Conflict, strategy, and defense technology.
Nukewars

Why did closing a Cold War-era Air Force base on the shore of a Great Lakes peninsula in the 1990s trigger the return of nesting piping plovers to beaches that had not seen a chick fledge in decades?

The 1993 closure of Wurtsmith Air Force Base on Lake Huron preserved miles of undeveloped shoreline at the exact moment federal biologists were scaling up recovery for a Great Lakes piping plover population that had crashed to 12 breeding pairs. Today it stands at 88.

By Space War Editorial Team · Sep 21, 2026

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Climate Science

How does breaching a dike and removing a tide gate on a Pacific Northwest estuary let salt water back into diked pasture and bring juvenile salmon and sculpins into fields that had grown hay for decades?

Removing a single derelict tide gate on a Pacific Northwest estuary breaks a 140-year seal, lets salt water reclaim diked hayfields within one tidal cycle, and reopens miles of blind channels that juvenile Chinook, sculpins, and Dungeness crab colonize in their first migration season.

By Space War Editorial Team · Sep 16, 2026
Flora And Fauna

Sandhill cranes stage on Nebraska's Platte River each March in flocks approaching 1 million birds, roosting shoulder to shoulder on shallow sandbars the river only maintains because upstream irrigation withdrawals stop short of erasing its braided channel

Each March, more than a million sandhill cranes pack the shallow sandbars of Nebraska's Platte River in the single largest gathering of any crane species on Earth — a spectacle that depends on a braided channel the river barely still maintains.

By Space War Editorial Team · Sep 15, 2026
Flora And Fauna

Manatees in Florida's Crystal River gather by the hundreds each winter around freshwater springs that stay at a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit, a thermal refuge that protects them from potentially fatal cold stress when Gulf water falls below 68 degrees

Every winter, hundreds of Florida manatees crowd into Crystal River's freshwater springs, where water flowing from the Floridan aquifer holds a constant 72 degrees. The margin between survival and cold stress is only four or five degrees, and the springs are what keeps them alive.

By Space War Editorial Team · Sep 14, 2026
Earth

Alligators in Florida's Everglades dig depressions through muck and peat, often down to the limestone bed, during the dry season, and the water-filled holes they maintain concentrate fish, turtles and wading birds so densely that ecologists count them as critical dry-season refuges across the southern marsh

During the Everglades' dry season, American alligators excavate and maintain water-filled depressions in the limestone that concentrate fish, turtles and wading birds — a piece of animal-built infrastructure that ecologists increasingly treat as central to how the southern marsh works.

By Space War Editorial Team · Sep 14, 2026

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Conflict, strategy, and defense technology.

SpaceWar is an independent publication covering military space, nuclear strategy, great-power competition, defense technology, and the security forces shaping modern conflict. The site pairs a deep archive with current reporting on the governments, companies, policy shifts, and technical breakthroughs shaping defense, deterrence, and global security. We employ modern AI technologies to support our editorial workflows. Every published piece is reviewed and approved by a member of our team before it goes live.

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