Raw Intel

Turkish defense manufacturer Roketsan conducted a live-fire test of its TAYFUN Block-3 ballistic missile, striking a free-moving, unmanned surface vessel roughly 7 meters (23 feet) long, built to represent a small fishing boat, with a live warhead traveling at hypersonic terminal speed. The company described the hit as achieved with surgical precision, and Turkish officials […]View the full article

Both in comments here, social media, and a variety of SEPCOR, Monday’s post on AUKUS got a lot more interest than I thought it did. That makes for a happy Salamander, as it is clear that along the broad spectrum of the navalist and Five Eyes community, the importance of this project is well understood and supported. In a way, I feel like I cheated an opportunity, so let’s assign some reading to everyone, pull out some interesting tidbits from the reading, and maybe slap a moonbat or two while we’re at it. Here is the syllabus for today’s Substack. I’ll quote from various places…and yes, it is another opportunity to thank the good people doing the hard work at the Congres…

Japan’s Ministry of Defense said on March 28 that the Air Self-Defense Force scrambled fighter aircraft after a Chinese military patrol aircraft flew over the East China Sea. The ministry said one aircraft was detected flying southwest of Okinawa and that Air Self-Defense Force fighters were urgently scrambled in response. The flight path, released in […]View the full article

A U.S. defense startup has been selected by the Defense Innovation Unit, a Department of War organization focused on accelerating commercial technology into military use, to advance an autonomous close-in weapon system designed to reduce aiming latency in close-in counter-drone engagements, moving into Phase II testing in front of Department of War evaluators this month. […]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

The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), better known as the Humvee, was born in the late 1970s. The U.S. Army concluded that its aging fleet of jeeps and light utility vehicles could not survive the demands of a modern battlefield. The service needed something faster, tougher, and far more versatile. In 1983, AM General […]View the full article

GE Aerospace has secured a U.S. Air Force contract to advance the preliminary design of its GE426 engine, a propulsion system built specifically for the medium-thrust class of autonomous combat aircraft the Air Force is developing to operate alongside crewed fighters. The award marks the next development milestone for a program that passed its concept […]View the full article

Back in the first week of May, we had the second edition in what has become a series about what options exist on the table to get additional weapons on ships: Yes, Reality Demands More Guns, Larger Guns, Everywhere. It was a follow-up to March’s Up-arm the Fleet? With What? A principal concern I have was outlined in a previous article in November 2024, Arm the Auxiliaries. If you are new to the issue, give the above a read and then come back. In addition to the primary concern, the secondary concern is our existing ships that are already armed, but do not have the best mix of weapons to address the new reality—the many cheap, unsophisticated, but deadly swarming threats n…

The U.S. Navy awarded Science Applications International Corporation, known as SAIC, a $112 million contract modification to continue producing components for the MK 48 Mod 7 heavyweight torpedo, the primary submarine-launched weapon of the U.S. Navy and Royal Australian Navy. The work covers production of torpedo components, spare parts, production support materials, engineering support, and […]View the full article

Spain unveiled the industrial blueprint for its next generation of fighter pilot training on April 28, 2026, as an Airbus-led consortium presented the full programme structure for the Spanish Air and Space Force’s new Integrated Combat Training System — a contract awarded in December 2025 that will retire the country’s aging F-5 fleet and replace […]View the full article

AM General showed up to Modern Day Marine with two vehicles and a clear message: the company that built the HMMWV for four decades is now building the unmanned systems that will operate alongside whatever comes next. At Booth 2007 of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., AM General displayed its next-generation […]View the full article

Words matter. Clarity matters. Consistency matters. I don’t think anyone has been happy with how we describe “drones”, “unmanned”, or the cringy reactionary-woke “uncrewed” phraseology. Don’t even get me started with the “kamikaze drone” and other such kludges. OK, I may be nine months late to the game, but it appears we may be moving past the awkward and tiresome, “Do we call it unmanned, uncrewed, or something else that starts with a ‘u’? I’m tired of being yelled at.” stage. Have you noticed something seeping into the…drone?…space recently? From what I can tell—and if you can find earlier official uses please let us know in comments—what brought this acronym to the fr…

Finland’s Minister of Defence, Antti Häkkänen, authorized the Finnish Defence Forces Logistics Command on June 18 to purchase additional GBU-53 Small Diameter Bomb II glide bombs from the United States, adding to a stockpile that will arm the country’s incoming fleet of F-35A stealth fighters with a weapon few air forces in the world currently […]View the full article

A Russian drone struck an apartment building in Galați, Romania, in May 2026, and the incident has become a flashpoint in a broader story about a vulnerability the European defense industry has been racing to address. Separate reporting has linked some stray-drone incidents across the region to heavy electronic warfare, including GPS spoofing and jamming, […]View the full article

U.S. Air Force Special Warfare Airmen tested a commercial off-the-shelf kinetic counter-drone interceptor in Arizona earlier this month. The proof-of-concept event brought together Airmen from the 48th Rescue Squadron, 7th Air Support Operations Squadron, and 316th Civil Engineer Squadron Explosive Ordnance Disposal at the Arizona Army National Guard Florence Military Reservation. The exercise integrated a […]View the full article

The Pentagon’s most ambitious research arm wants to build computers that can think in the dark, operate on almost no power, and keep working even when their own hardware is failing, and it is now asking the technology world to help figure out how. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Pentagon’s research and technology […]View the full article

The U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll visited U.S. Army Garrison Ansbach in Germany on April 30, where commanders from the 52nd Air Defense Artillery Brigade and 12th Combat Aviation Brigade briefed him on counter-unmanned aerial systems tested and implemented over the past year, and among the systems on display was the Merops AS-3 Surveyor counter-drone […]View the full article

Three years after a Chinese balloon drifted across the continental United States and was shot down off the South Carolina coast, the U.S. Army is now buying the same technology for itself, and the shopping list it published tells a story about how American commanders plan to watch the Pacific in any future conflict. The […]View the full article

Canadian armored vehicle manufacturer Roshel will debut three new military platforms at CANSEC 2026 in Ottawa, leading with a modular light utility vehicle that can convert from a standard unprotected configuration to a STANAG Level 2 armored vehicle in approximately two hours, offering NATO-aligned militaries a way to maintain battlefield-ready protected transport without sustaining large […]View the full article

Ukraine has doubled its strikes on Russian oil infrastructure and is keeping up that pace into May, targeting refineries, export terminals, Baltic Sea ports, and sanctioned tankers in what analysts at ACLED now describe as a sustained campaign rather than a temporary escalation — one calculated to drain the revenue Russia is drawing from a […]View the full article