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An Italian counter-drone turret that carries eight Benelli shotguns has been put through a live-fire demonstration for the Danish Armed Forces, according to Dualee, one of the companies behind it. Dualee, an Italian defense technology firm, said on social media on Thursday that its LIVET M4 remote-controlled weapon station “showcased its advanced capabilities in front […]View the full article

A new unmanned ground vehicle from North Defence Group, built to haul up to 1,500 kg (3,300 pounds) of supplies for frontline troops, has been put to work at a European military exercise in Switzerland, according to the company. Oliver North, founder and chief executive of North Defence Group, said on social media on Thursday […]View the full article

A Ukrainian handheld radio built for a war full of jamming has gone through two weeks of trials with troops in Portugal. Its maker, HIMERA, says two of its relay stations held a steady link about 11 km (7 miles) apart. The Kyiv-based company posted the results on social media on Thursday. It said it […]View the full article

Two weeks after showing its Reliant drone loaded with mortar rounds and grenades, Quantum Systems has shown the aircraft on its production line in Southern California. Dave Sharpin, chief executive of Quantum-Systems Inc., the U.S. arm of the German drone maker, shared the images on social media earlier this week from the company’s plant in […]View the full article

Ukraine’s second Turkish-built warship, the corvette Hetman Ivan Vyhovskyi, is close to completion in Istanbul and is preparing to put to sea for the first time, Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Presidential Office, said on Thursday. “The work is in its final stages,” Budanov wrote on X after touring the ship, which the Turkish defense […]View the full article

New weapons arrive on battlefields following a familiar pattern. Aircraft are a good benchmark of a pattern we are seeing today with drones. At the start of WWI, aircraft were barely a decade past the Wright Brothers’ first flight. Aircraft were still fragile stringbags, but advances were happening at an incredible pace. The top aircraft this month may be obsolete before the season changes. At first, aircraft performed the most basic mission, one they were naturally suited for—reconnaissance. Now and then, aircraft from opposing sides would see each other and, being unarmed, simply wave. That didn’t last long. There were ramming attacks. There were pistol shots. Then on October 5, 1914, the French decided to bring a machine gun on a Voisin III and found an unarmed German Aviatik B.I. You know the rest of the story from there. Drones are not new today, and neither was aerial reconnaissance in 1914. What had changed was technology. For well over a century before WWI, balloons were used for aerial reconnaissance in Europe and North America. Engines, lightweight construction techniques, and just plain good thinking brought powered flight into existence and changed the way aerial reconnaissance was done. It was only a matter of time until we strapped a weapon to them. Humans will eventually find a way to arm just about anything they can. If you consider fire ships to be drones, which I do, drones have been used in war at sea for centuries. In the air and on the ground for decades. All that was needed was advances in enabling technologies. Communication. Code. Navigation. Seeker heads. Miniaturization of…everything. We have already seen drone-v-drone warfare in the air and on the ground—even having surface drones shoot down aircraft—but even though attack drones had been used quite successfully especially by the Ukrainians and Americans, we haven’t seen a drone surface fight yet—until just a few weeks ago. I can’t believe this slipped by my scan for so long. As described by Naval News about two months ago, For the first time in history, an uncrewed surface drone (USV – uncrewed surface vessel) has destroyed another USV in combat. The Ukrainian Navy Sargan-3000 USV, operating on intelligence from the Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR), interdicted a Russian attack USV in the Black Sea. The Russian naval drone was sunk. The Russian USV can be positively identified as an improved Orcan type Here’s the video of the fight. You can find the Ukrainian Navy’s upload from Telegram at this link. Of course she’s armed with Ma-Deuce…what a jewel of a multi-tool weapon. This is how it starts. Simple boats with a simple weapon, man in the loop. From here, things should advance quickly. The automation and software needed to run the fight on its own are already here. It just needs a few more tweaks, a nod from the JAG, and we’re off and running. Remember all your ASW waterspace management details? SAA, JTAA, ect.? Modify it for drones, give them geofenced waterspace and a set of if-then ROE, and let them cook. This is going to happen, with more deadly weapons. Without a man in the loop, except for a kill switch and override, it is only a matter who will be firstest with the mostest. 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

Allen Control Systems, the Texas startup behind the Bullfrog robotic anti-drone gun, is starting a laser weapons business and has hired two senior U.S. Army directed energy officials to run it, the company said Tuesday. The Austin-based firm, which now brands itself simply as ACS, said in a press release that its new Directed Energy […]View the full article

The U.S. Army has awarded Safe Pro Group a $2.5 million contract to run the Florida company’s explosive-detection software aboard Anduril’s Ghost-X drones to help protect Abrams tanks, according to a company release. Safe Pro, based in Aventura, Florida, announced the award Tuesday in a release filed with regulators. It’s the company’s first prime contract, […]View the full article

AeroVironment has won a $405 million order for its LOCUST X3 anti-drone lasers from an unnamed customer in the Middle East, the Virginia-based company said Wednesday. The company, which goes by AV, called the deal an “international direct commercial sales order” in a release. That means AV negotiated it directly with the foreign buyer, instead […]View the full article

AEVEX Corp. raised its 2026 revenue forecast by about $120 million at the midpoint on Wednesday, its first report since buying drone-boat maker BlackSea Technologies, as sales from its core drone business more than made up for shrinking Ukraine-related work. The Solana Beach, California, company now expects full-year revenue of $820 million to $840 million, […]View the full article

Israeli defense company Elbit Systems has won a contract worth about $260 million to supply PULS rocket artillery launchers and munitions to an unnamed NATO country in Europe, the company said Thursday. The Haifa-based firm said in a release that the contract will be “performed over a period of 5 years.” It named the buyer […]View the full article

Fighterbomber, a Russian Telegram channel close to the country’s Aerospace Forces, posted a plain black square Wednesday morning. Underneath, channel owner Ilya Tumanov wrote that defending St. Petersburg from Ukrainian drones overnight “cost us very dearly.” “Very, very, very dearly,” he added. Another pro-war channel, Voevoda Veshchaet, went further. It said “3 experienced crews, seven […]View the full article

British Defence Minister Luke Pollard took the controls of STARK’s Vanta 12, a 12-meter (39-foot) uncrewed boat armed with Sea Venom anti-ship missiles, during a demonstration in Oslo this week, according to a company release sent to The Defence Blog. Pollard, the U.K.’s minister for defence readiness and industry, was in the Norwegian capital for […]View the full article

America has its Memorial Day, yes, but I have always preferred the Commonwealth’s concept of Remembrance Day. I’m an American, so I’ll form up. I almost posted something today that has been sitting in my drafts for the last few years. It might be more appropriate for Memorial Day…maybe. It is a bit dark and angry, and it may not work then either. Heck, I don’t like the post at all, so I may never publish it. I’ll need to ponder that some more. I feel that, with some of you having been here with us for two decades or more, I owe you the willingness to publish even the things I’m having second thoughts about. But I don’t know. I’ve got another half-year or so to think about it. Instead, what I’d like to do today is offer a reminder about a new generation of veterans coming online. The youngest of them were born the year President Obama was elected to the highest office in the land. The First Battle of Fallujah was already four years in the past, and the attacks of 9/11 had happened seven years earlier. USS Freedom (LCS-1) had just been commissioned. I first put on my Midshipman uniform in 1984. The assassination of Kennedy was as relevant to me as 9/11 is to the new batch of Midshipmen and Recruits coming online this year. Heck, probably even less so. Twenty-five years before I put on the uniform, the Eisenhower Administration was coming to an end. Some of these people will serve only a couple of years. Others will serve for a few decades. As time goes on, more and more of them will want to know not just what they are being asked to do, but why. The arguments, justifications, and references many of us still rely on are no longer useful to them. Our nation is going to ask them to do things they never imagined would be asked of them. Things will happen that no one expects. The only way to ensure these young men and women can meet those challenges as we would want them to is to insist on forward-looking perspectives and an unceasing effort to ensure they have the absolute best weapons, leaders, and thinking behind them. For those of us who are older veterans, that should be our focus as well. Not a reserved parking space. Not a discount. Not an extra percentage point on a VA disability rating. No. Our obligation, especially for those in positions of power and influence, is to look at these new volunteers coming online with the same sense of mission, support, and concern that we would have wanted from those who came before us when we first put on the uniform. The past has a greater obligation to the future than the present has to the past. 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

Raytheon fired several of its DeepStrike JR3 training rockets at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, in what the company called a “third successful flight test” for the U.S. Army. JR3 is short for Joint Reduced Range Rocket. The Army wants it to replace the Reduced Range Practice Rocket that HIMARS and M270 crews shoot in training. […]View the full article

Lockheed Martin’s plant in Camden, Arkansas, has turned out its 100,000th GMLRS rocket, the guided round fired from HIMARS and M270 launchers, and the company says it’s now making “nearly 14,000 rockets per year.” Lockheed held a ceremony at the plant Tuesday to mark the number, according to a company release. The rate came “ahead […]View the full article

Five self-driving vehicles arrived at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Nov. 4 to start a U.S. Army trial of commercial autonomous shuttles on post, according to an Army release. The vehicles are part of the Robotic Operations for Autonomous Delivery and Sustainment prize challenge, known as ROADS, which the Army is running with the Defense Innovation […]View the full article

A micro-crack, trapped moisture or a coat of paint that’s too thick in an F-16’s nose cone “will act like a dirty lens” on the fighter’s radar, and only one shop in the U.S. Air Force tests for that: a radio frequency shop at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. The 523rd Electronic Maintenance Squadron tests […]View the full article

The cannon-armed ACV-30 can be carried aboard the Marine Corps’ maritime prepositioning ships, Blount Island Command says, after Marines ran a yellow tape measure along one inside the cargo hold of USNS Dahl (T-AKR 312) on Nov. 4. Logistics specialists had expected trouble. The turreted ACV-30 was the variant in the Amphibious Combat Vehicle family […]View the full article

U.S. Air Force C-17s flew 25th Infantry Division HIMARS launchers to Kauai during the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center’s Rotation 27-01, where crews rolled them off on the airfield and went straight into a fire mission. The drill was a dry fire, with no rockets launched, and the division has not said how many launchers […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force wants to buy equipment for DroneShield’s Immediate Response Kits, a portable counter-drone system, at Joint Base San Antonio in Texas. The 502nd Contracting Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland posted a brand-name-only request for quotes on Nov. 10, and offers are due Nov. 17. The notice covers “the associated equipment needed […]View the full article

Companies interested in building the next U.S. Space Force missile warning satellites in medium Earth orbit have until Dec. 1 to answer a Space Systems Command request for information on Epochs 3 and 4. The deadline was originally Oct. 31, and a Nov. 10 update also raised the page limit to 50 and told firms […]View the full article

The Space Development Agency has awarded SpaceX a $9.9 million contract to study whether the company’s commercial “Plaser” laser terminal can be used on the Pentagon’s missile warning and tracking satellites. The deal, announced by the U.S. Department of War on Nov. 10 and awarded on Nov. 9, covers a risk reduction study, delivery of […]View the full article

U.S. defense startup XDOWN has carried out a strike demonstration with its STUD system, a compact, hand-launched tactical aircraft built to give individual soldiers their own strike and reconnaissance capability. The test took place in Eastern Europe, where the company’s partners are helping with the technical side of the project. The company released video of […]View the full article