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A fire destroyed a two-story warehouse building in Lublin, Poland, Sunday afternoon, gutting facilities owned by JFG Composites, a subcontractor to Leonardo’s PZL-Świdnik helicopter plant, according to Polish outlet Defence24. The fire broke out around 2:00 p.m. local time on Kasprowicza Street and spread through the building’s warehouse and office sections, PAP reported, according to […]View the full article

Ukraine’s National Guard just started fielding a robot roughly the size of a Humvee, built to haul ammunition into combat zones so soldiers don’t have to. Four units of Ukraine’s National Guard have received the first batch of Protector ground robotic complexes, part of a 100-unit contract funded by the German government, the National Guard […]View the full article

Naval Group signed a contract in Stockholm on Monday to build four defense and intervention frigates for the Royal Swedish Navy, less than four months after Sweden announced its selection of the French-designed FDI class. The signing took place in the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Mikael Granholm, […]View the full article

A Swedish composites manufacturer just flew a boat that doesn’t touch the water. Aston Harald Composite completed the first test flight of an unmanned hydrofoil vessel called GhostFoiler in the waters of Stockholm last week, weaving among ferries and recreational boats in the city’s archipelago. The company said the craft performed well for a first […]View the full article

Ukrainian company Drone Fight Group has deployed an HMMWV, known popularly as “Humvee”, converted into a remotely operated vehicle using its Kaban system, delivering three units to Ukrainian military formations, the company said. The vehicles went to the 3rd Army Corps, the 429th Separate Unmanned Systems Regiment “Achilles” and the 49th Brigade of Ukraine’s Armed […]View the full article

RENK Group inaugurated three new machining centers at its Rheine, Germany facility Monday, part of a plan to more than triple the company’s annual transmission output by 2030, the company said. RENK aims to grow production at its headquarters in Augsburg to exceed 2,000 transmission units per year by 2030. The company has been transferring […]View the full article

Tata Advanced Systems Limited and the Javelin Joint Venture, a partnership between Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, signed a memorandum of understanding to co-produce the Javelin All Up Round missile in India, the companies announced Sunday. Under the agreement, Tata Advanced Systems and the joint venture, known as JJV, will explore setting up a final assembly […]View the full article

Polish fighter jets intercepted a Russian Il-20 reconnaissance aircraft over the Baltic Sea on Monday, roughly 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of Łeba on Poland’s coast, Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defense Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said. “Russia has once again tested our deterrence and air defense systems,” Kosiniak-Kamysz wrote. “Before noon, 30 km […]View the full article

Remember back in January the very confusing story about the conflict between Anthropic and the Department of War? Well, at the end of last week, it broke back into the news. A U.S. judge on Thursday permanently blocked the Pentagon’s “supply-chain risk” designation against Anthropic, ending a months-long standoff over military access to the company’s frontier AI models. The dispute began early this year when the Pentagon pressed Anthropic to remove safety guardrails from Claude, a demand ​that escalated into a blacklisting and triggered lawsuits and federal agency bans. I’m not going to go into a lot of the details that are floating out there. It gets real complicated, real fast—and in places conflicts with other reports. At best, most are second-hand or third-hand reports, circular reports, or the standard issue partisan positioning. Firsthand reports from either side are few—especially about the specific details. The above Reuters report is not that helpful, though it does supply a good timeline. This CNN report isn’t much better. A federal judge ruled the Pentagon’s decision to label AI company Anthropic a ‘supply chain risk’ violated the law and ordered the designation be removed Thursday evening. Judge Rita Lin wrote that while the military should have wide latitude to decide which companies to work with, its actions against Anthropic “constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment” and that the company “was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment.” The Department of Defense’s quarrel with Anthropic began earlier this year after the company refused to remove internal safety guardrails that would prevent the military from using its Claude AI model in autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Anthropic argued its models were not reliable enough to be used for such purposes. Part of the problem is that most of the reporting usually focuses on very vague technical issues that are only quasi-germane to the issue at hand, or are play-by-play legal reporting. They are not useful from a military utility point of view. Almost everyone here looks at things through a national security lens, so I can think of few people better to speak our language than Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering (USW(R&E)) Emil Michael. The good folks at the Ruthless Podcast have an exceptionally interesting interview with Michael that you should give it a full listen, but let’s focus on the Anthropic issue. Once I heard what had happened from his perspective, the issues became much clearer to me. When you look at it from a military operations perspective, the decision became unavoidable. You just can’t operate inside the constraints and restraints Anthropic insisted on. If you just want to listen to the audio, go to the bottom of the post, I have the video of the interview there which provides an insider’s view of the Pentagon’s fight with Anthropic over AI. If you’d rather see the transcript, here you go. Emphasis is mine. Ruthless: …in your line of work, about why there was this massive uprising and problem with that situation. Anything you can— Michael: Yeah. So this is because of the Biden executive order they’re talking about, where they tried to really constrain AI so they could control it. They had this rule that said if you use more than X teraflops of compute, you’re going to be regulated. Ruthless: So crazy. Michael: You’re like, okay, well then people are just going to use less compute and we’re going to lose to China, or whatever other ridiculous thing they had.But there was the chosen one company that helped them write that executive order. Ruthless: Really? Michael: Yes. Ruthless; So they were trying to box in every EA person who were just like a menace, essentially. They didn’t bank on somebody like this showing up who actually knows. They’re like, ah shit, he knows the secret. Michael: They were anointed as a winner. So where did they deploy first in the U.S. government? The Department of War and the intelligence community. What do they want to do? They want to control the system of government we have. They want to give it to machine god.I got the AI portfolio six months into the job. I open it up like, let me read the contracts here. I’m a former lawyer—or I went to law school, I didn’t practice law. Let me see what this says. They’re like, you can’t use AI for battlefield management. I was like, what does that mean? You can’t use AI to defend yourself from a missile attack. What? You can’t use our AI—25 pages of restrictions. Indulge me as I break in here, as this really hit home. I almost got an eye-twitch flashing back to having to deal with all obscene “National Caveats” for troop contributing nations during my tour at ISAF in Kabul. Part of my responsibilities was to plan around these restrictions. “We have 2,500 ISAF forces in that district, but only 100 of them from nation X can be used for combat missions. Nations Y & Z that make up most of the force do not permit their forces to leave the gate.” Back to the interview. Ruthless: Imagine just writing that on a page with a straight face. With a straight face. Michael: Yeah. And I was like, this can’t be right. Maybe someone didn’t read this contract. The Biden administration. Maybe someone didn’t read it. Ruthless: It’s an onion contract. Michael: So I called them in and I was like, okay guys, this has got to change. We’ll use it lawfully—all lawful purposes—but it’s artificial general intelligence. You don’t tell me where I can fly a plane to. We decide that when we buy a plane from Boeing or Lockheed. And they’re like, well, we think these are our moral values. We have our own constitution. It’s called the Claude constitution. It’s like, okay, but those aren’t corporate values. No, it’s our constitution. What about our Constitution? Ruthless: We got one too. Michael: Turns out there’s the Constitution, and everything else. And then they were so out to lunch. I’d say, okay, help me understand this. Let’s say I have a drone swarm coming against a military base. There are a thousand soldiers sleeping there. And I use AI to discriminate what’s a decoy and what’s not, and to point a laser at shooting it down. They’re like, huh, I think we could work on that. I was like, okay. How about a Chinese hypersonic missile going Mach 5 or above? I’ve got two minutes to take it down from space. So there’s a guy with a joystick who could do this.And they’re like, call me.I was like, well, call you when? Just give me a call. We’ll work it out. Did you miss the two-minute window?And they denied this afterwards, but I was like, I have 20 people in the room listening. There were former soldiers there who were about to lose it. Going crazy. And so this was the way it went. You’re damn straight they were about to come unglued. Most of those guys were GWOT vets. We know stupid restrictions that make their way from the faculty lounge to your mission. And then Secretary Hegseth is like, okay, you’ve got to stop messing around. We’re single-threaded on this one vendor at the time, so I need time to get other vendors in the door.He just calls them in. He says, I give you guys a week to work it out. And Thursday before the Friday deadline, they’re like, we’re pulling out. Trump’s a dictator. Elon’s a Stalin. Sam Altman’s Hitler. These guys are trying to destroy the world. Ruthless: Partisan messaging. Michael: Yes. There was no component of policy. I was like, we’re being—we could be unsafe. I was like, well, the law is the law. We have a democratic system. Laws get passed by Congress. The executive signs them. If I agree to use your system lawfully, what else do you want? They want to create their own law, their own standards. There you go. DoW was spot on in keeping Anthropic away from national defense. That would be as if Northrup Grumman demanded that it gets a vote on how our B-2 bombers can be used. Nope. The courts can say what they want, but they cannot force the U.S. military to use an untrusted vendor. I assume this ruling from last week will run up the judicial chain. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Leave a comment Share View the full article

A fire broke out overnight Sunday at a WB Electronics facility in Skarżysko-Kamienna, Poland, adding another name to a growing list of European defense manufacturers hit by fires, explosions and suspected sabotage in 2026. The blaze started shortly after midnight in the plant’s assembly department, according to Radio Kielce, which cited a spokeswoman for local […]View the full article

Israel and Greece signed a defense export agreement worth approximately €3 billion ($3.5 billion) Monday, under which Israel will build Greece a multi-layered air defense array combining several Israeli-made systems, according to a statement from Israel’s Ministry of Defense. The deal, known in Greece as “Achilles Shield,” is the largest defense export agreement in the […]View the full article

At some point in the next decade, a historian is going to look at the first quarter of the 21st century from the perspective of the national security establishment and the blessings it had as it rose to global power status, and will publish the foundational reference book for those trying to understand that moment in time. Its primary rivals distracted and drained themselves in unnecessary quixotic quasi-imperial police actions, one in Central and Southwest Asia (U.S.A.), the other bled itself white attempting to reconstruct at least part of its predecessor’s empire (Russia). All the while, its economy grew, its diplomatic influence expanded, and its military became an impressive, if untested, colossus. Yes, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had its problems and setbacks: demographic collapse, massive debt, economic fragility, and poor messaging—but so did its greatest competitors. In 2026, while most have been focused on the Iranian-Israeli-American conflict and the Russo-Ukrainian War rooted in unsolved issues from the end of the 20th century, the PRC continues its march forward into the future. Returning to the Midrats Podcast today from 5-6 PM Eastern to discuss will be Dean Cheng. You can join us LIVE at this link, or if you are reading this after the show, check back to this Substack page later Sunday night for the podcast upload links. We’ll dive into: Chinese mobilization/military-civil fusion activities. Chinese space actions, including delays to their lander for the lunar south pole. Chinese political warfare, including efforts against US AI/data centers Chinese worries about Japan Possible lessons learned by the Chinese from the Ukraine war Dean is a Non-resident Senior Fellow, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and Non-resident Fellow, George Washington University Space Policy Institute. He recently retired after 14 years with the Heritage Foundation, where he was a senior research fellow on Chinese political and security affairs, and wrote on various aspects of Chinese foreign and defense policy. Prior to joining the Heritage Foundation, he was a senior analyst with the China Studies Division (previously, Project Asia) at CNA from 2001-2009. Before joining CNA, he was a senior analyst with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) from 1996-2001. From 1993-1995, he was an analyst with the US Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment in the International Security and Space Division, where he studied the Chinese defense industrial complex. He is the author of the book Cyber Dragon: Inside China’s Information Warfare and Cyber Operations (NY: Praeger Publishing, 2016), as well as a number of papers and book chapters examining various aspects of Chinese security affairs. 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

Ukrainian drone maker Buntar Aerospace raised $10.4 million in funding from Axon Enterprise and Munkene AS, placing the round among the six largest disclosed funding rounds in Ukraine this year, according to venture capital firm Defence Builder, citing data from Vestbee. The full list, in order of size: language-learning platform Preply at $150 million, UFORCE […]View the full article

Voltaic Marine has completed live trials pairing its AEU39 uncrewed surface vessel with a Moog Space and Defense RIwP remote weapon turret, the company said this week. During the trials, the turret drew power directly from the AEU39’s 300 kilowatt-hour battery bank through standard interfaces, while the vessel held position on the water. The RIwP, […]View the full article

The first production-standard HÜRJET jet trainer, distinct from the program’s two earlier flight-test prototypes, completed its maiden flight on Victory Day, August 30, marking the transition from prototype testing to a working production line for the Turkish Air Force, according to a social media announcement. The HÜRJET is a single-engine, tandem-seat supersonic jet trainer built […]View the full article

Lockheed Martin fired multiple training rockets from a HIMARS launcher during a second flight test of its new Joint Reduced Range Rocket at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, the company said Friday. The test measured range, trajectory, accuracy and the performance of the rocket’s marking payload, which allows crews to see where a round would have […]View the full article

The U.S. Army will send its M1E3 Abrams prototype to the 1st Cavalry Division for testing, the division confirmed in a social media post responding to an Army announcement about the next-generation tank. The 1st Cavalry Division said it will receive both M1E3 prototypes and XM30 prototypes, testing the vehicles and providing feedback that will […]View the full article

A commercial supply ship the length of a football field just spent nine days getting a robot brain installed, and then drove itself across open water in Hawaii with the U.S. Army watching. The ship is called the HOS Resolution, a 257-foot (78-meter) offshore supply vessel normally used to haul equipment and supplies to oil […]View the full article

Something big and mysterious rolled down a Japanese road late last week, and the internet is obsessed with figuring out what it is. A user on X posting under the name Yuzu snapped photos of a tracked military vehicle riding on a flatbed truck at night, completely wrapped in a yellow tarp. You could still […]View the full article

Uzbekistan’s state television broadcast footage of a Chengdu J-10CE fighter jet on the ground during coverage of the country’s 35th independence anniversary celebrations, confirming for the first time that Uzbekistan has received the Chinese-made aircraft. The footage aired on Uzbekistan 24, a state channel, and showed the jet taxiing on a runway. The first batch […]View the full article

U.S. Army armor officers argue that armored formations remain viable on the modern battlefield despite the spread of drones and precision-guided weapons, according to an essay published by the Modern War Institute at West Point. The piece, written by Lt. Col. Alan Hastings, Maj. James Casey and Capt. Elijah Leroux, responds to years of debate […]View the full article

General Dynamics Land Systems delivered its XM30 Wolf infantry fighting vehicle to the U.S. Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, last Friday, according to a post by Geoffrey Norman, a retired Army brigadier general now working on the GDLS team. Norman, who spent 30 years in the Army as a tanker and cavalryman, joined the […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy’s Harpoon Coastal Defense System successfully launched a Harpoon missile from land and struck a target vessel in near-shore waters during a two-day test in late July at Point Mugu Sea Range, California, the Navy said. The event, designated Developmental Test 1, brought together the Strike Weapons Program Office known as PMX-201, the […]View the full article

Somebody has to build the little wings and fins that steer America’s main air-to-air missile, and this week that job went to a small manufacturer most people have never heard of. BK Manufacturing, based in the small town of Arab, Alabama, just picked up a U.S. Air Force contract worth up to $28 million to […]View the full article

The U.S. Army just bought a small fleet of drones from a company most people have never heard of, and interestingly, only one company even bothered to bid for the job. The Army awarded Integrate DG LLC a contract worth up to $27.8 million to supply its Alphawing drone system, along with support gear and […]View the full article