Raw Intel

The United States government has approved the sale of seven surplus Marine Corps amphibious assault vehicles to Italy in a $30.6 million deal that will help Rome maintain the ability to put troops ashore from the sea as NATO faces growing pressure to expand its expeditionary capabilities. The U.S. Department of State notified Congress of […]View the full article

Norway’s Army has completed delivery of its final batch of new armored trucks from German manufacturer Rheinmetall MAN Military Vehicles, bringing the service’s total fleet of the new vehicles to 113 and drawing the curtain on a decades-long reliance on Cold War-era Scania logistics trucks. The Norwegian Army announced the arrival of the last 25 […]View the full article

A Lithuanian defense firm that has been developing hybrid electric military vehicles since 2020 demonstrated its latest capability to the Lithuanian Armed Forces last week: a remote-control system that can turn virtually any vehicle into an unmanned ground platform, tested during the military experimentation exercise Vanguard 2026 at the Rūdninkai Training Area. Ostara, the Vilnius-based […]View the full article

A man’s man, a man of God, and someone who really knew, “What would Jesus do?“ ... Kapaun defied orders to evacuate, knowing it meant he would most certainly be captured. He pleaded with an injured Chinese officer to call out to his fellow Chinese to stop shooting, an act that spared the lives of wounded Americans. As Kapaun was being led away, he came across another wounded American in a ditch and an enemy soldier standing over Sgt. Herbert Miller, ready to shoot. Kapaun pushed the enemy aside and helped Miller as they were taken captive. They arrived days later, by foot, at the village in Pyoktong, where a POW camp eventually was established. “This is the valor we hon…

Britain’s next-generation main battle tank has completed another round of Battlefield Mission serials, putting Challenger 3 trial vehicles through cross-country driving, road work, gunnery drills, and full crew exercises in conditions designed to mirror real operational use, UK Defence Journal reported. The results are feeding directly into the engineering baseline as the program builds toward […]View the full article

Ukraine launched one of its largest drone strikes on Moscow in the war’s history overnight into May 17, sending more than 130 unmanned aerial vehicles into the Russian capital and surrounding region, triggering fires at an electronics manufacturing facility and a major oil refinery, forcing all four of Moscow’s major airports to suspend flight operations, […]View the full article

The modern battlefield no longer belongs solely to armor thickness and engine power. Drones circle overhead, electronic warfare degrades communications, and sensor networks feed commanders more data than any single operator can process in real time. Against that backdrop, two companies from opposite ends of the defense technology spectrum are betting that the next leap […]View the full article

Ukraine has cleared its first domestically developed guided aerial bomb for combat use, with Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announcing that the weapon has completed all required testing and an initial experimental batch has already been procured by the Ministry of Defense, with pilots currently training on combat scenarios using the new munition. The bomb was […]View the full article

Japan’s Ministry of Defense has released a comprehensive briefing document outlining its space domain defense buildup, revealing a sweeping expansion of military space capabilities that includes a dedicated Space Operations Group growing to 880 personnel, a space defense budget that has surged more than threefold since 2022, and an ambitious program to field satellites capable […]View the full article

A very strange and rather short article came out yesterday from Richard Fontaine, the CEO at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will: this isn’t personal, this is professional. I had to double-check the publication date as it just read, well, strange. But no, August 4th, 2026. Its title, Japan isn’t rearming. It’s adapting to a new era. It is something if it were written by someone else, I might ignore…but Richard isn’t just some rando anon pounding away on Substack…so here we go. In the name of all that is holy. I know Richard has been in DC a long time and is well soaked in the Beltway NATSEC miasma…but someone has to put …

Portugal is doubling down on a bet it made just a year ago: that the best way to watch its own coastline and territory is to own the satellites doing the watching, rather than renting someone else’s. ICEYE, the Finnish company that operates the world’s largest synthetic aperture radar satellite constellation, announced that CTI Aeroespacial, […]View the full article

The Pentagon has told American metal suppliers it wants to know exactly how much titanium and magnesium the country would need to keep building fighter jets and military hardware if a real war cut off the foreign supply chains both materials currently depend on. The Defense Logistics Agency, the Department of War’s supply and logistics […]View the full article

The U.S. Army is building a biotech startup accelerator designed to fast-track biological defense technologies from laboratory bench to battlefield, and it wants nonprofit organizations to run it, with up to $95 million on the table and the possibility of a follow-on contract worth as much as $500 million. The Army’s Capability Program Executive for […]View the full article

Editor’s note: Robert Brüll is the founder and CEO of FibreCoat, a materials technology company that supplies lightweight, electrically conductive fibers used in defense, space, and industrial applications. He writes here in a personal capacity. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect the editorial position of The Defence Blog. At the time […]View the full article

Ukrainian investigators have published their findings from the wreckage of a nuclear-capable Russian ballistic missile that struck an industrial zone near Bila Tserkva on the night of May 23-24, and what they found inside the debris tells a story that undercuts several of the claims Moscow has built around its most heavily promoted weapon. Russia […]View the full article

Lithuania will purchase 936 Patria 6×6 armored vehicles from Finland in a landmark procurement approved by the State Defence Council on Wednesday, with President Gitanas Nausėda confirming that 300 of the vehicles are expected to arrive by 2030 and that part of the production process will take place inside Lithuania itself. The decision makes Lithuania […]View the full article

Elbit Systems announced a $350 million contract on May 28 to modernize main battle tanks for an undisclosed international customer, delivering an upgrade package that replaces the vehicles’ fire control systems, gun and turret drives, communications, and situational awareness systems over four years. The customer’s identity remains confidential, continuing a pattern in Elbit’s recent contract […]View the full article

Russian Su-57 stealth fighters have resumed high-tempo cruise missile operations along nearly the entire length of the Ukrainian front, with Ukrainian air raid monitoring services recording more than ten confirmed launch events during May alone, a pace of operations that had been significantly curtailed following a Ukrainian drone strike deep inside Russia earlier this spring. […]View the full article

Canada unveiled a new self-propelled artillery system at its premier defense exhibition this week that can fire a 155mm shell while moving at speed, reload automatically without a gunner exposed outside the vehicle, and hit targets up to 70 km (43 miles) away, all operated by a crew of three from inside an armored hull […]View the full article

Israeli loitering munitions manufacturer Uvision launched a new battle management software system on June 1 that connects sensors, decision-making processes, and multiple weapons into a single unified framework, announcing the CORTEX active Battle Intelligence and Mission Management system at ILA Berlin 2026 as the company’s most ambitious step yet toward automating the full sensor-to-shooter chain […]View the full article