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The main job of the U.S. Air Force’s growing fleet of F-15EX Eagle IIs has been and continues to be air-to-air combat, especially in defense of the U.S. homeland . However, operational and test units are laying the groundwork for F-15EXs to also take on air-to-ground missions.

Despite its primary mission set, air-to-ground capabilities are inherently a part of the F-15EX’s design. The Eagle II is a member of the extended F-15E Strike Eagle family, having been derived from the F-15QA developed for Qatar .

Last week, the Oregon Air National Guard’s 142nd Wing shared that one of its F-15EXs had dropped training bombs for the first time ever during a trip to Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho back in May. The 142nd, based in Portland, Oregon , is currently the Air Force’s only operational unit flying the Eagle II.

A stock picture of one of the 142nd Wing’s F-15EX Eagle IIs. USAF

“The crew dropped a total of 24 BDU-50s and 12 BDU-56s over 10 missions with zero safety incidences and satisfactory scores,” according to an official release . “These ‘bombs’ were loaded onto the F-15 EXs and dropped in the Mountain Home firing range complex.”

The BDU-50/B and BDU-56/B are inert training bombs with the same shape and weight as live 500-pound-class Mk 82-series and 2,000-pound-class Mk 84-series bombs, respectively. In U.S. service today, bombs in the extended Mk 82 and Mk 84 families are far more commonly employed in combination with Paveway laser guidance or Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) GPS-assisted guidance kits.

The BDU-50s and BDU-56s are still useful tools for training more general ‘dumb bombing’ skill sets for aircrew and for handling of air-to-ground weapons on the ground. This includes things like going through the procedures for targeting and safe release from an aircraft, as well as loading and unloading the bombs from planes.

A stock picture of a pair of BDU-50/Bs on a dolly about to be loaded onto an F-15E Strike Eagle during training. USAF

Basics are especially important for the members of the 142nd, which previously flew F-15C Eagles with no operational air-to-ground capability. It’s also worth noting here that the F-15C was a single-seat type, while the F-15EX is a two-seater. However, the Air Force’s plan, at least initially, has been for a single pilot to fly the Eagle II, something we will come back to later on.

The 142nd does have some personnel with air-to-ground mission experience from prior assignments, but this is still a new mission set for the unit as a whole, which requires new training regimens.

Three pilots from the 142nd “attended a 9-month training course to understand the science behind dropping bombs and the tactics involved. They were tasked with creating a program to train the rest of the wing’s pilots on the basics so they could make the first steps to be able to drop munitions,” according to the official release. Earlier this year, weapons loaders from the Wing also “traveled to Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. where they worked with F-15 E-models assigned to the 59th Test and Evaluation Squadron to become certified on loading bombs.”

The Air Force’s Test and Evaluation community has already been validating the F-15EX’s air-to-ground capabilities . This testing is now extending overseas. Earlier this month, the 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron brought an Eagle II from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to Kadena Air Base in Japan to support a munitions load training event. An F-15E Strike Eagle also took part in that training. Pictures the Air Force released on Monday show that live GBU-53/B Small Diameter Bomb IIs (SDB IIs), also known as StormBreakers, were among the munitions that ground personnel at Kadena practiced loading onto the jets.

GBU-53/B Small Diameter Bomb IIs sit on a dolly in front of an F-15EX from the 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron during a training event at Kadena Air Base, Japan, on July 8, 2026. USAF

Airmen assigned to the 67th Fighter Generation Squadron prepare to load GBU-53/B Small Diameter Bomb IIs onto an F-15EX Eagle II assigned to the 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron at Kadena Air Base, Japan, on July 8, 2026. USAF

Two active duty squadrons of F-15EXs are set to be established at Kadena , taking the place of units previously based there that had flown F-15Cs. The Air Force has been deploying F-15Es and other fighters to the base on a rotational basis to fill the gap in the meantime.

The Air Force has previously announced plans to stand up National Guard F-15EX squadrons in California, Louisiana , and Michigan . The service’s proposed budget for the 2027 Fiscal Year outlines plans to dramatically expand the total size of the Eagle II force, which could lead to a dozen squadrons or more flying the jets in the end, as you can read more about here . How this might change the Air Force’s plans for employing the jets remains to be seen.

In its 2027 Fiscal Year budget request, the Air Force continued to stress that “the F-15EX aircraft will be used predominantly in defensive and offensive counter-air missions at both Air National Guard (ANG) and Air Combat Command (ACC) operational squadrons.” However, it did also note that the “F-15EX will perform the Homeland Defense mission and provide Combatant Commanders (CCDR) with strike packages capable of operating in Highly Contested Environments (HCE).”

As TWZ has been reporting for years , it has been more or less clear from the start that the F-15EXs would eventually take on more of a multi-role mission after entering service, despite the emphasis on the air-to-air role. This has also raised the possibility that Eagle IIs could be flown with Weapon System Officers (WSO) , another pilot with multi-role skills, or a mission specialist, in their backseats, just like their F-15E cousins.

A stock picture of an F-15E Strike Eagle with a pilot in the front seat and a WSO in the rear. USAF

“We currently don’t have conformal fuel tanks [CFTs] for it [the F-15EX], but there is a plan to get us conformal fuel tanks . And then when we do, we can start talking about putting all kinds of air-to-ground capabilities into the airplane, potentially putting WSOs or other experts in the backseat as well to have us do any number of multi-role capabilities that it’s just physically not possible to in the C model,” now-retired Col. Michael Kosderka, then commander of the 142nd, told TWZ in an interview back in 2024 . “So the X has tremendous growth capability. It’s really exciting.”

The F-15EX is capable of being fitted with the same CFTs as the F-15E, which give the aircraft more hardpoints for stores on top of providing extra fuel. The current status of the plan to get CFTs for the Eagle IIs assigned to the 142nd is unclear. The initial pair of jets for the Wing were delivered without them. The picture released of the F-15EX at Mountain Home for the air-to-ground training in May, seen at the top of this story, shows that jet, at least, still lacks them. The default configuration for Eagle II test jets includes the CFTs, as seen below.

An F-15EX assigned to the 40th Flight Test Squadron with CFTs fitted. USAF

“Basically, what it’s going to do is turn a wing with a primary mission that is on life support, frankly, into something that has America’s newest fighter, and we’re going to be relevant with that airplane for decades to come,” Kosderka added at that time.

“Gen. Kelly made it very clear in his public address here that the F-15EX is going to have an inherent capability that we need to put to work from day one, to include limited air-to-ground capability,” Lt. Col. Robert Waller, then commander of the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, also told TWZ in a separate interview in 2024 . Waller was referring to now-retired Gen. Mark “Grace” Kelly, who was head of Air Combat Command at the time.

All of this makes perfect sense given the F-15EX’s inherent ability to carry a lot of payload, including both air-to-air and air-to-ground munitions, over a long distance. The Eagle II can also accommodate outsized stores . These are attributes that have already made the F-15E one of the most heavily in-demand platforms in the Air Force today .

An F-15E seen loaded with five AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) cruise missiles, underscoring the jet’s payload capacity. USAF

Strain on the aging Strike Eagle fleet, which has been further magnified by the total loss of four of those aircraft this year during operations against Iran , might prompt the Air Force to consider further expanding the air-to-ground role of the Eagle II. Additional planned F-15EX purchases could very well enable the retirement of at least some older F-15Es, as well as other aircraft . In 2024, Congress blocked an attempt by the Air Force to divest roughly half of its Strike Eagles .

There is already substantial overlap between the F-15E and F-15EX communities , as underscored by the 142nd Wing’s milestone air-to-ground training at Mountain Home in May.

Air-to-air missions still look set to be the dominant task for the F-15EX fleet, at least in the near term, but work is being done now to ensure the jets can also take on air-to-ground missions if the call comes.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post Air-To-Ground Capabilities Are Already Creeping Into The F-15EX’s Mission Set appeared first on TWZ .

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Egyptian developer demonstrates how to block ads with an ESP32-C3 "SuperMini" board

ESP32 ad-blocking dongle costs just $5 to build

537,000 blacklisted domains are stored in the device’s 4MB of flash memory

When online ads become a problem, ad-blocking software is a good idea, used in conjunction with dedicated hardware like a Raspberry Pi running Pi-Hole. But what if the device is rebooting or otherwise out of action? Egyptian developer ZedAxis claims to have developed a solution that might inspire a rethink on how online whitelisting and blacklisting is processed.

Relying on a sub-$5 ESP32-based mini board, the device somehow squeezes over 500,000 domains into paltry 4MB of onboard flash storage.

The build has been demonstrated on YouTube, with the video of the “DNS sinkhole” apparently providing how simple it is to set up. All the hard work has been done by ZedAxis, with the code available via GitHub.

What is an ESP32-C3?

ZedAxis has built the compact Pi-Hole substitute from a $5 ESP32-C3 “SuperMini” board, easily available from online stores (currently £3.50 on the UK Amazon). These devices feature USB-C for power, Bluetooth 5.0, and crucially for a project like this, Wi-Fi.

The board has been paired with a USB adapter and a 3D-printed case to enable it to be plugged into a power source – in this case, the back of a router, but it could be a TV, console, or any other always-on device with an unused USB port. Direct access to the device is available through a web dashboard, it supports mDNS for easy discovery, and can download over-the-air (OTA) updates.

Code for the project is available on the developer’s GitHub , where the unusual compression that shrinks over 500,000 domains into 4MB of flash storage is explained.

Isn’t that a lot of domains for 4MB?

Strictly speaking, 4MB should not be able to hold 500,000 domains. As described on the project’s GitHub, the actual figure is around half that (141,000 taking up “~2.5 MB of RAM”). So how are the 537,000 domains squeezed into 4MB of RAM?

The board chosen is specifically free of PSRAM (so it just has the flash) and rather than 32-bit or 64-bit, hashes the domains into 40-bit FNV-1a, an algorithm designed for speed and low-collision rates. So, 141,000 domains can be squeezed into 0.7MB of flash, with under 50 KB of RAM apportioned for matching the blacklisted ad domains.

In most cases, the blacklist is limited to around 250,000 domains as OTA firmware updates need around 1.3MB of the flash. But this can be determined when the device is set up and the first blacklist pull is made. Other features are set to be added to this project, including set up as a DHCP server.

The big question is, could this be adopted by, say, small businesses looking for a reduction in broadband bandwidth being eaten by ad networks?

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The face of a young woman crowned with a laurel wreath, buried in elaborate clothing and unusual cork sandals, has appeared nearly 1,700 years after her death.

She is one of 16 people from Aquincum, a Roman-era city in present-day Hungary, whose faces have been reconstructed for "Once We Were Like You," a new exhibition at the Aquincum Museum in Budapest. The display pairs skulls excavated in and around the ancient city with scientifically informed approximations of how their owners may have looked in life.

Six of the reconstructions are hyperrealistic silicone models, complete with artificial eyes, human hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and, in some cases, beards. The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 31, includes men, women and a child who lived during the region's period of Roman rule.

"The face is the most important feature for recognizing a person," Emese Gábor , a forensic facial reconstruction specialist who sculpted the silicone faces, told Live Science in an email. Although a skull cannot reveal every detail of a person's appearance, reconstruction lets museum visitors encounter the faces as those of "a real human being rather than as skeletal remains," she said.

The entrance to the "Once We Were Like You" exhibit at the Aquincum Museum in Budapest. (Image credit: Gábor Lakos Aquincum Museum Budapest) Rebuilding a Roman face

Aquincum stood on the Danube frontier of the Roman Empire in what is now Budapest. The city was home to a diverse population in the first through fourth centuries, and genetic and archaeological analyses of the individuals in the exhibition point to connections with regions including present-day Italy, Scotland and Syria, as well as Sarmatian groups from the Eurasian steppe and Celtic communities that lived in the region before Roman rule.

The remains of those who lived here have also been unearthed, and continue to be discovered today during the excavation of cemeteries," according to a statement from the museum.

Creating a reconstructed face begins with a high-resolution 3D CT scan of the original skull. Specialists then produce an exact 3D-printed replica, allowing experts like Gábor to work without repeatedly handling or disturbing the ancient remains.

"The latest scientific advances — including 3D scanning, CT imaging, archaeogenetic (ancient DNA) analysis and facial approximation research — are incorporated whenever possible," she said.

"If a hyper-realistic reconstruction is required, I create a mould and cast the face in coloured silicone, finishing it with real human hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and, where appropriate, a beard," she said.

ARC-heo art-REKO Studio ARC-heo art-REKO Studio ARC-heo art-REKO Studio ARC-heo art-REKO Studio ARC-heo art-REKO Studio Ancient DNA can sometimes provide additional clues about pigmentation, including probable eye, hair and skin color. But the results are still approximations, not portraits. For instance, hairstyle, expression and many details of the person’s appearance are usually more speculative.

The woman with the laurel wreath

Of all the people she reconstructed, Gábor said she found it especially difficult to forget the woman known as the Jablonka Road mummy .

The woman's skeleton was relatively well preserved, but the soft tissue on her face had decayed, leaving only the skull. A laurel wreath still rested on her head, and, according to Gábor, her burial contained fine clothing , a spindle for weaving, bird-shaped cork sandals and a painted male portrait that had been placed near her feet. Archaeologists have suggested that the portrait may have represented her husband or father, although his identity is unknown.

The silicon reconstruction of an ancient construction worker. (Image credit: Gábor Lakos Aquincum Museum Budapest) "Based on these details, the archaeological context and the anthropological data, it was the archaeologists who pieced together her story while I reconstructed her face," Gábor said. "That was very moving."

Other individuals selected for the exhibition include those of a young girl who died in childhood and a woman interpreted as a nurse or healer who was buried in a children's cemetery. Some of the other reconstructions include a construction worker, a military officer and a blacksmith.

Two women appear to have met particularly violent or punitive ends. They were buried face down with their legs bound together, Gábor said. The exhibition's interpretation associates one woman with an accusation of witchcraft and the other with poisons, although such details are historical interpretations rather than evidence-based findings from the burials.

Gábor stands in front of a display showing the reconstructed face of a child from Aquincum. (Image credit: Gábor Lakos Aquincum Museum Budapest) "Every reconstruction is a journey," Gábor said. "As I shape each face, I find myself reflecting on that person's life again and again, and by the end, they no longer feel like anonymous remains, but like real people."

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Analyses of the skeletons suggest that many of the individuals endured strenuous physical labor, periods of hunger and chronic inflammation. This evidence led museum curators to conclude that many represented the less wealthy inhabitants of Roman society — people whose names and experiences were unlikely to appear in surviving written histories.

For Gábor, the physical reconstructions offer something that a digital image cannot: Visitors can stand face-to-face with a life-size person, walk around the model and study it from different angles. Her hope is that this encounter encourages visitors to think beyond the scientific data and imagine the full lives that once surrounded the excavated bones.

"When you see a face, you don't just see bones in a display," Gábor said. "You see a person — someone who was born, who grew up, who worked, who loved, who laughed, who struggled, who fought with challenges, who raised children. Some were sick. Not everyone died of illness. Some died in accidents. Some through violence. And eventually, all of them died. That sense of shared humanity helps spark empathy."

Can you match these historical maps to the empires that ruled them? Test your geography skills with our ancient empires quiz !

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President Donald Trump’s latest threat to bomb Iranian infrastructure is unlikely to rattle Tehran — and instead underscores the limits of what an air war alone can accomplish.

The Trump administration has become increasingly frustrated by Iran’s refusal to capitulate, as the two sides have escalated attacks over the past month in a fight for control of the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for world energy supplies. Now, Trump has pledged to hit “one bridge or power plant” for every ship attacked in the Arabian Gulf.

But five months into the massive U.S. air campaign, a ceasefire lies in tatters, Tehran hasn’t relinquished its claims on the Strait, and the Pentagon has been unable to fully eliminate the regime’s ability to launch drone and missile strikes — a reality underscored by the deaths of three U.S. servicemembers over the past weekend.

Unless the administration is willing to sharply up the ante — perhaps by substantially expanding the list of acceptable targets or even deploying ground forces — the current cycle of attack and counter-attack will likely continue without a clear endgame or offramp from the White House.

“We’ve seen that when the U.S. applies force hesitantly or incrementally, what it does is it prolongs conflict and it increases risk,” said one former military officer, who, like others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to speak frankly. “If you don’t have the threat of force and are willing to follow it up, you’re not going to convince the enemy of anything.”

So far, there has been no buildup of ground forces that would suggest a land invasion is on the horizon. The American force posture remains what it was in February when the U.S. and Israel launched their first airstrikes, with rotations of air wings and ships keeping the number of troops in the region at around 50,000, one U.S. official said.

“Right now, the President is focused on making Iran pay for their violations of the MOU and their continued acts of terrorism in the Strait of Hormuz,” a White House official said. “In addition, the President will make Iran pay for the recent deaths of U.S. soldiers. These devastating blows will continue until the President deems otherwise, but talks between our countries are continuing.”

The Pentagon did not respond to a requests for comment.

Historically, air power has been successful at eliminating specific targets, but it’s proven less effective when it comes to regime change or achieving strategic victory over an enemy.

“I think we’re understanding the limits of air power here because we’re basically at a stalemate,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine in a hearing on Tuesday.

Caine himself acknowledged during the hearing that “airpower has its limits, and we always have to be mindful of those” when it comes to trying to achieve a military victory.

And Tehran has shown its willingness to endure the American bombardment.

Rachel VanLandingham, a retired Air Force judge advocate who has advised military commanders on the laws of war, said that “the expansion or intensification of the strikes to more civilian infrastructure isn’t going to change the regime’s mind,” adding that the strikes would be legal provided there is some military use for any bridges or power plants that are hit.

“Even if these strikes that are expanding to greater numbers of civilian infrastructure targets are lawful, they’re ineffective” in convincing Tehran to give up, said VanLandingham.

So far, there aren’t clear indications that top officials on either side have embarked on a clear path to finding a way out of the fighting. Instead, they’re looking to win what advantage they can in a relatively small-bore conflict.

“Certainly, air power can do a lot” on its own, said former Central Command commander (ret.) Gen. Joe Votel. But the Iranian leadership has seemingly “made the determination that it is worth actually continuing to exercise control over the Strait of Hormuz, and I think they believe that maintaining that control is worth going back to this limited but escalating air campaign.”

A new POLITICO poll shows that not only are the Iranians not convinced, but there is some bleeding of support among Trump’s MAGA base.

In May, half of them thought the Iran war was worth its economic costs, but today only around a third holds the same opinion. That steep 13-point drop in just two months suggests that the president’s most ardent supporters are inching closer to the majority of Americans who have long opposed the U.S. involvement in the war.

An expanded air campaign raises the risk of civilian deaths. Upon entering office in 2025, Hegseth gutted the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which is tasked with limiting civilian harm during American military operations, over the objection of military leadership.

Opponents of the cuts argued that the office was critical for preventing risk to civilian populations, but Hegseth moved forward anyway, reducing the number of employees working on the issue from 200 to less than 40.

The current staff is almost exclusively focused on investigating reports of civilian casualties, and are no longer working on briefing ahead of upcoming strikes, according to a person familiar with the current office.

Independent estimates put the civilian death toll from the war inside Iran at around 1,700.

Hegseth, who’s long maintained that the Iranian military had been dealt a massive blow, admitted during Senate testimony Tuesday that “they still have capabilities, no doubt … But the amount of damage that we’ve done to them over the course of these series of operations has put them in the worst place they’ve ever been.”

The war has run $37.5 billion so far, Hegseth said, while making the case for an additional $67 billion from Congress for war costs and other expenses, over and above the administration’s record-breaking $1.5 trillion budget request for next year.

He declined to offer a timeline for when the war might end.

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As we descend ever further into an AI-fueled dystopia, one question about our future becomes ever more pressing: When the internet is dominated by machines, who's going to be around to continue its long-standing tradition of fetishizing Japanese culture and media?

Well, there's no reason to worry, because it turns out the AIs are weebs, too. According to a white paper published back in April , experiments indicated that—when asked open-ended questions about culture—frontier LLMs like Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek display a "disproportionate prominence of Japan" in their responses.

(Image credit: Getty Images) The study, conducted by a team of University of the Basque Country and Cardiff University researchers, was designed to assess the cultural and regional biases of LLMs. To do so, they constructed a multilingual set of 31,680 "open-ended yet culturally grounded questions," including prompts in 24 languages that spanned "66 cultural subtopics grouped into 11 higher-level domains."

The prompts included questions about belief and society, asking "What legends explain the land?" and "What is the role of neighbors?" They asked which subjects are most valued in school, what types of traditional dances exist, what foods are eaten during daily meals—all without directly referencing specific countries and cultures. After being given the initial prompt, the LLMs were then instructed to explicitly select a country or region to provide examples in their response.

"To reduce prompt variability, all questions follow a standardized template, and no explicit regional cues are provided," the researchers write. "This ensures that any regional or cultural assumptions arise from the model’s internal priors rather than prompt design."

(Image credit: NurPhoto via Getty Images) After prompting eight models—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Meta Llama, Command-r, Magistral, Qwen, and DeepSeek—the most apparent bias is an unsurprising one: Across all models, LLMs will most often answer cultural prompts with whichever country or region is associated with the language used in the prompt. In other words, when asked cultural questions in French, LLMs will tend to give responses referencing France and French culture.

However, whenever LLMs provided an exogenous reference—that is, answers referencing a different country than the one associated with the language used—they had a clear favorite: AI loves talking about Japan.

On average, six out of the eight evaluated models preferred to reference Japan during exogenous responses. The United States came in second, followed by India, China, and France—but across all models, in all 24 languages, LLMs overwhelmingly preferred referencing Japan in seven out of 11 cultural prompt topics when excluding own-country mentions.

(Image credit: 2K) "This pattern suggests an uneven regional representation in frontier model outputs, with a strong concentration on a small set of dominant regions," the researchers say.

The study wasn't just intended to assess LLM bias, but also when that bias emerges during LLM training. To do so, they compared the English responses of Meta Llama, Qwen, and Gemma, and Mistral models both before and after instruction tuning —the fine-tuning of a pre-trained LLM intended to optimize its ability to provide responses that are useful to the user and not just grammatically correct.

The researchers' findings indicate that, before instruction tuning, base models displayed a broader set of cultural associations: "While the United States remains prominent" in base model responses to English-language cultural prompts, "substantial references are also made to Japan, India, China, and several European countries."

(Image credit: hapabapa via Getty Images) After instruction tuning, however, LLMs show more marked cultural preference.

"Across all examined model families, instruction tuning sharply increases alignment with the United States and Japan while reducing references to most other countries," the researchers write. "This convergence toward culturally dominant regions occurs even in models developed outside Western contexts, indicating that post-training induces a homogenization of cultural perspectives rather than merely reflecting model origin."

The disparity is particularly pronounced for model variants that have undergone supervised fine-tuning, a type of LLM optimization in which the model is further trained on examples of correct responses—often using human-generated or human-curated datasets.

The researchers found that "SFT sharply increases concentration on a small number of dominant regions (most notably the United States and Japan)"—an effect that's "only marginally" mitigated by additional instruction alignment. Those findings suggest that the process of curating or authoring "correct" responses injects a cultural bias into the model's response criteria.

"Taken together, these results demonstrate that instruction tuning systematically reduces cultural diversity in model outputs, steering responses toward a limited set of culturally dominant perspectives, particularly those associated with the United States and Japan," the study reads. "This finding has important implications for the deployment of instruction-tuned models in cross-cultural or global applications, where preserving diverse cultural viewpoints may be critical."

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