Raw Intel

Barely a month after a rash of resignations from Labour’s defense cadre, we’re starting to see what this is about. The details only confirm what we have all seen coming: those given stewardship of the defense of the United Kingdom do not think it worth defending, nor do they think she should have the ability to effectively do her fair share in the collective defense with her allies. They most unquestionably do not believe that any future government of the United Kingdom, should the nation exist in its present form beyond the near future, should have the ability to project national will to any meaningful degree, anywhere. The decline of her most critical power, her sea pow…

Estonian soldiers successfully tested a signals intelligence system mounted on a lightweight FPV racing drone during Exercise Spring Storm, the country’s largest annual military exercise, detecting hostile electronic emitters at ranges that ground-based sensors could not reach, the companies behind the system announced June 29. The technology pairing combines Sky Spy’s SkyAgent 001 autonomous passive […]View the full article

Japan’s Self-Defense Forces recruited 11,177 personnel in Fiscal Year 2025, surpassing 10,000 for the first time in three years and marking a 1,453-person increase over the previous year. The turnaround reversed three consecutive years of declining recruitment that had culminated in fiscal 2023, when the SDF hit a record-low recruitment rate of just 51 percent […]View the full article

South Korea successfully completed a technical flight test of its domestically developed long-range air-to-ground missile Cheonryong on June 25, 2026, following two consecutive failures in January and March that forced engineers to remotely shut down the engine and ditch the prototypes in the Yellow Sea, Seoul Economic Daily reported on June 28. The test, conducted […]View the full article

South Korean Air Force fighters scrambled on June 27, 2026, after nearly 10 Chinese and Russian military aircraft successively entered and exited the Korea Air Defense Identification Zone over the country’s eastern and southern waters, prompting Seoul to lodge a formal diplomatic protest with both Beijing and Moscow the following day. China’s Ministry of National […]View the full article

Japanese warships and aircraft conducted simulated attacks against China’s aircraft carrier Liaoning during its 40-day deployment to the South China Sea and Western Pacific that concluded on June 22, 2026, according to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, which described the actions as “outrageously audacious”. The claim, first reported by CCTV commentator Teng Jianqun and cited by […]View the full article

Britain has abandoned plans to build a conventional successor to its Type 45 destroyers, instead ordering at least six new warships designed to command networks of autonomous drones across the air, surface, and subsurface, as reported by UK Defence Journal. The new class, called the Common Combat Vessel, will be the Royal Navy’s first hybrid […]View the full article

For almost two years, the war on the Continent had been raging. The Battle of Verdun has already happened, but the real bloodshed had not even started yet, with the Battle of the Somme only a month away. While the European land armies have been fighting on a scale not seen since Napoleon a century earlier, major conflicts at sea were rare in spite of the major belligerents having great and powerful fleets. Like two heavyweight boxers wary of each other, the surface fleets of the Royal Navy and the Kaiserliche Marine stared at each other across the North Sea, throwing a jab here or there, but not committing for a hard fight. Then, in the early morning hours of May 31st, Vi…

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