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New footage from American Rheinmetall shows the company’s XM30 infantry fighting vehicle concept in greater detail, giving the clearest promotional look yet at the front profile, main gun, turret sensors and running gear of one of two vehicles competing to replace the U.S. Army’s Bradley. The video arrives as the Army’s XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat […]View the full article

A new air defense missile system will move through a secure Kratos manufacturing facility under a roughly $36 million contract, adding another discreet but telling order to the United States push to rebuild missile and air defense production capacity. Kratos Defense & Security Solutions said July 2 that it had received the single-award contract for […]View the full article

A New Zealand-built drone boat became a moving radio-sensing platform during a British military trial at RMB Chivenor, where SYOS Aerospace supported the Trident Sprint series with its SM300 uncrewed surface vessel and helped integrate CRFS passive RF sensors into a wider battlefield network. The trial, led by the UK Ministry of Defence and MarWorks, […]View the full article

Nineteen companies have survived a brutal, weeks-long elimination round built to answer one question the Pentagon considers existential: can American industry build enough cheap, lethal drones fast enough to matter in a real war. The Drone Dominance Program, a Pentagon initiative jointly run by the Test Resource Management Center and the Defense Innovation Unit, announced […]View the full article

Ukraine is preparing a grant competition to develop humanoid robots for its Defense Forces, opening a new experimental track in the country’s wartime effort to move soldiers away from the most dangerous parts of the battlefield. The initiative was announced by Brave1 head Andriy Hrytseniuk during the Brave1 Advantage event, Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi reported. Brave1, […]View the full article

Czech paratroopers in Chrudim have received their first U.S.-made Flyer 72 HD light tactical vehicles, beginning the replacement of aging Land Rover Defender Kajman vehicles that have served the unit since 2009 and giving the Czech Army’s airborne force a more mobile platform for raids, command tasks and combat operations across difficult terrain. The vehicles […]View the full article

The combat jet that is supposed to replace an aging fighter fleet on the front lines of the Pacific flew back into Okinawa this week, months after the Air Force quietly admitted its permanent arrival has slipped by a year. An F-15EX Eagle II, escorted by two F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft, landed at Kadena Air […]View the full article

Drug cartels have started borrowing tactics straight from the Ukraine battlefield, and Washington state’s National Guard just bought the hardware needed to teach police officers how to fight back. The Washington Army National Guard issued a sole-source purchase order on July 1, 2026, for four Vector Defense first-person-view drones, two of the 10-inch class and […]View the full article

A missile system old enough to have fought in Vietnam is getting locked in for at least three more years of service, and the Army has confirmed only one company is allowed to keep it running. The U.S. Army Contracting Command at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama published a presolicitation notice on July 1, 2026, announcing […]View the full article

From New England to Puerto Rico, across the Gulf of America, skipping over the desert to the West Coast…the vast American coastline is littered with closed and abandoned shipyards. They surround us like ghosts haunting the ruins of a once great empire, whispering of what once was. Some have been repurposed so much it would require a national emergency to claw back the waterfront. Others only a bit, and another cohort almost frozen in aspic from the day they were closed. Every time there is a proposal to do something as straightforward as reviving Charleston or something more ambitious like Jan Sramek’s Solano Shipyard, those trying to make forward progress have to swim through a sea of excuses, defeatism, obstructive regulations, or outright greed from those who want to turn industrial future into just another mixed-use development for empty nesters—nationalizing national security risk and privatizing profit. There is some progress, but it is along the edges, like we see in Charleston linked above, what Davie is doing in Texas or on a very small but important way by companies like Saronic…but it isn’t on global seapower scale. It doesn’t have to be this way. With firm, visionary leadership, sustainable funding, and will—it can be done. That is what South Korea is doing. Plans to fully relaunch the long-dormant Gunsan Shipyard in South Korea got a boost as the company signed a letter of intent to build its first ships in nine years. The yard had fallen victim to a downturn in the shipbuilding industry nearly a decade ago and never achieved its full potential… This is serious work. The shipyard is a little more turnkey than some of our abandoned shipyards—but not by too much. It is the land that matters. The letter of intent calls for the construction of four 114,000-ton crude oil and petroleum product tankers. They identify the shipowner only as a company in Oceania. The plan is to operate J Ocean alongside HJ Shipbuilding to provide a large increase in total capacity. HJ is a mid-sized yard that also undertakes repair work but is constrained on the size of vessels. The Gunsan yard has an approximately 700-meter (approximately 2,300-foot) dock and was designed to build 10 to 12 ships a year, including ultra-large vessels. The U.S.A. has a population 6.8x that of South Korea. Our economy is 16.8x the size of South Korea’s. When my father’s generation came back from the Korean War, South Korea was little more than rubble and rural poverty. We can do this. Look at the graph below, then ponder that civilian shipyards are, in times of war, the difference between being able to carry on the fight against a determined enemy and finding yourself at an early culmination point, needing to come to the negotiating table. We do not need more think tank work. We do not need more studies. We do not need more problem appreciation. We have a little bit of a head of steam going. We need to up the pressure and expand the base, because that's what we once were and what we could be again. 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

The U.S. Navy has told the defense industry it wants an alternative to its own primary radar-killing missile, and it wants companies capable of building as many as 600 of them every year. The Naval Air Systems Command, the branch of the Navy responsible for developing and buying naval aircraft and weapons, published a Request […]View the full article

X-Bow Systems said Monday it has delivered more than 1,100 solid rocket motors, a sharp production milestone for a U.S. defense market trying to rebuild a rocket motor supply base that has struggled to keep pace with missile and drone demand. The company did not identify every customer or program tied to the 1,100 motors […]View the full article

Russia’s Ministry of Defense has officially confirmed that its air defenses intercepted a “long-range operational-tactical missile,” adding new weight to OSINT reporting about an unusual high-altitude engagement over Moscow Oblast on June 30. The Russian ministry did not specify where the intercept took place and did not identify the missile type. However, the statement came […]View the full article

Engineers at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division and Fleet Readiness Center Southwest built a 3D-printing method that lets sailors repair cracked composite panels on the F/A-18 Super Hornet right at the base where the jet is stationed, and they expect it to cut repair time by roughly 50 percent once it reaches the […]View the full article

A Norwegian defense giant just bet on Ukraine’s homegrown robot army, with KONGSBERG, one of Europe’s largest defense manufacturers, and Ukrainian robotics company DevDroid signing a Memorandum of Understanding on June 30, 2026, in Kyiv that lays groundwork for large-scale, long-term cooperation to produce existing systems and develop new remotely operated combat robots together. The […]View the full article

A two-person engineering firm in a small Colorado town just picked up a $4.3 million contract to help the Air Force answer a question that still sounds like science fiction: can rockets replace cargo planes for getting supplies anywhere on Earth in under two hours? The Department of the Air Force awarded the money to […]View the full article

Northrop Grumman secured a $49 million contract from U.S. Space Systems Command to provide sustainment services for the Joint Tactical Ground Station, a network of mobile satellite ground receivers that give U.S. and allied military commanders real-time warning when an adversary launches a ballistic missile anywhere on Earth. The contract was awarded on a sole-source […]View the full article

Boeing secured a $49.5 million contract from the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center on June 30, 2026, to remanufacture the electronic flight controllers and produce production test equipment that sustain the AGM-86B Air Launched Cruise Missile, the subsonic nuclear-capable cruise missile that has served as one of America’s primary airborne nuclear delivery systems since 1982. […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy awarded Lockheed Martin a $104 million contract on June 26, 2026, to begin procurement of long-lead materials and early engineering work for the F-100 mid-life upgrade of Spain’s Álvaro de Bazán-class frigates, the most capable surface combatants in the Spanish Navy and one of the most combat-proven Aegis frigate designs operating outside […]View the full article

The U.S. Army awarded Lockheed Martin a $3 billion contract to produce additional AN/MPQ-64F1 Sentinel A4 radars and provide supporting engineering services, locking in production of the ground-based air surveillance system that serves as the primary airspace watchman for Army air defense units around the world. The contract, awarded through Army Contracting Command at Redstone […]View the full article

Japan, the United Kingdom, and Italy will extend the contract for the Global Combat Air Programme through the end of 2027, after Britain’s delayed defense spending plan created an impasse that had left the three-nation stealth fighter effort operating on temporary bridge funding since April, Nikkei reported. The extension resolves the immediate crisis triggered when […]View the full article

Sweden and Ukraine signed an agreement covering the procurement of fighter jets for Ukraine’s Air Force, with deliveries set to begin in early 2029, Militarnyi reported. The signing ceremony took place in the presence of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, with Ukraine set to receive not only the aircraft but […]View the full article

Pyka’s autonomous cargo aircraft DropShip flew a 32 km (20-mile) resupply mission entirely without a human pilot from Gulfport to Diamondhead, Mississippi, then executed a precision 91 kg (200 lb) airdrop, as part of the U.S. Army Reserve’s Combat Support Training Exercise within Operation Sentinel Justice, the company announced June 30, 2026. The aircraft also […]View the full article

At 3 a.m. in a contested forward operating base, a patrol thirty kilometres out is taking casualties. They need blood, plasma, and ammunition, not in hours, but in minutes. The aircraft that answers that call launches from a patch of dirt, climbs vertically on four jet turbine engines, pitches forward, and is gone. It returns […]View the full article

Russian investigators have opened criminal cases alleging officials and contractors stole approximately 500 million rubles ($6.4 million) earmarked for constructing naval infrastructure at the home base of Russia’s Caspian Flotilla, the business daily Kommersant reported. The cases, filed under Russia’s criminal code for abuse of authority in fulfilling state defense orders, name Alexander Katser and […]View the full article