airlines’ investment banker.

Held on August 14, Google placed the opening bid at $5 million, while promising from the start to cover the cost of a third party scrubbing the data. Competing bids raised next were rejected after requesting additional consumer data, including a certain customer list that Spirit wouldn’t sell. But any bid seeking to include PII in the sale was cast aside after the first round.

Included in the dataset were Spirit computer programs, applications, and code, as well as worker data spanning decades, including approximately 100 million employee emails, HR information, payroll data, and data measuring employee behaviors, activity, and productivity.

A court document showed that Google spent two and a half hours fighting off other bidders. Mercor Corporation was its fiercest rival for the data, but Mercor tried to avoid terms that would require a third party to scrub the data. Instead, Mercor floated rejected bids repeatedly offering to scrub the data itself.

Ultimately, Google won by offering the highest price, $10 million, as well as by going the extra step of covering the costs of hiring a third-party service to scrub the data to comply with consumer privacy laws. An alternative bid with similar terms for $7.5 million was accepted from Mercor, should Google fail to follow through on the purchase.

In the flight attendants’ objection—which is “limited” and does not seek to disrupt the sale—the AFA argued that Spirit debtors should have protected workers as strongly as they did consumers. “The Sale Agreement nowhere requires that anyone screen for, segregate, or restrict the use of confidential employee information” that employees deem sensitive. Specifically, they argued:

“Deidentification addresses whether a record can be traced to a named individual. It does not address whether the contents of the record are confidential. A flight attendant’s disciplinary correspondence, a crew training deficiency, a leave or accommodation request, an internal Teams exchange about staffing or scheduling grievances, and a payroll adjustment history each remain sensitive employment information whether or not the employee’s name has been stripped from it.”

Further, they’re concerned that despite Google’s agreement to never intentionally re-identify anyone in the data, the company could possibly combine the worker data with other Google datasets to re-associate them with their Spirit data.

Google says it won’t re-identify data

In a statement to Ars, a Google spokesperson suggested that the company isn’t interested in using the data to identify people connected to Spirit Airlines. Google purchased the data to improve its AI and other products.

“We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models,” the spokesperson said. “We will not receive any personal information from this dataset. Any data we receive will be rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt.”

Although the AFA doesn’t make a “technical claim that any particular record can be re-identified,” they feel that they don’t need to because the risk is not speculative. For years, “increasingly powerful computer hardware” has made it easier to combine publicly available data—like you might find in Google searches—with scrubbed data to de-anonymize it, a Georgia Law researcher noted back in 2017. If Google is using the data for AI training, then it will inevitably be combined with other data.

It’s also troubling to flight attendants that Google’s deal only limits intentional efforts to identify individuals in the data. That overlooks concerns that confidential data can expose information particular groups of Spirit workers might not want public.

“Where a small, highly structured population is described across linked operational and communications datasets spanning more than a decade, the risk that information about identifiable individuals or small identifiable groups can be inferred is not speculative, and the Buyer’s covenant reaches only intentional association,” the AFA wrote.

They argued that Google’s public commitments against re-association “are real and were not obviously required,” but “a pseudonymized dataset can still disclose which crew bases generated grievances, how a small subset of flight attendants performed on recurrent training, which employees were subject to investigation, what compensation adjustments followed which events, and what employees said to one another about management, staffing, or their union.” Although Google won’t have names, “the consequence is that information whose sensitivity has nothing to do with names will pass through untouched.”

Flight attendants warned that so far, only Google has a voice in how de-identification works. They argued that the court should acknowledge that’s a problem since Google’s process allegedly ignores “legitimate concerns of parties who are not at the negotiating table.”

To protect workers, the AFA asked the court to deny approval of the sale until Google agrees to exclude all flight attendant information from the purchase and to notify workers when Google allows a third party to access the data.

Ars could not immediately reach the AFA’s lawyer for comment, but the filing is dated one day after the court’s deadline to object to the sale. It’s currently unclear if the court will weigh the AFA’s objection, but the AFA’s filing suggested a representative would be at a hearing scheduled in September where the court will possibly approve the sale.

“If the Court does permit the sale to move forward, it should only approve the sale until at a minimum the same protections extended to consumers are extended to former Spirit flight attendants,” the AFA argued. That should include directly prohibiting Google from using worker data to “analyze, profile, evaluate, score, or draw conclusions regarding any individual Spirit flight attendant or any identifiable group or subgroup of Spirit flight attendants, and from attempting to re-associate the Deidentified Data with any Spirit employee,” their filing said.

Sale requires public trust in Google

Although flight attendants seemingly feel that workers are most vulnerable to privacy risks from the data sale, consumers who understand how easy it is to re-identify scrubbed data may share their concerns.

Google is still reviewing the AFA’s objection, while maintaining that data privacy is at the heart of the deal.

A source close to the sale, who was granted anonymity to discuss the technical risk of Google re-identifying the de-identified data, told Ars that Google’s vendors will apply certified de-identification industry standards to ensure that all PII is removed from the dataset. Google won’t receive the data until it’s scrubbed and will never gain access to the original identifiers, the source said.

Additionally, Google has made binding commitments in court to never intentionally re-identify the data.

However, as the flight attendants’ association pointed out, the data sale seems to require that both consumers and workers put a lot of trust in Google.

Meanwhile, skeptics, which to some extent includes the AFA, know that Google has been accused of shady data practices linked to privacy violations in the past. In 2024, Google settled a class action lawsuit raised by Incognito users and agreed to delete billions of data records reflecting users’ private browsing activities that it surreptitiously collected. Then last year, Google agreed to pay Texas $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit claiming Google unlawfully tracked and collected users’ private data regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data. In a press release, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton bragged that it was “the highest recovery nationwide against Google for any attorney general’s enforcement of state privacy laws.”

Consumers will also have to trust that Google’s third party does a thorough job sanitizing the data. Flight attendants are concerned that Google’s process seems to rely on removing identifiers from structured fields, like names associated with email addresses or chat sessions. That seems like a “poor instrument” to try to strip confidential info, even if the court agrees to order the conditions they have requested to drop their objection to the sale.

Left as is, Google’s deal omits consumer data while seemingly retaining records that any worker would consider confidential, the AFA argued.

“Nearly every consumer-facing category, including Customer Profiles, loyalty and Free Spirit data, active email addresses, chat sessions, call recordings, telephone numbers, website analytics, DOT complaints, is designated ‘Not Included,’” the AFA wrote in its objection. “Nearly every category under the heading ‘Team Member,’ time card information, employee data and employee records, employee business travel records, corporate and crew training records, payroll records, employee tax forms, and employee documents, is designated ‘Included.’”

Egypt-Ethiopia Nile Dispute Expands Into a Contest for the Horn

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IwPost
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Egypt-Ethiopia Nile Dispute Expands Into a Contest for the Horn


New Ethiopian hydropower plans are drawing Somalia, Somaliland, Eritrea and Gulf states deeper into the regional balance

Ethiopia’s plans to build three additional hydropower dams on the Blue Nile have reopened one of Africa’s most persistent geopolitical disputes, less than a year after Addis Ababa formally inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in September 2025.

For Egypt, the issue remains one of national water security. For Ethiopia, it is tied to sovereignty, electricity generation and economic development. The latest confrontation is unfolding in a regional landscape that looks increasingly different from the one in which the GERD dispute began more than a decade ago.

The Horn of Africa has become an arena where Nile politics intersect with competition over Red Sea access, ports, military partnerships and the growing involvement of Middle Eastern powers. Egypt has strengthened relations with several of Ethiopia’s neighbors, while Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have expanded their political, economic and security footprints across Somalia, Somaliland, Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia.

That does not necessarily mean Cairo and Addis Ababa are moving toward direct military confrontation. The emerging pattern is one of diplomatic pressure, strategic positioning and possible proxy competition—a distinction made from different perspectives by experts in Egypt and Ethiopia.

Recent Egyptian statements have become markedly firmer. Cairo maintains that new upstream projects should not proceed without prior notification and coordination, while Ethiopian officials argue that the country has the right to develop water resources originating within its territory. Egypt depends on the Nile for nearly all its freshwater, and the Blue Nile supplies approximately 85% of the water reaching the country.

Dr. Walid Kazziha, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo, described the latest phase as serious but still largely contained within diplomatic and legal channels.

“The Egyptian reaction is … limited to making statements [and] focusing on the legal violations that the Ethiopian action may involve under international law. There are no direct military tones to the Egyptian reaction,” he told The Media Line.

Egyptian warnings sharpened during the summer. On July 13, Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty rejected reports of additional unilateral construction on the Blue Nile and said Egypt reserved “the right to legitimate self-defense in accordance with the rules of international law.”

An unnamed Egyptian government official told the state-run Middle East News Agency on Aug. 16 that Cairo had “several means at its disposal” to protect its Nile interests and would not permit any country to control the river’s flow to downstream states.

Addis Ababa views the dispute through a fundamentally different political and legal lens.

Dr. Gashaw Ayferam Endaylalu, a senior researcher specializing in Nile hydropolitics and hydropower development at Ethiopia’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, said Ethiopia considers development of the river a sovereign right and an economic necessity.

“From the Ethiopian perspective, Ethiopia has a sovereign right to utilize the water resource of the Nile,” he told The Media Line.

“Ethiopia has a legal right, a sovereign right, to utilize its water resource for development purposes,” he added. “Because Ethiopia is an agrarian-based economy, food security is the main problem for Ethiopia. Water scarcity is the main problem for Ethiopia. Energy scarcity or energy poverty is also the main problem.”

The disagreement extends beyond the technical operation of dams. It also concerns which legal and political framework should govern the river.

The Nile River Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement entered into force in October 2024 after six countries—Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda—ratified it. South Sudan supplied the sixth ratification required for the treaty to take effect.

The agreement sets out principles including equitable and reasonable water use, avoidance of significant harm, data exchange and notification of planned measures. It also envisages a permanent Nile River Basin Commission. Egypt and Sudan did not ratify the agreement and are not bound by it, leaving a fundamental divide between upstream and downstream interpretations of the river’s governance.

Gashaw said Cairo’s reliance on the language of historical and existing water rights lies at the center of the disagreement.

“Those things [the claims of historical and existing water rights] are not acceptable since Ethiopia has also historical and territorial claims connected to the Nile,” he said.

For Gashaw, the Nile is “a development issue and a sovereignty issue,” rather than a matter that should be considered exclusively through a national-security framework.

The argument no longer stops at the riverbank.

Egypt’s expanding security relationships in the Horn have become part of how Addis Ababa interprets Cairo’s strategy. Egypt signed a security agreement with Somalia in 2024 and subsequently sent military aid to Mogadishu during a period of acute tension between Somalia and Ethiopia over Addis Ababa’s attempt to obtain access to the sea through Somaliland.

Turkey mediated the dispute throughout 2024, culminating in the Ankara Declaration on Dec. 11. Ethiopia and Somalia affirmed each other’s sovereignty and agreed to negotiate Ethiopian commercial access to the sea under Somali authority.

The countries restored diplomatic relations in January 2025 and opened technical negotiations the following month, although no final sea-access agreement has been announced.

Gashaw described those developments as part of an Egyptian effort to build pressure around Ethiopia.

Diplomatic and military encirclement is one of the strategies Egypt is using to isolate Ethiopia

“Diplomatic and military encirclement is one of the strategies Egypt is using to isolate Ethiopia,” he said. “Egypt is trying to create an alliance with Ethiopia’s neighbors, and Ethiopia is doing the same by diversifying partnerships as well.”

Cairo has presented its regional partnerships as serving bilateral security, Red Sea stability and Egyptian national interests. Their geography is strategically important to Ethiopia: Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia and Djibouti surround much of its route toward the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, while landlocked Addis Ababa has made access to the sea an increasingly important objective.

Egypt has also expanded military cooperation with Eritrea and secured contracts to develop Djibouti’s ports and later participate in their management, The National reported on Aug. 17.

Other countries are also shaping the strategic environment surrounding Egypt and Ethiopia.

Israel formally recognized Somaliland in December 2025, a decision sharply opposed by Somalia and Turkey. Ankara, already one of Mogadishu’s most important security partners, has expanded its presence through military cooperation, energy agreements, planned offshore drilling and preparations for a spaceport in Somalia.

Gashaw described Israel and Turkey as increasingly important competitors in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

Israel is also projecting power from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. So the main competition in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden is between Israel and Turkey.

“Israel is also projecting power from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. So the main competition in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden is between Israel and Turkey,” he said.

He argued that Israel’s recognition of Somaliland was partly intended to establish a presence overlooking the Gulf of Aden.

The Horn is also being drawn into growing competition among Gulf states. Reuters reported on Feb. 14 that the Saudi-UAE rivalry, initially centered on Yemen, had spread across the Red Sea into Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Libya.

The UAE has built influence across Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti through multibillion-dollar investments, diplomatic relationships and military support. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has increasingly aligned with Egypt, Turkey and Qatar.

These relationships do not produce a clean division into fixed blocs. Ethiopia maintains relations with competing powers, including the UAE and Turkey, while Egypt works with countries that may oppose one another elsewhere. A government may be a partner in one theater and a competitor in another.

Gashaw described Ethiopia as pursuing a “multi-vector foreign policy” based on engaging competing regional powers while avoiding membership in a formal alliance directed against Egypt.

Within that fragmented system, proxy competition appears more plausible than a conventional Egypt-Ethiopia war.

“I don’t think there will be a conventional open war between Ethiopia and Egypt for different reasons,” Gashaw said. “Instead … maybe there might be [a] proxy war or proxy competition.”

He predicted “geopolitical competition between the two countries” across Africa and said they would compete for influence over both the Red Sea and the Nile.

Despite viewing Egyptian strategy differently, Kazziha reached a similar conclusion about the immediate danger of direct conflict.

“Up to this point the issue is limited to [an] exchange of unpleasant statements, but [it] has not crossed into anything more serious,” he said.

Kazziha said Egypt may eventually seek intervention from President Donald Trump’s administration to restrain Ethiopia’s ambitions.

“Trump has in the past sent comforting signals to Sissi, but has not taken any serious steps toward mediation,” he said.

The United States has intervened before. During President Trump’s first administration, Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan held negotiations in Washington with the US Treasury and World Bank over the filling and operation of the GERD. The talks produced a draft agreement that Egypt initialed in 2020, but Ethiopia did not sign it.

Kazziha described the current confrontation as “a war of words” that could invite American intervention before it becomes more serious.

Gashaw said the competing interests surrounding the river make a decisive turn toward either sustained confrontation or lasting cooperation unlikely.

Conflict, competition, and cooperation will coexist in the Nile River Basin

“So, I don’t think conflict will dominate cooperation, even [as] I don’t think cooperation will dominate conflict,” he said. “Rather, conflict, competition, and cooperation will coexist in the Nile River Basin.”

China loading more missile punch into its frigate fleet

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China loading more missile punch into its frigate fleet

China’s Type 054B frigate upgrade is more than a bigger missile load—it is a warning that the next naval arms race may be won by the fleet that can combine firepower with mass.

This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that China appears to be expanding the missile capacity of its next-generation Type 054B guided-missile frigate by 50%, outfitting a new hull under construction in Shanghai with a 48-cell vertical launch system (VLS), according to satellite imagery captured by US intelligence firm Vantor in June.

The imagery reveals a six-unit VLS layout at the vessel’s bow at the Hudong Zhonghua shipyard, marking an upgrade from the four eight-cell modules (32 cells) installed on the first two commissioned Type 054B frigates, the Luohe and Qinzhou.

The additional cells — which launch HHQ-16 surface-to-air missiles and Yu-8 rocket-assisted anti-submarine torpedoes — are engineered to significantly boost the 5,000-ton warship’s anti-saturation defenses and regional air-defense envelope.

Designed with radar-reducing stealth features and AI-assisted combat systems, the Type 054B serves as an escort for aircraft carrier strike groups and conducts long-range patrols.

A larger munitions payload directly enhances the vessel’s standalone combat effectiveness and survivability during independent single-ship missions in distant waters such as the Western Pacific and the South China Sea.

The Type 054B broadly occupies the same frigate category as the US Constellation class and its planned FF(X) successor, though the three designs reflect different capability tradeoffs. The roughly 5,000-ton Type 054B sits below the nearly 8,000-ton Constellation but close to the planned 4,750-ton FF(X).

The clearest distinction is missile magazine depth. The Constellation-class carries 32 Mk 41 VLS cells, compared with the upgraded Type 054B’s apparent 48-cell VLS. The initial FF(X), meanwhile, is planned without an integrated VLS and instead emphasizes modular weapons, unmanned systems and provision for up to 16 Naval Strike Missiles (NSM).

The Type 054B and Constellation nevertheless occupy broadly comparable multi-mission roles, particularly in anti-submarine, anti-surface and air-defense warfare as part of larger naval formations. In contrast, the FF(X) places greater emphasis on surface warfare, modular payloads and teaming with unmanned systems.

Explaining the advantages afforded by that increased VLS count, Dmitry Filipoff explains in an April 2023 article for the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) that larger magazine depth enables a platform to maintain force distribution longer by supporting multiple small salvos while staying on station.

Filipoff points out that an isolated or stressed platform benefits from a high magazine depth, allowing it to fire significant volleys, whether independently or as a final effort.

In contrast to a large magazine depth, Filipoff points out that a shallow magazine depth necessitates more frequent reloading during conflicts, which can disrupt force deployment. He also adds that a shallow magazine depth leads to last-ditch, independent salvos with limited firepower, decreasing the chances of overwhelming the enemy.

Situating the role of Type 054B in carrier operations, Daniel Rice mentions in a July 2024 report for the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) that the Type 054A frigate – and possibly the up-armed Type 054B – is deployed as a dedicated escort within their carrier’s “Middle Defense Zone,” spanning 45 to 185 kilometers.

Rice notes that these ships serve as the carrier’s “constant bodyguard,” functioning as a secondary defensive barrier alongside the Type 052D destroyer. He says they are tasked with neutralizing any adversary subsurface, surface, or aerial threats that slip past the outer defensive perimeter consisting of carrier-based fighter aircraft and submarines.

These frigates could also reinforce China’s quantitative naval advantages. An April 2025 US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report notes that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is the world’s largest navy, with 370 platforms, including major surface combatants, at the time of its writing.  

According to the report, China’s overall battle fleet is expected to grow to 435 ships by 2030, with much of that growth in major surface combatants. In contrast, the report says the US Navy had 296 battle force ships as of September 2024 and that this number is projected to shrink to 294 by 2030.

Numerical mass enhances scouting capabilities, facilitates saturation attacks via massed fires, and enables forces to absorb enemy first salvos while maintaining dominant striking power.

Furthermore, superior numbers deplete enemy precision-guided weapon inventories, create complex targeting dilemmas, and provide a vital reserve to replace combat losses in protracted attrition warfare.

However, simply having numerical mass doesn’t ensure naval superiority, since factors such as training, sensors, networking, logistics, weapons quality, and command effectiveness affect how effectively those ships are utilized.

The US still holds major qualitative advantages in high-end warships, submarines, carrier aviation and networked warfare, but quality cannot fully compensate for a shortage of affordable combat mass.

Kevin Eyer points out in an April 2026 Proceedings article that the US has so far failed to produce affordable surface combatants due to relentless requirements creep and gold-plating, which led to the cancellation of the Constellation-class frigate program in November 2025, leaving only the first two of six procured ships under construction.

Eyer says that by overloading small hulls with unproven technologies, excessive speed mandates, and complex multi-mission requirements like area air defense, costs spiraled while construction stalled.

He adds that former US Secretary of the Navy John Phelan noted that the Constellation-class cost 80% of an Arleigh Burke destroyer yet had only 60% of its capability, making it more sensible to buy more of the latter ships.

In the aftermath of the Constellation-class program, the US initiated the FF(X) program, a new frigate design based on the US Coast Guard’s National Security Cutter (NSC), with a planned procurement of 50-65 units.

However, a January 2026 Navy Lookout article notes that the FF(X) design may involve significant compromises. The article notes that the FF(X) would be substantially smaller than the Constellation-class and slightly smaller than China’s Type 054B – that smaller displacement could impose significant limits on magazine depth, power generation, and future upgrades.

Beyond that, the article says that the FF(X) may have survivability issues. It notes that while the baseline NSC design meets US Coast Guard protection standards, it falls short of the required level for purpose-built warships.

Navy Lookout says that modifying the NSC to the FF(X) may entail several modifications to the design – threatening to repeat the same gold-plating mistakes that ended the Constellation-class frigate program.

To expedite the FF(X)’s entry into service, the article notes that the US Navy may have to treat the class as expendable and accept a higher risk to its crews.

Unless the US learns to trade exquisite specifications for rapid, repeatable production, the decisive naval contest of the 2030s may hinge less on which fleet fields the best ships than on which can keep enough credible hulls fighting after the opening salvos.

Israel risks ceasing ‘to exist as a state,’ senior Russian general says

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Israel risks ceasing ‘to exist as a state,’ senior Russian general says

A senior Russian military official said Israel risks ceasing “to exist as a state,” claiming Tel Aviv’s main objective is to escalate the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and draw the US and NATO into the war, Anadolu reports.

In remarks released on Wednesday, Lt. Gen. Apti Alaudinov, deputy chief of the Russian military’s Main Military-Political Directorate and commander of the Akhmat special forces, told state news agency TASS that the regional conflict is likely to intensify further.

“We must realize that the war in the Middle East will only escalate. I believe that is precisely Israel’s objective to ramp up the conflict as much as possible and drag both the US and the entire NATO bloc into it,” Alaudinov said.

OPINION: No Coming Back from Genocide: Israel’s Global Counter-Offensive Has Begun

Ultimately, he warned, Israel “will overestimate their strength and cease to exist as a state.”

Tensions in the Middle East have heightened after the US and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran on Feb. 28. In response, Tehran retaliated with strikes on regional countries hosting US assets.

Iran and the US signed a memorandum of understanding in June aimed at ending the war and paving the way for a broader agreement, but the arrangement later broke down amid mutual accusations of violations and renewed hostilities.

Diplomatic efforts have since failed to produce a breakthrough on reopening the Strait of Hormuz or resuming negotiations on a broader agreement.

READ: West Bank approaching ‘point of no return’: Russia

NASA calls off mission to rescue Swift gamma-ray observatory

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NASA calls off mission to rescue Swift gamma-ray observatory

NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on a robotic mission to rescue the Swift gamma-ray telescope before it falls out of orbit.

The rescue satellite, named Link, launched July 3 on a journey to fly up to NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, capture it with three robotic arms, and boost its orbit high enough to escape a looming reentry. Link is about the size of a refrigerator, with two power-generating solar arrays and three xenon-fueled electric thrusters to send Swift into a safer, higher orbit.

Katalyst, the startup leading the Swift rescue effort, said Wednesday that “ongoing attitude control issues” will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission. The spacecraft is still alive, and Katalyst said it will make the most of Link’s remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of the satellite’s close-in navigation system.

“While the mission will not have the ending we originally intended, NASA and Katalyst are assessing what milestones remain ahead,” Katalyst said in a statement. “We will continue working to extract technical and operational value from the spacecraft.”

It was a lot to ask

The Swift rescue mission was always risky. NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract less than a year ago to build and launch the Link satellite. NASA said Katalyst had to launch the rescue mission by this summer in order to reach Swift before it falls back into Earth’s atmosphere and burns up.

“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting.”

NASA gave Katalyst a remarkably tight schedule. It usually takes several years to ready a first-of-its-kind satellite for launch. Katalyst did it in nine months. The timeline forced hard trade-offs, with the schedule driving engineers to tolerate technical risks they might not otherwise accept. Everything seemed to go well during the satellite’s first few weeks in orbit.

That changed in late July when the Link spacecraft suddenly spun out of control. Katalyst hasn’t said what caused the problem, but two of the satellite’s three reaction wheels, used for attitude control, stopped working. There were also issues with cold gas thrusters used for finer pointing control. That left the satellite’s three low-impulse plasma thrusters as the only means of regaining control of Link’s orientation as it zipped around the Earth at nearly 5 miles per second.

But it wasn’t enough.

“Katalyst designed, developed, and launched an experimental spacecraft to go after an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline,” Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said. “We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way. We have already learned a tremendous amount, and now our job is to turn those lessons into something durable—building a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing.”

Artist’s illustration of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

Credit: NASA/Northrop Grumman

Artist’s illustration of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Credit: NASA/Northrop Grumman

Katalyst is one of several US companies working on satellite servicing. These kinds of missions could eventually refuel, repair, or upgrade satellites. The rendezvous sensors and robotic arms used by Katalyst are crucial technologies for future servicing missions.

“Building, testing, and operating this mission has already strengthened America’s space industry pipeline, advancing in-space servicing capabilities in completely new ways,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, which oversees the Swift Observatory. “We’re so proud of this team for: getting to the launch pad in record time, in a record-setting year for NASA astrophysics launches; its innovative problem-solving up to this point; and the dedication to the exciting capabilities this mission will attempt to demonstrate next.”

While there is much to celebrate with Katalyst’s accomplishments, giving up on rescuing Swift will commit the nearly 22-year astrophysics mission to a fiery end. Swift is falling out of orbit and is expected to reenter the atmosphere later this year.

Swift is an old mission that has far outlived its original two-year design, but astronomers still rely on it to detect and study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the known Universe. Swift’s unique combination of multi-wavelength instruments and agile pointing allows it to identify and locate gamma-ray bursts for follow-up observations by other observatories.

The problem is Swift lacks thrusters to maintain its orbit, so a rescue effort like Katalyst’s Link mission was the only way to keep the $500 million observatory going.

“We were all hoping for more science from Swift,” Domagal-Goldman said in a statement. “But we knew the takeaways from this mission would be worthwhile either way, and we have gained so much through the series of accomplishments up to this point.”

Princess Diana’s brother to publish book about her life

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Princess Diana’s brother to publish book about her life


Charles Spencer, the brother of Britain’s late Princess Diana, is to publish a book about his sister’s life, promising to divulge the ​truth about her ahead of the 30th anniversary of her ‌death.

Diana, the first wife of King Charles, was killed aged 36 in August 1997 when the car carrying her and her lover Dodi al-Fayed crashed in the Pont ​de L’Alma tunnel in Paris as it sped away from chasing ​paparazzi photographers on motorbikes.

“Swan Song: Diana, My Sister” penned by ⁠her brother, known as Earl Spencer, is slated to be released next ​month in Britain and published around the world, telling the story about Diana, from ​his perspective, according to its publisher Michael Joseph, a division of Penguin Random House.

“With the 30th anniversary of Diana’s tragic death on the skyline, I’ve been inundated yet ​again with requests for interviews about my sister,” Spencer said in a ​statement.

“This has convinced me to write down my own thoughts and memories, once and for ‌all, ⁠rather than having the discomfort of again reading the opinions of others, many of which are based on untruths that have become accepted over time.”

Diana became the most photographed woman in the world after marrying Charles in ​a glittering ceremony ​in 1981. However, ⁠the marriage turned sour and they eventually divorced in 1996.

At her funeral, Spencer famously delivered a eulogy in which ​he castigated the royal family.

“The aim of this book ​is to ⁠tell the truth about Diana from her brother’s perspective, just as I attempted to do when speaking at her funeral. As with my eulogy, I want ⁠to ​speak on Diana’s behalf and do so ​in an openly positive way,” Spencer said.

Daniel Bunyard, Publishing Director at Penguin Random House, said it ​would be a “book of historic importance”.

Source:  Reuters

Defense minister talks are bigger than just India and Japan

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Defense minister talks are bigger than just India and Japan

Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi’s visit to India on Thursday, August 20, 2026, could well mark the beginning of a structural transition in Asian security architecture, shifting major bilateral relationships into cross-border defense-industrial frameworks.

Koizumi’s meetings with Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh come at a moment when Asia is struggling to decipher and mitigate strategic risks associated with Trumpian policy volatility and Beijing’s accelerated revisionism.

It’s significant that the visit comes just as India and Japan launch their first defense co-development project – the UNICORN integrated mast, featuring “ninja tech” to add to warships’ stealth capabilities – and Japan relaxes the export restrictions that had constrained its defense industry for decades.

Japan needs greater defense production capacity, technological resilience and the ability to sustain a prolonged conflict without depending entirely on American supply. India wants access to Japanese technology, but on terms compatible with Make in India, domestic production, and technology absorption.

Both face a China whose military-industrial scale is expanding rapidly along with its revisionist threat quotient. Both also operate in an Indo-Pacific in which US policy is becoming less predictable.

Japan faces assertive Chinese military posture in the East China Sea and growing security coordination among Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang. Japan’s Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, has suggested that an attack on Taiwan could threaten Japan’s survival.

India must manage both the US and China. The main strategic imperative underpinning the growing India-Japan relationship is the realization that single-source security and industrial dependencies are no longer tenable in a fracturing geopolitical landscape.

Systemic vulnerabilities in global supply chains, the potential for persistent maritime friction at sensitive points in Asia, and the economic and political constraints within Western defense-industrial bases are forcing a reassessment of regional deterrence.

The India-Japan response to a complex context is about a network of economic, technological and defense relationships that gives each country more options. The significance of the visit, therefore, is not only about another reaffirmation of the India-Japan strategic partnership. It’s also about questions of how the two countries can, and will, build industrial capacity partnerships that reduce their respective strategic vulnerabilities.

Japan cannot give up its US alliance. India will retain its policy of strategic autonomy. But neither country can assume that a single external power will always supply the technology, capital, weapons and components and the military or strategic support required in a crisis.

Japan’s own defense documents now explicitly call for multilayered networks among allies and like-minded countries, connecting training, operations, defense equipment, and industrial bases. India-Japan cooperation fits directly into that architecture.

The timing matters for Japan because the character of warfare has changed faster than the structure of defense production. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have demonstrated that a prolonged conflict can consume missiles, drones, ammunition and other equipment at rates that peacetime production systems cannot easily replace.

Japan’s defense establishment is consequently placing greater emphasis on sustainability and resilience alongside stand-off weapons, missile defense, unmanned systems, cross-domain operations and command-and-control. Its Defense Buildup Program states that by fiscal 2027 Japan should have sufficient capability to take primary responsibility for dealing with an invasion, while still operating with the support of its allies and others.

Yet, Japan is not becoming militarily independent from the US. Japan seeks greater capacity to act and sustain itself before American support becomes indecisive. It’s a crucial distinction.

Japanese dependence on the US is not only about combat forces. It extends to weapons inventories, replacement parts, munitions production, advanced technologies and industrial supply chains. The limits of US production capacity have become more visible as Washington simultaneously supports Ukraine, manages conflicts in the Middle East and seeks to reinforce deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. The result is a Japanese incentive to build additional production relationships with countries such as India and Australia.

India’s calculation is about both defense autonomy and industrial capability. Its interest is in converting strategic defense convergence into domestic manufacturing capability. Japan brings strengths in precision engineering, electronics, sensors, communications, robotics, advanced materials and shipbuilding. India brings a much larger manufacturing workforce, engineering capabilities, lower production costs, and an expanding defense-industrial base.

Image: Times of India

The UNICORN project provides a model where Japanese companies supply design and core technology while Bharat Electronics Limited undertakes manufacturing and integration in India.

The implications extend beyond the mast itself. UNICORN combines communications, surveillance, and electronic-warfare functions within an integrated naval system. Its localization in India creates the possibility of developing Indian suppliers, maintenance capabilities and system-integration expertise rather than treating Japanese defense equipment as an imported end-product.

The goal is a platform that can be maintained, modified, and progressively integrated with Indian systems. This sort of a platform is more crucial for India than any weaponry end-product whose critical components remain externally controlled.

The same logic applies to the wider areas of cooperation already identified. Japan and India are examining unmanned systems and robotics, advanced electronics, semiconductor and critical-mineral supply chains, advanced materials including carbon fiber, artificial intelligence and military applications, satellite-enabled maritime-domain awareness and maintenance, repair and overhaul.

Japan’s manufacturing strengths can therefore connect with India’s production scale across a wider industrial ecosystem rather than through isolated defense purchases.

The economic side is equally important. Japan has set a new target of ¥10 trillion, or about US $63 billion, in private investment in India. Japanese companies are looking at India as a manufacturing location for semiconductor materials, advanced chemicals, composites and other inputs.

Japanese investment in India is therefore becoming relevant not simply because India is a large market, but because production located in India can diversify Japanese companies’ exposure to China. Japanese FDI into India is rising while flows into China have fallen sharply, although much of this remains commercially rather than politically driven.

Japanese companies are relocating from China as a response to both geopolitics and market opportunities, supply-chain risks, and economic calculations. The geopolitical effect is highly significant. Japanese manufacturing investment in India can create additional Asian production nodes for semiconductors, advanced materials, chemicals, batteries and other strategic inputs. That reduces concentration risk without requiring either country to sever economic relations with China. It is hedging through industrial geography.

For Japan, this is also about China. Tokyo’s latest defense assessment describes China as its greatest strategic challenge and identifies as major concerns the expanding Chinese military capabilities, maritime activities around Japan, pressure around Taiwan and China-Russia military cooperation.

Japan therefore needs not simply more weapons but a broader industrial base capable of sustaining them. Its defense strategy explicitly connects defense-equipment transfers with shared production, maintenance and sustainment infrastructure.

The April 2026 revision of Japan’s Three Principles on Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology is consequently central to what can happen next. The old restrictions had made serious defense-industrial cooperation difficult. The revised framework retains prohibitions, examination requirements, and controls on third-country transfers, but permits a much broader range of defense-equipment transfers.

Japan’s own defense policy now treats equipment transfers as a means of strengthening the capabilities of allies and like-minded countries while also sustaining Japan’s domestic production base.

For India, the significance is that the regulatory barrier has moved, although it has not disappeared. Japanese technology transferred to India remains subject to conditions, including controls over subsequent transfers to third countries.

This becomes particularly important if India and Japan move from UNICORN towards jointly produced drones, naval systems, electronic-warfare equipment, sensors, or other platforms that India might eventually want to export. The Three Principles could potentially shape not only bilateral cooperation but the emergence of India-Japan defense products for third-country markets.

There is also an important US dimension. Japan’s diversification of defense-industrial partnerships should not be interpreted as an attempt to replace Washington.

Japan remains deeply integrated with the US in advanced computing, artificial intelligence, quantum technology and advanced materials. But diversification gives Tokyo greater bargaining power and resilience within that alliance. It also gives Washington an additional reason to regard Japanese and Indian industrial capacity as complementary to, rather than dependent upon, US power, Trumpian insecurity notwithstanding.

For India, this calculation is significantly consequential. A stronger Japanese manufacturing presence could create an Asian production network that is not dependent on either Chinese manufacturing concentration or US technology alone.

This is the real strategic value of Koizumi’s visit. The objective is not to choose between China and the US. It is to build enough technological, manufacturing and defense-industrial interdependence among Asian powers that dependence on either becomes less constraining.

Amazon aims for delivery drones to reach 500 US neighborhoods by end of 2026

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Amazon aims for delivery drones to reach 500 US neighborhoods by end of 2026

Amazon wants to grow its Prime Air delivery drone service sixfold to reach nearly 500 cities and towns across the United States by the end of 2026. The planned expansions from Amazon and its rivals could make the convenience of delivery drone services available to tens of millions more people in the coming months—but will also test more communities’ tolerance for increased noise from daily drone flights.

On August 19, Amazon announced it would soon launch Prime Air in the metropolitan areas of Chicago; Cleveland; Atlanta; Syracuse, New York; and Boise, Idaho, with more to come later in the year. Each Prime Air site offers delivery drone service within an area of about 175 square miles, with delivery times ranging from half an hour to an hour.

Prime Air already operates out of Amazon warehouses in 10 cities across seven states. Those include primarily suburban neighborhoods of Phoenix; Tampa; Kansas City; Omaha, Nebraska; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Detroit; Houston; and San Antonio, Dallas, and Waco, Texas.

The Amazon Prime Air expansion comes as competitor Walmart has teamed up with the companies Wing and Zipline to scale up its own delivery drone service. Walmart recently celebrated the milestone of surpassing 1 million drone deliveries after operating from 66 stores across four states, and is looking to expand that service footprint to more than 270 Walmart stores by 2027.

Separately, Zipline also just announced a partnership with Uber aimed at scaling up to 1 million drone deliveries per day by the end of 2029. Having initially pioneered long-range drone deliveries of blood and other crucial medical supplies in Africa, Zipline has been steadily growing its US delivery operations and claims to have already made more than 2.7 million deliveries worldwide.

Even DoorDash is looking to build its own in-house delivery drone program. In July, the delivery service company announced it had received its FAA Part 135 certification to launch what it describes as DoorDash Air—though it is still in the early phases of designing its delivery drone and planning out operations.

The accelerating US expansion of drone delivery services promises speedy deliveries to customers within an hour, and sometimes within minutes in the fastest cases. Such autonomous drones typically run on battery-electric power and potentially offer lower-emission, lower-cost operations without putting more vehicles on the road for last-mile deliveries.

However, delivery drones are still limited in how much they can carry. For example, Amazon describes its drones as being capable of handling nearly all items weighing five pounds or less that can fit within a large shoebox. Strong winds, heavy rain or snow, and extreme cold can also prevent drones from operating.

There have also been community concerns about safety, privacy and especially noise pollution in neighborhoods serviced by drones. None of those issues are likely to go away as US companies ramp up delivery drone services nationwide with the regulatory approval of the US Federal Aviation Administration.

Safety records

Zipline appears to have the cleanest safety record despite its autonomous drones having collectively flown over 100 million miles. The company includes backup parachutes for its drones, which have apparently proven handy on a few occasions when individual drones ran into trouble while delivering Walmart orders this year.

By comparison, Amazon Prime Air’s operations have led to several safety incidents that sometimes triggered investigations by the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board.

Two Amazon delivery drones crashed into a stationary construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona in October 2025, while another delivery drone took down an overhead Internet cable in Waco in November 2025. The federal government’s investigations into those incidents are ongoing.

“We trained our algorithms; we felt pretty good, but we found in the real world the performance just wasn’t good enough, and let me tell you, that was a humbling experience,” said David Carbon, vice president of Prime Air at Amazon, in a recording of an internal staff meeting in March that was obtained by CNBC.

The most recent incident saw a vertically ascending Amazon delivery drone collide with an apartment building before falling to the ground in Richardson, Texas, in February 2026.

Alphabet-owned Wing has experienced at least one notable safety incident when a food delivery drone caught fire after landing on top of overhead power lines in Brisbane, Australia, in September 2022. That forced the energy company Energex to temporarily shut down electricity service to about 2,000 people.

A Wing delivery drone fulfilling Walmart orders also crashed and burned on grassy ground in Kemah, Texas, in March 2026.

Losing the sound of silence

The most common complaints about delivery drones have less to do with safety than with the persistent noise. Some people have described hearing delivery drones multiple times a day over their houses.

“It’s the equivalent of a flying leaf blower, lawnmower 20 feet over my house, 50 times a day,” said Joshua Brent, a resident of Hazel Park, Michigan, in an interview with the TV station WDIV. “My dogs lose their minds and get upset.”

Multiple posts on the topic of delivery drone noise have also appeared on community-focused subreddits on Reddit. Although Wing and Zipline drones are sometimes mentioned, many posts tend to focus on the noise from Amazon’s delivery drones.

“Some days I hear them 5 or 6 times back and forth every 15 minutes,” commented Reddit user Puzzleheaded_Belt740 in a subreddit for Royal Oak, Michigan. “They are so LOUD, it sounds like a small helicopter hovering.”

Some Reddit users described attempting to ask Amazon customer service to reroute drones around their house but without much success. Others said they had filed noise complaints with the FAA.

“More often than any actual street traffic in our neighborhood. it’s actively altered the ambiance of our home,” wrote Reddit user le_artista in a subreddit for Richardson, Texas. “A business gets to loudly disturb our home, unsolicited, unwanted and with no recourse to keep them out apparently.”

Residents from several neighborhoods in Richardson even held a public protest over the noise from Prime Air operations in June. Amazon responded by describing its efforts to do public outreach before launching delivery drone services and its willingness to continue engaging with local community concerns.

Some people also voiced privacy concerns about having drones constantly fly or hover over their backyards. “I was in my backyard sunbathing and had like 4 drones go over my house and felt super creeped out and ended up going inside,” said Reddit user redheadjo8 in the Royal Oak subreddit.

Amazon has described its delivery drones as only using onboard cameras and sensors for navigation, obstacle detection, and dropping off packages, without tracking individuals or recording people’s movements.

“There is no live camera feed monitored by any person,” according to an Amazon News article about the Prime Air service expansion. “The onboard camera data is processed by the drone itself for safe navigation.”

It will be worth seeing how many people voice their concerns to local city councils or the FAA in the coming months. The FAA’s latest data shows that the total number of registered noise complaints and inquiries for drones is still relatively low compared to noise complaints for helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft—but that could change as US delivery drone operations continue expanding nationwide.

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