Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 Kyiv has prohibited the export of military goods to other countries to guarantee that the Ukrainian armed forces are supplied with the equipment they need to continue defending their territory.

While the ban has allowed smaller local defense companies to grow at a fast rate, thanks to an initial boost of orders by the state, the policy is now hurting their business, Anatolii Khrapchynskyi, deputy director general of Piranha Tech said.

“It has opened up opportunities for private companies to produce weapons and led to the emergence of numerous firms that, in two and a half years, have grown from garage-based startups to stable companies capable of fulfilling a large number of orders,” he told Defense News. “At the same time, as firms have scaled up their capabilities, they’ve accelerated to a level the state cannot fully procure from.”

Piranha Tech has specialized in the development and production of electronic-warfare systems, radio-jamming as well as drones and counter-drone systems since 2014.

Khrapchynskyi noted that most of the investments in research and development came either from the companies’ own funds or small grants provided by platforms like Brave1, a Ukrainian government entity responsible for fast-tracking the delivery of weapon samples to the frontlines.

At the rate defense systems have evolved on the battlefield, research and development has become more expensive, and having the state as the sole customer is no longer sufficient for many firms, the argument for lifting the export ban goes.

According to Ukrainian media, a government working group on arms exports has been working since August on assessing risks that would come with the country re-entering the global arms market, and setting conditions that could make this possible.

Khrapchynskyi told Defense News he supports the initiative, saying reconnaissance drones could serve as a test case because they are useful in military and civilian applications alike.

“Security and the end-user are of the utmost importance – we could also consider selling earlier versions that are not cutting edge, but companies must guarantee that state contracts remain a priority and be fulfilled on time,” Khrapchynskyi said.

A requirement to invest some of the profits into company research and development also should be on the table, he added.

One of the biggest issues associated with lifting the wartime ban on these weapons is the possibility for Russian forces to get their hands on information and technology.

“We see how Russia circumvents sanctions, so we understand that they will certainly start looking for ways to obtain certain means for copying [weapons] or developing countermeasures against them,” Khrapchynskyi said.

The tests come as Taiwan is seeing Chinese military activity in the waters around the island, including drones flying within the country’s air defense identification zone. China views Taiwan as a rogue province and has threatened to take it back by force.

Tron Future, a Taiwan-based company, has been supporting the government in integrating counter-drone systems with Taiwan’s low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites through its T.SpaceRouter user terminals, expected to boost the island’s wartime communication resilience.

The T.SpaceRouter is a lightweight satellite communication terminal that uses active electronically scanned array (AESA) technology, envisioned to double as a kind of communication antenna relying on regional private 5G coverage.

“As our anti-drone systems will be able to connect with LEO satellites by the end of 2025, each C-UAS installation site can serve as a regional military communication hub with LEO satellite backbone – this will help prevent systemic collapse of the core communication network in potential future conflicts,” Dr. Yu-Jiu Wang, chief executive of Tron Future said.

The Taiwan Space Agency has launched an experimental satellite project dubbed Beyond 5G, which aims to develop two high-performance LEO spacecraft that will be deployed at an altitude of 600 kilometers.

Last year, Wang told Defense News that at the height of tensions, the company’s radars deteced as many as 100 Chinese surveillance drones above the island in the span of a week.

According to the vendor, the Taiwanese military also recently began testing a variety of counter-drone active and passive radars, including Tron Future systems, as well as jammers.

These include achieving at least a 6 kilometers effective detection range for drones over the sea, with one of the target references being a Mavic 3 Pro, for active and passive radars, and at least a 4 kilometer effective jamming capability for drones, Wang said.

The government is expected to sign a contract with the winning contractor within two months as part of an order that could total tens of millions of dollars.

“A total of 26 sets of anti-drone systems need to be installed, with 13 sets to be completed within five months after signing the contract, and the entire procurement to be completed within 10 – the systems will be installed on the frontline islands closest to China,” the CEO said.

He noted that the closest distance from Taiwan’s outer islands to China is roughly 2 kilometers.

Taiwan is a major producer of computer chips, which means the country’s semiconductor factories are assumed targets in a potential Chinese attack besides military sites.

Launched Effects, or LE, is the service’s term of art for an envisioned unmanned segment among its aerial platforms, capable of delivering a wide range of capabilities such as targeting, reconnaissance, surveillance, network extension or kinetic strike. Launched Effects can be deployed from both air and ground vehicles.

The effort represents a new direction in the Army’s aviation portfolio, which prioritizes drones and the more loosely defined category of LE platforms as the tip of the spear in enemy contact.

“We were able to accelerate the long-range efforts by about a year,” Brig. Gen. David Phillips told Defense News in an interview before the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

This means the Army will likely put out a request for proposals for what is considered more of a Corps-level asset in the third quarter of fiscal 2026. The service was originally looking at focusing on small and medium launched effects first and had yet to secure funding for the long-range version.

At the same time, the Army is making sure it is collaborating with the joint force to ensure it is not duplicating efforts.

“We have been paying close attention to the maturity of longer-range capability,” Phillips said.

The Army also continues to mature its medium-range capability which is in a prototyping effort well underway using Anduril Industries’ Altius 700 aircraft. Collins Aerospace, a Raytheon Technologies company, is the mission system provider, and Aurora Flight Sciences is the system integrator. Technology Service Corp. and Northrop Grumman Information Systems are providing modular payloads.

“We completed some additional flight testing off of an MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, last month and we’re looking at a way to deliver that capability faster,” Phillips said.

The medium-range LE will also be developed in conjunction with Program Executive Office Missiles & Space to fill its requirement for a helicopter-fired Long-Range Precision Munition.

The service was debating whether it made sense to pursue a separate LRPM program through PEO M&S or if the capability essentially could be classified as an LE and was therefore a redundant effort.

The Army’s ruling is that “it is a Launched Effects Medium Range. It’s captured in that requirement and that’s [how] we’re going to go about the acquisition process,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, who overseas the programs and resources division of the Army staff at the Pentagon, told Defense News.

As part of the requirement, the Army is looking at ways to accelerate the lethal version of the medium-range LE to meet the service’s need for an air-launched precision munition.

“We’re being more efficient and effective that way,” Phillips said.

The Army has already issued a request for white papers for a short-range LE.

“We’re squarely in the evaluation space,” Phillips said.

The service plans to launch an effort late this year or early next year that will lead to a user demonstration aimed at getting feedback from the force.

The method is similar to what the service has done with other small, unmanned aircraft systems efforts. “That may sound familiar, that model, but it’s working for us in the small UAS space,” Phillips said.

A year ago, the Army selected McQ, Textron Systems, General Dynamics Land Systems and Oshkosh Defense to design and build prototypes for the system.

The Army decided then to adjust its pursuit of three robotic combat vehicles of different sizes, moving forward instead with a single size that can keep up with crewed combat vehicles, Dean said at the time. And then the Army would equip the platform with different mission payloads to fill specific battlefield roles.

Each vendor delivered two prototypes in August, and all of the prototypes are now at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, Dean said.

“We’re on track to down-select in about the March timeframe from those four vendors to one and that’ll give us the base platform,” Dean said.

The chosen vendor will deliver eight prototypes for the next phase. “Then once we have that, that vendor will actually do another prototype spin. … We’ve tiered the requirements so they’re going to add some new requirements when they go into the second prototypes.”

While Dean said he prefers to keep as many vendors in a development effort as long as possible, funding is always a consideration. “It does come down to money. There’s a profile that we have to stay within. Unfortunately, the profile that we have really almost only allowed us to retain one. We looked at at least two and then that was still outside what we were able to afford.”

Who’s in control?

The Army has also settled on the Armored Multipurpose Vehicle, or AMPV, as the designated control vehicle for the robots, chosen because the control vehicle needs to keep up with the first unit designated to receive the robots, which will be a platoon in an Armored Brigade Combat Team, according to Col. Kevin Bradley, who is in charge of next-generation combat vehicle modernization within Army Futures Command.

The service looked at a number of concepts for a control vehicle from Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles to Stryker combat vehicles to even a truck-based one, but “the user community gelled on what they wanted,” Dean said.

A unit that has been working through how to operate and fight with RCVs at the National Training Center, for one, said using a control vehicle that was different from anything else in the formation became “very easy to target,” and the opposing force in a recent training event would go after the control vehicle easily to take the robots, according to Bradley.

The RCV’s first fielding is expected in fiscal 2028, which means the control vehicle will need to go under contract in FY25 because the AMPV has a two-year production lead time. Then from FY27 to FY28, the integration work to make it a control vehicle will occur, Dean detailed.

Tough road

While the RCV base platform prototyping and the control vehicle effort is moving forward smoothly, the Army’s work to develop off-road autonomy software is proving more difficult.

In June the Army conducted an off-road autonomy software assessment. “The good news is we are moving forward in that area. The bad news is industry is nowhere near where people think in terms of off-road autonomy. There’s still a lot of development to do,” Dean said.

The Army plans to hold another evaluation in December which will become routine in order to continue software development.

Three companies are working directly with the Bradley’s Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team and PEO GCS on autonomy capability – Forterra, Kodiak Robotics and Overland AI.

So far the evaluations for autonomous behavior haven’t even been truly off-road, Dean said. “We’re talking trails and unimproved road conditions. Building an autonomy algorithm that can identify the entire range of things it might encounter is challenging because you have a pretty big data set.”

The evaluation in June took place at Fort Cavazos, Texas, and in one instance the robot needed to cross a creek at the bottom of a hill and would need to navigate a series of switchbacks to get down. “It couldn’t navigate the switchbacks,” Dean said.

“We are still working through the negative obstacle problem. You see a dip ahead of you. It could be a puddle, I can drive right through it, or it could be a cliff, and the sensors sometimes have difficulty evaluating what’s safe to navigate,” he said.

The evaluation in June involved too much human intervention, Dean said, but it’s still better than having to tele-operate a system continuously and deal with latency issues at certain ranges and speeds.

Overall, based off a major training event at Fort Irwin, California, this summer “we saw that robots provided benefits to the organization particularly in the reconnaissance and security role for long-duration observation and security posts,” Bradley said.

But the service is still working through tradeoffs with power, range and the ability to make decisions at a distance and the desired level of control, he added.

“That was really what we were trying to tease out, that math problem of you want to be able to see 4K video to make decisions of shoot, don’t shoot, to maintain that kind of ethical high ground, then that requires a certain amount of bandwidth that’s impacting how far you can go, also impacts how much control you have,” Bradley said.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced last month that Replicator 2 would center on countering threats from small drones, particularly those that target “critical installations and force concentration,” he said in a Sept. 29 memo. DOD plans to propose funding as part of its fiscal 2026 budget request with a goal of fielding “meaningfully improved” counter-drone defense systems within two years.

As with the first round of the program — which aims to deliver thousands of low-cost drones by next summer — Replicator 2 will work with the military services to identify existing and new capabilities that could be scaled to address gaps in their counter-drone portfolio.

Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, said Monday that Replicator 2 is particularly focused on fixed-site counter-small uncrewed aerial systems, or C-sUAS, needs, which means protecting installations and facilities. The Army has been fielding systems to detect and engage drones at overseas bases, largely in the Middle East, for several years, and Bush said the service will initially look to increase production of those capabilities.

The Army could start to ramp up production of these existing lines right away, Bush told reporters at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, and may seek to reprogram funding in fiscal 2025.

“If Congress wants to help us in ‘25 when we reprogram, we have things we can buy today that we know work pretty well,” he said. “That’ll be one line of effort, expanding what we already have at the sites we’re assigned by the Department of Defense.”

But the Army also wants to use Replicator to explore emerging counter-drone technology, Bush said. The service is especially interested in systems that can not only detect objects but also use AI and machine learning to help decide how to engage them.

“It’s kind of a three-part problem set,” he said. “You have to detect it, figure out what to do, and then have an effector that can do something about it if you’re allowed. That middle part of figuring out what to do and bringing the data into that, I think, is where we can do better than we have.”

Championed by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, Replicator’s goal is to create a new pathway for the Pentagon to buy and scale high-need capabilities on faster timelines. Replicator 1 centers on delivering thousands of low-cost drones by next summer. The department plans to spend a total of $1 billion on the effort in fiscal 2024 and 2025.

Projects that the Army and the other services propose for the effort move through a validation process largely overseen by the Defense Innovation Unit. DIU Director Doug Beck chairs the Defense Innovation Working Group, which evaluates capabilities and recommends them for senior leader approval.

Maj. Gen. David Stewart, director of the Joint C-sUAS Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, said Monday that the Army is in the validation process for Replicator 2.

“The first thing to do is validate what you want to defend or protect,” he told reporters on the sidelines of AUSA. “And then it’s the process of determining what do we have that’s commercial off the shelf or military off the shelf or is it something new that we have to look at.”

The Replicator team takes advantage of planned demonstrations to do that validation work, and Stewart highlighted NORAD and U.S. Northern Command’s upcoming C-sUAS event, Falcon Peak, as one near-term opportunity.

C-sUAS on display

AUSA’s expansive exhibit halls were filled Monday with companies showcasing the full gamut of counter-drone capabilities — from software-enabled rifles to high-energy lasers.

At Leidos’ booth, the company featured its AirShield C-UAS system, an updated version of a capability it developed and demonstrated last year through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Mobile Force Protection program.

The system can be mounted on a vehicle and autonomously detect and track UAS through its Multifunction X-Band Radar. The system’s automated decision engine can identify a potential threat while on the move and use machine learning to determine whether to shoot it down or disable it.

Its nonkinetic effector is a small autonomous rotorcraft, dubbed CUGAR, which can fly with the target and release streamers that get caught in a drone’s propellers. Once it has finished its task — which could include disabling multiple UAS — CUGAR is programmed to return to the convoy or another location.

Elizabeth Robertson, vice president of growth for Leidos’ land systems business, told Defense News the firm is working with BAE to integrate the company’s Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System and is exploring other effectors to bring on in the future.

“The awesome thing about the system is the brains and backbone are already there, so integrating a new effector is not the heavy lift,” she said. “The heavy part is all the software, the programming, the machine learning. That’s all already there. So, integrating new effectors is a relatively quick turn.”

AirShield appears to be a good fit for Replicator 2′s homeland defense focus, Robertson said, noting that the company is starting to have some of those conversations with the Army this week. The system will participate in Falcon Peak later this month.

In another area of the exhibit space, Smart Shooter displayed its SMASH fire control system meant to provide military units with a dismounted counter-UAS capability. The camera and sensing capability can attach to a standard weapon and be used to track, target and shoot down a small drone with high accuracy.

Scott Thompson, vice president and general manager of the Israel-based company’s U.S. arm, told Defense News that Smart Shooter is developing a vehicle-mounted version of the system called Hopper. It plans to test the capability at the annual International Special Operations Forces demonstration next spring.

The Army and Marine Corps are both considering Smart Shooter’s technology for their C-sUAS needs, he said, and the Air Force is eyeing it as a base defense option. The company has vendors “lined up” and is ready to start producing SMASH in larger quantities.

“The secret sauce, of course, is the software,” he said. “That’s what separates us from everybody else.”

A unit detecting, intercepting and destroying a drone often took less than four minutes, said Maj. Gen. Scott Naumann, commander of the 10th Mountain Division.

To meet that threat, the two-star is working with his unit and using a soldier-created tool to prepare troops to counter drones more effectively.

“Training [counter-drone] should be as routine as drawing our rifles, going to the range and honing our marksmanship skills,” Naumann said at the Maneuver Warfighter Conference at Fort Moore, Georgia, in September.

Army boot camp will soon include counter-drone training

The 2nd Brigade Combat Team experienced 170 one-way drone attacks between August 2023 and April 2024, according to Naumann.

That may seem like a lot, but if data from the Russia-Ukraine war is any indicator, Naumann said, units could face that many attacks or more in a matter of days.

“Let that sink in a little bit,” Naumann said. “Our formations were defending from fixed sites. We weren’t maneuvering on the offense, and we weren’t conducting large-scale combat operations.”

While deploying units are developing more effective training methods to counter drone attacks, the Army is also making such habits part of a soldier’s foundational skills.

The service announced last year that it would include counter-drone training in boot camp. Staff at the Center for Initial Military Training is writing the doctrine for this initiative, Army Times previously reported.

Sgt. Brent Hemphill, a squad leader with 2nd Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, described his experience responding to frequent rocket attacks during a recent deployment to Syria.

“After the initial months, rocket attacks became a regular occurrence, averaging two to three times a week, mostly at night,” Hemphill said in a release. “We’d grab our gear and head to bunkers. Depending on the situation, we’d either deploy as a quick reaction force or track down the attackers based on intel or witness reports.”

A similar experience during a 2022 deployment of the 10th Mountain’s 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Brigade Combat Team, to Syria sparked an idea for how to prepare soldiers for this new reality.

At the time, 1st Lt. Samuel Strobel was serving as a night battalion battle captain, according to an Army release, and his experiences, along with those of 1st Lt. Mitchell Crowley, would lead them to create the Randomized Enemy Action Contact Trainer, or REACT, system.

The application “generates essentially combat information about an incoming drone or rocket attack that helps simulate battle drills for an operations center,” Naumann said. Users can adjust conditions in the application to change the type or number of attacks, according to Naumann.

Naumann highlighted Strobel’s creation as an example of the innovation he and other leaders are seeking in all their formations.

The Army released its Robotics and Autonomous Systems, or RAS, strategy in 2017 with a series of near-, mid- and long-term priorities.

Since the release, the service has met its early goals, which included lightening the load for dismounted soldiers, automating some parts of ground resupply and adding more robots in dangerous jobs such as explosive ordnance disposal.

Stuart Hatfield, a division chief at the Army headquarters soldier resourcing programs, shared current and future projects for the robot-soldier future, spanning from now through 2030.

Is this unit the future of Army combat formations?

“The RAS strategy priorities I don’t think are going to change even as we update our strategy,” Hatfield said at the September National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Future Force Capabilities Conference.

New projects, Hatfield said, include Tethered-Unmanned Aircraft Systems; medium-sized Joint Tactical Autonomous Aerial Resupply System; the Common Robotic System Medium variant; the Dismounted Unit Soldier Transport, or DUST; a first-person-view drone option and an exoskeleton for dismounted soldiers.

While he didn’t share timelines on specific systems, some of the capabilities are expected to arrive in the coming years.

Funding for these programs has increased steadily over the past decade. The Army got its first $7 million from Congress for robot strategy work in fiscal 2015; that grew to $335 million in the fiscal 2021 budget. For fiscal 2025, the current request is for $480 million, according to budget documents.

A version of the DUST device was in use during the recent rotation of the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, in August.

During the rotation, soldiers used a kind of motor-assisted wheelbarrow device previously called the Silent Tactical Energy Enhanced Dismount, or STEED, to move gear and role-playing “wounded” soldiers.

It’s a simpler device than some of the more complex technology that the Army is testing in other areas, but it does take a load off the soldier. The STEED can travel 15 to 30 miles on a single battery pack and carry up to 500 pounds, according to manufacturer Hendrick Motorsports.

The Common Robotic System Medium variant — currently under development — is a larger version of the individual model. The individual variant, which has been fielded to some Army units, is a 32-pound tracked robot with multiple cameras and an extendable arm that can fit into a rucksack.

The medium version would be capable of carrying more equipment and a variety of payloads that could include sensing devices or weapons platforms.

As far as robot-driven vehicle convoys, Army Times reported work back in 2021 that had already seen soldiers running 2,000 unmanned miles. The convoys were not entirely “robotic” but instead featured a single, manned vehicle and nine “follower” vehicles.

“We’ve got the robotic applique, which takes robotic technology and applies it to currently manned systems and makes them optionally [manned],” Hatfield said.

The focus in 2021 was to use medium-sized trucks with pallet loads, a typical resupply that soldiers might have experienced during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those convoys were often the target of attacks by insurgents and terrorists. The Army and other services are working on a variety of resupply methods, including drones.

But ground vehicles will continue to fit into the work as those platforms can carry more cargo than other options for land-based forces.

A full combat “Iron Man”-style suit has been in some sort of development for decades now. The Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, or TALOS, was proposed by U.S. Special Operations Command officials in 2013.

But in subsequent efforts, the Pentagon decided to pursue parts of the total-body system instead of a do-it-all suit.

That’s resulted in some simplified attachments that take the strain off heavy loads by supporting a soldier’s hips, lower back and legs.

Under the deal, which Anduril announced on Tuesday, the Defense Department will buy 500 Roadrunner all-up rounds as well as the firm’s portable Pulsar electronic-warfare capability, which can be integrated with aircraft to jam enemy systems.

“This latest contract award highlights Anduril’s commitment to investing its own research and development to support defense innovation, providing rapid, scalable solutions to safeguard U.S. forces,” the company said in a statement.

An Anduril spokesperson declined to name the firm’s DOD customer due to security concerns, but the company said the contract will serve multiple military services in “priority regions where U.S. forces face significant threats” from drones. Deliveries will begin this year and continue through the end of 2025.

The firm is already on a 10-year, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $1 billion with U.S. Special Operations Command to supply counter-drone hardware and software, but the spokesperson would not confirm whether the new business is part of its SOCOM award.

That deal was announced in January 2022 and later that year, the command awarded Anduril $12.5 million for Roadrunner. SOCOM also requested another $19 million for the technology in its fiscal 2024 budget request.

Anduril unveiled Roadrunner last December after spending two years secretly developing it with internal funding. At the time, the company’s founder Palmer Luckey told reporters that Roadrunner was in low-rate production with an initial U.S. customer for “hundreds of units.” He said the company plans to quickly scale to quantities in the hundreds of thousands.

The use of drones and loitering munitions on the battlefield has expanded in recent years. The department wants to learn from the ingenuity of the Ukrainian military, which has deployed small drones in response to Russia’s onslaught, but it also wants to develop a strong defense against the use of hostile drones by adversaries like Iran and its proxies.

The Pentagon created the Joint Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office to develop a coordinated, long-term response to drone threats in 2019, and in 2023, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks revealed a new DoD initiative called Replicator to field thousands of autonomous systems by next summer.

The department announced last week that Replicator’s next area of focus will be Counter-UAS.

According to Anduril, Roadrunner offers a solution for both sides of the challenge. Chris Brose, the company’s chief of strategy, told reporters last December the system — which can carry a variety of payloads — was built to adapt as DOD’s needs change.

“We’re very hopeful that the government will see in this capability what we see in it, which is a novel solution that is built to be adaptable to where those threats are going in the near future — which, by the way, has been a process that’s been playing out over the past few years, and it’s just going to get worse,” he said.

The Defense Innovation Unit released a solicitation this week for one-way, uncrewed aerial systems that can fly at ranges of 50 to 300 kilometers in low-bandwidth, GPS-denied environments.

“Recent conflicts have highlighted the asymmetric impact low-cost, one-way unmanned aerial systems have on the modern battlefield,” DIU said in the notice. “The Department of Defense must be able to employ low-cost precision effects at extended ranges.”

DIU plans to hold a live flyoff demonstration as soon as December to evaluate the proposed systems.

Small, one-way attack drones have featured heavily in recent conflicts — from Ukraine to the Middle East. Since last fall, the Iran-backed Houthi militia group has targeted commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, using aerial vehicles, uncrewed surface vessels and cruise missiles. Last week, the group launched what the Pentagon termed a “complex attack” on U.S. ships in the region.

On Monday, Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the Pentagon would focus the next round of its Replicator effort — a process for quickly fielding high-need technology at scale — on countering drone threats like these. But the department also recognizes the impact these systems can have and wants to stock up on its own supply.

“Reliable, affordable, and adaptable long-range UAS platforms that allow for employment at scale will maximize operational flexibility for the joint force,” DIU said.

A DIU spokesperson told Defense News that while the drones the department wants could perform attack missions, it’s also interested in systems that can fly electronic warfare, ISR and communications relay payloads.

According to the solicitation, the vehicles should also be hard to detect and track, have several pathways for two-way communications and be equipped with mission planning software. Critically, the department wants modular systems that can integrate new hardware or software in a matter of hours.

“Proprietary interfaces, message formatting or hardware that require vendor-specific licensing are not permitted,” DIU said.

The notice doesn’t detail how many systems the department might buy and it doesn’t set a cost target. The spokesperson said that omission was intentional because DIU’s selections won’t be based on the cost of a particular drone, but on the cost of the effect the platform achieves.

“The best way to think of what we’re targeting is a cost per effect,” the spokesperson said. “If we launch one $1M platform or ten $100k platforms and generate the same effect, then the cost per effect is the same and that’s what we want to focus on.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced “counter small uncrewed aerial systems,” or C-SUAS, as the Replicator 2 focus area in a memo last week to senior Pentagon leaders. His decision follows a monthslong review that considered what capability gaps could be best addressed through the rapid fielding initiative.

“Replicator 2 will tackle the warfighter priority of countering the threat posed by small uncrewed aerial systems to our most critical installations and force concentrations,” he said in the memo, which was released publicly on Monday. “My expectation is that Replicator 2 will field meaningfully improved C-sUAS protection to critical assets within 24 months of Congress approving funding.”

Championed by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, Replicator’s goal is to create a new pathway for the Pentagon to buy and scale high-need capabilities on faster timelines.

The first test of that pathway, Replicator 1, centers on delivering thousands of low-cost drones by next summer. The department plans to spend a total of $1 billion on the effort in fiscal years 2024 and 2025, with funds drawn from various sources including prior-year appropriations, a reprogramming request, a national security supplemental approved in August, and the Pentagon’s yet-to-be approved FY25 budget proposal.

As DOD leaders began deliberating this summer on what to pursue in Replicator 2, they focused on capabilities that would address a near-term operational imperative and would benefit from senior leader backing, Hicks told Defense News in June. According to Austin’s memo, the need to protect against growing threats posed by enemy drones fits the bill.

Hostile drones pose a major challenge to the U.S. and its allies and have featured heavily in conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Since last fall, Iran-backed groups have used drones, uncrewed surface vessels and anti-ship ballistic vehicles to launch dozens of attacks on U.S., allied and commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea. The incidents have disrupted global trade in key waterways and killed three merchant sailors.

According to a June 13 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, 65 countries and 29 major energy and shipping companies have been affected or have had to alter their routes in response to these aggressions.

DOD officials have said the department is taking a layered approach to defending against enemy drones, meaning the U.S. will pursue a range of capabilities to disable these systems, from electronic warfare to kinetic weapons. The military services have a number of ongoing programs to develop these systems.

Led by the Defense Innovation Unit, Replicator 2 will leverage those existing efforts to help the services field counter-UAS capabilities more quickly and in larger numbers. According to Austin, DIU will work closely with the military services, the Counter Uncrewed Systems Warfighter Senior Integration Group and Pentagon acquisition chief Bill LaPlante, who serves as DOD’s C-sUAS principal staff assistant.

“I am confident the Replicator initiative will complement and advance the significant C-sUAS work already underway in the DOD,” Austin said. “The expectation is that Replicator 2 will assist with overcoming challenges we face in the areas of production capacity, technology innovation, authorities, policies, open system architecture and system integration, and force structure.”

Several companies were competing to build the second increment of the service’s Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport (S-MET), robot, including General Dynamics Land Systems, an Anduril and Hanwha team, and Teledyne FLIR.

GDLS won the first contracts in 2019 and 2020 to build the first increment of the vehicle.

Under the newest contract, American Rheinmetall and HDT will each build eight prototypes for a combined total of $22 million, the service said in a statement.

“S-MET Increment II addresses capability gaps associated with excessive physical burdens, recharging batteries during continuous operations, and reducing sustainment burden for semi-independent operations,” Kyle Bruner, the Army’s project manager for force projection within the Program Executive Office Combat Support & Combat Service Support, said in the statement.

Using the robot also “reduces Soldier load and enhances small unit combat effectiveness by reducing fatigue and injury caused by excessive physical loads, shifting the burden to the robotic platform,” he added.

The first increment of S-MET is a radio-controlled, eight-wheeled platform that can carry various payloads and generate power for electronic systems. While the first increment is capable of carrying 1,000 lbs, the Army’s goal for the second increment is to double the weight the robot can carry, the service said.

Additionally, the second increment should have higher exportable power to handle unmanned aircraft systems, run more quietly and have a dismounted wireless mesh communication network integrated into the system.

The system is also required to be modular and open in order to upgrade it easily and cost-effectively, the Army stated.

The service plans to award a production contract for S-MET Increment II following the prototyping phase and developmental testing in late fiscal year 2027. The service’s current plan is to buy up to 2,195 systems.

The Army is pursuing a different robotic combat vehicle for heavy maneuver forces, but the S-MET vehicle could be the more common robot of choice for lighter formations, the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Combat Systems, Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, said in an interview in late 2023.

S-MET “is a very capable, small platform, and we’re seeing a lot of value with experimentation,” Dean said.

The name is short for Autonomous Tactical Light Armour System, and company executives unveiled a “collaborative combat” version of the vehicle at the Land Forces 2024 exhibition here earlier this month.

The show ride was armed with a Bushmaster 25mm cannon, but other possibilities include larger-caliber weapons, mortars, antitank guided missiles, loitering munition launchers and surveillance sensors, according to the firm

To evaluate new technologies such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGV), drones, robotics and counter-drone systems, the Australian Army is converting the Adelaide-based 1st Armoured Regiment into a test and experimental unit.

Lt. Col. Jake Penley, its commanding officer, told Defense News that the unit will hand in its M1A1 Abrams tanks later this year, before achieving an initial operational capability in the experimentation mission on Feb. 1, 2025.

Penley said of his unit’s new role: “The ability to get high-end emerging technology in the hands of soldiers sooner in an experimentation role means we can verify and validate those platforms quickly and get them out to combat units.”

The unit is already evaluating optionally manned M113 tracked vehicles, after BAE Systems Australia converted 20 vehicles. “They’re really beneficial,” Penley said, and the regiment’s armor expertise means they know how to maintain them.

BAE Systems is currently talking to the Army about upgrading these optionally manned M113s with more advanced sensors and software from the ATLAS project.

The 10-ton-class combat ATLAS – slightly smaller than LAV-25 8x8 armored vehicles used by the Australian Army and U.S. Marine Corps – can perform advanced reconnaissance, armored overwatch, flank protection and convoy escort missions.

Paul Finch, Project Manager Land Autonomy at BAE Systems Australia, told Defense News that the ATLAS employs a Supacat HMT Extenda chassis and drive module, plus a Vantage unmanned turret from Slovenian company Valhalla Turrets.

With a residual 6-ton payload capacity, it can fit inside a 20-foot standard shipping container. This opens up numerous transportation options by road, train and ship, while six ATLAS vehicles fit inside a C-17 aircraft.

Finch said the prototype was completed in July following a contract award to Supacat in June 2023. He said the vehicle is around 90% complete, with work still to be done to qualify subsystems and to train its software.

The ATLAS is competing against mostly tracked platforms in this medium-sized UGV category, but its wheeled configuration brings advantages in terms of road mobility.

Integrated Robotics Technologies, located in southeastern Russia’s Bashkortostan Republic, is an example of how Russian companies have switched to a wartime economy orchestrated by Moscow to prosecute the invasion of Ukraine.

IRT is not named in sanctions by Western governments despite touting its lineup of surveillance and attack drones in its advertising materials, a marked switch from a marketing strategy previously aimed at the agricultural and energy markets. A presentation by the Bashkirian government, seen by Defense News, shows that in 2023 alone, IRT produced more than 1,000 UAVs.

The company’s portfolio includes several types of so-called kamikaze drones, cheap and disposable aircraft fitted with an explosive warhead that have become the hallmark of Ukraine war tactics. An operator can plunge them into vulnerable targets from afar with deadly precision. The vendor also markets a set of larger, more complex drones that it claims can stay in the air for 20 hours and cover up to 1,600 kilometers while producing high-quality aerial imagery – useful for energy pipeline inspections but also for surveilling the battlefield from afar.

It is likely that countless companies like IRT exist scattered across Russia. The case underscores the government’s concerted efforts to mitigate the effectiveness of Western sanctions imposed after attacking Ukraine. The campaign, still labeled a “special military operation” in Kremlin verbiage, has been burning through weapon stocks new and old at an unprecedented pace.

Ukraine’s fire-dropping drones can find, shock Russian troops: experts

With the war in Ukraine in its third year, Russian businesses like IRT have come into the spotlight of Western authorities as they try to restrict the flow of components that could aid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts. In turn, Russia has been finding new ways to sustain its access to vital products, turning to China and setting up front companies in third countries like the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and in Central Asia, UN trade records and government information show.

IRT’s website does not explicitly mention a military dimension to its business, billing its drones instead as civilian tools. However, the company has participated in defense-oriented trade fairs since the war in Ukraine began in 2022.

“As they like to say now, it is dual-use,” quipped a press release by a regional trade show (archived here) covering IRT’s appearance at the event, referring to the company’s ostensibly agricultural tack.

The company did not return an email seeking comment on its defense-related activities.

A technology is dual-use when it was originally developed for civilian purposes but has significant warfare-related applications, says Robert Shaw, the program director for export control and nonproliferation at the California-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a think tank that studies arms control and sanctions.

“IRT’s UAVs seem to fit this definition very well,” he said, “and especially kamikaze drones very clearly have military applications.”

Founded in September 2021, IRT describes itself in public appearances as an innovative company that hopes to advance Russian domestic drone-making abilities. It has hosted aerospace engineering events for local youth and counts around 20 employees, according to public records.

While a private company, Integrated Robotics Technologies has received money and contracts from Russian government entities. Public records show that the regional government of the Republic of Bashkortostan paid IRT eight times for consulting services in early 2022. Governmental support has since expanded through programs to boost domestic UAV production, including plans to build drone-related research centers, launch platforms and factories, all outlined in regional government meetings in 2023 and 2024

The plans are worth tens of billions of rubles (hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars), according to Republic of Bashkortostan government documents.

Eager to tout a  local drone champion, officials have kept tabs on the company’s fortunes: IRT had produced 1,049 drones of six different types in 2023 alone, according to a presentation from Jan. 15 of this year. Of these, 332 were of the Scout or Dark Wing varieties, marketed as suicide drones in the company’s product catalog. The company also built 14 long-range surveillance drones of the IRT-5 variety and hundreds of quad- and hexacopters.

It’s unclear to what extent an individual company like IRT would be affected by Western sanctions. On a national scale, though, there are indications that Moscow has struggled with supplanting some parts of its supply chains with local vendors, most notably in advanced semiconductors and similarly specialized components and tools.

Russian customs data seen by Defense News shows a handful of occasions in which Integrated Robotics Technologies has imported drone components and parts for a 3D printer from China.

Companies linked to IRT may also be involved in procuring components on its behalf, making it difficult to gauge the extent to which the company relies on foreign components. For example, the company appears to have close ties to a medium-sized chemical- and laboratory-equipment manufacturer.

“Russian defense-related procurement efforts are using a wide range of third countries to circumvent sanctions,” Shaw told Defense News. He said the procurement of 3D printing components is a notable detail. “Our research suggests that additive manufacturing is a particular area to watch, especially when it comes to UAV and missile production,” he said. Being linked to a chemical company might allow for producing specialized materials for drone-building or polymers for 3D printing, Shaw said.

The sentiment comes amid a desire by Ukrainian and European manufacturers, in particular, to forge partnerships that are meant to blossom when the country enters something of a post-war period. Local arms makers have touted their products as war-proven, tested in an intense land conflict not seen in Europe since World War 2, since the Russian full-scale invasion began in February 2022.

Vadym Ivchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker for the Batkivshchyna party, told Defense News Ukraine’s defense industry has developed a wide range of capabilities since then. The country’s defense industry is obliged by law to supply its entire output to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, keeping the sector’s innovations local for now.

“We test all weapons and equipment in the battlefield, and all of them undergo upgrades based on the combat experience of our soldiers. We have very efficient drones that can successfully strike the enemy, and Ukrainian defense companies are very competitive with regards to drones, armored vehicles and many other types of gear,” Ivchenko said.

Ukraine is currently making efforts to ramp up its industry’s ammunition production capacities. In the long term, local plants could supply the surplus of their output to other militaries across Europe, as numerous allies are currently building up their stockpiles, according to Ukrainian officials.

“We also make mines and ammunition of different types: 122mm, 152mm and 155mm, among others. Right now, our industry produces only for our military. But once the war is over, it will be possible to export weapons that are needed by allied militaries abroad,” Ivchenko said.

Under Ukrainian law, local manufacturers are required to sell their output to the country’s armed forces to bolster its combat against Russia’s military. However, some officials have begun pointing out what they see as the limitations of such an approach, arguing the restriction deprives both the industry and the state budget of revenue.

At a Sept. 5 meeting of the Temporary Special Commission on Protection of Investors’ Rights in Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, lawmaker Halyna Yanchenko said opening up weapon and equipment exports could generate a major income stream for the country.

“Weapons made in Ukraine and tested in real combat are of interest to many countries around the world,” she said, as quoted in a statement released by the parliament. “Our defense industry can annually produce goods worth $20 billion. At the same time, the state is able to purchase weapons for only $6 billion, this includes purchases from abroad. We are slowing down the development of a strategic industry through export restrictions.”

Similarly to other industry players, Ukrainian defense company Kvertus supplies its entire output of electronic-warfare and reconnaissance systems to the country’s military. However, after the exports ban is eventually lifted, the manufacturer hopes to launch foreign sales of its combat-proven systems with the help of foreign partners in Europe or the United States.

Serhii Skoryk, the commercial director of Kvertus, told Defense News the business is promoting its offers, including anti-drone jamming systems, abroad even as it cannot sell it to foreign users. The company took part in the MSPO defense industry show in Kielce, Poland, in early September.

“We are the biggest anti-drone jamming system producer in Ukraine. Our company makes around 5,000 products per month, and all of it goes to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Kvertus equipment is combat-proven and saves lives every day. The demand is high, because a $400 drone can destroy a tank worth $10 million,” he said.

“Today, it’s forbidden to export such products, but it might be possible tomorrow. The demand abroad is huge, and we are discussing with our foreign partners how we can use our extensive experience with fighting against Russia’s attack,” according to Skoryk.

Ukraine’s industry is dominated by state-owned players, including the country’s defense giant Ukroboronprom. At the same time, the ongoing war has spurred the growth of many private companies such as Kyiv-based Kvertus.

“My prediction, ahead of any formal requirement being provided, is that future warfighting will see an increase in platforms with increased sophistication and capabilities,” Col. Helen Mammino, Director Battlefield Aviation Program of the Army Aviation Command, said here on Sept. 11 at the Australian Association for Uncrewed Systems conference, held in conjunction with the Land Forces 2024 event.

The opportunity arises because advances in robotics and autonomy are converging with new drone developments, according to Mammino.

“One of the key features for our objective-force operating environment will be the abundance and proliferation of uncrewed aerial systems,” or UAS, she added.

Kongsberg to set up missile plant in Australia, joins local ammo push

The ground service has combined various army efforts under the umbrella program DEF 129, divided into four size categories: nano-UAS, small drones (SUAS), SUAS-plus, and tactical drones (TUAS).

Beginning with the larger, brigade-level TUAS, the Australian Army is in the process of fielding Insitu RQ-21A Integrators to replace Textron’s Shadow 200 aircraft. “The delivery of the RQ-21 is currently underway, with an end state being a full complement of six systems introduced … by the end of 2025,” Mommino said. Each system contains four aircraft, with their indigenous content levels reaching 82%.

Concerning the SUAS-plus category for combat teams, Elbit Systems has been on contract since late 20222 for the Skylark I-LEX, but systems are only now reaching Australia. Designed for domestic use, they will be tasked with assisting civilian authorities, for instance.

The army also presently uses AeroVironment’s Puma AE in the same size category, and efforts to replace these will not occur before the early 2030s.

The DEF 129 program’s phase 4B targets the platoon-level SUAS segment, where the AeroVironment Wasp AE is being replaced by a mixed fleet comprising the Quantum-Systems Vector 2-in-1 for mounted operations, and the Sypaq Systems CorvoX for dismounted use. An contract exceeding $100 million Australian (US$68 million) announced in mid-July will see delivery of both types from the third quarter of 2025.

The Australian Army currently uses the Black Hornet 3 as a nano-UAS in infantry sections. Officials are also experimenting with numerous other types, and Mammino said ten nano variants would be in use by 2025.

Last year, the government suddenly canceled the Navy’s selection of Schiebel’s S-100 Camcopter. The Army is now responsible for the maritime UAS mission, and Mammino said her command is “working through the early stages of requirements for those systems, and understanding what the acquisition pathway will look like.”

Meanwhile, Army Aviation Command is also responsible for introduction of 29 AH-64E Apaches and 40 UH-60M Black Hawks into Australian service. Mammino said eight Black Hawks are already in Australia, with four more due before year’s end.

The U.S. military said it was aware of the Houthis' claimed downing of a drone over the country's southwestern Dhamar province, without elaborating.

All the Houthi-US Navy incidents in the Middle East (that we know of)

The Houthis have exaggerated claims in the past in their ongoing campaign targeting shipping in the Red Sea over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. However, the online video bolstered the claim, particularly after two recent claims by the Houthis included no evidence.

Other videos showed armed rebels gathered around the flaming wreckage, a propeller similar to those used by the armed drone visible in the flames. One attempted to pick up a piece of the metal before dropping it due to the heat.

Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, a Houthi military spokesperson, identified the drone as an MQ-9, without elaborating on how he came to the determination. He said it was the third downed by the group in a week, though the other two claims did not include similar video or other evidence. The U.S. military similarly has not acknowledged losing any aircraft.

Saree said the Houthis used a locally produced missile. However, Iran has armed the rebels with a surface-to-air missile known as the 358 for years. Iran denies arming the rebels, though Tehran-manufactured weaponry has been found on the battlefield and in seaborne shipments heading to Yemen despite a United Nations arms embargo.

Reapers, which cost around $30 million apiece, can fly at altitudes up to 50,000 feet and have an endurance of up to 24 hours before needing to land. The aircraft have been flown by both the U.S. military and the CIA over Yemen for years.

The Houthis have targeted more than 80 merchant vessels with missiles and drones since the war in Gaza started in October. They seized one vessel and sank two in the campaign that has also killed four sailors. Other missiles and drones have either been intercepted by a U.S.-led coalition in the Red Sea or failed to reach their targets, which have included Western military vessels as well.

The rebels maintain that they target ships linked to Israel, the U.S. or the U.K. to force an end to Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza. However, many of the ships attacked have little or no connection to the conflict, including some bound for Iran.

Those attacks include a barrage that struck the Greek-flagged oil tanker Sounion in the Red Sea. Salvagers have begun towing away the burning oil tanker, hoping to avoid a catastrophic leak of its 1 million barrels of oil on board.

But as Air Force leaders translated their vision into an acquisition strategy, a novel meeting of the minds — at least by Defense Department standards — may have saved the service from a major miscalculation: A new cohort of so-called collaborative combat aircraft, as originally envisioned, wouldn’t be able to fly far enough to be effective in combat, which would have been a serious problem in the Pacific theater.

That’s according to acquisition chief Andrew Hunter, who spoke about the episode anecdotally to stress how the Air Force had changed its acquisition practices by soliciting early input from stakeholders who were previously consulted only later in the process.

Key to catching the range shortcoming, he said in a July interview, was the unique approach the Air Force took to buying the autonomous drone wingmen known as CCAs. The service brought operators from Air Combat Command into the room alongside acquisition experts, who would normally have taken the lead on a major procurement like this.

“We had … a lot of discussion about range to understand operationally, what was meaningful and what was going to be effective,” said Hunter, the service’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics.

With ACC operators’ insights, he said, the Air Force was able to push contractors to find the “sweet spot” of enough range, at a reasonable price and on the right timeline.

That approach to acquisition is a hallmark of the Air Force’s operational imperative effort, Hunter said, and could change how the service procures systems in the future.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall rolled out his wide-ranging, seven-pronged operational imperative plan in March 2022, seeking to transform everything from how the Air Force deploys and sets up bases in war zones to procuring advanced aircraft — including CCAs, the Next Generation Air Dominance future fighter and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber — and finding better ways to track and target enemy forces.

With the Biden administration’s term nearing the finish line, Kendall’s operational imperative transformations could prove to be his lasting legacy on the Air Force.

And such modifications are already guiding other changes to the force. In a Sept. 4 panel at the Defense News conference, Hunter said the operational imperatives were the “genesis” of a broader restructuring of the Air Force, called the reoptimization for great power competition, that was unveiled earlier this year.

Along the way, the operational imperative effort also prompted the Air Force to rethink how it does business and procures new aircraft and other systems, in particular by bringing the operational and acquisition communities together.

From the start, Hunter said, each team working on an operational imperative effort was co-led by an acquisition expert and an operational expert, so each perspective was equally balanced. The systems eventually developed will be used by the Air Force’s operators, so involving them each step of the way was logical, he added.

The rapidly moving acquisition process involves so many decisions — everything from choices on designs, contracts, schedules and how systems will be used — that there’s no time to waste on creating systems that aren’t immensely useful.

“It’s not one of those cases where we get a requirement, and then we in the acquisition community run off and do our thing, and then we come back at the end and say [to operators], ‘Here it is, hope you like it,’” Hunter said. “If they don’t scratch the operational itch, then we’ve not succeeded.”

The time has come, Hunter added, to move away from the lengthy, traditional model in recent decades of sending requests for proposal to a limited number of major firms and only picking one. Instead, the Air Force wants to move to a “next-generation” acquisition model that continually works with a range of industry partners and iterates multiple designs over time.

The Air Force’s CCA program is the most prominent example of this approach. The service in April announced it had selected Anduril and General Atomics for the first “increment” of the drones. And a second increment is on its way in fiscal 2025 — one that could produce autonomous drones dramatically different from the first batch.

“Do not assume, and it may not be, just an evolution of increment one,” Hunter said Sept. 4. “It could be an entirely different set of missions; it could be an entirely different kind of an aircraft.”

Chasing threats

As the service works on operational improvements, threats faced by the United States continue to evolve. China, in particular, is focused on strengthening its own military for a possible invasion of Taiwan — and is doing so “incredibly quickly,” Hunter said.

“The threat’s not sitting still,” Kendall said in a June interview with Defense News at the Pentagon. “It’s getting worse, and it’s ... very creative.”

So, the Air Force adjusted its plans, supplementing its modernizing effort with other “operational enablers” that cut across multiple areas. The service also needed to improve capabilities, especially through greater munitions, better electronic warfare and mobility — like an envisioned future stealthy tanker, dubbed NGAS, for its next-generation aerial refueling system.

And the Air Force changed course on Next-Generation Air Dominance, a future fighter family of systems expected to replace the F-22. The price tag for each NGAD, as originally conceived, would likely have been about three times the cost of an F-35, Kendall said. The NGAD program is now on hold while the Air Force reconsiders its design, and it is unclear when the service will award a contract.

The imperatives were built around a “focus on operational problems we need to solve,” Kendall said. “What are the things we need to figure out to make sure we’re competitive and stay ahead of other threats?”

Kendall said the Air Force is making progress on these imperatives, though he tempered his comments by noting that funding limitations and shortfalls in cybersecurity and other technology have kept the effort from moving as quickly as he hoped.

“I’m always impatient,” Kendall said. “I want to go faster to get militarily meaningful quantities out into the force that make a difference operationally.”

When Kendall announced his operational imperative plan, work was already well under way on the 2023 budget proposal. This meant the first time the Air Force could request funding for new operational imperative efforts was in the 2024 budget cycle.

But Congress threw the Pentagon a curveball. Disputes on Capitol Hill held up the military’s 2024 spending bill for months, and the fiscal year was already half over when lawmakers finally passed it.

While the 2024 budget delay hindered much of the operational imperative effort, Hunter said, some elements — such as the command, control, communications and battle management, or C3BM, effort — were already under way or had existing funding to get going.

The Air Force was able to move quickly to field C3BM capabilities, such as the cloud-based command and control effort that knit together several different air defense data sources to better defend the homeland. Hunter said that was able to be fielded rapidly over the last two-plus years or so, and has been successful.

And because the program to develop CCAs was already under way as part of NGAD and had “significant” funding, the Air Force was also able to keep it rolling despite the 2024 budget delay, Hunter said.

But as budgets get tighter, it remains to be seen whether the OI project will receive the funding it needs.

A lasting impact?

The Air Force’s desired funding for operational imperative efforts grew from about $5 billion in 2024 — once the budget was passed — to $6 billion in the 2025 budget request.

Kendall said he’s hoping to maintain full funding in 2026, but expects tight budgets to force the service to make “difficult choices,” including whether the OIs will get the funding he wants.

The growth of additive manufacturing, and technology advancements making it possible to conduct distributed manufacturing for high-end military capabilities, are also helping the Air Force create its new procurement model, Hunter said.

“You can scale more rapidly,” he said. “You can maybe work more intimately with partners and allies … which is definitely important to our strategy of integrated deterrence. You can do complex designs more affordably. These approaches are very consistent with rapidly adopting those technologies into our production and design processes.”

Hunter feels strongly that this approach to procurement — with tighter cooperation between acquisition experts, industry and operators and more frequent iterations to evolve designs — will one day become standard for the Air Force, and perhaps other services.

“This is the way to do it, now and in the immediate future,” Hunter said. “I don’t see a date where it will become less relevant.”

And it’s not an entirely new approach, he said, but it is a habit the Air Force had gotten out. He compared this strategy to that of the World War II and post-war eras — when aviation technology transformed by leaps and bounds — as opposed to the late-Cold War era of the 1980s and 1990s, during which the pace of advancements slowed.

“Change was happening so fast” during WWII, Hunter said. “And you see … how quickly we were able to develop rockets and missiles in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The pace of change and progress was so fast that it drove us towards these more tight-knit relationships among experts.

“It’s not unprecedented, but I definitely think it’s a little bit of a ‘back to the future’ scenario of behaving a little more like we did in those earlier periods.”

While many aspects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resemble World War I — trenches, barbed wires, heavy exchanges of artillery — the innovative use of drones has been game-changing. Unmanned systems are altering the character of warfare, and the ongoing integration of AI and robotics will further accelerate this dramatic shift. It is why these were my top modernization objectives during my tenure as Army secretary and secretary of defense.

The potency of unmanned systems is most pronounced when it comes to small aerial drones — essentially robots — that are used today to conduct the same tasks that soldiers performed in the past: reconnaissance, surveillance, targeting and direct attack. But they do it far more efficiently and accurately. For instance, when I was a platoon leader decades ago, it typically took a couple infantrymen to destroy a tank at a max range of 3,750 meters. Today, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can do the same at far greater distances, with better success, and at much less cost.

To date, Ukraine has destroyed over 10,000 Russian vehicles, nearly one-third of which are tanks. Many of these were killed by UAVs. Ukraine has also had great success using unmanned surface vehicles to sink or damage a number of Russian ships in the Black Sea.

The introduction of drone swarms — think of dozens or hundreds of UAVs being employed simultaneously — will make the battlefield more lethal than ever before. From a production perspective, generating such a number is not an arduous task. At a gathering this summer of the Aspen Strategy Group that focused on AI, I co-led a panel discussion where one former U.S. official reported that Kyiv is acquiring well over 50,000 drones a month. The speed and cost at which the Ukrainians can do this compared to the United States is shocking.

As important, because the software on these drones is easily modified, Ukraine’s military can keep up with the changing threats and tactics of the modern battlefield. This is something many of our existing platforms, which are defined — and usually trapped in time — by their hardware, often cannot do. The good news is that this can be remedied with more investment in American innovation and process changes.

AI is also revolutionizing a wide range of administrative and logistical functions far removed from the front lines. It will do what AI does best: improve the speed, accuracy, cost and quality of decision-making. Artificial Intelligence can be used for preventive maintenance to reduce the likelihood of equipment breaking down during the fight; it can ensure the right supplies get to the right place at the right time; it can improve talent management in the force; transform supply chain risk management in the defense industrial base; and the use of large language models can hyperpower military staffs. This is the future for a broad range of ordinary military tasks, in addition to enhancing our warfighters’ effectiveness and survivability on the battlefield.

All this demands that DOD accelerate its across-the-board adoption of AI and advancement of robotics and autonomy. It is an asymmetric advantage the U.S. must master first and retain preeminence over. This means investing far more in these technologies, adopting commercial standards and processes as much as possible, capturing all the department’s data in a central repository, prototyping and testing far more aggressively and showing a willingness to deploy needed systems even when one’s confidence level is less than 100%. At the same time, the Pentagon must continue to do these things responsibly, beginning with the ethical principles for AI that I established in February 2020.

As the war in Ukraine rages on, we must heed the lessons from it and do everything in our power to ensure our military has the advanced AI, robotics and autonomy tools it needs to fight — and win — the battles of tomorrow. Doing so, and with a far greater sense of urgency, will serve us incredibly well in any future conflict; especially if we must face off against our greatest strategic threat today — a People’s Republic of China — with the world’s largest and most concentrated armed forces.

Dr. Mark T. Esper was the 27th secretary of defense and author of the New York Times bestseller, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times.” He is also a partner and board member in the AI venture firm Red Cell Partners.

On Sept. 2, footage emerged online showing what appeared to be a Ukrainian low-cost first-person-view drone, or FPV, carrying an incendiary burning mixture that it sprayed along a dense line of trees where Russian troops were suspected.

It was later reported by Ukrainian media outlet Militarnyi that the Ukrainian Mountain Infantry had received thermite munitions – which include a powdered mix of aluminum and iron oxide capable of burning at temperatures exceeding 2,200 degrees Celsius – that were mounted on drones and dropped on Russian positions.

Experts believe that the use of such weapons is two-fold, acting as both a cheap way to expose enemy locations and to cause fear among the invading troops.

“The primary use of these thermite FPV drones is as a defoliant to remove the tree and foliage cover that Russian troops and vehicles are using for concealment in tree lines; and secondarily likely intended as a psychological weapon due to the nature of the effects thermite would produce in contact with skin,” Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, said.

In addition, the high-temperatures of the blend can damage or destroy caches of equipment and ammunition in a single sortie, Federico Borsari, resident fellow at the U.S. Center for European Policy Analysis, noted.

“They can be employed for specific purposes for which explosive effects are not ideal, and be useful to burn abandoned vehicles, for instance, saving explosive warheads for missions requiring kinetic effects,” he said.

The two experts said FPVs are suitable drone variants to deliver the burning mixture at slow speed because of their low cost and precise maneuverability.

As incendiary weapons have become more common in the war, analysts have been flagging concerns over harm to civilians. For example, in 2023, Russia reportedly used thermite bombs in eastern Ukraine over residential neighborhoods, according to a video on social media that was picked up by the Youtube channel of The Telegraph newspaper.

Dangers in using thermite include the possibility of causing out-of-control fires that risk burning down civilian infrastructure and non-military targets.

The use of thermite munitions is not banned per say, but neither is it straightforward, experts say.

“It would be legitimate and legal to use them as defoliants to remove cover, and this holds unless they would a) hit civilians or b) there was a significant risk the subsequent fire would endanger civilians – contrast this with Russian use of thermite last year in an indiscriminate manner,” Matthew Savill, director of military science at RUSI, wrote in an email to Defense News.

Under the Geneva Conventions, deliberately targeting civilian areas with incendiary weapons constitutes a war crime, yet Moscow has paid little consideration to adhering to international norms during the course of the war.

Russian forces have used other fire-inducing weapons such as the 9M22S incendiary cluster rocket, used for the 122mm caliber Grad rocket artillery system, Bronk said.

Savill notes that throughout the war, Ukraine has largely been able to contrast its adherence to international conflict laws against Russian behavior, an important appearance he presumes Kyiv will strive to maintain.

“I would expect that however they choose to use thermite, they would want to keep that distinction,” he said.

The U.S. military told The Associated Press it was aware of the claim but has “received no reports” of American military drones being downed over Yemen.

The rebels offered no pictures or video to support the claim as they have in the past, though such material can appear in propaganda footage days later.

All the Houthi-US Navy incidents in the Middle East (that we know of)

However, the Houthis have repeatedly downed General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drones in the years since they seized Yemen's capital, Sanaa, in 2014. Those attacks have exponentially increased since the start of the Israel-Hamas war and the Houthis launched their campaign targeting shipping in the Red Sea corridor.

Houthi military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree made the claim in a prerecorded video message. He said the Houthis shot down the drone over Yemen’s Marib province, a long-contested area home to key oil and gas fields that’s been held by allies of a Saudi-led coalition battling the rebels since 2015.

Saree offered no details on how the rebels down the aircraft. However, Iran has armed the rebels with a surface-to-air missile known as the 358 for years. Iran denies arming the rebels, though Tehran-manufactured weaponry has been found on the battlefield and in seaborne shipments heading to Yemen despite a United Nations arms embargo.

The Houthis “continue to perform their jihadist duties in victory for the oppressed Palestinian people and in defense of dear Yemen,” Saree said.

Reapers, which cost around $30 million apiece, can fly at altitudes up to 50,000 feet and have an endurance of up to 24 hours before needing to land. The aircraft have been flown by both the U.S. military and the CIA over Yemen for years.

After the claim, the Houthis' al-Masirah satellite news channel reported multiple U.S.-led airstrikes near the city of Ibb. Late Sunday, the U.S. military's Central Command said it had “destroyed three Iranian-backed Houthi uncrewed aerial vehicles and two missile systems in a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen,” without elaborating.

The Americans have been striking Houthi targets intensely since January.

The Houthis have targeted more than 80 merchant vessels with missiles and drones since the war in Gaza started in October. They seized one vessel and sank two in the campaign that has also killed four sailors. Other missiles and drones have either been intercepted by a U.S.-led coalition in the Red Sea or failed to reach their targets, which have included Western military vessels as well.

The rebels maintain that they target ships linked to Israel, the U.S. or the U.K. to force an end to Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza. However, many of the ships attacked have little or no connection to the conflict, including some bound for Iran.

Those attacks include the barrage that struck the Greek-flagged oil tanker Sounion in the Red Sea. Salvagers last week abandoned an initial effort to tow away the burning oil tanker, leaving the Sounion stranded and its 1 million barrels of oil at risk of spilling.

“I think some of the areas that [Gen. Randy George], the chief [of staff of the Army] and I feel very strongly that we need to invest more in, both from the perspective of the Army... but also the needs of the joint force, is in the areas of unmanned aerial systems, counter-unmanned aerial systems and electronic warfare,” she said Wednesday at the Defense News Conference.

For instance, a Ukraine battalion commander told Wormuth earlier this year during training in Germany, that Russian electronic warfare capabilities were increasing “in ways that were concerning,” Wormuth detailed.

“I think you’ll see that in the budget that goes up to Congress next spring,” Wormuth said. “That’s an area where I think we also need to have more agility in our funding mechanisms because of the technology in those capability areas is changing so rapidly that we can’t afford to get locked into something and then be only allowed to use that something for the next 10 years.”

Both Wormuth and George have discussed the possibility of budgeting differently in order to get some capability into the hands of soldiers much more quickly. One of those possibilities is asking Congress to fund pots of money dedicated for a specific capability rather than budget across a number of specific line items that tend to be a specific product or program.

But both have also acknowledged that getting congressional appropriators on board might not be so easy. “Historically, they’re generally… very skeptical of what they see as kind of slush funds. They have a lot of scar tissue around [overseas contingency operations], and how the department has used that over the years,” Wormuth said.

Even so, “there is such a deep realization that we have got to change more quickly and that technology is changing rapidly right now that we do need to have more agile mechanisms,” she added.

Overseas contingency operations, or OCO, funding, used during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to pay for operations abroad, was a separate account with billions outside of the Pentagon’s base budget. It was often used to get extra funding for a variety of things rather than commit to paying for it within regular funding. Congress eliminated OCO funding beginning in FY22. Now the Defense Department must budget for any overseas operations within its base budget.

The Army plans to present a budget in these areas, according to Wormuth, that, for example, used to have 10 to 12 individual line items and now may have two or three.

“If we keep it relatively narrow and focused and we demonstrate that we can use that agility in those areas effectively, we may be able to sort of have a proof of concept,” she said. “I’m cautiously optimistic.”

In addition to delivering two Naval Strike Missiles for the Corps’ anti-ship missile system, the autonomous low-profile vessel the Marine Corps is experimenting with also aims to better get critical supplies like food to forward deployed and distributed Marines, Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Simon Doran said at the Defense News Conference on Wednesday.

“Truth be told, this is just a narco-boat,” Doran said. “We stole the idea from friends down south. And so this is 55 feet long, completely autonomous. It’s able to go hundreds or thousands of miles. It’s able to carry weapon systems that we have that are new. … It can carry pretty much anything you want to put in it.”

Marines expect ‘big year’ for drone, ship and logistics testing

Inspired by narco-boats, which are used by traffickers to smuggle illicit substances across bodies of water, the unmanned vessel remains close to the water-surface level to cut down on the likelihood of detection as it assists with logistics capabilities.

The service tested the logistics supply drone at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone in February at Camp Pendleton, California, where the Marine Corps trained a cook in 21 days to operate the system off the islands of Japan.

The Army spearheads the Project Convergence to test out advanced technology and capabilities in modern warfare as part of a joint, multinational exercise.

The autonomous low-profile vessel is particularly important because it allows forces to resupply food, fuel and ammunition without jeopardizing the safety of Marines, Doran said.

“If you have that unit located inside a weapons engagement zone, contested logistics and the ability to maneuver in the littorals becomes key,” Doran said. “And for that, what we’re looking at is trying to acquire systems that we deem risk worthy, meaning that we don’t necessarily want to just waste them, but we’d rather put something in there that’s autonomous, that doesn’t have humans on it that can do some of these higher risk missions without having personnel put in that riskier situation.”

This system is something the Marine Corps wanted “yesterday,” but testing is ongoing, Doran said. The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory received two prototypes in 2023.

The vessel is expected to join the III Marine Expeditionary Force based in Okinawa, Japan, for further evaluation this fall, he said.

The service hopes to purchase the vessels in the next several years, Marine Corps leaders said at the 2023 Defense News Conference.

“At this edition of the MSPO event, we have a number of premieres,” Remigiusz Wilk, the head of communications at WB Group, told Defense News. “In the field of unmanned systems, this includes the Warmate TL-R reconnaissance system, FT5 mini tactical class UAV in new variants, Warmate 20 loitering munition, and our latest extended-range addition, Warmate 50.”

Asked about the ranges of the systems, Wilk said that Warmate 20 has a range of “several hundred kilometers” and the range of Warmate 50 is “operational,” suggesting that it exceeds that of Warmate 20.

The expansion of the company’s portfolio comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is driving Poland’s efforts to modernize its armed forces and acquire enhanced combat capabilities.

The distance between Poland’s capital Warsaw and the Russian capital Moscow is around 1,151 km (715 miles).

The privately-owned manufacturer is one of the few major industry players in Poland that are not run by the state. WB Group supplies various unmanned systems to the Polish military, but also to foreign customers. The producer makes unmanned solutions, as well as communication, command, reconnaissance and weapons control systems, among others.

This month, nocturnal drone flights were repeatedly spotted over an area packed with critical infrastructure in the country’s far north. The unmanned vehicles were seen seemingly spying on a defunct nuclear power plant, a large chemical factory and a liquefied natural gas terminal, German public broadcasters reported.

The LNG facility was hastily constructed to help wean Germany off Russian gas following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Prosecutors are keeping tight-lipped about the case, but Schleswig Holstein state police have asked the country’s military for assistance. The intruding drones escaped at speeds of up to 100 kilometers per hour, outrunning the police drones, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported. The military has provided prosecutors with radar data and other information, a spokesman for the German Defense Ministry told German news agency DPA.

The public prosecutor’s office in Flensburg, the northern state’s capital, has launched an investigation into the case on suspicion of espionage for sabotage purposes, the French news agency AFP reported.

Last week, the NATO air base in Geilenkirchen in western Germany was temporarily put on the second-highest alert level after foreign intelligence suggested a threat may be imminent. German media reported that the danger was allegedly drone-based, though German authorities have not publicly confirmed this.

A spokesperson for the base told reporters last week that “nothing flew over the base,” calling speculations to the contrary “absurd.”

Officials at U.S. European Command, which oversees America’s force posture in Germany and elsewhere on the continent, declined to discuss specific threats. The command “routinely implements and adjusts appropriate force protection measures to ensure the security and safety of our personnel and our equipment,” a spokeswoman wrote in a statement for this article.

“As always, USEUCOM advises personnel in the European theater remain vigilant and report suspicious activity and implement prudent personal risk mitigation measures. The safety and security of our military communities is paramount.”

Unidentified drones have been reported over military training grounds, including those where Germany instructs Ukrainian soldiers. The flights and suspicious activities have been going on for well over a year, though little progress on countermeasures or investigations into their origin appears to have been made.

German intelligence agencies have, however, said that they suspect Russian involvement.

Two Germans of Russian heritage were arrested in Bavaria in April for allegedly planning to carry out sabotage attacks for Moscow in Germany. The prosecutors allege that they had already scouted out railroad tracks, military training areas and defense infrastructure for this purpose.

The Munich-based newspaper “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported this week that in 2023 alone, more than 400 drone flights over or near restricted German military areas were reported.

The Defense Department, meanwhile, expects to get new counter-drone technology soon, with Thomas Hitschler, the agency’s parliamentary state secretary, writing to lawmakers earlier this summer that new system would be delivered to the Bundeswehr, Germany’s armed forces, by the end of the year.

He clarified that defending against drones in and above military installations is the Bundeswehr’s job, while state police officials are responsible for doing so outside of bases.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a significant uptick in investment in the German military. Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared a “watershed moment” in the war, and his administration shored up defense budgets and started to address longstanding deficits in the country’s armed forces.

Concerns surrounding possible Russian acts of sabotage have spread throughout Western Europe. Earlier this year, a critical communications cable was cut in a “deliberate act,” as Norwegian authorities called it, at an air base in the Nordic country. Cables were also cut for Norway’s hydrophone system, which Oslo uses to surveil movements in the North Sea.

Other, as of yet unsolved cases of apparent sabotage, such as cases of apparent arson in countries like Poland, the U.K. and the Baltic States, suggest that a foreign actor with a gripe against the West may be stepping up its unconventional warfare activities.

The German domestic secret service has issued repeated public warnings of hybrid warfare, including recently in July: “The cases observed across Europe since 2023 and increased evidence of possible activities in Germany are currently leading to an adjusted assessment,” warned the so-called Office for the Protection of the Constitution. “There is an increased risk of sabotage activities or corresponding preparatory acts in Germany.”

The intelligence agency said in its most recent annual report that “hybrid threats such as cyberattacks and espionage, particularly by the Russian regime,” were at the center of its attention.

Noah Robertson in Washington contributed to this report.

The Belgium division of the underwater drone producer Exail Robotics announced this week that it was awarded a $67 million contract by NSPA for the procurement of an undisclosed number of its K-Ster C expendable mine disposal vehicles and K-Ster CT training vehicles.

The primary user countries of the systems will be the Netherlands and Belgium, where the K-Ster units will also be assembled, according to a company press release.

Exail established a production line in Oostende, Belgium, in 2022, where it has been manufacturing different drones for both navies already as part of a modernization program to upgrade their respective mine countermeasure capabilities.

The K-Ster C is a lightweight vehicle equipped with a guidance system that allows precise targeting and a potent shaped charge capable of effectively destroying all types of mines, per company information. The other variant acquired by NSPA is dedicated for training and is thus fitted with an inert warhead.

The drone can be operated from a command-and-control unit based outside of the minefield, either from land or on a ship, and can also be automatically deployed from an unmanned surface vessel.

In the last year, NATO has turned its attention to testing a variety of unmanned underwater technologies, including underwater drones outfitted with 5G communications capabilities, in different exercises to better connect surface and undersea assets.

As part of the Baltic exercise Baltops 2024, which took place in June, U.S. and NATO forces conducted joint mine hunting and mine detonation operations in the Baltic Sea, culminating in an mine countermeasures combat rehearsal drill at the end.

The exercise combined over 20 surface ships, 20 unmanned systems consisting of unmanned surface and underwater vessels, as well as two MH-60S Seahawk helicopters.