News, deep dives, and analysis — every US Air Force story, newest first.
A STRATCOM official calls Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb 'utterly eye-opening' as the command running America's nuclear triad studies counter-drone defense.
The Navy and Defense Innovation Unit are investing $50 million in Shield AI's X-BAT, a tail-landing fighter drone that has never flown. The Air Force is deliberately sitting this one out, and the hard part is the landing.
Red Cat's entire $2.49 million Air Force Black Widow order is built and waiting, Divisional CEO Mitch McDonald told DroneXL, as the Army assesses the company's new Palantir-equipped AiN payload on its own factory floor.
Red Cat's Teal Drones won a $2.49 million Air Force order to evaluate Black Widow as a potential successor to the Security Forces' current Teal 2 fleet.
Berlin Air Show this week, each chasing the same prize: the contract to fly as Germany's robotic wingman by 2029.
Airbus just turned its A400M transport into something much more dangerous. On April 18, 2026, the company confirmed a new mothership variant that can launch up to 12 cruise missiles or around 50 drones straight out of the cargo ramp, as reported by Interesting Engineering. The payload stays internal, so the aircraft keeps its range…
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…
A Tokyo defense startup just put a $450 fixed-wing drone on the Japanese market, and the airframe is made of wood. JISDA, short for Japan Integrated Security Design Agency, announced the ACM-01 Shiraha on April 14 in Tokyo. It’s a 6.2-foot wingspan trainer built to be flown hard, crashed, and replaced without anyone wincing at…
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