Military UAS, counter-drone, industry and contracts, commercial operations, and the rules of the sky — reported straight, with sources.
Bloomberg reports the Army will buy at least $400M of AeroVironment's Locust counter-drone lasers — the Pentagon's first production contract for a directed-energy system beyond the prototype phase — sending AVAV up ~8-9% and turning the E-HEL program of record from negotiation into recurring revenue.
Read the story →In a Boeing/Northrop Grumman demo, a P-8A Poseidon crew tasked an MQ-4C Triton via machine-readable UCI messages — the drone planned its own transit, worked its sensors, processed data with AI and reported back over satellite relay, no ground control station required.
A Jane's special report details how ammunition makers like Fiocchi are engineering tungsten-shot and fuzed 12-gauge cartridges as a last-ditch, close-range defense against FPV kamikaze drones that give soldiers as little as one second to react.
A new Janes special report details how ammunition makers are fielding tungsten-shot 12-gauge rounds and other counter-UAV cartridges as militaries scramble to give infantry a fighting chance against kamikaze FPV drones.
Janes reports China's PLA Ground Force has operationalized the CASC-built KVD002 unmanned combat aircraft, with state media footage showing 13 airframes and a live-fire strike on a naval target.
Ukrainian manufacturer F-Drones delivered the first 2,000 F10 FPV strike quadcopters to US forces on July 31, becoming the first Ukrainian drone cleared for export to the US under the Pentagon's $1 billion Drone Dominance Program.
Russia's overnight July 28-29 raid mixed jet-powered Shaheds with warhead-free Parodiya decoys to saturate Ukrainian radar and drain interceptor drones, even as defenders still downed 81% of the 80-UAV package.
The Marine Corps has awarded Epirus roughly $11 million for HAVOC, an autonomy-enabled evolution of the ExDECS high-power microwave prototype — a sled-mounted swarm-killer built to fight alongside MADIS, with the company already able to build about one system per week.
DHS split a five-year, up to $1.5 billion department-wide counter-UAS contract into two tracks, naming Anduril, BAE Systems, CACI, Leidos and eight other firms as awardees after fielding more than 100 competing proposals.
Facing $35K-$50K enemy drones downed by $1-4M interceptors, the Army is fielding a new automated fire-control system called Gunslinger and soliciting a sub-$150K missile that must fit existing Coyote launchers.
The Army's DEVCOM C5ISR Center ran its first 'Warden' assessment at Fort A.P. Hill, pitting 17 vendors' lasers, jammers and interceptor drones against 12+ UAS types including swarms.
Washington's 10th Civil Support Team has completed training on a mobile Anduril counter-UAS rig that fuses camera, RF and AI sensors — and it's headed for Super Bowl and FIFA World Cup security duty.
CENTCOM says it struck dozens of IRGC targets — including drone and missile factories — in a two-hour "heavy wave" on July 29-30, retaliation for an Iranian ballistic-missile attack that was fully intercepted the night before.
The Army wants a Coyote Launcher-compatible interceptor that can kill Group 2/3 drones at 16+ km for under $150,000 a round, with industry responses due August 20.
JIATF-401's vetted C-UAS Marketplace, built by startup Kaizen under a $15M contract, has processed $21M in purchases and added the UK and Romania as allied buyers while linking to the Foreign Military Sales Fast Lane.
Nineteen finalists are trucking 120 attack drones apiece to Fort Carson this August, the live-fire elimination round of a $1.1B Pentagon program racing toward a 200,000-drone fleet by 2027.
The Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital signed a conditional loan of up to $820 million with Performance Drone Works on July 31, 2026, to mass-produce propulsion, power/control, and vision-system components for Group 1/2 drones industry-wide.
SEC filings show Israeli drone-robotics firm XTEND and Nasdaq-listed JFB Construction advancing toward a $1.5B all-stock reverse merger that would list XTEND AI Robotics as XTND, as XTEND also closes its Atlas acquisition and lands a spot in a $1B Pentagon drone program.
At Farnborough 2026, Ukraine's state defense industry unveiled a Liutyi variant carrying four wing-mounted missiles, each with a roughly 20 kg warhead — reframing a drone known for one-way refinery strikes as a reusable, multi-shot standoff weapon with a decoy mode.
James City County, Virginia launched the state's first real-world AED-delivery drone pilot on August 1, 2026, with test flights showing a 2:30 drone delivery time versus an 8:06 average fire department response.
DoorDash has secured FAA Part 135 air carrier certification for its in-house robotics unit, clearing the way for DoorDash Air to begin first-party drone deliveries this fall alongside its existing Wing and Flytrex partnerships.
Amazon's new Baton Rouge drone-delivery service has logged a storm-drain near-miss and a burst syrup jar even as the company asks the FAA to scale the route to 1,000 flights a day.
Archer unveiled Halo, an autonomous hybrid-electric cargo VTOL sharing its airframe and powertrain with Anduril's Thunder attack tiltrotor — but with no published payload or range figures, its credibility rests on Anduril's half-billion in FY2026 contracts, not Archer's $2M federal record.
Powerus is pushing 100-1,000 lb US-built spray drones into agriculture through Kaizen Aerospace and a $60M New Zealand distribution deal — in the same week the FAA disclosed it is running operational validations on noncompliant Part 137 exemption holders and closing petitions that ignore its Requests for Information.
ZenaTech closed its 25th acquisition since January 2025, buying Alberta-based Velocity Geomatics to push its Drone-as-a-Service model into environmental and regulatory compliance flying for the oil-and-gas sector.
DJI is rallying its US customer base against FCC proposal DA 26-758, which would bar importing and marketing already-authorized drones in seven "military-grade" categories — from thermal imagers to docking stations — ahead of a September 2 comment deadline.
The FAA's 30-day comment period on Wing Aviation's Draft Environmental Assessment for expanded Atlanta-metro drone delivery closed August 1, 2026, moving the company a step closer to scaling beyond its six-store Walmart-anchored footprint.
The FCC added Chinese-made humanoid and quadruped robots to its national-security Covered List on July 28, using the same authorization-blocking mechanism it built for foreign drones — a signal for where UAS rules go next.
A DroneLife survey of FAA, EASA, UK CAA, CASA, MLIT and ICAO rules on operator fatigue lands the same week as an ICAO counter-UAS push and a Commercial UAV Expo keynote comparing FAA-EASA BVLOS approaches.
The FCC quietly removed the 2026 sunset date on Conditional Approval exemptions from its Covered List, turning what was billed as a temporary bridge for foreign-made drones into an open-ended compliance regime.
The FCC has granted Conditional Approvals to two more foreign-produced drones — Exedy Globalparts' Ayre CX and Parallel Flight Technologies' Firefly — letting them sidestep the Covered List ban if they follow onshoring plans and keep passing government vetting.
A thrust-vectoring nozzle that last flew on an F-16 testbed in the 1990s has been refurbished, mated to GE's F110-GE-129E and lit off at Peebles, Ohio — the hardware Shield AI's tail-sitting X-BAT fighter needs to hover on engine thrust, with prototype flight tests slated for later in 2026.
Roughly 115 teams converge on the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force this week to chase DARPA's $6.5 million prize for a sub-55-pound VTOL aircraft that can lift a 110-pound payload — as one finalist, Jetoptera, walks away over new safety rules.
More than 120 teams descended on Wright-Patterson AFB this week to chase $6.5 million in DARPA prize money for a sub-55-pound drone that can haul four times its own weight.
Seasats says its 12-foot Lightfish USV tracked a Chinese Type 052D destroyer to within a few hundred meters off Luzon on June 15, a Reuters-verified encounter that puts cheap autonomous sea drones on a collision course with contested Indo-Pacific waters.
The Office of Naval Research's new 2026 S&T Strategy, 'FEED at Speed,' leans on AI to compress research timelines and targets the technology-transition 'Valley of Death' — with unmanned systems like the MDUSV Seahawk held up as the model capability.
At the U.S. Navy's Lanternfish 2026 exercise, Ultra Maritime's Sea Spear sonar fed Anduril's Seabed Sentry and Lattice software to detect, track and classify enemy UUVs and alert operators with no human in the sensing loop.
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