publications and forced many others to cut longtime editors and writers. War Is Boring budget was heavily slashed, most of the staff was laid off and story output greatly decreased. Before long, Axe publicly announced that War Is Boring was searching for a new publisher. In July 2015, War Is Boring and Reuters launched the War College podcast, a joint venture hosted by Reuters opinion editor Jason Fields and War Is Boring contributing editor Matthew Gault. David Axe left War Is Boring in 2019. Notable stories F-35 "dogfight leak" In 2015, Axe obtained a leaked testing report written by a pilot that recounted how the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter the tester was flying was unable to outmaneuver an F-16 fighter it was facing off against in a simulated dogfight, the report circulated widely in defense publications and mainstream media outlets. The story has since been proven to be a misrepresentation of the facts with Axe's claims disproven on the first page of the test report. Then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump cited War Is Boring coverage during an interview with Hugh Hewitt in which he argued the F-35 program should be cancelled. This possibly helped spur a showdown between Trump and Lockheed Martin execs that Trump claimed reduced the cost of the program, though several analysts have questioned the savings. Civilian casualties in Syria and Iraq War Is Boring reporter Joseph Trevithick obtained U.S. military documents that revealed possible mistakes by Canadian pilots in the war against the Islamic State that could have resulted in greater civilian casualties than initially reported. After breaking the story, War Is Boring worked with the Airwars project to share the documents with The Guardian, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Dutch-language RTL Nieuws. CBC's The Fifth Estate would go on to incorporate the data into a larger investigative feature. "Narin Afrin photo" controversy During the siege of Kobanî, a photo taken by British freelance photographer Matt Cetti-Roberts (at the time working with War Is Boring) of YPJ snipers in the town of Rabia became widely shared by activists on social media claiming it depicted female Kurdish guerilla leader Narin Afrin, who was apparently in charge of Kobanî's defense. The photo soon became a meme. War Is Boring Iraq coverage editor Kevin Knodell wrote a post clarifying the photo's origin, and asserted that the woman in the photo was highly unlikely to