Raw Intel

OpenWorks Engineering, a counter-drone specialist based in Northumberland, England, announced this week that it recently attended an industry-focused counter-unmanned aircraft systems, or C-UAS, event at the British Army’s Larkhill Garrison, where the company demonstrated its Vision Pace targeting system to defense and security partners. Larkhill sits on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire and has served as […]View the full article

Vigilant Solution, the robotics division of the French small business MP-SEC, announced that its team took part in a new round of trials last week for Pendragon, a French military program working to build the country’s first Robotic Combat Unit, known in French as the Unité Robotique de Combat, or URC. The French Army launched […]View the full article

Observers at the Port of Callao got an unexpected surprise this week: a shipment of at least two K2 Black Panther main battle tanks, alongside six K808 8×8 armored personnel carriers, arriving from South Korea. The vessel, identified through tracking data as the GLOVIS SAFETY (IMO: 9798399), makes the shipment one of the clearest confirmed […]View the full article

Australia’s Army flew its Vector AI fixed-wing drone during Exercise Southern Jackaroo at the Townsville Field Training Area in Queensland, using the aircraft to identify targets in depth and feed that information directly into drone and artillery strikes on simulated enemy positions. The drone is built by Quantum Systems, a German manufacturer whose reconnaissance aircraft […]View the full article

A U.S. Air Force and industry tandem developed and tested a new cheap cruise missile, Rusty Dagger, in record time, and the pace of that work is now difficult to compare with any previous program the service has run. What has traditionally taken years came together here in months. Driven by urgent frontline need and […]View the full article

Australia has fired a live missile from a prototype ground-based air defense system for the first time, hitting a cruise missile target at the remote Woomera Test Range in South Australia and marking the debut pairing of an Australian-made radar with the U.S. Navy’s Aegis Combat System. The Department of Defence in Canberra announced the […]View the full article

Lockheed Martin has been tapped by the U.S. Department of War to build the most powerful laser weapon ever packed into a shipping container, a 500-kilowatt system designed to knock cruise missiles and drone swarms out of the sky before they reach American forces or the homeland. The Bethesda, Maryland-based defense giant announced the award […]View the full article

U.S. Marines on a remote Pacific island just proved they can shoot down cruise missiles using a weapon system built around the same technology that has protected Israeli cities from rocket attacks for over a decade. Marines from III Marine Expeditionary Force successfully fired the Medium-Range Intercept Capability, or MRIC, system on June 30 during […]View the full article

The U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division posted a sources sought notice on July 9 seeking companies capable of building a deployable cleaning system to remove what officials call “clutch sludge” from the F-35B’s short takeoff and vertical landing lift fan clutch cooling system, with responses due within just seven business days, by July […]View the full article

If nuclear war ever broke out and every ground-based command center went dark, a fleet of aging jets built on a 1960s airliner design would still be able to relay the launch order, and the U.S. Navy just opened bidding on a decade-long contract to keep those planes flying. The Naval Air Systems Command posted […]View the full article

The Pentagon just opened the door for private companies to pitch prototype hypersonic weapons capable of flying more than five times the speed of sound, releasing a formal Request for Solutions on July 9 that gives industry until August 10 to respond. The opportunity, titled Next Generation Hypersonics for the Department of War, runs through […]View the full article

The company that helped supply Ukraine’s front lines with cheap, mass-produced attack drones just announced it is racing to build the exact opposite: a drone built specifically to hunt and kill other drones. Neros Technologies posted a video on July 10 showing early testing of what the company calls Bandit, a counter-unmanned aircraft system, or […]View the full article

A shoulder-fired missile streaking toward a military cargo plane has mere seconds to find its target, and the U.S. Air Force has paid $60.4 million to make sure the aircraft sees it coming even faster. Northrop Grumman won a $60,438,241 contract to develop an enhanced sensor called the Optical Detection and Identification Node, or ODIN, […]View the full article

Türkiye has reportedly sold its Russian-made S-400 air defense system to a Gulf state, according to Hürriyet columnist Abdülkadir Selvi, whose report ties the transaction directly to Türkiye’s yearslong effort to escape American sanctions and potentially reopen the door to purchasing F-35 fighter jets. Selvi wrote that the sale had been finalized after last-minute details […]View the full article

For decades, only two American companies could build the powerful solid rocket motors that launch the Pentagon’s biggest missiles into the sky, and the Missile Defense Agency just handed nearly $11 million to a New Mexico firm trying to break that monopoly wide open. X-Bow Launch Systems, based in Albuquerque, won a competitive $10,981,581 contract […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy awarded Norwegian defense manufacturer Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace a contract modification worth roughly $50.3 million on July 2 to buy more launcher missile modules for what the Pentagon calls its “over-the-horizon weapons system,” the hardware behind a Marine Corps program that lets troops sink enemy warships from land without ever putting a […]View the full article

Once a bad theory is adopted because it makes sense to one cohort (GOFOs who went to a two-week MBA camp) and is encouraged by others (influential civilian companies looking for another income stream), at the expense of what the first cohort should have been focused on but is an unpopular topic (winning wars), it spreads and develops its inertia. Even when one area discovers the theory does not survive contact with reality, other areas carry on because, well, going along is easier than admitting error and changing. When the maintenance CONOPS for the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) came out in the mid-00s with its reliance on civilian contractors and OEMs being responsible for…

A Greek Air Force fighter pilot pulled off a landing gear failure Thursday afternoon that could have ended very differently, bringing an F-16 down on its belly at Zakynthos airport after the jet’s wheels refused to extend during a routine training flight. The Hellenic Air Force confirmed the emergency landing occurred around 1:45 p.m. local […]View the full article

Poland’s spending on drones and counter-drone systems has grown 260-fold in under three years, reaching roughly $6.9 billion (26 billion zloty) this year alone, Polish Deputy Defense Minister Cezary Tomczyk announced at a production line unveiling in Sochaczewa, according to Interia. Tomczyk made the announcement Thursday while touring the new manufacturing facility of Hornet-Polskie Drony, […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy released photos showing divers entering Dry Dock 2 as the attack submarine USS Illinois (SSN-786) prepared to undock at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility on June 24, 2026, marking the completion of a scheduled maintenance period for one of the fleet’s most closely watched Virginia-class boats. Open-source trackers monitoring […]View the full article