Brent M. Eastwood

Summary and Key Points: The US Navy built only 2 North Carolina-class battleships, and one of them holds a record no other battleship on earth has ever matched.

The Luftwaffe sent 8 Eurofighter Typhoons to Red Flag–Alaska in 2012, beat F-22 Raptors in close-range fights, and painted Raptor silhouettes on their jets to mark it.

Patton designed his own uniforms, wore riding breeches and high boots, carried ivory-handled revolvers, and fined men who turned up without a necktie — in combat. Eisenhower and Marshall came close to relieving him twice. They kept him because he took El Guettar in March 1943, ran the deception that sold the Normandy landings, and turned the Third Army ninety degrees into the Ardennes in December 1944.

Born in San Francisco in 1940 while his father was on tour, on screen at three months old, a child star in Hong Kong with 20 films behind him before adulthood, bullied by British schoolboys into taking kung fu lessons from Ip Man, and a philosophy major at the University of Washington. He built Jeet Kune Do — the Way of the Intercepting Fist — around the idea that no fixed style survives contact with a real opponent.

At Red Flag 2012, German Eurofighter Typhoons “killed” F-22 Raptors in dogfights, put Raptor decals on their jets and boasted of “Raptor salad for lunch.”

“War is just like boxing. When you get an opponent on the ropes, you must keep punching the hell out of him and not let them recover.” General George S. Patton.

Before Lockheed drew the SR-71, Soviet designer Pavel Tsybin was already sketching a Mach 3 spy plane. His RSR, for jet strategic reconnaissance, began in 1954 as a ramjet design meant to reach 98,000 feet, range deep over American missile fields and cities, and even drop a nuclear weapon on the way.

The Trump-class battleship promises up to 200 missile cells. The Navy’s last three new ship classes produced 3 Zumwalts, 2 Constellations and a $22 billion LCS.

Russia's only aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, has been out of service since 2017, and $1 billion and nine years of repairs are ending at the scrap yard. The PD-50 dry dock sank under her in 2018 and a 70-ton crane fell through the flight deck; fires killed workers. By 2025 the navy gave up and sent her sailors to fight in Ukraine. Her sister ship sails for China as the Liaoning.

The Air Force retired the SR-71 Blackbird in January 1990, officially over cost. A new memoir by Colonel Richard “Butch” Sheffield, a retired Blackbird Reconnaissance Systems Officer, adds other reasons: generals balked at more than $200 million to operate 10 airplanes, NSA thought the jet flew too fast for communications intelligence, and the chief of staff warned Lockheed that keeping the SR-71 alive would hurt its bid for the F-22.