Section
Defense
Vance presses Trump on Iran war intel as US missile stockpile fears mount
Vice President J D Vance has privately pressed President Donald Trump on whether the Pentagon is giving the White House an accurate read of the Iran war, including the scale of US missile-stockpile depletion. The report opens a rare crack in the administration's national-security discipline.
Pentagon awards Scale AI a $500m contract to sift battlefield data
The Pentagon has awarded Scale AI a $500 million contract to help process battlefield data and assist in operational decision-making, a five-fold expansion of a $100 million deal struck in September 2025 and the latest sign that the US military is wiring its planning workflow into Silicon Valley.
Inside Anduril: how a quiet engineer-CEO is building America's $31bn defense startup
Brian Schimpf, the soft-spoken former Palantir engineer who co-founded Anduril with Palmer Luckey in 2017, runs a $30.5 billion private weapons company whose Lattice software is being written into nearly every major Pentagon counter-drone program.
US ships $2.1bn in cheap APKWS rockets to Israel, Qatar and UAE as Iran war drains stockpiles
The State Department on May 1 cleared three emergency foreign military sales totalling $2.1 billion for the APKWS guided rocket, a Korean War-era weapon retrofitted as the West's cost-effective answer to Iranian Shahed drones. Israel and Qatar each get 10,000 rounds; the UAE gets 1,500 air-to-air guidance sections.
Taiwan defense budget stalls for third time as Trump-Xi summit nears
Taiwan's ruling and opposition parties on Tuesday failed for the third time to break a deadlock over a NT$1.25 trillion ($40 billion) special defense budget, with the latest negotiation collapsing days before US President Donald Trump's mid-May trip to China for a summit with Xi Jinping.
