Raw Intel

Russian air defense troops appear to be using Chinese-designed shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, according to an analysis by Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi of footage aired on Russian state television. The launchers were shown during an exercise by a mobile fire group of Russia’s 51st Air Defense Division in the Rostov region, in a segment broadcast by […]View the full article

South Korea’s arms procurement agency has asked Türkiye whether it can buy the Turkish PD170 drone engine, a powerplant already flying on some of the world’s most combat-tested drones, as Korean military drone programs suffer a string of public crashes. Turkish Aerospace Industries, or TAI, recently received an inquiry from South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program […]View the full article

Taiwan broke ground Monday on an aerospace and drone industrial park in the southern county of Chiayi, where the island’s main military research institute wants to build a drone supply chain free of Chinese parts. President Lai Ching-te led the Sept. 28 ceremony, which also opened a new Minxiong campus for the National Chung-Shan Institute […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy’s newest destroyer, the future USS Ted Stevens (DDG 128), arrived in Whittier, Alaska, on Sept. 27, less than a week before it is due to be formally commissioned there in a ceremony the state has not hosted in more than a decade. The Flight III Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer will be commissioned […]View the full article

The U.S. Department of War is setting up a permanent team inside the Pentagon comptroller’s office to find programs and processes it considers wasteful, inefficient or duplicative and recommend cutting, merging or reshaping them, under a memo signed by Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg. The new Force Agility and Streamlining Team, or FAST, will […]View the full article

Japanese radar satellite company Synspective has signed a contract with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to launch two of its StriX satellites on Japan’s H3 rocket in 2027, moving part of a constellation that feeds imagery to Japan’s Ministry of Defense onto a domestic launcher for the first time. The company announced the agreement Sept. 18. The […]View the full article

British startup Cambridge Aerospace plans to build its low-cost drone interceptor missiles in Japan and offer them to Japan’s Ministry of Defense, with each round priced at several million yen, or tens of thousands of dollars, the Nikkei business daily reported. The company’s interceptors cost tens of times less than conventional air defense missiles, and […]View the full article

Japan’s Ministry of Defense will start building at least 65 new ammunition depots for the Self-Defense Forces from fiscal 2027, using a single standardized design to get them into service faster, the Nikkei business daily reported Sept. 20. The push to store more ammunition follows lessons Tokyo has drawn from Russia’s war in Ukraine, where […]View the full article

Turkish defense company ASELSAN has shown its KORKUT 35 air defense gun system shooting down drones and hitting a moving target while driving, in a live-fire demonstration watched by military delegations from 12 countries. The company released video of the firing. The demonstration focused on drones, and KORKUT 35 engaged fixed-wing, delta-wing and small mini […]View the full article

A U.S. Army program that builds realistic enemy threats for training flew Performance Drone Works’ C100X drone at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 25, testing its thermal camera, its ability to drop inert practice munitions and whether it could be used in future training scenarios. The flights were carried out by members of the […]View the full article

U.S. Space Command held the third of four wargames with commercial space companies on Sept. 23, this time focused on spacecraft that operate outside the orbits most satellites use today, including very low Earth orbit and the space between Earth and the Moon. The tabletop exercise, part of a series called APOLLO INSIGHT, brought military […]View the full article

Soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division spent two weeks in the field in Hawaii this month testing new command-and-control software under realistic combat conditions, wrapping up the fifth round of the division’s Lightning Surge experiments with a brigade certification exercise called Nakoa Fleek. The exercise ran from Sept. 14 to 25 at Schofield […]View the full article

U.S. and Indian soldiers flew into battle together aboard Indian Army helicopters on Sept. 25, seizing two objectives in a combined air assault in the Himalayan training area of Auli during exercise Yudh Abhyas 2026. The mission mixed troops from both armies inside the same units, the U.S. Army said. Each of the two assaulting […]View the full article

The U.S. Army has picked 30 finalists, from defense giants such as RTX and Northrop Grumman to startups in Australia and the United Kingdom, in a prize competition to find cheaper interceptors that could fly alongside the Patriot air defense system. The Army’s xTech program announced the finalists for xTech|Apex Intercept this week. Each receives […]View the full article

Michigan drone maker Swarm Defense Technologies has received an order for 4,000 Kiwi one-way attack drones under the U.S. Department of War’s Drone Dominance Program, the company announced Sept. 22. The prototype delivery order has a minimum value of $25 million, including munitions, which works out to about $6,250 per drone at that minimum. The […]View the full article

The biggest improvements to MAUL, a Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle built to carry wounded soldiers off the front line, have come from the troops using it rather than from artificial intelligence, the head of the company behind it said. An unmanned ground vehicle, or UGV, is a remotely controlled or partly autonomous vehicle that moves […]View the full article

U.S. Army soldiers from the 11th Airborne Division took a mobile counter-drone system to India’s Rajasthan desert during exercise Yudh Abhyas 2026, showing Indian Army troops how it finds and defeats small drones. The system, the Mobile Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat System, or M-LIDS, was set up at the Mahajan Field Firing […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy’s new submarine-launched nuclear warhead, the W93, has moved into full-scale development, the first U.S. nuclear warhead and reentry body program started in nearly 40 years. The Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs office said the W93 and its Mk7 reentry body, the cone-shaped shell that carries the warhead back through the atmosphere to its […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy has set up a new command to turn its growing collection of drones, unmanned boats and robotic submarines into tools sailors can actually fight with, naming Rear Adm. Melvin Smith as its first commander. The Robotic and Autonomous Systems Warfighting Development Center, known as RASWDC, is headquartered at Joint Expeditionary Base Little […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force is looking for a contractor to replace an aging encryption unit on its E-3G AWACS radar planes after the manufacturer warned it can no longer keep up with changing National Security Agency security requirements, according to a sources-sought notice posted Sept. 25 on the federal contracting website. The part, known as […]View the full article