Raw Intel

The inevitable started last week. The U.S. Navy has begun retiring its first of four Ohio class guided missile submarines, with the USS Georgia scheduled to be officially inactivated on July 31 following its return to Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay. The retirement marks the beginning of the end for the world’s most heavily armed tactical submarines, which were designed to carry 154 Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles. Their withdrawal from service is particularly notable due to a lack of a similarly heavily armed replacement for the vessels. Originally commissioned in 1984 as ballistic missile submarines to carry strategic nuclear weapons, the four ships were converted i…

A defense think tank is telling the British government to reverse a decision it already made twice, warning that four of the Army’s armored infantry battalions are about to be left without any working vehicle at all, the UK Defence Journal reported, citing a new policy paper from the 878 Institute. The paper, titled Britain’s […]View the full article

A U.S. Army initiative wants ordinary infantry soldiers carrying nothing more than a backpack to be able to spot a tank down the road and simply send a drone to destroy it, and that vision just moved through another round of testing in the Arizona desert. Yuma Proving Ground is conducting risk reduction testing of […]View the full article

Yuma Proving Ground, the U.S. Army’s massive desert test range in southwestern Arizona, successfully supported a full-scale, live-fire hypersonic warhead test using a cannon-based test system, establishing what officials describe as a critical new testing capability for modern national security programs, according to a report published in The Outpost, Yuma Proving Ground’s official publication, on […]View the full article

The Pentagon’s top policy official has spent a week meeting with defense leaders from Germany, Britain, Italy, and Romania, laying the groundwork for a review that could reshape how many American troops stay in Europe and who actually pays for the continent’s defense going forward. Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby detailed that […]View the full article

A U.S. Marine Corps amphibious vehicle that can swim ashore from a warship still can’t stop a hobby-store drone from watching it do it, and the Marines just confirmed the fix, and the company they intend to buy it from, without opening the job to competition. The Marine Corps’ Program Manager Advanced Amphibious Assault, part […]View the full article

The U.S. Army has told drone makers it wants a battlefield scout small enough to fold into a backpack-sized case, tough enough to carry a lethal weapon, and versatile enough to deliver two pints of blood to a wounded soldier. The U.S. Army Contracting Command at Redstone Arsenal issued a Call for Solutions on August […]View the full article

A construction company has won a $37.6 million contract to build a facility so secure it needs its own classification category, part of a sprawling effort to turn a small Arkansas Air National Guard base into an international training hub for the world’s most advanced fighter jet. BL Harbert International LLC, based in Birmingham, Alabama, […]View the full article

One of the great things about today’s information environment in national security is the vast number of voices out there. I know for some this is a frustration—because they desire more control or are simply too lazy to want many choices—but it is by far a net positive. It was not too long ago that there were but a few regular voices out there that could be found only on a few publications or outlets. It was very hard for new voices to get ideas out there, and established experience was provided to you, not vetted through the marketplace of ideas. It was also much harder to push back against bad ideas or compromised institutions. It was easier to silence voices simply bec…

A Russian satellite network built to rival Starlink has quietly reached a threshold Ukrainian defense officials have been dreading, providing at least two reliable windows of connectivity over Ukrainian territory every single day, each lasting more than an hour, Militarnyi reported, citing satellite communications expert Volodymyr Stepanets. The system, called Rassvet, is being built by […]View the full article

A rocket booster that has flown to space and back seven times carried a classified American spy satellite into orbit before dawn last week, the latest and least publicized entry in a launch campaign the National Reconnaissance Office has been quietly running at a pace unlike anything the agency has attempted before. SpaceX launched the […]View the full article

A U.S. Navy warship named for a medic who threw his own body over a wounded Marine to absorb a grenade blast just took its first public step toward joining the fleet, breaking a bottle of sparkling wine across its bow in a Maine shipyard on Saturday. The U.S. Navy christened its fifth Flight III […]View the full article

Rheinmetall has unveiled a warship built to outgun vessels twice its size, betting that a mid-sized frigate packed with the same missile defense technology found on America’s largest destroyers can win over navies looking to modernize without breaking their budgets. Rheinmetall, the German defense manufacturer, revealed the GMF 140, a next-generation guided missile frigate measuring […]View the full article

A helmet factory in northern Poland has spent its first year of operation shipping more than 90,000 ballistic helmets to NATO allies, and the company behind it says that pace confirms a bet made three years ago is finally paying off. Galvion, a designer and manufacturer of soldier head protection, power systems, and integrated soldier […]View the full article

A Romanian robotics company says it has built a single platform that can fight wildfires, work construction sites, and operate as a counter-drone defense system, all from the same modular chassis. Maximus Labs Romania, alongside its manufacturing arm Maximus Lab, describes the Max1 as a modular unmanned ground vehicle capable of switching between operational roles […]View the full article

Ukraine’s military has shown a homemade air defense system built by bolting American anti-tank missiles onto a Rada radar and welding the whole thing to a Dutch army truck. Ukraine’s 302nd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade publicly displayed a new mobile variant of the STASH short-range air defense system in an official video, mounting the launcher on […]View the full article

I can think of few 18-month periods where shipbuilding, the merchant marine, and the importance of a strong maritime sector in the U.S. has been a more active topic. Near the center of this conversation—or at least a few paragraphs in—is a long-time friend of the show, Dr. Sal Mercogliano. He joins the Midrats Podcast today from 5-6 PM Eastern. Join us live at this link if you can, but if you miss it, refresh this page later Sunday night and the podcast links will be up. Sal is the Chair of the Department of History, Criminal Justice and Political Science at Campbell University; a former merchant mariner; and a contributor to USNI Proceedings, Sea History, Naval History, …

An autonomous warship that didn’t exist a year ago is now running sea trials around the clock, seven days a week, and the company behind it says that grueling schedule is deliberate proof the vessel can survive conditions no engineer would choose. Saronic Technologies said its Marauder medium unmanned surface vessel has entered full on-water […]View the full article

The Pentagon has agreed to lend a small Texas drone company up to $820 million, a bet that fixing a handful of tiny, unglamorous parts could unlock America’s entire drone manufacturing pipeline. The U.S. Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital announced a conditional loan commitment of up to $820 million to Performance Drone Works, […]View the full article

A German reconnaissance drone flying over Ukraine has got a new paint job and a rearward-facing camera, and both changes trace directly back to a threat that barely existed a couple of years ago, other drones built specifically to hunt reconnaissance aircraft out of the sky. Quantum Systems, a German drone manufacturer based in Gilching, […]View the full article