Verified military news tracked by GlobalMilitary.net: aircraft losses and deliveries, warship commissionings, procurement decisions, program milestones and data analysis drawn from our inventory database. Also available as an RSS feed.
BAE Systems Australia laid the keel of NUSHIP Hunter at Osborne on 24 August 2026, starting hull assembly on the first of six ships and taking the British Type 26 design to 34 hulls ordered across the Royal Navy, Australia, Canada and Norway.
The US Navy disclosed the Raytheon-built AIM-424 Malice at the Tailhook symposium in Reno on 22 August 2026: a 1,500-pound two-stage weapon credited with more than 250 nautical miles of reach, destined for the Super Hornet, the F-35C and the future F/A-XX.
General Atomics has entered a clean-sheet drone called Wildfire into the Pentagon's Massed Modular Aircraft competition to replace the MQ-9 Reaper, a fleet that fell from 231 aircraft to 165 this year after 46 US Reaper losses in the war with Iran.
Satellite imagery dated 11 August 2026 shows the Paracel Islands feature turned into a 3.7-mile landmass with a deep-water quay and a 10,000-foot runway under grading, ten months after dredging began.
The US Army's choice of a wheeled Korean howitzer this week put a spotlight on a global artillery fleet that remains stubbornly majority towed, and on the handful of armies that have already left towed guns behind entirely.
The US Army awarded Hanwha Defense USA a $100.3 million agreement on 18 August 2026 for six Mobile Tactical Cannon prototypes, a wheeled 155 mm derivative of the K9 Thunder, with the first vehicle due this fall.
First images of a Blue Spear quad launcher aboard RSS Steadfast, taken during the frigate's August 21-22, 2026 port visit to Tokyo, confirm the Israeli-Singaporean missile has replaced the RGM-84 Harpoon on the Republic of Singapore Navy's six Formidable-class frigates.
US President Donald Trump told reporters on August 19 that Kim Jong-un has "57 very powerful nuclear weapons", four months after citing 45 - a figure he did not source, and one well below the range South Korea's defense ministry says it works from.
The annual US-South Korean exercise will end on August 21 instead of August 27 and its second command-post phase is cancelled, after President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon on August 16 to substantially reduce the drills.
President Lai Ching-te's government will ask the Legislative Yuan for NT$1.1225 trillion ($35.2 billion) in defense spending for 2027, the first Taiwanese military budget above NT$1 trillion and the first to exceed 3 percent of GDP.
Record carrier deployments, a western Pacific without a flat deck, two-thirds of the Patriot stockpile expended and a defense strategy that ranked the Middle East behind two other theaters: an assessment of what the 2026 Iran conflict has cost the US force.
Lockheed Martin said on August 18 that the Luftwaffe's first F-35A has completed final assembly at Fort Worth, with a rollout set for September 18 and the first aircraft due at a US training base before the end of 2026.
The US Navy awarded Raytheon a seven-year, $22.9 billion contract on August 17 to raise annual Tomahawk production from about 60 missiles to more than 1,000, after the Iran conflict consumed roughly a third of the American stockpile.
A presidential memorandum signed on August 13, 2026 lets allied yards build the first hulls of three vessel families abroad, provided they buy into or build a US shipyard - aimed at a fleet that fields 77 destroyers and not one modern frigate.
The Boeing-built Orca extra-large uncrewed undersea vehicle patrolled more than 1,000 nautical miles across the eastern Pacific in July, the longest autonomous mission the program has flown, the US Navy disclosed on August 15, 2026.
GlobalMilitary.net's incident log counts 45 established violations of European airspace between January 1 and August 16, 2026, against 31 for the whole of 2025 - and almost all of the growth sits in incidents that ended with a shootdown or an explosion on the ground.
A joint statement delivered to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva on 11 August 2026 asks every state to give at least 24 hours' notice before launching an ICBM, a submarine-launched ballistic missile or a space launch vehicle.
India's Ministry of Defence issued a request for proposals on 12 August 2026 for 60 medium transport aircraft to replace the Indian Air Force's An-32 fleet, and a parallel request for information for 150 advanced jet trainers to succeed the Hawk Mk 132.
Poland christened and launched ORP Wicher at the PGZ naval shipyard in Gdynia on 12-13 August 2026, the first of three 7,700-tonne Miecznik frigates derived from Babcock's Arrowhead 140 design and due in service in 2029.
After the August 13, 2026 memorandum ordering steam catapults back on CVN-81, a technical explainer on how a steam piston and a linear induction motor each throw a 30-tonne jet off a flight deck, and why the Ford class was built around electricity.
A steel-cutting ceremony at Song Thu Corporation in Da Nang on August 10 launched a 2,500-3,000-tonne anti-submarine frigate designed in Vietnam and armed largely by Viettel, in a navy whose nine frigates are all Russian or Soviet designs.