Raw Intel

The U.S. Army has agreed to help test a weapon that fires interceptors using magnets instead of gunpowder or rocket fuel, betting that ditching traditional propulsion might finally solve a math problem that has been quietly draining America’s missile stockpiles. Auriga Space, a California company building electromagnetic launch technology, and the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development […]View the full article

Japan’s military procurement agency has handed a German drone company a foothold in one of the most urgent defense priorities in the Indo-Pacific: figuring out how to shoot down enemy drones before they hit anything. Quantum Systems, a German unmanned aircraft maker, announced Wednesday that Japan’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency, the defense ministry’s procurement […]View the full article

An unmanned fighter jet just fired a live air-to-air missile at a target over the California desert, and a human sitting somewhere else gave the order to pull the trigger. The Department of the Air Force confirmed that a YFQ-44A Collaborative Combat Aircraft, the service’s designation for a new class of autonomous fighter drones built […]View the full article

A 17-meter robotic ship built to patrol the ocean alone for nearly two months at a stretch has just rolled off a British production line, and its arrival says as much about where naval technology is headed as it does about the vessel itself. ZeroUSV, a Plymouth-based maker of uncrewed surface vessels, confirmed that its […]View the full article

Britain’s military just handed itself a $536 million-a-year budget and a five-point checklist for turning laboratory ideas into battlefield equipment faster than its notoriously slow defense bureaucracy has managed in decades. UK Defence Innovation, the Ministry of Defence’s newly consolidated innovation arm known as UKDI, announced Wednesday the five core themes that will guide how […]View the full article

Twenty-five U.S. senators want to know why the Pentagon is still sitting on an investigation into one of the deadliest strikes involving American forces in more than three decades, and they’re giving the Department of War exactly one week to start answering. Senators Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, joined by […]View the full article

Ukraine now builds roughly 10 million drones a year, a tenfold jump from the target President Volodymyr Zelenskyy first announced just three years ago, Radio Svoboda, the Ukrainian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, reported. Zelenskyy delivered the figure during a ceremony in Kyiv marking Ukrainian Statehood Day, framing it as proof that a goal […]View the full article

Germany approved more weapons for export in six months than most countries manage in years, and the country that received the single biggest share of that approval, once again, is not a NATO member at all. It’s Ukraine. Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, the government agency responsible for reviewing and approving […]View the full article

After my Monday post about our use of Corsair USV in the attack on the Iranian shipyard/submarine, a very sensible and steady friend sent me a note expressing concern that I was getting a bit too excited. He was concerned that I was joining the gaggle of the drones-uber-alles people. I felt a little insulted that he would think so little of me…but such is the danger of my imperfect writing. Here’s what I replied to his concerns, I am not one of these drones-uber-alles fellas. It’s just an evolution of an existing tool that we can put in the toolbox. It’s not a sexy opinion, It’s not popular, but I think it is the reasonable position. At the Australian Strategic Policy In…

Somewhere on the flight deck of a future U.S. aircraft carrier, a jet could be preparing to launch into contested airspace nearly 1,900 kilometers (1,151 miles) away, refuel itself mid-flight if needed, evade enemy threats, and strike a target, all without a single pilot strapped inside the cockpit. That’s the future the U.S. Navy just […]View the full article

The next major shift in military technology might not look like a stealth fighter or a hypersonic missile. It could look like a laboratory full of scientists trying to control particles so small and so strange that they can exist in two states at once, and the U.S. Air Force just paid one of its […]View the full article

The Pentagon has told American metal suppliers it wants to know exactly how much titanium and magnesium the country would need to keep building fighter jets and military hardware if a real war cut off the foreign supply chains both materials currently depend on. The Defense Logistics Agency, the Department of War’s supply and logistics […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force has asked American rocket companies for their best ideas on an engine that could let a single missile take off like a rocket, cruise like a jet, and skip the giant fuel tanks that usually make that kind of flexibility impossible. The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Rocket and Space Propulsion Division, […]View the full article

A satellite passing over southern Russia captured the aftermath Tuesday evening, and the image leaves little room for doubt: the Russian border guard ship Izumrud sits partially submerged against its pier, the surrounding dock scorched black from fire, exactly as Ukraine’s navy said it would be after announcing the ship’s destruction earlier the same day. […]View the full article

Ghostworks, a boutique shipyard based in Holland, Michigan, introduced MRLN, the Multirole Remote Logistics Node, on July 14 at the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit, an event hosted by U.S. Senator Dave McCormick at the Army War College in Carlisle. MRLN is not a boat itself but a remote-piloting and autonomy system that installs onto […]View the full article

The British military’s newest helicopter fleet finally has an engine, closing a question that even reporters covering the program in real time couldn’t get UK officials to answer for months. GE Aerospace announced July 14 that Leonardo selected its CT7-2E1 engine to power all 23 AW149 helicopters being built for the UK Ministry of Defence’s […]View the full article

You have to give the People’s Republic of China (PRC) credit for consistency. They like islands. On Sunday’s Midrats Podcast, we touched on this rather brazen act that would be laughable if not serious. The Batanes Islands, which are covered by the so-called maritime delimitation talks between Japan and the Philippines, are legally China's sovereign territory and form a natural geographic extension of China's Taiwan island. China should take corresponding actions to assert its sovereignty over the Batanes, the Global Times learned from Chinese experts and scholars at a symposium. The academic symposium on the sovereignty issue of the Batanes Islands was convened at Jinan…

A consulting firm best known for advising Fortune 500 companies on corporate strategy just landed a nearly $20 million contract to fix one of the U.S. military’s most persistent headaches: getting American weapons into allied hands faster. The Boston Consulting Group received a $19.9 million contract from the Army to help redesign how the service […]View the full article

Ukraine’s navy sank a Russian border guard ship near Novorossiysk using an unmanned strike boat. The Ukrainian Navy said its sailors sank the Rubin-class patrol ship Izumrud (354), a Russian Federal Security Service border guard vessel, using the Sargan-3000, a domestically built unmanned surface strike platform that has entered service with Ukraine’s naval forces over […]View the full article

Two German defense companies just proved a submarine can fire a scout instead of a torpedo, completing sea trials of an uncrewed boat small enough to launch from a standard torpedo tube and surface on its own to spy on an enemy without ever putting the submarine itself at risk. GABLER, a German firm known […]View the full article