Topic
Unmanned aircraft used by armed forces for reconnaissance, surveillance, and strike missions, ranging from small tactical drones to long-range systems.
Reuters reports, citing U.S. and Western officials, that the Oct. 14 Starlink slowdown on Ukraine's military was ordered from inside the White House. A senior U.S. official denied it came from Trump; no one has named who issued it.
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Ukraine's military can use Starshield on the move again, a Defense Ministry source says, after a speed limit disrupted drone missions. The cause is unexplained, and officials are in talks with SpaceX and its partners to find it.
Perspective Coverage
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L3Harris and Skydio have integrated Falcon IV embeddable radios and the Wraith waveform into the X10D drone to protect its command link from jamming. L3Harris says more than 150,000 US and allied tactical radios can host Wraith.
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AeroVironment is integrating Elsight's Halo into its Mayhem 10 drone so one connection can draw on satellite, cellular and radio links. Neither company has said when the work will finish, so operators cannot plan around it yet.
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Ukrainian drone maker Buntar Aerospace raised $16 million, taking its total to $30 million, to build more and reach beyond reconnaissance. The defense and civilian lines that money is meant to open are still plans without product names.
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Sesame Solar, Target Arm and AG3 Labs launched a renewable-powered Nanogrid meant to keep drones flying at forward sites with no fuel resupply. For a forward unit, that puts the drones and the grid that keeps them flying into one purchase decision.
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Ukraine's Third Army Corps says its heavy drones dropped armed ground robots roughly six miles behind Russian lines during Operation Vivaldi. Brave1 says only a few units can do it so far, so the open question is how fast unit-built kit reaches serial production.
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Business Insider tracked a Tekever AR3 from a Welsh airfield to a Ukrainian artillery reconnaissance brigade. The outbound logistics are the easy part; the feedback leg is the product.
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In-Q-Tel's cheques are small and the introductions are the product. A German aircraft maker turned CIA and FBI reconnaissance work into the government reference its home market would not yet supply, and runtimewire argues export control rides along.
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The data comes from tens of thousands of sorties, in conditions no AI company can stage on demand. The researcher who surfaced the trade wants rules before battlefield material gets licensed like any other dataset.
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At its Changwon plant Hanwha Aerospace signed cooperation memorandums with 43 domestic suppliers and set a target of more than 70% Korean content on the Mojave STOL it is developing with GA-ASI. No one has ordered the aircraft yet.
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Brig. Gen. Terry Tillis said 1,000 of the roughly 2,000 drones at the Germany exercise were consumable. The Pentagon's Drone Dominance program is spending $1 billion on at least 200,000 drones through 2027.
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Col. Gregory Merkl says the Army has fielded 10,000 drones and is receiving 30,000 more, enough for every squad, while qualified pilots reach only platoon level. The unit that concentrated that expertise is being phased out.
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Lt. Gen. James Isenhower says units were handed unfamiliar systems just as they entered their graded rotations, so the Army now requires new equipment 180 days early to give crews time at home station.
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The officers running Norway's Ukrainian training pipeline say Western peacetime procurement cannot hold a wartime tempo. Their evidence is a camp cleared out of Polish forest in months and a drone update that takes six.
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Investors polled by TechCrunch put Atomarine, whose first hull is planned to burn gas, among the highest-valued startups in Y Combinator's newest batch, on the strength of more than $4 billion in letters of intent.
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The Massed Modular Aircraft solicitation pairs a roughly $10 million airframe price with an 8,000 nautical mile self-deploy and 2,800 pounds of payload. GA-ASI says its clean-sheet drone clears all of it years before fiscal 2031.
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Ribbit, Infinite, Bedrock and Sequoia have put another $600m into Mach Industries at more than double the valuation they themselves set three months ago, lifting the Series C to $900m and lifetime funding past $1bn.
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Close to 10,000 soldiers fought a mock peer war at Razish with drones and new software layered on top. The general running the experiment says saturating them with kit would cost more in training quality than it buys in data.
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