Raw Intel

Footage of Stryker armored vehicles rolling off a cargo ship at a Thai port has been circulating on TikTok this week, and an open-source account tracking the videos says it points to a fresh shipment of American military hardware arriving in Thailand. The account, run by a user posting as Hem on X under the […]View the full article

I remember sending this off into the ether with a shrug 22 years ago as if it were yesterday. 22nd anniversaries are not that big of a deal, and I know many of you, like my friend Sid, have been with us from the start. I did a good origin story on the 20th anniversary post, so if you’re new, give it a read. At the 20th anniversary, my friend Claude Berube was kind enough to interview me on the inarguable UNCLAS Read Board Podcast that is outside the paywall. I think it ages well. I think for the rest of the 22nd I wanted to take note of a few things. First of all, in the last year, we saw the passing of a CDR Salamander Plankowner, Byron Audler, in April. A good man I had…

Raytheon, the RTX-owned defense manufacturer based in Andover, Massachusetts, announced that the U.S. Navy awarded it a $1.8 billion contract extension for hardware production and sustainment of the SPY-6 family of radars, building on an initial contract the company received in March 2022. The extension carries options that, if the Navy exercises all of them, […]View the full article

The British defense giant unveiled BlackThorn, a new family of modular warheads built specifically for the current wave of cheap, mass-produced weapons reshaping modern warfare, from autonomous drones and one-way attack munitions to counter-drone interceptors, missiles and unmanned ground vehicles. BAE Systems designed the warhead family to be modular, meaning the same core technology can […]View the full article

BAE Systems, Boeing and Saab announced they have signed a formal teaming agreement to jointly pursue the UK’s next generation pilot training program, built around Boeing’s T-7 trainer jet, and the deal commits the companies to building a brand new final assembly and integration facility inside Britain. Advanced fast jet training currently runs through the […]View the full article

BAE Systems announced at the Farnborough International Airshow that it has signed a licensing agreement with an unnamed strategic defense partner to support local manufacture of the Light Gun artillery system inside Ukraine, giving Kyiv’s defense industry direct access to the technical know-how behind a weapon British and Commonwealth forces have relied on for half […]View the full article

Somewhere in a Chinese factory right now, a machine is stamping out a rare earth magnet that could end up inside a U.S. missile, and until this week, the Pentagon had no reliable way to force American weapons makers to stop that from happening. President Trump signed an executive order on July 20, 2026 aimed […]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…

An unmanned robot the size of a small truck just proved it can drag an artillery piece across a battlefield while hauling more than a ton of extra cargo at the same time, a feat that could let front-line units cut the number of vehicles and soldiers needed for a single resupply run. ABRIS DG […]View the full article

Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, won a contract worth $199 million to provide research and development engineering support for the Sentinel program, the effort to replace the nation’s aging fleet of Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, with work continuing through July 2029. Sentinel, formally designated the LGM-35A, represents the Air Force’s […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force has handed a Georgia drone maker a contract worth up to $90 million to build small, expendable aircraft designed to deny enemies the ability to fly. Tandem Defense, based in Richmond Hill, Georgia, won a new contract, meaning the U.S. Air Force can order any quantity of equipment up to the […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force wants to install a network of microphones at one of its most secretive bases in England, built specifically to hear enemy drones coming before anyone ever sees them. A newly published Air Force solicitation reveals that the 352nd Special Operations Wing at RAF Mildenhall is seeking a passive acoustic drone detection […]View the full article

Teledyne FLIR Defense announced it will begin assembling its Star SAFIRE line of thermal imaging camera systems at its facility in West Malling, Kent, after more than two years of planning and formal approval to produce the advanced surveillance systems locally for the UK Ministry of Defence. Star SAFIRE is a family of gimbal-mounted camera […]View the full article

The U.S. Marine Corps’ Program Manager Light Armored Vehicles held what the service calls a Marine Touchpoint event last month for the Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle, letting Light Armored Reconnaissance Marines get hands-on time with the new vehicle, including a test drive, months before the program reaches its next major design review. The Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle, […]View the full article

A robotic gun mount built by a Texas firm just landed a spot on one of the Marine Corps’ most important counter-drone vehicles, giving Marines a way to turn an ordinary machine gun into an autonomous, AI-guided weapon. Allen Control Systems announced that the Marine Corps selected its Bullfrog autonomous weapon station for the service’s […]View the full article

A helicopter maker and an electric aircraft startup just proved they can bolt cutting-edge autonomy software onto a brand-new aircraft in under two weeks, a pace that would have sounded absurd for military aviation programs just a few years ago. Sikorsky, the helicopter manufacturer owned by Lockheed Martin, announced at the Farnborough International Airshow that […]View the full article

Lockheed Martin unveiled MORFIUS X-Rotor at the Farnborough International Airshow, an airborne counter-drone system built around a high-power microwave weapon that the company says can neutralize an entire swarm of hostile drones in a single mission, then land, get recovered, and fly again. A high-power microwave weapon, commonly shortened to HPM, works by blasting a […]View the full article

Ukraine has turned its signature long-range kamikaze drone into something considerably more dangerous: a standoff strike platform. The outlet Oboronka reported that its correspondent, present at the Farnborough International Airshow in the United Kingdom, saw an An-196 Liutyi drone displayed on a Ukrainian stand carrying four missiles mounted beneath its airframe, a configuration that would […]View the full article

China stole a march on us. In any multiplayer game, you cannot get scope-locked. While you may focus on one enemy or one particular part of the game, others are not standing by idly, politely waiting their turn to move. No, they will encourage your distraction. They will let you indulge yourself in other problems. Meanwhile, they move through the unguarded gates into fertile fields. We live on a large, round ball—but we think right and left because that is what our maps look like on our wall, across our screens. North-up, head-down, obsessing about the grind off some hot, dry, legacy concern or wet tropical island no one has heard of. Where are moves taking place we are n…

Israel Aerospace Industries introduced ELLYON, a multi-mission aircraft that combines electronic attack capabilities with advanced intelligence-gathering sensors into what the company calls a single, all-in-one airborne platform, built to operate from hundreds of kilometers away while keeping the aircraft and its crew out of an enemy’s direct line of fire. Electronic attack refers to the […]View the full article