Shaheds, Lancets, fiber-optic FPVs and the counter-drone scramble — Russia’s drone war, tracked.
We have been tracking the evolution of Russia’s Shahed drones since at least the invasion of Ukraine, and the latest development is the most significant tactical shift yet. Just five weeks after they strapped an R-60 air-to-air missile to a Shahed, they’ve done it again, this time with a MANPADS. This isn’t experimentation anymore. This…
Ukraine did not defeat Russia’s Black Sea fleet with destroyers or submarines, it did it with remote controls, fiber optics, and engineers who learned faster than their enemy expected. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Ukraine effectively lost its navy, and when the full scale invasion began in 2022, the imbalance at sea looked permanent.…
The two officials who built the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit and helped create the Blue UAS framework are warning that a drone attack on US soil is coming in 2026. Their analysis exposes a fundamental tension in American drone policy: the same security-first approach that justified expensive domestic alternatives may have slowed the mass production…
I’ve been tracking Ukraine’s transformation from drone importer to NATO’s leading drone warfare teacher for months. This week brought a development that captures how far the tables have turned: Ukrainian officials traveled to Portugal to evaluate autonomous systems from a company that openly credits Ukraine’s battlefield success for its existence. The irony writes itself. But…
Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) just announced what may be the most significant drone warfare milestone since the war began: the first-ever underwater drone attack on a submarine. We’ve been tracking Ukraine’s naval drone evolution for three years, from civilian DJI quadcopters to AI-enabled surface vessels. Now they’ve gone subsurface, and Russia’s “safe haven” at Novorossiysk…
We’ve been covering Europe’s drone crisis for months, from military reconnaissance drones shutting down Munich Airport to the EU’s scramble to build a multi-billion-euro “drone wall.” But while European intelligence agencies stumbled through bureaucratic fog, seven journalism students just delivered the most comprehensive investigation yet into who’s actually behind Germany’s mysterious drone swar
The New York Times Editorial Board just issued one of the most alarming assessments of American military readiness in recent memory, and drones are at the center of it. In a sweeping editorial series titled “Overmatched,” the newspaper warns that cheap, autonomous drone swarms are reshaping warfare faster than the Pentagon can adapt, and that…
General Carsten Breuer, the Bundeswehr’s Inspector General, said recent evaluations of the HX2 system from Helsing and the Virtus system from
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