HG S2 (Intel Bot)

General Dynamics showed up to Modern Day Marine 2026 with three business units, two booth numbers, and enough hardware to stock a small army — from a next-generation 8×8 reconnaissance vehicle with a 30mm cannon to an assault bridge mounted on an unmanned ground vehicle scheduled to begin testing in July. The company’s presence at […]View the full article

Two unmanned systems companies have combined GPS-denied mapping with radiation detection in a single integrated package — giving CBRN teams the ability to see inside contaminated spaces in three dimensions, in real time, without sending a person in. Emesent and Teledyne FLIR Defense announced a partnership that puts Emesent’s Hovermap LiDAR payload onto Teledyne FLIR’s […]View the full article

Textron Systems and its subsidiary Howe & Howe pulled the wraps off a new unmanned ground vehicle at Modern Day Marine on April 28, 2026 — a wheeled robotic platform built specifically around the Marine Corps’ vision of how autonomous systems should fight alongside its existing armored fleet. The vehicle is called the RIPSAW M1, […]View the full article

A NASCAR team just rolled a six-wheeled military platform onto the Modern Day Marine show floor — and it already has a Lockheed Martin missile test on its resume. Richard Childress Racing Enterprises, LLC, known across motorsport as the organization behind one of NASCAR’s most storied racing programs, brought its 6-Wheeled Adaptable Platform to Modern […]View the full article

Patriot3, a Virginia-based small business that has spent years building specialized equipment for special operations forces and law enforcement worldwide, brought its full maritime and ground operations portfolio to Modern Day Marine this week — sharing a booth with Canadian sensor specialist Shark Marine Technologies and putting some of its most ambitious platforms in front […]View the full article

American Rheinmetall brought a full slate of unmanned systems and next-generation squad weapon systems to Modern Day Marine. The centerpiece of the display is Rheinmetall’s Mission Master Silent Partner Hotel, designated MMSP-H, a fully autonomous ground vehicle that operates on land and water. The platform carries 2,200 pounds of payload on land and 880 pounds […]View the full article

Two separate contracts awarded within days of each other are pouring more than $163 million into the Reagan Test Site at Kwajalein Atoll — the remote Pacific range where the U.S. military tests ballistic missiles, tracks reentry vehicles, and validates the interceptors designed to shoot them down. The more recent award, dated April 27, 2026, […]View the full article

Japan’s Defense Minister met with the team behind one of the country’s more unconventional defense startups — a company building military drones out of cardboard — and the conversation signals where Tokyo thinks its unmanned future is headed. Shinjiro Koizumi, Japan’s Minister of Defense, held a meeting with representatives of Air Kamui, a startup that […]View the full article

Finnish-made Sisu GTP 4×4 armored vehicles have appeared in the inventory of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces, a development that raises immediate questions about how they got there — because Finland has never publicly announced transferring them. Ukrainian military historian Andriy Kharuk first reported the appearance of the Sisu GTP 4×4 in Ukrainian Special Operations Forces […]View the full article

Spain unveiled the industrial blueprint for its next generation of fighter pilot training on April 28, 2026, as an Airbus-led consortium presented the full programme structure for the Spanish Air and Space Force’s new Integrated Combat Training System — a contract awarded in December 2025 that will retire the country’s aging F-5 fleet and replace […]View the full article

It is well past time that we had a frigate SITREP, specifically the gray-hulled version of the Legend-class Cutter we are going to build for our Navy. No reason to rehash my concerns and assumptions—click the frigate hypertext above if you need to catch up, but…let me just say…though I’m glad she’s on the way and we’ll find good use for her, I hope Flight I is a short run. I know hope is not a plan, but back in December, I had this little bit of hope: I suspect that already there is work being done on a Flight II, which will incorporate the multi-mission capability of the patrol frigate proposed over a dozen years ago … While looking over the FY27 budget request, it appears that my hope is well placed. Here’s the important bit if it is too much to read the fine print above. Frigate will take the same validated flight-upgrade approach as our Arleigh Burke DDG-51 program - incorporating improvements over successive flights to evolve the ship’s capabilities over time. Flight I Frigates will have minimal adaptations from the existing NSC to start production as quickly as possible. The limited modifications of the NSC baseline to the Flight I Frigate requirements incorporate Navy weapons, combat systems, and communications programs of record, add a flexible weapons station in lieu of the NSC stern boat ramp, add a port-mid-ships boat davit, incorporate shipbuilder recommended producibility enhancements, and change to standard Navy grey paint. Studies for future flights will consider expanded capabilities including Vertical Launch Systems, and Anti-Submarine Warfare systems. FF(X) RAS C2 is enabled through use of Navy warfare system programs of record including the FF(X) combat system and eventually Aegis based Integrated Combat System (ICS), communications systems, and design reservations dedicated to future RAS C2 systems. Yes. As we were hoping, smart people in hard jobs have looked at the last successful surface ship program, the Arleigh Burke, and said, “Yes, that process worked. Let’s do that.” This isn’t easy work, but it’s not hard to benchmark success. When will we see Flight I, Hull-1? Looks like 30 June 2030, 1,531 days from now. Using our patented unit of time when looking at Navy programs, the WorldWar™, it will be 1.12 WorldWars™ from today until we have that ship delivered…at the earliest. This is already a mature design, already delivered, so that should not be delayed. Yes, I know. OK, that goes at the speed of smell, but at least it’s moving. When will we see Flight II? Looks like it will still be in the design phase through 30 SEP 2031. Sigh. 5 years too late. We should give the FF(X) Flight II project to Mike Gallagher’s band of merry engineers and move that timeline to 30 SEP 2026, but that’s just me. Sidebar: The last FF in the USN was USS Moinester (FF 1097). DE-1098 through 1107 were planned, but canceled. So, are we going to have FF(X) Hull-1 be FF-1098 or FF-1108? h/t Virtual Bayonet. Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

Last week we started things off with a discussion of the 18 battle force and 16 non-battle force ships. Let’s look back at that. It may have taken nine years, but there was a post of mine from 2017 that finally got a smile: On the list of "unsexy but important" are many items from icebreakers, to command ships, to hospital ships, that every POM cycle get left on the cutting room floor by the gaggle of cats chasing laser pointers we have in charge of building our fleet. When you look at the list from last Monday and the news from last summer about icebreakers, we seemed to have one ship that still is not getting the investment it needs—command ships. We’re running out of time. Even “Golden Fleet” documents that include such Salamander requirements like destroyer tenders right keep missing something that the new realities of war that we have learned in the last half-decade have shown are not a luxury, but a requirement for warfighting success—our command ships. As Brent Sadler mentioned over the weekend, Today there are only two of these ships in the Navy - the Mount Whitney (LCC 20) as 6th Fleet Flag Ship in Europe, and the Blue Ridge (LCC 19) as 7th Fleet FlagShip in Japan. … These existing flag ships have modern communications and staffs capable of running a prolonged war from sea - making it a harder target for cyber attacks, strikes and terrorist attacks - a valuable feature in modern warfare characterized by increased importance of connectivity with unmanned assets, dispersed logistics ships, and the strictest of communications requirements of frontline warships. The argument for command ships has never been stronger. In the age of precision warheads on conventional S/M/R/ICBM & the whole constellation of attack drones/cruise missiles, the utility of static shore-based higher headquarters is not just questionable; it is suicidal. We will not be given many more clear warnings as we saw over the last few months with the limited Iranian attacks against our land-based facilities in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, just to mention two. Never forget, the Chinese have already dialed in every static U.S. military facility inside the range of their rocket forces. While there are threats to anything afloat, in today's threat environment, command ships should be many and redundant in number. Not two replacements, but four. We don't even have to design a new ship. We have the LPD-17 design ready to go as a baseline. Slight mods...and there you go. Other designs can work as well, but the LPD-17 is a proven design, hardened, and easier to add additional self-defense systems to…including anything you can put in a MK-41 VLS cell. We don’t need to continue to appreciate the problem. We don’t need multi-million to billion-dollar studies. No. We just need to accept that previous generations dithered and we will not. Heck, I even know where to get $1.85 billion from to get things started. Cut steel. Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate has published a detailed technical breakdown of a previously obscure Russian cruise missile developed specifically for the Su-57 stealth fighter, revealing not only the weapon’s architecture and capabilities but the extensive network of foreign components — American, Chinese, Swiss, Japanese, German, Taiwanese, and Irish — that made it possible to build. […]View the full article

Elbit Systems inaugurated a new unmanned aerial systems production facility in Chitila, Romania on April 27, 2026 — and marked the occasion by flying the Watchkeeper XR over Romanian skies for the first time, turning a ribbon-cutting into a live capability demonstration for Romanian government and military officials watching from the ground. The Chitila facility […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy commissioned its newest fast-attack submarine, USS Idaho, at Naval Submarine Base New London in Groton, Connecticut on April 25, 2026 — adding a boat built for undersea warfare, surveillance, and special operations to a fleet that its leadership describes as operating forward every hour of every day. The ceremony at Groton brought […]View the full article