Raw Intel

Russia fired an upgraded ballistic missile at Kyiv for the first time this summer, one with roughly 40 percent more range than the version Moscow has used against Ukraine for years, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said this week. The agency, known as HUR, said the missile is called the 9M723-2. It’s an upgraded version of […]View the full article

REGENT Craft has raised $240 million in Series B funding, split evenly between equity and debt, the Rhode Island-based seaglider manufacturer announced Thursday. The round was co-led by investment firms Mare Liberum and AE Ventures, with debt capital provided by Erebor Bank. The new funding brings REGENT’s total raised to date, across equity and debt, […]View the full article

The Netherlands plans to turn an Australian-designed laser into a working weapon against drones and build it on Dutch soil, the Dutch Ministry of Defense said Thursday. State Secretary for Defense Derk Boswijk signed a letter of intent this week with Electro Optic Systems (EOS), the Canberra-based maker of the Apollo high-energy laser. The ministry […]View the full article

RENK Group inaugurated three new machining centers at its Rheine, Germany facility Monday, part of a plan to more than triple the company’s annual transmission output by 2030, the company said. RENK aims to grow production at its headquarters in Augsburg to exceed 2,000 transmission units per year by 2030. The company has been transferring […]View the full article

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a U.S. federal agency, is moving to buy a single armored vehicle from Roshel LLC on a sole-source basis, saying its current fleet of armored trucks has aged to the point where some units date back to 2008 and are becoming too unreliable to drive long distances. […]View the full article

A defense company that just unveiled a laser powerful enough to shoot down threats from a fighter jet cockpit also posted a record $32 billion order backlog, and the two facts are not unrelated. Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense technology company that develops everything from night vision goggles to unmanned aircraft, reported second quarter 2026 […]View the full article

Ukraine’s General Staff said Ukrainian forces struck the Russian naval base at Novorossiysk overnight on August 12, 2026, damaging four Russian warships in what it described as a joint operation by Ukraine’s Defense Forces. The General Staff identified the damaged vessels as the frigates Admiral Makarov and Admiral Essen, both Project 11356 ships, the Project […]View the full article

The U.S. Army has opened a Sources Sought notice for production of the T901-GE-900 turboshaft engine, the next-generation powerplant set to replace the T700 series across the service’s Black Hawk and Apache helicopter fleets. The notice, posted August 14 by the Army’s Aviation Turbine Engines Project Office, asks industry to identify companies capable of executing […]View the full article

Open-source analysts say wreckage from a short-range ballistic missile turned up in northern Yemen this week, and they believe it points to a weapon type Saudi Arabia has never been confirmed to use before. The debris, identified as the booster stage of a Chinese-made DF-15A, was found in the Raghwan district of Marib Governorate, according […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force has designated a new turbofan engine built by GE Aerospace and Kratos Defense & Security Solutions as the F143-ZZ-100 and awarded the companies a contract to develop it as a second engine option for the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, the companies announced. The engine, previously known as the GEK800, generates about […]View the full article

Footage has emerged showing the rollout of a new Il-78MK-90A aerial refueling tanker, apparently built in export configuration, according to posts circulating on Russian social media and aviation channels. Social media users have claimed the aircraft was built under an export contract to supply 20 Il-78 tankers to China, but The Defence Blog could not […]View the full article

No more complaining about a long Sea & Anchor detail. What a great story about a frigate ... and three hurricanes. Read the full thing, but here is how it starts; THE 24-gun frigate H.M.S. Experiment was built in 1740 by Henry Bird of Rotherhithe. She sailed on her maiden voyage on 21 July 1740 from Spithead to join Vice-Admiral Vernon’s squadron in the West Indies. Her captain was James Rentone, who had piloted Vernon’s squadron into Portobello Harbour and had been given the honour of bearing the news of Vernon’s victory to the king. George II had rewarded him with a present of 200 guineas and the promise of a 6o-gun ship. Under his command H.M.S. Experiment had n…

Japan’s Ministry of Defense has signed a contract to buy interceptor drones from Ukrainian manufacturer SkyFall, Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said, making Japan one of the first countries outside Europe to order Ukrainian drones built to shoot down Russian attack drones. Koizumi announced the deal at a press briefing but did not say which SkyFall […]View the full article

While some military hardware ages out quickly, the Army’s Avenger air defense system has instead spent nearly four decades getting upgraded piece by piece, and this week it received another one: a new contract worth up to $25.2 million for infrared sensors that let its crews spot targets in the dark. The Defense Logistics Agency […]View the full article

A Ukrainian defense expert has flagged an apparent discrepancy in a promotional video from American drone maker AeroVironment, saying footage the company presented as a successful Switchblade 600 strike actually shows the Ukrainian-made RAM-2X strike drone in action. Bohdan Miroshnychenko, military analyst and editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian defense outlet Oboronka, raised the discrepancy in a […]View the full article

Remember back in January the very confusing story about the conflict between Anthropic and the Department of War? Well, at the end of last week, it broke back into the news. A U.S. judge on Thursday permanently blocked the Pentagon’s “supply-chain risk” designation against Anthropic, ending a months-long standoff over military access to the company’s frontier AI models. The dispute began early this year when the Pentagon pressed Anthropic to remove safety guardrails from Claude, a demand ​that escalated into a blacklisting and triggered lawsuits and federal agency bans. I’m not going to go into a lot of the details that are floating out there. It gets real complicated, r…

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

Russia’s state defense conglomerate Rostec says it will unveil a new, previously undisclosed weapon on its Su-57E export fighter at an airshow in Egypt next week, the company said in a statement. The Su-57E, an export version of Russia’s fifth-generation Su-57 fighter, is scheduled to fly at the El Alamein International Airshow 2026, running September […]View the full article

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev visited the country’s navy on September 6, where officials showed him two unmanned surface vessels now being built inside Azerbaijan through a joint production line with a Turkish shipbuilder. Aliyev and First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva were briefed on the SALVO armed unmanned surface vessel and the KAYRA kamikaze unmanned surface vessel […]View the full article

Norwegian defense company KONGSBERG has selected a radar built by U.S. firm Echodyne to help its remote weapon systems detect and shoot down drones, the companies announced September 9. KONGSBERG has integrated Echodyne’s MESA radar into its PROTECTOR RS4 and RS6 remote weapon stations, turning the widely used gun mounts into counter-drone systems capable of […]View the full article