Raw Intel

U.S. Army soldiers attached a solar-powered fixed-wing aircraft to a high-altitude balloon at Orote Airfield on Naval Station Guam on June 24, 2026, and prepared to launch the combination into the stratosphere as part of Valiant Shield 2026, the largest U.S.-led joint exercise in the Indo-Pacific. The aircraft is the Apollo R, built by Icarus, […]View the full article

U.S. Marines from III Marine Expeditionary Force were photographed calibrating and evaluating the Medium-Range Intercept Capability system on Mason Range, Guam, on June 24, 2026, as part of Valiant Shield 2026, the biennial U.S.-led exercise that assembles joint and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific to practice the kind of high-end multi-domain combat the Pentagon considers […]View the full article

A drone climbed into 40 km/h (25 mph) gusts above a high desert training range in Oregon on June 22, 2026, carrying a live Bangalore torpedo, a metal tube packed with Composition B4 explosive, and dropped it directly onto a wire obstacle before soldiers detonated the charge from cover. Army doctrine normally assumes half the […]View the full article

Two U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyers have completed a comprehensive mid-life modernization that gives them the most advanced shipborne electronic warfare capability the Navy has ever fielded, making them significantly harder to kill with anti-ship missiles and dramatically more capable of disrupting enemy radar and communications at the same time. The Navy confirmed the completion of […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force is looking for industry solutions to upgrade one of the most tactically valuable but persistently underdeveloped sensors on its F-15 fleet — a heat-detecting system that can find and track enemy aircraft without ever turning on a radar, without alerting the enemy that it has been spotted, and without being fooled […]View the full article

A British laser weapon capable of destroying drones for roughly $13 a shot is on track to be installed aboard Royal Navy destroyers in 2027, making the UK the first European NATO member to field an operational shipborne directed-energy weapon, and the system’s makers used a major NATO industry forum in Portsmouth last week to […]View the full article

Ukraine is on the verge of test-launching its first domestically produced long-range ballistic missile capable of striking Moscow, the founder of the company building it said in a rare on-camera interview filmed inside one of the firm’s production facilities, according to the Ukrainian YouTube channel Pressing. Denys Shtilerman, chief designer and co-founder of Fire Point, […]View the full article

Russian media published footage of a Geran-4 kamikaze drone striking a Ukrainian Air Force MiG-29 as the aircraft prepared for a mission at an airfield in southern Ukraine, destroying it completely. Ukrainian sources confirmed the aircraft was lost but said no personnel died in the strike. Separately, the Ukrainian Air Force Command confirmed in an […]View the full article

A Ukrainian robotic ground vehicle took a direct hit from an enemy FPV drone, shrugged off the shrapnel damage, and kept driving until it delivered nearly a ton of supplies to front-line positions, Militarnyi reported. The same vehicle later struck a mine on the return leg of a subsequent mission and was lost, too damaged […]View the full article

With the first operational B-21 Raiders scheduled to arrive at Ellsworth Air Force Base in 2027, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a $44 million construction contract to build the permanent outdoor shelters that will protect America’s most advanced stealth bomber from the harsh South Dakota winters, extending its service life and keeping […]View the full article

The U.S. Marine Corps Systems Command in Quantico, Virginia awarded Seattle-based Overland AI a $20 million contract to supply unmanned ground vehicles and accompanying software in direct support of the Marine Air Defense Integrated System, the Corps’ primary mobile air defense capability, with deliveries required by October 2027. The Marine Air Defense Integrated System, known […]View the full article

Boeing secured a contract worth up to $2 billion from the U.S. Space Force on June 25 to build two new satellites that will extend the life of the military’s primary secure voice communications network, knocking out the constellation’s original builder, Lockheed Martin, in the process. The program is called the Mobile User Objective System […]View the full article

The CEO of AM General stepped into a rapidly widening political fight on June 26, publishing a public statement defending his company’s handling of the JLTV A2 program as Congress moved to slash funding, the Marine Corps hunted for a backup supplier, and lawmakers in Washington called the program a readiness crisis in the making. […]View the full article

RENK America, the Muskegon-based subsidiary of German defense giant RENK Group AG, announced June 26 that the Army Contracting Command at Detroit Arsenal had awarded the company a new five-year production contract for its HMPT 800 hydromechanical transmission. The deal is the fourth consecutive multi-year contract in the same series, meaning the Army has now […]View the full article

Thick smoke was still rising over Volgograd’s Krasnooktyabrsky District on the morning of June 27 when open-source analysts began piecing together what had just happened to one of Russia’s most critical defense manufacturing sites. According to the monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+, FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles struck the Titan-Barrikady plant at least three times, with footage […]View the full article

DARPA, the Pentagon’s advanced research agency responsible for some of the most consequential technological breakthroughs in American military history, has issued a request for information targeting metals producers, ceramics manufacturers, and composites makers with an unusual proposition: share your production data, and we will give you AI tools that make your factory perform better than […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force is preparing to sole-source a contract to Lockheed Martin Space Systems to integrate America’s nuclear warhead reentry vehicle into the new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, a critical step in transferring the country’s ground-based nuclear deterrent from the aging Minuteman III system that has stood watch since the 1970s to the weapon […]View the full article

It has been just a couple of years since I last posted this FbF. That is quite a bit sooner than most encore postings, but there is a new movie out about it, so I figured it was time to tell the story again. First, the trailer. I’m not sure where it will be streaming in the U.S., but I’ll keep an eye out for it. Watch the trailer first, then read the extended story below. The war is about to begin. You are in command of your Navy's newest ship and are leading the attack on another nation's capital. Decades before others thought they had discovered such concepts as "Shock and Awe" and "Decapitation Strikes" - you are on the tip of the spear of an attack that will seize the…

America’s missile defense testing program has a logistics problem, and the Pentagon wants industry to solve it: the Missile Defense Agency, the organization responsible for developing and testing America’s shield against ballistic missile attack, has issued a formal solicitation seeking mobile launch platforms that can fire test missiles from virtually anywhere on earth at dramatically […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force has awarded a contract worth up to $95 million to study how laser weapons affect their targets and how to analyze that data more effectively, accelerating a research effort that sits at the foundation of America’s push to field directed energy weapons as a primary defense against the drone and missile […]View the full article