Raw Intel

Ultra APV demonstrator (click to view full) In an age of non-linear warfare, where front lines are nebulous at best and non-existent at worst, one of the biggest casualties is… the concept of unprotected rear echelon vehicles, designed with the idea that they’d never see serious combat. That imperative is being driven home on 2 fronts. One front is operational. The other front is buying trends. These trends, and their design imperatives, found their way into the USA’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program, which aims to replace many of the US military’s 120,000 or so Humvees. The US military’s goal is a 7-10 ton vehicle that’s lighter than its MRAPs and easier to…

Americas Naval Air Force Atlantic tested a long-range aerial drone last weekend, the Navy announced. The long-range cargo transport, dubbed Blue Water UAS, is designed to operate with Naval Forces that typically operate in heavy winds over open water and require aircraft to land on vessels that are moving rapidly at sea. The proof-of-concept test was conducted last Sunday by transporting lightweight logistical equipment from the mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center at Naval Station Norfolk on board USS Gerald R. Ford while the carrier was in-port. Boeing announced that its T-7A Red Hawk advanced trainer has entered production at its plant in St. Louis. Chuck Dabundo,…

China's military posturing is in the air this Monday, so we'll look west of Wake to start the week out. Though rough translations can be a challenge to read, if you get a chance to read your main opponent's intellectual work that references how they think - you should make the effort. Though it would be great to have a more recent copy, thanks to the USAF's Air University you can read the People's Republic of China Science of Military Strategy (2013). They use a slightly different approach to think about the same issue all militaries do - how to look at the different areas of power and control. In the West, most of us think in "domains." The PRC's 2013 work uses the term …

Americas The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has awarded $3 million in contracts to two non-profits to hire and educate new digital security personnel from underserved communities. The agency signed agreements with Tennessee-based apprenticeship organization South Memphis Renewal Community Development Corporation (SMRCDC) and New York tech skills instructor Per Scholas. BAE Systems has […]View the full article

Americas Boeing won a $19 million modification for the F-15 Eagle Passive/Active Warning Survivability System. The modification brings the total cumulative face value of the contract to $824,669,013. Work will be performed at Nashua, New Hampshire, and is expected to be completed by December 31, 2026. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Wright-Patterson Air […]View the full article

Americas Sikorsky Aircraft won three contracts by the US Navy in support of the CH-53K. The first deal is worth $175.7 million for the procurement of 22 main modules in support of the CH-53K aircraft. The second contract is worth $132.9 million for the procurement of 128 main rotor blade assemblies, the third one involved $11.6 million for the procurement of eight helicopter rotor hub assemblies. Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) pilots have begun intensive training with the Royal Air Force (RAF) on the P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft. This collaboration marks a crucial phase in the RCAF’s transition to the advanced platform, replacing the aging CP-140 Aurora fleet. …

OK, hold on…you might have suffered the same yawn that I did when reading news about our old girl NIXIE… U.S. Navy budget documentation released last week is adding a series of new capabilities to the current AN/SLQ-25 Nixie countermeasures suite, including a new hard-kill capability via deck launchers, set to be deployed to over 168 different front-line ships in coming years. …until you got to the second clause. I know some of you are thinking, “Oh, we can talk about hard kill now?” Then, in the next paragraph by Carter Johnson at Naval News, this sexy little creature wanders on stage, The hard-kill weapon, known as the Mk58 Compact Rapid Attack Weapon (CRAW), is expecte…

At Uncrewed Innovation Day 2025, defense technology firms MDSI and Armadrone conducted a live demonstration of advanced drone warfare integration, showcasing the controlled release of a precision-guided munition from an uncrewed aerial platform. The trial featured Armadrone’s PUNISHER drone carrying MDSI’s precision-guided munition, known as MAILMAN, in a test that emphasized seamless interoperability and accuracy. […] The post Punisher drone tests MAILMAN munition in Denmark first appeared on Defence Blog.View the full article

Raytheon, an RTX business, has successfully completed testing of a ground-launched variant of its StormBreaker smart weapon, developing and launching the prototype in just 50 days. The rapid test underscores the company’s push to expand precision strike options beyond the air domain and into ground-based platforms. The test took place this spring at a private […] The post Raytheon tests ground-launched precision strike system first appeared on Defence Blog.View the full article

The United States military has withdrawn its Typhon mid-range missile launcher from Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni after deploying it there in September for joint exercises with Japan. The Chugoku-Shikoku Defense Bureau notified the city of Iwakuni about the withdrawal on November 17, according to information communicated to local officials. The launcher, known as Typhon, […]View the full article

A Danish startup is entering the unmanned logistics market with a family of heavy-lift, high-speed autonomous cargo aircraft designed to move large payloads over medium distances. Acodyne says it is developing an unmanned electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft aimed at what it describes as the “middle-mile” logistics segment, a space between short-range drones and […]View the full article

As you all know, I love nothing more than quoting myself. So, Front Porch members of long standing by now can say things from memory: Plan Salamander for the U.S. posture toward Europe that I have been proposing in one form or another for a couple of decades+. Here is just one example from 15 years ago. …withdraw all maneuver forces from Asia and Europe except for what is needed at Combined Training and Logistics Bases with our most important allies. No, we don’t leave NATO. I’m a former NATO staff officer who used to give seminars on operational planning at war colleges all over Europe. We just need a 21st century reality check. We still have 80-100,000 personnel there. …

I know it is just a little bit more than a week after my last post on the outstanding performance of the under-appreciated Expeditionary Mobile Base (ESB)—by the way, can we get this class of ships a proper classification? We have other options. However, they are doing the heavy lifting again in the post-Maduro takedown. Here we have U.S. forces capturing the tanker VERONICA III in the Indian Ocean. The tanker is linked to the illegal transportation of crude oil from Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. She could run, but could not hide from the yet-to-be named U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke destroyer. And as Sal Mercogliano let us know over the weekend, in the background of the pictur…

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries confirmed it has successfully conducted flight demonstrations of AI-powered mission autonomy for unmanned aerial vehicles, using the Hivemind Enterprise development environment from U.S.-based Shield AI. According to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the full development cycle—from AI design and training to installation and flight—was completed in eight weeks. The company stated that the use […]View the full article

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has, for the first time, publicly appeared alongside what is believed to be a new Ukrainian-developed surface-to-air missile during a video message marking the professional holiday of the country’s defense industry workforce. The missile was shown in the background behind the president together with several weapons systems developed during the active […]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

The Chinese are not playing games. Great graphic by HI Sutton over at Naval News on the state of play in the submarine world. Wake up everyone. Conventional non-nuclear submarines remain a key pillar of China’s submarine force, but the focus is changing to nuclear boats. Until very recently the sole shipyard building nuclear submarines was at Huludao in the north of the country. Now two shipyards on the Yangtze River, the Wuchang shipyard in Wuhan and the JN yard in Shanghai, have joined. Wuchang appears likely to focus on the Type-041 Zhou class ‘mini-nuke’ while JN has begun construction of much larger boats. The first nuclear powered boat launched at JN was a new class…

Photos released by a U.S. Army unit this week appear to show America’s newest hypersonic missile system training somewhere in the Pacific, and one open-source analyst believes he has pinned down exactly where. The X account 笑脸男人, tracking military hardware sightings under the handle @lfx160219, said the U.S. Army may have deployed its Dark Eagle […]View the full article

The U.S. Army has increased its procurement objective for the Infantry Squad Vehicle to 11,582 vehicles, an 18-fold jump from the program’s original 649-vehicle target, according to Jacqueline Hames of the Army Acquisition Support Center. The Infantry Squad Vehicle is an ultra-light tactical vehicle that carries nine passengers along with their equipment. The Army launched […]View the full article

I mentioned @Schizointel’s graphic from last month on the last UNCLAS Read Board Podcast, and it keeps popping into my mind. Only the paying subscribers get access to the UNCLAS Read Board Podcast, so I thought I’d bring it to the Substack, chat about it a bit, and then perhaps it will get out of my head. Probably not, because it is one of the best representations of a regular topic of ours here: we have too small of a Navy. It is also a good representation of what it takes to conduct a blockade and deal with the threat of the once-3rd-rate and now-4th-rate-power of Iran and her proxies. So, here it is. How many ships do you need? Today, let’s just look at our Aegis ships…