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NATO countries want to give the alliance’s top military commander more freedom to shoot down drones by the time leaders meet in Ankara next month, after nine months of incursions that have caused damage and injuries while rattling politics across the Eastern Flank. Two NATO diplomats and one alliance official described the proposal to Politico,…
Operation Epic Fury has cost the US Air Force 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones since late February. At roughly $30 million per airframe, the losses add up to around $720 million in hardware alone, as National Interest reports. Iranian surface-to-air missiles are doing most of the shooting, and the clusters of lost drones map almost perfectly…
Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division launched a Textron Systems Aerosonde unmanned aircraft system during a Joint Readiness Training Center rotation at Fort Polk, Louisiana on April 9, 2026, as DVIDS reported. The deployment puts one of the Army’s leading tactical drone candidates into a realistic combat training environment alongside the service’s most storied light…
Northwestern State University’s ARGO Lab just ran its first drone training program for soldiers at Fort Polk, Louisiana. The two-day course took troops from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division through the fundamentals of UAS operations, flight planning, sensor work, and field maintenance, as reported by National Today. What the Training Covered JD…
The U.S. Army is finally moving past two decades of failed grenade launcher programs, and this time it’s baking counter-drone capability directly into the weapon from the start. A new solicitation published April 6, 2026, asks defense contractors to submit prototypes for the Precision Grenadier System (PGS), a man-portable weapon that will replace the aging…
Former USAF pilot Nolan Peterson warns that Iran’s drone campaign has permanently eliminated "safe zones" for military personnel. Explore the tactical and psychological shifts in warfare as Shahed drones target RAF Akrotiri and Baghdad.
The Army just held its first drone warfighter competition. The best pilots grew up with a controller. But one veteran wants you to know what happens after the goggles come off. The Competition Nobody Expected to Look Like This Gray skies over Huntsville, Alabama. Soldiers huddled under trees holding controllers that looked exactly like Nintendo…
The U.S. Army has quietly opened a new front in its modernization push, not on a distant battlefield, but inside a classroom at Fort Benning, Georgia. This week marked the debut of the Robotic Autonomous Systems Leader Tactics course, known as RASLT. The goal is simple but ambitious: teach combat leaders how to actually use…
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