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No, you don’t want to put up Halloween decorations this afternoon, you want to continue to avoid it until the last minute…and instead plan to join Mark and me from 5-6 PM for another LIVE Midrats Podcast! If its happening in the national security arena and its worth talking about, we’ll cover it. You can listen live and join the studio chat at this link. If you are reading this after the show, check back on the Substack page later Sunday night for the podcast audio links. Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

A Russian drone unit fired about 100 Lancet loitering munitions over three months and hit only three targets, according to pro-Russian militant Pavel Gubarev, who said Ukrainian air defenses brought down most of the rest. The account points to a sharp drop in the effectiveness of one of Russia’s most widely used strike drones, Ukrainian […]View the full article

Britain’s Ministry of Defence has opened a tender to buy Skydio X10D small drones, the American-made reconnaissance quadcopter already ordered by the thousands by the U.S. Army, with an estimated budget of £120,000 (about $160,700) excluding VAT, according to a notice on the Defence Sourcing Portal. The tender was issued by Navy Commercial, the Royal […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Pinckney (DDG 91) has entered General Dynamics NASSCO’s shipyard in San Diego for a second depot modernization period that will make it the first warship to receive the Raytheon AN/SPY-6(V)4 radar, the Navy’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Maritime said. The availability will also make Pinckney the first ship fitted with […]View the full article

DARPA, a central research and development organization within the United States Department of War, put four autonomous unmanned ground vehicles through their first end-to-end test at Fort Knox, Kentucky, on Oct. 15, sending them as a team from a satellite-imagery tip all the way to a simulated strike on an enemy position, with a human […]View the full article

Russia’s Amur Shipbuilding Plant has launched the multipurpose corvette Grozny, the fifth Project 20380 warship it has built for the Russian Navy’s Pacific Fleet, the fleet’s press service said. The ceremony took place on Oct. 23 in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in Russia’s Far East, more than five years after the ship was laid down on Aug. 23, […]View the full article

A French Navy Atlantique 2 maritime patrol aircraft has deployed to Romania and is supporting search and rescue efforts after a wave of drone attacks on merchant ships off the Romanian and Bulgarian coasts, while a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon has begun patrolling the Black Sea at Bulgaria’s request. The Atlantique 2 arrived in Constanța […]View the full article

Philadelphia-based Raptor Defense Company is advancing in two U.S. Army programs with PIT VIPER, a small modular wheeled unmanned ground vehicle the company calls a “Personal Combat Vehicle” and designs to be fielded at the level of the individual soldier, the company announced. Raptor was selected for Phase II of GroundBreaker 1, a joint unmanned […]View the full article

Ukraine has rejected Elon Musk’s claim that its military broke Starlink’s terms of service by using the civilian satellite network for offensive drone strikes, with a presidential adviser saying that restrictions SpaceX placed on the service in February make such use physically impossible. Musk made the accusation on X on Oct. 24, the same day […]View the full article

China and Russia sent military intelligence aircraft toward Japan on four consecutive days this week, prompting the Japan Air Self-Defense Force to scramble fighters each day, as two Chinese Y-9 aircraft crossed the gap between Okinawa and Miyako-jima into the Pacific on Oct. 20 and 21 and Russian IL-20 aircraft flew over the Sea of […]View the full article

Kadena Air Base in Okinawa will bar all vehicles made by Chinese electric carmaker BYD from entering the installation starting Oct. 26 over concerns that the cars could expose sensitive military information, Kangnam Times reported. The ban covers privately owned cars as well as contractor vehicles, taxis, delivery vans and other commercial vehicles. The 18th […]View the full article

Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said on Oct. 19 that the basic policy governing how the Ministry of Defense and the Self-Defense Forces use artificial intelligence needs to be reviewed, telling lawmakers that AI development has moved faster than the 2024 guidelines can handle, the Nikkei reported. “I feel there is a need to review […]View the full article

China and South Korea completed a 10-day joint maritime law enforcement patrol in the Yellow Sea fishing zone the two countries share under their bilateral fisheries agreement, with the China Coast Guard ship Changshan and the South Korean fisheries guidance vessel Mugunghwa 42 sailing together. Over more than 210 hours at sea and more than […]View the full article

China’s Liaoning carrier group has carried out its second far-seas training deployment to the Western Pacific this year, a decade after the carrier’s first such voyage in 2016, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported on Oct. 24, describing the ship’s path over those 10 years as a three-step climb from training ship to combat ship to […]View the full article

China’s 48th naval escort task force returned to a military port in Qingdao on Oct. 23 after 378 days away, the longest deployment in the history of the Chinese navy’s anti-piracy missions in the Gulf of Aden and the waters off Somalia, China’s Ministry of National Defense said. The task force, made up of the […]View the full article

The Turkish Naval Forces used HAVELSAN’s Barkan unmanned ground vehicle to support amphibious raid and urban warfare training and then to evacuate simulated wounded personnel during TURNAs-2026, the service’s unmanned maritime systems exercise under way in the Gulf of Antalya and the eastern Mediterranean from Oct. 19 to 27, the Naval Forces Command said. The […]View the full article

U.S. Army soldiers in Germany are training with AZAK’s S26 unmanned ground vehicle. On Oct. 21, troops from 2nd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment used the robot to evacuate a casualty during a platoon situational training exercise at Grafenwoehr Training Area, the first field use of the system by the Vilseck-based regiment since it began receiving […]View the full article

Turkish Aerospace’s Aksungur long-endurance drone has completed its mission with Aselsan’s aselBUOY 100P underwater acoustic listening system during the Turkish Naval Forces’ TURNAs-2026 unmanned maritime systems exercise, the company announced on X on Oct. 24, adding a new capability to the drone’s set of maritime missions. “With this integration, which offers an important capability for […]View the full article

About 30 of Poland’s South Korean-built K2 tanks are sitting in military workshops with various faults, most of them at the army base in Braniewo in the country’s northeast, Radio ZET reported, and some of the damage involves the engines of a fleet that has grown to more than 200 tanks delivered so far. The […]View the full article

Spanish defense company EM&E Group used remote weapon stations on armored vehicles and a jamming-equipped ground robot to detect and shoot down several drones during the Spanish military’s ATLAS 26 counter-drone exercise this week at the Médano del Loro firing range in Huelva, in southwestern Spain. The exercise was led by Spain’s Chief of the […]View the full article

Two more F-35A Lightning II stealth fighters arrived in Finland on Oct. 23, 2026, landing at the Lapland Air Wing in Rovaniemi at 5:56 p.m. and bringing the number of Finnish F-35s in the country to four, the Finnish Defence Forces said. The jets, JF-509 and JF-511, made up Finland’s second F-35 delivery. JF-509 left […]View the full article

L3Harris Technologies has received a three-year contract worth up to $60 million to develop a long-range, maneuverable missile for the U.S. Army that is designed to shoot down small and medium drones at greater distances than today’s interceptors. The company announced the award on Oct. 23, 2026, under the Xtended Range Counter-sUAS Missile program run […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force has published new details of its $20.7 billion contract with Raytheon for AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, confirming that the sole-source deal covers seven production lots and will keep the Tucson, Arizona, production line busy until mid-2033. An award notice posted on the federal contracting site on Oct. 23, 2026, shows the […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy has added $2.4 billion to Fluor Marine Propulsion’s contract to run naval nuclear propulsion work at the Naval Nuclear Laboratory, the network of government labs that designs and supports the reactors powering every U.S. Navy submarine and aircraft carrier. Naval Sea Systems Command awarded the $2,409,077,590 cost-plus-fixed-fee modification on Sept. 24, 2026, […]View the full article

The Royal Canadian Air Force has taken delivery of its first two CF-35A stealth fighters, the Canadian version of the Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II, at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, the service announced. The jets will stay at Luke, a major U.S. Air Force training base for F-35 pilots from the United States […]View the full article