Military drone news from UASFeed — UAS programs, battlefield lessons from Ukraine and beyond, loitering munitions, and how uncrewed systems are changing combat.
The Australian Army says its drone fleet is "in the low thousands" across about 20 small types, and it does not keep an exact count by design. A DJI ban in place since about 2023 is pushing it toward Australian-built quadcopters.
Read the story →France and Madagascar have signed a drone and training agreement that is to put roughly 100 UAVs in Malagasy military hands by the end of 2026. The first aircraft, which appears to be a hybrid VTOL fixed-wing design, is aimed at illegal vessels off the island's southern coast.
The Army's UAS program office asked approved DoW Drone OTA Consortium members for off-the-shelf brigade drone whitepapers on Oct. 5 and gave them until 23:59 Central on Oct. 7, the shortest response window of the consortium's three Army calls so far.
During Merz's Oct. 4 Kyiv visit, Berlin committed to fund tens of thousands of Ukrainian-built Quantum Systems/WIY interceptors aimed at jet-powered Shaheds, which Zelensky says now arrive by the hundreds each week while Ukraine's best interceptor stops up to 30%.
Germany's army will form its first drone regiment in 2027. It will start with 300 to 350 soldiers and grow to as many as 600 under the 10th Panzer Division. The same year, the US Army took the drone mission away from a paratrooper battalion of roughly that size.
An AFRL lab at Eglin spent four days checking Anduril's Barracuda-M cruise missiles against 14 domains of the Air Force's open weapon architecture and found them compliant. It is a test of whether "modular" can be proven by someone other than the vendor.
A JASDF RQ-4B Block 30i Global Hawk crashed into the Sea of Japan on September 15, 2026, instantly shrinking Japan's three-aircraft high-altitude surveillance fleet to two.
The Navy has moved its Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel program from testing to production, giving HII, Saronic and Galliano Marine 10 vessels each at about $40M apiece, roughly $1.2B in total.
Hegseth announced AUTOWARCOM, a four-star combatant command with service-like authorities for drones, AI and autonomy, targeted for Oct. 1, 2027, but Congress must act and the memo leaves structure and leadership open.
Phase 3 of the Drone Dominance Program offers $450M for about 60,000 one-way attack drones, with new price points and a 400-drone production order as the price of entry to Gauntlet III. The listed prices cover at most $300M of the total.
Bahrain is the first country publicly tied to CENTCOM's Task Force Falcon Strike, the multinational one-way attack drone force announced in August, after a Sept. 23-24 military committee meeting in Manama.
Britain bought over 10,000 drones in a year under Project Rapstone, but most exist to teach soldiers manual, GPS-free flight rather than to fight — a deliberate hedge against hardware Ukraine has shown can go obsolete in weeks.
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