Raw Intel

A robotic combat vehicle that can drive itself 280 miles while charging drones, powering radar and running a portable command post has rolled through a demonstration in the Utah desert for a room full of government, defense and technology leaders. Hypercraft, a Provo, Utah-based autonomous vehicle company, showed off its Razorback unmanned ground vehicle at […]View the full article

Hromadske, the Ukrainian outlet, published an exclusive video report embedded with soldiers from Ukraine’s 19th Rocket Artillery Brigade “Svyata Varvara,” one of the first Ukrainian units to receive the American-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System back in 2022, documenting the launch process from the crew’s perspective for the first time in this level of detail. […]View the full article

An unmanned aircraft equipped with a microwave retroreflector, a device that bounces radar signals back with the strength of an object roughly twenty times its actual size, is designed to make one radar blip look like a genuine incoming strike drone. That aircraft, called Spectr, is built by OM Defence Systems, a UK based defense […]View the full article

The Defense Logistics Agency, the Pentagon office responsible for keeping military equipment supplied with everything from fuel to spare parts, published a notice on August 11 seeking manufacturers capable of building a replacement electric control panel for the B-1B Lancer, a swing-wing bomber that has served as a backbone of American long-range strike capability since […]View the full article

A team of engineers have proved that a helicopter design older than most of their grandparents can still out-fly the strangest, most futuristic drone shapes engineers could dream up. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s advanced research arm known for funding technologies that eventually reshape entire industries, announced that its Lift Challenge had […]View the full article

Soldiers from two of the U.S. Army’s most closely watched combat divisions spent a week at an Alabama training range flying different drones head to head, then got to pick which ones actually make it into their units, according to a report from the Army’s Capability Program Executive Aviation. The evaluation, held at Clarke Range […]View the full article

U.S. and Moroccan forces have proven out a brand-new weapons testing range in North Africa by firing a low-cost, long-range cruise missile across it, the first live-fire event ever held at the site, according to a report by Army Capt. Jordan Beagle of U.S. Africa Command. The demonstration ran from August 3 to 7 at […]View the full article

DroneShield, an Australian counter-drone technology company that has spent years building systems to detect and defeat hostile uncrewed aircraft, announced Tuesday the launch of RfRecon, a portable device designed to do something most current sensors cannot: not just detect radio frequency activity, but explain what it means, in real time, from a single handheld platform. […]View the full article

A pre-revenue air taxi startup has bought its way into the defense drone business, and Boeing is the one that sold it the keys. Archer Aviation, the Silicon Valley company racing to put electric flying taxis over American cities, announced Monday that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire three Boeing subsidiaries in a […]View the full article

It’s been almost nine months since the last Long Game post. We’re overdue. For a while I thought I might stop the Long Game series I started in 2004, after all, the Long is Now…but I was mistaken. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is still playing a long game…and we—and that includes me—just keep getting distracted. I had the following exchange with Brent Sadler at about the 52-minute mark toward the end of last Sunday’s Midrats Podcast that reminded me that, even in 2026, we’re still thinking like it’s 1996. Sal: It seem like it just happened a little while ago when they said, “Hey, there are there are PRC police stations right here in New York City.” It’s fairly hig…

A California aerospace firm building giant swarms of unmanned aircraft has landed a deal with the Air Force to prove it can manufacture those aircraft faster and cheaper than anyone else in the industry. Swarm Aero, a defense technology company that develops large uncrewed aerial vehicles designed to operate in coordinated fleets, announced more than […]View the full article

Money is flowing into defense technology at a pace that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago, and the people writing the checks are not just Pentagon program managers anymore. Individual investors, boutique venture funds and family offices are increasingly betting on drone makers, artificial intelligence startups and companies building weapons for a war in […]View the full article

The Swedish Armed Forces will receive 45 heavy recovery and technical rescue vehicles built entirely in Poland, a deal that marks one of the few instances in which Sweden has turned to a manufacturer outside its own borders for this kind of specialized military hardware. Szczęśniak Pojazdy Specjalne, a family-owned vehicle manufacturer based in Bielsko-Biała […]View the full article

A defense company that just unveiled a laser powerful enough to shoot down threats from a fighter jet cockpit also posted a record $32 billion order backlog, and the two facts are not unrelated. Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense technology company that develops everything from night vision goggles to unmanned aircraft, reported second quarter 2026 […]View the full article

A Ukrainian company that built its drone-detection network by listening for the sound of incoming Shahed attack drones has tried something its own engineers had never planned for, and it worked well enough to change how the technology might be deployed across NATO’s eastern flank. Zvook, a Ukrainian defense and space manufacturing company headquartered in […]View the full article

Sometimes, history whispers to you during small and medium-sized wars. It won’t force you to listen or even understand, but it is a loud enough whisper that you know it is there. These are not private whispers, only for you. These are understandable by anyone making an effort to hear them. More often than not, it is not a good-news whisper. No, it is an uncomfortable whisper, an inconvenient whisper, an expensive whisper. You don’t have to think about the implications of this whisper, but other people may. These whispers from small to medium-sized wars are, on occasion, riddle-strewn prophecy, but more often than not they are clear and direct about what you should expect …

A West Point cadet has spent three weeks helping Army engineers solve a math problem that could determine how many enemy drones an American air defense system can shoot down before it runs out of ammunition. Cadet Alex Anteen, a member of the U.S. Military Academy’s class of 2028, worked alongside scientists at the Army’s […]View the full article

Cameras mounted on Royal Navy surveillance drones bound for special forces missions in the Gulf were secretly transmitting signals to an IP address inside China, The Telegraph reported, citing an investigation by the newspaper’s Richard Holmes. The drones in question are Kraken K3 Scout uncrewed surface vessels, roughly 8.4-meter (28-foot) unmanned speedboats built by the […]View the full article

A mysterious Chinese warship that has spent years testing stealth technology just showed up with something new bolted to its deck, and naval watchers cannot agree on whether it is designed to disorient people or fry electronics. Open-source images circulating on social media this week show China’s unnamed experimental corvette, a stealthy test vessel that […]View the full article

A British air defense startup that did not exist until late 2024 just landed a $300 million funding round that values the company at $3.4 billion, a valuation that puts it on par with established defense primes despite having built its first missile from a blank sheet of paper less than two years ago. Cambridge […]View the full article