Raw Intel

In Congress, July 4, 1776 The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty…

The U.S. Army has told drone makers it wants a battlefield scout small enough to fold into a backpack-sized case, tough enough to carry a lethal weapon, and versatile enough to deliver two pints of blood to a wounded soldier. The U.S. Army Contracting Command at Redstone Arsenal issued a Call for Solutions on August […]View the full article

An uncrewed patrol boat just fell out of an airplane at 1,300 feet and splashed down ready to go to work, and the company behind it says nobody has ever pulled that off before. Kraken Technology Group and Capewell announced on July 8 that they completed the world’s first extracted-load airdrop of an uncrewed surface […]View the full article

Three Taiwanese-built drones have searched a stretch of contested airspace together, coordinated by artificial intelligence rather than a room full of human pilots, and the demonstration marks the moment Taiwan’s own defense engineers proved they can run that technology without American hand-holding. Shield AI, a California-based defense technology company, and Taiwan’s National Chung-Shan Institute of […]View the full article

Life comes at you fast; you better be ready for it. We are coming up on three years from the final wakeup call after October 7th, 2023, that conventionally armed ballistic missiles are the premier threat to critical capabilities ashore and at sea. In the U.S. at least, though production was minimal and inventories allowed to be too small, we at least had the technology to meet the threat from Medium, Intermediate, and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. At sea, which will be our focus today, we just made it across the finish line in time with the RIM-161 SM-3, which built off the success of the iterative development of the SM-2 for decades. This work has paid off via th…

The Netherlands sent more than 60 Toyota Hilux pickup trucks to Ukraine, dispatching them by rail for use by Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Force Command, the branch of the Ukrainian military that operates the country’s drone forces and has become one of the most consequential fighting formations in the war against Russia. The Dutch Ministry of […]View the full article

More than a thousand patients in war-torn Ukraine completed nearly nine thousand sessions of mixed reality therapy across 47 organizations over six months, a new study released May 26 shows, providing the most detailed real-world evidence yet that immersive headset-based mental health tools can function at scale inside an active conflict zone’s care infrastructure. The […]View the full article

Australia has sold its most closely guarded surveillance secret to Canada in a $2.5 billion deal signed on June 22, 2026, that marks the first international export of the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar technology and the largest single defense export in Australian history, giving Canada a system capable of detecting aircraft and ships approaching from thousands […]View the full article

The top American general in South Korea described the Korean Peninsula as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s perspective, and China’s embassy in Seoul responded by publicly telling him he had crossed the line, injecting a pointed diplomatic confrontation into a week already complicated by the broader state of U.S.-China relations. General […]View the full article

The U.S. Marine Corps has placed its first order under a new vehicle contract with Polaris Government and Defense, buying more than 70 MRZR Alpha ultra-light tactical vehicles along with a suite of mission-specific accessories, with more than half of the vehicles configured to export 5 kilowatts of electrical power directly from the vehicle itself. […]View the full article

Poland has ordered nearly 46,000 of its domestically produced MSBS GROT assault rifles in the latest A3 configuration, signing a contract worth approximately $160 million with the state-owned manufacturer Fabryka Broni “Łucznik” Radom, with all deliveries scheduled for completion by the end of 2027. The contract, announced June 24, 2026, by Poland’s Armament Agency, the […]View the full article

As regulars here know, there are two defining cultures that shaped who I am. First, both sides of my family are Old Line Southern families who have been in the South for four centuries. Second, I grew up in Florida with the children of Cuban and Iranian refugees. The former, especially, shaped my view of the greatest cancer on this planet in the last two centuries—Communism. As a fellow Floridian of the same age, I just nodded and smiled when Secretary of State Marco Rubio's State Department published, Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism. It pulls it all together. It is a document that serves as a marker, a Ref. A, and a testament. I encourage you to put it on you…

Ukrainian forces destroyed three Russian explosive drone boats attempting to attack the Ukrainian coastline in the early hours of June 23, with Bayraktar TB2 combat drones delivering the strikes that sank the uncrewed vessels at sea, marking one of the relatively rare instances in the current phase of the war where the Turkish-built aircraft have […]View the full article

TCOM LP, based in Columbia, Maryland, was awarded a $447 million contract by U.S. Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, to handle production, fielding, sustainment and lifecycle support for the Persistent Surveillance Systems-Tethered family of systems, an aerostat-based surveillance program the Army has relied on for more than a decade. The contract itself […]View the full article

The United States Air Force’s newest special operations aircraft is a lean, rugged turboprop built for long loiter times, precision strikes, and operations from remote airstrips in some of the world’s most austere environments. There is just one problem: it has nowhere to put anything and the 17th Special Operations Squadron, the only OA-1K flying […]View the full article

A Romanian F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian-linked drone over the Black Sea on Sunday morning, marking the third such intercept in just three days, and Romania’s president says the country has had enough. President Nicusor Dan confirmed that Romanian Air Force pilots downed the drone at 10:13 a.m. local time roughly 12 kilometers […]View the full article

Russia’s Ministry of Defense has officially confirmed that its air defenses intercepted a “long-range operational-tactical missile,” adding new weight to OSINT reporting about an unusual high-altitude engagement over Moscow Oblast on June 30. The Russian ministry did not specify where the intercept took place and did not identify the missile type. However, the statement came […]View the full article

A new batch of Canadian-built Roshel Senator armored vehicles has arrived in Europe, being unloaded and prepared for final handover to Ukraine under Operation UNIFIER, Canada’s long-running military support mission. Images released by the Canadian Armed Forces confirm the delivery is underway, adding to a fleet that has already proven its worth on some of […]View the full article

Ukraine’s homemade ballistic missile is close enough to its first flight that its own maker won’t say when, in an exclusive interview with The War Zone, Fire Point CEO Iryna Terekh revealed the company is now casting the engine for its FP-9 ballistic missile, a weapon designed to reach Moscow, and expects a test launch […]View the full article

The drones buzzing over U.S. military bases today are often too small, too cheap, and too fast for existing radar systems to reliably catch, and the Army just placed a multimillion-dollar bet on artificial intelligence closing that gap. The U.S. Army awarded Xtremis Inc., a technology company headquartered in Washington, D.C., a contract to research […]View the full article