This week, a Pentagon official anonymously told USA Today that the U.S.-led air campaign against ISIS had killed 20,000 of the group’s fighters in just over a year. That figure was up from July, when “military and intelligence estimates” suggested that 15,000 members of the Islamic State had been killed.

For more than a decade the U.S.’s drone program has been shrouded in secrecy. But a new series Thursday in The Intercept pulls back the curtain on a number of details that, among other things, reported that nearly 90 percent of people killed in drone strikes over a 5-month period were unintended causalities.

In a 8-part series titled “The Drone Papers,” the online news site obtained a cache of classified documents from an anonymous whistleblower that offer a glimpse into the internal process of the U.S. military’s drone operations, which have become a tool to remotely kill al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives.

"it will take eight to 10 years for Pakistan to incorporate the eight submarines from China into its combat capacity," an article in state-run Global Times said, the first comment in the Chinese media on the deal.

"It will be extremely hard to break the military balance of India and Pakistan with the latest acquisition. Pakistan is actually trying to prevent the gap between its naval strength and India's from widening," it said.

"The USD 4-5 billion deal (with Pakistan) is reportedly China's largest ever arms deal and can be a milestone in China's arms export. Some consider the deal as a new benchmark for China's arms trade that grows with its increasing military strength," said the article.

The Malaysian Defense Minister will attend an informal meeting between Chinese and ASEAN defense ministers and the sixth Xiangshan Forum in Beijing.

A future sixth-generation fighter will need to have potent electronic and cyber attack capabilities—stealth alone will not cut it going into the future. Air Force officials admit that privately and Navy officials are adamant about it.

But stealth is not going away. The F-X and F/A-XX will need to have broadband all-aspect stealth—which means that it can’t have protruding empennage surfaces like tail fins. Broadband stealth all but mandates a flying-wing design—but industry sources say that will be extremely challenging and—very possibly—impossible even with thrust vectoring.

While a flying-wing bomber is relatively simple to design without tail fins, a fighter is a different matter. A fighter does not have the wingspan to use differential control surface movement for low speed control. Nor is thrust vectoring a viable solution, particularly during landing when the engines are at a low power settings. Industry officials say it’s a vexing problem to solve—thus the Air Force and Navy might be forced to rely on electronic and cyber warfare to counter low-frequency radars that can detect and track tactical fighter-sized stealth aircraft.

“There are other ways to survive, and we will look at the best combination of ways to survive in the future,” a senior Air Force official told me last year. “I wouldn’t say it is going to be 100 percent stealth, and I wouldn’t say it’s going to be zero percent stealth.”

The RDO-3221 KOMONDOR is the first light-armoured military vehicle developed in Hungary for almost four decades, Attila Zsitnyányi, head of the Hungarian Defence Industry Association and chairman of Gamma.

October 8, The Houthi alliance have launched a missile attack against a Saudi coalition warship and destroyed it off the coast of Yemen in the Bab al-Mandab Strait after the ship had repeatedly fired rockets on residential areas in the province of Ta’izz, inflicting casualties and destruction. Earlier, a Saudi soldier was killed in a rocket attack on a military base in the Saudi province of Jizan and destroyed a number of armored and military vehicles. A Saudi coalition airstrike struck another wedding ceremony in Yemen’s province of Dhamar, killing at least 23 people and wounding dozens more. Another airstrike in Sa’ada claimed the lives of at least 3 people, including 2 children. In the province of Ma’rib’s Sirwah district near the Kofel military camp, at least 160 Saudi coalition forces were killed and 378 others injured in airstrikes over the Kofel district, Sirwah market as well as Jebel Hilan, where a number of phosphorus bombs were used. ISIS bombings hit the government’s temporary headquarters and military installations in Aden killing more than 15 people raising a fresh challenge for the Saudi coalition.

October 9, Warplanes from the Saudi coalition raided positions east of the rebel-held capital in the west to regain control of Ma’rib province in a bid to advance on Sanaa. Raids also targeted Hodeida and arms depots on the Nahdain hill south of Sanaa.

October 10, Houthi alliance army spokesman, Col. Luqman vows that more surprises are awaiting the Saudi coalition aggression. He said: “We have defense systems which they had not experienced,” that we will use in the coming days. He dismissed the “fake victories” announced by the Saudi-led media, saying: “They said they will enter Mar’ib and then will move to Sana’a within 48 hours. Up till now 40 days have passed and they did not control but a town near their camp there

October 11, The Houthi alliances destroyed a second Saudi warship in a missile attack in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. Tens of Saudi coalition soldiers were killed and several Saudi military vehicles destroyed in retaliatory attacks in the province of Ma’rib. The Houthi fired 40 missiles and artillery shells at the districts of al-Qamar and Sudanah near al-Qarn military base in Jizan leaving several Saudi coalition soldiers dead.

October 12, Al-Qaeda is thriving in the civil war, and in the besieged city of Taiz, the Islamists are uniting to fight the Houthi alliance. At least 20 prisoners were killed and up to 30 others were wounded when warplanes of the Saudi coalition bombed a prison in the province of al-Bayda which held more than 100 prisoners, controlled by the Houthi alliance.

October 13, Saudi coalition warplanes launched air strikes in Taiz, including the medical college near the presidential palace and the 35th Brigade headquarters in the old airport. Yemen’s army and popular forces fired rockets and artillery shells at military bases in Saudi Arabia’s Jizan province in retaliation for the kingdom’s aggression against their nation, leaving several Saudi soldiers dead.

October 14, The leader of Yemen’s Houthis urged all followers on Tuesday to head to war fronts to repel the called invaders, saying: “We cannot sacrifice our dignity and freedom and independence. We will defend our land and our honor.”

There are not enough Raptors and they don’t carry enough missiles. For example, it’s fairly routine for four Raptors to take on more than twenty Red aircraft during training exercises. Moreover, those Raptors help fourth-generation fighters like the F-15 to engage their targets — but the frequent complaint from both Raptor along with F-15 and F-16 pilots is that they run out of missiles very, very quickly.

That’s especially true with the advent of digital radio frequency memory jamming that wrecks havoc on the AIM-120 and even the active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars found on America’s best fighters.

“We — the U.S. [Department of Defense] — haven’t been pursuing appropriate methods to counter EA [electronic attack] for years,” a senior Air Force official with extensive experience on the F-22 told me last year. “So, while we are stealthy, we will have a hard time working our way through the EA to target [an enemy aircraft such as a Russian-built Sukhoi] Su-35s and our missiles will have a hard time killing them.”

While the F-22 force could slaughter hordes of Chinese J-10s in a battle with relatives ease, eventually the U.S. aircraft would be overwhelmed as they run out of missiles — especially if they are not killing those enemy aircraft one-for-one with their missiles. The Chinese — like the Russians — have formidable electronic attack capabilities including DRFM jammers.

Really, the only chance aircraft like the J-10 stands against the Raptor is to overwhelm the U.S. military with numbers. Basically, the Chinese would have to hope that jamming would allow some of their aircraft to ride out the onslaught of AMRAAMs raining down on them while they close to visual range. It’s only close in during a visual range dogfight where high off-boresight missiles and luck might afford them a chance.

But while China can afford to lose dozens of cheap J-10s, we only have 143 operational Raptors. It’s a strategy that worked for the Soviet Union during the Second World War; it could certainly work for China.

According to Al Arabiya, the Turkish air force gave three warnings before shooting it down. A Reuters report has claimed that it was a drone. However, based on the photos shared on Twitter, it is believed that it was a military helicopter.

Chechen-born Abu Bakr al-Shishani, the top commander of Ahrar al Sham terrorist group in Homs province, was killed in a Russian airstrike in Syria, Fars news agency reports .

The Syrian army also killed two other top commanders of the Takfiri terrorist group, including head of the militants’ operations room, in Homs Thursday.

The terrorist commander, Rawad al-Aksah, was killed in Teir Ma’la in Homs countryside. Al-Aksah was in charge of Homs operations room, and also led the terrorists in Teir Ma’la.

Reports from Homs said that another top terrorist leader, Amer Moussa Shiblout, has also been identified among the dead.

Four of the seven Dhruv helicopters delivered to Ecuador between 2009 and 2012 have crashed. One was assigned to transport President Rafael Correa, though he was not in the aircraft at the time.

Ecuador earlier complained that HAL had failed to ship some parts for the helicopters, which were bought for a total of $45.2 million.

Besides Ecuador, the Dhruv is also operated by the security forces of Nepal, Mauritius and the Maldives. The Dhruv has also been offered to Malaysia and Indonesia.

Growing numbers of Islamic State militants in Syria have become discontent with their command and deserted the ranks of the militant group amid the Russian anti-terror operation, Moscow's Defense Ministry said on Friday.

"The majority of armed gangs are demoralized. Discontent with field commanders is growing amid the fighters, and there are instances of disobeying orders," senior Russian General Andrey Kartapolov told a media briefing.

Cases of desertion among the jihadists are no longer isolated, with them now fleeing "en masse," the colonel general, who heads operations in the Russian general staff, added.

Meanwhile, some of the strikes conducted in Syria by the US led coalition destroy objects of civilian infrastructure, the Russian military official said, adding that it results in the growing flows of refugees fleeing from their native lands to the European Union.

On October 11 a Syrian thermal power plant was destroyed by the coalition strikes, Kartapolov said, adding that the location had been bombed repeatedly for several days. As a result, civilians in the city of Aleppo were left without electricity and sewerage stopped functioning, the general told defense attaches and journalists.

Three-D printing could potentially enable the Defense Department to reduce inventory and storage space, and thereby lower costs, she noted. It could also allow the military to print obsolescent parts that are no longer being manufactured.

As the technology advances, some military leaders want to give 3D printers to depots and deployed troops to facilitate maintenance and operational readiness and save money. The Navy is particularly gung-ho about the technology, having created a “Print the Fleet’” project two years ago to develop procedures for building, qualifying and delivering parts. In recent years, the U.S. military has 3D-printed basic items like oil caps and medical supplies. Going forward, officials envision printing out larger, more complex objects such as aircraft wings or even small drones.

“Soon there will be no physical tether to the supply chain,” Vice Adm. Phillip Cullom, deputy chief of naval operations for fleet readiness and logistics, said at an additive manufacturing conference earlier this year, according to a Navy news release.

But integrating 3D printing into the force on a large scale isn’t as simple as buying the machines and materials and installing them downrange. Many issues and challenges need to be addressed, analysts and industry executives said.

Jim Joyce, a specialist leader at Deloitte Consulting’s manufacturing and operations office, said ensuring quality is the key obstacle.

On Wednesday, Oct. 14, DARPA announced its latest program named Dynamic Network Adaptation for Mission Optimization (DyNAMO) that will aim to keep unmanned and manned combat aircraft connected when enemies try to jam and hinder their communications.

"We aim to develop technology that dynamically adapts networks to enable instantaneous free-flow of information among all airborne systems, at the appropriate security level and in the face of active jamming by an adversary," said Wayne Phoel, DARPA program manager.

The technology that is being developed is not very straightforward. Many combat aircraft in the U.S. operate on different platforms that have incompatible radio networks using different encryption schemes. DOD has developed special data-link gateways, which acts as universal translators between them, but the gateways' bandwidth is limited.

Phoel says that existing airborne networks in the U.S. are not intended to manage the complications of up-to-date dynamic and distributed combat missions. The challenge in this field is also expected to increase over the next few years.

DyNAMO targets at enabling pilots in a specific aircraft and with particular sensors to easily find and share information with other different forms of aircraft, whether unmanned or manned to get a complete vision of the combat battle space.

DARPA is expecting that the technology being developed by DyNAMO will run some customized radio hardware via the Communications in Contested Environments (C2E) program. The C2E program essentially seeks to translate and update data-link gateways with a design, which nearly resembles those used in commercial smart phones.