#Air defense

Figure 1: The U-10 was a military variant of Helio Aircraft Company’s Super Courier. The Air Force, Army, and CIA used more than 100 aircraft in three different models during the Vietnam War. Here a U-10B of the 5th Special Operations Squadron is photographed over South Vietnam in 1969 (USAF photo)

After more than 25 years of successful but one-sided combat operations, plans to replace the U.S. Air Force’s legacy big-wing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft with new jets are in doubt. As Air Force planners see it, advances by “near-peer” adversaries such as Russia

Editor’s Note: A version of this article was originally published by The Interpreter, which is published by the Lowy Institute, an independent, nonpartisan think tank based in Sydney. War on the Rocks is proud to be publishing select articles from The Interpreter. By international standards, the

With the U.S. periodically sending the occasional sortie of B1 bombers, accompanied by South Korean fighters, over the Korean peninsula to simulate what a (very fast) war with Pyongyang would look like, the airspace over the biggest geopolitical hotspot in the world today just got a little hotter