On March 15, the US Navy launched a torpedo-shaped robot into the Persian Gulf from the back of a helicopter. The robot was a Slocum glider, an uncrewed sensing tool that can collect data on ocean conditions below the surface. Dropping it from a helicopter was a proof of concept, a test towards expanding the array of vehicles that can put the robots into the water. As the US Navy seeks to know more about the waterways it patrols, distributing data collection tools can provide a more complete image of the ocean without straining the existing pool of sailors.

The US Navy helicopter, part of Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron (HM) 15, delivered the glider by flying low and slow over the sea surface. The glider, held between railings facing seaward, slid forward, diving but not tumbling into the water. The setup enabled smooth entry into the water, keeping the robot from falling aft over teakettle.

“We are excited to be a part of another series of firsts! In this instance, the first launch from a helicopter and the first-ever successful glider deployment from an aircraft,” Thomas Altshuler, a senior VP at Teledyne, said in a release. While the test took place in March, it was only recently announced by both the Navy and Teledyne, makers of the Slocum glider. “Teledyne Marine​ takes pride in our continued innovation and support of the U.S. Navy as it expands the operational envelope of underwater gliders.”

This is what that entry looked like:

A second video, which appears to be recorded by the phone camera of one of the sailors standing next to the rail, offers a different angle on the descent. The mechanics of the rail mount are clearer, from the horseshoe-shaped brace holding the glider in place, to the mechanism of release. When the glider hits water, it makes a splash, big at the moment then imperceptible in the wake of the rotor wash on the ocean surface.

For this operation, Teledyne says the glider was outfitted with “Littoral Battlespace Sensing – Glider (LBS-G) mine countermeasures (MCM) sensors.” In plain language, that means sensors designed to work near the shore, and to collect information about the conditions of the sea where the Navy is operating. This data is used by both the Navy for informing day-to-day operation and by the Naval Oceanographic Office, for understanding ocean conditions and informing both present and future operations.

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

In addition to HM 15, the test was coordinated with the aforementioned Naval Oceanographic Office, which regularly uses glider robots to collect and share oceanographic data. The Slocum glider is electrically powered, with range and endurance dependent upon battery type. At a minimum, that means the glider can travel 217 miles over 15 days, powerlessly gliding at an average speed of a little over 1 mph. (Optional thruster power doubles the speed to 2 mph.) With the most extensive power, Teledyne boasts that the gliders can range over 8,000 miles under water, stay in operation for 18 months, and work from shallows of 13 feet to depths of 3,280 feet.

“Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command directs and oversees more than 2,500 globally-distributed military and civilian personnel who collect, process, and exploit environmental information to assist Fleet and Joint Commanders in all warfare areas to make better decisions faster than the adversary,” notes the Navy description of the test.

Communicating that data from an underwater robot to the rest of the Navy is done through radio signals, satellite uplink, and acoustic communication, among other methods. These methods allow the glider to transmit data and receive commands from remote human operators. 

“The invention of gliders addressed a long-standing problem in physical oceanography: how do you measure changes in the ocean over long periods of time?” reads an Office of Navy Research history of the program. The Slocum gliders themselves date back to a concept floated in 1989, where speculative fiction imagined hundreds of autonomous floats surveying the ocean by 2021. The prototype glider was first developed in 1991, had sea trials in 1998, and today according to that report,the Naval Oceanographic Office alone operates more than 150 gliders.

This information is useful generally, as it builds a comprehensive picture of the vast seas on which fleets operate. It is also specifically useful, as listening for acoustics underwater can help detect other ships and submarines. Undersea mines, hidden from the surface, can be found through sensing the sea, and revealing their location protects Navy ships, sailors, and commercial ocean traffic, too.

Releasing the gliders from helicopters expands how and where these exploratory machines can start operations, hastening deployment for the undersea watchers. When oceans are battlefields, knowing the condition of the waters first can make all the difference.

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In April, the Air Force took its Angry Kitten out for a spin in the skies above Nevada. The feline-monikered system is a tool of electronic warfare, developed originally to simulate enemy systems in testing and training. Now, the Air Force is exploring using the system as an offensive tool, and as a weapon it can bring to future fights. This testing included putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone.

Electronic warfare is an increasingly important part of how modern militaries fight. The systems generally operate on the electromagnetic spectrum outside the range of visible light, making their actions perceived primarily by their resulting negative effects on an adversary, like lost signals or incorrect sensor information. What makes Angry Kitten especially valuable as a training tool, and as a future weapon, is that it uses a software-defined radio to adjust frequencies, perceiving and then mimicking other aircraft, and overall making a fussy mess of their signals.

“Electronic Attack on the MQ-9 is a compelling capability,” said Michael Chmielewski, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron commander, in a release. “15 hours of persistent noise integrated with a large force package will affect an adversary, require them to take some form of scalable action to honor it, and gets at the heart of strategic deterrence.”

In other words, putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone means that the jamming system can be airborne for a long time, as Reapers are long-endurance drones. Any hostile air force looking to get around the jamming will need to attack the Reaper, which as an uncrewed plane is more expendable than a crewed fighter. Or, it means they will need to route around the jammed area, letting the Air Force dictate the terms of where and how a fight takes place.

Reapers were developed for and widely used during the long counter-insurgency wars waged by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars saw the drones’ long endurance, slow speed, and ability to loiter over an area as valuable assets, especially since the drones rarely had to contend with any anti-air missiles. They were operating in, to use Pentagon parlance, “uncontested” skies. As the Pentagon looks to the future, one in which it may be called upon to use existing equipment in a war against nations with fighter jets and sophisticated anti-air systems, it’d be easy to see Reapers sidelined as too slow, vulnerable, or irrelevant for the task.

Putting an Angry Kitten on a Reaper is a way to make the drone relevant again for other kinds of war.

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

“The goal is to expand the mission sets the MQ-9 can accomplish,” said Aaron Aguilar, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron assistant director of operations, in the same release. “The proliferation and persistence of MQ-9s in theater allows us to fill traditional platform capability gaps that may be present. Our goal is to augment assets that already fill this role so they can focus and prioritize efforts in areas they are best suited for.”

Putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper turns a counter-insurgency hunter-killer into a conventional-war surveillance platform and jammer. It emphasizes what the tool on hand can already do well, while giving it a different set of ways to interact with a different expected array of foes. 

An earlier exercise this spring saw the Air National Guard test landing and launching a Reaper from a highway in Wyoming, expanding how and where it can operate. The ability to quickly deploy, refuel, rearm, and relaunch Reapers, from found runways as well as established bases, can expand how the drones are used.

In addition to testing the Angry Kitten with Reapers, the Air Force tested the Angry Kitten in Alaska on F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolts, both older planes originally designed for warfare against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In the decades since, Fighting Falcons—known more colloquially as vipers—have expanded to become a widely used versatile fighter in the arsenal of the US and a range of nations. Meanwhile, the Air Force has long worked to retire the A-10s, arguing that they lack protection against modern weapons. That process began in earnest this spring, with the oldest models selected for the boneyard.

In the meantime, putting the Angry Kitten on drones and planes still in service means expanding not just what those planes can do, but potentially how effective they can be against sophisticated weapons. Targeting systems, from those used by planes to find targets to those used by missiles to track them, can be disrupted or fooled by malicious signals. An old plane may not be able to survive a hit from a modern missile, but jamming a missile so that misses its mark is better protection than any armor.

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In the desert plain south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and just north of the Isleta Pueblo reservation, the Air Force defeated a swarm of drones with THOR, a powerful microwave weapon. THOR, or the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, is designed to defend against drone swarms, frying electronics at scale in a way that could protect against many flying robots at once.

THOR has been in the works for years, with a successful demonstration in February 2021 at Kirtland Air Force Base, south of Albuquerque. From 2021 to 2022, THOR was also tested overseas. 

This latest demonstration, which took place on April 5, saw the microwave face off against a swarm of multiple flying uncrewed aerial vehicles. The event took place at the Chestnut Range, short for “Conventional High Explosives & Simulation Test,” which has long been used by the Air Force Research Lab for testing.

“The THOR team flew numerous drones at the THOR system to simulate a real-world swarm attack,” said Adrian Lucero, THOR program manager at AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate, in a release earlier this month. “THOR has never been tested against these types of drones before, but this did not stop the system from dropping the targets out of the sky with its non-kinetic, speed-of-light High-Power Microwave, or HPM pulses,” he said.

Crucial to THOR’s concept and operation is that the weapon disables and defeats drones without employing explosive or concussive power, the kind derived from rockets, missiles, bombs, and bullets. The military lumps these technologies together as “kinetics,” and they make up the bread and butter of how the military uses force. Against drones, which can cost mere hundreds or even thousands of dollars per vehicle, missiles represent an expensive form of ammunition. While the bullets used in existing counter-rocket weapons are much cheaper than missiles, they still create the problem of dangerous debris everywhere they don’t hit. Using microwaves means that only the damaged drone itself becomes a falling danger, without an added risk from the tools used to shoot it down.

“THOR was extremely efficient with a near continuous firing of the system during the swarm engagement,” Capt. Tylar Hanson, THOR deputy program manager, said in a release. “It is an early demonstrator, and we are confident we can take this same technology and make it more effective to protect our personnel around the world.”

The THOR system fits into a broader package of directed energy countermeasures being used to take on small, cheap, and effective drones. Another directed energy weapon explored for this purpose is lasers, which can burn through a drone’s hull and circuitry, but that approach takes time to hold focus on and melt a target.

“The system uses high power microwaves to cause a counter electronic effect. A target is identified, the silent weapon discharges in a nanosecond and the impact is instantaneous,” reads an Air Force fact sheet about the weapon. In a video from AFRL, THOR is described as a “low cost per shot, speed of light solution,” which uses “a focused beam of energy to defeat drones at a large target area.”

An April 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office is much more straightforward: A High Power Microwave uses “energy to affect electronics by overwhelming critical components intended to carry electrical currents such as circuit boards, power systems, or sensors. HPM systems engage targets over an area within its wider beam and can penetrate solid objects.”

Against commercial or cheaply produced drones, the kind most likely to see use on the battlefield in great numbers today, microwaves may prove to be especially effective. While THOR is still a ways from development into a fieldable weapon, the use of low-cost drones on the battlefield has expanded tremendously since the system started development. A report from RUSI, a British think tank, found that in its fight against Russia’s invasion, “Ukrainian UAV losses remain at approximately 10,000 per month.”

While that illustrates the limits of existing drone models, it also highlights the scale of drones seeing use in regular warfare. As drone technology improves, and militaries move from adapting commercial drones to dedicated military models made close to commercial cost and scale, countering those drones en masse will likely be a greater priority for militaries. In that, weapons like THOR offer an alternative to existing countermeasures, one that promises greater effects at scale.

Watch a video about THOR, which also garnered a Best of What’s New award from PopSci in 2021, from the Air Force Research Laboratory, below:

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On May 18, the United States Department of the Air Force announced that it is looking to award a contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance Platform in 2024. The name, shortened to NGAD, is a jumble of Pentagon concepts, obscuring what is actually sought: a novel fighter jet representing the newest era of military aircraft—a sixth-generation fighter. 

“The NGAD Platform is a vital element of the Air Dominance family of systems which represents a generational leap in technology over the F-22, which it will replace,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in a release. “NGAD will include attributes such as enhanced lethality and the ability to survive, persist, interoperate, and adapt in the air domain, all within highly contested operational environments. No one does this better than the U.S. Air Force, but we will lose that edge if we don’t move forward now.”

The solicitation to industry for the NGAD is classified, making the details of what, exactly, the Air Force wants hard to know at this time. But jet fighters have, for decades, been classified into generations. So what makes a fighter generation, and what makes a sixth-generation fighter?

“In calling NGAD a sixth-generation fighter, that’s an important signal that it’s moving into a new level of capability, and it has to, because the threats are really evolving,” says Caitlin Lee, senior fellow at Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Aircraft generations, explained

Fighter planes date to the first World War as a distinct concept, and ever since that time observers have grouped fighters into generations, or models built at similar times around similar technologies. Fighter evolution in war happened rapidly, as the first exchanges of pistol-fire between the pilots of scout planes gave way to aircraft built for combat, with dedicated machine guns firing first around and then even through propellers. As hostile planes got better, new aircraft were built to let pilots win fights. Once enough of these changes were accumulated in new models of planes, those aircraft could be grouped by sets of features into different generations.

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

This is true for the earliest fixed-wing and biplane fighters, up through the piston-powered patrollers of World War II and into the jet era. In October 1954, Popular Science showed off four fighter generations flying in formation for ceremonies at an Air Force gunnery competition. This snapshot of generations captured two propeller-driven planes: the SPAD biplane from World War I and the F-51 fighter from World War II. They are joined by two distinct jet fighters: the F-86 Sabre, a type which saw action in the Korean War, and F-100 Super Sabre, a model that would go on to see action in the Vietnam War.

The attributes that go into an aircraft generation

What separates fighter generations, broadly, is their speed, weapons, sensors, and other new features as they become part of the overall composition of a plane. Sticking to jets, fighters with that method of propulsion have gone from straight-wing planes flying at top speeds below the sound barrier, with guns, unguided rockets, and bombs, all the way to sensor-rich stealth jets capable of carrying a range of anti-air and anti-ground missiles.

There is no one agreed-to definition of exactly what fighter generations are, though jet fighters are generally grouped separately from propeller predecessors. Historian Richard Hallion expressed a version, published in the Airpower Journal’s Winter 1990 issue, that outlines six generations as defined primarily by speed and maneuverability. Hallion’s definitions precede not just the Next Generation Air Dominance plane, but also the F-35 and F-22, which have become widely accepted as definitive fifth-generation fighters.

First generation

• Feature: The propulsion comes from jet engines. Weapons, wing shapes, and sensors are similar to preceding and contemporary propeller-driven plane designs.
• Models: Germany’s Me 262, which saw action in World War II. The P-80 Shooting Star, flown by the United States from 1945 to 1959.

Second generation

• Features: The wings are swept backwards, planes are now equipped with onboard radar, and they are armed with missiles.
• Models: The F-86 Sabre, flown by the US in Korea, and the MiG-15, flown by China and North Korea in the Korean War.

Third generation

• Features: The jets can now achieve supersonic speed for short bursts and are equipped with missiles that could hit targets beyond line of sight.
• Models: The MiG-21, designed by the USSR and still in service today, and the F-4 Phantom, developed for the US Navy and still in service with a few countries today.

Fourth generation

• Features: These jets have reduced radar signatures, better radars, and even more advanced missiles.
• Models: France’s Mirage 2000, a delta-wing fighter still in service today, and the F/A-18, used by the US Navy and Marine Corps. Plus, the US Air Force’s F-15 and F-16.

Fifth generation

• Features: Jets are built for stealth, use internal weapons bays, fly with high maneuverability, have better sensors, and have the ability to sustain cruise at supersonic speeds.
• Models: The F-22 and F-35 family developed by the US, and the J-20 made by China and the Su-57 developed by Russia.

Tirpak defined a fifth-generation fighter as having “All-aspect stealth with internal weapons, extreme agility, full-sensor fusion, integrated avionics, some or full supercruise,” and pointed to the F-22 and F-35 as examples. 

To unpack the jargon above, “stealth” is a set of technologies, from the coating of the plane to the shape it takes, that make it hard to detect, especially with radar. Sensor fusion combines information from a plane’s sensors, like targeting cameras and radar, as well as other avionics, to create a fuller picture of the environment around the aircraft. “Supercruise” is flight at above supersonic speed, for sustained time, without having to dump extra fuel into the engines, a previous way of achieving supersonic bursts.

[Related: How fast is supersonic flight? Fast enough to bring the booms.]

All of these changes are responses to the new threat environment encountered by previous fighters. Stealth is one way for plane design to mitigate the risk from advanced anti-air missiles. Enhanced sensors are a way to allow fighters to see further and better than rival aircraft, and rival air-defense radars. Fighter design is about both building with the threats of the day, while anticipating the threats of the future, and ensuring the plane is still capable of surviving them.

One way to think of this is that the NGAD will be one among several kinds of aircraft the Air Force intends to use in the future, the way it might use wings of fighters today. This could include fighting alongside the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a combat drone the Air Force plans as part of its Next Generation operations model.

“What’s next-generation about CCA is that they will have more autonomy than the current UAVs in the Air Force inventory like Reaper. And the question is how much more autonomy will they actually have,” says Lee. “And I think what the Air Force is interested in is starting with having that manned fighter aircraft, whether it’s NGAD or something else, be able to provide inputs and certainly oversee the operations of the CCA.”

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Navy SEALs have a well-earned reputation as an amphibious force. The special operations teams, whose acronym derives from “Sea, Air and Land,” are trained to operate from a range of vehicles, departing as needed to carry out missions through water, in the sky, or on the ground. When deploying covertly in the ocean, SEALs have for decades taken the SEAL Delivery Vehicle, a flooded transport in which the crew ride submerged and immersed in ocean water.  Now, Special Operations Command says the new enclosed submarine—in other words, it’s dry inside—should be ready for operation before the end of May.

This new submarine, in contrast to the open-water SEAL Delivery Vehicle, is called the Dry Combat Submersible. It’s been in the works since at least 2016, and was designed as a replacement for a previous enclosed transport submarine, the Advanced SEAL Delivery System. This previous advanced sub, developed in the early 2000s, was canceled after a prototype caught fire in 2008. That, compounded by cost overruns in the program, halted development on the undersea vehicle. It also came at a time when SEALs were operating largely on land and through the air, as part of the increased operational tempo of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

But now, it appears to be full-steam ahead for the Dry Combat Submersible. The news was confirmed at the SOF [Special Operations Forces] Week conference in Tampa, Florida, which ran from May 8 through 11. The convention is a place for Special Operations Forces from across the military to talk shop, meet with vendors selling new and familiar tools, and gather as a chattering class of silent professionals. It is also, like the Army, Navy, and Air Force association conventions, a place for the military to announce news directly relevant to those communities.

“This morning we received an operational test report. So that means the Dry Combat Submersible is going to be operational by Memorial Day, and we’re coming to an end scenario,” John Conway, undersea program manager at SOCOM’s program executive office-maritime, said on May 10, as reported by National Defense Magazine.

The flooded submersible in use today allows four SEALs and two drivers, clad in wetsuits, to travel undetected under the surface of the water several miles. With just the driver and navigator, the craft can traverse 36 nautical miles at 4 knots, a journey taking nine hours. With the four SEALs, the distance is limited, not just by the weight of passengers and their gear, but by the conditions of the submersible itself.

“Because the SEALs are exposed to the environment water temperature can be a more limiting factor than battery capacity,” wrote Christopher J. Kelly, in a 1998 study of the submarine in joint operations.

When Lockheed Martin announced in 2016 that it would be manufacturing Dry Combat Submersibles, it offered no specifics on the vehicle other than that it would weigh more than 30 tons and be capable of launch from surface ships. (The current SEAL Delivery Vehicle is launched from larger submarines.) The Dry Combat Submersible, at announcement, promised “longer endurance and operate at greater depths than swimmer delivery vehicles (SDV) in use,” the ability to travel long distances underwater, and an overall setup that “allows the personnel to get closer to their destination before they enter the water, and be more effective upon arrival.”

Concept art for the vehicle showed a passenger capacity of at least nine, though it would still be a fairly compact ride. The S351 Nemesis, made by MSubs, who has partnered with Lockheed Martin on this project, and is the likely basis for the Dry Combat Submersible. As listed, the Nemesis has a capacity for eight passengers and one pilot. The nemesis can travel as far as 66 nautical miles, and do so at a speed of 5 knots, or make the journey in 13 hours. 

Once in the Navy’s hands, the new submersible will ensure better starts to operations for SEALs, who can arrive at missions having only briefly donned wetsuits, instead of dealing with the fullness of the ocean for hours.

As the Pentagon shifts focus from terrestrial counter-insurgencies to the possibility of major power war, especially in and over the islands of the Pacific, the Dry Combat Submersible will expand how its SEALs can operate. It’s a lot of effort for a relatively small part of the overall military, but the precise application of specialized forces can have an outsized impact on the course of subsequent operations, from harbor clearing to covert action behind fortified lines. 

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Later this year, the Department of Homeland Security hopes to provide a new prototype helmet for firefighters, a piece of gear designed to meet modern challenges in one flexible, composite form. Firefighting is dangerous work, even when it’s narrowly focused on fires, but as first responders firefighters handle a range of crises, including ones where the immediate threat may be more from firearms than flame. To meet that need, the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology directorate is funding a new, all-purpose helmet for firefighters that will include both protection from bullets and fire.

“Firefighters are increasingly called upon to respond to potentially violent situations (PVS), including active shooters, armed crowd and terrorist incidents, hazardous materials mitigation, and disaster response,” reads a Homeland Security scouting report published in July 2019, outlining the needs and limits of existing helmet models. “Currently, firefighters must carry one helmet for fire protection and one helmet for ballistic protection, which creates a logistical burden when firefighters must switch gear on the scene.” 

Relying on two distinct helmets for two distinct kinds of response is not an efficient setup, and it means that if a firefighter is responding to one kind of emergency, like a shooter, but then a fire breaks out, the first helmet offers inadequate protection for the task. While dealing with shooters is and remains the primary responsibility of law enforcement, rescuing people from danger that might include a shooter is in the wheelhouse of firefighters, and so being able to do that safely despite bullets flying would improve their ability to rescue. 

Beyond survivability from both bullets and fires, Homeland Security evaluated helmets for how well they could incorporate self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) gear, fit integrated communications, and be able to either project light or, if lights are not baked into the helmet design, easily mount and use lights. The breathing apparatus required for indoor firefighting must work cleanly with the helmet, as without the outside air circulation like in wildfire fighting, firefighters are tasked to venture into smoke-filled rooms, sometimes containing smoke from hazardous materials. Communications equipment allows firefighters to stay in contact despite the sounds and obstructions of a building on fire, and lighting can cut through the smoke and blaze to help firefighters locate people in need of rescue.

The National Fire Protection Association sets standards for fire gear, and the ballistic standards chosen are from the National Institute of Justice’s Level 111A, which includes handgun bullets up to .44 Magnum but does not cover rifle ammunition. 

[Related: A new kind of Kevlar aims to stop bullets with less material]

In the 2019 evaluation, eight helmets met the standard for fire protection, while only one met the standard for ballistic protection. The fields of fire and ballistics protection have largely been bifurcated in design, which is partly what initiatives like funding through the Science and Technology Directorate are built to solve. In the same 2019 evaluation of existing models, no one existing helmet offered both ballistic protection alongside the other firefighting essentials sought in the program. These designs all ditch the wide brim and long tail traditionally found in firefighting helmets, as the protection offered by the helmet’s distinctive shape can be met through other means.

“The NextGen Firefighter Helmet will be designed with a shell that can absorb energy during impact and rapidly dissipates it without injuring the skull or brain. While the current materials used in both firefighter and military helmets are inadequate for the temperature and ballistic protection being sought, they provide a useful blueprint for future innovation,” said DHS in a release. “For example, Kevlar fiber has a melting point of 1040 °F and has proven highly effective in ballistic helmets and body armor. Similarly, polyester resins used in current firefighter headgear can have glass transition temperatures (the point at which it becomes hard and brittle) as high as 386.6°F. The idea is that thermosetting resins can be reinforced with Kevlar fiber, creating a shell that meets both the thermal and ballistic protection requirements of the NextGen Firefighter Helmet.”

Other important design features will be ensuring that the finished product doesn’t weigh too much or strain the necks of wearers too badly, as protective gear that injures wearers from repeated use is not helpful. That means a large-sized helmet that ideally weighs under 62 ounces, and in a medium size is under 57 oz. The helmet will need to be simple to put on, taking less than a minute from start until its secure in place. 

DHS expects the prototype to be ready by mid-2023, at which point it will conduct an operational field assessment. Firefighters will evaluate the helmet design and features, and see if what was devised in a lab and a workshop can meet their in-field needs. After that, should the prototype prove successful, the process will be finding commercial makers to produce the helmets at scale, creating a new and durable piece of safety gear.

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On April 30, an MQ-9 Reaper drone landed on Highway 287, north of Rawlins, Wyoming. The landing was planned; it was a part of Exercise Agile Chariot, which drew a range of aircraft and saw ground support provided by the Kentucky Air National Guard. While US aircraft have landed on highways before, this was the first time such a landing had been undertaken by a Reaper, and it demonstrates the continued viability of adapting roads into runways as the need arises. 

In a video showing the landing released by the Air Force, the Reaper’s slow approach is visible against the snow-streaked rolling hills and pale-blue sky of Wyoming in spring. The landing zone is inconspicuous, a stretch of highway that could be anywhere, except for the assembled crowds and vehicles marking this particular stretch of road as an impromptu staging ground for air operations. 

“The MQ-9 can now operate around the world via satellite launch and recovery without traditional launch and recovery landing sites and maintenance packages,” said Lt. Col. Brian Flanigan, 2nd Special Operations Squadron director of operations, in a release. “Agile Chariot showed once again the leash is off the MQ-9 as the mission transitions to global strategic competition.”

When Flanigan describes the Reaper as transitioning to “global strategic competition,” that’s alluding to the comparatively narrower role Reapers had over the last 15 years, in which they were a tool used almost exclusively for the counter-insurgency warfare engaged in by the United States over Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as elsewhere, like Somalia and Yemen. Reapers’ advantages shine in counter-insurgency: The drones can fly high over long periods of time, watch in precise detail and detect small movements below, and drone pilots can pick targets as the opportunity arises.

But Reapers have hard limits that make their future uncertain in wars against militaries with substantial anti-air weapons, to say nothing of flying against fighter jets. Reapers are slow, propeller-driven planes, built for endurance not speed, and could be picked out of the sky or, worse, destroyed on a runway by a skilled enemy with dedicated anti-plane weaponry.

In March, a Reaper flying over the Black Sea was sprayed by fuel released from a Russian jet, an incident that led it to crash. While Wyoming’s Highway 287 is dangerous for cars, for planes it has the virtue of being entirely in friendly air space. 

Putting a Reaper into action in a war against a larger military, which in Pentagon terms often means against Russia or China, means finding a way to make the Reaper useful despite those threats. Such a mission would have to take advantage of the Reaper’s long endurance flight time, surveillance tools, and precision strike abilities, without leaving it overly vulnerable to attack. Operating on highways as runways is one way to overcome that limit, letting the drone fly from whenever there is road. 

“An adversary that may be able to deny use of a military base or an airfield, is going to have a nearly impossible time trying to defend every single linear mile of roads. It’s just too much territory for them to cover and that gives us access in places and areas that they can’t possibly defend,” Lt. Col. Dave Meyer, Deputy Mission Commander for Exercise Agile Chariot, said in a release.

Alongside the Reaper, the exercise showcased MC-130Js, A-10 Warthogs, and MH-6M Little Bird helicopters. With soldiers first establishing landing zones along the highway, the exercise then demonstrated landing the C-130 cargo aircraft to use as a refueling and resupply point for the A-10s, which also operated from the highway. Having the ability to not just land on an existing road, but bring more fuel and spare ammunition to launch new missions from the same road, makes it hard for an adversary to permanently ground planes, as resupply is also air-mobile and can use the same improvised runways.

Part of the exercise took place on Highway 789, which forks off 287 between Lander and Riverton, as the setting for trial search and rescue missions. “On the second day of operations, they repeated the procedure of preparing a landing zone for an MC-130. Once the aircraft landed, the team boarded MH-6 Little Birds that had been offloaded from the cargo plane by Soldiers from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The special tactics troops then performed combat search-and-rescue missions to find simulated injured pilots and extract them from the landing zone on Highway 789,” described the Kentucky Air National Guard, in a statement.

With simulated casualties on cleared roads, the Air Force rehearsed for the tragedy of future war. As volunteers outfitted in prosthetic injuries were transported back to the care and safety of landed transports, the highways in Wyoming were home to the full spectrum of simulated war from runways. Watch a video of the landing, below.

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Early in the morning of May 3, local Moscow time, a pair of explosions occurred above the Kremlin. Videos of the incident appeared to show two small drones detonating—ultramodern tech lit up against the venerable citadel. The incident was exclusively the domain of Russian social media for half a day, before Russian President Vladimir Putin declared it a failed assassination attempt.

What actually happened in the night sky above the Russian capital? It is a task being pieced together in public and in secret. Open-source analysts, examining the information available in the public, have constructed a picture of the event and video release, forming a good starting point.

Writing at Radio Liberty, a US-government-funded Russian-language outlet, reporters Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov point out that a video showing smoke above the Kremlin was published around 3:30 am local time on a Moscow Telegram channel. Twelve hours later, Putin released a statement on the attack, and then, write Dobrynin and Krutov, “several other videos of the night attack appeared, according to which Radio Liberty established that two drones actually exploded in the area of ​​​​the dome of the Senate Palace with an interval of about 16 minutes, arriving from opposite directions. The first caused a small fire on the roof of the building, the second exploded in the air.”

That the drones exploded outside a symbolic target, without reaching a practical one, could be by design, or it could owe to the nature of Kremlin air defense, which may have shot the drones down at the last moment before they became more threatening. 

Other investigations into the origin, nature, and means of the drone incident are likely being carried out behind the closed doors and covert channels of intelligence services. Without being privy to those conversations, and aware that information released by governments is only a selective portion of what is collected, it’s possible to instead answer a different set of questions: could drones do this? And why would someone use a drone for an attack like this?

To answer both, it is important to understand gimmick drones.

What’s a gimmick drone?

Drones, especially the models able to carry a small payload and fly long enough to travel a practical distance, can be useful tools for a variety of real functions. Those can include real-estate photography, crop surveying, creating videos, and even carrying small explosives in war. But drones can also carry less-useful payloads, and be used as a way to advertise something other than the drone itself, like coffee delivery, beer vending, or returning shirts from a dry cleaner. For a certain part of the 2010s, attaching a product to a drone video was a good way to get the media to write about it. 

What stands out about gimmick drones is not that they were doing something only a drone could do, but instead that the people behind the stunt were using a drone as a publicity technique for something else. In 2018, a commercial drone was allegedly used in an assassination attempt against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, in which drones flew at Maduro and then exploded in the sky, away from people and without reports of injury. 

As I noted at the time about gimmick drones, “In every case, the drone is the entry point to a sales pitch about something else, a prelude to an ad for sunblock or holiday specials at a casual restaurant. The drone was always part of the theater, a robotic pitchman, an unmanned MC. What mattered was the spectacle, the hook, to get people to listen to whatever was said afterwards.”

Drones are a hard weapon to use for precision assassination. Compared to firearms, poisoning, explosives in cars or buildings, or a host of other attacks, drones represent a clumsy and difficult method. Wind can blow the drones off course, they can be intercepted before they get close, and the flight time of a commercial drone laden with explosives is in minutes, not hours.

What a drone can do, though, is explode in a high-profile manner.

Why fly explosive-laden drones at the  Kremlin?

Without knowing the exact type of drone or the motives of the drone operator (or operators), it is hard to say exactly why one was flown at and blown up above one of Russia’s most iconic edifices of state power. Russia’s government initially blamed Ukraine, before moving on to attribute the attack to the United States. The United States denied involvement in the attack, and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said to take any Russian claims with “a very large shaker of salt.”

Asked about the news, Ukraine’s President Zelensky said the country fights Russia on its own territory, not through direct attacks on Putin or Moscow. The war has seen successful attacks on Putin-aligned figures and war proponents in Russia, as well as the family of Putin allies, though attribution for these attacks remains at least somewhat contested, with the United States attributing at least one of them to Ukrainian efforts.

Some war commentators in the US have floated the possibility that the attack was staged by Russia against Russia, as a way to rally support for the government’s invasion. However, that would demonstrate that Russian air defenses and security services are inept enough to miss two explosive-laden drones flying over the capital and would be an unusual way to argue that the country is powerful and strong. 

Ultimately, the drone attackers may have not conducted this operation to achieve any direct kill or material victory, but as a proof of concept, showing that such attacks are possible. It would also show that claims of inviolability of Russian airspace are, at least for small enough flying machines and covert enough operatives, a myth. 

In that sense, the May 3 drone incident has a lot in common with the May 1987 flight of Mathias Rust, an amateur pilot in Germany who safely flew a private plane into Moscow and landed it in Red Square, right near the Kremlin. Rust’s flight ended without bloodshed or explosions, and took place in a peacetime environment, but it demonstrated the hollowness of the fortress state whose skies he flew through.

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On April 4, Australia’s Department of Defence announced the award of $12.9 million to defense giant QinetiQ for a laser weapon. The move followed years of work and interest by Australia’s government in developing lasers for the battlefields of tomorrow. What is most ambitious about the Australian research into laser weapons is not the modest funding to QinetiQ, but a powerful goal set by the Department of Defence in 2020: Australia wants a laser weapon powerful enough to stop a tank.

Laser weapons, more broadly referred to as directed energy, are a science fiction concept with a profoundly mundane reality. Instead of the flashy beams or targeted phasers of Star Wars or Star Trek, lasers work most similarly to a magnifying lens held to fry a dry leaf, concentrating photons into an invisible beam that destroys with heat and time. Unlike the child’s tool for starting fires, modern directed energy weapons derive their power from electricity, either generated on site or stored in batteries. 

Most of the work of laser weapons, in development and testing, has so far focused on relatively small and fragile targets, like drones, missiles, or mortar rounds. Lasers are energy intensive. When PopSci had a chance to try using a 10-kilowatt laser against commercial drones, it still took seconds to destroy each target, a process aided by all the sensors and accouterments of a targeting pod. Because lasers are concentrated heat energy over time, cameras to track targets, and gimbals to hold and stabilize the beam against the target, all ensure that as much of the beam as possible stays focused. Once part of a drone was burned through, the whole system would crash to the ground, gravity completing the task.

Tanks, by design and definition, are the opposite of lightly armored and fragile flying machines. That makes Australia’s plan to destroy tanks by laser all the more daring.

Tanks for the idea

In the summer of 2020, Australia’s Department of Defence released a strategy called the 2020 Force Structure Plan. This document, like similar versions in other militaries, offers a holistic vision of what kinds of conflicts the country is prepared to fight in the future. Because the strategy is also focused on procurement, it offers useful insight into the weapons and vehicles the military will want to buy to meet those challenges.

The tank-killing laser comes in the section on Land Combat Support. “A future program to develop a directed energy weapon system able to be integrated onto [Australian Defence Forces] protected and armoured vehicles, and capable of defeating armoured vehicles up to and including main battle tanks. The eventual deployment of directed energy weapons may also improve land force resilience by reducing the force’s dependence on ammunition stocks and supply lines,” reads the strategy.

The latter part of the statement is a fairly universal claim across energy weapons development. While laser weapons are power-intensive, they do not need individual missiles, bullets, or shells, the same as what a chemical explosive or kinetic weapon might. Using stored and generated energy, instead of specifically manufactured ammunition pieces, could enable long-term operation on even field-renewable sources, if available. This could also get the shot per weapon use down below the cost of a bullet, though it will take many shots for that to equal the whole cost of developing a laser system.

But getting a laser to punch through the armor of a tank is a distinct and challenging task. A drone susceptible to melting by laser might have a plastic casing a couple millimeters thick. Tank armor, even for older versions of modern tanks, can be at least 600 mm thick steel or composite, and is often thicker. This armor can be enhanced by a range of add-ons, including reactive plating that detonates outward in response to impact by explosive projectiles.

Defeating tank armor with lasers means finding a way to not just hold a beam of light against the tank, but to ensure that the beam is powerful and long-lasting enough to get the job done. 

“One problem faced by laser weapons is the huge amount of power required to destroy useful targets such as missiles. To destroy something of this size requires lasers with hundreds of kilowatts or even megawatts of power. And these devices are only around 20% efficient, so we would require five times as much power to run the device itself,” wrote Sean O’Byrne, an engineering professor at UNSW Canberra and UNSW Sydney, in a piece explaining the promise and peril of anti-tank lasers.

O’Byrne continued: “We are well into megawatt territory here — that’s the kind of power consumed by a small town. For this reason, even portable directed energy devices are very large. (It’s only recently that the US has been able to make a relatively small 50kW laser compact enough to fit on an armoured vehicle, although devices operating at powers up to 300kW have been developed.)”

April’s announcement of a modest sum to develop a domestic laser weapon capability in Australia is a starting point for eventually getting to the scale of lasers powerful enough to melt tanks. Should the feat be accomplished, Australia will find itself with an energy-hunger tool, but one that can defeat hostile armor for as long as it is charged to do so.

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On April 11, the Department of Defense announced that it was allocating just over $8 million for 21 new delivery drones. These flying machines, officially called the TRV-150C Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft Systems, are made by Survice Engineering in partnership with Malloy Aeronautics. 

The TRV-150C is a four-limbed drone that looks like a quadcopter on stilts. Its tall landing legs allow it to take off with a load of up to 150 pounds of cargo slung underneath. The drone’s four limbs each mount two rotors, making the vehicle more of an octocopter than a quadcopter. 

The TRV drone family also represents the successful evolution of a long-running drone development program, one that a decade ago promised hoverbikes for humans and today is instead delivering uncrewed delivery drones.

The contract award is through the Navy and Marine Corps Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems program office, which is focused on ensuring the people doing the actual fighting on the edge of combat or action get the exact robotic assistance they need. For Marines, this idea has been put into practice and not just theorized, with an exercise involving drone resupply taking place at Quantico, Virginia, at the end of March.

The Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft System (TRUAS), as the TRV-150C is referred to in use, “is designed to provide rapid and assured, highly automated aerial distribution to small units operating in contested environments; thereby enabling flexible and rapid emergency resupply, routine distribution, and a constant push and pull of material in order to ensure a constant state of supply availability,” said Master Sergeant Chris Genualdi in a release about the event. Genualdi already works in the field of airborne and air delivery, so the delivery drone became an additional tool to meet familiar problems.

Malloy Aeronautics boasts that the drone has a range of over 43 miles; in the Marines’ summary from Quantico, the drone is given a range of 9 miles for resupply missions. Both numbers can be accurate: Survice gives the unencumbered range of the TRV-150 at 45 miles, while carrying 150 pounds of cargo that range is reduced to 8 miles. 

With a speed of about 67 mph and a flight process that is largely automated, the TRV-150C is a tool that can get meaningful quantities of vital supplies where they are needed, when they are needed. Malloy also boasts that drones in the TRV-150 family have batteries that can be easily swapped, allowing for greater operational tempo as the drones themselves do not have to wait for a recharge before being sent on their next mission.

These delivery drones use “waypoint navigation for mission planning, which uses programmed coordinates to direct the aircraft’s flight pattern,” the Marines said in a release, with Genualdi noting “that the simplicity of operating the TRUAS is such that a Marine with no experience with unmanned aircraft systems can be trained to operate and conduct field level maintenance on it in just five training days.”

Reducing the complexity of the drone to essentially a flying cart that can autonomously deliver gear where needed is huge. The kinds of supplies needed in battle are all straightforward—vital tools like more bullets, more meals, or even more blood and medical equipment—so attempts at life-saving can be made even if it’s unsafe for the soldiers to move towards friendly lines for more elaborate care.

Getting the drone down to just a functional delivery vehicle comes after years of work. In 2014, Malloy debuted a video of a reduced scale hoverbike designed for a human to ride on, using four rotors and a rectangular body. En route to becoming the basis for the delivery drone seen today, the hoverbike was explored by the US Army as a novel way to fly scouts around. This scout ultimately moved to become a resupply tool, which the Army tested in January 2017.

In 2020, the US Navy held a competition for a range of delivery drones at the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona. The entry by Malloy and Survice came in first place, and cemented the TRV series as the drones to watch for battlefield delivery. In 2021, British forces used TRV drones in an exercise, with the drones tasked with delivering blood to the wounded. 

“This award represents a success story in the transition of technology from U.S. research laboratories into the hands of our warfighters,” said Mark Butkiewicz, a vice president at SURVICE Engineering, in a release. “We started with an established and proven product from Malloy Aeronautics and integrated the necessary tech to provide additional tactical functionality for the US warfighter. We then worked with research labs to conduct field experiments with warfighters to refine the use of autonomous unmanned multirotor drones to augment logistical operations at the forward most edge of the battlefield.”

The 21 drones awarded by the initial contract will provide a better start, alongside the drones already used for training, in teaching the Marines how to rely on robots doing resupply missions in combat. Genualdi expects the Marines to create a special specialty to support the use of drones, with commanders dispatching members to learn how to work alongside the drone.

The drones could also see life as exportation and rescue tools, flying through small gaps in trees, buildings, and rubble in order to get people the aid they need. In both peace and wartime uses, the drone’s merit is its ability to get cargo where it is needed without putting additional humans at risk of catching a bullet. 

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On July 12, 2020, the USS Bonhomme Richard caught fire. The vessel is officially described as an “amphibious assault ship,” a name that doesn’t truly capture the Bonhomme Richard’s role as troop and vehicle transport; its flat top also lets it launch helicopters, V-22 tiltrotor aircraft, and special fighter jets. It was a complex, powerful machine—one that would be considered an aircraft carrier in any other nation’s navy—which makes the fact that a single fire was able to do over $3 billion in damage to it so remarkable. 

This month, the Government Accountability Office published a study into fire safety on Navy ships, which reached a clear and blunt conclusion: The US Navy needs to do more to study, track, analyze, and prevent future fires.  

What is particularly jarring about the accident that ultimately led to the decommissioning of the Bonhomme Richard is that it happened in port, in San Diego. The amphibious assault ship was docked so that it could receive about $250 million in upgrades to better let it accommodate F-35B jet fighters. Instead of upgrading the ship to serve for decades into the future, a poorly managed accident and a days-long firefighting response removed what had been a wholly functional ship from operational use.

The July 12, 2020 fire “started in the lower vehicle storage compartment onboard the USS Bonhomme Richard,” the report notes. “The fire burned for several days, spread to 11 of 14 decks, and reached temperatures in excess of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit.”

The Bonhomme Richard fire was initially investigated as an arson, though the primary suspect was acquitted in court. The sailor’s defense made a compelling case that abundant other hazards on the ship, from poor lithium-ion battery storage to part of a lower deck being used like a junkyard, could be responsible for the fire.

Sparked, as it were, by Congressional inquiry into the destruction of the Bonhomme Richard, the GAO report set out to “review the Navy’s response to fire incidents aboard Navy ships as they undergo maintenance or modernization and to review the effects of the fires.” This inquiry specifically looked at how the Navy has responded to lessons learned, how the Navy has collected and analyzed data about such fires, what the Navy has done to manage staffing needs for fire response when ships are docked for maintenance, and how much of the Navy’s training for crew focuses on fire-safety for when the ship is docked for maintenance.

Such maintenance work is a dull inevitability of naval operations, and has been a fact of maritime life in some form or another for centuries. Sustainment work, the practice of ensuring long-lasting vehicles are able to actually function as desired, is far removed from the glamor and excitement of overseas patrol or active operation, but the consequences of leadership failures to maintain the ship can be just as severe as if the ship had been neglected in battle.

The GAO report cites several major incidents of fire on ships undergoing maintenance, starting with the USS Miami submarine in May 2012, up to the Bonhomme Richard in July 2020. While the Miami was docked in Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, a painter and sandblaster working on the submarine set a fire, which he later confessed to NCIS investigators was an action he took in order to get out of work. Such a small act ultimately led to the Miami’s full decommissioning, as the estimated cost to repair was over $700 million. Following the destruction of the Miami, the Navy reviewed its process for fire investigations, with the goal of preventing future such disasters.

What the GAO report finds, more than a decade after the devastation of the Miami, is that the Navy is unable to follow its own best advice for tracking and mitigating such risks. The report notes that “Navy organizations use processes that inconsistently collect, maintain, and share fire safety-related and damage control lessons and best practices to improve fire safety on ships undergoing maintenance.”

These reporting problems continue through work on ships, where workers may see evidence of past fire damage or signs of risk but do not know the most appropriate way to file and share that information. Data entry is a dull task, and one of the obstacles found by GAO is that the system used to log such risk is slow, making it less likely that fire risk is logged.

Another challenge is simply that a docked ship is crewed less than a ship deployed. At sea, the whole of a crew lives on and sustains a ship, corresponding to crisis with full strength as appropriate. In port, crew are assigned elsewhere, taking leave, deploying to other missions, or even just taking training courses on land. That means the baseline occupancy of a ship is reduced, often by 5 percent but in at least once incident cited by up to 30 percent. That makes having personnel on hand to spot and respond to fires as they happen harder.

Ensuring the ship doesn’t get burnt down while docked for repairs is an important job, and one that should be staffed adequately, even if most of the time it’s dull duty for the crew assigned to it.

Ultimately, the report notes, “If the Navy had a designated organization to use existing information to analyze and respond to Navy-wide effects of fire incidents, then the Navy could better understand the magnitude of risks associated with ship-fire incidents and their effects on Navy operations or the nation’s strategic resources.”

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On April 19, Nauticus Robotics announced that its work on the Terranaut, an amphibious machine designed to defeat explosive mines for the Defense Innovation Unit, had cleared its initial phase and was progressing to further development. The machine builds on Nauticus’ previous work with aquatic uncrewed vehicles. It fits into a holistic picture of untethered, autonomous underwater operations, where tools developed for commercial underwater work inform machines specifically built to tackle the special military needs below the ocean’s surface.

Nauticus teased this announcement of Terranaut on social media with a picture of tread lines on a beach leading into the ocean surface.

DIU, or the Defense Innovation Unit, is an organization within the larger Department of Defense designed to pull innovations from the commercial tech world into military use. Rather than reinventing the wheel, it is built to look at wagon wheels it could simply buy for its chariots.

“DIU gets intrigued when you have some commercial-facing technologies that they think they could orient towards a defense mission,” Nauticus CEO Nicolaus Radford tells Popular Science. “A lot of people focus on our big orange robots. But what’s between our robots’ ears is more important.” 

“So DIU is like, all right, you guys have made some commercial progress,” Radford adds. “You’ve got a commercial platform both in software and hardware. Maybe we can modify it a little bit towards some of these other missions that we’re interested in.”

In Nauticus’ announcement, they emphasized that Terranaut is being developed as an autonomous mine countermeasure robot, which can work in beaches and surf zones. These are the exact kind of areas where Marines train and plan to fight, especially in Pacific island warfare. Terranaut, as promised, will both swim and crawl, driven by an autonomous control system that can receive human direction through acoustic communication.

The Terranaut can navigate on treads and with powerful thrusters, with plans for manipulator arms that can emerge from the body to tackle any tasks, like disassembling an underwater mine.

“It’s able to fly through the water column and then also change its buoyancy in a way that it can get appreciable traction,” says Radford. “Let’s say you’re driving on the sub-sea bed and you encounter a rock. Well, you don’t know how long the rock is, it could take you a while to get around it, right?” The solution in that case would be to go above it. 

Much of the work that informed the creation and design of Terranaut comes from Nauticus’ work on Aquanaut, which is a 14.5-foot-long submersible robot that can operate at depths of almost 10,000 feet, and in regular versions at distances of up to 75 miles. Powered by an electric motor and carrying over 67 kilowatt hours of battery power, the aquanaut moves at a baseline speed of 3 knots, or almost 3.5 mph, underwater, and it can last on its battery power for over four days continuously. But what most distinguishes Aquanaut is its retractable manipulator arms that fold into its body when not needed, and its ability to operate without the direct communications control through an umbilical wire like another undersea robot.

The Aquanaut can perceive its environment thanks to sonar, optical sensors in stereo, native 3D cloud point imagery, and other sensors. This data can be collected at a higher resolution than is transmittable while deep undersea, with the Aquanaut able to surface or dock and transmit higher volumes and density of data faster

Like the Aquanaut, the Terranaut does not have an umbilical connecting it to a boat.

Typically, boats have umbilicals connecting them to robots “because you have to have an operator with joysticks looking at HD monitors, being able to drive this thing,” says Radford. “What we said is ‘let’s throw all that out.’ We can create a hybrid machine that doesn’t need an umbilical that can swim really far, but as it turns out, people just don’t want to take pictures. They want to pick something up, drop something off, cut something, plug something in, and we developed a whole new class of subsea machines that allows you to do manipulation underwater without the necessity of an umbilical.”

Removing the umbilical frees up the design for what kind of ships can launch and manage underwater robotics. It also comes with a whole new set of problems, like how to ensure that the robot is performing the tasks asked of it by a human operator, now that the operator is not driving but directing the machine. Communication through water is hard, as radio signals and light signals are both limited in range and efficacy, especially below the ocean’s surface.

Solving these twin problems means turning to on-board autonomy, and acoustic controls.  

“We have data rates akin to dial up networking in 1987,” says Radford. “You’re not gonna be streaming HD video underwater with a Netflix server, but there are ways in which you can send representative information in the 3D environment around you back to an operator, and then the operator flies the autopilot of the robot around.”

That means, in essence, that the robot itself is largely responsible for managing the specifics of its ballast and direction, and following commands transmitted acoustically through the water. In return it sends information back, allowing a human to select actions and behaviors already loaded onto the robot.

Like the Aquanaut before it, the Terranaut will come preloaded with the behaviors needed to navigate its environment and perform the tasks assigned to it. Once the Terranaut rolls through surfy shallows, onto beaches, and into visual range, it will apply those tools, adaptive autonomy and remote human guidance, to taking apart deadly obstacles, like underwater explosives.

“I think this is the beginning of a very vibrant portfolio of aquatic drones that I hope captures the public’s imagination on what’s possible underwater. I think it’s just as fascinating as space, if not more so, because it’s so much more near to us,” said Radford. “You know, five percent of the ocean seabed has been explored on any level. We live on an ocean planet stupidly called Earth.”

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Earlier this month, a new kind of electric boat was demonstrated in Colombia. The uncrewed COTEnergy Boat debuted at the Colombiamar 2023 business and industrial exhibition, held from March 8 to 10 in Cartagena. It is likely a useful tool for navies, and was on display as a potential product for other nations to adopt. 

While much of the attention in uncrewed sea vehicles has understandably focused on the ocean-ranging craft built for massive nations like the United States and China, the introduction of small drone ships for regional powers and routine patrol work shows just far this technology has come, and how widespread it is likely to be in the future.

“The Colombian Navy (ARC) intends to deploy the new electric unmanned surface vehicle (USV) CotEnergy Boat in April,” Janes reports, citing Admiral Francisco Cubides. 

The boat is made from aluminum and has a compact, light body. (See it on Instagram here.) Just 28.5 feet long and under 8 feet wide, the boat is powered by a 50 hp electric motor; its power is sustained in part by solar panels mounted on the top of the deck. Those solar panels can provide up to 1.1 kilowatts at peak power, which is enough to sustain its autonomous operation for just shy of an hour.

The vessel was made by Atomo Tech and Colombia’s state-owned naval enterprise company, COTECMAR. The company says the boat’s lightweight form allows it to take on different payloads, making it suitable for “intelligence and reconnaissance missions, port surveillance and control missions, support in communications link missions, among others.”

Putting sensors on small, autonomous and electric vessels is a recurring theme in navies that employ drone boats. Even a part of the ocean that seems small, like a harbor, represents a big job to watch. By putting sensors and communications links onto an uncrewed vessel, a navy can effectively extend the range of what can be seen by human operators. 

In January, the US Navy used Saildrones for this kind of work in the Persian Gulf. Equipped with cameras and processing power, the Saildrones identified and tracked ships in an exercise as they spotted them, making that information available to human operators on crewed vessels and ultimately useful to naval commanders. 

Another reason to turn to uncrewed vessels for this work is that they are easier to run on fully  electric power, as opposed to a diesel or gasoline. COTECMAR’s video description notes that the COTEEnergy Boat is being “incorporated into the offer of sustainable technological solutions that we are designing for the energy transition.” Making patrol craft solar powered and electric starts the vessels sustainable.

While developed as a military tool, the COTENERGY boat can also have a role in scientific and research expeditions. It could serve as a communications link between other ships, or between ships and other uncrewed vessels, ensuring reliable operation and data collection. Putting in sensors designed to look under the water’s surface could aid with oceanic mapping and observation. As a platform for sensors, the COTEnergy Boat is limited by what its adaptable frame can carry and power, although its load capacity is 880 pounds.

Not much more is known about the COTEnergy Boat at this point. But what is compelling about the vessel is how it fits into similar plans of other navies. Fielding small useful autonomous scouts or patrol craft, if successful, could become a routine part of naval and coastal operations.

With these new kinds of boat come new challenges. Because uncrewed ships lack humans, it can make them easier targets for other navies or possibly maritime criminal groups, like pirates. The same kind of Saildrones used by the US Navy to scout the Persian Gulf have also been detained, if briefly, by the Iranian Navy. With such detentions comes the risk that data on the ship is compromised, and data collection tools figured out, making it easier for hostile forces to fool or evade the sensors in the future.

Still, the benefits of having a flexible, solar-powered robot ship outweigh such risks. Inspection of ports is routine until it isn’t, and with a robotic vessel there to scout first, humans can wait to act until they are needed, safely removed from their remote robotic companions.

Watch a little video of the COTEnergy Boat below:

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On March 27, Gecko Robotics announced its hull-inspecting robots will be used to assess a US Navy destroyer and an amphibious assault ship, expanding work already done to inspect Navy ships. These robots map surfaces as they climb them, creating useful and data-rich models to better help crews and maintainers find flaws and fix them. As the Navy looks to sustain and expand the role of its fleet while minimizing the number of new sailors needed, enlisting the aid of robot climbers can guide present and future repairs, and help ensure more ships are seaworthy for more time.

Getting ships into the sea means making sure they’re seaworthy, and it’s as important to naval operations as ensuring the crew is fed and the supplies are stocked. Maintenance can be time-intensive, and the Navy already has a backlog of work that needs to be done on the over 280 ships it has. Part of getting that maintenance right, and ensuring the effort is spent where it needs to be, is identifying the specific parts of a ship worn down by time at sea.

Enter a robotic critter called Gecko.

“The Navy found that using Gecko achieved incredible time savings and improvement in data quantity and quality. Before Gecko, the Navy’s inspection process produced 6,000 data points. Gecko provides significantly more coverage by collecting over 3.3 million data points for the hull and over 463,000 data points for the outboard side of the starboard rudder,” Ed Bryner, director of engineering at Gecko Robotics, tells Popular Science via email.

Those data points are collected by a hull-climbing robot. Gecko makes several varieties of the Toka robot, and the Navy inspections use the Toka 4. This machine can crawl over 30 feet a minute, recording details of the hull as it goes. 

“It is a versatile, multi-function robot designed initially to help hundreds of commercial customers in the power, manufacturing and oil and gas industries. It utilizes advanced sensors, cameras, and ultrasonics to detect potential defects and damages in flight decks, hulls and rudders,” says Bryner.

To climb the walls, the Toka uses wheels with neodymium permanent rare earth magnets that work on the carbon steel of the ship’s hull. The sensors are used to detect how thick walls are, if there is pitting or other degradation in the walls, and then to plot a map of all that damage. This is done with computers on-board the robot as it works, and then also processed in the cloud, through a service offered in Gecko’s Cantilever Platform.

“The millions of data points collected by the Toka 4 are used to build a high-fidelity digital twin to detect damage, automatically build repair plans, forecast service life and ensure structural integrity,” says Bryner.

A digital twin is a model and map based on the scanned information. Working on that model, maintainers can see where the ship may have deteriorated—perhaps a storm with greater force or a gritty patch of ocean that pockmarked the hull in real but hard to see ways. This model can guide repairs at port, and then it can also serve as a reference tool for maintainers when the ship returns after a deployment. Having a record of previous stress can guide repairs and work, and over time build a portrait of what kinds of degradation happen where.

“Gecko’s Cantilever Platform allows customers to pinpoint & optimize precise areas of damage in need of remediation (rather than replacing large swaths of a flight deck, for example), track their physical assets over time to identify trends and patterns, prioritize and build repair plans, deploy repair budgets efficiently, and make detailed maintenance plans for the service life of the asset,” says Bryner.

The robot is a tool for guiding repairs, operated by one or two people while it inspects and maps. This map then guides maintenance to where it is most needed, and in turn shapes maintenance that comes after. It’s a way of modernizing the slow but important work of keeping ships ship-shape. 

So far, reports Breaking Defense, Gecko’s system has scanned six ships, with two more announced this week. Deck maintenance is a dull duty, but it’s vital that it be done, and done well. In moments of action, everyone on a ship needs to know they can trust the vessel they are standing on to work as intended. Finding and fixing hidden flaws, or bolstering weaker areas before going back out to sea, ensures that the routine parts of ship operation can operate as expected. 

Watch a video of the robot below: 

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Earlier this month, Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries showed off a new tool for fighting against drones. With an enclosed cabin on top of a four-wheel ATV frame, the system mounts a high-energy laser in the back, alongside the power needed to make it work. It is part of the growing arsenal of counter-drone weapons, and one that fits into the expanded role and arsenal of Japan’s modern military.

The laser and ATV combination was on display at the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) Japan conference, which ran from March 15 through 17 outside Tokyo. The exhibition is a place for various arms makers from around the world to gather and showcase their wares to interested collaborators or governments. This year’s conference, the second Japan-hosted iteration, had 66 countries and 178 companies represented.

The system, while funded by Kawasaki, was made at the request of Japan’s Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency (ATLA), a rough analog of DARPA that looks to integrate new tech into Japan’s self-defense forces. On display, the laser system included a tracker, a high-energy laser, a gimbal to balance and hold the laser’s focus, and a 2 kilowatt power source. It has a range of just 100 meters or 328 feet for destroying drones, though it can track targets at up to 300 meters, or 984 feet. It was mounted on a Mule Pro-FX, a three-seat all terrain vehicle that retails for $15,000.

“The system tracks targets with an infrared camera, and laser beams cause instantaneous damage to UAVs and mortar shells. ATLA and Kawasaki have been testing it for this purpose, plus they are researching whether it can also intercept missiles,” reports Shephard Media.

A 2019 document from the Ministry of Defense outlined Japan’s vision for how to use new technology to improve its defense forces. Lasers, or directed energy weapons, are mentioned as a tool to intercept incoming missiles through precise targeting. These weapons are seen as part of a comprehensive suite of tools that utilize the electro-magnetic spectrum, a category that includes sensors for watching enemy signals, as well as jammers and high-powered microwaves that can interfere with or harm enemy electronics.

“High-power directed energy weapons must be realized from the standpoint of low reaction time countermeasures for accelerated aircraft and missiles as well as low cost countermeasures for miniature unmanned aircraft, mortar shells, and other large-scale, low cost threats,” reads a 2020 strategy document from ATLA. This document explicitly argues for the damage and destruction by high-powered lasers as their most salient points. Against missiles, uncrewed ships, and drones, especially smaller cheaper drones, lasers can be an invaluable asset.

What sets Kawasaki’s displayed laser vehicle apart from others is the power level. At just 2 kilowatts, the vehicle is attempting to fry drones with an amount of power roughly comparable to what it takes to run a dishwasher. Raytheon’s counter-drone laser, which Popular Science got to fire first-hand in October 2022, fires a 10 kilowatt beam. Other laser weapons, designed to quickly burn through incoming artillery rounds or missiles, can use power in the tens or even low hundreds of kilowatts.

Drones, especially the commercial kind that have become an essential part of how armies in Ukraine fight, are small, weak targets. A laser does not necessarily need a ton of power if it is going to burn through the more vulnerable parts of a quadcopter. Tracking tools, which let lasers stay focused on a target, can let a lower-powered laser burn through plastic and metal in the same time as a more powerful but less locked-on laser might.

While the laser at DSEI was displayed on the back of an ATV, it could be mounted on other vehicles, a situation where its power requirements could be an added bonus. As a tool for hunting down drones, limited range and power hinder function, but as a defensive system mounted on vehicles that might come under attack by drone, a smaller laser that sips power could be enough to disable a drone. Drones can be deadly threats on their own by dropping bombs, but they are also used as spotters for other weapons, like artillery. If the spotter is incapacitated and the convoy moves on, artillery are left to fire at where they think the vehicles are, rather than where they know their targets to be. 

“Japan will also reinforce the capability to respond to small UAVs with weapons including directed-energy weapons,” reads a defense strategy published December 2022. “By approximately ten years from now, Japan will reinforce its integrated air and missile defense capabilities by further introducing research on capability to respond to hypersonic weapons in the gliding phase and interception by non-kinetic means to deal with assets such as small UAVs.”

Lasers like this are the start of an effective counter-drone strategy, one explicitly framed as a beginning approach while developing more and different powerful systems. These could include high-powered lasers and high-powered microwaves. As the threat from small drones has expanded, so too are the tools explored by countries to stop all manner of aerial threat, including small drones.

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On March 8, in the ocean between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, the US Navy tested out a new drone. Called the Aerovel Flexrotor, it rests on a splayed tail, and boasts a powerful rotor just below the neck of its bulbous front-facing camera pod. The tail-sitting drone needs very little deck space for takeoff or landing, and once in the sky, it pivots and flies like a typical fixed-wing plane. It joins a growing arsenal of tools that are especially useful in the confined launch zones of smaller ship decks or unimproved runways.

The March flights took place as part of the International Maritime Exercise 2023, billed as a multinational undertaking involving 7,000 people from across 50 nations. Activities in the exercise include working on following orders together, maritime patrol, countering naval mines, testing the integration of drones and artificial intelligence, and work related to global health. It is a hodgepodge of missions, capturing the multitude of tasks that navies can be called upon to perform.

This deployment is at least the second time the Flexrotor has been brought to the Persian Gulf by the US Navy. In December 2022, a Coast Guard ship operating as part of a Naval task force in the region launched a Flexrotor. This flight was part of an event called Digital Horizon, aimed at integrating drones and AI into Navy operations, and it included 10 systems not yet used in the region.

“The Flexrotor can support intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions day and night using a daylight or infrared camera to provide a real-time video feed,” read a 2022 release from US Central Command. The release continued: “In addition to providing ISR capability, UAVs like the Flexrotor enable Task Force 59 to enhance a resilient communications network used by unmanned systems to relay video footage, pictures and other data to command centers ashore and at sea.”

Putting drones on ships is hardly new. ScanEagles, a scout-drone used by the US Navy since 2005, can be launched from a rail and landed by net or skyhook. What sets the Flexrotor apart is not that it is a drone on a ship, but the fact that it requires a minimum of infrastructure to make it usable. This is because the drone is a tail-sitter.

What is a tail-sitter?

There are two basic ways to move a heavier-than-air vehicle from the ground to the sky: generate lift from spinning rotors, or generate lift from forward thrust and fixed wings. Helicopters have many advantages, needing only landing pads instead of runways, and they can easily hover in flight. But helicopters’ aerodynamics limit cruising and maximum speeds, even as advances continue to be made. 

Fixed wings, in turn, need to build speed and lift off on runways, or find another way to get into the sky. For rail-launched drones like the ScanEagle, this is done with a rail, though other methods have been explored.

Between helicopters and fixed-wing craft sit tiltrotors and jump-jets, where the the thrust (from either rotors/propellers or ducted jets) changes as the plane stays level in flight, allowing vertical landings and short takeoffs. This is part of what DARPA is exploring through the SPRINT program.

Tail-sitters, instead, involve the entire plane pivoting in flight. In effect, they look almost like a rocket upon launch, narrow bodies pointed to pierce the sky, before leveling out in flight and letting the efficiency of lift from fixed wings extend flight time and range. (Remember the space shuttle? It was positioned like a tail-sitter when it blasted off, but landed like an airplane, albeit without engines.) Early tail-sitters suffered because they had to accommodate a human pilot through all those transitions. Modern tail-sitter drones, like the Flexrotor or Australia’s STRIX, instead have human operators guiding the craft remotely from a control station. Another example is Bell’s APT 70.

The advantage to a tail-sitting drone is that it only needs a clearing or open deck space as large as its widest dimension. In the case of the Flexrotor, that means a rotor diameter of 7.2 feet, with at least one part of the launching surface wide enough for the drone’s nearly 10-foot wingspan. By contrast, the Seahawk helicopters used by the US Navy have a rotor diameter of over 53 feet. Ships that can already accommodate helicopters can likely easily add tail-sitter drones, and ships that couldn’t possibly fit a full-sized crewed helicopter might be able to take on and operate a drone scout.

In use, the Flexrotor boasts a cruising speed of 53 mph, a top speed of 87 mph, and potentially more than 30 hours of continuous operation. After takeoff, the Flexrotor pivots to fixed-wing flight, and the splayed tail retracts into a normal tail shape, allowing the craft to operate like a regular fixed-wing plane in the sky. Long endurance drones like these allow crews to pilot them in shifts, reducing pilot fatigue without having to land the drone to switch operators. Aerovel claims that Flexrotors have a range of over 1,265 miles at cruising speeds. In the air, the drone can serve as a scout with daylight and infrared cameras, and it can also work as a communications relay node, especially valuable if fleets are dispersed and other communications are limited.

As the Navy looks to expand what it can see and respond to, adding scouts that can be stowed away and then launched from cleared deck space expands the perception of ships. By improving scouting on the ocean, the drones make the vastness of the sea a little more knowable.

Watch a video below:

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The Air Force is asking Congress for 1,000 new combat drones to accompany planes into battle. The announcement, from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, came March 7, as part of a broader push for Air Force modernization. It fits into a broader plan to combine crewed fighters, like F-35s and new designs, with drone escorts, thus expanding the scope of what the Air Force can do without similarly increasing the demand for new pilots.

Kendall spoke at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. The speech focused on what the Air Force can and must do to remain competitive with China, which Kendall referred to as “our packing challenge.” While the Air Force can outline its expectations and desires in a budget, it is ultimately up to Congress to set the funding sought by the military. That means Kendall’s call for 1,000 drones isn’t just an ask, it has to be a sales pitch.

“The [Department of the Air Force] is moving forward with a family of systems for the next generation of air dominance, that will include both the NGAD platform and the introduction of uncrewed collaborative aircraft to provide affordable mass and dramatically increased cost-effectiveness,” said Kendall. By NGAD (Next Generation Air Dominance), Kendall was referring to a concept for future fighter planning, where a new crewed fighter plane heads a family of systems that includes escort drones. One of these potential drone escorts is called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA.

This Collaborative Combat Aircraft fits with the broader plans of the Air Force to augment and expand the number of aircraft it has by having drones fly as escorts and accessories to crewed and piloted fighters. These fighters include the existing and expanding inventory of F-35A stealth jets, as well as the next generation of planes planned for the future.

Kendall broke down the math like this: “[General Charles Q. Brown] and I have recently given our planners a nominal quantity of collaborative combat aircraft to assume for planning purposes. That planning assumption is 1,000 CCAs,” said Kendall. “This figure was derived from an assumed two CCAs per 200 NGAD platforms [equalling 400 drones], an additional two for each of 300 F-35s, for a total of a thousand.” 

One reason for the Air Force to pursue drone escorts is because they can expand what the planes can do, without requiring another expensive craft of a vulnerable pilot. Stealth on an F-35A jet fighter protects the pilot and the $78 million plane. If a drone can fly alongside a plane, help it on missions, and costs a fraction of the crewed fighter, then it may make more sense for the drones to be, if not disposable, somewhat more expendable.

Previously, the Air Force referred to this as “attritable,” a term coined to suggest the drones could be lost to combat (attrition), without emphasizing that the drones were built specifically to be lost. In Kendall’s remarks on March 7, he instead used the term “affordable mass,” which emphasizes the way these drones will increase the numbers of aircraft an enemy has to defeat in order to stop an aerial attack.

“One way to think of CCAs is as remotely controlled versions of the charting pods, electronic warfare pods, or weapons now carried under the wings of our crude aircraft. CCAs will dramatically improve the performance of our crude aircraft and significantly reduce the risk to our pilots,” said Kendall.

In this way, a drone escort flying alongside a fighter is just an extra set of bombs, cameras, missiles, or jammers, all in a detached body flying as an escort to the fighter. In 2017, the Air Force announced an attritable drone escort, using the Valkyrie built for the task by target drone maker Kratos. 

The first Valkyrie is already a museum piece, but it represents a rough overview of the kind of cost and functions the Air Force may want in a Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Priced at around $2 million, a Valkyrie is not cheap, but it is much cheaper than the fighters it would fly alongside. As designed, it can fly for up to 3,400 miles, with a top speed of 650 mph. That would make it capable of operating in theater with a fighter, with escorts likely delivered to bases by ground transport and then synched up with the fighters before missions.

Getting drones to fly alongside crewed planes has been part of the Air Force’s Loyal Wingman program, which shifts the burden of flying onto onboard systems in the drone. Presently, drones used by the US, like the MQ-9 Reaper that crashed into the Black Sea, are labor-intensive, crewed by multiple shifts of remote pilots. To make drones labor-saving, they will need to work similar to a human compassion, receiving commands from a squad leader but independent enough to execute those commands without human hands on the controls. The Air Force is experimenting with AI piloting of jets, including having artificial intelligence fly a crewed F-16 in December.

Whatever shape these loyal wingmates end up taking, by asking for them in bulk, Kendall is making a clear bid. The age of fighter pilots in the Air Force may not be over, but for the wars of the future, they will be joined by robots as allies.

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This post has been updated on March 16 to include video of the incident released by the US Department of Defense. The story was originally published on March 14, 2022.

At 7:03 am Central European Time on March 14, one of a pair of Russian Su-27 fighter jets flying over the Black Sea struck the propeller of an MQ-9 reaper drone piloted by the United States. According to US European Command, the strike against the propeller required the drone’s remote pilots to bring it down into international water. It is hardly the first takedown of a Reaper drone, nor is it even the first time Russian forces have caused the destruction of such a plane, but any confrontation between military aircraft of the world’s two foremost nuclear-armed states can understandably feel tense.

Since 2021, the United States has based MQ-9 Reaper drones in Romania, a NATO ally that borders both Ukraine and the Black Sea. These Reapers, as well as Reapers flown from elsewhere, were part of the overall aerial surveillance mission undertaken by the United States and NATO on the eve of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

What happened over the Black Sea?

The basics of the incident are as follows: “Our MQ-9 aircraft was conducting routine operations in international airspace when it was intercepted and hit by a Russian aircraft, resulting in a crash and complete loss of the MQ-9,” said US Air Force general James B. Hecker, commander of US Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, in a statement about the incident published by US European Command. “In fact, this unsafe and unprofessional act by the Russians nearly caused both aircraft to crash. US and Allied aircraft will continue to operate in international airspace and we call on the Russians to conduct themselves professionally and safely.” (Watch video of the incident here.)

This is language that emphasizes the incident as a mistake or malfeasance by the two Russian Su-27 pilots. It is not, notably, a demand that the loss of a Reaper be met with more direct confrontation between the United States and Russia, even as the US backs Ukraine with supplies and, often, intelligence as it fights against the continued Russia invasion. In the years prior to Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine, Russian jets have harassed US aircraft over the Black Sea. It is a common enough occurrence that the think tank RAND has even published a study on what kind of signals Russia intends to send when it intercepts aircraft near but not in Russian airspace.

“Several times before the collision,” according to European Command, “the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner.”

Russia’s Ministry of Defence also released a statement on the incident, claiming that the Reaper was flying without a transponder turned on, that the Reaper was headed for Russian borders, and that the plane crashed of its own accord, without any contact with Russian jets.

In a press briefing the afternoon of March 14, Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder noted that the Russian pilots were flying near the drone for 30 to 40 minutes before the collision that damaged the Reaper. Asked if the drone was near Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea that was part of Ukraine until Russia occupied it in 2014, Ryder said only that the flight was in international waters and well clear of any territory of Ukraine. Ryder also did not clarify when asked about whether or not the Reaper was armed, saying instead that it was conducting an ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) mission.

The New York Times reported that the drone was not armed, citing a military official.

What is an MQ-9 Reaper?

The Reaper is an uncrewed aerial vehicle, propelled by a pusher prop. It is made by General Atomics, and is an evolution of the Predator drone, which started as an unarmed scout before being adapted into a lightly armed bomber. The Reaper entered operational service in October 2007, and it was designed from the start to carry weapons. It can wield nearly 4,000 pounds of explosives, like laser guided bombs, or up to eight Hellfire missiles.

They measure 36 feet from tip to tail and have a wingspan of 66 feet, and in 2020 cost about $18 million apiece. 

To guide remote pilots for takeoff and landing, Reapers have a forward-facing camera, mounted at the front of their match-shaped airframes. To perceive the world below, and offer useful real-time video and imaging, a sensor pod complete with laser target designator, infrared camera, and electro-optical cameras pivots underneath the front of the drone, operated by a second crew member on the ground: the sensor operator. 

Reapers can stay airborne at altitudes of up to 50,000 feet for up to 24 hours, with remote crews guiding the plane in shifts and trading off mid-flight. The Reaper’s long endurance, not just hours in the sky but its ability to operate up to 1,150 miles away from where it took off, lets it watch vast areas, looking for relevant movement below. This was a crucial part of how the US fought the counter insurgency in Iraq and especially Afghanistan, where armed Reapers watched for suspected enemies proved an enduring feature of the war, to mixed results.

While Reapers have been used for well over a decade, they have mostly seen action in skies relatively clear of hostile threats. A Reaper’s top speed is just 276 mph, and while its radar can see other aircraft, the Su-27 air superiority fighter can run laps around it at Mach 2.35. In seeking a future replacement for Reapers, the US Air Force has stated an intention that these planes be able to defend themselves against other aircraft.

Have drones like the Reaper been shot down before?

The most famous incident of a US drone shoot-down is the destruction of an RQ-4 Global Hawk by Iran in June 2019. This unarmed surveillance drone was operating in the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz, a highly trafficked waterway that borders Iran on one side and the Arabian Peninsula on the other. Iran claimed the Global Hawk was shot down within Iran’s territorial waters; the United States argued instead that the drone was operating in international waters. While the crisis did not escalate beyond the destruction of the drone, it was unclear at the time that this incident would end calmly.

Reapers have been shot down by militaries including the US Air Force. In 2009, US pilots lost control of an MQ-9 Reaper over Afghanistan, so a crewed fighter shot it down proactively before it crashed into another country.

In 2017 and again in 2019, Houthi insurgent forces in Yemen shot down US Reapers flying over the country. Reapers have also been lost to jamming, when the signals between operators and drone were obstructed or cut, as plausibly happened to a Reaper operated by the Italian military over Libya in 2019.

Ultimately, the March 14 takedown of the Reaper by Russian fighters appears to be part of the larger new normal of drones as a part of regular military patrols. Like with the US destruction of a surveillance balloon in the Atlantic, the most interesting lesson is less what happened between aircraft in the sky, and more what is discovered by whoever gets to the wrecked aircraft in the water first.

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DARPA is inviting designers to reimagine aircraft that can fly fast and take off and land without runways. Earlier this month, DARPA announced an upcoming “Proposers Day,” to be held on March 23, when the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing will offer information to designers and companies about an initiative it calls SPRINT, which stands for the SPeed and Runway INdependent Technologies (SPRINT) X-Plane Demonstrator program. In 42 months, or three and a half years, DARPA hopes to have a demonstration flight of a new plane through the program.

As the name suggests, SPRINT is looking for a fast aircraft, or at least a plane capable of going fast over short stretches. The program is specifically seeking to develop an aircraft that can cruise at 400 knots, or 460 mph. That’s well below the cruising speed of a fighter like the F-16, though it’s much faster than the cruising speed of Black Hawk helicopters, which might be the more relevant consideration. That’s because the other aspect of SPRINT is that the aircraft should be able to hover in austere environments, like fields or deserts, without the specific paved infrastructure of a runway or a helipad.

“The objective of the SPRINT program is to design, build, certify and fly an X-plane to demonstrate enabling technologies and integrated concepts necessary for a transformational combination of aircraft speed and runway independence for the next generation of air mobility platforms,” reads DARPA’s announcement.

While the open sky is vast, runways remain one of the more demanding parts of the infrastructure of flight. Once built, a runway is relatively easy to repair after an attack, provided no planes were destroyed at the time of incoming bombs and missiles. But clearing the space for a runway and hangars, as well as maintaining crew and planes, creates a durable target visible from space. As the United States war planners explore options should a war break out in the Pacific region, the known and fixed locations of existing runways could leave aircraft vulnerable to surprise attack. Even without the surprise, once planes are in the air, they will need a runway to land, and losing that surface can lead to, at best, harsh landings on unprepared ground, which damage the plane and risk the pilot.

[Related: Bell wants to soup up tilt-rotor aircraft by adding jet engines]

DARPA announced SPRINT on March 1. The shape of the new vehicle is undetermined, reported Patrick Tucker of Defense One. “It could be a new form of helicopter, or perhaps a vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft that might fly even faster.” Tucker also noted that the director of DARPA “deliberately avoided calling the program a vertical-lift effort, and an accompanying slide displayed two artist’s concepts that were decidedly unhelicopter-like.”

Helicopters, of course, have long been the most reliable form of vertical takeoff, though their design comes with major constraints on speed and efficiency. Matching the runway independence of a helicopter with the speed and endurance of fixed-wing flight is a problem the military has tried to solve for decades. The most successful variants have followed one of two paths. There’s tilt-rotor planes, like the V-22 Osprey and upcoming V-280 Valor, which have high-mounted wings, and rotors that pivot parallel to the ground to take off, before turning to a different angle for forward flight. The Osprey can land in austere environments, provided there is clearance for the rotors, though in normal conditions the planes are flown and landed at dedicated pads on military bases.

The other path, seen in the Harrier Jump Jet and the F-35B stealth fighter, uses ducted exhaust from a jet engine to lift the plane into the sky, before pivoting to forward thrust. This tremendous amount of heat and power have caused speculation, especially in the development of the F-35, that the engine would destroy all but the most specially prepared landing pads. 

Neither of the designs shown by DARPA commit to these traditional Vertical Takeoff or Landing (VTOL) approaches. One, a silver-glossy image of a plane with jet-like ducts and folded blades on nacelles, has wings positioned like a tiltrotor. In the high-flight concept art, the engines used for vertical lift are drawn dormant, letting even more powerful systems propel the plane through the sky. The V-22 Osprey has a cruising speed of 310 knots, while the V-280 Valor has one just over 280 knots. Both planes have higher top speeds for, er, sprints, but getting to faster cruising speeds likely means ditching rotor engines as the primary form of propulsion, even if they can tilt.

In DARPA’s other concept drawing, the image appears as a rendering of a flying wing, reminiscent of the B-2 or B-21 bombers, but with a V-shaped tail. The engines are even more suggested than shown here, with space for ducted fans or rotors to provide vertical lift in the vehicle’s body, while jet intakes suggest means of forward propulsion. 

Such concept art is a type of vision board for what DARPA is trying to accomplish. Getting a new kind of plane that can fly without runways, helipads, or other external infrastructure could expand where planes operate. Ensuring that the plane flies fast could make it useful for more tasks than those already performed by helicopters, expanding the scope of what the military might do. And, ultimately, DARPA’s mission is not to design finished products—it is to explore new spaces, trusting that once the hurdle of technological demonstration is accomplished, others will figure out how to bend that new technology into useful form.

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On March 3, the Department of Defense announced it would be sending mobile bridges to Ukraine. The bridges are the signature part of the Pentagon’s 33rd offering of existing US equipment to supply Ukraine, since Russia invaded the country in February 2022. These vehicles that can place bridges, along with the other equipment sent, are reflections of the shape of the war so far, and offer a glimpse into the tools the Biden Administration expects Ukraine to need in the coming spring thaw.

An Armored Vehicle Launched Bridge, or AVLB, is essentially a portable and durable structure that is carried, placed, and then removed by a modified tank hull. The specific Armored Vehicle Launched Bridges that will be sent to Ukraine are ones based on an M60 tank chassis, our colleagues at The War Zone report. 

Rivers, chasms, and deep gaps in terrain can form impassable barriers to militaries, allowing defenders to concentrate forces at existing bridges or crossings. Getting over such a gap can necessitate flying to the other side, though that depends on an air transport force capable of massive movement and a cleared landing zone. It could mean physically building a new bridge, which can take time and is vulnerable to attack. Or it could mean bringing the bridge to the battlefield on the back of a tank and plopping it down as needed.

“These vehicles are designed to accompany armored columns and give them the ability to cross rivers, streams, ditches and trenches. The bridges are carried on the chassis of armored vehicles and launched at river or stream banks. Once the crossing is finished, the vehicle can pick up the bridge on the far bank and carry on,” the Department of Defense said in a release about this latest drawdown.

The exact number and model of the AVLBs sent to Ukraine is not yet known, though the general family is M60, or derived from the M60 Patton tank. That makes the models of a particular Cold War vintage, designed for the lighter armored vehicles and tanks of that era. Variants of the M60 AVLB have seen action in Vietnam, and have seen use in training exercises with NATO as well as in wars like Iraq.

The bridges are stored folded in half. When put in place by the vehicle, the bridges span 60 feet, can support up to 70 tons, and are 12.5 feet wide. Setting up the bridge takes between 2 and 5 minutes, and retrieving the bridge, which can be done at either end, takes about 10 minutes. 

Some heavier vehicles, including modern combat tanks, can only use the bridge at slower speeds and over narrower gaps. The US Army and Marine Corps are working on a new bridge and launcher capable of supporting Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks, to better meet the needs of the US military.

Even with limitations, the bridges will expand how and where Ukrainian forces can operate and move. Being able to rapidly span a narrow but otherwise impassable river dramatically expands how and where an army can move and attack, creating room for surprise. 

In addition, the announcement of the drawdown package notes that the US is sending Ukraine “demolition munitions and equipment for obstacle clearing,” which can facilitate both cleaner retreats and surprise advances. War leaves battlefields littered with craters, ruins, unexploded bombs, and deliberately set mines. Blasting a way through such hazards can restore movement to otherwise pinned forces.

Beyond the bridges and demolition equipment, the latest drawdown includes three kinds of artillery ammunition. The HIMARS rocket artillery systems, invaluable for Ukraine’s fall offensives, are getting resupplied with more rockets. The United States is also supplying Ukraine with 155mm and 105mm artillery rounds, for howitzers donated by the US and NATO allies to the country. These weapons use different ammunition than the Soviet-inherited stock that made up the bulk of Ukraine’s artillery before the war, and are still the overall majority of artillery pieces on hand today. But supplies for Soviet-pattern ammunition are scarce, as it’s also the size used by Russia, and Russia aggressively bought up existing stockpiles of the rounds around the world.

The fourth kind of ammunition included in the drawdown is 25mm, or the kind used by Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles. This tracked, turreted, and armed craft are more a form of fighting transport than a tanks, despite their appearance, but their 25 mm cannons are useful against all sorts of vehicles below the heavy armor of a tank. The package also includes tools for maintenance, vehicle testing and diagnostics, spare parts, and other of the less flashy but still invaluable work of ensuring vehicles can stay functional, or at least be repaired and brought back into use quickly.

Taken altogether, the latest drawdown of equipment fits the pattern of supplies to Ukraine this year. US supplies continue to give Ukraine the tools to fight existing artillery duels along grinding front lines, as well as building up the armored forces and accompanying features, like mobile bridges, needed for a future offensive.

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In the marina at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center, in the United Arab Emirates, floated a prototype submersible that looked like it might have been part of a GI Joe playset. With wide wings that dipped below the water line and a feature suggesting a bubble dome cockpit, the operational Kronos Submarine concept seemed as much spacecraft as submersible. The vessel was on display as part of the NAVDEX naval exhibition that ran from February 19 to 24.

Built by Desert Power Designs and Highland Systems in the UAE, the Kronos is pitched as a vehicle for military, rescue, and underwater engineering work. A brochure of the Kronos, available online, shows the 30-feet-long and 24-feet-wide submersible as capable of carrying six Italian-made Black Scorpion small torpedoes, aimed forward. (The resemblance to a toy submarine playset is uncanny.) With just one driver needed to operate the vessel, the Kronos has room for 10 passengers inside, making it potentially a useful transport for covert missions, needing to move special forces discreetly and under the surface.

“The ‘Kronos’ is the first world’s gliding submarine as it has wings/fins with ailerons and two shunting engines on each wing, which allows it to maneuver underwater like an airplane in the sky,” Khalit Khabibullin, director of Highland Systems, said in an email. Kronos “also has two maneuvering engines on each wing which allows for the sub to stay idle underwater at one place or make an instant U turn, also folding wings are made for easy transportation while onshore.”

Underwater glider design is primarily the domain of uncrewed vehicles, where the technology has been explored for decades. Wings lets gliders toggle buoyancy like lift on an airplane, leading to descents and ascents that look more like flights than dives.

With underwater speeds of over 30 mph and surface speeds of 50 mph, the Kronos offers a fast way through the water. Its promised speed is comparable to that of nuclear-powered attack submarines, and much faster than existing underwater-launched delivery craft for special forces.

Powering the Kronos is an electric engine, giving it up to 18 hours of power on batteries alone. The submarine also has a diesel generator, and the brochure lists the vehicle as being able to run on both diesel generated and stored electricity for over 50 hours. The vehicle promises an air supply that can last 36 hours, and a range of over 600 miles on a single fuel tank for the diesel generator. It is built to operate at 328 feet below the surface, though it can reach a maximum depth of 820 feet.

[Related: In the depths of this Idaho lake, the US Navy is testing out its submarine tech]

“Typical missions are military special operations as it could carry in the military version up to 10 men and one captain,” says Khabibullin. “Search and rescue, services for oil and gas companies to check underwater pipes, luxury ones that could be only for 6 people with all facilities inside.”

Various mock-ups and display images of the submarine interior promise something akin to a modest yacht or perhaps an update of the spacefaring shuttles common to Star Trek. The mock-ups also show a clear bubble cockpit, which the display model lacked. A video, shared by Khabibullin, offered a glimpse into the interior of the Kronos as it floated in the marina.

A slew of LCD screens, familiar in shape and possibly origin as computer monitors, are spread at eye level around the cabin. A curved display is visible on top of a navigational console, and in three distinct angles it shows the surface outside the craft. Spectators and visitors can be seen idling on the deck.

Kronos has an electronic periscope with 360 view with day and IR night cameras, and at least for the monitors that were working, that appears to be the case. The vessel very much gives the appearance of a work in progress, from the monitors displaying error messages to the exposed wires and cramped back of the vessel.

“The Kronos submarine on display at NAVDEX in Abu Dhabi was a full size operational prototype of the electric self charging submarine which was built in Dubai, UAE by a team of 7 engineers in 8 months from scratch,” says Khabibullin.

It remains to be seen if the prototype will move to a production version, though the promise is certainly present in the vehicle. At a minimum, if it does not find a buyer among the militaries of the world, it seems like a shoo-in a prop for the next James Bond film.

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Just a year after the United States reopened its embassy in Havana, Cuba, in 2015, some diplomats began experiencing a painful ringing in their ears. This “Havana syndrome” was first reported at that embassy in 2016, and included symptoms like dizziness and headaches, incapacitating diplomats and the spies who worked alongside them. It was reported across several embassies over multiple years.

One immediate hypothesis was that the symptoms were the result of a deliberate attack by another nation against the diplomats and spies of the United States. Today, that theory is as close to being fully dismissed as it has ever been. On March 1, the Washington Post reported that five US intelligence agencies determined that Havana syndrome was very unlikely to be the result of action by a foreign adversary. With the new reporting, while the actual origins of all injuries attributed to it cannot be pinned down, it is safe to say the majority of the intelligence community does not see the symptoms as resulting from malicious action by a hostile nation.

The intelligence community, as the collection of spy and surveillance agencies are known, includes better known agencies like the CIA, NSA, and the FBI, as well as long-running but lower-profile organizations like the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Seven of these agencies (the Post’s reporting does not specify which ones) conducted a review of around 1,000 cases broadly identified under the Havana syndrome banner.

The Post, citing two intelligence officials who remained anonymous, summarized the findings this way: “Five of those agencies determined it was ‘very unlikely’ that a foreign adversary was responsible for the symptoms, either as the result of purposeful actions — such as a directed energy weapon — or as the byproduct of some other activity, including electronic surveillance that unintentionally could have made people sick,” wrote Shane Harris and John Hudson. 

Of the remaining two agencies on the review, one determined that it was merely “unlikely,” not “very unlikely” that a foreign government was responsible, while that last agency did not offer a conclusion either way. Still, none of the agencies in the review offered a dissenting view from the conclusion. 

Congress has already mandated payments for those injured by the syndrome, which the Biden administration last summer said it would honor, even as no clear cause of the symptoms could be found. 

The previous leading explanation was an as-yet undiscovered advanced directed energy weapon.

How would such a weapon work?

Directed energy weapons have moved from the realm of science fiction to reality. These include, most commonly, high-powered lasers and microwaves, which operate in different ways. Laser weapons need a clear line of sight, and cause harm by heating up the surface of the drone or other object they are in contact with, until that object burns or breaks. Popular Science even had the chance to try one.

Because Havana syndrome sufferers lacked visible marks, it is easy to rule out a laser as the origin. Other directed energy weapons, like high-power microwaves, or sound beyond what humans can consciously perceive, have also been considered and then dismissed as possible causes. 

[Related: What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser]

“The officials said that as analysts examined clusters of reported cases, including at U.S. embassies, they found no pattern or common set of conditions that could link individual cases. They also found no evidence, including forensic information or geolocation data, that would suggest an adversary had used a form of directed energy such as radio waves or ultrasonic beams,” the Post reports. “In some cases, there was no ‘direct line of sight’ to affected personnel working at U.S. facilities, further casting doubt on the possibility that a hypothetical energy weapon could have been the culprit, one of the officials said.”

The Post’s reporting of this conclusion contradicts an earlier independent study of possible causes. A 2020 study by a committee from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine “felt that many of the distinctive and acute signs, symptoms, and observations reported by [Department of State] employees are consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy.”

This is the kind of energy used in less-lethal millimeter-wave weapons like the Active Denial System employed by the US military. This weapon takes a massive amount of power to operate, and it can cause second degree burns on people in the beam’s path if it is held for long enough. The weapon is used to disperse crowds, making the pain felt immediately and in a way that dissipates as people leave the area of the beam. For people who do stay in the beam’s path, spots can become visible on their skin.

[Related: The US military’s heat weapon is real and painful. Here’s what it does.]

The people suffering Havana syndrome symptoms lacked injuries that would match how a microwave weapon works.

“There’s a persistent myth that microwaves heat things from the inside out. Anyone who has heated a frozen dinner knows that this is not true. The outer part of the frozen food thaws first, because it absorbs the microwaves before they can reach the inner part,” wrote Cheryl Rofer, retired Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist, in response to the NAS study. She added: “if a directed microwave beam hit people’s brains, we would expect to see visible effects on the skin and flesh. None of that has accompanied Havana syndrome.”

The new report suggests that, while there may be no single explanation for the symptoms, there are likely other, identifiable causes. One possibility, instead of a weapon causing the harm, was simply the conditions of people in an embassy breathing air passing through clogged ducts, reports the Post. 

Embassy work can be difficult and stressful, to say nothing of the decades when US embassies were regularly violently targeted by insurgencies and terror groups. This includes the US Embassy in South Vietnam in 1965 by the Viet Cong, the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy by Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon, and attacks on the US Embassy in Afghanistan in 2011, 2012, and 2019, among others. In light of that history, it can be easy to understand how worsening health might feel like symptoms of an invisible siege. While the report likely rules out known weapons and deliberate attack, it doesn’t negate the fact that people can experience harmful symptoms from sources other than weapons.

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On February 14, geostationary communications satellite company Astranis announced that it had been awarded a contract with the US Space Force worth over $10 million. The contract is to first demonstrate a secure comms technique on the satellite hardware in a terrestrial test setting, and also includes the possibility of testing it in space. 

Space remains a useful place for countries to place sensors that look down on other nations. Many of these satellites reside in low Earth orbit, or about 1,200 miles above the surface, which is easier for satellites to reach and lets satellites circle the globe rapidly. Geostationary orbit, which is 22,200 miles above ground, is harder to get to. Plus, satellites at all altitudes risk having signals jammed, or being disrupted by other objects in orbit, which has led the US military to pursue satellite constellations, or formations of smaller satellites, as a way to ensure that some functionality persists in the event of attack or disaster. 

“We build small satellites for higher orbits, starting with geostationary orbit, which is quite a higher orbit,” says Astranis co-founder and CEO John Gedmark. “It’s the special orbit where you can park a single satellite over a part of the world or over a country and provide continuous service with just that one satellite.”

Over Alaska and Peru

Geostationary satellites have been used to provide communications and television broadcasts, and Astranis’ primary aim for both commercial and military customers is to use smaller geostationary satellites to provide continuous broadband-level internet connections. For two demonstrations of commercial uses, Gedmark points to upcoming launches placing satellites above Alaska (scheduled for early April), and one later this year that will put a satellite above Peru.

“This is a satellite that’ll go up over Peru and also provide some coverage in Ecuador. We will basically allow them to go and deploy and upgrade a number of cell towers out in some of the most remote parts of the country,” said Gedmark. “There’s a lot of parts of Peru where the terrain is just super rough and pretty extreme in the jungles, they have Andes mountains, they have a lot of things that make it very hard to get connectivity out to some of these remote areas.”

In both these places, the satellites will augment existing telecommunications infrastructure on the ground, letting remote towers connect through space instead of over land. Peru, like Alaska, contains vast stretches of varying terrain, where infrastructure such as wires, cables, or fiber internet connections can be hard to place. Freestanding cell phone towers can be set up, powered locally, and then route their communications through satellites instead of over-land wires, bringing 3G and 4G levels of internet to places people could not previously access it.

For military use

Those same traits, for connecting local rural infrastructure to wider data networks through space, are part of what makes Astranis satellites so appealing to the military.

“We realized that the military has this real problem right now for milsatcom and for some other capabilities around resiliency, right? They are really dependent on a small handful of these giant geo satellites, some of which cost billions of dollars. And those satellites are, as we like to quote General Hyten on this, big fat and juicy targets,” said Gedmark.

In 2017, Air Force General John Hyten was the head of US Strategic Command, and announced that he would no longer “support the development any further of large, big, fat, juicy targets,” referring to those types of satellites. Hyten retired in 2021, but the Department of Defense has continued to push for smaller satellites to fill the skies, as a more resilient option than all-in-one massive satellites of the present. Many of these constellations are aimed at low earth orbit.

“Without getting into specific pricing, we could put up about a dozen or more of our satellites for the cost of one of the big ones,” says Gedmark. Since 2018, Astranis has attracted venture funding on its premise to put satellites into geostationary orbit. 

“It’s hard to design all the electronics for the harsh radiation environment of geo, you’re right in the thick of the Van Allen belts,” says Gedmark. The Van Allen belts contain charged particles that can damage satellites, so anything built to survive has to endure the heavy ion strikes and radiation dosages inherent to the region. “These higher orbits are harder to get to, so you have to solve that with some clever onboard propulsion strategies. We solve that by having an electric propulsion system, and having an ion thruster on board.”

When launched, the satellites are aimed towards geostationary orbit, and then use their own power to reach and maneuver in space. Gedmark says the satellites are designed to stay in geostationary orbit for between 8 and 10 years, with the ability to relocate up to 30 times in that period.

The speed at which the satellites can be maneuvered from one orbit to another depends on how much fuel the satellite operators are willing to expend, with repositioning possible in days, though Gedmark expects moving to a new location in weeks will be the more typical use case. 

Once in orbit, the satellites need to communicate securely. The Protected Tactical Waveform is a communications protocol and technique developed by the US military, which Astranis aims to demonstrate can be run on the software-defined radio of its satellites. (A software-defined radio  is a computer that can change its parameters for transmitting and receiving information with code, while a more traditional radio requires analog hardware, like modulators and amplifiers, to encode and decode information from radio signals.) 

The Protected Tactical Waveform is “a set of techniques that are programmed into the radio so it can automatically avoid jamming and interference,” says Gedmark. “We’re gonna start by doing that as a demo in our lab, and then with the future satellites do that as an on orbit demo.”

Because this protocol will run on software radio, rather than hardware that is fixed on form once launched, it likely means that should the need arise, Astranis could adapt existing commercial satellites to carry the Protected Tactical Waveform, while it remains in orbit, facilitating the surge communications as events arise and to meet military need.

For now, the promise is that private investment in communication tech can yield a tool useful both for expanding internet connectivity across the globe, and for providing communications to US military forces in the field faster than it would take to set up ground-based infrastructure. For the Space Force, which is tasked with ensuring reliable communications across the heavens, more durable satellites that can be maneuvered as needed would allow it to redeploy assets across the skies to win wars on Earth.  

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Today, President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced that the country would suspend participation in New START, the last standing major arms control treaty between the country and the United States. Putin clarified that the suspension was not a withdrawal—but the suspension itself represents a clear deterioration of trust and nuclear stability between the countries with the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. 

Putin’s remarks precede by a few days the anniversary of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, an entirely chosen war that has seen some concrete Russian gains, while many of Russia’s biggest advances have been repulsed and overtaken. At present, much of the fighting is in the form of grinding, static warfare along trenches and defended positions in Ukraine’s east. It is a kind of warfare akin to the bloody fronts of World War I, though the presence of drones and long-range precision artillery lend it an undeniably modern character.

Those modern weapons, and the coming influx of heavy tanks from the United States and other countries to Ukraine, put Putin’s remarks in some more immediate context. While New START is specifically an agreement between the United States and Russia over nuclear arsenals, the decision to suspend participation comes against the backdrop of the entirely conventional war being fought by Russia against Ukraine, with US weapons bolstering the Ukrainian war effort.

A follow-up statement from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified that the country would still notify the United States about any launches of Intercontinental or Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs and SLBMs), and would expect the same in reverse, in accordance with a 1988 agreement between the US and the USSR. That suggests there is at least some ongoing effort to not turn a suspension of enforcement into an immediate crisis.

To understand why the suspension matters, and what future there is for arms control, it helps to understand the agreement as it stands.

What is New START?

New START is an agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation, which carries a clunky formal name: The Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. The short-form name, which is not really a true acronym, is instead a reference to START 1, or the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, was in effect from 1991 to 2009, and which New START replaced in 2011. New START is set to expire in 2026, unless it is renewed by both countries.

New START is the latest of a series of agreements limiting the overall size of the US and Russian (first Soviet) nuclear arsenals, which at one point each measured in the tens of thousands of warheads. Today, thanks largely to mutual disarmament agreements and the limits outlined by New START, the US and Russia have arsenals of roughly 5,400 and 6,000 warheads, respectively. Of those, the US is estimated to have 1,644 deployed strategic weapons, a term that means nuclear warheads on ICBMs or at heavy bomber bases, presumably ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Russia is estimated to have around 1,588 deployed strategic weapons.

As the Start Department outlines, the treaty limits both countries to 700 total deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. (Bombers are counted under the treaty in the same way as a missile with one warhead, though nuclear-capable bombers like the B-52, B-2, and soon to be B-21 can carry multiple warheads.) In addition, the treaty sets a limit of 1,550 nuclear warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments, as well as 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments

In its follow-up statement to the suspension of New START, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified it would stick to the overall cap on warheads and launch systems as outlined in the treaty.

What will change is the end of inspections, which have been central to the “trust but verify” structure of arms control agreements between the US and Russia for decades. The terms of New START allow both countries to inspect deployed and non-deployed strategic systems (like missiles or bombers) up to 10 times a year, as well as non-deployed systems up to eight times a year. These on-site inspections were halted in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and their resumption is the most likely act threatened by this change in posture.

It is unclear, yet, if this suspension means the end of the treaty forever, though Putin taking such a step certainly doesn’t bode well for its continued viability. Should New START formally end, some analysts fear it may usher in a new era of nuclear weapons production, and a rapid expansion of nuclear arsenals.

While that remains a possibility, the hard limits of nuclear production, as well as decades of faded production expertise in both Russia and the United States, mean such a restart may be more intensive, in time and resources, than immediately feared. Both nations have spent the last 30 years working on production of conventional forces. Ending an arms control treaty over nuclear weapons would be a gamble, suggesting nuclear weapons are the only tool that can provide security where conventional arms have failed. 

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Since February 4, United States aircraft have shot down four objects passing over North American skies. The first of these, a massive high-altitude surveillance balloon traced to China, meandered over the country for four days before becoming the first air-to-air kill for the high-end F-22 stealth jet fighter. The other three, however, have not yet been identified, except for their size, altitude, and ability to stay aloft seemingly on wind power alone.

President Joe Biden addressed the topic in remarks delivered today. “Last week, in the immediate aftermath of the incursion by China’s high altitude balloon, our military, through the North American Aerospace Defense command, so called NORAD, closely scrutinized our airspace, including enhancing our radar to pick up more slow-moving objects above our country and around the world,” he said. “In doing so they tracked three unidentified objects—one in Alaska, Canada, and over Lake Huron in the Midwest.” 

“They acted in accordance with established parameters for determining how to deal with unidentified aerial objects in US airspace,” he added. “At their recommendation, I gave the order to take down the three objects, due to hazards to civilian commercial air traffic, and because we could not rule out the surveillance risk of sensitive facilities.”

[Related: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

Given the short timeline between the tracking of China’s high altitude balloon and the following shootdowns, expanding the aperture of existing sensors was the most expected way to widen what swaths of the sky could be observed. One effect of that is suddenly detecting objects previously unobserved. Notably, Biden highlighted that the newly found objects were slow-moving. NORAD’s sensors, for decades trained to track fast moving planes and missiles, are not calibrated by default to look for balloons, which drift through the sky.

“Our military, and the Canadian military, are seeking to recover the debris so we can learn more about these three objects,” said Biden. “We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were but nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country.”

Minutes before Biden gave his remarks, Aviation Week published a plausible explanation of the objects. The story notes that the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a hobbyist club, had tracked a high-altitude pico balloon they had launched to the coast of Alaska at just under 40,000 feet on February 10. Predicted wind direction would have brought that balloon over the Yukon on February 11.

That, notes Aviation Week, was “the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.”

“Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade,” continues the story. “At any given moment, several dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons. The launch teams seldom recover their balloons.”

While Biden did not name what the downed objects were, he said that the intelligence community’s most likely estimate was that these three objects were most likely balloons with ties to private companies, recreation, or research institutions.

“I want to be clear: We don’t have any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky, we’re now just seeing more of them partially because of the steps we’ve taken to increase our radar, and we have to keep adapting to dealing with these challenges,” he said.

While the larger surveillance balloon from China was easier to track based on its mass alone, the existence of small, potentially hobbyist or commercial balloons riding high-altitude winds appears to come as something of a surprise. 

“In the U.S., academic and commercial balloons have to include transponders that let the FAA know where they are at all times,”Jeff Jackon, a US representative from North Carolina, shared in his notes on a congressional briefing with NORAD on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). “These UAPs did not appear to have transponders, and that was also a factor in the decision to shoot them down.”

Transponders are a key tool for larger aircraft, as they make air traffic visible to people in the sky and on the ground. For something as light as a hobbyist research balloon aiming at high altitude, the weight of a transponder and the batteries to power it could strain the craft. Finding a different solution, one that allows air traffic controllers and pilots to avoid such balloons, is a likely first step to ensuring the skies remain safe and the objects don’t go unidentified. 

Transponders wouldn’t solve the problem of balloons sent with malicious intent, but it does at least allow those with purely peaceful purposes to be affirmatively identified as safe. Biden outlined a set of policies to avoid shootdowns like those experienced this month. One improvement would be an accessible inventory of objects in the airspace above the US, kept up to date. Another would be improving the ability of the US to detect uncrewed objects, like small high-altitude balloons. Changing the rules for launching and maintaining objects would also help the US get hobbyist launches, like that from the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, on its radar, metaphorically and perhaps literally. Finally, Biden suggested the US work with other countries to set out better global norms for airspace.  

“We’re not looking for a new Cold War,” said Biden. “But we will compete, and we will responsibly manage that competition so it doesn’t veer into conflict.”

In the history of high-altitude surveillance from the last Cold War, efforts to spy by balloon and plane led to crisis. The rules and norms allowing countries to share space, instead, allowed countries to keep spying on each other, while also fostering tremendous economic and scientific developments alongside the spycraft.

Watch the address, below:

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So far in February, the United States has shot down four objects in territorial skies. The first of these was a balloon, traced to the People’s Republic of China, which entered US airspace over Montana on February 1 and was shot down off the coast of South Carolina February 4. Since then, three other objects have been spotted and destroyed, including most recently an octagon-shaped flying object above Lake Huron. The new frequency of sightings, as well as the unknown uses and origins of several of the craft, have led to public confusion, and two big questions: What exactly are the objects, and why were they not detected until now?

“I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no — again, no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity — (laughter) — with these recent takedowns,” Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a February 13 briefing. “Again, there is no indication of aliens or [extra]terrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.  Wanted to make sure that the American people knew that, all of you knew that. And it was important for us to say that from here because we’ve been hearing a lot about it.”

That the objects remain unknown but terrestrial in origin fits into the broader pattern of Unidentified Flying Objects and, more recently, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Pilots and sensors have certainly been observing mysterious items in flight, but the challenges of discerning what, exactly, they are seeing, is real, as sensors are only built to study known objects. 

In the late 1940s, following the first Flying Saucer panic in the United States, the Department of Defense even reached out to film-and-camera maker Eastman Kodak, to try and develop a plane-mounted camera specifically for photographing unidentified objects. The program was ultimately abandoned because the task was a bad fit for the technology: it’s hard to design a new sensor around detecting objects with unknown properties. Better to use existing sensors, and try and discern the reality of observations from what is already on hand.

One way to increase coverage is by expanding the aperture of what sensors flag as worth of alert. This is, at least in part, likely related to the detection of the three other objects identified by the US and Canada and shot down over the US this month.

“Now, in light of the Chinese balloon program and this recent incursion into our airspace, the United States and Canada, through NORAD, have been more closely scrutinizing that airspace, including enhancing our radar capabilities, which — as the Commander of NORTHCOM and NORAD, General VanHerck, said last night — may at least partly explain the increase in the objects that have been detected,” said John Kirby, spokesperson for the National Security Council, at the same February 13 briefing. 

Increasing sensor sensitivity means expanding the scope of what a system, like a radar, is trained to detect. The change will allow it to include other signals that it has been set to filter out as irrelevant previously. Often, there is a good reason for this. In 2015, after an activist flew a gyrocopter onto the east lawn of the US Capitol, Congress held hearings to understand why his small flying machine wasn’t detected. Toggling area radar to be sensitive enough to see a gyrocopter would also mean getting alerts from flocks of birds, or low-lying rainclouds. What radar “sees” is reflected radio signals, and making that useful means prioritizing for known threats, like jets and missiles.

NORAD, or the North American Aerospace Defense Command, is a joint undertaking by the United States and Canada to watch for potential attacks coming from over the horizon, especially from the North Pole but including skies more broadly. NORAD was started in 1958, in the early Cold War, to watch skies for Soviet bombers loaded with atomic warheads, and expanded to focus on watching for missiles and other threats.

In the popular imagination, NORAD is best known for annually tracking the imagined flight path of Santa Claus every December 24th, a long-running public relations coup that finally found a palatable way to sell ever-watchful aerial defenses to a public worried about nuclear armageddon. In October, the National Park Service nominated a former Defense Early Warning line site, or early NORAD radar station, to be a national landmark.

It was NORAD who tested the security of DC airspace after the 2015 gyrocopter incident, and it was NORAD that tracked and alerted US fighters to the aerial object off the coast of Alaska, before fighters shot it down. 

“There are no active tracks today, but the professionals at NORAD will continue to do their important work,” said Kirby. The three objects detected after the first balloon were assessed by the White House to lack a “kinetic threat” to people on the ground, as it was determined to not be sending communications signals, and to lack an onboard crew.

Kirby did not rule out the possibility that the objects were surveillance tools, but noted that “They weren’t being maneuvered. It was basically — they were been being driven by the wind.”

The recent spate of shoot-downs, and expanded sensitivity of sensors, means it may be possible that more are still to come. If these are deliberately wind-born craft lofted into US skies, ones already launched before the shoot-down may still be meandering over. Given the fate of the known large balloon and the threat other wind-borne objects, it might be reasonable to expect a pause in launches, as anyone previously putting balloons up on the premise they’ll be undetected confronts the reality of a more expansive surveillance aperture for aerial objects.

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On February 3, Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder confirmed that the United States was sending a type of munition called Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs to Ukraine, among other equipment and weapons. The bombs will expand what Ukraine can do with existing weapons, and will fit into an overall buildup of armaments that should allow Ukraine to more effectively pursue its war to repel the Russian invasion, which began in February of last year.

“This gives them a longer-range capability,” said Ryder, who added that the weapons will help Ukraine “conduct operations in defense of their country and to take back their sovereign territory in Russian-occupied areas.”

The GLSDB, developed by American defense giant Boeing and Swedish defense manufacturer Saab, is a combination of a bomb with wings and a rocket engine. The rocket engines are the same as those used for boosters in an artillery rocket called the M26 Multiple Launch Rocket System. What the GLSDB adds on top of that rocket booster is a 250-pound bomb with a winged guidance system. Those wings fold out in flight, taking the weapon from a diameter of 9.5 inches to a flying bomb with a wingspan over 5 feet. 

In other words, this bomb launches from a tube like a rocket, flies like a little plane, and then explodes like a bomb. That sets it apart from other bombs, which are dropped out of planes, or other artillery rounds, which arc back to the ground after launch. 

The bomb features inertial guidance, which can plot the bomb’s path based on distance and direction traveled since launch, as well as GPS guidance. To protect against electronic interference, the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs include features to block jamming, and to block spoofing, or the injection of false coordinates into its navigation. Against sophisticated Russian electronic warfare tools, ensuring that bombs travel the paths intended is important.

But what really sets the GLSDB apart from other artillery rounds is the range: 93 miles, or 150 kilometers. Firing guided rockets, HIMARS have a range of 43 miles. The GLSDB more than doubles that range. Artillery can be useful for winning fights on static fronts, as it punishes hostile advances and can counter enemy artillery. Longer range artillery also lets Ukrainian forces attack positions further away from the front lines, especially supply depots and ammunition stockpiles. When Ukraine launched its counter-offensives in fall 2022, the increased range of HIMARs made it hard for Russian defenders to hold territory, and also denied supplies to other reinforcing Russian units. 

“We’ve been focused on several key areas in the last few months to support Ukraine, specifically air defense capabilities, armor capabilities, long-range fires capabilities, and then combined with training in order to enable them to have the ability to conduct combined arms operations,” said Ryder.

The announcement of the GLSDB, described plainly as “precision-guided rockets,” came with a longer list of further material aid to the war from the United States. This includes ammunition for HIMARS, for other artillery, and for mortars, a small, soldier-portable weapon that can hurl bombs over obstacles and into trenches. The notice included anti-personnel weapons like Claymores, a close cousin of land mines, and heavy machine guns. Apart from the rockets, these weapons would all be familiar in form, generally speaking, to soldiers fighting in the trenches of World War I. (Rocket artillery dates to World War II.) Given the static fronts and held trenches in the Donbas, and especially around the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, it is a familiar style of warfare.

What is newer are tools like thermal imagery sights paired to machine guns, which give users a powerful edge in night battles. Then there are MRAPs, or Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, which were heavily used by the United States to protect soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan from roadside bombs; those are being sent to Ukraine where they can serve as useful transports especially in areas that might have landmines or unexploded bombs.

Counter-drone tools and ammunition, designed to spot the small flying scouts from observing soldiers in the field, are a modern reality paired with an older style of warfare. These, alongside anti-tank missiles and anti-air weapons, fit into the broader combined arms package prepared by the US and other countries for Ukraine. Following on the heels of January’s big push to commit heavy armored tanks to Ukraine, the nation should be in a better position to launch counter-offensives and drive back the invading forces.

Weapons like the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb, which extend the range of how and where Ukraine can strike, should give its military added depth and punch as it chooses battles in the coming months.

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On February 4, a pilot in an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet scored the plane’s first air-to-air kill, firing a missile at the Chinese surveillance balloon drifting off the coast of South Carolina. The shot, an AIM-9X Sidewinder fired from 58,000 feet above the ground, hit the balloon at an altitude of up to 65,000 feet, and ended a week-long incident in which the military, the public, and Congress all followed the course of the balloon with great interest.

“The balloon, which was being used by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] in an attempt to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States, was brought down above US territorial waters,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a written statement. 

The balloon entered the sky above Montana on February 1, where it caused a halt to flights in and out of Billings International Airport. For four days, from Wednesday to Saturday, the balloon followed the wind across the US, until ultimately meeting its missile-induced end over the ocean. 

At a press conference February 2, a senior defense official noted that the US had tracked the balloon and “had custody” of it ever since it entered the country’s airspace. This includes previous fly-bys of the balloon with F-22s over Montana, although the decision was made not shoot it down then out of a concern for risk to those below.

The defense official repeatedly identified the balloon as created and operated by China, acknowledging when a reporter highlighted that Montana houses siloed nuclear ICBMs. The location of the silos is by design not secret—part of Cold War nuclear strategy that dictated the placement of the silos set them far away from dense urban centers, in part to ensure some incoming nuclear missiles would aim for the silos instead of cities. The day-to-day operation of missile silos can still contain some fresh information, so it is possible that is what was targeted by the balloon’s sensors.

[Related: The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride]

“Our best assessment at the moment is that whatever the surveillance payload is on this balloon, it does not create significant value added over and above what the [People’s Republic of China] is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low-Earth orbit,” said the official. “But out of an abundance of caution, we have taken additional mitigation steps.  I’m not going to go into what those are.  But we know exactly where this balloon is, exactly what it is passing over. And we are taking steps to be extra vigilant so that we can mitigate any foreign intelligence risk.”

At the same briefing, the official noted that this was not the first time “that you had a balloon of this nature cross over the continental United States.  It has happened a handful of other times over the past few years, to include before this administration.”

While this event garnered widespread national fascination—it was even fodder for a skit on Saturday Night Live—the use of balloons for gathering intelligence dates back centuries. Here’s what to know about their history. 

Trial balloons

Balloons have been used in military surveillance since 1794, when revolutionary France employed them to watch movements of people and cannons from above. In the US Civil War, the Union and Confederate forces used balloons, flying as high as 1,000 feet, to document activity below. Communication with balloons then was tricky, with balloonists using either signal flags or telegraph wires to report what they observed. These balloons were tethered, allowing crews on the ground to draw the balloons back into place. In this sense, the balloons were more like deployable observation towers, rather than true scouting vehicles.

Later, World War I saw balloons used to photograph battlefields below. While film took time to develop, the long static fronts of the Great War ensured that such information was useful, or at least useful if the balloonists collecting it were not shot down by early fighter planes. In World War One, Frank Luke Jr was a US Army pilot who earned the nickname “Arizona Balloon Buster” for shooting down 18 German observation balloons. 

World War I also saw the use of dirigibles, or rigid airships, which flew as bombers as well as spotters. Airships could move under their own power and without tethers, allowing them deadly access to the skies above enemy lines. 

In World War II, Japan built high-altitude balloons that were lofted into the newly discovered jet stream, and then carried by the high-altitude wind across the pacific. More than 9,000 FuGo balloons were launched into the jet stream, complete with incendiary bombs designed to burn down cities and forests. The FuGo attacks were limited in effectiveness because they relied on winds that were strongest in November through March, when the Pacific Northwest was wet and cold, limiting the ability of fires to spread. Indeed, apart from fires, the only deaths directly attributed to FuGo attacks were that of a picnicking family, investigating a mysterious device.

Eyes floating in the sky

Long-range balloon surveillance is limited by how the balloon can be directed and what information it can communicate. Weather balloons, launched hourly, record atmospheric conditions. The famous 1947 balloon crash at Roswell, New Mexico, was of an instrument carrying acoustic sensors, designed to listen for the sounds of Soviet nuclear detonations.

[Related: Is the truth out there? Decoding the Pentagon’s latest UFO report.]

One reason to use balloons is that they can carry large payloads, as a lighter-than-air body of sufficient size floats in the sky, instead of needing to generate lift. The US general responsible for North America described the balloon as “up to 200 feet tall, with a payload the size of a jetliner.”

As for what the balloon was actually recording, that remains to be seen. It is possible that its high-altitude flight allowed for greater surveillance of radio and other wireless transmissions than can a satellite, though that is more speculative than proven.

Recovery of the downed balloon, and especially its sensor package, could prove revelatory, though it should be assumed that any sensitive information and technology taken into military possession will be classified, only parts of which may be selectively released. Given the widespread interest of other militaries in developing surveillance balloons, as well as the revelation that these overflights have happened before, it is likely that the modern balloon race is only just beginning. 

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On January 26, Russian politician Dmitry Rogozin claimed in an interview that the country’s robotic Marker Uncrewed Ground Vehicles will be deployed in Ukraine as a tool to counter tanks. The Marker is a long-in-development and high-tech concept, designed to explore how robots could work together with humans on the battlefield. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, and as Ukraine prepares to receive armored vehicles, including tanks, from other countries, Marker appears to have been moved from conceptual promise to being touted as a wonder weapon. 

The Marker UGV dates back to at least 2019, when it was promoted as a symbol of the modern technological prowess of the Russian military. While Russia had already developed armed drones, ground robots typically took the form of mine clearing machines like the Uran-6. With treads and with a turret, the Marker featured in glossy produced videos with a rock beat and a machine gun swivel that seemed to follow the commands of a remote human spotter.

Marker was developed by Russia’s Advanced Research Foundation, which is a rough analog to DARPA in the US. Early work on Marker made it a tool for exploring concepts in robots, remote control, and autonomy, with the assumption that later, other companies would develop new tools and weapons based on the research done with Marker.

As recently as January 2022, Russian state-owned media described Marker as being used to patrol a spaceport and work alongside quadcopter drones. Marker was one of several robots promoted as major technological advances, all against the backdrop of Russia mobilizing tanks and soldiers for the invasion of Ukraine that came February 24. In the eleven months since the invasion, Russia’s major advances have been halted, and on multiple fronts turned back. Now, with news that Ukraine stands ready to receive armored transports and tanks, Marker is back to being a darling of Russian media.

Meeting its Marker  

On January 15, Rogozin claimed to news service TASS that Marker robots would be tested in Ukraine soon. While Rogozin has no official capacity in the Russian government, he has held multiple high-level positions within the Russian government. In July 2022, he was dismissed as the head of Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, and has since rebranded himself as a leader of a volunteer group called the “Tsar’s Wolves” whose aim is improving the technology of Russian forces. Testing Marker in Ukraine would mark a debut for the device, and a task it was never quite designed for.

“This would be a first combat deployment for the Marker UGV, and yes, it wasn’t really tested in combat conditions before,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “It was tested in a rather controlled environment, even when it had to navigate autonomously through a forested environment in late 2021. There is of course a possibility of a classified series of tests that could have taken place, but as far as all info about this UGV, there was no real combat stress test.”

Deploying an untested robot into combat, should it happen, reads as more of a stunt than battle-changing tool. In earlier tests and demonstrations, what set Marker apart was its ability to carry machine guns and anti-tank weapons, then use them at the discretion of protected or hidden soldiers. Powerful cameras and sensors could make it a useful spotter and shooter, though the role necessarily entails exposing the robot to return fire, risking the integrity of the machine. At a production level, that is a loss that a military can absorb. But with just a handful of test platforms, it is a big gamble for a flashy demonstration.

“Marker has limited autonomy capability for movement and target selection, although testing that in a complex battlefield space is probably different than trying to recreate such a test in pre-2022 trials. This is the crux of the problem in using such UGVs – real combat presents many unpredictable situations that cannot be all tested out beforehand, so it’s also likely that Markers will be remote-controlled to avoid losses,” says Bendett. “And there is also a significant PR element here.”

The possible fronts where Marker could be deployed in Ukraine are many, from old trenches in the Donbas region that Russia has contested since 2014, to fierce fighting around the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in the east, or even along Russian-held front lines northeast of Crimea. Regardless of where it is deployed, it is unlikely to be effective against heavy armor.

Rogozin highlighted that Marker exists in two forms. The sensor-and-drone equipped scout is designed as a useful spotter. Rogozin pitched the armed version, complete with anti-tank missiles, as an answer to Abrams and Leopard tanks. Says Bendett: “The recon version seems more plausible [for use] than a straight up contest against two of the most powerful tanks in the world.”

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In the fall of last year, DARPA announced that it was looking for new ways to keep satellites operating in the lower edges of space. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency exists to explore blue-sky technologies, and create innovations that make new tools possible. Project Daedalus, announced in October, is a way to manage satellites beyond the blue sky of Earth, but not much further. The program solicitation is a fascinating portrait of the technology challenges DARPA wants to tackle to expand what can be done in orbit.

DARPA defined Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) as orbits less than 450 km, or roughly 280 miles, in altitude. Low Earth Orbit, by contrast, is 2,000 km or 1,200 miles. The benefits of being in Very Low Earth Orbit include, according to DARPA, “improved spatial resolution for optical imaging, higher signal-to-noise ratios for radar and lidar systems, improved geospatial position accuracy.” These all let cameras and other sensors on the satellite better observe activity on Earth below, and communicate those observations more quickly and accurately. 

In addition, DARPA suggests that it’s cheaper and easier to put a satellite into VLEO, noting “greater launch vehicle insertion capability, and mass, volume, and cost savings.” Even more importantly than all of that, because VLEO is so close to Earth and so far from other satellites, the low satellites can get away with less radiation protection, and are generally out of the path of most orbital debris.

The announcement also notes that “compliance burdens with Interagency Space Debris Coordination Committee guidelines are reduced compared to higher orbit,” likely in part because the very low orbit keeps the satellites generally out of the more heavily trafficked orbital lanes.

Debris in war and peace

Orbital debris is a compounding problem for satellites and especially satellites used by the military. While space is vast, orbit is not, and the useful slices of orbits are increasingly populated by human-made objects. 

Some of these objects are purely scientific, oriented out towards the stars beyond, while many are built to serve terrestrial ends. Communications satellites, surveillance satellites, and even observation satellites used for documenting weather below are all potential targets should a shooting war break out into space. Anti-satellite missiles, demonstrated by nations like the United States, Russia, China, and India, prove the capability is widespread.

Destroying a satellite with a missile creates debris, from the remains of the missile to the wreck of the satellite, and this debris persists in orbit. In November 2021, Russia destroyed its own Kosmos satellite, scattering debris throughout orbit, some of which continues to persist.

Even without the threat of destruction in war, when existing debris collides with satellites, it can create new debris, further imperiling all objects in orbit. The risk of these collisions increases with every new object put into orbit, because debris can travel into multiple directions from a collision, it can imperil satellites at further and closer orbits, too.

Flying close to the thermosphere

Orbital space has friction, especially the closer a satellite is to the atmosphere. Satellites in Low Earth Orbit experience atmospheric drag, as the gaseous particles bound to Earth’s atmosphere expand and contract in cycle with the sun. This in turn can increase the friction on a satellite, which will require either orbital correction by onboard engines or an orbit degrading until the satellite re-enters the atmosphere proper. The thermosphere, or the area starting about 90 km (56 miles) in altitude, extends “to between 500 and 1,000 km (311 to 621 miles) above our planet,” a range that fluctuates.

All of Very Low Earth Orbit is within the thermosphere. That makes the challenges of keeping a satellite in Very Low Earth Orbit unique, and suggests why DARPA might devote a program to mastering those challenges. These challenges include atmospheric and aerodynamic drag, space weather, charging the spacecraft’s batteries despite being lower than low orbit, and even atomic oxygen erosion, or the phenomena by which the O2 common lower in the atmosphere is replaced by single-atom oxygen in the thermosphere. Atomic oxygen can break chemical bonds, a problem for satellites made, as they are, out of chemical compounds.

In Daedelus, DARPA set out to demonstrate new technology that could enable sustained long-term Very Low Earth Orbit operations, despite these unique hazards. Should such a program succeed, it could allow for a new layer of satellite infrastructure, pointing narrowly targeted sensors down at the world below.

The Daedalus program itself is classified, with solicitations noting that contractors need to have security clearances for facilities and secret clearances for personnel working on the project. The program borrows its name from the Greek myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun on waxen wings and thus perished in uncontrolled descent. Icarus’ more cautious father, Daedalus, flew lower, and survived.

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On January 17, DARPA announced the next steps of a program to create an aircraft designed to fly entirely on control surfaces that lack the moving parts that airplanes typically use to maneuver. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, specializes in blue-sky visions, investing in research towards creating new possibilities for technology. In this program, it seeks to change how aircraft alter direction in the sky.

The program is called Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors, or CRANE. DARPA first started the program in 2019, with a request for proposals to “design, build, and flight test a new and novel aircraft that incorporates Active Flow Control (AFC) technologies as a primary design consideration.”

AFC is a kind of control paradigm that replaces moving parts like ailerons and rudder of an aircraft. Planes change their positions by redirecting airflow with ailerons attached to the wings, an elevator at the tail, and a rudder. These controls are what let planes roll side to side, pitch upwards to take off and downwards to land, as well as or yaw left to right. Extendable slats and flaps on wings can also allow planes to generate more lift at low speeds, and to slow the plane as it angles down for a landing. (Here’s more on exactly how wings generate lift.)

With “Active Flow Control,” aircraft can use plasma actuators or synthetic jet actuators to move air, instead of relying on physical surfaces. With plasma actuators, this is achieved through changing the electrical charge of air passing over the actuators mounted in the wing, in turn changing the flow of that air. Meanwhile, synthetic jets can inject air into the airflow over the wing, changing lift. In 2019, NASA patented a wing control system that combined both plasma and synthetic jet actuators, with the goal of creating actuators without any moving parts, and which were “essentially maintenance free.”

In DARPA’s 2019 call for proposals, it emphasized that this technology could lead to “elimination of moving control surfaces for stability & control,” improvements in “takeoff and landing performance, high lift flight, thick airfoil efficiency, and enhanced high altitude performance.”

With improved takeoffs and landing, such a control system could allow for “extreme short takeoff and landing” (ESTOL), where a plane or drone operates from runways even smaller than those present used for short takeoff and landing. The Department of Defense and NATO define short takeoff as being able to land on a runway 1,500 feet long, with a 50-foot obstacle at either end. 

Because these new flow controls could increase the angle of lift for takeoff and improved braking for descent, it’s possible that a plane with it could land in an even smaller area. That expands how and where such planes can operate, and matters especially with future wars and operations at sea, where the military has to bring its own runways on ships, or on small islands.

Another area where these controls can help is in making it harder for aircraft to be observed, as it reduces the number of surfaces on an aircraft that would reflect radar signals. The controls can also be quieter, minimizing detection from audio sensors, and can improve aircraft stability and lift at high altitudes. The controls also allow for thicker plane wings, which can hold more fuel.

In December, Aurora Flight Sciences (which is a part of Boeing) was awarded over $89 million for the CRANE program, or roughly the cost of a single F-35A stealth jet fighter. In Phase 1, which is already completed, Aurora created an aircraft that was able to use active flow control to demonstrate control in a wind tunnel test. Phase 2, which was announced this month, will focus on designing and developing the software and controls of an X-plane demonstrator that “can fly without traditional moving flight controls on the exterior of the wings and tail.”

Should DARPA decide to continue the contrast, there’s the option for Phase 3, in which DARPA will fly a 7,000 pound X-plane that incorporates active flow control and relies on it for controlled flight.

In starting the design from a new kind of control paradigm, DARPA hopes to spark new thinking about how planes can fly and maneuver. DARPA’s long record of X-plane design includes everything from long endurance drones to stealth aircraft to hypersonic designs, all of which have led to changes in military design and planning. The ability of aircraft to use active flow control to operate from smaller runways expands not just the areas where the military can fight, but even the size of ships that could launch long-flying drones. 

DARPA, on the innovation edge of research, has focused the project on making sure the technology can work in demonstration, first. Should it prove successful, it will be up to other parts of the military to best determine how they want to employ it.

Correction on Jan. 31, 2023: This article was updated to change “1,5000 feet long” to “1,500 feet long” and “active follow control” to “active flow control.”

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On January 19, the Department of Defense announced that it would send 90 Stryker Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) with 20 mine rollers to Ukraine, as part of a broader $2.5 billion package of aid. The Strykers will join Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles and a host of other equipment that will increase Ukraine’s ability to move with armor. 

Adding to the Strykers, Bradleys, and other equipment is now the distinct possibility that the US could send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, as both CNN and The Wall Street Journal are reporting. The US “could make an announcement as soon as this week” about those tanks, according to CNN. Meanwhile, Germany is reportedly preparing to announce the delivery of Leopard 2 tanks as well.

All this mobile armor—Strykers, Bradleys, tanks, and more—serve different roles on a battlefield. To understand this hodgepodge better, it is easiest to look at each component part.

What to know about Strykers, or armor for moving

The Stryker is an eight-wheeled armored transport, designed to fit in between the Army’s light vehicles (like Humvees) and heavier transports (like Bradleys). It is operated by a crew of two, with room for a nine-person squad of infantry to ride in the back. The basic model of a Stryker is lightly armed, with just a machine gun for shooting and smoke grenades to conceal the vehicle’s movement. There are eight Stryker variants, including ones armed with everything from anti-tank missiles to extra sensors or even a mortar artillery piece, fired through the flipped-open roof hatches.

The mine rollers mentioned in the release allow a Stryker to detonate explosives, like anti-tank landmines, that are triggered by the weight of heavy vehicles. These rollers, which can be mounted on the front of the vehicle, set the mines off before they are underneath the Stryker. Strykers, as wheeled vehicles, are especially dependent on roads, which are easy to cover with mines. Using a Stryker to clear mines lets the road become an open path not just for the Strykers, but for the whole armored column behind them.

[Related: The Army’s new light tank can venture where its beefier cousins can’t]

At a press conference on January 20, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that the US’s objective “is to provide the capability that Ukraine needs to be successful in the near term. And so you’ve heard us talk about two battalions of Bradley infantry fighting vehicles — very capable platform, [as well as] three battalions, or a brigade’s-worth of Strykers. So you add that up, that’s two brigades of combat power that the U.S. is providing, along with enablers and other things.”

In the US, a Brigade Combat Team is a formation of about 5,000 soldiers and about 300 vehicles, usually some mix of transports and tanks, or vehicles with heavy weapons. So far, the United States has promised Ukraine 109 Bradleys and 90 Strykers, which is two-thirds of the way to an armor brigade combat team, without the tanks. The US has also provided other vehicles, like 300 M113 Armored Personnel Carriers, an even more lightly armed and protected battlefield taxi than the Stryker. 

What to know about tanks, or armor for fighting

In order for an army to take advantage of armored transports, it needs to break through a defended line. That is the role tanks were built for, as heavy armor designed for fighting.

Tanks are in concept and execution over a century old. The first tanks were built to break the stalemate along Europe’s Western Front in World War I, where trenches, machine guns, explosives, and artillery made any assault horrific and bloody. Tanks, as literal moving armor, protected soldiers advancing behind them; with cannons and machine guns, tanks could devastate defenders. While tanks debuted in World War I, their use in World War II would shift the course of warfare. German tank doctrine, developed during the interwar era, prized armored formations that could punch through enemy lines, leaving defenses useless and routed around.

Today, tanks remain a vital part of the military effort, as both Ukraine and Russia employ their Soviet-inherited tanks against one another. Tanks remain vulnerable to dedicated anti-tank weapons, like Javelin missiles, as well as to attack from the air, like by planes or helicopters. And tanks are also vulnerable to other tanks. In other words, stopping a tank assault requires dedicated anti-tank weapons, which could include other tanks. Meanwhile, weapons that are useful at stopping other armored vehicles, like rocket-propelled grenades useful against Bradleys and Strykers, are more abundant, but will struggle against heavy armor.

The heavy and powerful M1 Abrams is optimized to run on jet fuel, which American logistics can regularly supply, but could be trickier for a military without as robust a resupply system as the United States. Meanwhile, the Leopard 2, made by and exported from Germany, is a diesel-powered tank used by the militaries of many NATO countries. Should Ukraine receive the tanks, they will enable the Ukrainian military to launch combined arms assault, with the mobility of tanks and armored transports shifting the battle. 

In brief, the Stryker is a transport that can protect passengers from machine gun fire. The Bradley is heavier armored transport with some weapons useful against other vehicles, and a tank like the M1 Abrams is built to destroy other heavy vehicles, while being protected from the same.

The stakes: Armored columns pick their battlefields

Ever since Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the United States and other countries have increased aid to that invaded country. This aid built in some cases on programs already in place, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, along with Russian occupation of the Donbas from 2014 to the present. But while the Donbas war was long-fought, it was geographically contained, over a fraction of the country, and involving somewhat static defensive lines for both sides. The present war was launched with a three-pronged invasion of Ukraine, with Russia at one point threatening Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv, the eastern metropolis of Kharkiv, and occupying the city of Kherson, at the mouth of the Dnipro river.

Today, much of Russia’s effort is aimed at capturing the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, in the Donbas. The nature of the war is such that the two sides can lock into grinding, gruesome fights over static positions, and then shift dramatically based on a collapse elsewhere in a front line. When Ukraine launched a counter-offensive in fall 2022, its armed forces did so with new weapons like US-supplied HIMARs rocket artillery, which destroyed Russian supplies at a great distance.

With an army in armored transports, like those provided by the US, Ukraine would be in a position to take advantage of any new gap in Russian defenses, moving behind established defenses and possibly causing a major shift in the war, like what happened in the fall of 2022. 

Update on Feb. 13, 2022. This story has been updated to clarify that M1 Abrams tanks are optimized to run on jet fuel. They don’t necessarily run on that fuel exclusively.

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On January 12, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs. The term “UAP,” which is largely synonymous with the original usage of Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO, is designed to be a broad category for reporting observed but unexplained sights in the sky, a kind of “see something, say something” for pilots. 

The report, mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act for 2022, includes the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was originally created within the Department of Defense in 2020 as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. “All domains” means the phenomena need not be flying in the sky, but could also occur at sea, in space, or on land. 

This is the second report on UAPs since the creation of the task force, following a preliminary report released in 2021. In the preliminary report from two years ago, the task force identified 144 sightings over the previous 17 years. In the new report, there are a total of 510 sightings, including those 144 already documented, 247 new ones made since the first report, and 119 reports of events prior to 2021 but that were not included in the initial assessment, for a total of 366 newly identified reports.

[Related: UFO research is stigmatized. NASA wants to change that.]

The majority of new reports come from US Navy and US Air Force “aviators and operators,” who saw the phenomena during regular operations, and then reported those sightings to the newly created appropriate channels, like the AARO. 

The official takeaway? “AARO’s initial analysis and characterization of the 366 newly-identified reports, informed by a multi-agency process, judged more than half as exhibiting unremarkable characteristics,” the document notes. Of those unremarkable reports: 26 were drones or drone-like, 163 were balloons or balloon-like, and six were clutter spotted in the sky.

That leaves 171 “uncharacterized and unattributed” remaining from the batch of newly identified reports, a group that is perhaps thought of more as unresolved than unexplainable. Of those, some “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis,” though anyone looking for that analysis in the report will be sorely disappointed.

Tracking, cataloging, and identifying unexplained—or at least not immediately explainable—phenomena is tricky work. It has created persistent problems for the military since the first panic over “flying saucers” in the summer of 1947 (more on Roswell in a moment), and it persists to this day. Part of the impetus for a task force to study UFOs, or UFOs under the UAP name, came from a series of leaked videos, later declassified by the military, showing what appear to be unusual objects in flight.

Lost in observation

One of the more famous UAP sightings this century is the “Tic Tac,” spotted by Navy pilots flying southwest of San Diego on November 14, 2004. The pilots captured video of the object, which appeared small and cylindrical, and changed direction in flight in an unusual way. This video was officially released by the Navy in 2020, but which had found its way onto the internet in 2007, and was the centerpiece of a New York Times story about UFO sightings in 2017. New documents released by the Navy on January 13 show that formal reports of the so-called Tic Tac never made it beyond the 3rd Fleet’s chain of command, effectively leaving the report stranded within part of the Navy. 

As PopSci sister publication The War Zone notes, “the Navy and other U.S. military officials have publicly acknowledged that there were serious issues in the past with the mechanisms available, or lack thereof, through which pilots could make such reports and do so without fear of being stigmatized.” The released documents show that, indeed, the pilots faced stigma for the report afterwards.

None of that explains what the object in the “Tic Tac” video is, or what other still-unidentified phenomena might actually be. But it does suggest that the existence of an office responsible for collecting such reports has made it easier for such phenomena to be collected and analyzed, rather than kept quiet by pilots afraid of ridicule or having their judgment questioned.

Everything unidentified is new again

Part of the challenge of thinking about UFOs, and now UAPs, is that by asking people to report unusual sightings, people may interpret what they see as directly related to what they are being asked to find. Tell someone to take a walk in the woods and keep their eye out for rodent sightings, and every shadow or scurrying creature becomes a possible identification. 

The Army observation balloon that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 was discovered almost a month before it was reported to local authorities. The summer of 1947, early in the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, saw a major “flying saucer” panic, as one highly publicized sighting led people across the nation to report unusual craft or objects. 

These reports eventually became the subject of study in Project Blue Book, an Air Force effort to categorize, demystify, and understand what exactly people were reporting. When the Air Force concluded Project Blue Book in 1969, it did so noting that 90 percent of UFOs were likely explainable as ordinary objects, like planets in twilight or airplanes at odd angles. 

As documents later declassified in the 1990s revealed, the military knew even more of the sightings to be explainable, such as backyard observers documenting US spy plane flights and reporting them to the government. The Roswell crash, which a military officer first identified as a flying saucer before the Army clarified a day later that it was a weather balloon, wasn’t precisely a weather balloon. The object was indeed a balloon, but it carried acoustic sensors designed to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. In other words, letting the public think an object is mysterious or unexplained is a good way of disguising something that’s explainable but should be secret.

[Related: UFO conspiracies can be more dangerous than you think]

In the decades following the conclusion of Project Blue Book, the military tried to debunk sightings, rather than catalog them. Today, the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office is to take the sightings seriously, and to encourage reporting, in case there are in fact important aircraft sightings that would otherwise be shrugged off. The advent of drones, stealth technologies, uncrewed sea vehicles, and advanced ways for someone to interfere with sensors all make it possible, if not always plausible, that a given UAP sighting could be a deliberate act by a hostile group or nation.

Still, as the report already attests, most sightings can be dismissed and known phenomena. Balloons, decades after Roswell, still catch light in unusual ways, and can look surreal on the ground.

One takeaway from the report hints that some of the phenomena could be due to people or sensors being mistaken or not working properly. “ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] and AARO [All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office] operate under the assumption that UAP reports are derived from the observer’s accurate recollection of the event and/or sensors that generally operate correctly and capture enough real data to allow initial assessments,” notes the report. “However, ODNI and AARO acknowledge that a select number of UAP incidents may be attributable to sensor irregularities or variances, such as operator or equipment error.”

The post Is the truth out there? Decoding the Pentagon’s latest UFO report. appeared first on Popular Science.

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This post has been updated with additional information. It was originally published on January 17.

The US Navy is adding more medical vessels to its fleet, to better meet the needs of the force across theaters. The next produced Expeditionary Fast Transports, a vessel type already in production, will be built with modifications to serve as medical ships when needed. 

After the medically modified transports are constructed, the next ship built will be a new dedicated medical vessel. This Expeditionary Medical Ship will be designed to offer medical care where larger hospital ships cannot go. Before the Navy builds this newer class, it will learn to fill the role by adapting a familiar frame.

Tucked away in the Navy’s 2023 Justification Book, a document that outlines the why and what of its budget requests, are two notes about the medical adaptation of these ships. Expeditionary Fast Transports (confusingly abbreviated EPF) “will have modifications to conduct a Role 2 Enhanced (R2E) Medical Transport mission which will include enhanced medical capabilities to support embarked Medical Military Detachment (MILDET) teams while retaining the ability to perform high-speed intra-theater sealift.” 

That means, in essence, that these will be medical-capable transports, but ones that can also do the workhorse job of moving people and goods from ship to shore and back.

The book also notes that after building a few modified transports, the next built “will be an Expeditionary Medical Ship (EMS) Variant,” which is the one that will be designed with medical care at the forefront of its mission. 

“The ship’s builders and Navy officials say this reimagined vessel, the Expeditionary Medical Ship, is especially designed for easy movement and rapid response in the shallow littorals and vast expanses of a future operating theater like the Pacific,” reports Hope Seck at Sandboxx. “And the service is working to develop a complement of skilled medical personnel trained and ready to deploy onboard these ships to provide triage care almost anywhere in the world.”

The Navy has three of the EPF-template medical transports under contract, with funding secured for three EMS ambulance ships to follow, according to shipbuilder Austal USA.

To understand what sets these medical capable Expeditionary Fast Transports and the upcoming Expeditionary Medical Ships apart from existing medical vessels, it’s important to understand the hospital ships it is designed to augment.

Hospital shipping 

Medical ships are an accommodation to the grim reality of war. Wherever the Navy goes, sailors will need medical attention, and those facilities can accommodate the various marines, soldiers, and other compatriots injured and within reach of a hospital ship. The Navy currently operates two large hospital ships, the USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy, which barged into public consciousness when deployed to render aid in the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. That aid rendered appears to have been less than expected, though not nothing.

Pandemic relief is an outlier job for the vessels, which are constrained not just by size but speed, making them most useful as a hospital that can be parked in a deep harbor or anchored offshore, treating patients as they arrive. The USNS Comfort in particular boasts a long record of surgeries at sea, in support of US and allied forces in the Gulf and Iraq wars. Both Mercy and Comfort have also been deployed for disaster relief, where the hospital ships trained personnel and stockpiles of blood make them a powerful resource for treating injury. 

And both hospital ships were converted from former oil tankers, and fit into a long history of commercial vessels adapted into hospital ships. Converted vessels come ready-made, but they lack the dedicated military design features to accommodate specific military missions.

Getting the medical supplies from storage on a hospital ship to patients in need often, but not always, involves bringing the patients aboard. In 2016, researchers tested using drones to deliver blood from ship to shore, an approach that could help get aid to people injured and unable to reach port.

Hospital ships can also receive patients by helicopter, thanks to a landing pad. That kind of arrival is vital for the injured but limited in capacity for transporting large numbers of people to the care they need. With 15 patient wards, 80 ICU beds, and accommodations for 1,300 people, the Comfort and Mercy can treat the people brought to it, but they cannot get everywhere. And, with a top speed of 20 mph, they are slow going even in the best of times. 

To get care closer and faster, the Navy has selected a smaller, faster ship in the ambulance role.

Catamaran ambulance

Smaller than full-scale hospital ships, the ships in the Expeditionary Fast Transport class are already expanding how and where the Navy can operate, by providing supply and transport support for the fleet. The EPFs can sustain an average speed of 40 mph at sea, twice as fast as the hospital ships, and they can operate in shallower waters and less developed ports, with a draft of only 15 feet. The ship’s catamaran design offers great stability, especially important for the difficult tasks of surgery and sea.

When it comes to moving people and goods, the existing EPFs can carry up to 544 metric tons of cargo, and beyond a crew of 41, can accommodate 416 passengers, with 312 of those in airline-style seats and 104 in more proper berths. As presently designed, the EPFs can land helicopters as large as the CH-53 Super Stallion.

In the envisioned medical role, beyond converting some of that space to treatment facilities, EPF maker Austal says that the landing deck will be enhanced to accommodate V-22 Ospreys. This, combined with 10 ICU beds, 23 ward beds, and two operating rooms, would make the ship able to function as a floating hospital in miniature, providing care to match the needs of the remote coasts it can access.

This article has been updated to include additional information about how many ships of each type will be produced.

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The US Army is moving ahead with its augmented reality headset, a gadget that has had a turbulent history. In an announcement shared January 5, the Army announced that Microsoft had been awarded a contract for version 1.2 of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, a headset for soldiers that’s designed to improve perception of their surroundings. The Army already has 1.0 and 1.1 versions of the headset on hand, and expects to start fielding the headsets in September 2023.

“The mixed-reality headsets allow Soldiers to see through smoke and around corners, use holographic imagery, thermal and low-light sensors to see in the dark and display 3D terrain maps and a compass projected into their field of vision,” the Army said in a release. “They provide tools to better conduct land navigation, battlefield tracking and movement through urban buildings and open terrain.”

The headset, based on Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality headset, is designed to let soldiers see the battlefield in a normal way, as well as with additional information, thanks to onboard image processing and data-sharing tools. Ideally, it’s a way to make real combat incorporate some of the innovations in perception and data display that have proven useful in video games, while also ensuring that only actually relevant information is added.

IVAS strain

In asking for a 1.2 variant, the Army appears to be addressing some of the limitations of existing models of the headset. These shortcomings were reported in October, after an unclassified internal evaluation was obtained by Bloomberg News, revealing the existing headsets caused “‘mission-affecting physical impairments’ including headaches, eyestrain and nausea,” according to a summary of soldiers’ experiences during a field exercise, complied by the Pentagon’s testing office. 

One way to think of the headsets is as providing an extra set of sensory information to the people wearing them. If displaying that information in front of the soldier’s face, as the visor is designed to do, causes impairment, then it takes what should feel like a superpower and turns it into, at best, a discarded inconvenience and, at worst, a life-threatening liability. 

These reported problems undermine the potential of the system, and with it the Army’s vision of data-driven warfare down to every soldier acting as a sensing node in part of a larger network.

In the terse language of the award announcement, the possible headaches, eyestrain, and nausea are not mentioned. Instead, the announcement first walks through the achievements of the 1.0 and 1.1 versions of the headset. “IVAS 1.0 provides baseline warfighter capability, and the IVAS 1.1 features an improved low-light sensor to aid maneuver and positive target identification.”

It’s in outlining the 1.2 improvements that changes made to ease the strain of use can be seen.

“In addition to the IVAS 1.1 improvements, IVAS 1.2 will include a new form factor to address Human Systems Integration, including physiological impacts identified during testing, and a lower profile heads-up display with distributed counterweight for improved user interface and comfort. IVAS 1.2 will also include software improvements for increased reliability and reduced power demand.”

That reads like a tacit acknowledgement of some limitations in the system. The Army did not respond to a request for comment.

Future focus

As reported at Defense News, the goal for the 1.2 version of IVAS is to trim over half a pound from the total weight of the original system. The 1.0 weighs 3.4 pounds, including a 2.4-pound headset and 1 pound of weight carried somewhere below the soldier’s head. The goal for 1.2 is a total system weight of 2.85 pounds, “the same or better than the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular,” defense officials told Defense News.

Should the 1.2 version of IVAS mitigate the earlier reported problems with the system, it will increase the field of what soldiers can see and track. Goggles and binoculars are limited by the narrowness of their field of view, and IVAS’s broad goggle plus camera array is aimed at widening that perception. Target identification, or the ability for the goggles to perceive and mark objects like vehicles, buildings, and people on the battlefield, could greatly improve the ability of soldiers to fight, especially in low-light situations or against enemies hiding in cover. The headsets even promise to let soldiers riding as passengers in transports perceive the area outside the vehicle’s armored walls.

By incorporating the individual headset-wearing soldier into the broader array of Army sensors, the hope is that the Army can not just perceive more of the battlefield, but make sure vital information is in the hands of—or vision of—the soldiers who most need it. It’s long been the promise of the future. If the 1.2 version delivers as promised, and the headsets can start being fielded on time, that means this future starts in September 2023.

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From January 6 through 9, in the Persian Gulf, the US Navy conducted an exercise in which two Saildrone robotic boats communicated with the USS Delbert D. Black, a destroyer. The exercise used robots, AI, and a crewed ship to scout the environment around them, a practical peacetime use of the robot that could inform how these tools are used in war. 

“During the exercise, unmanned and artificial intelligence systems operated in conjunction with Delbert D. Black and CTF [Coalition Task Force] Sentinel’s command center ashore in Bahrain. The systems were able to help locate and identify objects in nearby waters and relay visual depictions to watchstanders,” the US Navy said in a release. 

This isn’t the first time the Navy has used Saildrones in these waters. In August 2022, a ship from the US Coast Guard and a ship from the Royal Bahrain Naval Force worked alongside a Saildrone, integrating the robot’s sensors into the mission. And in September 2022, while Navy Saildrones were operating in the Persian Gulf, Iran’s Navy temporarily seized and held the robots before returning them to the US Navy, a return facilitated by the USS Delbert D. Black. 

Robots at sea can see

So what kind of information or images might the robots capture that’s so valuable to the Navy? A pair of images released by the service branch offer some detail. In one, Lieutenant Richard Rodriguez, aboard the Delbert D. Black, watches images sent from the sea-going drone to a monitor. The Saildrone’s information is viewed through a Mission Portal dashboard displayed in Chrome. The robot’s camera tracks the horizon at an angle, and against it are three marker rectangles, showing possible ship sightings.

As the Navy’s caption describes it, the visuals were transmitted from a Saildrone to a room on the destroyer where a crew member could watch it. In this way, the drones help the crew keep watch.

Another image captures the information as displayed inside the group’s Manama, Bahrain headquarters. At the center of this display is a map, where the layout of the observed gulf is plotted and abstracted. Solid shapes indicate vessels, lines track the Saildrones’ path through time, and plotted polygons denote other phenomena, perhaps rules of egress or avoidance.

The Malaysian-flagged cargo vessel MSC Makalu III is selected in the shot. The Makalu III was tracked for 23.6 nautical miles over two hours and 38 minutes by two Saildrones. Two images below the name of the Makalu III on the dashboard, presumably from the Saildrone’s cameras, show the distant position of the ship against the watery horizon, and a zoomed-in view that clearly shows the dark mass of a far-away vessel on the surface.

Again, the Saildrone was being used as an observer, a robot on watch duty.

In some sense, this information isn’t exactly novel. The Makalu III is trackable publicly. What is more remarkable is that the Saildrones are able to not just spot vessels, but follow them. The Persian Gulf is a high-traffic waterway, and while many navigational technologies make it easier to track and follow ships as they transit to and from the gulf, the ability to put new sensors into the water enhances what can be known.

The screen displayed in the Manama headquarters shows not just Saildrone activity at the moment, but over time. One of the driving goals behind the Navy’s adoption of uncrewed ships is to enhance how much ocean traffic it can observe over time, and in this case, with two wind-driven robots the ability of a ship to passively observe its surroundings appears greatly enhanced. 

Watching, waiting

Saildrones are small boats, just 23 feet long and rising 16 feet above the surface. With a sail to catch the wind and solar panels to power its electronic systems, and charge its batteries, a Saildrone exists as a tool for passively monitoring the sea. 

These vessels have been used by scientific organizations for civilian purposes. NASA and NOAA, respectively, used Saildrones to fix gaps in satellite maps and monitor fish populations. While the Navy’s recent exercise with Saildrones was brief, the solar power and long endurance of the robots makes them ideal for longer term monitoring, as they sip power from the sun.

The Pentagon formally divides the places combat can take place into domains, and while “sea” is smaller than the vastness of “space,” it is far more peopled. The Navy is tasked simultaneously with ensuring the free flow of law-abiding traffic across the oceans, and with being ready to fight any force that threatens open navigation of the oceans. Knowing where and when to fight, or at least move ships into a show of force, can be aided by keeping an eye on ocean traffic.

Saildrones are a way to make the ocean more known, through the watchful and unblinking eyes of wind-propelled and solar-powered robots.

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On January 6, the Department of Defense announced it was going to send 50 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine. The long-awaited move comes amidst a flurry of announcements from NATO nations about sending armored vehicles to Ukraine, as the country’s fight against the Russian invasion lurches inevitably towards its second year. 

The Bradley is an armored transport, with tracks and a small turret. It is tank-like in appearance, though the Bradley’s gun is much smaller than what’s mounted on a main battle tank like the M1 Abrams fielded by the US military. Its inclusion in the aid package comes after public calls from Ukraine’s President Zelensky for countries to send them high-end military equipment, including tanks.

“It’s not a tank, but it’s a tank killer,” Brigadier General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon Press Secretary, said at a press conference on January 5. “A Bradley is an armored vehicle that has a firepower capability that can deliver troops into combat.  So, again, it will provide a significant boost to Ukraine’s already impressive armor capabilities.  And we’re confident that it will aid them on the battlefield.”

[Related: Ukraine is getting upgraded Soviet T-72B tanks]

In the January 6 announcement of US aid to Ukraine, the 50 Bradley vehicles share a line with 500 TOW anti-tank missiles, as well as 250,000 rounds of 25mm ammunition. The TOW, an acronym that originally stood for “Tube Launched, Optically Tracked, Wire-Guided” and now stands for the “Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wireless-guided” missile, is a kind of anti-tank missile that often is mounted on the side of Bradley turrets. This is the primary weapon to be used against tanks, and has been for decades. 

The 25mm ammunition, fired by the Bradley’s 25mm Bushmaster cannon, means that a Bradley can destroy targets like light vehicles, walls, and even helicopters. The weapon can fire armor-piercing ammunition, giving it some ability to fight with the gun against heavier armor, though that is at best a secondary use. Bradleys can sometimes fire ammunition using depleted uranium penetrators, which can punch through armor and also carry long-term environmental and health risk to civilians who might encounter them after the battle, especially if the rounds have not been properly disposed of.

Beyonds its weaponry, the Bradley can carry six or seven passengers inside. Dismounted, those soldiers can fight in support of the vehicle, before loading up and driving away as needed.

War of maneuver

One way to understand the Bradley is not in relation to tanks, which outclass it in firepower, but compared to the vehicle it was designed to replace. The M113 Armored Personnel Carriers, first introduced in 1960, were designed as a “battle taxi,” or a way to get soldiers where they needed to be to fight. The M113s were initially outfitted with machine guns, but unlike the sturdy cannon and missiles of a Bradley, the M113 was not designed to fight on its own in battle. Instead, the role of the M113 was to carry troops quickly to where they needed to disembark and fight.

The M113 is still in service today, and the Pentagon announced the aid to Ukraine would include 100 M113 APCs, alongside the 50 Bradleys provided. The M113 needs a crew of two to operate, and can carry 11 soldiers and their gear in addition to that. While a modest difference from the Bradley’s passenger capacity, it can add up: The 50 M113s can carry 550 soldiers, while 50 Bradleys can at best transport 350 troops.

[Related: What the future holds for the Army’s venerable Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle]

In addition to the Bradleys and the M113s, the same aid package includes 55 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs. These machines, used heavily by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, are big troop transports with V-shaped hulls, capable of deflecting the explosive blast from roadside bombs into injuries instead of immediate deaths. Landmines, common across the war, have been exacerbated by the risk of unexploded weapons fired across the battlefield. MRAPS provide a way for Ukraine to more safely move forces across those hazards.

Rounding out the mobility aid portion of the package, the Department of Defense aims to provide 138 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs), popularly known as Humvees. These are light transports, which move soldiers quickly and can cross terrain, like marshes or rocky fields, that may trap heavier vehicles.

[Related: The Army’s new light tank can venture where its beefier cousins can’t]

Tanks are a threat in combat in part because they require specialized equipment, like massive cannons or anti-tank missiles to destroy. But one major way to limit the impact of heavy armor is to launch fast offensives where the tanks aren’t, and then make sure anti-tank weapons are in place before a counter-offensive. Bradleys, with TOW missiles, offer added punch. The combined fleet of MRAPs, M113s, and Humvees supporting the Bradleys ensures that Ukrainian forces will have greater freedom of movement. 

While the United States is not at this moment providing Ukraine with heavy armor to fight heavy armor, it is preparing the aforementioned slew of vehicles that let Ukraine pick when and where to fight battles. 

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On December 28, the Department of Defense announced the award of an $118 million contract to build a special kind of radar installation in the Republic of Palau. Palau is a nation in the Pacific, about 800 miles southwest of Guam and about 1,000 miles southeast of Manila. It will, by 2026, be host to the Tactical Mobile Over-the-Horizon Radar, a new sensor about which the military is being fairly tight-lipped.

The late December announcement mentions only the concrete foundations that will support the installation. A February 2018 budget document notes that the Tactical Mobile Over-the-Horizon Radar, or TACMOR, “will support air domain awareness and maritime domain awareness requirements over the Western Pacific region. The project will demonstrate a sub-scaled over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) that is one quarter the size of traditional [Over The Horizon] systems.”

The installation, as outlined, will have two sites. One will be along a northern isthmus of Babeldaob, the largest island in Palau. The other will be on Angaur, an island about 60 miles south. These two sites will need to have communications between them, suggesting that the complex could be one linked sensor array. Site schematics show the Babeldaob location as a transmit site, with Angaur as a receiver site. 

Department of Defense documents, as well as general US planning and policy, increasingly suggest the western Pacific as a potential future battlefield for the United States. Guam, a territorial possession of the United States since the Spanish American war in 1898, routinely houses bombers that may be tasked with flights to North Korea or China. One of the major challenges of fighting in the Pacific is that the ocean is vast, and in any war that lasts more than a few hours (as a nuclear exchange might), being able to find, track, and attack enemy forces will be a vital component to victory.

That desire to see beyond, in order to better fight, is a driver of over-the-horizon radar.

Beyond line of sight

Radar, while capable of seeing far, is a technology bound by the physics of waves traveling in straight lines. A radio wave sent out needs to hit an object in a direct line from where it emanates to reflect back, and the difference between where it was sent and how it returns makes the signal. This is partly why radar is so useful for tracking planes, which travel above the ground and can thus be detected at further distances, without the curve of the Earth in the way. It is also why radar installations are often mounted high above the ground, as every few feet of height added increases how far it can see.

The Cold War drove early research and deployments of over-the-horizon radars, which were used as a way to try and watch for incoming missile and bomber attacks. So how do they typically work? 

One example comes from a Soviet over-the-horizon radar receiver, named Duga, that was built outside of Chernobyl, in Ukraine. Shortwave radio signals sent from transmitter sites in southern Ukraine would bounce off the ionosphere, allowing the signal to travel much further, and would then be detected and interpreted at the Duga site. The Soviet radar signal could be heard on shortwave radios, and radio hobbyists in the United States dubbed it the “woodpecker” for its distinctive pattern.

Another approach to sending radar over the horizon is to use low-frequency signals and send them along the surface, letting diffraction carry the waves further. This surface wave radar has a range of hundreds of kilometers, while techniques bouncing off the ionosphere can perceive the world thousands of kilometers away. 

In Ukraine, the distance between the Duga transmitter and receiver sites is over 300 miles. In Palau, the tactical over-the-horizon radar will have a distance between signal and transmitter of roughly one sixth that. If TACMOR is built on similar principles, the shorter distance between sending and receiving might suggest a short range of surveillance. Duga was designed to warn of nuclear launches. The TACMOR site will instead track different threats, on a different scale.

See the sea

TACMOR appears built for a different kind of role than the globe-spanning over-the-horizon radars of the Cold War. Instead of looking for the first sign of nuclear oblivion, TACMOR will track movements related to battle, and will presumably do so at a fraction of the cost of deploying crewed ships and aircraft patrols to scan the same area.

“A modern OTHR [over-the-horizon radar] on Palau will be able to support space-based and terrestrial-based sensor and weapon systems for the potential cueing and early warning of incoming hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, enemy aircraft, and ships,” reports The War Zone. “Most of all, OTHR allows for persistent monitoring of specific areas that would otherwise require many types of radar systems forward deployed over a huge area on the ground, in the air, and at sea at any given time, which may not even be possible.”

By putting the radar system in Palau, the Department of Defense will be able to increase its awareness of a vast swath of sea in the region, and in turn, keep an eye on an important slice of the Pacific. With luck, the radar will report nothing to worry about, but should danger arrive, having the sensor in place means the Navy and Air Force can respond with advance warning, should they need to. 

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To better defend Taiwan in the face of a potential invasion, the United States is selling it Volcanos. More precisely, the United States is selling Taiwan the Volcano Mine Dispenser, a system that can rapidly hurl anti-tank landmines, creating a dangerous and impassable area for heavy armor. The Volcano is an older system, but its use in Taiwan would be brand-new, indicating the kinds of strategies that Taiwan and the United States are considering when it comes to how to defend the island nation in the future.

Land mines are a defensive weapon, though one that can certainly be used aggressively. Putting a landmine in place imperils all who would pass through the area, forcing attackers to face immediate danger or slow down their advances as they reroute around the hazard. What the Volcano does, specifically, is allow for the defenders to create a minefield rapidly. 

“Using a ground vehicle, a 1,000-meter minefield can be laid in 4 to 12 minutes based on terrain and vehicle speed,” reads an Army description. The Volcano system’s mines can also be deployed by helicopter, and it can deploy anti-personnel mines, but the announcement from the State Department specifically mentions trucks for carrying and mounting the Volcano systems it is selling Taiwan, and mentions anti-tank mines. 

Enemy mine

Every landmine is an explosive designed to detonate in the future. Anti-personnel landmines, as the name suggests, are used to kill people, and are prohibited by international treaties in part because of the threat they pose to civilians during and after war. (The United States is only party to some of the treaties regarding land mines.)

Anti-tank landmines have detonation thresholds that are harder to accidentally set off with anything except a vehicle, and are targeted squarely at the largest and deadliest vehicles on a battlefield. In addition, to ensure that the anti-tank mines are used for battlefield purposes, rather than permanently delineating a fixed border, their detonation fuses can be programmed to not work after a set amount of time. 

“A Soldier-selectable, self-destruct mechanism destroys the mine at the end of its active lifecycle – 4 hours to 15 days – depending on the time selected,” declares the Army.

This fits into the larger role of mines as tools to change how battles are fought, rather than create static fronts. In the announcement authorizing the sale, the mines are referred to not as mines but as “munitions,” the broader category of all explosives fired by weapons. With the ability to cover an area, and then have that area be littered in active explosives for over two weeks, one way to think of the Volcano is as artillery designed to send explosives forward in both space and time. 

Island time

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine illustrated, landmines can have a major impact on how and where armies fight. Ukraine borders Russia by land, and even before the February 2022 invasion, the country had leftover explosives littering the landscape, posing a threat to life and limb. After the invasion, both sides used explosive barriers to limit how and where their foes could safely move. Placing landmines can be quick, while clearing landmines without loss of life or equipment usually needs specialized tools and time.

Taiwan’s unique position as an island nation gives it a meaningful physical barrier to hostile takeover. Unlike Russia into Ukraine, China cannot simply roll tanks over the border. An invasion of Taiwan, should the government of mainland China decide to undertake it, would have to be an amphibious affair, landing soldiers and vehicles by ship as well as attacking from the sea and sky. 

“I think we’ve been very clear in the United States over multiple administrations, that Taiwan needs to put its self-defense front and center. We think the Chinese put a premium on speed,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kath Hicks at a security forum in December.

“And the best speed bump or deterrent to that is really the Taiwan people being able to demonstrate that they can slow that down, let alone to defend against it,” Hicks continued. “And that’s where the Ukraine example, I think, really can give the Chinese pause to see the will of a people combined with capability to stall or even stop a campaign of aggression.”

The Volcano is not the flashiest of tools for stopping an invasion by sea, but it does give Taiwan’s military options for how to stop invading forces once they have landed. By being able to place deadly, explosive barriers to movement where they’re needed, for likely as long as they’re needed, the Volcano can halt and restrict advances. It makes the assault into a mess of impassable terrain, blunting attacks with an eruption of explosive power.

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On December 12, Australia announced the name of its latest robotic submarine: the Ghost Shark. This vessel, which is being developed by both Anduril and Australia’s Navy and Defence Science and Technology Group, is designed as a large, underwater, autonomous machine, guided by artificial intelligence. The Ghost Shark will be a stealth robot, built for future wars at sea.

In picking the name, the Royal Australian Navy chose a moniker that conferred both stealth, and paid tribute to the wildlife of the continent, or in this case, just off the coast of the continent.

“Ghost Shark’s name comes about from actually an indigenous shark that’s found on our southern waters, indeed it’s found in deeper waters, so it’s quite stealthy, which is a good corollary to the stealthy extra large autonomous vehicle. It also keeps that linkage to the Ghost Bat, the MQ-28 program for the Air Force, which is also another quite stealthy autonomous system,” said Commodore Darron Kavanagh of the Royal Australian Navy. (Ghost sharks, the animals, are often consumed as part of fish and chips.)

The Ghost Bat drone fighter, or MQ-28 he referenced, is another recent initiative by Australia to augment crewed forces with robotic allies. While a jet is bound by the finite number of hours it can stay airborne, a robotic submarine, freed of crew, can endure under the sea for a long time.

“They have the capacity to remain at sea undetected for very long periods, carry various military payloads and cover very long distances,” Rear Admiral Peter Quinn said in a release. “The vessels will provide militaries with a persistent option for the delivery of underwater effects in high-risk environments, complementing our existing crewed ships and submarines, as well as other future uncrewed surface vessels.”

Pause for effect

“Effects” is a broad term that refers to all the ways a vehicle, tool, or weapon can make battle easier for one side and harder for its enemies. “Kinetic effects,” for example, are the missiles, torpedoes, and bullets that immediately come to mind when people think of war. But effects can include other tools, like electromagnetic jamming, or a smoke grenade detonating and creating a dense cloud to hide the movement of soldiers.

Underwater, those effects could be direct attack, like with torpedoes, or it could be sending misleading sonar signals, fooling enemy ships and submarines to target a robot instead of a more powerful crewed vessel.

In May, Anduril announced it was working on Extra Large Autonomous Undersea Vehicles (XL-AUVs) for the Royal Australian Navy, which is what is now known as Ghost Shark.

“It is modular, customizable and can be optimized with a variety of payloads for a wide range of military and non-military missions such as advanced intelligence, infrastructure inspection, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting,” read the announcement.

In this instance, its job could include seeing enemy vessels and movements, as well as identifying targets for weapons fired from other vehicles. One of the most consistent promises from autonomous systems is that, by using sensors and fast onboard processing, these machines will be able to discover, discern, and track enemies faster than human operators of the sensor systems. If the role of the Ghost Shark is limited, at least initially, to targeting and not firing, it lets the robot submarines bypass the difficult questions and implications of a machine making a lethal decision on its own.

At the press conference this month, Quinn told the press that adversaries will have to assume that a Ghost Shark is not only watching their movements, but “is capable of deploying a wide range of effects — including lethal ones,” reports Breaking Defense. If the Ghost Shark is to be an armed robot, it will raise difficult questions about human control of lethal autonomous machines, especially given the added difficulty of real-time communication under water.

Uncrewed underwater

The Ghost Shark is just one of a growing array of large underwater drones in development by a host of nations. In the chart below, the XL-AUV references the original name for the Ghost Shark.

Before the Ghost Shark can reach the extra-large size it’s intended to have, Anduril is developing the concept on an existing robot submarine it already makes, the smaller Dive-LD. At the naming announcement, a Dive-LD with “Ghost Shark” on the side was on display, highlighting how the program will flow from one into the other.

The Dive-LD is smaller than the XL-AUV (or Ghost Shark) will be, with its 5.8 meter length between 4 and 24 meters shorter than the final design. It still is a useful starting point for developing software, techniques, and testing payloads, all with the intent of scaling the robot up to the size needed for long lasting and deep operations.

The company boasts that these submarines can operate for up to 10 days, with room to expand that endurance, and can operate at depths of up to 6,000 meters below the surface. 

Watch a video about the Ghost Shark, from the Australian Department of Defence, below:

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On December 2, the Air Force revealed its first new bomber in 34 years: the B-21 Raider. The Raider most closely resembles its stealthy predecessor the B-2 Spirit, and both were built by defense giant Northrop Grumman. With only head-on views of the B-21 released and available to the press, it is hard to know all the features that distinguish it from its predecessor. Still, the head-on image is enough to identify some major changes. 

The Raider is a stealth flying wing, designed to carry an explosive arsenal deep into hostile countries while bypassing their radar systems. The B-2 could deliver deadly payloads from conventional explosives to nuclear weapons. Unlike the Spirit’s 1988 reveal, the B-21 arrived in a world with a very different geopolitical climate, one where the nuclear superpower over the horizon for the US to worry about is China, not the Soviet Union. 

The “Spirit” of the Cold War

The Spirit’s production, which the Air Force originally expected to reach 132 bombers, was stopped after just 21. This change matched the geopolitical and domestic expectations of the mid-1990s, when the dissolution of the USSR and the seemingly unchecked ascendancy of American power meant specialized aircraft to bypass advanced defenses seemed superfluous at best.

Stealth is a curious kind of protective technology. It is built into the physical form of the aircraft, with rounded shapes and smooth edges built to minimize the amount of surface that reflects radio waves back to radar receivers. That makes the shape both tremendously important as a secret during development, even if the ultimate form will be discernible by eyes and cameras. A 1988 memo from the CIA, declassified decades later, estimated that half of what the Soviet Union knew about stealth came from the public reporting on it by one Aviation Week writer in the United States.

[Related: Our first look at the Air Force’s new B-21 stealth bomber was just a careful teaser]

That was before Aviation Week pulled its biggest stunt to report on stealth aircraft. In 1988, for the B-2 rollout, the bomber was pulled by a tractor from a hangar into the open air, and then wheeled back again. Reporters with Aviation Week, knowing the location and time of the rollout, rented a Cessna plane to get photographs from overhead.

“One of the driving functions to get us into this mode was, ‘Hey, if they were going to pull this thing out of the hangar into the open, I can guarantee the Russians are going to have a satellite overhead. And if the powers that be don’t care if the Russians see the trailing edge, why should they care about the American people?’” William B. Scott, former Aviation Week editor, recalled in a recent piece.

While the Air Force and pre-merger Northrop revealed more about the B-2 over time, the stunt by Aviation Week to capture photographs of the plane’s whole outline and trailing edges was clearly remembered. The 1988 reveal took place outside a hangar, and during the daytime. The 2022 reveal of the B-21 took place at night, and it barely left the hangar.

Spot these differences

Even limited to the head-on view, there’s still striking details that stand out in the new bomber compared to the old one. The B-2 Spirit appears as two caverns and a mound arising from the flat plain of the wing. The B-21, instead, shares one generally rising approach to the middle, with a gentle slope for the narrower air inlets before a sharper incline to the peak of the cockpit. 

“Perhaps the most striking features of the B-21 are its slender, barely-there air intakes. Unlike the higher-rise, scalloped intakes on the B-2, the B-21’s are almost organically a part of its wing root,” reports Air & Space Forces Magazine. “That’s good for stealth—radar loves abrupt angles and big cavities—but the intakes are so thin and shallow, they seem hardly big enough to swallow enough air to feed the B-21’s engines.” 

The fact that it has slender inlets means that there would be less of a cavity for search radars to find. Moreover, the B-21’s engine fan blades are a huge radar reflector that are shielded from direct view. 

There are seven other notable differences spotted by Air & Space Forces, from depth of the bomber’s belly to its landing gear, color, and smoothness. Sensor technology has improved greatly in the decades since the first B-2 was introduced to the world, and protecting the bomber means stealth not just against radar, but from acoustic sensors, thermal imaging, and other detection strategies.

Many tests and, invariably, reveals are still ahead for the Raider, which has come a long way since the plane was first developed as the Long Range Strike Bomber. The Air Force also intends to roll the B-21 into full production, eventually replacing not just the existing B-2 Spirits but the B-1 Lancer bombers. It may even one day replace the still-in-service B-52 bomber, though that’s a lower priority for the Air Force.

The Air Force places to acquire at least 100 Raiders. Soon enough, observers both civilian and military will be able to catch it in the air, with its once carefully guarded form revealed against the undeniable clarity of the sky.

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On December 21, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke before the United States Congress, on his first trip out of his country since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Speaking against tyranny and drawing a direct analogy to American successes in the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Saratoga and World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, Zelensky promised to see Ukraine through to victory. He also asked for weapons. He asked for artillery, tanks, and planes, and he asked for one weapon specifically by name: Patriot missiles.

“If your Patriots stop the Russian terror against our cities, it will let Ukrainian patriots work to the full to defend our freedom,” said Zelensky. “When Russia cannot reach our cities by its artillery, it tries to destroy them with missile attacks.”

On the same day, the Department of Defense announced it was sending Ukraine its first Patriot air defense battery, along with missiles for it. 

Missile defense

There are, broadly, two ways that militaries can use long-range explosives in war. The first is specific attacks, trying to find military bases or ammunition depots, fixed targets with clear impact on the ability to fight a war. Another is to use bombardment as a weapon of punishment, to inflict pain generally on a population, hoping that the destruction and demoralization hastens victory. Cruise missiles, which can be quite precise weapons, can serve the latter function when fired in barrages at targets far away.

Stopping cruise missiles is hard, in part because of their long range and ability to change direction in flight. Missile defense, which are systems that pair sensors like radar with interceptors like missiles, is one way to stop some of the attacks. Missile defense is a hard problem, even when only talking about missiles with conventional (non-nuclear) warheads, but it’s also a technology that has been developed for decades.

In November, the Department of Defense announced it was joining Spain in supplying Ukraine with HAWK missile interceptors. These weapons were first developed in the 1950s, deployed in the 1960, and upgraded versions still in use by many nations today. HAWKs are useful against aircraft, and they destroyed planes and helicopters when fired by Kuwaiti forces against Iraq in 1990. 

Patriot missiles 

While the United States retained HAWKs in its inventory and other nations deployed them, Patriot missiles have been the standard of interception for a long time. A Patriot missile battery consists of launchers, missiles, a command room to control firing, and a radar to identify and track targets. Once a target, like a plane or a missile, is detected for intercept, the operators fire in response, and then the Patriot missile flies to intercept, its own sensors guiding it along the course. Early Patriot missiles would intercept targets by exploding near them. Modern Patriot missiles destroy their targets in a physical collision.

Patriot missiles also had a major debut in the 1991 Gulf War against Scuds, a ballistic missile fired by Iraq, though that debut should come with caveats.

“During the 1991 Gulf War, the public was led to believe the [sic] that the Patriot had near-perfect performance, intercepting 45 of 47 Scud missiles,” wrote Jeffrey Lewis of Middlebury Institute of International Studies in 2019. “The U.S. Army later revised that estimate down to about 50 percent — and even then, it expressed ‘higher’ confidence in only about one-quarter of the cases. A pesky Congressional Research Service employee noted that if the Army had correctly applied its own assessment methodology consistently, the number would be far lower. (Reportedly that number was one — as in one lousy Scud missile downed.)”

Patriot missiles have improved considerably since then. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Patriot missiles were much more effective at intercepting ballistic missiles than they were in 1991, though there were still limits to their performance. The missiles have seen extensive use by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, intercepting missiles, rockets, and drones fired into the countries by forces in Yemen as part of that ongoing war. Israel has also used Patriot missiles to shoot down a Syrian fighter-bomber.

Part of the challenge of using Patriot missiles is that they are made to destroy big threats, like bombers and ballistic missiles, while also being used to destroy smaller targets, like drones. In his speech before Congress, Zelensky said “Iranian deadly drones sent to Russia in hundreds — in hundreds became a threat to our critical infrastructure.”

These drones, most especially the self-detonating Shahed-136s, are used like cruise missiles to barrage a target from afar, but built from much cheaper parts.

“The high cost per missile and the relatively small number of missiles in a battery means that Patriot operators cannot shoot at every target,” wrote Mark Cancian and Tom Karako of CSIS, a think tank, earlier this month. “High-value Russian aircraft and ballistic missiles would be appropriate targets. Shooting $4 million missiles at $250,000 Russian cruise missiles might be justified if those missiles would hit sensitive targets. Shooting a $4 million missile at a $50,000 Iranian Shahed-136 drone would probably not.”

So long as Russia launches or threatens to launch cruise missiles into Ukraine, Patriot missiles can have a role in stopping the severity of the attack. To comprehensively deal with threats to the country, Ukraine can incorporate the Patriots into a holistic and layered defense, with everything from retaliatory rocket strikes to “threat emitters” that confuse sensors.

When it comes to stopping attacks, Ukraine may need not to use just Patriots, but Vampires—which are truck-mounted drone interceptors—too.

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Mayhem is an odd name for a spy, but it’s a pretty good name for a superfast jet. On December 16, the Department of Defense awarded contractor Leidos $334 million to develop a hypersonic flying scout. The award is technically for the “Expendable Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and Strike program,” but it’s also known as Mayhem. It will be uncrewed—a drone.

“The Mayhem system will use a scramjet engine to generate thrust, propelling the vehicle across long distances at speeds greater than Mach 5,” Leidos said in a release.

Hypersonic is the threshold defined as five or more times the speed of sound. Many of the recent developments in hypersonic technology have focused on weapons such as missiles that fly fast to evade detection and interception. Speed is profoundly useful for a weapon, as the force of a fast impact can be tremendously deadly even without a warhead on board.

What sets Mayhem apart from more outright destructive designs is that, while still intended to be expendable, the hypersonic Mayhem is a tool more for finding out than flying around. 

ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and is generally the Pentagon’s acronym for everything involved in discovering, observing, and monitoring activity below, is a mission often associated with slow-moving vehicles. Drones, like the medium-altitude Reaper or the ultra long-endurance Global Hawk, are built to keep watch on activity below, informing how soldiers, sailors, and pilots below all respond. Yet some missions cannot be done at the ponderous speeds of Reaper’s prop engine, or wait for an overhead satellite to be in place.

It is likely in that void, where the need is urgent and the information collection is dangerous, that Mayhem will work best. 

Past is prologue

One way to understand the role the Mayhem might have is to look at the history of superfast spy planes. The most famous of these is the SR-71 Blackbirds, and its single-seat, CIA-piloted predecessor, the A-12, also known as Oxcart. Both planes were designed to take photographs without being shot down by anti-air missiles, which had advanced considerably in power and accuracy into the Cold War. The Soviet Union used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down a U-2 spy plane in 1960, and while U-2s still fly today, there are certain missions better suited for a faster vehicle. The Oxcart flew missions for the US above North Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, before it was retired. The two-seat Blackbird, with room for a pilot and a person to crew the sensors, operated into the 1990s

“The SR-71 was designed to fly deep into hostile territory, avoiding interception with its tremendous speed and high altitude. It could operate safely at a maximum speed of Mach 3.3 at an altitude more than sixteen miles, or 25,908 m (85,000 ft), above the earth,” notes the National Air and Space Museum.

The Blackbird entered service in the late 1960s, and was retired in 1998. In April 1988, a decade before the Blackbird’s retirement, Popular Science highlighted what the Air Force would want in a replacement, including a speed of Mach 5 and a service ceiling of above 100,000 feet. 

There’s a third distant predecessor to Mayhem: the D-21 supersonic drone. Launched by planes, including the B-52, four D-21s were used to take photographs of China between 1969 and 1971. The drone was designed within the limits of the technology at the time, which meant film cases that had to be ejected and recovered, before they were to be processed in a darkroom. The D-21 flew a fixed path, and then detonated after its mission. None of the four flights over China produced recoverable images, and the program was abandoned. 

Developing a new hypersonic spyplane has long been a goal of the Air Force, with reports of new concepts sprouting periodically. 

Uncrewed is good news

What might make Mayhem a better bet in 2022 than any prior attempt at a Blackbird replacement is a conflux of factors, all of which have led to improved drone technology. Removing the need for a pilot onboard a plane can shrink its overall profile, and lets the aircraft operate without the constraints of having to keep people onboard alive.

Cameras, data processing, and wireless data transfer have all improved tremendously in the past decades. The era of using film cameras for aerial surveillance finally ended this summer, and with it the constraints of having to collect or process film negatives. The cameras that make possible drone sensors, like the far-seeing pods on Global Hawks, show an industrial community proficient in far-seeing sensors, though taking pictures with clarity and at speed has its own obstacles. The Blackbird included sensors for listening and recording signals, like radar and radios, and those too could be incorporated into a hypersonic drone.

Like the D-21 before it, Mayhem can be expendable, where the loss of the drone need not mean the loss of information it collected. But expendable doesn’t have to mean that the drone is destroyed at the end of every mission, and a drone that could be recovered and reused offers a boon to military brass looking for a way to confirm reports by photography 

“This program is focused on delivering a larger class air-breathing hypersonic system capable of executing multiple missions with a standardized payload interface, providing a significant technological advancement and future capability,” is all the detail provided by the contract announcement for what Mayhem actually will do.

However Mayhem ultimately develops, it will fill a void the Air Force has left open for almost thirty years. 

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The Army will field a platoon of laser-armed fighting vehicles in January 2023, Task and Purpose reports. This platoon was originally supposed to be delivered by October 2022, but was delayed due to additional checks ensuring that the system will be fully functional when it arrives. The testing is a crucial first step towards providing an Army with a deeply protective tool that can roll into battle against drones and mortars.

One way the Army currently fights is from Stryker vehicles. These armored, eight-wheeled transports can seat up to nine soldiers inside, and can mount light weapons on turrets. In the case of the laser-armed Strykers, the light weapons are literal, and they use the heat of photons (also known as directed energy) to quickly burn through hostile targets. 

A Stryker Platoon consists of four vehicles, each with a drive, commander, and a squad of infantry. That’s roughly 44 people in light armored vehicles, tasked with moving across the battlefield into a well-placed position suitable for deploying their weapons. En route and in combat, those soldiers can expect to face attack from a range of enemy weapons from indirect-fire mortar rounds to hostile drones armed with bombs or scouting for artillery.

With lasers, the Strykers will have a defense against these attacks. In proper military fashion, the ability to shoot objects out of the sky is given a big acronym: Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense, or DE M-SHORAD. “DE” is the laser, “maneuver” here means “on a vehicle,” and “SHORAD” is about the types and distances of targets these lasers will defeat. That’s all a bit of a complex alphabet soup, so the vehicles will be known by a more straightforward name: Guardian.

[Related: What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser]

“There are places where directed energy can provide a significant advantage,” Craig Robin, deputy director of the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office’s directed energy office, said in 2021. “All the bullets are built into the system, so the logistics associated with moving a platform and supplying it requires just gas and parts.”

For the Stryker-mounted laser, the vehicle’s gas engine charges its batteries, powers its cooling system, and can power its laser. The stored energy allows the 50-kilowatt laser to fire multiple times before the system needs a recharge.

In May, laser-maker Raytheon announced that a laser mounted on an armored vehicle had successfully shot down multiple mortar rounds in testing. Mortars are common in both counter-insurgency and conventional warfare because the small and low-cost explosive rounds arc over intervening terrain, like trees and hills and buildings, crashing down onto targets from above. Mortar fire was a regular concern for forces in Afghanistan because they could bypass walls. Additionally, on-the-move mortars could destroy a vehicle and slow down a whole column. 

What lasers offer is a way to destroy those rounds mid-flight. The heat of the beam can detonate the bomb in midair or melt its guiding fin, sending it on a different trajectory. A whole platoon of Stryers equipped with these lasers could have a kind of rolling protection, making such weapons that much harder to use against soldiers.

[Related: This laser-armed Stryker vehicle can shoot down drones and mortar rounds]

Lasers have already seen some use as a way to defend ships and soldiers from mortars and drones. In the right conditions, laser weapons can be effective, though dust, rain, or thick fog can all alter how well the light from these devices travels and concentrates. Destroying drones with a laser takes a matter of seconds, depending on what part of the drone is hit and the power of the laser. 

Drone scouts and artillery spotters, especially low-cost drones, have proven themselves on the fields of Ukraine, as both Russian and Ukrainian forces have been utilizing commercial models to great effect. The US Army is deploying its own dedicated quadcopters, designed to match and exceed the abilities of commercial quadcopters. Lasers cannot prevent the drone from having already transmitted video or coordinates, but they can stop the drone from continuing to watch. 

Before any laser-armed Strykers see action abroad, they will arrive at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. The Army has already tested the system in development exercises and demonstrations. Now, lasers can be integrated into the regular operation of the military—becoming one more tool designed to protect modern soldiers from the threats of modern warfare.

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On December 1, the Army announced that the 3rd Battalion, 75th Army Rangers are now fielding a dedicated quadcopter, built for military use. The Rangers are the second Army formation to field the Skydio-built RQ-28A drones. The fact that these drones are being used in more training shows how important quadcopters have become on the modern battlefield.

When it comes to personal, commercial, or hobbyist drones, the quadcopter is easily the most familiar form. With four rotors to balance weight and provide redundancy, quadcopters are simple to launch and land. Plus, they provide a stable platform for a camera to be mounted. Commercial quadcopters are so competent and useful, in fact, that they have ended up in military exercises for the better part of a decade. 

What has been trickier is getting commercial-quality quadcopters, without the assumed risks of unsecured commercial communications. Securing a specifically military-ready quadcopter for cheap has long been a goal of the Army.

“The Skydio RQ-28A is the Army’s first program of record quadcopter. It is a new and disruptive organic capability that is fielded to the platoon echelon in the form of a portable rucksack Vertical Take Off and Lift, small, unmanned aircraft,” the Army said in a release. “It provides Warfighters with enhanced situational awareness and a standoff capability in urban and complex terrain, enabling accurate reconnaissance and surveillance of targets of interest.”

In other words, the drones let soldiers scout in cities, forests, and hills. Video from the drones lets a platoon, or group of 36 or so soldiers, see what is around them, especially when sight might be obstructed by obstacles, like buildings or boulders. All of these functions could, largely, be done with commercial quadcopters. And for militaries without the massive funding of the United States, that is often what was done.

Off the shelf

After Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, quadcopters became a part of the static warfare along fixed positions in the Donbas region. In 2018, Ukrainian forces released a video showing them using a modified DJI Mavic quadcopter to drop a grenade on separatist-held trenches. Since the February 2022 invasion, soldiers in both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries have made extensive use of commercial quadcopters. These drones let soldiers see the area around where they are fighting, and inform how they move through terrain. The drones are also useful spotters for artillery and mortar fire, increasing accuracy of existing weapons. As some Russian veterans returning from the front noted, fighting without quadcopters meant operating like “blind kittens.”

For years, the US Army and other parts of the Pentagon also explored the potentials of off-the-shelf quadcopters. But in 2017, the Army moved to ban the use of DJI, and in 2018, the Department of Defense sent a memo suspending the military from purchasing off-the-shelf drones, citing cybersecurity concerns. These concerns primarily arose because the drones were made by DJI, China’s hobbyist drone giant, which could pose a national cybersecurity risk to the US military.

In an independent audit funded by DJI, the concerns were mostly though not entirely dismissed, and the drones still make their way into military-adjacent testing. It was DJI drones that Raytheon destroyed in a field test with a laser, for example. A 2017 Navy evaluation of DJI drones, used as the basis for the Navy ban, noted that the drones were also cheap enough to be treated as expendable, and recommended mitigation strategies for cyber vulnerabilities. 

However, despite the advancements that have been made in adapting commercial drones, the Army has decided instead to pursue the development of a dedicated military quadcopter, which it is now fielding. 

Mission set

The RQ-28A drone itself weighs less than 5 pounds, can be transported in a hard-case, and can be carried onto the field in a rucksack. Ultimately, the Army expects to field 480 of the drones in 2023, with a total of 1,083 delivered by the end of March 2025. These drones will be piloted using an existing government controller, which works with the existing drones. 

In September, the Army fielded the RQ-28A for the first time with the Small UAS Master Trainer Schoolhouse at Fort Benning, Georgia. That school also trans soldiers on other small drones, like the hand-tossed fixed-wing Raven scout. For training on the RQ-28A, the school received 30 drone systems.

As The War Zone notes, the RQ-28A is likely based on Skydio’s X2D drone, which means they probably share similar features such as 35 minutes of flight time and the ability to communicate and send video from up to 3.6 miles away. 

In the field, these drones can mean the difference between what soldiers can see with their own eyes, and detecting an ambush waiting ahead and tucked away out of sight. However, for the RQ-28A to truly match the utility of the commercial drones it is emulating, it will need to be as expendable in battle. What makes battlefield quadcopters so useful is that they not only offer an overhead video of combat, but that they can be abandoned without real loss if need be.

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To fire artillery faster, the US Army is turning to robotic arms. On December 1, Army Futures Command awarded a $1 million contract to Sarcos Technology and Robotics Corporation to test a robot system that can handle and move artillery rounds. 

Every artillery piece is, in essence, a tube that combines the artillery shell with an explosive propellant, hurling a projectile and pain far away to someone else. The rate of artillery fire is determined by how quickly the crew can aim, load, and reload the gun. For artillery on the ground, that’s a matter of drill and skill, training the humans to lift and load, and clear and seal guns as fast as possible without dropping an artillery round that can weigh over 90 pounds. 

As such, the Army hopes that robotics can help with this process. “The Sarcos robotic ammunition handling solution leverages a dexterous robotic arm that was designed to be integrated into the U.S. Army’s fleet of Self-Propelled Howitzer Systems,” the company said in a release.

A self-propelled artillery system is a long-range gun mounted on a vehicle, usually a tracked and to some extent an armored one, that looks at a distance like a tank with a very large gun. The Army’s self-propelled howitzer is the venerable M109 Paladin, whose earliest models entered service in 1963. The Paladin has been upgraded at least 15 times in its long service, with new production models adapting to better technology and changing needs in combat.

Operating a Paladin at present takes a crew of six. The driver directs the vehicle, the gunner aims the weapon, three ammunition handlers load and ready the weapon, and a commander oversees the whole operation. Fitting three people in the back of the Paladin to lift and load ammunition means specifically finding recruits who can fit within the vehicle’s confines. Those people must also endure the stress of repeatedly lifting and loading rounds at the pace of battle.

[Related: The US’s latest assist to Ukraine: Rocket launchers with a 43-mile range]

For the Extended Range Cannon Artillery, the Army’s latest iteration of the Paladin-derived design, the Army is hoping to double the range of its artillery, while keeping pace with the complex tasks of firing and calibrating shots. Depending on ammunition, a Paladin today can hit targets at a range of 11 to 15 miles away. The Extended Range version, which has been thoroughly redesigned since the 1963 models, will have a range of 40 miles. 

“The Extended Range Cannon Artillery system is used extensively in the U.S. Army for long range precision firing, but the downside to this system is the weight of the ammunition needing to be hand-loaded by Soldiers in the field,” Reeg Allen, vice president of business development, Sarcos, said in a release.

An automated system, using robot arms to fetch and ready artillery rounds, would function somewhat like a killer version of a vending machine arm. The human gunner could select the type of ammunition from internal stores, and then the robotic loader finds it, grabs it, and places it on a lift. 

If it sounds futuristic, a system like this is actually already in use. This is how the automated loader of the Panzerhaubitze 2000 self-propelled howitzer works. That gun is in service with several nations, including Germany and Ukraine. The use of the automated system requires one fewer human artillery crew member in the vehicle. The PzH 2000 also has an automated loader for outside the vehicle, allowing soldiers to carry ammunition from trucks or nearby storage and restock the vehicle in the field, without having to crawl into the confined space of the artillery crew compartment.

[Related: What to know about the Caesars, the gigantic truck-mounted artillery units France sent Ukraine]

Testing the new automated system means ensuring not just that it can lift and load artillery, but that it can also handle the rigors of war. Any useful hardware must be able to absorb the shock and vibration of driving, as well as handling the environmental factors in which it operates, from intense heat to sharp cold, as well as erosion from sand, dust, and humidity.

Should the robot arm perform as expected in testing, it will eliminate a job that is all repetitive strain. The robot, lifting and loading ammunition, is now an autonomous machine, automating the dull and menial task of reading rounds to fire.

Improved speed and reduced crewing of artillery are always broadly good objectives, and the ongoing war in Ukraine has emphasized the continuing role of artillery on modern battlefields. Self-propelled artillery offers a way for armies to shoot and scoot, unleashing salvos and then relocating before retaliation. Unlike high-end rock and missile systems like the HIMARs, self-propelled artillery can deliver that barrage using much lower cost artillery shells.

Watch an automated loader for a PzH 2000 in action below: 

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To confuse Russian aircraft, Ukraine reportedly has access to a training tool from the United States. Known as “Threat Emitters,” they are a way for pilots to learn the signatures of hostile aircraft and missiles, allowing them to safely practice identifying and reacting to combat situations in training. In simulated scenarios, pilots learn how their sensors would perceive real threats, and can safely plan and adapt to the various anti-aircraft weapons they might encounter. The net effect is that pilots learn to fight against a phantom representation of air defenses, in preparation for the real thing.

But when brought to actual war, the emitters in turn are a way to make an enemy’s sensors less reliable, confounding adversarial pilots about what is real and what is merely an electromagnetic mirage.

These “low-cost emitters were built for ranges inside the U.S. but now are in the hands of Ukrainians,” reported Aviation Week, citing Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr. “The emitters can replicate surface-to-air missiles and aircraft, and are a cheap, innovative way to further complicate the air picture for Russia.”

One such system is the Joint Threat Emitter. There are two major components to the system: a command unit that lets soldiers operate it, and trailer-mounted radar threat emitters. A command unit can control up to 12 different threat emitters, and each emitter can simulate up to six threats at once. 

These emitters help pilots train on their sensors, practicing for war when far from conflict. In 2013, the Air Force and Navy set up Joint Threat Emitters at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. Both the Navy and Air Force operate from the island, and as the American territory closest to North Korea and China, Guam is prominently featured in war plans around either country. 

“When [pilots] go to a real-world situation, they won’t see anything that we haven’t thrown at them before,” Staff Sgt. Rick Woltkamp, a ground radar systems craftsman with the Idaho Air National Guard, said in 2013. “We simulate a ground attack, and the pilot will react and respond accordingly to the simulation.”

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

Development and use of the tech goes back two decades. In 2002, the Air Force selected Northrop Grumman to develop the Joint Threat Emitter over the next 10 years as a “high-fidelity, full-power threat simulator that is capable of generating radar signals associated with threat systems” that will “better enable aircrews to train in modern war environments.”

Some of the signals it can generate mimic surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery, both of which threaten planes but require different countermeasures. One example of a non-missile air defense system is the ZSU-23, built by the Soviet Union. The ZSU is an armored vehicle with anti-aircraft guns pointed on a turret that uses a radar dish to guide its targeting. As a Soviet-made system, ZSU-23 systems were handed down to successor states, and are reportedly in operation by both the militaries of Ukraine and Russia.

When used for training purposes, the Joint Threat Emitters let pilots perceive and adapt to the presence of enemies, beyond visual line of sight. At these distances, pilots rely largely on sensor readings to see and anticipate the danger they are flying into. One way for them to adapt might be to pick a new route, further from the anti-air radars. Another would be to divert the attack to knock out anti-air systems first.

[Related: How electronic warfare could factor into the Russia-Ukraine crisis]

In Ukraine, the likely use case for these emitters is to augment the country’s existing air defenses. Using the emitters to project air-defense signals across the battlefield—signals identical to known and real Ukrainian air defenses—could mask where the actual defenses are. Real defenses lurking in a sea of mirage defenses, simulated but not backed up by the actual weapons, is a vexing proposition for an attacker. Discovering what is real means probing the defenses with scouts (or hoping that satellite imagery provides a timely update). But because the emitters, like the weapons they emulate, can be driven around, even a view from space cannot accurately pin down a fixed location for long.

Russia’s air force has struggled to achieve air superiority over Ukraine since it invaded in February 2022. Existing air defenses, from vintage human-portable missiles to newer arrivals, put planes and helicopters at real risk for attack. Videos of Russian helicopters lobbing rockets, increasing range while greatly reducing accuracy, suggest that even in the war’s earliest months Russian pilots were afraid of existing Ukrainian anti-air defenses. 

While the threat emitters alone do not offer any direct way to shoot down aircraft, having them in place makes Russia’s work of attacking from the sky that much harder. Even if a threat emitter is found and destroyed, it likely means that Russia spent ammunition hitting a decoy target, while missing a real and tangible threat.

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On November 29, the Department of Defense released its annual report on the military power of China. The document offers a public-facing look at how the military of the United States assesses the only country it truly considers to be a potential rival. Most strikingly, the report suggests that not only is China expanding its nuclear arsenal, but it is potentially on track to field 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035.

Nuclear warheads are hardly the only measure of a nation’s destructive power, but they’re easily the most eye-catching. China already has the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, behind Russia and the United States. 

In the report, the Pentagon estimates China’s arsenal to currently be over 400 warheads. The Federation of American Scientists, which produces an independent assessment of nuclear forces, estimated China’s arsenal at over 350 warheads as of early 2022. Getting to 1,500 warheads by 2035 would require China to produce 85 warheads a year, every year, until then.

Nuclear numbers

China’s arsenal, while large and growing, is relatively in keeping with the arsenals of India, Pakistan, the UK, and France. More specifically, India is estimated by the Federation to have 160 warheads while France has 290. (North Korea and Israel, with 20 and 90, respectively, have the fewest.) 

These arsenals are all an order of magnitude or two smaller than the 5,428 for the United States, and 5,977 for Russia. That’s a huge change in scale, with the world’s largest arsenal roughly 300 times as big as the world’s smallest. It’s also a divide largely determined by history. The United States and the Soviet Union, from which Russia inherited its nuclear arsenals, were the first two countries to develop and test atomic weapons, and they did so in the context of the Cold War, after the United States used two atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

Importantly, the arsenals of the United States and Russia remain bound by arms control treaties, most crucially the New START treaty. While the US and Russia both maintain thousands of warheads in stockpiles or reserves, they both actively deploy roughly 1,600 warheads each. That’s comparable to the total the Pentagon estimates China to be working towards.

Throughout the Cold War, arsenal increases were driven by advances in technology and changes in strategy. More warheads in more missiles, including missiles that could carry and launch multiple warheads at once, developed as an approach to guaranteeing destruction in the face of developments around sophisticated defenses, like missile interceptors or silos hardened against nuclear attack. New technologies, like the continued development by Russia, China, and the United States of hypersonic weapons, could similarly bend arsenal design to more warheads, ensuring that the missiles launched in an attack can cause sufficient harm upon arrival. 

Launching points

Warheads are the smallest unit of a nuclear arsenal. They are, after all, the part that creates the explosions. But a nuclear warhead on its own is just a threat waiting to be sent somewhere far away. What really determines the effectiveness of warheads is the means available to launch them.

In the United States, there exists what’s known as the nuclear triad: Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) launched from silos, submarine-launched missiles, and weapons delivered by planes. But even that seemingly simple triad fails to capture the complexity of launch. The United States can fire Air Launched Cruise Missiles with nuclear warheads from bombers, a weapon that travels at a different trajectory than gravity bombs or ballistic missiles.

The Pentagon report outlines China’s platforms across air, sea, and land. Air is covered by China’s existing H-6N bomber class. At sea, China has six operational nuclear-armed submarines, with development expected on a next-generation nuclear-armed submarine this decade. On land, China has both road-mobile missile launcher-erector trucks, which can relocate and launch long-range missiles across the country, and growing silo fields, capable of housing ICBMs underground.

The distribution of warheads across submarines, planes, road-mobile missiles, and silos matters, because it can suggest what kind of nuclear war a country anticipates or wants to deter. Silos are especially notable because they are designed to launch in retaliation to a first strike, like submarines, but unlike submarine-launched missiles, silos are specifically placed to attract incoming attack, diverting enemy firepower away from civilians or military command as a missile sink.

Road-mobile missiles, instead, are vulnerable when found, but can be relocated to avoid strikes like submarines and bombers, only with the added feature that they are visible from space. The act of signaling—when one nation uses the position and readiness of nuclear weapons to communicate with other nations indirectly—is tricky, but one of the signs countries look for is obvious mobilization seen from satellite photography. 

Ultimately, the increase in warhead numbers suggests a growing arsenal, though it is hard to know what the end state of that arsenal will be. Producing nuclear weapons is hard, dangerous work. Wielding them, even as a deterrent, is risky as well. 

What is certain, at least, is that the days of talking about Russia and the United States as the world’s predominant nuclear powers may be trending towards an end. Cold War arms control and limitation treaties, which halted and then meaningfully reduced arsenal sizes, were done in the context of two countries agreeing together. Reducing arsenals in the 21st century will likely be a multi-party effort. 

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On November 29, San Francisco’s government voted 8 to 3 to authorize the use of lethal weapons by police robots. The vote and authorization, which caught national attention, speaks directly to the real fears and perils regarding the use of robotics and remote-control tools domestically. The vote took place in the context of a 2021 law enacted by California mandating that police get approval from local governing authorities over what equipment it uses and how it does so. 

As the the San Francisco Chronicle reported, city Supervisor Aaron Peskin told his colleagues: “There could be an extraordinary circumstance where, in a virtually unimaginable emergency, they might want to deploy lethal force to render, in some horrific situation, somebody from being able to cause further harm,” offering a rationale for why police may want to use a robot to kill.

Police robots are not new, though the acquisition of military-grade robots was bolstered by a program that offered local police departments surplus military goods. Bomb squad robots, used heavily in Iraq and Afghanistan to relocate and safely dispose of roadside bombs, or Improvised Explosive Devices, were offered to police following the drawdowns of US forces from those countries in the 2010s. 

Many of the tools that ultimately end up in police hands first see their debut in military contexts, especially in counter-insurgency or irregular warfare. Rubber bullets, a now-ubiquitous less-lethal police weapon, have their origin in the wooden bullets of British Hong Kong and the rubber bullets of British forces in Northern Ireland. MRAPS, the massive heavy armored vehicles hastily produced to protect soldiers from bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, have also seen a second post-war life in police forces.

Bomb squad robots are remarkable, in part, because they are a tool for which the military and police applications are the same. A robot with a gripper and a camera, remotely controlled over a long tether, can inspect a suspicious package, sparing a human life in the event of detonation. Police and military bomb squads even train on the robots together, sharing techniques for particularly tricky cases. 

San Francisco’s government voted to allow police, with explicit authorization from “one of two high-ranking SFPD leaders” to authorize the lethal use of an armed robot, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The Chronicle also notes that “the department said it has no plans to outfit robots with a gun,” instead leaving the killing to explosives mounted on robots.

Past precedent

There is relevant history here: In the early hours of July 8, 2016, police in Dallas outfitted an explosive to a Remotec Andros Mark V-A1 and used it to kill an armed suspect. The night of July 7, the suspected shooter had fired on seven police officers, killing five. Dallas police surrounded the suspect and exchanged gunfire during a five-hour standoff in a parking garage. The Dallas Police Department had operated this particular Remotec Andros bomb squad robot since 2008. 

On that night in July, the police attached a bomb to the robot’s manipulator arm. Operated by remote control, the robot’s bomb killed the suspect, while the lifeless robot made it through the encounter with only a damaged manipulator arm. The robot gripper arms are designed to transport and relocate found explosives to a place where they can be safely detonated, sometimes with charges placed by the robot.

While Dallas was a groundbreaking use of remote-control explosives, it fit into a larger pattern of police using human-set explosives, most infamously the 1985 MOVE bombing by Philadelphia Police, when a helicopter delivered two bombs onto a rowhouse and burned it down, as well as 65 other houses. 

Flash bang grenades are a less-lethal weapon used by police and militaries, creating a bright light and loud sound as a way to incapacitate a person before police officers enter a building. These weapons, which are still explosive, can cause injury on contact with skin, and have set fires, including one that burned a home and killed a teenager in Albuquerque, New Mexico in July 2022.

The authorization to arm robots adds one more category of lethal tools to an institution already permitted to do violence on behalf of the state. 

Remote possibilities

Bomb squad robots, which come in a range of models and can costs into the six figures, are a specialized piece of equipment. They are often tethered, with communications and controls running down a large wire to humans, ensuring that the robot can be operated despite interference in wireless signals. One of the ways these robots are used is to facilitate negotiations, with a microphone and speaker allowing police to safely talk to a cornered suspect. In 2015, California Highway Patrol used a bomb squad robot to deliver pizza to a knife-armed man standing over a highway overpass, convincing the man to come down. 

The possibility that these robots could instead be used to kill, as one was in 2016, makes it harder for the robots to be used for non-violent resolution of crises with armed people. In the Supervisors’ hearing, references were made to both the 2017 Mandalay Bay shooting in Las Vegas and the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, though each is a problem at best tangentially related to armed robots. In Las Vegas, the shooter was immediately encountered by an armed guard, and when police arrived they were able to breach rooms with explosives they carried. In Uvalde, the use of explosives delivered by robot would only have endangered children, who were already waiting for the excruciatingly and fatally long police response to the shooter.

By allowing police to turn a specialized robot into a weapon, San Francisco is solving for a problem that does not meaningfully exist, and is making a genuinely non-lethal tool into a threat. It also sets a precedent for the arming of other machines, like inexpensive quadcopter drones, increasing the distance between police and suspects without leading to arrests or defused situations. 

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The past year has been marked by serious challenges, from the ongoing climate emergency, a subsequent increase in extreme forest fire frequency, and the devastating war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. But we’ve also seen true innovation in the field of crisis response. More exact location systems will help emergency services find people in trouble quicker. Better respirator technology is rolling out, designed to help wildland firefighters breathe a little easier. And fire trucks are finally starting to go electric. This year’s best emergency services and defense innovations offer paths out of tight spots, aiming to create a safer future—or at least a better way to handle its myriad disasters.

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Find it here.

Grand Award Winner 

Wildland Firefighter Respirator by TDA Research: A lightweight, field-rechargeable respirator for forest firefighters

TDA

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Forest fire fighters need a lightweight wearable respirator to protect them from inhaling smoke. The Wildland Firefighter Respirator, by TDA Research, uses a hip-mounted pump to pull air through a HEPA filter, channeling it to a secure but loose-fitting half-mask (a helpful feature for people who haven’t had the chance to shave while in the field). A sensor in the system detects air flow direction, letting the pump only blow at full strength when the user inhales. Importantly, the device weighs just 2.3 pounds, which is only about 10 percent the weight of a typical urban firefighting Self Contained Breathing Apparatus. About the size of a 1-liter water bottle, the respirator is powered by a lithium-ion battery pack. To recharge in the field or away from a generator, that pack can also draw power from 6 AA batteries. Bonus: Even though it was designed for safety professionals, the device could also become civilian protective gear in fire season.

Connect AED by Avive: Connecting defibrillators to those in need, faster

Avive

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Avive’s Connect AED (Automated External Defibrillator) is designed to be a life-saving device that’s also smart. The devices can automatically do daily maintenance checks to ensure they can perform as needed, thanks to WiFi, cellular, bluetooth, and GPS. Plus, with that connectivity, 911 operators could alert nearby Connect AED holders to respond to a called-in cardiac arrest, saving time and possibly someone’s life. Once a person has been defibrillated, Connect’s connectivity also lets emergency room doctors see data the device collected, such as the patient’s heart rhythm, as well as the device’s shock history, complete with timestamps. The Connect AED also has a backpack-like form factor and touch screen for intuitive use.

Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations by Ames Research Center: Letting drone pilots clear skies for aerial emergency vehicles 

Ames Research Center

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The sky above a forest fire can be a dangerous, crowded place, and that was before forest fire fighters added drones joined the mix. Developed by NASA, the Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations project (STEReO) is developing tools for managing the complicated airspace above an emergency. In the spring of 2022, a NASA team field-tested a STEReO’s suitcase-sized prototype device, called the UASP-Kit, to monitor drones safely in the open airspace around prescribed burns. By tracking transponders on crewed aircraft, the UASP-Kit can play a sound through tablet speakers, alerting drone operators when helicopters and planes fly close to where they are operating. That hopefully lets drone pilots get their equipment to safety without risking aerial collision.

Locate Before Route by AT&T: Pinpointing the emergency 

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When a person in an emergency calls 911 for help, that call is routed, based on its location, to the closest 911 operator. For cell phones, that meant matching the call to the nearest tower and hoping it sent the call to dispatch in the right county. But in May 2022, AT&T announced the nationwide rollout of a better system. Leaning on the improved location services on iOS and Android phones, AT&T’s Locate Before Route feature can pinpoint the location of the emergency call within 50 meters, sometimes even as precisely as 15 meters. This better location information should allow the call to be routed to the best dispatch center, ideally helping responders arrive faster. That data can only be used for 911 purposes, and helps first responders get where they’re needed quickly, nationwide.

GridStar Flow by Lockheed Martin: Helping to power defense with renewable energy

Lockheed Martin

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The US military is a massive consumer of fossil fuels, but if it wants to use more renewable energy, it needs a way to store that electricity to power vital functions. GridStar Flow, developed by Lockheed Martin for the US Army, is a massive battery complex that takes advantage of the space of Colorado’s Fort Carson to go big. It will store up to 10 megawatt-hours of juice, thanks to tanks of charged electrolytes and other equipment. Construction at Fort Carson broke ground on November 3, but the company has already tested out a smaller flow battery in Andover, Massachusetts. Using electrolytes that can be derived from commodity chemicals, GridStar Flow offers a power storage and release system that can help smooth the energy flow from renewable sources.

Volterra Electric Firetruck by Pierce: A more sustainable, quieter fire truck

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Fire trucks are big, powerful vehicles, but they run on diesel, a polluting fossil fuel. The Pierce Volterra truck can deliver all that power on an electric charge, and it can also run on diesel fuel if need be. Already in use with the Madison, Wisconsin fire department, but with contracts to expand to Portland, Oregon and Gilbert, Arizona underway this year, the Volterra has enough battery power for a full day as an electric vehicle. The electric power helps complement a transition to renewable energy, but it also comes with immediate benefit to the firefighters: the vehicle doesn’t spew exhaust into the station. The quiet of the electric engine also lets firefighters coordinate better on the drive, and can help cries for help be heard when the responders arrive on site.

Vampire Drone by L3Harris: Taking down drones from kilometers away

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Drones are increasingly a part of modern battles, seen in wars across the globe but especially with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with both countries using a range of uncrewed aircraft to scout and fight. In August 2022, the Department of Defense announced it would send a new tool to aid Ukrainian forces as a way to counter Russian drones. Made by L3Harris, the Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) system is a rocket launcher and sensor kit that can be mounted to a range of vehicles, providing a means to damage and destroy drones at a range of at least three miles. The laser-guided rockets, directed by a human operator, explode with a proximity fuse, making near misses into effective takedowns. 

Emergency SOS via satellite by Apple: Locating lost hikers with satellites

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For hikers lost in remote parts of the United States and Canada, calling for help means hoping for cell phone coverage, or waiting for a serendipitous rescue. But Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite, announced September 2022, will let people with an iPhone 14 transmit emergency messages via satellite, provided they can’t first establish a cellular connection. Texters will have a tap-through menu to create an information-dense but data-light report, and provided trees or mountains don’t block the signal, they can transmit crucial information, like what kind of injuries someone has sustained. With a clear view of the sky and fifteen seconds, a cry for help can reach space and then, even better, rescuers on Earth.

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An army may march on its stomach, but it can’t march at all if the soldiers don’t have water. To ensure that its forces are always able to hydrate wherever they operate, this year, the Marine Corps has been testing a machine that can pull drinkable water out of the air. Called the Atmospheric Portable-water Sustainment Unit, when paired with a water purification system it can generate over 15 gallons in a day, or enough water for a squad of marines.

Capt. Sean Conderman, of the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment’s combat logistics battalion at MCBH, told The Honolulu Star-Advertiser that it’s in essence a small dehumidifier paired with a purifier. “We can mount it basically on any vehicle, and what it does is it pulls water out of the air to give us potable water without having to connect to an actual water source.” He further elaborated to The Star Advertiser that this device would be ideal in humid environments like the ones across the United States Indo-Pacific Command. 

The Atmospheric Portable-water Sustainment Unit, or APSU, is paired with the Corps’ Lightweight Water Purification System, to ensure that the water it pulls from the atmosphere is drinkable. This system generates 15 to 20 gallons of drinkable water every 24 hours. Since the Corps recommends “three to four and a half quarts (96–144 fl oz) of fluid per day for men and two to three quarts (64–96 fl oz) for women,” using the high end of the recommendations, the system can sustain 13 men, or 20 women. With variable water consumption rates across people, and production of up to 20 gallons, a single unit could sustain at least one squad, possibly a squad and a half.

Drinking water is a necessity anywhere the military operates. In the Pacific or other humid environments, it can turn the oppressively moist air into an asset, freeing forces up from a reliance on known streams, instead letting them drink from the sky. 

Snowbird Water Technologies built the APSU for the military, which it describes as an “Air Water Generator.” The air water generator “produces water from air, using an extremely efficient process by which condensation is collected and treated with an ozonator and UV light, ensuring safe and potable drinking water is produced at the tactical edge of the battlefield.

Snowbird first announced their contract with the military in April 2021, highlighting that the system can fit on the back of trailers or vehicles. Being able to bring a water generator into the field means that the water supply is constrained only by the availability of power and storage.

One possibility this opens up is that soldiers or marines could set up temporary camps in austere places where shipping in drinking water would be more trouble than it’s worth.

As the marine corps revisits its pacific past and considers island campaigns, one challenge is resupply. Logistics, or the process of getting forces in the field everything they need, is a hard problem, and it is harder over sea and in war zones. A marine regiment that can supply its own water will still need some aid: everything from food to bullets to medical supplies are depreciating quantities in war. But the ability to free itself from dependence on local water supplies, which this Atmospheric Portable-water Sustainment Unit promises, could let the marines go longer between supply drops, or move through otherwise impassible routes without sacrificing health.

For centuries, the most meaningful constraint on a military was how much food it could carry on the march (or forage in the field), and that was along routes premised on water being available. 

The ability to bring water resupply into the field expands where an army can go, and how long it can operate. Often, battles have been forced by soldiers desperate for supply seeking what they can before rations run out. With at least water resupply on hand (for as long as there’s power to run the water generator), a unit can wait, choosing instead to raid when it is most advantageous to do so.

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Stopping a missile is a complicated operation that takes a team of machines. The Army, charged with protecting soldiers in the field from enemy attacks, is testing a system that can coordinate sensors and interceptors to better accomplish this task. On November 17, the Army successfully used this new system to shoot down a cruise-missile stand-in at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

To do this, soldiers from the Army’s 43rd Air Defense Artillery Regiment used two Patriot and Sentinel radars, Patriot missile launchers, and Patriot interceptors, all coordinated through a new command system. This connective tissue between sensors and interceptors is the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, or IBCS. It’s a way for the Army to coordinate radars and missile interceptors across a broad area, comprehensively detecting incoming threats and then making sure those missiles are stopped, without overcommitting interceptors and depleting vital stockpiles.

This endeavor “had a test objective of demonstrating Army Integrated Air & Missile Defense capability to execute [a] kill chain against a ground launched cruise missile surrogate,” the Army said in a release.

In other words, the soldiers used the sensors and interceptors to track and destroy a target drone that was imitating a cruise missile in flight. While the test specifically used Patriot and Sentinel radars, and Patriot interceptors, the premise is that the IBCS can incorporate a host of useful existing and future sensors, as well as any kinds of interceptors the Army might field.

“Preliminary indications are that the planned flight test objectives against the cruise missile threat were achieved, and the target was successfully intercepted,” said the release.

Cruise missiles are a durable threat on modern battlefields, in part because their low trajectory and high degree of maneuverability mean they can be hard to detect at a distance. Patriot missiles, which are deployed in batteries with fire command stations and radars to track targets, have been used to defend against cruise missiles for decades, though the missiles drastically underperformed at intercepting targets during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

One way to improve targeting is to incorporate and coordinate more sensors across a wider field, so that missiles can be detected earlier and the most relevant ways to stop them can be brought to bear against the target. Sometimes, these tools for stopping weapons will be missiles, like the Patriot interceptors, or the older HAWK missiles the US is preparing to send to Ukraine. 

Other ways of stopping an attack may be rockets, like the Vampire anti-air and anti-drone system. Laser weapons, like one tested by PopSci, are another component of modern anti-missile tech, and could be incorporated into a command system.

There are many ways to stop a missile, or a drone, in flight. Grouped together, jammers, guns, missiles, lasers, and other answers to aerial threats are called “effectors,” in military and industry parlance. The effect can be everything from explosion by missile, puncture by bullet, melting by laser, electronic disruption by jammer, but what is essential to the IBCS is that a commander has the sensors that can say where the attack is and the tools to stop it. 

“Once fielded, IBCS will extend the battlespace beyond what a single sensor tied to a single effector can provide, allowing the use of a sensor or effector’s full range and enabling the warfighter to quickly see and act on data across the entire battlefield,” said Northrop Grumman, maker of IBCS, in a release.

Many legacy weapon systems are designed to work with a specific sensor, making a self-contained and compact kit that matched the capabilities and limits of the technology at the time of introduction. It also meant that commanders in the field were limited to working within that system’s information and weapons, even if another system could see the same target. By designing IBCS to incorporate information across sensors, it can match the Army’s desired plug-and-play information environment of the future, where the tools on hand are used to share information, and then the coordinating node matches signal to weapon.

The testing of IBCS at White Sands started in January, and over 10 months soldiers learned how to use the system in a range of scenarios designed to resemble what might be seen in combat. This included two flight tests prior to November 17 where “IBCS detected, tracked, and intercept threats that included: a high speed, high performance tactical ballistic missile and two cruise missile surrogates during a stressing electronic attack,” according to Northop Grumman. 

Provided the system can withstand electronic attack in the field as well as it did in testing, the coordinated system should let the Army better protect soldiers from a range of incoming assaults, using whatever tools are on hand to build a defense that’s stronger together.

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The wars of the future may be decided by boots off the ground. DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing, is prepared to award funding for new kinds of personal mobility systems, PopSci sibling publication Task & Purpose has learned. The form may vary, but the net effect of new mobility is the same: DARPA is funding the development of jetpacks for soldiers.

The jetpacks, and other such mobility devices, are being pursued under the Portable Personal Air Mobility System (PPAMS). A DARPA spokesperson told Task & Purpose that DARPA has selected several companies for phase II funding, noting that “DARPA is currently working with the small companies to finalize contracting details and award contracts, so at this time we can’t discuss the specifics.”

This news follows previous developments. In March 2021, DARPA posted a notice stating its intent to develop and demonstrate “novel or unique approaches to personal battlefield mobility for operators in a man portable low-cost package.” While there are already many types of transport already available to soldiers, from Humvees on the ground to parachutes or V-22 Ospreys for arriving from the sky, what this sought was a unique way to move an individual person.

Going beyond existing mobility means finding a new way soldiers can move and fight beyond that. Extra mobility on a personal level is useful for everything from light resupply, fighting in cities, search and rescue, boarding ships at sea, and letting special operations forces sneak in and out of hostile territory. 

“When deployed, the systems allow mobility for a range of at least 5 km [3.1 miles] for a single operator, likely at low to medium altitudes. Systems should be designed such that assembly and deployment can occur in less than 10 minutes using only simple tools or no tools at all,” reads the 2021 notice.

One other standout feature is that DARPA is exploring both reusable and disposable systems. These jetpacks are designed to carry a person over rough terrain, up a building, or somewhere else they could not normally get. Plus, they can be expendable if the situation demands it.

“Some examples of technologies of interest include jetpacks, powered gliders, powered wingsuits, and powered parafoils which could leverage emerging electric propulsion technologies, hydrogen fuel cells or conventional heavy fuel propulsion systems,” continued the notice.

Because these are tools designed in part for covert missions, DARPA wants to make sure that they are both quiet and cool, in a literal sense: If a jetpack is hot enough to show up on infrared sensors, it likely means the person wearing it can be caught and shot. In addition, the kit needs to be simple to operate and quick to learn, with both design and computer-assistance allowing an average grunt to become a jump-jet enabled mobile infantry unit of one in no time.

Phase II of the program is about developing the technology enough to show that it is viable in ground or flight tests, with Phase III aimed at creating a demonstrator. Phase I, which already awarded contracts, asked companies to describe the system, anticipate how it will perform, outline a path for tech to go from concept to demonstrator, and showcase its use.

Triton Systems, a defense contractor, was one of the companies awarded a Phase I contract. In its contract award from 2021, Triton did not describe the type of portable mobility system pursued. Instead, the company noted that its system “will be quiet, highly reliable, capable of carrying a wide pilot and payload weight range, compact and light enough to easily be transported by a single soldier, require relatively little operator training, and can be made to autonomously self-deliver to stranded operators in remote areas.”

Autonomous delivery of a jetpack to people in the field is a major promise, as it turns a jetpack into not just a way in but a tool that could be delivered from some distance away, allowing stranded soldiers the means to escape safely. It is a promising offer, though there are inherent hurdles in the design. A trip to deliver itself to someone will drain fuel or electrical power, limiting travel time and distance, even more so when carrying a human.

There is a long history of the US military pursuing novel flying machines, with an eye towards more mobility and better scouting for individual soldiers. But the hard limits of turning an individual human into an efficient flying machine, at speeds and sizes useful enough for sneaking into key areas, have so far meant these concepts remain novelties and prototypes, instead of a regular feature of war.

In general, modern jetpacks have moved to at least the demonstration stage. Whether or not they can be useful in actual military missions remains to be seen.

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In the desert south of Death Valley, mock patients waited for drones to deliver simulated blood. California’s Fort Irwin is an Army base that hosted an event called Project Convergence 2022 from late September into November, an annual exercise led by the United States where militaries of multiple nations work together to explore new technologies in service of war. By testing drone delivery of medical supplies, in conjunction with other tech, the military is looking at ways to ensure the survival of soldiers after battle injuries, even in circumstances where it’s unsafe to send people on foot for help.

Part of Project Convergence was Project Crimson, which involved drones dropping medical relief to field medics in a simulated mass casualty scenario. 

“Project Crimson is a project to take a common unmanned air system and adapt it to support a medical mission,” said Nathan Fisher, medical robotics and autonomous systems division chief at the US Army’s Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center, in a release. “This drone supports medical field care when casualty evacuation isn’t an option. It can keep whole blood and other crucial items refrigerated in the autonomous portable refrigeration unit and take it to medics in the field with wounded warriors.”

Researchers first proved that drones could successfully deliver blood in 2015. As cargo, blood makes a lot of sense, since a small amount can be life saving, and drones can rapidly transport small cargoes as needed. In the summer of 2021, British marines tested blood delivery by drone swarm, with the dedicated resupply drones carrying everything from ammunition to blood to troops in the field. 

For Project Crimson, the army used a FVR-90 drone, a vertical takeoff and landing UAV. Two outriggers attached to the drone’s wings each feature two rotors, allowing the FVR-90 to launch and land like a quadcopter. In flight, the FVR-90 flies like a fixed-wing plane, with a front-facing propeller and its over 15-feet wide wingspan allowing for long-lasting efficient flight of up to 16 hours. The FVR-90 tops out at 74 mph, but it can carry up to 10 pounds of payload under its wings, ready to drop and deliver.

The drone “doesn’t need a catapult launch or runway to perform a lifesaving mission. This allows military personnel to preserve life in the critical phase of injury and facilitate rapid transport to an Army hospital for further treatment,” said the release.

Beyond medical delivery drones, the army tested distant communication and diagnostic tools, designed to improve the ability of field medics to observe and manage the health of injuries in the field.

One of these is the Battlefield Assisted Trauma Distributed Observation Kit, or BATDOK. It’s a smartphone app that can work with sensors placed on the patients, scanning information and then storing it for up to 25 patients per device. This information can be shared over a mesh network with other devices, or transferred via protocols like Bluetooth and WiFi, letting a field medic pass along records seamlessly for a patient at the point of transfer to better care. 

“The facility can see the patient’s status real-time using BATDOK, while the medics on ground can update treatments and medications for the patients as well. This allows the facility to be alerted, rally and prepare to treat the patient once they are transported,” explained Michael Sedillo, an integrated cockpit sensing program airman systems director with the Air Force Research Laboratory, in a press release.

As part of Project Convergence, troops carried litters of mock casualties to medical transports, with medics applying care in transit. At the field hospital, field medics and hospital staff traded records using local communications infrastructure, ensuring smooth flow of care. 

Project Convergence included participants from the British and Australian Armies, with allied nations like Canada and New Zealand observing.

Ultimately, exercises like this will improve the ability of the military to not just fight wars, but to ensure that injury on the battlefield is dealt with as best as possible. Drone resupply of medical necessities like blood can keep people in the field alive longer until reinforcements or evacuation arrives. Better data management can make sure that as little information as possible is lost when transferring care, letting medical teams move forward in treatment as conditions allow.

As robots and new data tools move into greater use on the battlefield, training on these labor-saving devices should open up the possibility for human soldiers to focus directly on the tasks of saving lives, while machines provide the tools needed to do that.

Watch a video about Project Convergence below:

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At a range in southern England, researchers tested a new laser, making it one step closer to military use. Developed for the Ministry of Defence, DragonFire is intended to be a long-range answer to incoming threats, a way to defeat projectiles in mid-air through the concentrated power of intense light. On November 8, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) announced it had conducted long-range laser trials at the Porton Down site. During the live fire test, the laser hit and neutralized a small drone at a range of 2 miles.

The laser was developed for the MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). Like most laser weapons, it is a composite technology, a sum of multiple systems put together into one more functional package. This included controls and image processing from defense contractor MBDA, a beam directory to track and point at targets made by defense contractor Leonardo, and a 50-kilowatt laser built by QinetiQ. In the future, the plan is for this laser to be able to “scale fire-power levels,” likely letting the user increase or decrease power to match the target. That saves energy otherwise wasted on overkill, while ensuring the laser can defeat tougher targets when they exist. 

“The trials involve firing the UK DragonFire demonstrator at a number of targets over a number of ranges, demanding pinpoint accuracy from the beam director,” DSTL said in a release. “These tests improve the UK’s understanding of how high-energy lasers and their associated technologies can operate over distance and defeat representative targets.” 

To develop the laser, the Ministry of Defence and industry have spent “around £100 million,” or roughly $118 million dollars. Laser weapons are heavily front-loaded on cost, with the research and development expense in the name of creating a weapon that can destroy targets cheaply, relative to using high-caliber bullets, rockets, or missiles instead.

“Laser directed energy weapons have the potential to provide lower cost lethality, reduced logistical burden and increased effectiveness when compared to other weapon systems – the technology could have a huge effect on the future of defence operations,” said DSTL in the release.

[Related: What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser]

Laser weapons work by combining and focusing powerful light, and then holding that light steady on a target until the heat of the laser can damage it. The effectiveness of the laser depends on a host of factors, from the amount of power going in, to how well the tracking system can keep the laser focused on the same part of an object. Even the location of where a laser is focused on a drone can change the speed at which it is disabled: a laser aimed at plastic casing and circuits will disable a drone much faster than a laser aimed at igniting a battery.

That means simply developing a powerful laser is not enough to ensure a quick takedown of a drone, or a missile, or other threats like mortar rounds and rocket fire. The sensors and automated tracking systems that go into laser weapons are important for reducing the amount of time a laser needs to fire per target. On the range, a laser can focus on one object without distraction, but in a realistic combat scenario, a laser may have a few seconds to disable a projectile before moving onto another. 

The Ministry of Defence has been looking to develop a laser weapon since at least 2015. One of the durable challenges of making a laser weapon is that the beam’s effectiveness can be diminished by particulates in the air, from smoke or dust or even moisture like fog and rain. The 2015 request stated that the goal was for a laser which can “detect, acquire and track targets at range and in varying weather conditions, with sufficient precision.”

Some of those conditions, like billowing dust or thick fog, are also obstacles to drone flight and sensors. But with laser weapons also taking an anti-projectile role, an inability to stop attacks in bad weather could turn a gloomy day into a grim one in combat.

[Related: The UK’s solution for enemy drones? Lasers.]

DragonFire has been in the works since at least 2017, as a way to defeat and disable aerial targets, like drones. Drones are an ideal target, in part because they fly slow enough for lasers to track, and because there is no onboard pilot that a laser can blind. Laser weapon use against people is governed by the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, part of the Geneva Conventions on Certain Conventional Weapons, which entered into force in 1998. Both the United States and the United Kingdom are among the treaty’s 109 signatories, agreeing to not use lasers specifically to blind people in war. 

That makes DragonFire, like other laser weapons, a modern solution to a modern threat. It’s a way to stop flying robots and uncrewed enemies, protecting humans from inanimate attackers.

Watch a video about it below:

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Above the town of Mailuu Suu in western Kyrgyzstan, the International Atomic Energy Agency is flying drones to monitor for radiation. For 22 years, from 1946 to 1968, people in Mailuu Suu mined and processed uranium ore for the Soviet Union. Decades later, waste still remains, and monitoring is essential to ensure that people can live safely in the environment actively contaminated by production of nuclear materials. The drone flights, captured in a video shared online November 4, are a way for new technology to ease the burden of monitoring risk.

The town of Mailuu Suu was intimately tied to the extraction of nuclear material in the Soviet Union, which meant that the town was unlisted on maps, closed to outsiders, and officially logged only as “Mailbox 200.” In the Cold War climate, where espionage was essential for superpowers tracking and estimating the size of nuclear weapons arsenals, this made some degree of sense. It also meant that the protective geography of the town, in a river valley in a region prone to landslides and earthquakes, helped keep residents in place, even as it led to risky decisions like burying waste nearby the village.

An accident in 1958

In 1958, heavy rainfall and seismic activity caused a dam failure that pushed 14 million cubic feet of radioactive waste into the Maylu-Suu river that runs through the town. Downstream, the river flows into the Ferghana valley of Central Asia, an area split between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and a region home to 14 million people. The 1958 disaster contaminated the river and areas downstream, leaving a visceral legacy in the memories of those who witnessed it.

The concern for the town, the government of Kyrgyzstan, and international observers, is that such a disaster could strike again. Much of the waste from the site exists in “tailings,” or the sludge left over from extracting uranium ore and processing it with chemicals. In addition to the 23 sites of tailings, there are 13 sites of radioactive rock around the city. Climate change can cause a shift in rain patterns and an increase in storm severity, exacerbating the risk posed by these sites to the whole region.

Eventually, remediation will be needed to tackle all of the sites, ensuring they no longer pose a threat to people in the area or elsewhere. Before that, there is the constant work of monitoring the waste, which has traditionally been done by humans on foot or, rarely, helicopters. Now, uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVS) or drones are being brought to bear on the problem.

“The tailor-made UAV-based gamma spectrometer will make it possible for experts to explore sites without the need to trek through difficult terrain with lots of gear,” Sven Altfelder, an IAEA remediation safety specialist, said in a June 2021 release. “By using the UAV to conduct monitoring duties, experts in the region will be able to easily gather the necessary data quickly, while avoiding potential physical and radiological risks altogether.”

A good job for a drone

Drone monitoring reduces the labor and risk of checking out the area on foot. Thanks to the ability of drone-borne sensors to carry and upload data, it also allows for a more complete picture of radioactive risk and sites, mapped in three dimensions by the flying robot.

Another perk is that drones can detect new or unmarked sites, since thorough scanning of the region by air makes it easier to find mislabeled or unknown waste sites. Drone piloting is also easier and cheaper than using crewed aircraft, and drone pilot training has fewer hurdles than that of pilots who actually fly inside the craft they operate.

The technology was tested in Germany in 2020, showing that the drone can produce a reliable and accurate radiation map of partially remediated sites. This work was funded by the European Union and the German government, which has a specific tie to Mailuu Suu. When the town was set up as a closed community in 1946, among the people relocated to work in it were ethnic Germans, alongside Crimean Tatars and Russian soldiers who had surrendered during World War II.

[Related: Why do nuclear power plants need electricity to stay safe?]

With proof that the drone can be used to successfully monitor the sites in Kyrgyzstan, the hope is that experts in the country, and other Central Asian countries, can be trained to take on the work. The project is supported by the governments of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

“We will be able to use the results obtained by the UAV to explain remediation results to the local population and demonstrate that those areas are now safe,” said Azamat Mambetov, State Secretary of the Kyrgyzstan Ministry of Emergency Situations, in the June release.

The drone monitoring will aid in guiding remediation and proving its success. This, in turn, could expand possibilities in the region, with some hope from the IAEA that a remediated and safe Mailu Suu could not just stop being a risk, but could even become a destination for travelers and tourists, eager to behold the natural beauty.

Watch a video about it below:

The post How drones are helping monitor Kyrgyzstan’s radioactive legacy appeared first on Popular Science.

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On November 4, the Department of Defense announced a $400 million package of aid and weapons for Ukraine. This latest installment joins a long list of previous aid to the country as it continues its fight against Russian forces, which invaded Ukraine in February. The shape of the war is reflected in the aid sent, which in this package includes funding for anti-air missiles, river boats, and armored vehicles. But what is most striking about this latest aid package is the juxtaposition of both vintage and modern weapons: among them are refurbished T-72B tanks, a design that is decades old, and 1,100 new Phoenix Ghost Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems. 

The package, the announcement states, is designed to support Ukraine “by meeting their most urgent needs, while also building the capacity of Ukraine’s Armed Forces to defend its sovereignty over the long term.”

Some of the $400 million is going to funding for training, maintenance, and sustainment, ways that the Ukrainian forces can keep fighting at a professional level. It’s also important for incorporating a range of modern and older equipment into one effective military force.

Here’s what to know about both the old and new tech that’s going to Ukraine.

Old equipment

Two of the systems included in the package are, at least in origin, decades old. Included is funding to refurbish old HAWK missiles so the US can deliver them to Ukraine in the future. HAWK missiles were first developed by the US in the 1950s, and deployed in the 1960s, with upgraded versions introduced in the 1970s and 1990s. The missile was named after the bird first, before retroactively getting the acronym “Homing All the Way Killer”

While their role in the US military has been supplanted by Patriot surface-to-air missiles, HAWK missiles can reach altitudes twice that of human-portable anti-air missiles like the Stinger or Strela, and fly nearly ten times as far, hitting planes as far away as 25 miles. Spain has already sent HAWK missiles and launchers to Ukraine, so the US announcement will expand the inventory of missiles.

Also included in the package are T-72B tanks, a Soviet design whose base T-72 model was first prototyped in 1968. T-72s entered production in 1972, with the B model first produced in 1986. This is a main battle tank, one of three lines maintained and produced by the USSR, with a 125mm gun designed to destroy the armored vehicles of NATO in any war in Europe. What sets the T-72B apart from other variants is especially thick turret armor, as well as a better engine. In addition, the tanks have a laser designator and can fire laser-guided rounds from the main gun, though this was designed as an option rather than the default. 

Because the T-72B is a Soviet design, the vehicles designated for Ukraine will come from a former Soviet stockpile, in this case the Czech Republic. The announcement notes that these tanks will be refurbished with “advanced optics, communications, and armor packages.” A separate announcement of the deal says that the United States and the Netherlands are partnering with the Czech Republic for the refurbishment. The first of these tanks are expected for delivery to Ukraine in December 2022, with more to come in 2023.

New weapons

The war in Ukraine is being fought with legacy systems from decades of Cold War buildup, and it is also being fought with new and modern tools, some of which specifically debuted in this war. The Phoenix Ghost, announced in April, is a self-detonating drone. These kinds of weapons have seen prolific use on Ukrainian battlefields, along with US-made Switchblade systems already in use.

When Phoenix Ghost was first announced, it was as a delivery of 121 of the systems. This latest announcement is an order of magnitude larger, at 1,100. These weapons fit in the increasingly crowded low skies above Ukraine, where quadcopter scouts and small remotely piloted missiles give soldiers on foot better information and greater reach.

A toolbox of tech 

The package is best seen as not a hodgepodge of old and new tech, but a coherent picture of what a modern military, at war for months against a similarly equipped foe, needs to win battles and fronts. The tanks in the announcement are listed alongside M117 armored wheeled vehicles, which allow soldiers to fight and move on routes with unexploded bombs or hidden landmines. The Armored Riverine Boats will help forces move and fight on the waterways of the country, of which none is likely more important than the Dnipro that runs through both Kyiv and Kherson.

This will all be coordinated with new communications, soon to be under the watchful protection of anti-air missiles, and with new drone-based weapons hitting gaps in defensive lines. War is a combined arms affair, and all of the items in the November 4 package offer tools for Ukraine to break out from the static artillery duels that can hold fronts in place.

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A typical hobbyist drone is made by assembling electronic parts on frames made of carbon fiber or plastic. But as these flying machines continue to proliferate, it’s worth remembering that drones can come in many forms.

As an extreme case, consider a drone recently shared on Twitter. The quadcopter looks like it was assembled on a dare. With a body made of six sticks, the drone is little more than rotors, wires, and a control unit wrapped around an ultra minimalist frame. A caption on it reads, in Arabic, “Yemeni makes aircraft from stalks of qat.” For at least a few seconds, the drone flies, soaring overhead.

Here it is, in action: 

The drone is a reminder that such devices can actually be pretty simple. “I think the biggest benefit of this design is that once key materials are available – a battery, a receiver, several small motors, propellers and wiring – such a drone can be essentially assembled ‘on the fly,’ pun intended,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security.

What’s striking is how this drone distills the aircraft down to minimum parts. The wee flying machine is motors, writes, controls, and something it can all stick to. In this case, literal sticks, or stems from the qat plant.

“Obviously, some experience building and flying such quadcopters is helpful in making sure the drone can be properly stabilized, but a lot of those requirements and knowledge is freely available online as well,” says Bendett. “The main point of this video is that the quadcopter frame can be assembled from any products freely available. And the rest of the components can be relatively easily procured or even built/3D printed if necessary.”

Spare parts

The modern drone market is built on complete, packageable products. These are made by a variety of companies, though China’s DJI has long been the industry leader in low cost and mass production of capable drones. DJI drones have such a durable presence that, when Popular Science took part in a laser weapon demonstration in October, their drones were the targets.

As such a large player in the commercial space, DJI’s products end up in military use, which led the company to ban sales in both Ukraine and Russia after the latter invaded the former in February. The ready-made drones are the easiest and fastest way to get scouts into the sky. But as the Yemen-made stick-drone illustrates, the whole can be made from a handful of parts.

ISIS, the theocratic insurgency that for a few years controlled territory in Syria and Iraq, was able to build its own drones. These aircraft, largely fixed-wing (or miniature plane-like), employed plywood and styrofoam for their bodies. Guidance systems came from electronics supply shops, designed to go into DIY drone kits. By tapping into the same market, and getting parts from markets out of territory they controlled, ISIS was able to outfit its own drones from the same broader supply chain that makes mass-produced drones possible.

Food that flies

What stands out about the stick drone is the minimalism of its design, replacing bulky plastic with sticks destined for disposal. Another alternative, as presented in a recent robotics conference, is to make a drone where the wings themselves are cargo, consumable on delivery.

In this case, the drone’s wings are made of rice cakes.

“The researchers designed the wing of this partially edible drone out of compressed puffed rice (rice cakes or rice cookies, depending on whom you ask) because of the foodstuff’s similarity to expanded polypropylene (EPP) foam. EPP foam is something that’s commonly used as wing material in drones because it’s strong and lightweight; puffed rice shares those qualities,” writes Evan Ackerman of IEEE Spectrum.

By cutting rice cakes into hexagons, and then binding them together with edible gelatin, the researchers were able to make a foam-like wing. The electronics of this drone included a rotor, engine, control surfaces on the tail, and a battery. With the rice cakes packed in plastic and attached to the electronics as the wing, the drone is an airborne breakfast for one, designed as air-deliverable rescue rations.

Sticks and drones

While militaries will stick with equipment built for the purpose, the ability to turn a small amount of electronics into a flying machine kit with only a few found materials opens up possibilities for drone operation. In the field, it’s easy to imagine soldiers with a spare parts kit adapting those parts to make a new drone if their built unit is too broken to work. Even if all the spare drone does is make a noise and a distraction, the option for a little unexpected movement directed remotely could be useful, distracting hostile forces while seeking cover or escape. 

With field-assembly of drones as an objective, kits could be designed to work for forces that have to travel light, with an understanding that the drone will be assembled from foraged materials as needed. If a stick-kit drone is designed to be expendable, then the careful considerations of balancing an airframe for hundreds of hours of flight become secondary. Instead, a minimalist drone, built on trash, just needs to fly for a moment, useful until it crashes down and returns to rubbish.

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A scout drone is a system for collecting information—an uncrewed flying machine with freedom of movement and the ability to get lost or even shot down. As the United States Navy plans for greater integration of drones in its operations, the way drones capture, store, and transfer data are all new avenues for risk. At two October 26 events, the Navy and the defense industry addressed the unique problems of drone data management in the fleet. In brief, the issue at hand is how much data drones can collect, and how to convert that collected data into useful information, all while transfering that info to human commanders in a timely manner.

“What [are] the most important 1s and 0s it needs to travel on very resource-constrained devices that move things from satellite, from ship to ship and all of the above? The Navy is really struggling with this, but there are organizations that have [been] stood up to look at all these problems,” said Chris Cleary, principal cyber advisor to the Navy, according to reporting by Inside Defense. Cleary’s remarks came at an event held by the Federal News Network

While the specifics vary from vehicle to vehicle, a typical flying drone with cameras can, at a minimum, collect video, video in infrared, location data of the drone’s position, other flight information for the drone, as well as possibly the distance to an object filmed. With onboard data processing, the drone could do object analysis, and send back the raw data, the analyzed data, or both.

For nearly two decades, when the US’s primary use case for long-endurance drones was aerial surveillance and attack above Iraq and Afghanistan, collecting and analyzing the data from Predator, Reaper, and other drones became a labor-intensive task. This sometimes meant dozens of analysts watching either in-country or on video recorded and transferred to secure facilities stateside.

The Navy, which operates in fleets and squadrons at sea, can be more removed from terrestrial internet links. Satellite data links are one possibility, though they are vulnerable to loss if a shooting war spills into orbital destruction. For sailors at sea, direct connection between drones and ships is likely the way to go, though there are other hurdles for maritime drone use.

Data mines

On-board processing, part of what is in the commercial world known as edge commuting, is one way to minimize the data load that needs to be transferred out. That can come with its own risks, as people receiving and acting on the data for, say, target identification, would need to trust that the onboard computer processed it correctly. 

Another risk for drone use at sea is that if the drone stores data in its onboard computers, there’s a risk the data could be found when the drone is shot down and then extracted by a hostile enemy. The battlefield capture of intact sensitive Russian military equipment by Ukraine wasn’t just a battlefield victory, it also likely makes the use of that equipment by Russia against US-supplied foes less effective, as the equipment can be reverse-engineered and countermeasures can be designed with explicitly known.

Even without the risk of enemy capture, a downed drone still represents lost data. While drones will sometimes be in communication with human operators on ships, the vast expanse of ocean around the fleets that ships want to surveil could have the uncrewed vehicles flying beyond distances amenable to easy data transfer.

“When I lose the attritable thing if I don’t have links, how do I get that information off that little buddy? Otherwise, the mission was for naught and I have to go back and do it again,” Steven Fino said October 27 at the Association of Old Crows symposium in Washington, according to Inside Defense. (The Association of Old Crows is a group of former electronic warfare professionals.)

Foggy futures

In the past, commanders have been constrained by a lack of information in the field. This “fog of war,” which once applied to the clouds of gunpowder smoke over battlefields, metaphorically accounts for the uncertainty of knowing what is happening in war at any given moment. Drones, as data-gathering tools that expand the amount of information commanders collect, offer instead a different challenge. Instead of a lack of information, commanders can be inundated with too much information, or information that is, through processing, different from the reality on the ground (or sea, as it may be).

No technology can remove uncertainty from war. What new tools can offer, in the best cases, is a way for additional information to be added into the decision process. Converting data to information to action is difficult work. When it comes to designing, building, and employing flying machines, how that data is ultimately used can inform the process, and ensure drones are enhancing understanding of the world, rather than overwhelming it.

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Before I could lock the laser weapon’s crosshairs on the DJI Phantom drone, I had to make sure it was in the right position. With the drone against a cloudless blue sky, the weapon’s sensors could clearly see and track it, but hard-coded rules of engagement prevented the weapon from firing until the target had an earthen backdrop. Light travels far, and we don’t want to accidentally zap the wrong thing that’s far away.

The target drone’s pilot directed the Phantom below the horizon line, with some landmass behind it. On the laptop in front of me, I placed a tracker marker just to the side of the drone, a push of the left joystick of an Xbox controller fixing the tracker to the target. With a slight nudge of the right joystick, I moved my crosshairs onto one of the quadcopter’s rotors, and then held the trigger. The Phantom lit up on the infrared view, and 15 seconds later it crashed down, the molten plastic of the rotor arm bending on impact.

I set the controller down and an engineer flicked the “armed” switch to the off position. It was my first time firing a laser weapon.

The 10-kilowatt laser in question was a High-Energy Laser Weapon System built by Raytheon, and I was invited by the company to observe it in operation at the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center, part of New Mexico Tech, in Socorro, New Mexico. 

To get to the range, we had to take a four-wheel drive vehicle onto the dirt roads, about six miles behind Socorro Peak. While New Mexico Tech has its origin in mining, its proximity to White Sands Missile Range (and the availability of EMRTC itself) have kept other defense contractors, like Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne, as range tenants.

Some of what is tested at the range is explosives. The shape, composition, and aerodynamics of artillery can all be studied through live fire. On the other side of the ridge from where Raytheon has set up its work station came the unmistakable thunder of artillery. Around the testing area were several M110 Howitzers, artillery pieces on treads that the US retired in 1994. 

This old artillery, juxtaposed against a field demonstration of lasers disabling drones, illustrated one of the realities of modern warfare. Artillery can remain effective for decades after it enters service, but drone scouts are changing how armies move and fight, and how armies direct artillery fire, too. The lasers are a reaction to those drones, and an attempt to make drone destruction simple, effective, and in the long run, affordable.

As we arrived on site, past the weathered cannons, I disembarked from the SUV and saw a launch zone of roughly ten or so DJI Phantom 4s. Depending on the model, these drones can cost up to $3,500 each. That’s on the higher end of DJI’s commercial offerings, but an order of magnitude cheaper than the most bare-bones drones designed for military use. At the range, these Phantoms were lined up like clay pigeons, waiting their turn in the sky before being shot down. 

Frying these drones would be a pair of High Energy Laser Weapon Systems (HELWS), made by Raytheon. One was mounted on the back of a Polaris MRZR, a military grade dune buggy. The MRZR still had the two front seats, and in the back sat the power supply and targeting system for the HELWS. Next to the buggy-mounted laser weapon was an identical system, only this one was on the bed of a large truck. In the field, HELWS is designed to be battery powered, but for today each was running off a portable generator, burning gasoline.

Cost comparison

A relatively small amount of fuel would power the two lasers in use that day for the whole of their operations. By the end of the day, 10 DJI Phantom 4s would lie, collected, in various states of destruction. At roughly $3,000 apiece, depending on the model, that’s $30,000 in drones destroyed for roughly what it takes to fill up a small car.

This cost disparity, between cheap drones and even cheaper laser takedowns, is an explicit reason for developing laser weapons. Current means of destroying drones in the field can risk overkill, and come with various drawbacks.

“It has to be a cost-effective solution for soldiers to be able to use it,” said Annabel Flores, chief operating officer of Global Spectrum Dominance at Raytheon Intelligence and Space. “It makes no sense to shoot something that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars or a million-dollar missile into something that’s a thousand dollars.”

In 2017, a US ally reportedly fired a Patriot anti-air missile at a hobbyist quadcopter. Patriot missiles are designed to intercept cruise missiles and airplanes, and they cost about $3 million apiece. Patriots are also made by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and while the missile was effective against the drone, the cost difference is so great it was at best a Pyrrhic victory. It’s like killing a mosquito using a grenade.

“That’s just the wrong side of the cost equation that you wanna be on,” said Flores. “What fundamentally drove us down this path is that this is a real need and a real solution.”

The cost of each laser activation is only part of the equation. Raytheon has been awarded at least $52.4 million to develop and deliver HELWS systems to the Department of Defense. Those prototypes and models have been put through the paces, with deployments outside the United States and 25,000 hours operational hours. 

“The next step for us is really being prepared so that it’s not just a cool demonstrator, a cool prototype, but these are producible systems that assembly technicians are putting together today,” said Flores. “Originally physicists were the ones that were working with lasers, then it became engineers while we were doing these proofs. Now it’s assembly technicians that are pulling these systems together.”

What I saw on the monitor in front of me

On the drive to the range, my hosts asked if I play video games. It’s been a decade since I really spent time on a first-person shooter, but there’s a muscle memory to video game controllers that persists. The controls for the laser were set up inside a nearby trailer with plywood walls, but they could fit into a backpack easily.  Firing the HELWS laser is done through a program running on a laptop, which is fed information by ethernet or fiber-optic cord. In my hand, controlling the turret and the laser, was the plug-in Xbox controller.

The laptop’s screen was divided into quadrants of different sizes. In the upper-left, there’s a wide view from the electro-optical camera, showing a slice of surrounding terrain. In a smaller window on the upper right is a narrower view, looking down the “sight line” of the laser. (More on that in a moment.) Below the narrow view is a compass on a map, showing the direction the vehicle is facing, the orientation of the laser, and when designated, any targets in view. That quadrant also has columns for “cues” that the camera can quickly pivot to, which could be predetermined points to focus on or could be new drones added to the system by sensors. 

In the bottom-left of the screen was a landscape-oriented photographic panorama of the area surrounding the laser. This image was captured by the camera pod, and it has layered data on top. A bright red line traces the horizon, hard-coding a boundary that, for this range on this shoot, the laser is not permitted to fire above. In a cluster, beneath a high slope, sit several green rectangles, marking fields of vision and fire zones. Within those settings, the laser turrets can track and then fire and melt drones, but above the horizon line or outside the box, the trigger pull on the laser won’t work. 

This capability, which was set by other menus, is useful on the training range, and has applications in the field. A laser deployed to protect a power plant, say, may want to be hard-coded with certain areas as off-limits, to be absolutely sure the laser doesn’t hit infrastructure by accident. 

Arming the laser

Before firing the laser, it needs to be armed. A safety interlock box with two toggles lets users turn on the laser weapon, and turn on a laser illuminator, which is distinct from the laser weapon. The illuminator is used for targeting, but can also cause harm and disorientation if pointed in a person’s eyes. To ensure that the laser cannot be set up without command authorization, the toggles can be locked off by a key, carried by a commander.

With the controller in hand, targeting the laser is something like playing a video game, though one where the difficulty of aiming in infrared is hard to ignore, rather than eased for sake of playability. Once an object is designated as a target, the turret can follow it well, but zooming around to find the object can be tricky, especially against the juniper-speckled hills of the high desert.

In the field and at other ranges, optical identification can be aided by radar data, which can ping and track new drones arriving within range. With this, a laser gunner can “Slew to Cue,” or toggle between tracked objects the way a remote flicks between favorite channels.

Firing the laser

The laser of the HELWS is housed in the body beneath the turret, and it points upwards at a lens that focuses it. This orientation also lets a camera point in the same direction, giving the video feed a perspective that’s equivalent to looking down the barrel of a gun, though the laser has no barrel and is not a gun. 

The HELWS laser is built into an existing Raytheon camera and laser designator pod. Remove the laser weapon, and the pod’s infrared and electro-optical cameras, as well as the laser illuminator, can be found on vehicles like Predator drones and C-130 planes. The illuminator can seem redundant, but in action it can even out the image on the camera while the laser weapon itself is powered on. In the infrared view, the heat of the laser distorts the target, a bright glowing spot over what was once clearly drone features. With the illuminator, the heat appears washed out, and the laser on the target can clearly be seen. 

The laser has an effective range of 3 kilometers, or just over 1.8 miles. The speed at which the laser can burn through a target depends on a host of factors, not least of which is the air itself. Had the day been rainy, or windy and dusty, the visit would have been rescheduled, as the particles in the air can hinder its function. The laser’s time to destroy a target is also determined by the steadiness of its focus, the wattage of the weapon, and the material of what it was firing against.

To get a feel for the laser before firing it at drones, some targets were set on a board, with another board on a stand behind it. These included inert 20mm rounds with rubber tips, mock grenades, cans of energy drinks and soda and, later, an ammunition box. One of the 20mm rounds lit like a candle under the laser fire, as the heat from the metal moved upward to burn off part of the rubber tip. The soda cans popped and drained, thin metal heating quickly and bursting outwards. The empty ammo box burned open in seconds. The grenades were uneventful. The cement backing of the board behind the objects melted, cement and fiber looking glassy, crystalline upon examination afterwards.

Against drones, the key factor for how long a takedown took was what part of the drone was hit. Battery casings took the longest. A clean shot into the hull and electronics could down a drone in 8-10 seconds. My long shot on the rotor, which melted part of one arm, was the slowest of the day, at 15 seconds.

Modern weapons for modern battlefields

Ultimately, it’s hobbyist drones used as cameras that have sustained the Pentagon’s interest in the HELWS and weapons like it. Prior to drones, aerial surveillance was expensive, requiring planes or helicopters, and could be neutralized with expensive weapons. Now camera drones, even ones cheap enough to buy at a store, are useful enough that forces fighting on both sides in Ukraine see them as essential. The drones can scout, sometimes even attack, and guide artillery fire. In real time, soldiers operating long-range weapons can see not just where to shoot, but the impact of a shot after the dust settles. The lasers, mounted on trucks and buggies, are a way to prevent that, to incapacitate drones and leave foes without that information in the field.

Throughout the day, the boom of artillery would occasionally interrupt conversation, adding extra ambience. The laser testing facility was, ultimately, a trailer and a few four-wheel drive vehicles, parked on a hill with some porta-potties and sparse bunkers. The landscape was beautiful, especially at a distance. Worn and rusted metal collected in certain spots, and hardy plants with sticky seeds dug into everything.

We drove away from the site around 4 o’clock. Behind, in the dirt waiting to be carted out, were the molten husks of several once-useful flying robots.

The post What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser appeared first on Popular Science.

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On October 21, the Asian American Journalists Association, together with Military Veterans in Journalism, put forth guidelines urging “newsrooms to refrain from use of the Japanese word ‘kamikaze’ to describe the self-detonating Iranian-made drones that Russia is using to conduct attacks in Ukraine.” The letter came in light of a flurry of news stories using the term to describe attacks like a recent one in Ukraine, where Russian forces fired Shahed-136s at military targets and civilian buildings. 

When a Shahed-136 hits, sometimes people die, but a pilot on the weapon never does, because it’s uncrewed.

“‘Kamikaze’ is a Japanese word that translates to ‘divine wind,’ and is commonly used to refer to the Empire of Japan’s military pilots who were ordered to go on suicide missions during World War II, purposely crashing aircraft loaded with explosives onto targets, such as U.S. Navy ships,” reads the guidance. 

With modern loitering munitions—in this case, loitering means the ability to fly around before it impacts a target, if it does—a guidance system, or sometimes a remote operator, makes the decision to aim the uncrewed explosive into a building, vehicle, or people, selected as a target. Yet the term “kamikaze drone” has stuck, with multiple outlets using it in headlines. In 2010, when Popular Science was covering the early development of the Switchblade, it referred to the prototype as both a “Flying Assassin Robot” and “Kamikaze Suicide Drones.” 

Another variation, used by news orgs and manufacturers like Switchblade-maker Aerovironment, is “Suicide Drone.” This lacks the same historical or cultural stigma attached to the word “kamikaze,” but also describes a process that does not happen when the drone detonates, because there is no human on board to die by suicide. 

In place of the term, the guidance from AAJA and the veterans organization suggests “self-detonating drones.”

“Kamikaze attacks have nothing to do with modern drone warfare, and there is no good reason for reporters to reference a previous historical warfighting tactic in this context,” Russell Midori, president of Military Veterans in Journalism, said in the statement. “Instead, we recommend using language that more accurately explains how this new technology impacts present-day conflicts.”

“Self-detonating drones” is not an especially remarkable term, though it captures an essential part of what separates this kind of weapon from others. These weapons fly like drones, and they blow up like missiles. 

History: loitering munitions and self-detonating drones

In 1918, the Kettering Bug was built for action in World War I, but never saw it. It was an early ancestor of drones and guided missiles, and was dubbed an “aerial torpedo,” matching the water-based weapons that would seek out ships by means of rudimentary guidance. The Kettering Bug itself would follow a gyroscope for navigation and then would fly a predetermined distance, before shedding its wings and crashing its explosive-containing body into the ground.

The Kettering Bug is useful as a way to understand where drone and missile development diverged. With missiles, engineers and weapon designers regularly improved the guidance and navigation systems, creating a weapon that could fly itself to a target accurately and then explode on arrival. Drones, instead, were developed as remotely controlled systems. 

In World War II, the United States also converted some B-17 bombers to be remotely controlled drone bombs, which were directed from pilots in other bombers flying nearby. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, the older brother of future president John F. Kennedy, died in 1944 while flying a mothership when the drone bomb B-17 it was commanding detonated mid-flight.

As remote control and guidance systems improved, more kinds of drone bombs became possible, blurring the once-clear division between missiles and drones. The Harpy, developed by Israel, is one of the earliest “loitering munitions,” a drone-shaped missile that can detonate into a target, but one that can also be called off from an attack and flown for another mission. 

In short, once fired, missiles fly towards a target and then explode, while drones in the form of loitering munitions can seek out a target in flight, and then be directed to attack or not. And of course, drones not built as munitions can also be used for more traditional tasks, such as intelligence-gathering or launching small missiles. 

Why rename the weapons now?

Loitering munitions and self-detonating drones are in the news because they are being actively used as tools of war. The Switchblade, made by Aerovironment, is a short-range loitering munition that the United States has provided to Ukrainian forces, as they resist the invasion by Russia. Switchblades were first deployed in 2012, though coverage on the use of drones by the US largely focused on larger, Predator- and Reaper-sized drones. Switchblade’s role as a specific weapon given as aid against the invasion, along with the development of the newer “Phoenix Ghost” loitering munition, has given the weapons newfound prominence.

Russia continues to use Iranian-made Shahed-136s against Ukraine. These weapons reportedly cost about $20,000, and so many have been fired in the war that the Ukrainian Air Force can claim it shot down at least 200 of them. The weapons have joined long-range missile attacks as a way for Russia to strike deeper into the country.

Whenever a Shahed crashes to the ground, it’s a hazard and almost certainly a tragedy for all those caught in its blast. The people who perish after such an attack are its targets. The machine, never alive, does not die when it completes its objective.

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The future is troubled for a military device called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS). It’s a headset, based on Microsoft’s HoloLens, that uses cameras and displays to offer soldiers more information about their environment. Plus it’s designed to enhance the ability of individuals and squads to fight, in part by making data collected by military sensors immediately available in the field. But a tool can only be useful so long as soldiers are willing to use it, and a report prepared for the Pentagon suggests that the actual infantry tasked with trying out the equipment would rather ditch the headsets than use them.

That’s the conclusion of a summary of the report prepared for the Department of Defense, by director of Operational Test and Evaluation Nickolas Guertin (the position oversees all DoD testing and specifically reports to the Secretary of Defense). “More than 80% of those who experienced discomfort had symptoms after less than three hours using the customized version of Microsoft’s HoloLens goggles,” the summary reports, according to Bloomberg.

Those symptoms included “headaches, eyestrain and nausea,” reports Bloomberg, which are conditions that can incapacitate people in normal circumstances. In combat, which demands situational awareness, clear eyesight, and an ability to rapidly make clear and effective life-or-death decisions, those afflictions can render soldiers ineffective without a foe ever having to fire a shot.

HoloLens, on which IVAS is based, was not designed primarily as a military device, and adapting it to become the IVAS headset has taken years of work and faced internal pushback, too. In February 2019, shortly after the contract was announced publicly, some Microsoft workers sent a letter to the company’s CEO objecting to the adaptation of HoloLens into a tool of war.

“The application of HoloLens within the IVAS system is designed to help people kill. It will be deployed on the battlefield, and works by turning warfare into a simulated “video game,” further distancing soldiers from the grim stakes of war and the reality of bloodshed,” the letter writers noted.

While the possibility persists that IVAS will become a functional, battlefield tool, existing public reports suggest that if IVAS turns battlefields into a video game, it’s a game soldiers do not want to play. 

Adapting technologies from a recreational augmented reality headset to military use was always going to be a challenge. In the years that the Army has experimented with IVAS, the limitations of the technology have been made readily apparent, while the promise of the tool is only starting to be realized. 

Heads up

While the Army’s report is not public, other earlier assessments that are public include some skepticism that the program will deliver its promise. An Inspector General audit of the Army’s IVAS program, released April 2022, noted that the program failed to define a floor level at which user acceptance of the technology would meet needs. 

“Procuring IVAS without attaining user acceptance could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that Soldiers may not want to use or use as intended,” declared the audit. 

The report emphasizes that it was the lack of a defined acceptance threshold, and not a lack of interest by soldiers, that led to its conclusion. Yet this is a problem that could only be remedied by the Army setting a standard for acceptance by soldiers, which the audit notes that at the time of publication the Army still had not done.

[Related: Watch the impressive HoloLens 2 Apollo 11 demo that failed during Microsoft’s keynote]

Every year, the Government Accountability Office prepares an assessment of weapon systems  for Congress. In its June 2022 report, the GAO noted that “IVAS continues to experience technical challenges with display quality and reliability.” The report went on to note that while the fourth iteration of the device had an improved display, “most deficiencies were not corrected and the capability set had yet to demonstrate the capability to serve as a combat goggle.”

Augmented reality 

The IVAS program is premised on employing modern sensors, displays, and data integration to enhance how soldiers understand their immediate environment. In 2021, Microsoft said IVAS would “allow soldiers to see through smoke and around corners, use holographic imagery for training and have 3D terrain maps projected onto their field of vision at the click of a button.”

To understand why the Army is interested in a device like this, it helps to consider its potential advantages. One unique possibility for the technology is not just projecting maps in soldiers’ field of view, but doing so while they are inside a moving vehicle, without windows. That kind of awareness, perhaps of the outside terrain as filmed and transmitted from a transport’s cameras, could let soldiers familiarize themselves with where they are going to fight. When exiting the vehicle, knowing the terrain already could let soldiers take the fastest routes into cover, enhancing their ability to fight.

IVAS was also intended to work as night vision, but with an 80 degree field of vision, twice as wide as the typical 40 degrees of other night vision goggles. Some other display features, like a compass rose for navigation, or a feature illuminating friendly forces, offer the kinds of combat information management tools that generations of soldiers now have expected from first-person shooter games.

Some features that enhance navigation and coordination work, according to the summary obtained by Bloomberg. 

If the headset can be modified to enhance soldier awareness, instead of burdening soldiers with discomfort while offering information, then IVAS might be able to live up to its promise. If not, the headset could be confined to historical novelty, an augmented reality layer for war that wasn’t ready for combat.

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Every October, the Association of the United States Army hosts an exposition in Washington, DC, where arms makers from across the globe gather to showcase the latest vehicles and weapons. On offer at the 2022 conference was a new and quintessentially modern type of vehicle: a rugged military truck with a launcher for loitering munitions, which are drone-shaped guided missiles that can (as their name implies) loiter, or spend time circling an area before crashing into a target. The idea was so compelling, it showed up on the floor at least twice. In one case, the F72-U Hero-120, made by Flyer Defense, mounts a loitering munition launcher on the back of the company’s F-72 utility truck. And in another, made by AM General, the HUMVEE Saber Blade features a loitering munition launcher on the back of a HUMVEE vehicle.

The existence of both vehicles suggests that there is special value in this kind of composite technology. Both models are working with existing, known, and reliable trucks as platforms. Adding loitering munition launchers to the back creates a new vehicle, one that can launch weapons at distance and with accuracy, before moving away. 

These developments are taking place in light of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, where artillery and drones have both had a major impact on how forces fight. For example, the HIMARS, a US-made and supplied rocket artillery truck, mounts a sophisticated launcher on the back of a vehicle, letting crews fire at a target and then drive away before retaliation. 

In a pinch, both options from Flyer Defense and AM General suggest the ability for an army to use loitering munitions in much the same way that a HIMARs employs rockets. A vehicle-mounted launcher gives flexibility for advance and firing, as well as mobility to relocate after launch.

Flyer assault

The F72-U Hero-120 is built around the ability to fire Hero-120 loitering munitions. These winged missiles, made by Mistral and UVision, have a range of at least 25 miles, and can carry a 10-pound warhead. The Hero-120s can also fly for up to 60 minutes, powered by their onboard electric motor. This also lets the missiles be called off after launch, in case the situation changes or the target is no longer relevant, which is one of the more crucial distinctions between loitering munitions and unrecoverable missiles. 

As displayed, Flyer’s vehicle can transport 10 of the weapons, with four ready to launch and six stowed.

The Marine Corps has already selected Hero-120s as a loitering munition to pair with Organic Precision Fires-Mounted requirement. The goal of that program is to arm a vehicle that can travel with marines, while also expanding the range of what those marines can target beyond that of infantry-carried weapons. 

Saber rattling

Also on display, and following a similar template, is the HUMVEE Saber Blade. Made by AM General, the Saber Blade also features a remote-control weapon station and counter-drone system, made by Hornet. This includes airburst ammunition and a special drone-specific detection sensor.

“The current conflicts have demonstrated the increasing importance of drones, whether to target vehicles or for reconnaissance missions. Being able to detect and defeat such threats while maintaining the vehicle’s primary protective capacity is the ultimate capability for a Remote Control Weapon Station,” Jean Boy, managing director of Hornet, said in a release.

Drones, from hobbyist models to dedicated military machines, have been a regular feature of the Ukraine Donbas war since 2014. In that conflict, drones often scouted static positions, or on occassion dropped small bombs. When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, both sides began using drones in far more extensive ways. Armed drones have been used to hunt tanks. Small quadcopters have been used to guide infantry and artillery fire, to the point where soldiers fighting without quadcopters in their formations felt like “blind kittens.” 

The Saber Blade vehicle can not just defend itself against drones, it can also launch Switchblade 300 and Switchblade 600 loitering munitions, which its maker AM General describes as “loitering precision strike missiles for use against non-line-of-sight targets.”

Loitering munitions

Loitering munitions, like drones, are an increasingly common presence on modern battlefields. Russia has launched attacks on Kyiv using Iranian-supplied Shahed-136 loitering munitions. These weapons can complement missile barrages or rocket attacks. The history of modern artillery development suggests that the weapons can be used for precision strikes, as well as wider destruction.

While it will likely be some time before these vehicles can be adopted and integrated into modern forces, the promise is for accurate, beyond line of sight fire that leans on the kind of sensors and navigation already inherent in loitering munitions. Equipping mobile formations with loitering munitions mounted from trucks lets soldiers fight enemies at greater distances, with weapons that can, as designed, hit just the specific vehicles, enemies, or buildings targeted.

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When it comes to crossing rivers on bridges, all the technology of modern warfare is still bound by the hard limits imposed by the laws of physics—the structure needs to be able to support the vehicle that’s on it. To try to cope with this problem, the Army is investing in a lighter tank than its current battlefield behemoth, the M1 Abrams main battle tank. This new vehicle, which is still known by its descriptive moniker Mobile Protected Firepower, was promoted at the Association of the United States Army conference held in Washington, DC, from October 10-12. 

The Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) vehicle weighs in at 38 tons, which is heavy by all standards, except it is light compared to the 70 tons of heft of an Abrams tank. That means it can go places the Abrams can’t, expanding how and where the Army can effectively fight war from vehicles. The MPF will also feature fire control and situational awareness sensors, which can allow enemy location data to be shared across vehicles in formation. 

“Bridge classifications being what they are, you know right away whether that bridge can support the weight of a mobile protected firefighter vehicle, or it can’t,” says Tim Reese, the director of US business development for General Dynamics, the company that makes both the Abrams and MPF. “Same thing with the Abrams tank, which requires a much more robust bridge to cross than does the MPF.”

The MPF is designed to accompany Infantry Brigade Combat Teams, which are intended primarily for travel on foot. These formations, which consist of between 3,900 to 4,100 people, incorporate some vehicles, but are distinguished from Armored and Stryker Brigade Combat Teams, which use roughly heavy and medium-armored vehicles to transport soldiers and weapons around the battlefield. 

“It’s designed to help dismounted units when they get into a spot where they cannot maneuver and accomplish their mission because of a threat that is greater than the weapons systems they carry with them on their backs,” says Reese. “Because of [the MPF’s] mobility, it can rapidly move around the battlefield and can be very quickly on call to [assist] that infantry element.” 

“You don’t have to wait for higher coordination for an air asset. You don’t have to try to coordinate helicopters or anything like that,” he adds. 

While Armored and Stryker brigades bristle with heavy weaponry, Infantry brigades are constrained to gear that fits on soldiers’ backs and what can be mounted on vehicles that keep up with infantry over rough terrain, like urban rubble or soft soil. The soldiers on the ground are generally referred to as “dismounts.”

“If they get to any kind of [enemy] fortified bunker situation, or light and light-armored vehicles, that’s something that would hamper the dismounts currently, but [those are threats] that the MPF vehicle’s protected large caliber direct fire power can easily defeat,” says Kevin Vernagus, General Dynamics program director for the MPF. 

The Infantry Brigade Combat Teams, unlike the heavier brigades, can be deployed by aircraft, letting the formation move into action after disembarking from transport planes and helicopters.

“It has to be able to roll off and be able to fight upon roll off,” says Vernagus. “We had to make sure it does everything it needs to do coming out of that aircraft.”

That meant keeping the weight within the bounds of what a C-17 cargo transport plane can deliver. It’s not a tradeoff made lightly: the armor on a combat vehicle is vital for survival, so to lighten the load without compromising protection, General Dynamics says it looked to other parts of design where it could incorporate durable but lighter components.

“Talking about the armor protection obviously is something we can’t really do,” said Reese, “but a more mundane one is the road wheels. They’re the same size as [on] a Bradley vehicle, but they weigh a lot less because they’re made out of a high-strength aluminum.”

Should the Army decide the MPF needs more and heavier armor in the future, the vehicle’s frame is designed to accommodate it.

“We have add-on armor on the sides and the belly plate on the bottom which would allow us in the future, as threats evolve or new materials become available, you simply can take off one set of armor and put on new material or thicker or thinner armor as necessary,” says Vernagus. This system also includes hooks for additional defenses, like active protection systems that explode into incoming anti-tank missiles, mitigating their impact.

To make sure that new tank crews can adapt to the MPFs as they’re delivered, the tank has the same one-in-the-body, three-in-the-turret crew configuration as an Abrams, though the turret itself is situated further back. That’s because, unlike the Abrams or the Patton tanks which preceded it, the engine and transmission of the MPF is mounted in the front. The MPF’s interior look, feel, and controls are designed to closely match that of an Abrams.

The design beat out a competing model by BAE in trials before the Army selected General Dynamics to make the MPF in June. The designers adapted to feedback from soldiers during testing.

“The side skirts that cover over the track in the first phase of the program, we had those as bolt-on,” says Vernagus. “And so anytime the soldiers had to do maintenance to the track or adjust anything, they had to take off these bolts in this big heavy armor piece. What we’ve done now for this next phase of the program is put on hinges, so those skirts actually open sideways and they can get right to what they need to without having to take off a heavy armor piece.”

Deliveries for the production run MPF, which still lacks a proper, non-acronym-based name, are scheduled to begin by the end of fiscal year 2023.

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Every day the world wakes up in the shadows of the Cold War, both metaphorically and literally. The metaphorical shadow is the perpetual specter of nuclear oblivion, stemming primarily from the massive arsenals of the United States and Russia, but also the nuclear arsenals of the seven other nations with atomic weaponry. The literal shadows are smaller but no less real: The built environment of the Cold War, from missile launch sites to blast craters to office buildings of strategic consequence, still dot the landscape of the United States and its territorial possessions.

On October 7, the National Park Service released a new study evaluating Cold War sites for their potential to become National Historic Landmarks. While some Cold War sites are older than the 50 years typically required to be considered for registration or designation as a landmark, some are much younger than that, while still belonging entirely to the Cold War era.

The exact duration of the Cold War is a matter of academic and scholarly dispute, but the National Park Service offers an expansive definition. “For the purposes of this theme study, the Cold War is considered to have begun with the detonation of the first two atomic bombs and Japanese surrender in 1945 at the end of World War II and having ended with the dissolution of the [USSR], America’s principal adversary, in 1991,” reads the report. 

It’s a meaningful choice to stitch the start of the Cold War directly into the end of World War II, a moment when the US and the USSR were still formal allies, rather than waiting for a direct breach in the relationship. It does cleanly tie the first use of nuclear weapons to the Cold War, letting sites integral to early atomic warfighting be part of the Cold War legacy.

In order for a site to be considered for National Historic Landmark status, it has to be tied to nationally significant events, people, ideas, architecture, settings, or scientific discovery. One example of a site already designated as historic, included in the study for point of comparison, is the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The Pentagon is, first and foremost, an office building for the administration of the US military. Or, as the study puts it, it is the “epitome of command and control operations” and was “involved in most major and routine Cold War events.”

The report suggests 24 possible sites for designation as new National Historic Landmarks. Here are three of them.

Atlas ICBM Launch Facilities

Atlas was the first deployed class of US-made Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. These weapons were capable of carrying nuclear warheads at least 5,000 miles. The study notes that “three extant launch facilities for this first generation of ICBM missiles have been identified.” It places one at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, one outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, and one in Weld County, Colorado.

Popular Science first covered the Atlas missile in March 1958, in the story “The Fantastic Problems of Ballistic-Missile Warfare.” The article details the challenges in propulsion, range, and navigation, though the most striking feature is the magazine’s description of the warhead. “The warhead that goes inside the ballistic missile’s nose cone once seemed the ‘impossible’ problem. What help up American ICBM development so long was the seeming pointlessness of spending billions of dollars to send a little A-bomb across 5,000 miles of land and sea, maybe miss by a mile or so, and just get people mad over there.”

The solution was the greater density and explosive power of hydrogen, or thermonuclear, bombs, which can have yields in the megatons instead of the kilotons of the first atomic weapons, while still fitting into a dense package. The range of the weapon, as well as the desire to spread out where missiles launched from, can be seen in the remaining sites existing in California, and along the Wyoming/Colorado border.

Today, the modern class of ICBMs that lurk in silos are the Minuteman IIIs, which the Air Force plans to replace entirely by the 2030s with a missile called Sentinel.

Defense Early Warning (DEW) Line

World War II ended with Japan’s surrender, an event that shortly followed the US dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombs killed an estimated 110,000 or 210,000 people; the US delivered the bombs with B-29 Superfortresses, a long range bomber that could threaten atomic devastation thousands of miles from where it was launched. 

Additionally, developments in rocketry, as both the United States and the Soviet Union employed captured Nazi scientsits from the V-2 program, ensured that bombers would be just one vector for nuclear weapons. Detecting flights, from rockets or bombers, meant investing in permanent sensor networks.

The Defense Early Warning Line, across Alaska and Canada, “was a network of radar and communication facilities established to detect enemy bombers and ICBMs,” says the study. “Most DEW facilities have been demolished or modified, but the most intact examples might be at Point Barrow or Olitok [Alaska].” 

In August and September 1956, Popular Science covered the construction of the DEW Line as the “World’s Toughest Building Project” and “Radar Builders Outfox the Arctic.” In 1961, “Could A Radar False Alarm Trigger Atomic War?” detailed the workings of early warning systems, including the DEW Line.

Today, the US no longer relies on the DEW Line, instead keeping an eye on polar risks with the North Warning System, in use since 1988. Like the DEW Line before it, the North Warning System is part of NORAD, the joint US-Canadian military command tasked with looking for aerial threats to North America. 

Sedan Crater

Of the 1,054 nuclear tests conducted by the United States, 928 of them took place at the Nevada Test Site. While all nuclear detonations were fundamentally weapons tests, some of the tests explored other features of what atomic force could do. Sedan Crater is a 320-foot-deep, 1,280 diameter crater that the National Park Service describes as “formed by a 1962 test that was part of the Atoms for Peace program’s effort to explore using nuclear detonations to excavate earth in large construction projects.”

Much of “Atoms for Peace” was devoted to the production of electricity through nuclear power plants. “Project Plowshares,” which ultimately produced Sedan Crater, was instead designed to see if the explosive force of atomic weapons could reshape the built landscape of the world in useful ways. In “Atomic blasting for peacetime feats,” Popular Science examined Project Plowshares proposals for carbing harbors and creating aquifers through constructive blasting.

The Sedan Crater is a popular site for tourists to the present-day Nevada National Security Site, which the NNSS notes sees over 10,000 visitors a year. 

The above are just three of the 24 sites under consideration in the study. Others include the Bikini Atoll nuclear test site, the Camp David presidential retreat that was the site of diplomatic summits, the Raven Rock mountain bunker designed as emergency military headquarters in a nuclear war, and many more. For the full list, follow this link. 

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On October 4, the USS Gerald R. Ford departed Norfolk, Virginia, for a trip across the Atlantic. The ship is the first of the Ford-class aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered hangars-and-runways that serve as the centerpiece of the US Navy’s fleets and, as such, project American military might all across the globe. While the Ford has already sailed on sea trials, this will be its first deployment as an operational part of the Navy. For this mission, the Ford will include at least one foreign port of call, but the journey itself is set to be a shorter voyage than a typical carrier deployment.

The Ford’s construction began in 2009, and it was formally commissioned in 2017. In 2008, when funding for the Ford was approved, it cost $13.3 billion. The ship was first declared operational in December 2021, though it suffered delays as work on technical problems, like weapons elevators, was still needed before it could properly set sail.

The Ford is the eleventh aircraft carrier presently in the fleet to enter active service, and it’s the first of the new design. The previous Nimitz-class carriers first entered service in 1975, with the most recent of that class joining in 2009. Eleven carriers is a lot, more than that of any other nation, though it’s also the minimum allowed by Congress. It’s a number that also does not include the Navy’s amphibious assault ships, in both Wasp and America classes, which have flight decks and are comparable in size to the aircraft carriers of other nations.

[Related: A handy glossary to all the military aviation terms in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’]

The Ford borrows a hull design from the Nimitz class, though it is somewhat modified. Internally, the carrier is redesigned to maximize both its utility and minimize long-term costs. This includes, most notably, the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), which replaces the steam catapults on earlier carriers. Steam catapults help planes get up to speed when taking off from the short carrier runways, pulling a cable that helps hurl the plane as it accelerates to flight. EMALS replaces the steam buildup and launch of the previous system for an electromagnetic rail, which can be reset and reused more quickly. 

The EMALS is one of several systems developed for the Ford-class carriers that have had performance issues in development, necessitating repair and modification. Other design changes include replacing the hydraulic weapons elevators of the Nimitz system with electromagnetic motors, allowing more and faster movement of munitions to and from deck. There are 11 of these elevators on the ship, and all 11 were fixed after construction, with repairs continuing until December 2021, even as the Ford was conducting trials at sea

[Related: The US Navy floats its wishlist: 350 ships and 150 uncrewed vessels]

The Ford class also includes a more powerful nuclear power plant, allowing it to run existing and future electronics systems. Another big change with the design is that the Ford class is designed to need about 800-1,200 fewer crew than a Nimitz class, saving space, labor costs, and ultimately, allowing the Navy to fulfill more needs on more ships with fewer people.

On its deployment, the Gerald R. Ford will travel with a flotilla, formally referred to as a Carrier Strike Group. This will include three destroyers, a guided missile cruiser, two cargo ships, and an oiler, which carries spare fuel for the other ships and for aircraft. The combination, ultimately, is designed to let the carrier launch aircraft at enemy ships or targets on land, while the fleet protects the carrier from any of a number of hostile threats that might be encountered at sea, most especially submarines.

One durable risk to aircraft carriers is that, by concentrating so many people and so much force into a single ship, if that vessel is sunk a navy loses a significant amount of its fighting power. Submarines with torpedoes have long threatened carriers, and new anti-ship missiles also threaten the massive and expensive ships. This is partly why the Navy has invested in means to shoot down missiles, like with shipboard laser weapons. It is also why, when a carrier sets sail, it does so surrounded by an entourage of allies, armed to the teeth. 

In total 17 ships and one submarine will form the multinational fleet on the Ford’s first deployment, including participation from the US, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden.

[Related: The Navy’s robot pilots could one day outnumber its human ones]

“USS Gerald R. Ford is going to sail on the high seas with our partners,” Capt. Paul Lanzilotta, Ford’s commanding officer, said in a release. “We want interoperability, we want interchangeability with our partners. Our NATO partners that are sailing with us – we’re going to work with them every day, every night. That’s what it means to operate on the high seas. Air defense exercises. Long-range maritime strike. We’re going to be doing pretty much every mission set that’s in the portfolio for naval aviation, and we’re excited about that.”

For its voyage, the Ford is bringing eight squadrons of aircraft. This includes the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets strike aircraft, which can fight other aircraft as well as drop bombs or fire missiles at ships or targets on land. The carrier will also house EA-18G Growlers, which are Super Hornets modified for electronic warfare. Early warning  E-2D Hawkeye aircraft and C-2 Greyhound cargo aircraft will also be part of the carrier’s fixed-wing component. Seahawk helicopters, capable of transport, combat, search and rescue, and anti-submarine warfare, are also part of the complement of aircraft aboard.

Gerald R. Ford’s first voyage will be across the Atlantic ocean, which would be a calm theater in which the crew and allied ships can better learn the ins and outs of the new vessel in operation. 

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In orbit, there are no obvious places for satellites to hide, except temporarily behind the bulk of Earth itself. Satellites, gravitationally bound to our planet, are visible clearly in the night sky. Discerning their movement, their patterns and actions, requires special tools for scanning the sky. On September 30, Australia’s Department of Defence announced the Space Surveillance Telescope—a special tool just for this kind of scanning—is operational.

“In an increasingly contested and congested space environment, The Space Surveillance Telescope will provide enhanced awareness of the space domain and contribute to greater Alliance cooperation,” Air-Vice Marshal Cath Roberts said in the release.

The main point of the telescope is to watch satellites in geosynchronous orbit, and to keep an eye out for unusual movement or activity among satellites. Satellites in geosynchronous orbit are used for everything from television transmission, GPS coordinates, communications, photography of Earth, and more. One possible way to disrupt assets in orbit would be with a satellite designed to move to attack and sabotage other objects in orbit. Watching the sky for unusual movement is the first step to detecting such an attack.  

The telescope started development in 2001 as a DARPA project. The first version was built and set up on the top of North Oscura Peak at White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, where it started watching the night sky in 2011. In 2012, the United States and Australia announced a plan to move the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) from its perch above White Sands to Australia, where it could scan the sky above the southern hemisphere instead. This move was designed “to strengthen the US Space Surveillance Network’s ability to track space assets and debris and provide warnings of possible collisions between space objects,” says Australia’s Department of Defense.

The US Space Surveillance Network is a collection of telescopes and radar installations across the globe, used to scan the skies for unusual activity. In some ways, watching space is straightforward, as most satellites typically travel on fixed trajectories, and cannot easily change them. There is no object besides the Earth to hide behind, though there are parts of the world where it is harder for the US to place sensors. This is specifically a challenge when it comes to northern Eurasia, where the US does not have access, and to the southern hemisphere, where telescopes in Australia help a great deal. 

Space is also vast. The realm of useful orbit is estimated to have a volume of some 24,000,000,000,000 cubic miles. What space surveillance entails is finding and cataloging satellites in that orbit. The expansive scope of the SST is designed to see a wide swath of the sky, and to generate data that makes it easy for analysts to see if objects in orbit are moving in ways beyond what would normally be expected with orbital deviations.

In October 2016, DARPA handed over control of the telescope to Air Force Space Command (which itself became a part of the Space Force in October of 2020), in a ceremony attended by the media. In 2017, the telescope was dismantled and then reassembled at Australia’s Harold E. Holt naval base on the continent’s north-west coast. It’s a whopping 9,845 miles from its first location at White Sands. 

The US Space Force will be responsible for part of the US operation of the SST, under the auspices of US Space Command.

“Reaching initial operational capability is a major achievement that underscores the importance of working together to secure the ultimate high ground,” U.S. Space Force Gen. John Raymond said. “My thanks and congratulations to our Australian partners and our [Space Force] Guardians and Airmen who have been collaborating for almost a decade to make this possible.”

When nations have taken action against objects in orbit, it has been through firing missiles from Earth at their own deorbiting satellites. So far, only the United States, China, Russia, and India have destroyed their own satellites this way, with Russia’s November 2021 destruction of the Kosmos-1408 satellite being the most recent. The debris created by satellite destruction can persist in orbit for years, risking collision with other satellites and threatening the continued usefulness of orbit for everyone. So far, two-thirds of the debris from the destruction of Kosmos-1408 has deorbited, but what remains may take a decade or more to stop being a threat.

But other means to damage or destroy satellites exist, with one of the most concerning possible threats being a satellite already in orbit that is designed to attack and sabotage or destroy other objects in orbit. Space has for decades been a place where militaries put useful sensors, like cameras or eavesdropping devices pointed at Earth. Beyond military utility, space carries communication across the globe, on both military and commercial channels. While for now nations have not yet overtly targeted the satellites of others in war, the possibility remains, which is what space surveillance is designed to find and, hopefully, deter.

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When it comes to equipping the aircraft carriers of the 21st century, the US Navy wants a mix of aircraft that is at least 60-percent uncrewed. This goal was “outlined by multiple officials during updates at the annual Tailhook Association symposium in September,” reports Aviation Week, referring to the conference held by a fraternal order of Naval Aviators, the pilots who presently and previously performed the kind of job that the Navy intends to shift mostly to robots.

The Navy has made no secret of its intentions to move towards more uncrewed aircraft flying on and off of carriers. In March 2021, Vice Adm. James Kilby told the House Armed Services committee that “we think we could get upwards of 40 percent of the aircraft in an air wing that are unmanned and then transition beyond that.”

Shifting from 40 to 60 percent is a substantial leap, though it’s of a piece with the overarching strategy for how the Navy intends to incorporate and expand the use of uncrewed vehicles in the coming decades. In the 2022 Navigation Plan, the Navy’s longer-term procurement strategy document, the Navy said that by the 2040s it is planning to field “Aircraft for anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, to include helicopters and maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, all augmented by unmanned aviation systems” with a capacity goal of “approximately 900.”

For the Navy, much of its uncrewed aviation plans hinge on the continued success of the MQ-25 Stingray tanker drone. The Stingray’s mission is to take off from a carrier deck, and travel with fighters like the F/A-18 jets part of the way to their mission. Then, the Stingray is supposed to top off the fuel tanks of the jets while they’re already airborne, extending the functional range of those fighters. This is a mission at present performed by specially equipped F/A-18s, but switching the refueling to a specialized uncrewed aircraft would free up the crewed fighter for other missions.

In June 2021, a Stingray successfully transferred fuel from an external storage tank to a fighter in flight for the first time, and testing of the aircraft continues, with the Navy expecting the drones to enter service in 2026. While not as flashy as the combat missions Navy drones may someday fly, the tanker missions require mastering the ability to take off from and land on carrier decks, as well as the ability for an uncrewed vehicle to coordinate with human pilots in close contact while airborne. If the airframe and its autonomous systems can accomplish that, then adapting the form to other missions, like scouting or attack, can come in the future. 

Adding uncrewed aircraft can potentially increase the raw numbers of flying machines fielded, as autonomous systems are not limited by the availability or capacity of human pilots. The uncrewed aircraft can also be designed from the start without a need to accommodate human pilots, letting designers build airframes without having to include space for not just cockpits but the pilot safety systems, like ejection seats, oxygen, and redundant engines. 

By saving the labor of piloting by shifting towards autonomy, and saving space on an aircraft carrier through denser uncrewed design, roboting wingmates could allow ships to put more flying machines into the sky, without needing to have a similar expansion in pilot numbers or carrier decks. 

[Related: The US Navy floats its wishlist: 350 ships and 150 uncrewed vessels]

The Navy’s intention has parallels across the Department of Defense. In September, DARPA announced ANCILLARY, a program looking for a versatile drone that could fly from rugged environments and ship decks, without any need for additional infrastructure. GAMBIT, a program by defense contractor General Atomics, is pitched to the Air Force as a way to develop four different drone models from one single core design, allowing cost savings and versatility with shared parts.

Beyond those speculative programs, the Air Force has worked to develop semi-autonomous drones that can receive orders from and fly in formation with human-piloted planes. This Loyal Wingmate program is aimed at expanding the number of aircraft, and in turn sensors and weapons, that can be flown in formation, again without expanding the number of pilots needed. It also allows the Air Force to develop a rotating cast of uncrewed aircraft around existing crewed fighters, with hoped-for shorter production timelines and rapid deployment of new capabilities once they’re developed.

[Related: A guide to the Gambit family of military drones and their unique jobs]

The Navy’s ultimate vision, one suggested at 40 percent uncrewed and necessitated at 60 percent, is that the new robotic planes perform well enough to justifying their place in carrier storage, while also being expendable enough that they can take the brunt of risk in any conflict, sparing human pilots from exposure to enemy anti-aircraft weaponry. A shot-down pilot is a tragedy. A shot-down drone is just lost equipment and the ensuing paperwork.

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In August, the Pike, a miniature submarine replica, surfaced in Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho. The Pike model is about one-fifth the scale of a real Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine (a class that’s still in development), and its work in the lake is part of the overt testing done by the Acoustic Research Detachment (ARD), a part of the Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Carderock Division. The resurfacing of the Pike happens regularly, along with other testing on the lake. The acoustic research, which dates back to the 1960s, informs how the Navy develops and designs submarines, improving the ability of subs to remain hidden beneath the sea.

For testing, the Pike is brought to the Detachment’s Intermediate Scale Measurement System Range, an array of 158 hydrophones and 36 projectors mounted underwater. “The purpose of that range is to evaluate target strength and structural acoustics,” says Seth Lambrecht, who directs ARD. (Target strength is a metric used to determine the area of an underwater object on sonar). 

To make the Pike stand in for the Columbia class, researchers added a Columbia-specific stern to the model. The Columbia class is a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, designed to replace the venerable Ohio class that’s been in service with the same mission since 1981. The submarines are primarily designed to carry and, if need be, fire nuclear-armed Trident missiles, as part of the nuclear force of the United States. (Four Ohio-class submarines have been converted to launch conventional Tomahawk cruise missiles instead.)

Unlike plane-dropped bombs or missiles, or silo-launched ICBMs, the potency of the nuclear-armed submarines hinges on their ability to stay concealed. And that’s where the acoustics come in. Underwater, light is limited, but submarines have hunted and avoided each other for decades using sonar, a kind of underwater echolocation. The Navy has conducted tests at Lake Pend Oreille of new sonar systems developed over the last 20 years, though is unwilling to disclose specifics as to which systems had been tested or developed there.

“We started in the 1960s, so the first class of submarines that we really had an impact on was the USS Sturgeon class, and we were just starting our infancy of the ARD there, so we didn’t really inform the design of those, we just improved them,” says Lambrecht. The Sturgeon class was a kind of attack submarine, designed to find other submarines, especially those armed with ballistic missiles. 

“The first class of submarines that we were integral in the design of was the Los Angeles class,” he adds. “And so every class since then, we have been there to basically inform the full scale design since then. So Los Angeles class, Sea Wolf class, Ohio class, Virginia class, and now currently the Columbia class. All those have had great advances to their designs thanks to our contribution.”

Submarines in service will live out their lives in the saltwater of the ocean, but the parts studied by Lake Pend Oreille are tested in the conditions of a freshwater lake, which is different from what they will experience in service. Fortunately, that’s an easily solved problem.

“The major difference is the sound velocity in fresh water versus salt water. Because salt water is denser, it changes the sound velocity, so it has a different speed of sound in fresh water, which is a really easy variable to account for,” says Lambrecht. “From a functional standpoint, fresh water is wonderful to work in. It doesn’t have the corrosive elements of salt water.”

Lake Pend Oreille is 43 miles long, with a depth of 1,158 feet, making it the fifth deepest lake in the nation. That makes it an ideal place to test submarine propulsion, specifically rudders, propellers, and motors. To ensure these moving parts are as quiet as possible, they are mounted on Cutthroat, the Large Scale Vehicle that the Navy claims is the “world’s largest unmanned submarine.” Cutthroat, which resides in the lake, is a one-third-scale Virginia class submarine, the class used to hunt for other submarines under the surface. It is massive: Cutthroat is 200 tons, 111 feet long, and has a 3,000 shaft horsepower electric motor.

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

“That is a fully autonomous submarine model,” says Lambrecht. “And the primary purpose of the Cutthroat model is to enhance submarine propulsor development. So you can outfit it with any type of prototyped submarine propulsor, and then drive it back and forth through underwater range doing any type of maneuver; roll, dive, an ascension, anything you want to do that’s any type of maneuver that you would do on a full scale submarine you can do with the [large surface vessel] model. And then you can see how the submarine propulsor performance affects the acoustic signature.”

While Navy submarines are powered by nuclear reactors with diesel backups, the electric engine on the Cutthroat is more practical for the lake, and skips the noise of the diesel, allowing the research to focus on the acoustic signature produced by the propellers and motors.

The testing at Lake Pend Oreille is not new or secret, though it has improved greatly with modern advances in data collection and transfer. Pike and Cutthroat are just one part of how the ARD collects data on submarine components, but it is the sensor installation, along with modern upgrades, that make it possible to convert the movements of underwater models into useful design data.

“Prior to my time in the 1990s, everything was recorded on tape drive and it was an incredibly cumbersome process,” says Lambrecht. “Nowadays with the computing power that we have, we can record simultaneously on roughly 3,000 sensors at a fairly high frequency rate so we can collect gigabytes of data per minute.”

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The Air Force is testing a new tool for sinking ships with guided bombs, and this month released additional footage of a successful test of the system from April.

In the video captured from the deck of the derelict ship Courageous, the bomb hits as a plume of water and smoke, with the camera’s angle jolted skyward as the now-halved vessel splits and sinks. The footage, released September 19, offers a more complete picture of an Air Force Research Lab weapons test, which originally took place on April 28. Previous footage showed the ship sinking, from the sky. Now, with the footage from the onboard camera recovered, it is possible to see what would be a sailor’s eye view of the destruction, before the falling bomb permanently condemns them to what would be a long stay in Davy Jone’s locker.

The Air Force Research Laboratory describes its new Quicksink technology as a “low-cost, air-delivered capability for defeating maritime threats.” It is, in practice, a target-tracking system that can attach to existing bombs and bomb guidance systems, letting fighter jets and other planes sink ships from the sky with the accuracy and force typically reserved for seaborne torpedoes. 

In the April demonstration, an F-15E Strike Eagle released a roughly 2,000-pound JDAM bomb, hitting and sinking the ship set up as a target in the Gulf of Mexico. (JDAM means “Joint Direct Attack Munition,” and refers to a family of bombs with guidance systems used by both the Air Force and the Navy.) In the first footage released of the test, the target ship can be seen intact, then buckling upward as the bomb hits one-third of the length from the rear of the vessel. The whole of the ship is soon engulfed in a plume of smoke, debris, and blasted water, with the split sections mostly submerged by the time the cloud clears 20 seconds later. 

Sinking into history

Sinking ships with attacks from aircraft is a century old idea. In the summer of 1921, the US Navy and Army competed to see which pilots could sink captured German World War I warships used for target practice. (Previously, some of these warships had been used as target practice for battleship guns.) Planes sinking ships became a crucial part of World War II, with some dedicated planes carrying torpedoes, and others flying harrowing dive-bomb attacks to place bombs on ship decks. 

Precision guidance systems have improved dramatically since the end of World War II and especially since the 1970s, and anti-ship missiles have benefitted as well. 

Current options for sinking surface ships from planes “are the Harpoon AGM-84, Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) AGM-158C, and laser guided bombs (GBUs). All achieve functional and mission kills, but sinking a ship may require multiple munitions and all require some level of intelligence knowledge of the ship for mission planning and targeting the critical nodes,” Kirk Herzog, AFRL program manager, told Popular Science via email.

These weapons can prove effective, but long-range flight, navigation, and guidance systems come at a cost. The Harpoon anti-ship missile can be air-, surface-, or submarine-launched, has seen action in Ukraine, and costs over $1 million per missile. The Long Range Anti Ship Missile, a cruise missile built to do what it says on the label, costs over $3.5 million per missile.

Bombs away

Bombs, on the other hand, are relatively cheap, even with guidance systems. In 2020, every JDAM purchased by the Air Force cost about $21,000 apiece. Herzog said that, as a technology demonstration program, there is no target cost per item, but the “objective of the program is to incorporate features, such as Weapon Open System Architecture and open competition, that drive down the overall life cycle cost.” This would make Quicksink a low-cost way for planes to sink ships with JDAMs.

Navy submarines, armed with torpedoes, already perform this patrol function to some degree. The AFRL says that Quicksink “aims to develop a low-cost method of achieving torpedo-like seaworthy kills from the air at a much higher pace and over a much larger area than covered by a lumbering submarine.”

Submarines are an odd direct comparison to aircraft, especially when planes like the Navy’s P-8 Poseidon already carry anti-ship weapons and are used for maritime patrol. What Quicksink offers when used from a stealth fighter, like torpedoes fired from a submarine, is surprise in sinking a vessel. Unlike submarines, which risk revealing themselves in an attack, a stealth plane retains a similar degree of stealth even as it flies away.

The latest video released features a 3D model of the Courageous resting on the seafloor. This 3D model was produced for the Okaloosa County Artificial Reef Office (explore it on their site), and the reefs, which include other wrecks, are promoted by the Office as “excellent sites for fishing, diving, and snorkeling activities.” To make the model, a company called Reef Smart Guides took images captured from an underwater uncrewed vehicle, and then fed it into software that produced a 3D video. “It’s the same technologies used for years to map the ocean bottom, inspect bridges, cables, and other underwater infrastructure,” said Herzog.

One of the videos released by the AFRL shows an animated segment representing a hypothetical future mission where having Quicksink would be important. In that scenario, a navy reconnaissance plane spots a “ship heading to the west coast armed with long range ballistic missile disguised as typical cargo containers,” then dispatches an already-flying F-35 on maritime patrol, which sinks it. 

In addition to its effectiveness at guiding a bomb through a target ship, Quicksink is designed as a “Weapon Open Systems Architecture” tool, or one that can easily plug into existing system. Should the US suddenly find itself beset by cargo ships secretly arming and launching ballistic missiles, the ability to easily and rapidly convert existing bombs into guided anti-ship weapons would prove a direct boon for national security. 

Watch the ship being sunk, below:

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On September 19, defense giant General Atomics unveiled four related drone concepts, all under the family name of Gambit. The program, which was first announced in March, aims to take advantage of the possibilities afforded to uncrewed design, allowing several distinct aircraft to be built around a single core. Drones based on the Gambit Core would then join fighter wings and missions, under the direction of human pilots in F-35s or newer fighters, all working towards the same end.

The heart of the Gambit, as General Atomics says, is a “core platform that encapsulates a single set of common hardware: landing gear, baseline avionics, chassis, and other essential functions. A common Gambit Core accounts for roughly 70 percent of the price among the various models, providing an economy of scale to help lower costs, increase interoperability, and enhance or accelerate the development of variants.”

General Atomics, in its announcement, explicitly compares this to the assembly line style of automotive manufacture, in which both luxury sedans and family economy models start from the same base and then deviate only later in production. Gambit is pitched explicitly as a suite of useful drones, which will offer four useful versions and come in a line that can be expanded as production evolves.

Common core for four

The four initial Gambit models, as pitched, come complete with sketchpad-style illustrations. General Atomics announced them as each having a number, and each one is also intended to have a specific focus. Together, they will allow the military to use drones for everything from scouting to combat to advanced training to stealth missions.

Gambit 1

This is a scout and surveillance drone. This scout Gambit will take the core package and add “high aspect wings and a fuel-optimized engine,” letting it “spend more time patrolling a given box of airspace to provide early warning or surveillance.” This is the role most familiar to the pattern of drones like the Reaper or Global Hawk, made by General Atomics and Northrop Grumman respectively, though as described the scout Gambit is intended to watch for enemy planes, in addition to any watching movements below on the ground.

Gambit 2

This is an air-to-air fighter. This fighter drone will have less endurance than the long range scout. Instead, it will fight in packs, with sensors shared between multiple fighter-Gambits, all using shared signals to triangulate and find even stealthy targets. General Atomics says that this group could do multiple tasks: “They could alert human-piloted fighters farther away with a burst transmission. They could wave off to keep clear of the hostile fighter. They could attack with their own weapons using AI and machine learning to harass and trap the hostile fighter.” This theoretically lets drone aircraft be on the bleeding edge of a fight, with commanding human supervisors able to respond after the drones have already detected a hostile enemy.

Gambit 3

This aircraft is a training tool, a drone that will be able to emulate the powerful sensors of a modern crewed stealth fighter and pretend to be something it’s not, all without requiring actual pilots to fly training missions and masquerade as enemies. Training work is important and time-intensive, and the Air Force is already invested in using AI to evaluate pilots and pilot technique. Tools that are especially effective at training, like the Angry Kitten electronic warfare suite, can end up adapted to frontline service.

Gambit 4

Last but not least, this model is “a combat reconnaissance-focused model with no tail and swept wings,” which in the sketch resembles the flying wing B-2 bomber or the uncrewed RQ-170 drone. The General Atomics release for this drone is the least descriptive, offering only that the stealth Gambit is “optimized for long-endurance missions of a specialized nature, leveraging low-observable elements and other advanced systems for avoiding enemy detection.” As the B-2 and RQ-170 indicate, that kind of stealth is useful for bombing targets despite the presence of air defenses, or for surveillance in areas where another plane would risk getting shot down or being detected.

Teaming with possibilities

When General Atomics president David Alexander announced Gambit in March, he said that “Gambit will usher in a new era, where UAS [uncrewed aircraft systems] work collaboratively with manned aircraft to detect, identify and target adversaries at range and scale across the battlespace.”

The drone family is designed to work with and around existing and new crewed aircraft, letting autonomy take over many of the tasks presently done by remote pilots. Instead of multiple analysts gathering around a video feed from a drone while a remote crew steers it and directs sensors, the Gambit family is envisioned as self-sufficient but under human direction. That allows the fighter pilots in the sky to focus on missions, like clearing out anti-air missiles or intercepting enemy jets, without devoting their full energy and mental capacity to shepherding drones.

With programs like the Loyal Wingman, the Air Force has already indicated an interest in drone escorts for future fighters, and has worked with multiple contractors on designs that meet this need. Gambit, at a minimum, suggests that the defense industry is interested in providing whole families of potential drone escorts.

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On September 15, defense giant Lockheed Martin announced that it had delivered a 300-kw laser to the Department of Defense. Developed for a program called the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative, or HELSI, this laser was delivered to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering (OUSD) in early August. Since August 14, it has been with the Army in Huntsville, Alabama, where it is undergoing further testing. The laser component is designed to be integrated into laser weapon systems on ground vehicles or ships.

“This is yet another step in proving that these systems are ready and are able to be deployed as force multipliers and as part of the directed energy and kinetic energy mix that our war fighters can use to defend against threats like rockets, artillery, mortars, cruise missiles, UAVs, and small ships,” Richard Cordaro, a vice president at Lockheed Martin, said at a media roundtable.

Since the US started developing and deploying these systems in the 2010s, the fundamental premise of modern directed-energy weapons—as the military prefers to call high-power lasers—is that they can cost-effectively destroy a range of enemy projectiles. The idea is that a laser weapon on a ship, for example, could zap everything from an inexpensive drone to a pricey incoming cruise missile, with each shot of the laser costing relatively little. 

In Huntsville, the Army will be testing the HELSI laser as part of its broader Indirect Fires Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) program. In IFPC-HEL, the Army is seeking a cost-effective weapon against cheap threats to defend “fixed and semi-fixed sites,” which could be everything from a base to an artillery position. The laser is also expected to “defeat more stressing threats,” making it a system that can easily handle inexpensive weapons like rockets but also expensive and especially deadly ones like cruise missiles. 

[Related: The Navy’s next-gen destroyer concept involves powerful lasers]

A full laser weapon system combines a power supply with a beam of directed light energy, sensors for targeting and tracking, and likely (for ground use) a vehicle to move the whole component around. HELSI is just the laser component of that, and it actually works by combining several lasers.

“We sort of describe it as the cover of the Pink Floyd album where you see the light coming in white light and then splitting off into the different spectrums of color,” said Cordaro, referencing the iconic “Dark Side of the Moon” cover. “Well, it’s doing that in reverse, where we take the different spectrum elements and combine them into one high-energy beam.”

To make the beam, the system needs power. The most common way to generate the electrical power needed to produce a 300 kW beam would be batteries, though generators and other means of electric power could work with the system. Race McDermott, a business development lead with Lockheed Martin, said that the company has a history of producing lasers with an electrical efficiency “north of 30 percent,” which offers a rough sense of how much electrical power goes into producing 300 kilowatts of optical power output. 

[Related: This laser-armed Stryker vehicle can shoot down drones and mortar rounds]

Increasing laser power is done by upping the number of channels, or individual beams, that go into the combined laser, increasing the power of each of those channels, or by doing both at once.

“We focused on doing both and demonstrating that we can combine more individual lasers into one SBC [Spectral Beam Combination] 300-kilowatt class laser, and we increase the power per channel,” said McDermott. “Since you have each of these individual channels, you can sort of throttle the power for each of the engagements. If you wanted to maximize your magazine depth, you may not shoot everything at full power.”

That allows the HELSI laser to punch at full force against a hard target, like a cruise missile or small ship, or to only apply the necessary force and save on power against a target like a smaller drone or an artillery round.

While HELSI has yet to destroy a flying object in testing, Lockheed Martin’s Helios laser—a different system—used its 60 kilowatts of power to destroy drones flying as cruise missile surrogates in a test at White Sands. That laser has since been deployed on the destroyer USS Preble, where it may be used to protect the vessel from threats encountered at sea. Other explorations into laser weaponry include a drone zapper mounted on a heavily armored truck; also, the Navy is planning on laser-armed destroyers to replace its current destroyer fleet.

McDermott said that the power increase of a laser is fairly linear (if you hold variables of target type, range, and atmosphere constant), meaning the 300 kilowatt HELSI laser could destroy targets about five times as quickly as the Helios would destroy them.

The potential of a system like this, once the weapon exists, is for soldiers or sailors to fight with an extra layer of protection, as the laser draws on battery reserves to clear the sky of incoming attacks. Laser weapons alone will not stop attacks, but they could carve a safe pocket of time in which other weapons, like the Army’s own mortars or artillery, could fire back at attackers, potentially tilting the balance of artillery duels in favor of the side with lasers.

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In an animated video released on September 7, a glistening silver-white drone flies towards a modest warship. The drone turns 90 degrees vertically, its rotors allowing it to descend gradually as its wings pivot at elbow joints to take up only a fraction of the ship’s helipad. Made by DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing, this is the vision of a new drone program called ANCILLARY, an acronym that comes, not quite naturally, from the phrase “AdvaNced airCraft Infrastructure-Less Launch And RecoverY.”

To scout and resupply the battlefields of the future, DARPA is asking companies to design compact, useful, vertical-takeoff-and-landing drones that can fly from ships or unprepared clearings. On Sept. 20, DARPA is hosting a “Proposers Day,” for traditional and non-traditional military aircraft makers to explore creating this new drone.

ANCILLARY is an X-Plane program, making it more akin to past experiments in aviation that demonstrated concepts of flight design more than outright designed aircraft for production. Inside the clunky acronym, the term “Infrastructure-Less” refers to the ability to launch and recover a drone without runways or special equipment, which would be a big boon for uncrewed aircraft. Presently, vertical takeoff or landing are small, like quadcopters, and limited in what they can carry.

Many ship-launched fixed-wing drones, which boast useful range for sea scouting, launch from rails, and land by crashing into nets or catching skyhooks on approach. That kit of rail launch and hook or net can be set up on land, but requires at minimum a truck to transport it around. It also takes up space and uses time and effort from the crew, at sea or on land, making it a more labor intensive process than simply landing.

With ANCILLARY, DARPA says it wants to develop and flight test “critical technologies required for a leap ahead in vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), low-weight, high-payload, and long-endurance capabilities,” with the goal of building “a plane that can launch from ship flight decks and small austere land locations in adverse weather without launch and recovery equipment typically needed for these systems.”

Because this is the earliest stage of the project, the actual shape and design of the drones sought is likely to change from the concept. What is clear, at least in the video demonstration, is the kind of missions these drones will be called on to perform. 

In one scene, the ANCILLARY drone descends onto a marked-out landing zone on a road through a jungle. The landing indicators are a handful of lights, and next to them sit soldiers in dark uniforms that suggest a night mission by special operations forces. While the squad provides armed overwatch (looking out for enemies with weapons drawn), one member unloads a cylinder of supplies, and another prepares to send the drone on a return mission with a quick command on the tablet. 

The concept video shows ANCILLARY drones flying in teams, cameras and other sensors pointed below to surveil an archipelago, all while staying in communication with the small ship that launched the scouts. DARPA is service-agnostic, but the scenario described is likely for the US Navy in support of marine advances.

Another scene shows the ANCILLARY aircraft flown from behind a rough mountain to spy on a village of mud-brick houses, sending information of suspected enemy positions back to the tablet of a commander. This scenario most resembles the use of drones in the long counter-insurgency wars waged by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and presently parts of sub-Saharan Africa. 

The Department of Defense has already explored a range of delivery drones, from the hoverbike-derived Joint Tactical Aerial Resupply Vehicle to the tilt-body APT-70 cargo drone. Neither of these drones were designed to perform the scouting tasks like the catapult-launched and skyhook-recovered ScanEagle. Adding a vertical-takeoff ability to drones like the ScanEagle has been such a long-standing interest that in 2015, the company that makes ScanEagle released a video showing the drone launched and recovered from a giant quadcopter mothership.

Across the conceptual DARPA scenarios, the drone is a self-contained tool, taking up at most a fraction of a landing pad or the back of a single truck. Flying from anywhere, it delivers aid and intelligence to the forces that need it, with similarly minimal input expected from human operators. In the DARPA video, the hypothetical drone appears to be a tail-sitter, meaning that it performs a pivot maneuver when taking off or landing to adjust its orientation. The Space Shuttle was also a tail-sitter when it took off, but not when it landed.

If such a drone already existed, DARPA would not need to fund the research to develop one. DARPA’s bet is that the components for such a drone can be found across commercial and military design. The agency suggests ANCILLARY will take advantage of “advancements in small propulsion systems, high capacity low weight batteries, fuel cells, materials, electronics,” and affordable 3D printing, all of which could allow new, more capable drone designs.

If ANCILLARY can deliver a delivery drone, soldiers stuck in rough terrain, distant islands, small ships, or wherever else normal supply infrastructure struggles could see aid arriving by sky, thanks to the autonomous robot couriers. Designing one drone capable of such delivery, while also functioning as a useful scout and communications relay, is a hard problem, one that will likely have to lean on the capabilities developed in both military and commercial sectors. 

Watch the DARPA video, below.

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For 20 hours, from 2 pm local time on September 1 to 8 am the next day, Iran’s Navy seized and held two robot scouts used by the US Navy, before their return was negotiated. The action took place in the Red Sea, where the US has operated the Saildrones since December 2021. The incident followed the attempted capture of a Saildrone in the Persian Gulf by Iran on August 29, when a Saildrone was towed by the Iranian Navy before being released as US ships arrived. The incidents, which passed without bloodshed, are a curious feature of modern not-quite-warfare, demonstrating the vulnerabilities and benefits of robotic craft at sea.

What is a Saildrone?

The Saildrones are, as ocean-faring craft go, quite small: 23 feet long, 15 feet tall above the surface, and just 6 feet deep underneath it. To help other ships steer clear, Saildrones broadcast their location (and receive the location of other ships) from Automatic Identification System transceivers. Saildrones are also monitored remotely, allowing distant human operators to keep track of, and redirect, the drones as needed.

[Related: The feats of engineering that dazzled us in 2021]

The Red Sea is a long body of water, stretching over 1,200 miles from the Bab al-Mandab Strait to the mouths of the Gulf of Aqaba and the Gulf of Suez. Since at least December 2021, the US Navy has operated Saildrones in the Gulf of Aqaba. The uncrewed vessels have tremendous range, thanks to their use of batteries and solar power to maintain electronics and wind to provide propulsion. NOAA, which also uses Saildrones for weather monitoring and research, lists the range of the Saildrones in its use as over 16,000 nautical miles (18,400 statute miles), and Saildrone itself, the company that makes the similarly named robots, says the range is unlimited.

Seaways, like the Red Sea and the Strait, are governed by the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, a set of shared rules agreed to by nations allowing safe transit through international waterways. The US is not a signatory to the convention but by policy follows all its rules regarding waterway navigation. 

Why might Iran seize them?

In its statement on the August 29 towing of a Saildrone, the US Navy said: “The Saildrone Explorer USV the IRGCN [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy] attempted to confiscate is U.S. government property and equipped with sensors, radars and cameras for navigation and data collection. This technology is available commercially and does not store sensitive or classified information.”

By highlighting the commercial nature of the technology used, the US Navy is dialing down the inferred harm from the recent incidents, as well as minimizing potential for greater harm should a Saildrone be seized and studied for a longer time. If the Saildrone only uses cameras, radar, and navigation tools on the open market, then conceivably, Iran could just obtain those same technologies through open-market purchases. (Some weapons, like missiles and military-specification drones, are governed by strict export controls, their very make and operation inherently restricted from such sales.)

“The unmanned surface vessels were unarmed and taking unclassified photos of the surrounding environment while loitering in an assigned patrol area at least four nautical miles from the nearest maritime traffic lane. The vessels posed no risk to naval traffic and had been operating in the general vicinity of the Southern Red Sea for more than 200 consecutive days without incident,” the US Navy declared in a statement on the September incident.

Like the statement from the temporary seizure in the Red Sea, both emphasize that Saildrones are not vessels that create or contain secrets. They are, primarily, robots that take pictures of what’s around them. Keeping sensitive technology out of the hands of enemies at war or rivals in peace is a fundamental military mission; it’s what made Ukraine’s capture of an undestroyed Russian electronic warfare truck headline-grabbing news.

What could be gleaned by Iran, beyond the commercial tech and the unclassified photos, is a sense of what exactly the US Navy tasked the Saildrones with photographing. That would require gaining access to the drone’s data storage during the capture, or more likely (as with the incident in the Persian Gulf) towing the drone to a port where it could be studied and accessed. In the US Navy description of events, once the Saildrones were discovered seized, US ships pursued and flew helicopters as a part of encouraging a negotiated return of the drones.

The stakes, for now, are largely about shared use of the seas, between two navies without a tremendous amount of trust in one another. Because the Saildrones are uncrewed, when they are captured, no lives are at stake. There’s no person in peril. While the machines could be destroyed, that’s a loss of material, not casualties of war. 

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In October, the Army is expected to announce a proper name for its newest vehicle. The machine is essentially a light tank, an armored turreted and tracked vehicle with a big gun. In June, the US Army announced it was spending up to $1.14 billion on this brand-new light tank, which is formally called the Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle. The contract, awarded to General Dynamics Land Systems, will deliver between 26 and 96 vehicles, with the first set to arrive in 2024.

The Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle will be the “Army’s first new design vehicle fielded in over four decades,” the Army said in June. While the Army has developed, deployed, and iterated on many vehicle designs, these have largely been adaptations of existing models. The heavy M1 Abrams main battle tank, also by General Dynamics, has undergone five variations, with a Next Generation version underway. 

By contrast, the last light tank fielded by the Army was the M551 Sheridan, which saw action in Vietnam, Panama, and was also deployed to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield, and then saw combat in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. When the Sheridan was fully retired in 1996, the Army did not have a direct replacement, and before the MPF, it lacked a tracked vehicle to take on that same role. The M112 Stryker Mobile Gun System, an armored and eight-wheeled vehicle with a powerful 105mm gun mounted in its turret, fulfills roughly the same role as the Sheridan, but the Strykers are set to be retired by the Army in 2022. 

Why a light tank?

In 2017, the Army outlined a vision for why they wanted a new, lighter vehicle than the existing Abrams tanks. The MPF, as planned, weighs only 38 tons, relative to the 70 tons of an Abrams. (For context, the new Hummer EV from GM weighs a comparatively wispy 4.6 tons.)

“The Army particularly needs the as-yet nonexistent Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) vehicle to support infantry brigade combat teams–a lightweight vehicle that can be airlifted into battle and maneuver, dispersed if necessary, in close-quarters urban terrain, but with lethal long-range firepower to take out enemy armored vehicles,” read a March 2017 article in an Army magazine. “The idea is to defeat enemy positions and destroy their light armored vehicles pre-emptively to provide U.S. forces with greater freedom of movement. MPF is now the Army’s highest mid-term priority in combat vehicle modernization.”

In every such request, there is a vision of the kind of war the Army expects to fight. For Mobile Protected Firepower vehicles, this war is in cities and it is against an enemy with armor beyond heavy tanks. Enemy vehicles, from technicals to dedicated armor, can carry heavy guns into urban environments, and the Army wants a way to destroy those vehicles directly, without the collateral damage of an artillery barrage. Most notably, this vision includes the ability to be airdropped alongside infantry, a requirement no longer part of the program.

At a March 2017 hearing before Congress, shortly after the announcement of MPF, Lieutenant General John Murray, deputy chief of staff of the Army, emphasized the role of the vehicle specifically for adding punch to Infantry Brigade Combat Teams (IBCT). Against a peer or near-peer nation, like China or Russia, Armored Brigade Combat Teams already have heavy tanks, and Stryker Brigade Combat Teams have many anti-tank weapons, including javelin missiles.

But, said Murray, while an MPF vehicle is not designed to go “toe-to-toe with a Soviet tank,” having the MPFs in an Infantry Brigade Combat Team means they can handle other threats, like bunkers or light armor, that they cannot deal with at present without support. 

Where Abrams do not tread

The Army has, for decades, enjoyed relative freedom where it operates, often complete with air support from Air Force and Navy pilots, to say nothing of its own attack helicopters. This means that Army formations that fight on foot or from lighter vehicles, like Humvees or its JLTV replacement, could reliably call on air support if they encountered a fortified enemy position or armored vehicles. Counter-insurgency, like that fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, meant the US was fighting an enemy without an air force, and so was free to fight from the skies with only minimal risk to pilots.

In a contested war against a country with its own armor, air force, and most importantly anti-air and anti-tank missiles, the Army expects to fight much more on its own. That means when it sends units across difficult terrain, which is where infantry combat brigade teams go, they will have to fight with just the weapons and vehicles they can bring to battle.

In places where Abrams cannot go, and in wars where air support is strained or hard to rely on, the Army will want to bring full firepower to bear against enemy positions. That, more than anything else, is the expected role of the Mobile Protected Firepower.

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The US Air Force is looking for a new way to win fights in the sky, and is turning to drones that can escort crewed fighters to do so. To explore the concept, the US Air Force is eyeing the idea of using a drone called the Ghost Bat, which was built for the Royal Australian Air Force. Speaking at an August event with the head of the Royal Australian Air Force, US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall suggested that the MG-28 Ghost Bat, or a variant, may fly into combat alongside future US fighters. The remark was first reported by Breaking Defense and hints at a future of international design for the loyal wingmate aircraft of tomorrow.

“I’m talking to my Australian counterparts in general about the [Next Generation Air Dominance] family of systems and how they might be able to participate,” Breaking Defense reports Kendall saying. In that context, Kendall continues, the Ghost Bat “could serve ‘as a risk reduction mechanism’ for NGAD’s drone capability.”

Next Generation Air Dominance is a long-in-development Air Force program and concept for designing aircraft that will fight in the skies of the 21st century. Historically, the Air Force has invested a great deal of effort into developing generations of fighter jets, with each wave flown alongside fighters from the previous and succeeding eras until deemed fully obsolete and phased out. 

Generations of jets

Consider the F-4 Phantom, a third-generation fighter that first entered military service in 1958, where it flew alongside the second-generation F-100 Super Sabre. The US retired the F-4 Phantom in 1996, after it flew alongside fourth-generation planes like the F-15 and F-16. Today, those fourth generation fighters fly alongside fifth-generation planes like the F-22 and F-35.

That pattern of development, which matched the pace and limits of aircraft development in the 1950s through 1990s, meant planes being flown for decades, despite becoming more and more obsolete as newer aircraft entered service at home and abroad.

“The Next Generation Air Dominance program is employing digital engineering to replace once-in-a-generation, mass-produced fighters with smaller batches of iteratively-upgraded platforms of multiple types,” declares an Air Force acquisition report from 2019-2020. 

Ghost Bat is a product of the Loyal Wingman program, which set out to design a dependable drone escort for fighters. This program is a way for the Air Force to iterate on plane design without committing to decades of service from the drones. 

Loyal wingmate

In the 2019-2020 report, the Air Force described Next Generation Air Dominance as a way to achieve air superiority in challenging conditions. At present, the air superiority mission is performed by crewed fighters like the F-22 and F-15, whose pilots risk their aircraft and their lives when fighting against enemy aircraft and anti-air weapons. Instead of building a single new fighter to replace F-15s and F-22s, the Air Force wants to borrow from the iterative design of the automotive industry, making drones with open architecture that can be more quickly developed, all in the name of improving the Air Force’s ability to survive, kill, and endure in the face of enemy aircraft and weapons. 

This survival will come as part of a mixed fleet of drones and crewed aircraft. Under the Loyal Wingman program, the Air Force has worked for years to develop a drone that can fly and fight alongside a crewed aircraft. Loyal wingmates, as envisioned, will fly alongside F-22s and F-35s, and any crewed aircraft that replaces the stealth jets may be designed with loyal wingmates in mind. 

What is the Ghost Bat?

The Ghost Bat is an uncrewed plane that is 38 feet long, with a flight range of 2,300 miles. Boeing, which makes it, says that the drone will incorporate sensor packages for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and expects it to perform scouting missions ahead of other aircraft, as well as being able to detect incoming threats. In addition, the plan is for the Ghost Bat to employ “artificial intelligence to fly independently or in support of crewed aircraft while maintaining safe distance between other aircraft.”

When the Royal Australian Air Force announced the Ghost Bat in March, they said it was the “first Australian-built aircraft in more than 50 years.” 

The name, selected from a pool of over 700 possibilities, is a tribute to the only carnivorous species of bat in Australia; they are hunters that use both eyes and echolocation to hunt prey. As the announcement from the RAAF explained, Ghost Bat was chosen as a name because ghost bats are the only Australian bat that can prey on both terrestrial and flying animals. In addition, the RAAF pointed to the drone’s possible use in electronic warfare, a mission already carried out in Australia by a unit with a ghost bat symbol. 

None of this offers a wealth of information on what the Ghost Bat actually does, but that’s sort of the point. What the Ghost Bat most needs to be able to do is be an uncrewed plane that can fly safely with, and receive orders from, crewed aircraft. To meet the goals of Next Generation Air Dominance, the Air Force wants planes that can be easily adapted to new missions and take on new tools, like sensors or electronic warfare weapons, or other tech not yet developed. 

Boeing built the Ghost Bat for the Loyal Wingman program, but it’s not the only loyal wingmate explored. The Kratos Valkyrie, built for the Air Force and tested as a loyal wingmate with the Skyborg autonomous pilot, has already seen its earliest models retired to be museum pieces.

While these are distinct aircraft, the flexibility of software and especially open-architecture autopilots means that an autonomous navigation system developed on one airframe could become the pilot on a different one. It is this exact modularity and flexibility the Air Force is looking at, as it envisions a future of robots flying alongside human pilots, with models numbered not in generations but years.

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On August 24, the Department of Defense announced it would be sending anti-drone weapons called VAMPIREs to Ukraine. The announcement of the VAMPIRE came in a larger, nearly $3 billion package of assistance from the United States to Ukraine as it fights against Russia’s invasion. The inclusion of VAMPIRE highlights the major role that drones are playing in the war, and the challenge of fighting against them without having specialized weapons.

The shape of the war is reflected in the other weapons included in the package. The US is sending up to 245,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition and up to 65,000 rounds of 120mm mortar ammunition, weapons that emphasize how much of the present conflict is an artillery fight. The 155mm artillery rounds, fired by US- and NATO-supplied howitzers, can duel with Russian artillery, while the mortar rounds let soldiers on foot attack enemy defenses from behind hills or otherwise out of sight. Paired with the artillery are two dozen counter-artillery radars, allowing better targeting in artillery duels.

The other half of the package is all drone- or counter-drone related. VAMPIRE is the headlining system, which combines a sensor with an anti-drone missile launcher that can mount on a range of vehicles, but it’s hardly the only counter-drone system in the package. Beyond an unspecified number of VAMPIRE systems, the August 24 announcement included six additional National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, a kind of anti-air missile system already in use in Ukraine, along with ammunition to match. The package includes laser-guided rocket systems, confirmed to be Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II rockets, which have been tested against drones. The drones included are Pumas and Scan Eagles, which can be launched without runways and give forces on the ground a better sense of where enemies and their artillery are.

What is the VAMPIRE counter-drone system?

Colin Kahl, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, described the VAMPIRE as a kinetic system that uses small missiles to shoot drones out of the sky. Many counter-drone systems use electromagnetic interference or jamming to disrupt the way a drone flies and communicates remotely with a human operator, but destroying the drone outright is a straightforward solution.

Made by L3Harris, VAMPIRE stands for Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment. “Vehicle-Agnostic” means it can go in multiple vehicles, and L3Harris’ site shows the system mounted in the bed of a crew-cab truck. Civilian vehicles are abundant and often modified for war. When weapons are mounted on such a vehicle, it becomes a “technical,” and the popularity of Toyota Hi-Lux trucks as technicals has led to the whole category of insurgency-by-truck being dubbed “Toyota Wars.”

Modular and palletized both refer to how the VAMPIRE can be transported and modified, and that the system includes its own power supply. ISR is “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,” and in the case of VAMPIRE refers to the specific camera pod attached to the system. This camera pod, made by L3 Harris, includes a thermal sensor, optical camera, low-light optical camera, laser rangefinder, and a laser target marker to guide the laser-guided rockets. This sensor system can also include image processing, feature recognition, and video tracking, all of which are features that could enable it to see and track drones in flight.

What will the VAMPIRE hunt?

Drones are extensively used by both sides fighting in Ukraine. Before the invasion, Russia prepared with dedicated military drones to act as scouts and, especially, as spotters for artillery. Since the invasion, both forces have used drones extensively, with Ukraine using bomb and rocket-armed Bayraktar TB2 drones to strike Russian forces and record footage of the act.

As the war progressed, and initial stockpiles of machines and weapons depleted through use or destruction, both Ukrainian and Russian forces turned increasingly to other drone supplies. The United States, as well as NATO allies, continue to supply Ukraine with scout-and-spotter drones like the Pumas and Scan Eagles included in the latest package, as well as armed drone-missiles like the Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost. 

Russia has turned to Iran for extra drone supplies, and provincial governments in Russia have even redirected funds to purchase hobbyist, commercial drones so that their soldiers can go into battle with quadcopter scouts equal to the numbers used by Ukrainian soldiers. Hobbyist quadcopters are so in-demand militarily that Russia is formally training volunteer drone pilots. These drones are much cheaper than dedicated military models, with limited range and more vulnerable to jamming or other kinds of electronic warfare. 

A Mavic quadcopter can cost around $400, and the laser-guided rockets fired by VAMPIRE can cost $27,500 apiece, a disparity that suggests VAMPIRE will instead be hunting more specific military models like Orlan-10 and Orion drones, as well as other aircraft. Larger Iranian-made Mohajer-6 and Shahed drones, now in Russian service, are also likely VAMPIRE targets.

But in the context of the broader artillery duel in Ukraine, and with Ukrainian forces launching a counter-offensive to retake the Russian-held city of Kherson on the mouth of the Dnipro river, the ability to destroy artillery spotters in the form of drones in flight could save lives and preserve the advance. Brought into the open, VAMPIRE shows that modern counter-drone weapons are no longer kept in the shadows. 

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As the Arctic warms, the Army wants a new vehicle for combat over ice. On August 22, the Army announced that it had chosen the Beowulf two-bodied tracked vehicle by BAE systems to fulfill its Cold Weather All-Terrain Vehicle needs. The contract for production is worth just over $278 million, with the stated objective of delivering 163 of the vehicles by 2029.

The Beowulf vehicle has two segments, joined in the middle. Both segments can be configured to carry people as well as other payloads, and having the joint allows for easier movement across uneven terrain while retaining the size of a larger vehicle. It rolls on tank-like tracks.

“Beowulf successfully completed the prototype evaluation phase of the CATV program earlier this year in Alaska,” said BAE Systems in a release. “It performed in multiple tasks while remaining fully mission capable. The testing included amphibious operations, navigating terrain with varying levels of complexity, starting and operating in extreme cold weather, and most critically, user assessment by soldiers.”

The US Army will use the Beowulf to replace its existing and aged fleet of Small Unit Support Vehicles, which are all two-bodied tracked transports used to carry people, cargo, and medical supplies over rough terrain in climates like the Arctic. The Small Unit Support Vehicle was built by Hägglunds Vehicle AB, which was acquired by BAE Systems in 2005. BAE Hägglunds is the maker of Beowulf.

In a 2019 listing outlining what it expected from the Cold Weather All-Terrain Vehicle (CATV) Prototype, the Army stated that the vehicle will be able to carry a combat-loaded infantry squad, perform medical evacuations, serve as communication and command relay, and carry cargo. In addition, the vehicle needed to work on roads and off-road in terrain impassable to infantry without it. This included the ability to drive over “rocky terrain, inland lakes, marsh and muskeg [a kind of Arctic bog], deep snow, ice and operate in extreme cold weather.”

The vehicle design sought under the contract also needed to be light enough that it could be carried by cargo helicopters, and compact enough to fit inside a C-17 cargo transport plane. Wherever cold the Army might be expected to fight, it needed to be able to bring its transports with it.

BAE Systems describes the vehicle as capable of carrying up to 14 people, or a payload of 17,600 pounds, all while moving at just over 40 mph. In practice, and as outlined by the June 2022 solicitation, that will mean carrying a 9-person squad. The Beowulf is unarmed and unarmored, unlike the BAE BvS10 on which it is based, and which is in use by militaries in Europe, including Sweden, France, and the United Kingdom.

In January 2021, the US Army released “Regaining Arctic Dominance,” a strategy outlining how and why the military should prepare for war in the extreme cold of northern latitudes. Part of this is strictly territorial: Alaska is an Arctic state, and any military plan to defend Alaska or Canada (a NATO ally) should accommodate for their vast territory, unique terrain, and specific conditions. Part of it is more broadly geographic: US forces stationed in Europe have long trained for the possibility of defending NATO allies, like Norway, in Arctic approaches. While the 2021 strategy predates the likely ascension of Sweden and Finland into NATO, both countries exist in the Arctic, and Finland even shares a border in the Arctic with Russia.

Beyond present geopolitical challenges, the warming of the planet is experienced acutely in the Arctic, where temperatures are warming faster than elsewhere on the globe. This means that sea lanes, blocked for centuries by ice, are open more of the year, facilitating greater transport, trade, and resource exploitation. It also means that the long winters, normally stable times of heavy ice, are fading faster into the unpredictable weather of spring and summer, where uneven melts and mud make movement harder, especially for wheeled vehicles.

It is with this in mind that the US Army is investing in the Beowulf as a tracked transport that can carry goods and people where needed through friendly countries or across unfriendly Arctic battlefields.

In the 2021 strategy, the Army specifically names the Cold Weather All-Terrain Vehicle as a crucial capability to “improve mobility in an Arctic environment.” The strategy continues, “The Army will continue its plan to replace the existing fleet of Small Unit Support Vehicles to mitigate maneuver challenges of the current wheeled fleet. Additionally, the Army will investigate what further changes to motorized transportation to provide four-season mobility.”

Whatever war in the frozen north looks like, we know that Beowulf will be the cold-weather transport that takes part in the saga. Take a look at the Beowulf vehicle, below.

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When the Royal Marines ride into battle on buggy-like MRZR transports, they may be able to send the transports back for supplies with no humans at the wheel. The MRZR is a four-wheeled unarmored light vehicle that is practically just a frame of a body around a versatile chassis. For its stated mission of fast transport over rough terrain, it’s an ideal shape. Like most vehicles, it’s driven by a human being. But to make it even more versatile, and to risk fewer lives on military missions, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence wants a suite of sensors and automated driving tools that can let the vehicle operate autonomously.

On August 16, defense company Rheinmetall Canada announced that the company had installed a PATH autonomy kit on a Polaris-made MRZR D4 for the first time, as part of Protect Theseus for the UK’s Ministry of Defence. Project Theseus is “an initiative to automate supply delivery to soldiers in hostile environments,” and the PATH kit is an AI-powered navigation system that should help with that objective.

“Under Project Theseus, it is hoped the use of self-driving air or ground platforms to deliver combat supplies, including ammunition, materials, food and fuel, will reduce the need for personnel to risk their life by entering into what are typically hostile environments,” the British Army said in a release in January.

Rheinmetall’s contract was awarded in February, and the fitting of the PATH kit to the MRZR is a demonstration of its capability. The contract will outfit up to 11 MRZR D4 vehicles with the kit.

“Once equipped with the A-kit, the MRZR D4 will be ready for crewed and teleoperated use cases, as well as autonomous execution of resupply missions in complex terrain, adverse weather conditions, day and night,” writes Rheinmetall.

[Related: The new Mission Master XT is a massive military self-driving pack mule]

The light vehicle can seat four people, or six with a couple added seats, and despite a weight of just 2,100 pounds, it can transport up to 1,500 pounds of people and/or cargo. The MRZR D4 can also be outfitted with one or two litters to transport the wounded or deceased from battle and into safer environs.

“It hasn’t got armour protection, so with that it’s more for manoeuvre and agility than for weapons systems,” Chris Burge, a warrant officer with the Royal Marines, said during testing of the crewed MRZR in 2021. “The guys are loving it. It’s something new and the capability is better than what we usually have. The guys are on the ground now understanding limitations and the capability across arduous and demanding conditions.”

By adding an autonomous kit, soldiers or marines could gain the ability to send the vehicle out for resupply, or to evacuate the wounded without exposing a human driver to enemy fire. In the testing of the crewed version in 2021, the marines noted that its light body made it ideal for fast attacks at unsuspecting targets, like radar or missile installations.

Should all go well, a light vehicle can carry the commandos out of danger after the mission. Should they need more ammunition or other supplies, sending the vehicle on its own lets the troops hide or fight without having to manage the vehicle in combat.

[Related: Meet the JLTV, the Humvee’s agile new cousin]

“PATH-equipped vehicles can then safely and reliably navigate complex terrains under hostile weather conditions, reducing troops’ exposure to hazardous situations. Leading-edge AI allows PATH to navigate autonomously using sensor fusion and environment mapping,” says Rheinmetall. 

Combat resupply is a hard mission. While soldiers go to war packing plenty of supplies, a long fight in a fixed position can exhaust those reserves. And of course, an attack that takes out a transport vehicle can destroy supplies inside of it. Getting relief most often means sending more troops, but if lines are stretched thin or there’s simply none around to spare, troops can be forced to wait or retreat. 

Autonomous resupply, by ground vehicle or flying drone, can make the difference in a fight and in surviving a fight. But for it to work, the vehicle doing the resupply has to safely arrive and not imperil anyone else in the process. Autonomous navigation of motor vehicles is a hard problem in environments as straightforward as highway driving. Add in the variables of rough terrain and combat, and it can become much harder.

Steps to mitigate that risk could include combining information from multiple sensors, mapping the environment as the vehicle travels, and communication with other vehicles as well as remote human operators. Adding the ability for the buggy that carries soldiers into combat to carry them out of it should the mission go badly is a tremendous boon for forces that operate light and alone, like marines specifically or expeditionary armies generally. 

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In a video live-streamed April 7, the Air Force Research laboratory fired a rotating detonation rocket engine for less than a second. Video of the test, when slowed down orders of magnitude, revealed a success in the thermal image of the exhaust plumes. For the brief time that it was fueled, the engine had two rotating explosions spinning through the cylinder. In a contract posted July 18 and updated August 10, DARPA, the military’s blue sky projects wing, announced it wanted to develop a long-range weapon, powered by a rotating detonation engine. This project, ambitious in scope and reach, is named Gambit.

DARPA projects often start from a problem, one that can be specifically fixed by taking a new technology from theoretical to demonstrable. In the case of Gambit, the problem is the limits of existing rockets, ramjets, and gas turbine engines, which can be too short-ranged, too slow traveling, or too expensive. A better weapon should have greater reach to hit targets, faster speeds to reach them in time to matter, and be cheap enough that commanders can have them in the field and feel comfortable using them.

Rotating Detonation Engines, or RDEs, are one possible way to meet that need. Specifically, DARPA says the weapon powered by these engines will be used for “4th generation fighters” like the F-15 and F-16, and against “time-critical targets,” which could include everything from tanks moving across a field to a specific military command post. This type of weapon is also designed to reach targets “at campaign scale,” a broad term that implies a reach of up to hundreds of miles.

The mode of operation for RDEs shares some overlap with subsonic cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons, though the weapon sought in Gambit is expected to reach “high supersonic” speeds, making it faster than the speed of sound but not five times faster (like hypersonics).

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

One way to deliver a weapon that reaches and maintains those speeds is to put it on a ramjet, which at supersonic speeds injects fuel into compressed air to propel it outward at high speed. One major hurdle for ramjet adoption is that, to get to supersonic speeds, a ramjet either needs to catch a ride on a rocket or contain a rocket booster itself, which takes up finite space and weight.

“We’re trying to leverage detonations to create propulsion,” Tylor Rathsack from the Air Force Research Laboratory said in the April 7 livestream. “Explosion is a big one-time event. It’s great if you want to blow up some bad guys, it’s not so great if you’re trying to put something into orbit.”

The AFRL has years of experience in detonation engines, with research projects like the April 2022 demonstration focused on rotating detonation in rocket engines.

In its solicitation for Gambit, DARPA specifies that the project is seeking “ram-RDEs as a new class of propulsion.” In this configuration, the rotating detonation engine will allow it to “switch from low-efficiency rocket-booster propulsion to high-efficiency air-breathing propulsion earlier in the flight trajectory than conventional ramjets.”

In addition, the Gambit-sought engine will have a more compact and efficient engine, allowing it to turn extra fuel into greater range than a ramjet, while also freeing the design from a reliance on the moving parts common to supersonic turbine engines. Instead, the detonations will rotate in the annulus, or circular exhaust stream.

[Related: A short history of US hypersonic weapons testing]

“So what we do is we have a circular combustion chamber and when we initiate the initial light off for the engine in one part of the engine, that detonation starts to expand in a circle around the perimeter of the engine,” said Rathsack, “and what you end up with is a detonation that revolves around the perimeter constantly chasing itself about 30,000 laps per second, what this does is provide use with perpetual thrust.”

Because the engine of the Gambit weapon will have fewer moving parts than other ramjets, DARPA expects it to be cheaper to produce and use.

As a DARPA project, research on Gambit will take place over a few years, with conceptual designs expected by the end of the first year and demonstrators that are “weapon-scale, tested at weapon-flight conditions, and be flight-weight” expected to be tested by the end of the third year.

If the contractors can deliver, and given the years of research put into similar projects already, DARPA will have sheparded into existence a new weapon for fighter jets. Armed with the weapon produced by Gambit, planes could quickly hit important, time-sensitive targets like ammunition depots, all thanks to a supersonic engine powered by continuous explosions.

“One time bangs bad,” said Rathsack, “continuous thrust from a rotating detonation, really good.”

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On August 10, defense contractor Sierra Nevada announced it will provide high-altitude balloons to the United Kingdom, where the Ministry of Defense will experiment with using the balloons as communications relays and surveillance platforms. The balloons are part of the Ministry’s “Project Aether” and a demonstration of the technology under the contract is expected later this year.

The high-altitude balloons are an attempt to solve a tricky problem in war. When a military goes into combat against a new foe, it does so without existing communication infrastructure, and without an innate awareness of the area in which it is fighting.

In the solicitation for Project Aether, posted December 2021, the Ministry outlines an ambitious set of goals for the uncrewed comms system ultimately selected. The chosen solution, be it a drone or balloon or something else, should be able to be “rapidly manoeuvred to any area of interest in the world to provide ultra-persistent wide-area communications in addition to Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.”

Not only will Project Aether produce a flying redeployable communications relay and scout, it must be capable of transmitting the information it collects in near real time, in data formats that can be used by existing systems aboard ships, planes, and carried by soldiers in the field. And whatever scout and relay is chosen, it “must be on task for several months at a time with minimal resupply or maintenance effort.”

In other words, Project Aether is looking for a flying atmospheric satellite, which can be brought over a battlefield or a warzone, and then left in place as a useful watch tower, all out of reach of any hostile forces below.

The contract solicitation is ambivalent about the specific platform for Aether, other than it will by design not have people on board. A heavier-than-air vehicle, like the extremely long endurance solar-powered Zephyr drone, is a possible answer. The High-Altitude Balloon instead offers a lighter-than-air vehicle.

[Related: A solar-powered Army drone has been flying for 40 days straight]

“Balloons offer higher operational altitudes than aircraft and can provide longer observing times at much lower size, weight, power and cost than traditional ISR platforms,” Josh Walsh of Sierra Nevada Corp said in the announcement.

Balloons are one of the oldest forms of military aircraft, with documented uses in wars by France in the 1790s, as well as limited use in the US Civil War. The ability to see a battlefield from above is tremendous, and the human pilots aboard these air balloons are able to see enemy maneuvers at distance. But the balloons have many limits: Communicating that information initially required pilots to land, at which point the information was outdated, or required signal flags or telegraphs to communicate that information faster, if less precisely. Balloons are also hard to use in anything but ideal atmospheric conditions, and steering depends greatly on direction of the wind.

For high-altitude balloons, the promise is that by reaching a point in the sky between 60,000 to 90,000 feet above ground, the concerns of terrestrial weather will be minimal, and the few winds encountered at those heights can be designed around or otherwise managed.

Writing about the prospect of military balloons for Military Review in 2019, Anthony Tingle of the US Army argued that “while we may have crossed a technological threshold that greatly increases the viability of high-altitude balloons, harnessing the power of this inhospitable domain will depend in part on conquering meteorology and physics.”

[Related: RIP Loon, Google’s balloon-based cellular network]

What balloons offer, at least potentially, is a kind of localized satellite, one that can be launched cheaply and simply, but which has to struggle with weather and power supply instead of the comforting, gravitational embrace of orbit. The US Army, through its Space and Missile Defense Command, explored high-altitude balloons in tests at White Sands Missile Range in 2020. At an exercise in Norway in 2021, the US Army used high-altitude balloons to discern weather patterns and help with artillery targeting.

Putting sensors on balloons has long been a way to cheaply loft them into the sky. (The famous object that crashed at Roswell in 1947 was a balloon with an acoustic sensor to listen for nuclear detonations, which the Army famously described as a weather balloon.) What Project Aether is hoping to do is turn balloons from a launch system for data collection into a useful node in a battlefield communication network, one that can detect hostile movements below and share that information in time to protect soldiers and win battles.

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South of Death Valley this spring, the Air Force experimented with electronic warfare. In tests that took place in April at China Lake, California, fighter jets flew 30 training missions, testing the efficacy of an electronic warfare training device called “Angry Kitten.” In an August 3 announcement, the Air Force recommended using Angry Kitten for actual combat.

“Given the success of the pod in training and demonstrated ability to be reprogrammed, Air Combat Command recommended four pods be converted into combat pods to provide attack capabilities against enemy radio frequency threat systems, instead of simulating them,” reads the announcement.

Electronic warfare is a crucial part of modern armed conflict. It involves, broadly, the transmission and obstruction of signals along the electromagnetic spectrum, primarily but not exclusively in the domain of radio waves. These signals are used for communication between pilots; with radar to perceive the location of enemies beyond visual sight; and for weapons guidance. If one side can block the signals of the other side, it can potentially prevent their pilots from communicating, their radar from perceiving, and their weapons from following radar guidance.

The Angry Kitten was developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute to simulate the electronic warfare devices of other country’s aircraft, the kind that the Air Force might encounter in the sky. It is a system that incorporates a software-defined radio, meaning its signal and frequencies can be changed by code. This is in contrast to traditional hardware-defined radio, which is limited by what frequencies the physical components can produce and receive. 

[Related: How electronic warfare could factor into the Russia-Ukraine crisis]

“The project, known as Angry Kitten, is utilizing commercial electronics, custom hardware development, novel machine-learning software and a unique test bed to evaluate unprecedented levels of adaptability in [Electronic Warfare] technology,” wrote Georgia Tech Research Institute in 2013.

An adaptable training tool allows the Air Force to train against a range of simulated foes. This work is done by aggressor squadrons, specialized pilots who train against USAF aircraft to try to prepare those pilots for forces they might encounter in a real war. Because the US does not have the highly sensitive top-end fighters built by countries like China’s J-20 and Russia’s Checkmate, it will instead use other aircraft to simulate them, and that means employing a tool to simulate how those jets will conduct electronic warfare.

Angry Kitten “offers the ability to collect realistic, representative jammer data on advanced waveforms. It can be used to represent virtually any known threat – and even hypothetical radar systems that don’t currently exist,” said Georgia Tech Research Institute in 2013.

While countermeasures for radar detection and jamming have existed for decades, the ability to switch techniques and frequencies makes it more likely that the jamming session succeeds. That adaptability was a crucial part of what the Air Force tested Angry Kitten on in April.

“The flight test at China Lake was our final operational assessment event,” said Keith Kirk, the experiment program manager for AERRES, a program examining in part how open software can lead to better electronic warfare tools.

[Related: BAE Systems Wants To Defeat Jammers With Thinking Machines]

“The software was updated within hours based on the performance they were seeing against certain threats and then was improved, and those improvements were verified during flight test the following day. That’s really tough to do with software and tools that are not designed to open standards,” Kirk continued. 

In a future war, the Air Force can be reasonably certain about what kinds of airplane its fighters will encounter, as airplanes are difficult to produce or store in secret. Besides, because fighter jets are often made for military export markets, the airframes are promoted at tradeshows and international arms expositions to be seen by prospective customers.

However, the specific systems of fighters are easier to keep secret. A jammer designed for the future, then, has flexibility if it can perceive and adapt to the specific signals it encounters in combat. If the data can be shared from one aircraft to the entire Air Force, a possibility with open standards and reliable, open bandwidth, then the second day of aerial combat against a hostile jammer could go much more smoothly than the first.

With the recommendation for Air Combat Command, Angry Kitten could move from a versatile training tool to an integral part of future combat. Operating in a contested electromagnetic spectrum is an all-but-given part of future warfare. For the Air Force, a dedicated sensor-and-jammer pod that can perceive the spectrum, adjust, and share what it learned could provide a significant edge across the sky.

Correction (August 16, 2022): The photo caption previously mentioned that the F-16 was in California. The photo was taken in Florida.

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For decades, humans have used radio waves to remotely control drones. But this summer, British defense firm QinetiQ announced the successful control of a drone by laser. The communication and control method—between a flying robot and a human operator—suggests a new way to command drones in circumstances where traditional radio controls are susceptible to interference or interception. It is a promising technology, one that trades the existing known set of radio control limitations for a whole new set of laser-focused challenges.

The demonstration took place earlier this year at the Salisbury Plain Training Ground in southern England near Stonehenge. The drone was controlled, at least in part, by a system called “Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC),” in which information is turned into light, transmitted through the open sky, and picked up by a dedicated receiver.

“FSOC provide very high bandwidth, very low probability of detection communications, low logistical footprint and the potential to negate the considerable investment that adversaries may have made in denying the RF spectrum,” reads the July announcement from QinetiQ.

The demonstration took place in March of 2022, as part of a broader push by the United Kingdom’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory effort to make drone communications more resilient. Communications that depend on sending and receiving laser signals can struggle in low-visibility weather, like fog or dust, which obscures the sky. The promise of this approach, though, is for the possibility of clear, high-bandwidth transmission of vast quantities of data rapidly with light, and done openly wherever the sender and receiver may be. This has already been realized in networks of fiber-optic cables, which are closed space optical communications, and require infrastructure investment to establish and connect. 

Light years

Making this kind of communication work has been the subject of military research for decades. In 2004, the Air Force Research Laboratory and DARPA collaborated on the Optical and Radio Frequency Combined Link Experiment (ORCLE). The program aimed to combine the high data capacity of light communications with the signal fidelity of radio. ORCLE set out to integrate both methods into a network of communication nodes, with an understanding that radio would allow for persistent communication in difficult weather.

In 2008, DARPA awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman for the Optical RF Communications Adjunct (ORCA) project, aimed at providing “an all-weather, high connectivity, jam resistant, high bandwidth network,” according to Northrop Grumman’s release.

Because of the limits of optical communication alone, much of the research on free-space optical communication pairs it with radio communication for greater resiliency.

“Although FSOC systems can be inoperable through clouds or thick fog, employing them in a hybrid RF/optical link configuration can yield a system that can operate under most weather conditions and provide high-bandwidth, secure, jam-resistant communications under most conditions,” argued the authors of a 2011 paper on free-space optical networks, including members of DARPA. 

More recently, DARPA has focused its research on optical communications in space between satellites, which is free from the atmospheric obstacles impeding light-based communication on earth. 

Free space, narrow aperture

Radio signals are sent over known frequencies, understood and monitored for ever a century. The nature of radio transmission means the waves can be observed beyond where they are received, as the signals travel through open air and sometimes refract or diffuse across terrain and atmospheric phenomena. That trait is useful for transmitting information over distance, but is less useful for keeping that information secret. The promise of optical communication, specifically based on lasers, is that it will instead concentrate all its transmitted information in a narrow beam of light.

“Free Space Optical Communications is almost impossible to intercept or detect, as the laser beam travels directly from one platform to another over a very narrow path,” QinetiQ describes on its website. “Interception would require an adversary to be physically present in the path of the beam – something that is extremely difficult to achieve.”

If interception is difficult, maintaining a signal is likely not easy. While a drone would have the advantage of knowing where the directed beam is coming from, and automatically orienting its receiver to that point, it could become vulnerable to laser dazzlers, designed to disable the sensors on a flying robot.

The greatest promise of the technology, used at the shorter ranges of small drones, is that it would allow soldiers a way to command a scout without being detected along radio frequencies. QinetiQ’s announcement notes that the demonstration “included Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC) as a bi-directional link in its mission communication system.” 

Other bi-diretional communication links may exist in the system tested by QinetiQ, serving as fail-safes or backups. A drone designed to only receive laser signals could be challenging to use. A drone that includes a laser signal alongside traditional methods would, in a fail-case, operate normally, while having the potential for extra utility.

For now, this technology appears focused on the command, control, and data transfer functions of a scouting drone. The challenge becomes more complex should it apply to a drone designed to carry weapons. But with just a scout, the faster data transfers of optical communication would let useful video arrive rapidly, or allow greater resolution cameras without bandwidth concerns. All with the promise, at least, that the drone would be useful even in the face of radio jammers and counter-drone technologies.

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On July 22, the US Navy announced that for the first time an uncrewed robot ship and payload were ready for deployment. The “Unmanned Influence Sweep System” (UISS) is a tool for destroying sea mines, which are floating explosives designed to sink ships. By using robots for this work, the Navy could preserve the lives of sailors, and make ocean passageways safe for military and commercial vessels alike.

As designed, the UISS can be operated from a dedicated control ship, such as the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship, or a “vessel of opportunity,” which is a catch-all term for other ships on hand capable of using it. The Littoral Combat ship is a long-troubled class of warship. Its promise, when it was first planned in 2004, was that it could operate in shallower waters than the rest of the Navy’s deep-sea vessels. One of these crucial missions is minesweeping. As a February report from the Government Accountability Office argued, “costs to construct the ships have more than doubled from initial expectations, and promised levels of capability have been unfulfilled.”

Congressional action is likely to keep some of the Littoral Combat Ships in service despite Navy efforts to decommission them. Because the UISS is a minesweeping capability specifically designed to work with Littoral Combat Ships, a declaration that the ships can perform more of their expected role could go a great distance to keep the ships in service.

Regardless of whether or not the Navy keeps its Littoral Combat Systems, the UISS is adaptable enough to operate out of a range of vessels, making minesweeping possible regardless of what other capabilities the Navy has on hand.

The UISS is a system, in this case one that combines an uncrewed vessel, a set of sensors,  communications and control equipment, and a mine detecting-and-detonating tool. As declared by the Navy in its announcement, the UISS “provides acoustic and magnetic minesweeping coupled with the semi-autonomous, diesel-powered, aluminum-hulled Mine Countermeasures Unmanned Surface Vehicle.”

The earliest sea mines were set off of direct collision with a ship, but a range of triggers exist designed to ensure the mines threaten large ocean-going vessels while being difficult for minesweepers to find and defuse. In November 2020, the UISS completed tests of detection and detonation against simulated mines. In January 2022, the system underwent an “underwater shock” test, where the Navy tested how well it withstood repeated explosions. 

Naval mines could be a hazard in any future war that involves the US Navy. They are also a live problem on the Black Sea, where naval mines have for months drifted into the territorial waters of Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. These mines, deployed by either Russia or Ukraine or possibly both countries, offer brief tactical advantage, blocking safe passage into and out of ports. But when they get caught in the current or become loose from their mooring, they change from a fixed hazard near an expected war to an ambient danger, one that can threaten all sea-going vessels nearby. 

Defusing mines can be done by teams of skilled human divers. The stakes are high, and the conditions are rough. Using robots instead to defuse mines, or detonating them if need be, can free up time and risk fewer lives in the process. It’s partly why forces like the Royal Navy have also invested in autonomous minesweeping as a way to protect ships and shipping lanes without loss of life. 

Bringing minesweeping into the Navy through autonomous boats is also one way to emphasize how a combined human-robotic fleet might work in the future.

“Notably, this is also the first [Initial Operating Capability] of an unmanned surface platform by the U.S. Navy, marking an important milestone in the evolution toward a hybrid fleet of manned and unmanned systems,” read the Navy’s announcement on UISS.

Last month, the Navy announced plans for a 500-ship fleet by 2045. To reach that goal, the Navy expects to have 150 uncrewed vessels, operating alongside and in conjunction with 350 crewed vessels. The officers and enlisted sailors who learn how to work alongside an uncrewed platform, like the UISS, on minesweeping missions may go on to command or manage fleets where uncrewed vessels won’t just be a tool used by the ship, but the ships themselves. If robots are to serve a useful purpose in future naval war, then having those robots tackle the time-intensive and dangerous work of clearing seaborne explosives is a great place to start. 

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When the military goes to war, it brings its communications infrastructure with it. From the drums and fifes of early US history through to the radios and electronic communications of the 20th- and 21st-century warfare, how and where troops fight in the field is determined by the ability for troops in the field to hear and follow orders. Which is why, when it comes to communications systems built for 5G, the US Navy wants to be able to deploy such networks on the go.

At the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, near San Diego, the Navy is “looking at being able to generate private 5G networks for forward operating bases,” Benjamin Cohen, director of the NavalX Southern California TechBridg, told DefenseOne at a conference on 5G Futures held July 28.

Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) are set up during a war, often but not always in a counter-insurgency conflict, where they host troops and vehicles near the expected fighting, allowing the military to rapidly respond to threats. FOBs serve as a crucial node for both launching and defending against attacks, making communication and data sharing vital. As the military collects more and more data—from sensor-rich vehicles and surveillance towers placed at bases—wirelessly collecting and transmitting that data becomes essential to fighting a data-rich kind of war.

This decade, the military expects 5G networks to become a crucial part of this planned fight, which is why the military is working with 5G connections at existing bases, and why it plans to bring these networks straight into battle if necessary.

“We’re putting 5G nodes onto fully electric autonomous vehicles which can then provide enough power for us to create these closed 5G networks for us to operate on,” said Cohen. “That data bandwidth, that pipe if you will, is so important for us to be able to share the data going back and forth. Because we’ve added more autonomous systems and more sensors to our tool kit, so we need to be able to generate these 5G networks and allow for the passage of all this data in a timely fashion.”

Vast data is a potential resource if it can be shared and processed quickly. There are a variety of ways to manage the kind of data-flow from such intensive collection. One, explored in the self-driving car space, is “edge computing,” in which computers near the sensor, like in an autonomous car, process most of the information immediately, and then transmit only already-processed data wirelessly. (The opposite of edge computing is having that same processing take place in the cloud.)

Another way is expanding the reach and availability of existing data networks, especially with the high bandwidth limits of 5G. This is an approach the Army is exploring as well as the Navy, where outfitting bases with 5G networks can facilitate the kind of interconnection systems would normally get in a 5G-rich environment. Creating this kind of 5G infrastructure would allow the military to take advantage of an “internet of things” network, where sensors on towers, robots, and vehicles can collect and share data with each other and with human operators on computers or tablets, both at and away from base.

Today, troops have access to the Android Team Awareness Kit, a tablet or smartphone software that can display and transfer important information right in the field. Internet-connected devices are only as useful as their connections are strong, so having continued network connection in the field is especially important. 

Sharing and collecting data between relevant forces in the field is a powerful promise of a military acting and responding where needed, with relevant information shared and used as soon as it can be transmitted. Maintaining that connectivity requires nodes, from the stable cellular networks of a fortified barracks, to the quickly installed networks of a forward operating base, to forces in the field. A network-connecting node might come from a special data relay installed on the back of a truck. 

Or this might come from an ad-hoc network, carried on the back of electronic autonomous vehicles, that arrive alongside the marines as they first enter a country or a battlefield. 

“The Navy’s SoCal Tech Bridge at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar is experimenting with new 5G networks carried on the back of autonomous vehicles, so that when future robo-amphibs storm the beach, they can bring their own 5G network with them,” writes DefenseOne.

Relying on such networks carries risk. If the signal is intercepted and understood, a hostile force can anticipate American troop movements. If the signal is seen and jammed, US forces could have to revert to pre-5G means of communication. But the potential of arriving, network in tow, and transmitting data to the rest of the military before battle is even joined is immense. Still, the military isn’t planning on going in without examining how exactly it might fall short.

“What happens if the system is compromised? If it’s intended to be that mesh network for forward operating bases, what happens if it’s compromised, what are the impacts on the marines and sailors operating there, what happens to the sensor-to-shooter network that we’re really concerned about,” said Cohen.

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On August 1, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) announced that the next plane in its inventory would be a single-engine prop aircraft. SOCOM will buy up to 75 AT-802U Sky Warden planes, built by L3Harris Technologies and Air Tractor. These planes will support special operations forces, like Delta Force or Navy SEALs, as they fight irregular wars.

The name of this program is “Armed Overwatch.” The contract announcement says it “will provide Special Operations Forces deployable, affordable, and sustainable crewed aircraft systems fulfilling close air support, precision strike, and armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, requirements in austere and permissive environments for use in irregular warfare operations in support of the National Defense Strategy.”

Irregular warfare is a broad term that is easier to define by what it doesn’t include. Regular warfare is when the uniformed soldiers of one nation fight the uniformed soldiers of another. These conflicts usually involve the whole range of conventional military forces, from rifles through tanks and artillery to fighter jets and bombers. Irregular warfare, by contrast, involves fighting against insurgencies, rebellions, and tracking down people linked to terror operations. It can also involve helping other countries’ militaries do the same.

For example, in 2003, the US invaded Iraq with a conventional war, which lasted until the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s military. Armed resistance afterwards to the American military and to the new government of Iraq became irregular warfare, and to this day the US deploys forces in the country to assist in training Iraq’s military in irregular warfare. 

For SOCOM’s purposes, a plane that can support special operations forces doesn’t need to survive in a sky filled with hostile fighter jets or when the enemy brings dedicated anti-aircraft vehicles to the battle. Instead, what is most important is that the plane can fly easily, shoot what it needs to shoot, as well as take off and land if need be on rough runways and cleared fields, instead of dedicated airbases.

[Related: Navy SEALs could get new airborne backup. Here’s what the planes look like.]

Those characteristics, that rugged versatility, are likely why the Sky Warden won out over the four other planes SOCOM considered for the contract last summer. The contract initially awards $170 million, or about the price of two F-35A stealth jets, with a ceiling of $3 billion for the full fleet. L3Harris said in a statement that production will begin in 2023, for the initial lot of six Sky Wardens. 

“We want to deliver game-changing, modular solutions to U.S. special operators for their hardest missions, and Sky Warden does just that,” Christopher E. Kubasik, CEO of L3Harris, said in a statement.

“Armed Overwatch” is a role that involves both scouting for targets and attacking enemies on the ground. While SOCOM considered planes that could also perform a transport role for the special operators, the Sky Warden is built to scout and to attack. To that end, the Sky Warden can carry over 8,000 lbs of payload while armored. The wings can carry a range of weapons, from 500-pound bombs to small missiles to sensor pods, and the center of the aircraft can host two heavier systems as well. The wing station can fit a gun, like a .50-caliber machine gun or a 20mm cannon. With a full load of sensors and weapons, the plane can take off on a runway of just 1,400 feet, and it can land on one 1,200 feet long. The tandem cockpit seats two pilots.

The AT-802 (note the lack of a “U,” which denotes the latest variant, the AT-802U, that SOCOM is getting) first flew in 1990, where its rugged airframe and heavy payload capacity made it an ideal crop duster. As a crop duster, the plane was used to spray crops on counter-narcotics missions, an action that sometimes saw the planes shot at by farmers defending their crops. “Years of coca crop eradication missions in South America resulted in the development of lightweight composite ballistic armor for the AT-802U cockpit ‘bathtub’ and engine compartment,” notes the Air Tractor page for the plane.

In other words, SOCOM is getting a plane with crop duster origins, and one that can be used for the military missions of special operators. The Sky Warden is armored against attack, provided the enemy it is facing is armed mostly with small arms, like machine guns and rifles.

This was a concern 13 years ago, when the Air Force announced a plan to purchase 100 such planes in 2009. Skeptics of the Air Force’s 2009 plan for a light attack plane similar to the Sky Warden noted at the time that insurgent forces could get portable and effective anti-air weapons that could threaten the aircraft. With the award of the Armed Overwatch contract this week, former Popular Science contributor Peter W. Singer, now a fellow at New America, revisited an article he wrote that year, tweeting, “And note, since writing that in 2009, the cropduster [Sky Warden-style plane] has not improved, while both the enemy capabilities and the unmanned alternative has obviously drastically improved.”

As nations like Germany and the United States offload old anti-air missiles to Ukraine for use in its war against Russia, the possibility exists that some of these weapons will make their way onto the black market. While old anti-air missiles may struggle against modern jets or be overkill for modern drones, they are perfectly suited for attacking planes like the Sky Warden. As SOCOM makes a big bet on how to fight irregular wars from the sky, it is also gambling that the enemies it finds will lack anti-air weapons, even as war makes those weapons more available. 

Correction on August 3: This story has been updated to correct a typo that referred to the F-35 fighter jet as an F-25.

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Fifty feet into the April sky above Eglin, Florida, the drone wobbled, its passenger seat empty. The flying machine is the Hexa, made by LIFT Aircraft. Hexa is an electric, remotely piloted, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft capable of human transport. More than three months after that April 4 flight, the Air Force announced on July 14 that a second Hexa, Hexa 09, had recently completed a flight test, also at Eglin Air Force Base. Run by the Air Force’s 413th Flight Test Squadron, the Hexa flights are a way for the Air Force to learn what the utility of this specific vehicle is, and what vehicles like it might offer the service in the future.

Broadly described, the Hexa is a rotorcraft. The vehicle has 18 electric motors, each powering a separate rotor, in a canopy that looks like what would happen if a DALL-E-style AI was asked to draw a tree in the style of a drone. The rotors sit on a latticework canopy, with a rotor on each of the Hexa’s six arms and 12 rotors spaced evenly around the outer ring. Machines like these are also called eVTOLs, for electric vertical take-off and landing craft.

The many rotors are a big shift from the traditional one or two massive rotors of a traditional helicopter. They allow for greater redundancy and a small footprint. A helicopter like the UH-60 Black Hawks flown by the military has a rotor diameter that’s nearly 54 feet. The Hexa, instead, is just 15 feet in diameter. Even the much smaller MH-6 Little Bird helicopter has a rotor diameter of over 26 feet.

The Black Hawk and Little Bird both put their size to use as cargo transport for troops, resupply, and rescue, and both can also carry guns, bombs, and missiles, fighting like flying gunships. The Hexa has the capacity for a single occupant, one that is fully optional. In the test flights at Eglin, the Hexas flew under remote control.

Hexa is one of several projects funded by Agility Prime, an initiative specifically to develop electric vertical takeoff or landing (eVTOL) vehicles. Other projects supported by Agility Prime include the Heaviside electric plane, Joby, Archer, and Beta’s Alia.

Air Force testing of the Hexa “aims to accelerate and further develop HEXA for future public and military applications like emergency first response, personnel transport, base logistics, and search and rescue missions,” LIFT said in an April 7 statement.

Those are roles where a small-footprint aircraft offering high visibility could be especially useful. A human passenger acting as a spotter, especially one with access to sophisticated sensors mounted on the airframe, could look for people lost in unfriendly terrain. With the vehicle remotely piloted, the spotter could devote their full attention to looking below, telling the remote pilot where to steer the Hexa. Another advantage of a remotely piloted craft for search and rescue is that a Hexa could be flown empty to where it’s needed, letting a person climb inside while the remote pilot carries them to safety.

For personnel transport, it is easy to imagine the Hexa filling roles both vital and of convenience. A commander skipping the ground traffic to catch a ride to a meeting across base is certainly a possibility, and multiple Hexas could be kept in place, and charging, to ensure they are always available.

Using a Hexa for cargo likely would require cargo that either straps well into a seat, or a different airframe built around the same principle. Here, also, the small footprint of the rotor-lattice, combined with the redundancy of the many engines, could be appealing as an alternative to human couriers. 

What is unlikely is that a Hexa built as it presently is will see combat. Remote control is useful for medical evacuation or transporting emergency responders to the injured. But the Hexa’s open sides, oblong profile, and whirring rotors slot it into the long and frustrating history of single-personnel flying transports. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Department of Defense explored single-pilot rotorcraft that featured soldiers standing on a platform above spinning blades. The Hexa, which keeps people beneath its rotor array, is a massive improvement over that era of design. And, unlike the novelty of jetpacks explored by militaries specifically for combat, the Hexas initial test cases all seem within the bounds of existing technology, without risking catastrophic disaster from use under fire. (Should disaster come, the Hexa boasts a parachute and the ability to land on water.)

With the flight at Eglin, Hexa 09 reached 50 feet in altitude and was airborne for about 10 minutes (Hexa 05, which flew at Eglin in April, also reached 50 feet.) Any useful flying machine will need to fly both higher and longer, but sustained flight is a promising early sign of the vehicle’s potential. If the Hexa can remain as low-cost and easy to fly as LIFT promises and the Air Force expects, the vehicle could become a buzzing part of routine military operations, effectively moving people from place to place with all the flash and dazzle of an airborne Segway. 

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On January 27, 1996, France conducted Xouthos, its 210th and final live nuclear test, detonating a thermonuclear warhead beneath the Fangataufa lagoon in the southern Pacific Ocean. The test had a yield of between 20 and 120 kilotons of TNT, potentially 8 times as explosive as the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Xouthos marked the end of France’s nuclear tests but not the end of its nuclear stockpile maintenance. To ensure that the country’s warheads are in working order, France is working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States to develop a super-cooled laser ignition test facility.

There are eight other nations with nuclear weapons: The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan. In the 21st century, only North Korea has conducted live nuclear weapons tests. For the other countries, maintaining and sustaining nuclear warheads without real-world tests is an engineering challenge. One way to manage this is through computer modeling, which lets nuclear laboratories refine warhead design and study new types of warhead refurbishment.

But testing a warhead’s actual fissile material, the gas around which a plutonium pit condenses until it sparks a nuclear fission reaction, means looking at the actual material itself, and seeing how it behaves under high density and intense heat. Lawrence Livermore describes a process for testing nuclear material with lasers at low temperatures as a “cryogenic target system,” which it runs in the National Ignition Facility. This system, in theory, would allow them to understand how nuclear fuels behave in conditions of high energy density, by creating real if temporary fusion energy under laboratory conditions.

The National Ignition Facility started operation in 2010. That year’s budget request from the National Nuclear Security Administration describes the program as providing “the scientific understanding to assess the safety, security, and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons without nuclear testing.” To achieve that goal, “[s]cience-based weapons assessments and certification requires that these advanced experimental tools have the capability to create and study matter under extreme conditions that approach the high-energy density (HED) environments found in a nuclear explosion.”

Thermonuclear explosions are hot, with the first-stage fission reaction reaching over 100 million kelvin. They are also dense: the conventional non-nuclear components of a thermonuclear warhead use explosive force to compact plutonium into an even more compact form around a gas made of heavy hydrogen, deuterium and tritium.

Another way to achieve this density is to cool a tiny pellet of deuterium-tritium to 18.5 Kelvin (or -426 Fahrenheit). The cooling is the “cryogenic” part of the “cryogenic target system,” and the pellet is the target. Instead of an exploding inwards plutonium sphere, like in an actual warhead, in these tests the energy for ignition is provided by high-powered laser beams. 

At the National Ignition Facility, this process is done through 192 laser beams, which focus 1.92 megajoules on the single super-cooled pellet of deuterium and tritium. The energy released through fusion is akin to that of a star, though much shorter lived. France’s counterpart of the National Ignition Facility, the Laser Mégajoule, “will use 176 laser beams to focus more than one megajoule of ultraviolet laser energy on tiny targets containing a partially frozen mixture of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium.”

While the research into nuclear fusion has often been promoted and framed as a path to viable fusion reactors for electrical energy generation, it is fundamentally a weapons evaluation and research tool, with incidental potential for scientific research attached.

[Related: Humans just generated nuclear energy akin to a star]

“NIF was designed to produce extraordinarily high temperatures and pressures—tens of millions of degrees and pressures many billion times greater than Earth’s atmosphere,” reads an explanation from the laboratory. “These conditions currently exist only in the cores of stars and planets and in nuclear weapons.”

When those conditions exist in the lab, they do so only very briefly. “For a few billionths of a second during an ICF experiment, [the National Ignition Facility]’s 192 lasers duplicate the same temperatures, densities, and pressures found within the interiors of stars and planets and detonating nuclear explosives,” says a 2019 report from the laboratory. That’s still enough time for researchers to study the effect of those conditions on relevant materials, crucial in stockpile stewardship. “About 15 experiments per year are aimed at researching materials’ equations of state,” or a mathematical modeling of how the material handles the conditions of a nuclear reaction.

While the National Ignition Facility has been operational for almost 12 years, the closest it has come to creating energy-producing fusion was with a test on August 8, 2021. That shot yielded 1.35 megajoules from igniting the near-frozen pellet, marking an almost 70 percent conversion of laser energy to reaction. 

“For the Stockpile Stewardship Program,” the laboratory said in a statement from February, “the record shot provides access to a new regime of high-energy-density plasmas to test and verify the Laboratory’s nuclear weapons-related simulation codes. [National Ignition Facility] performs experimental studies of fusion ignition and its subsequent thermonuclear burn, which provides the immense energy of modern nuclear weapons.”

Creating the conditions of fusion without outright detonating a nuclear warhead is still a work in progress. By working with France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, the national laboratories are ensuring both countries can benefit from parallel and collaborative research. When compared to the alternative of resuming live nuclear tests, a hard physics problem in a controlled laboratory setting is a small challenge, relative to the geopolitical risks of a resumed international arms race.

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The rising oceans of the 2040s will be battlefields for both crewed ships and robotic ones. In a document called Force Design 2045, the US Navy’s strategy guiding the next decades of ship and vehicle development, anticipating what war will be like in the middle of the century is crucial to ensuring peace or, failing that, seizing victory. In announcing the strategy, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday wrote that “the world is entering a new age of warfare, one in which the integration of technology, concepts, partners, and systems—more than fleet size alone—will determine victory in conflict.”

The strategy is couched, first and foremost, in continued open, free, and lawful trade across the seas, including the familiar commerce of goods and materials, but also incorporating the undersea cables that connect the internet as vital infrastructure. To ensure this peace, the plan says the Navy must maintain a nuclear deterrent (presently missile-carrying submarines), control the sea to deter invasion (and land Marines as needed), and to defeat enemies in ocean battles should it come to that.

To meet this need, the Navy plans to maintain its crewed fleet of aircraft carriers, nuclear-armed ballistic submarines, nuclear-powered attack submarines, as well as crewed destroyers and frigates. The Navy also plans to introduce over a hundred robotic ships. Here’s how it’s all going to shake out.

How many ships?

Variations of this strategy have existed since the dawn of nuclear-armed submarines. Beyond submarines, the question for the Navy has been how it meets those objectives, and what composition of ships it needs to get there. In the latest strategy, the Navy offers clear numbers.

“In the 2040s and beyond,” reads the strategy, “we envision this hybrid fleet to require more than 350 manned ships, about 150 large unmanned surface and subsurface platforms, and approximately 3,000 aircraft.”

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

The exact number of ships needed by the Navy has been the subject of presidential campaigns, with then-candidate Trump proposing a 350-ship Navy when running in 2016. In October 2020, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper called for a Navy with more than 500 ships. At present, the US Navy has 298 ships, with previous plans floated this year suggesting the Navy aim for a goal between 316 and 367 ships.

With the new strategy, the Navy sets an ambitious goal for 52 more crewed vessels than at present, while also showcasing that to get the reach and numbers promised by a 500-ship fleet, the Navy will have to lean heavily on uncrewed ships, like those tested this month at the major RIMPAC naval exercises.

So what will the drone ships do?

The most immediate use for uncrewed ships and robotic submarines will be as scouts. The ocean is vast, and scanning the seas in real time allows the Navy to see some of it and plan accordingly.

“The integration of autonomous USVs with manned combatants will give fleet commanders much-needed enhancements to maritime domain awareness, thereby increasing decision speed and lethality in surface warfare,” Captain Scot Searles, Navy program manager for unmanned maritime systems, said in a release describing the use of uncrewed ships at RIMPAC.

Sensors on robotic ships represent an ideal initial use case, because that approach offers an immediate benefit without requiring constant human supervision or careful monitoring. These roles are also good testing opportunities for autonomous navigation and remote direction, both features that will be crucial should oceans become battlefields.

[Related: A Navy ship got a giant liquid-metal 3D printer earlier this month]

“Unmanned surface and subsurface platforms to increase the fleet’s capacity for distribution; expand our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance advantage; add depth to our missile magazines; supplement logistics; and enhance fleet survivability,” reads the strategy. “This transition will rebalance the fleet away from exquisite, manpower-intensive platforms toward smaller, less-expensive, yet lethal ones.”

Scouting will likely be the first mission for these ships, but future missions will include resupply and transport, allowing extra ammunition and other vital cargo to be carried on ships without sailors. To get to “lethal,” these uncrewed ships will need to have weapons, as the Navy has already demonstrated. 

Under remote operation, a missile battery on an uncrewed ship could still be under human control, with the decision to fire handled by humans who are located on a different vessel. As with any autonomous sensor-and-weapon system, the possibility exists that targeting and firing could be made autonomous in the future, though nothing in the strategy indicates that as an approach.

Armed uncrewed ships, like the planned Large Unmanned Surface Vehicles, will carry vertical launch system missile tubes, expanding the number of missiles that can be brought to battle. Uncrewed armed ships can’t do everything a crewed missile-destroyer can, like relief missions or dissuading attacks of opportunity. In a ship-to-ship naval battle, the available number of missiles ready to launch may be more important for victory than the number of ships in a flotilla.

In addition to the uncrewed ships, the strategy says the Navy will “augment the force with an evolving complement of thousands of small, rapidly adaptable, and attritable unmanned platforms.” These many small and expendable drones in land, surface, and underwater will include models that scout ahead of ships, ones that wait in the ocean a long time, and ones that can hurt enemy vessels, through electronic warfare or explosive power, all with the goal of enhancing the fighting ability of the crewed fleet.

Putting it all together

As the Navy plots a strategy for a course between now and the 2040s, it is focused primarily on a singular potential threat: the growing naval capabilities of China. Where once Russian and before that Soviet navies were the focus of US fears, China has overtaken the country in the imagination and warplanning of the Pentagon. Fighting a future war against China, should it occur without a world-ending nuclear exchange, means adapting to a very different reality, a kind of naval warfare that has not yet been attempted.

In the decades since the Pacific campaigns of WWII, missile technology has improved tremendously, not to mention the development of modern hypersonic weapons. Missiles shift the calculus for fleets, as a successful missile hit can sink a massive and expensive ship for a fraction of what it cost to produce the vessel. Replacing a ship takes years even in ideal conditions, and even if a ship is damaged, it can still be out of commission for months.

While the Navy’s plan still relies on aircraft carriers, submarines with nuclear missiles and those without, and big crewed escort ships, adding in uncrewed vessels means the burden of resupply can gradually be removed from crewed ships, preserving sailors for the vessels on which they’re most needed. The ability to scale up ship operations, without training new human crews, means the Navy could operate more and smaller resupply vessels, minimizing the harm from each loss. 

While the Navy sets out a strategy for 2045, the immediate impact will be seen in spending, on what ships and programs the Pentagon decides to build out for its fleet now. If the future of war is human-crewed fighting ships with uncrewed resupply and robotic scouts, that future will start to take shape in shipyards.

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On July 14, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC held a one-day conference premised on a specific threat: What if, in the future, war comes to the United States via cruise missile? Pointing to new developments in cruise missile technology, and the limitations of existing early warning systems that are focused on the high arcing trajectories of ballistic missiles, the CSIS conference and accompanying report suggests that to defend the continental United States from such a threat, the military should adapt and deploy the kind of cruise missile defenses presently used as regional weapons.

Unlike ballistic missiles, which arc up into space before traveling back down towards earth, cruise missiles fly close to the ground, making it hard for radar on the ground that’s pointed up at space to see them.

The perceived threat from new cruise missiles is driven by tech developments occurring across the globe, as new materials, better aerodynamics, and sophisticated sensors and guidance systems make possible the fielding of weapons, like hypersonic missiles, that had mostly been just theoretical decades ago.

For the United States, the development of long-range bombers in the 1940s, followed by the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, shattered the notion that the enormous distances of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were enough to protect the continental US from direct attack. (During World War II, US territories in the Pacific came under direct attack, but the only long-range assault on the 48 states came in the form of incendiary-carrying balloons launched by Japan into the jet stream and carried over to the US.)

With atomic and then thermonuclear payloads, bombers and long-range missiles threatened devastation on an unprecedented scale, and the United States built an elaborate system of early warning sensors focused on detecting early signs of launch, and expanded its first-in-the-world nuclear arsenal to deter attack. North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is run by both Canada and the United States, and maintains a series of radars and other sensors designed to detect early attacks across the Arctic or elsewhere. (Every December, NORAD highlights its existence by tracking Santa Claus, turning a system designed to detect oblivion into a kid-friendly Christmas tradition.)

At the conference held by CSIS, the threat from cruise missiles was discussed as a way that other countries could attack the United States that is hard to detect by employing existing, ICBM-focused measures. It is also considered hard to deter through threat of nuclear retaliation, operating on the assumption that if a cruise missile with a conventional warhead destroyed a building or killed people in the United States, the President would not immediately respond with a nuclear strike.

“You know, our adversaries are building diverse, expansive ranges of modern offensive missile systems, and we see them – we see them in the news every day,” Stan Stafira, Chief Architect of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, told the panel. “They’re capable of maneuvering in the midcourse and the terminal phases of their flight, like maneuvering reentry vehicles, multiple independent reentry vehicles, hypersonic glide vehicles, and cruise missiles.”

Part of the broader appeal of hypersonic weapons to nations like Russia, China, and the United States is that the speed and trajectories of the missiles make them harder to detect than ICBMs. The ballistic arc of ICBMs means the launch is visible to radar while it is still ascending, once it clears the horizon line. Meanwhile, both hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles, which travel at Mach 5 or above, are designed to fly below that radar horizon, with the cruise missile keeping a close trajectory to earth and the glide vehicle flying in the high atmosphere.

“I want to state that we absolutely believe that nuclear deterrence is the foundation of homeland defense,” said Lieutenant General AC Roper, deputy commander of Northern Command, the part of the US military responsible for North America. “However, we also must have credible deterrence options below the nuclear thresholds, options which allow for a balanced approach of deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment or cost imposition.”

Deterrence, at its most straightforward, is a strategy of making a big threat on a condition: One country publicly declares it will launch nukes at another if it launches nukes at it, with the intended effect that neither country launches nukes. But because the payload of a cruise missile—it could be nuclear or conventional, unlike ICBMs, which are always nuclear—is unlikely to be known until impact, generals like Roper would prefer to have a range of weapons with which to respond.

Missile defense is one of those options, and the US already employs a few forms. Part of any missile defense system is the sensors, like specially focused radar, that can detect incoming attacks, and then track those weapons as they travel. These radars then send that tracking information to interceptors, which are missiles launched to fly and destroy the incoming attacking missile. Shooting missiles at other missiles is a hard problem because an incoming threat arrives at great speed, and because the cost calculus can favor an attacker. Interceptors, like shorter-ranged Patriot missiles or longer-ranged ballistic interceptors, are often more expensive than the missiles they are intercepting. And unlike interceptors, which have to hit precisely to work, missiles launched in attack can deploy decoys or countermeasures to redirect interceptors away, or can instead be fired in a greater volume, overwhelming interceptors through sheer numerical advantage.

“The resulting 20-year cost to provide even a light defense of a vast area ranged from $77 billion to $466 billion,” reads the CSIS report, citing an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office studying a range of cruise missile defense options. “The considerable cost variation is due to alternative combinations of sensors and interceptors and varying desired warning times of 5 or 15 minutes.”

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When the new B-21—the Air Force’s next-gen stealth bomber—goes to war, it will do so without a drone escort. The news, broken by Breaking Defense on July 16, is a sharp reversal from earlier plans that had included developing a drone fighter that could travel alongside the bomber and protect it. 

The story of the planned and then abandoned drone escort is a smaller part of the broader story about the B-21, the first new bomber developed by the United States in 30 years, and the first one developed entirely after the Cold War.

News of the cancellation of the drone escort came at the Royal International Air Tattoo, a massive military air show held in England every July.

“The idea of a similar range collaborative combat aircraft is not turning out to be cost effective, so it looks like we’re not going to go that direction,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told Breaking Defense in an interview at the event. Kendall had previously announced the possible drone escort in December 2021, with the intention of the drone fighters being a budget item for 2023.

Abandoning the concept of a fighter escort, even an uncrewed one, for the new bomber is part of the long history of failed attempts to protect bombers en route. Three separate but related programs are key to understanding the impact of this cancellation: the B-21 itself, escort fighters, and the Loyal Wingman drone fighter program.

The B-21

The B-21 Raider began its history as the Long Range Strike Bomber. Rebranded the B-21, and with its “Raider” name stemming from the Army Air Force’s 1942 raid on Tokyo, the aircraft will be the fourth bomber in service with the Air Force. These include the ancient B-52 bombers, which have fought in every US war since Vietnam, the supersonic B-1 bombers, which entered service in 1986, and the stealth B-2 bombers, which first saw combat in the Kosovo War in 1999. The B-21 will be closest in conceit to the B-2.

Those bombers all represent a range of abilities and design eras. While all were built to carry both conventional and nuclear weapons, today only the B-2 and B-52 do so. Nuclear capability was engineered out of B-1 bombers in upgrades done as part of arms control limits on total nuclear-capable bombers.

Early in the development of the Long Range Strike Bomber, the Air Force explored the possibility that the bomber could fly uncrewed, though that notion was roundly rejected for nuclear missions, and probably for other bombing runs, too.

As designed, the B-21 will be a stealth long-range bomber capable of carrying both conventional bombs and nuclear weapons. Long-range in this sense is intercontinental: the B-1 can fly almost 6,000 miles with a useful payload, while the B-2 can reach nearly 7,000 miles, and the B-52 can fly close to 9,000 miles. (Air refueling helps.) To replace existing bombers and accommodate planned future need, the Air Force is requesting that a minimum of 100 B-21s be built, with construction on the first six B-21s underway as of February 2022. (It has not yet flown.)

For countries that want to protect against bombers, the weapons they have historically turned to are anti-air missiles and fighter aircraft. Stealth features, which the B-2 was built around and the B-21 will incorporate as well, make it harder for sensors like radar to detect and track a plane, limiting the danger from anti-air missiles. 

Escort fighters

Fighter jets that can intercept and attack bombers are a hard threat to mitigate. In World War II, bombers, especially the “Fortress” line of which the B-52 is still a part, adopted on-board guns to shoot fighters. (The B-52’s tail guns saw use in Vietnam, but the guns were removed in October 1991, while the gun’s rear-facing radar systems were retained.) That defense strategy struggles against the threat of long-range anti-air missiles and especially at the high speeds of jet combat, which is where the possibility of an escort fighter is appealing. 

An escort fighter is one designed to fly alongside bombers and, in the event of interception, protect the bombers from the hostile fighters. A variant of escort is the “parasite” fighter, which rides attached to or inside a bigger plane, waiting to be released when needed. While the parasite fighters save on fuel, carrying one reduces a bomber’s effective payload and also requires the difficult task of landing a fighter back on a plane after the bombing is done. DARPA is exploring cargo planes that can launch drones, for a similar effect, but without having to worry about a pilot on board or their safety after the mission.

If the escort is to fly alongside the bomber, then, it needs to have the same range as the bomber, while still being in a small enough airframe to be useful and maneuverable as a fighter when it falls under attack. Removing the pilot from a cockpit saves some room in a fighter escort, but the plane would still need to carry enough fuel for an intercontinental journey, enough sensors and weapons to fight, and if the drone is designed for repeat use, enough fuel to carry it back afterwards. That is a tall ask, especially when crewed fighters like the F-16 Fighting Falcon have a one-way travel range of just over 2,000 miles, and a shorter combat effective range.

Mid-air refueling can extend the range of both bombers and fighters, but it would be another hurdle for a long-distance drone escort fighter. Before adding “autonomous mid-air refueling” to the list of tasks for a drone, it is likely the Air Force will want to try a shorter-range drone fighter first.

The Loyal Wingman

The Air Force is already working on a drone fighter of sorts, just not one built for the great distances of bomber flights. The Kratos Valkyrie, part of the Air Force’s “loyal wingman” program, is a drone designed as a relatively inexpensive complement to fighter squadrons.  And Skyborg, another Air Force program to create an autonomous pilot for aircraft, is an effort to enable uncrewed planes to fly alongside crewed craft.

These drones are designed to fly alongside fighters crewed by pilots, with the autonomous system of the drones possibly carrying out tasks like flying ahead. By keeping extra sensors and possibly even weapons in the loyal wingmates, pilots of expensive fighters like the F-35 could send drones in for riskier missions, like scouting and attacking hostile surface-to-air missile sites. 

Even as the prospect of a drone fighter escort for bombers is unlikely, the loyal wingman program remains a priority for the Air Force. The Air Force is still developing drones that can fly and fight alongside crewed planes, even if they are not yet bomber escorts. For now, the B-21 will have to rely on stealth and speed to keep it safe. 

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The middle of July saw a whopping three successful hypersonic missile tests by the United States—tests of missiles designed to go at least five times the speed of sound. On July 13, DARPA announced the successful test of the Operational Fires (OpFires) missile at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Also on July 13, the Air Force announced a successful test of the booster for the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), used in a flight off the California coast. And on July 18, Raytheon announced the second successful flight test of its Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) hypersonic missile for the Air Force.

While the first human-made objects to reach Mach 5 were launched in the 1940s, there has absolutely been a recent uptick in missiles built to go that fast. The other new aspect is that, while in the past hypersonic speeds were a feature of other weapons, today nations such as the United States, China, and Russia are specifically developing weapons to travel at this speed. “Hypersonic” has become a category term for the development of very fast and maneuverable weapons. 

To illustrate how we got to this hypersonic moment, below is a timeline of military hypersonic milestones, starting with ballistic rockets.

1944: Hypersonic descent

German V-2 rockets reached a speed of Mach 4.3 in ascent, and then became hypersonic in descent, clearing Mach 5 as they struck targets in England. The V-2 was the first long-range ballistic missile. With a range of about 200 miles, it carried a one-ton warhead. It was built using concentration camp labor, a process in which at least 10,000 people in those camps died. It was designed by Wernher von Braun, who would go on after the war to have a long career designing ballistic missiles for the US Army and rockets for NASA.

1949: Hypersonic ascent

A rocket launch called Bumper 5 was the fifth in a series of tests at White Sands. The Bumper series tested a kind of two-stage rocket built by putting one rocket on top of another. The rocket on top for the Bumper tests was a sounding rocket, or a small rocket designed to carry instruments into the upper atmosphere to collect data. For the base and booster, Bumper used a V-2 rocket, which functioned as the first stage, allowing the sounding rocket to reach a speed of Mach 6.7 and an altitude of 250 miles.

1959: Hypersonic weapon deployed

The Atlas was the first intercontinental ballistic missile fielded by the United States. Its life in service was short, with the missiles recalled from active duty in 1965. Atlas set the template for many ballistic-trajectory hypersonic weapons to follow. With a range of between 6,400 and 9,000 miles, Atlas could arc up into space and then continue its ballistic trajectory back towards Earth, reaching Mach 21 as it did so. 

Developing Atlas meant designing special heat shielding to ensure that the missile and its thermonuclear payload arrived intact to the target, as the friction and heat from traveling through air at such great speeds could damage the weapon and render it less useful. Today, the US still deploys Minuteman III ICBMs, which are hypersonic missiles like Atlas, but because they travel at detectable ballistic arcs they are not what policymakers or military planners refer to as “hypersonic weapons.”

1980: Hypersonic glide maneuvering

Much of the hypersonics research of the 1960s and 1970s was focused on vehicles that carried people, from the X-15 rocket plane to the proposed and never finished Dyna-Soar space plane. This crewed vehicle research led to the development of “lifting body” vehicles, most famously the Space Shuttle, in which the body of the plane would generate lift at hypersonic speeds (as it glided back towards Earth) the way wings work at subsonic speeds. 

When it comes to weapons development, one of the bigger hypersonic efforts built on this “lifting body” research and created the Maneuvering Reentry Vehicle (MaRV). The Air Force tested the Advanced MaRV in 1980, and it demonstrated the ability of a warhead-carrying reentry vehicle to change its flight pattern at high speed, allowing it to hit targets beyond the initial arc of ballistic trajectory. That maneuverability is crucial to the modern field of hypersonics. Advanced MaRVS were mounted on Pershing II missiles, before those missiles were withdrawn from service as part of an arms control treaty between the United States and the USSR in 1987.

1998: Joint hypersonic scramjet test

The Kholod was an experimental design, Soviet in origin, that ended up being tested by both the United States and the Russian Federation in a project of mutual research. Scramjets take in air at supersonic speeds, then combine it with fuel, ignite the fuel, and express the injected fuel out a back nozzle. To get to supersonic speeds, the Kholod needed to ride on the tip of an anti-air missile. In a 1998 test in Russia with NASA involved, the Kholod reached Mach 6.5.

2010: X-51 WaveRider ushers in modern hypersonics 

Building on previous scramjet knowledge, the Air Force tested the Boeing-built X-51 Waverider from 2010 to 2013. For these tests, the WaveRider was attached to a cruise missile that was carried aloft by a B-52 bomber. The missile worked as a first stage, with the WaveRider accelerating from there to at least Mach 5.

2011: Too fast for thick skin 

In October 2011, DARPA lost contact with its Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 nine minutes into flight. A report published in April 2012 concluded that traveling at Mach 20 wore through its protective outer coating, damaging the ability of the vehicle to self-correct in flight. 

2014: Advanced hypersonic failure

In a 2014 test at the Kodiak Island launch facility in Alaska, the Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon failed. Later investigations revealed the flaws to be in the launch vehicle, not the hypersonic weapon itself. 

September 2021: HAWC

In September 2021, DARPA first tested the Raytheon-built version of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, which reached speeds at or exceeding Mach 5. Then again in March 2022, DARPA tested the version of the HAWC built by Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne. In July 2022, Raytheon successfully flew its version of HAWC a second time. 

October 2021: Glide vehicle

In October 2021, China demonstrated an object launched partially into orbit that crashed back down at hypersonic speeds. It was most likely a glide vehicle known as a “fractional orbital bombardment system,” a kind of trajectory that can cross the globe without the high arc and sharp descent of a traditional ballistic missile.

May 2022: ARRW

In a test off the coast of California, the Air Force launched an Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon. This test checked the bare minimum of boxes for a successful flight: It detached successfully, its engine started, and it reached Mach 5, all feats that previous tests of the ARRW had failed to achieve. In July 2022, the ARRW again hit its mark.

July 2022: OpFires

In testing at White Sands, DARPA successfully deployed and launched an Operational Fires missile from a Marine Corps logistics truck using Army artillery controls. The intent of the program is to have a hypersonic weapon that can be fired from standard available trucks, hitting targets at speed and range that cannot be safely reached by aircraft.

Watch a video of OpFires below: 

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On July 11, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, told reporters that the government of Iran was prepared to send several hundred drones, including armed drones, to Russia. And in late June, the impoverished Buryatia region of Russia reportedly raised 200 million rubles of its own funding to buy equipment for soldiers, including quadcopters. Taken together, these stories offer a portrait of how Russia is trying to sustain its invasion of Ukraine, with both foreign and hobbyist drones being pressed into military service.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, it did so with an army that had some experience with modern warfare, but nothing on the scale of the massive three-pronged tank-led assault it undertook. In the four and a half months since, the Russian military consolidated its hold around southern Ukraine, withdrew its failed attempt to capture the capital of Kyiv, and concentrated a major advance on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. 

With an increasingly static front line, Russia is relying on its numerically superior artillery to destroy Ukrainian forces. Ukraine, in turn, has received new long-range artillery from the United States and NATO countries, which it is using to destroy Russian ammunition depots near the front. To make every artillery shot count, both sides are relying on drones to find targets, and also to reveal if the targets were destroyed.

Russia’s push for new and more drones comes in the context of these artillery duels.

No longer ‘blind kittens’

Drones give forces an eye in the sky. “These commercial drones are used to conduct surveillance, provide timely intel on the Ukrainian forces, as well as to direct artillery/MLRS/mortar strikes,” said Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “Russian efforts now also involve using these commercial quadcopters to drop munitions, something that Ukrainians have excelled in during the conflict.” Videos of drones dropping bombs in Ukraine date back to the earleir Donbass war, and have proliferated ever since the invasion.

While there are dedicated drone models built for and deployed by the military, Russian units, from infantry formations to tank crews to artillery teams, have supplemented military drones with commercial and hobbyist models, the kind that can be found in stores. 

These hobbyist drones, like those made by China’s drone giant DJI, are not part of standard issue kit. In April, DJI specifically halted sales of its drones to Russia and Ukraine.

Regardless, soldiers are finding ways to get the drones on their own, or in the case of the regional government of Buryatia, using its own meager governmental funds to supply soldiers.

[Related: Calling all ‘dronations’: a new way to help Ukraine]

Buryatia “is one of the poorest regions in the country, and it’s no surprise that many of its soldiers are fighting in Ukraine, many for the monetary reward promised by the Ministry of Defense,” says Bendett. Siberian news service Tayga published an account from the government of Buryatia, where soldiers returning from the front described fighting without quadcopters as being like “blind kittens.” These quadcopters give soldiers the ability to see 5 km (3.1 miles) from where they are, whereas going into battle against enemies that do have quadcopters risks being spotted miles away.

Additional funds being raised for deployed soldiers is not uncommon in war. During and after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, stories of national guard soldiers buying their own body armor proliferated, as did reports of bake sales to equip soldiers already serving in the best funded military on Earth. In Russia, the invasion of Ukraine is still described by the government and press as a ‘special operation,’ but published appeals for more direct aid to soldiers show at least some acknowledgement that the military is struggling.

“What’s unusual so far is the language critical of Russian military capability gaps, like soldiers talking openly that they lack [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] equipment at the tactical edge,” says Bendett.

What to know about the Iranian drones

“It’s unclear whether Iran has delivered any of these [drones] to Russia already,” Sullivan told press on July 11. “But this is just one example of how Russia is looking to countries like Iran for capabilities that are also being used, I might add, or have been used before we got the ceasefire in place in Yemen, to attack Saudi Arabia.”

Sullivan was specifically referring to the kind of drone strikes launched by Houthi forces in Yemen, as part of the ongoing war in that country between various factions, including Saudi Arabia. These attacks include loitering munitions fired at oil refineries in Saudi Arabia, a kind of long-range attack that was previously difficult for armed factions without air forces to conduct. 

Using drones for long-range strike would augment a persistent limitation of Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, which is that its helicopters, fighters, and bombers are vulnerable to anti-air missiles. As noted by The War Zone, “Iranian armed drones would be much cheaper than using cruise or ballistic missiles.”

It is possible that the Iranian drones mentioned by the White House are instead the more traditional scouting type, in which case they would augment existing scout and spotter drones flown by Russian forces. But if Russia is turning to Iran for drone-like missiles, it suggests that Russia sees a path to victory in the war through hitting Ukrainian targets far from the front line.

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On July 13, Boston’s Merlin Labs announced that it would be working with the US Air Force to add autonomy to the C-130J Super Hercules cargo transport plane. Merlin’s technology is a kind of advanced auto-copilot, designed to take over the responsibilities of one crew member in flight while being supervised by a human pilot. If the technology delivers as promised, it will allow planes that normally fly with two human pilots to operate with just one, and could even allow single-seater planes to fly fully autonomously.

The same day that Merlin announced its partnership with the Air Force, it also announced a second round of $105 million in funding, which combined with a first round means the company has $130 million of runway to develop its technologies. (In Air Force terms, $130 million is enough money to buy one F-35A and have some change left over.) 

This funding, says Merlin Labs CEO Matthew George, will help the company continue to develop “the world’s most capable, safest and flexible pilot, that will eventually enable very large aircraft to fly with reduced crew and small aircraft to fly totally uncrewed.”

When George says “pilot,” he means it, drawing a distinction between traditional autopilots and Merlin’s product, the way that having cruise control in a car is different from having a driver. That means not just maintaining a course in flight, but also performing takeoffs and landings, responding to challenges like turbulence and storms as they come up, and even talking with air traffic control.

While such a pilot may conjure images of a humanoid robot sitting in a captain’s chair (or, to a certain generation, the goofy inflatable contraption from 1980 comedy Airplane!) Merlin’s pilot is software, plugged into the plane. This software will receive the same kinds of sensor information a pilot does, though it will get it directly as data instead of having to read it off instrument displays. 

[Related: This company is retrofitting airplanes to fly on missions with no pilots]

The Merlin Pilot is “a box that goes into the aircraft,” says George. “Depending on the aircraft, we have a bunch of different interfaces that allow the Merlin pilot and the Merlin intelligence to be able to go and control the aircraft surfaces.”

It may not have a literal hand on the yoke controlling roll, pitch, and yaw, but it is intended to steer the plane all the same by skipping the physical interface and going directly to the electrical controls. Or, on older aircraft that are not fly-by-wire, installing the Merlin pilot means adding servos and actuators so that the system can work with the plane.

As this technology is still in development, George says the company is hiring human factors scientists to figure out the best relation between the Merlin pilot-in-a-box and a human overseer. But even at this stage, the device is set up so that a human pilot can monitor what the Merlin pilot is doing, in much the same way a flight instructor would keep an eye on a student co-pilot.

“We haven’t announced how we’re gonna do that yet,” says George. “You can assume a tablet type device, where the human pilot is able to monitor the system to understand what the system is doing. If the human pilot doesn’t like what the system is doing, they’ll be able to take over for the aircraft.”

In addition to operating the plane mechanically, for Merlin’s pilot to function like a human pilot, it will need to take and follow commands from air traffic control. These commands are verbal, carried out around the world on a fairly uniform basis, but always with the expectation that a human pilot is talking to a human air traffic controller.

“Philosophically, we believe that air traffic control needs to be able to interact with an autonomous aircraft,” says George, adding that this includes not just uncrewed aircraft but also people-carrying planes flown by a crew that includes human and autonomous pilots. “The system present-day is designed to be talked to just like a human pilot and will respond just like a human pilot, albeit with a slightly funny voice.”

Merlin is working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the United States and the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) as the first regulators for certifying its pilot, and is still figuring out if the autonomous system needs to identify itself as such to air traffic controllers when talking to them.

The Merlin pilot was trained on voice data from a wide variety of air traffic controllers around the world. This training was done through a machine learning process, with the intention of the AI being able to respond on its own, rather than just following a set script of fixed rules for speaking. This makes it more similar to Alexa or Siri than to a bot that simply reads a pre-recorded script.

Before certification comes something called certification basis, which gives the regulator a framework for later certification.“This is the first time ever that a regulator has issued a certification basis to a system that has a machine-learned element,” says George. “Everything in avionics prior to us has been rules based and deterministic.”

For air traffic controllers, and governments more broadly, to trust AI-enabled autonomous pilots means the rules have to accommodate the choices and actions of the AI. When it comes to air traffic control, those choices made by AI will be in spoken words, and will come with the added safety feature of a human pilot on board who is able to clear up any discrepancies.

Merlin plans to deploy its co-pilot on cargo routes in New Zealand first on Cessna Caravans, where relatively empty skies and rough terrain make it ideal for testing aerial supply lines. This will be a civilian air route, but the company intends to take lessons from these routes to flying US Air Force C-130 planes on cargo runs.

“In a world where pilots are becoming more scarce, we can enable pilots to be able to go perform other missions where human brains are even more needed,” says George. “The Air Force, I think, has picked the C-130J as the first testbed for this because it’s the most ubiquitous transport aircraft out there. It is a really good platform to start to think about autonomy in the cockpit in a very real and practical way.”

Merlin’s first task will be adapting the digital pilot to fly the plane, but once it has that figured out, the possibilities of a plug-in autonomous pilot for the Air Force are many. In an immediate sense, the Air Force could reassign human pilots to more sensitive missions while the autonomous pilot works with human crew on routine flights. In short, a cockpit of two human pilots is now just one.

“You can imagine, especially in the early days of the war in Ukraine, we two had areas of Ukraine that were cut off. If you were going to resupply those areas, having the fewest possible human crew members aboard to be able to go perform those vital humanitarian missions, to be able to resupply villages, cities, other places—that’s critical.” says George. “It gives the Air Force a really flexible tool in a way that they can use in a variety of different ways while still having that human in the cockpit and still having that human supervision of the autonomous system.”

As exciting as the possibility of autonomous co-pilots on wartime resupply missions are, George emphasizes that the tech at present is delivering an interesting future. Cargo running in the sky above New Zealand with an AI that can talk to air traffic control is not just a step to future technology—it is a feat in and of itself. With this week’s announcement, Merlin has more funding to make it possible. It remains to be seen how much future those investors are buying with $130 million.

Correction on July 15, 2022: This article has been updated to clarify that the cargo routes in New Zealand will utilize Cessna Caravans, not Beechcraft King Airs.

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South of Death Valley and north of Los Angeles, the Air Force is testing a new weapon designed not to kill. Together with the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory is conducting two months of testing on a device called the High-Powered Joint Electromagnetic Non-Kinetic Strike Weapon, or HiJENKS. It’s the culmination of a five-year project to create a machine that can destroy electronics in a targeted way. 

HiJENKS is the successor to a similar weapon, the Counter-electronics High-Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP. Both weapons were designed to disable electronics without using physical force, such as an explosive blast or the kinetic force from impact. Making a weapon that can disable electronics without causing physical damage to its target is hard, and it might be part of why the Air Force is open to new delivery systems, other than a missile, in this latest iteration.

In short, HiJENKS is a high-powered weapon that fries electronics with pulsed bursts of microwave energy. When it comes to targets, many weapon and sensor systems require smooth functioning of electronics to work, and a disruption that fries circuits could halt a threat while leaving the physical parts of the system untouched. 

CHAMP, which HiJENKS is designed to improve upon, was built to fit in the case of a bomber-launched cruise missile. Little about the exact form of HiJENKS is known at present, though it could be mounted on a new cruise missile. Alternatively, HiJENKS might be carried in a weapon pod that draws power from a plane, or it could even become the primary weapon system of a drone flown as a wingmate to a crewed fighter.

“We’ll start looking at more service-specific applications once we’ve done this test that demonstrates the technology,” Jeffry Heggemeier, chief of AFRL’s high-power electromagnetics division, reportedly told press at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

“Heggemeier said the program hasn’t yet designated a platform for the weapon, but noted HiJENKS’ smaller footprint means it could be integrated on a wider range of carrier systems,” reports C4ISRNET.

To grasp the full ambition the Air Force has for HiJENKS, it helps to first understand its predecessor, CHAMP. 

Thanks CHAMP

The origins of CHAMP, possibly the first non-kinetic-effect missile deployed by the Air Force, can be traced back to 2009. The Air Force was looking for a weapon that could disable electronics without causing physical damage. Functionally, CHAMP was a cruise missile that replaced an explosive payload for one that targeted electronics with high-powered pulsed microwaves. Possible targets for disruption could include the navigation computer in a missile, or the radar and targeting system of an anti-air missile installation. The Air Force demonstrated CHAMP in a test in Utah in 2012, but then the program stalled. 

In 2017, CHAMP briefly gained some wider attention as a possible tool for the United States to use against a North Korean nuclear launch, though that possibility had real limits. The first is that, while not all electronics are hardened against electromagnetic energy attacks, nuclear missiles and warheads tend to be. (This is because a nuclear blast is the one kind of weapon guaranteed to produce an electromagnetic pulse, which is part of the overall horror of a nuclear detonation, though not the primary risk to people.) 

Regardless of its specific limitations in that mission, CHAMP was designed to give the Air Force an option for neutralizing an electronics-dependent threat without having to kill people or destroy a building or vehicle. 

When a cruise missile outfitted with CHAMP was fired at a specific building, reports Popular Mechanics, “The resulting pulse of electromagnetic radiation would fry enemy electronics, rendering vital equipment worthless without, as the Air Force Research Lab put it, ‘damage to infrastructure and danger to life.’”

And HiJENKS ensue

In 2019, the Air Force retired the missile that carried CHAMP. HiJENKS could be in a new missile, or it could be in a range of weapons from drone payload, to plane-mounted weapon pod. Whatever the new form factor, HiJENKS appears to be developed to make it a more immediately useful weapon than CHAMP.

“HIJENKS will include improvements that ‘resolve operational issues’ that the CHAMP team experienced with the first airborne [high-powered microwave] system,” wrote Jack McGonegal of the Air Force in the spring of 2020, as part of an Air Force task force analyzing future weapons. “These improvements will most likely involve decreases in size and weight of the [high-powered microwave] payload while seeing an increase in maximum power.”

However HiJENKS develops, it carries with it some of the inherent risks in a new weapon loaded inside a familiar casing. Because the effect of the high-powered microwave is range-limited, a commander targeted by HiJENKS would be unable to tell if the missile fired is carrying deadly explosives, or tactically frustrating but nonlethal microwaves. When fired upon by HiJENKS, it would be reasonable to assume most people would respond as though under attack by a traditional weapon. 

In battle, that may not make much of a difference at all. But if commanders and presidents are hoping a non-kinetic weapon like HiJENKS may expand their options in a conflict, that assumption carries the risk that it will be seen as a conventional threat, regardless.

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Later this year, the Army plans to order full production of a ride called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV. It may, by 2041, number about 49,000. The JLTV, which the Pentagon insists isn’t a “one for one” replacement to the widely used Humvee family of vehicles, is still best understood as informed by the limitations of Humvees. As production increases and the Army prepares to use the JLTV even more, it’s helpful to understand what role it is filling, how it does that, and what tasks will still be left to Humvees.

The base model of the JLTV is a four-seat vehicle that comes in several configurations. It can be general purpose, or a Heavy Guns Carrier version with a gun turret on top and room for a fifth occupant, or the Close Combat Weapons Carrier, which has a turret for soldier-fired anti-vehicle weapons like TOW missiles. There’s also a two-seat utility version.

As a “joint” vehicle, the JLTV is used primarily by the Army, but also in great numbers by the Marine Corps, and smaller numbers by the Air Force and Navy. The British Army has also purchased JLTVs.

What is most immediately striking about the JLTV is its high clearance, allowing the four-wheeled vehicle to bound over narrow trenches, climb wide hills and gravel ramps, and even keep going over felled logs. Oshkosh Defense, which made the initial 16,000 vehicle production run of JLTVs, emphasizes that the wheels can travel 20 inches independently, allowing it to roll over rough terrain.

The main selling point of the vehicle, and the feature highlighted upon its initial production in 2015, is that it is designed to protect the crew inside from IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and other roadside bombs. As the Army and Marine Corps learned in nearly two decades of fighting in Afghanstan, and especially in the many years of the Iraq War, a light transport designed for moving quickly across open field is vulnerable when faced with urban ambushes, hidden bombs, and other threats. 

To understand the JLTV, it helps to understand the vehicle it’s designed to supplement and serve alongside, the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), or Humvee.

The Humvee

Like the Bradley family of Fighting Vehicles and Abrams tanks, the Humvee was built for combat on the open plains of Europe but first saw action as part of 1991 Operation Desert Storm against Iraq. In June 1991, Popular Science referred to them as a “jack-of-all-trades of Desert Storm,” noting that they “served as cargo and troop carriers, ambulances, TOW missile trucks, and communications equipment transporters.”

By carrying the missiles and the troops into battle, the Humvee could get teams near enemy vehicles, fire missiles in an ambush, and drive away. In the Persian Gulf war, in which fronts moved so quickly that it was hard for defenders to set up defenses, much less lay mines or booby-trap roads, Humvees performed well.

[Related: The new Hummer EV is an agile, 9,200-pound monster]

“Over the past 20 years, the purpose and use of the Army’s tactical wheeled vehicles have dramatically changed,” wrote William P. Canaley of the  Army National Guard in a 2013 case study on the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. “Originally designed as a thin-skinned vehicle, deployed primarily in a logistics centric role, behind what was once considered the forward line of troops on a linear battlefield, is now an armored vehicle, required to survive in an ever-increasing threat environment in both a logistics and weapons-carrying platform role.”

Ambush-heavy warfare, especially in Iraq after 2004, limited the areas that Humvees could be safely operated. In response, in 2007 the Pentagon started adopting heavy Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected vehicles (MRAPs) to use in patrols. MRAPS, while better at protecting occupants from the immediate harm of an ambush, are also three times as likely as a Humvee to roll over, and often much slower.

Joint Light Tactical Vehicle: Emphasis on ‘light’ 

The JLTV is an attempt to get back to the speed of moving by Humvee, without giving up the lessons of how to survive roadside bombs. One weakness of the MRAPs adopted for patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan was that rollover risk and heavy weight meant they had to stick to roads. These vehicles’ armor, especially v-shaped hulls to deflect the immediate force of an explosion, let the troops inside survive initial attacks, but the limited places they could drive also meant it was easier for hostile forces to plan ambushes.

As an off-road vehicle, the JLTV can travel beyond roads when in combat. The JLTV also comes with some armor already on the vehicle, but with kits for further armor that can be added on when deployed. This lets the base model be lighter by default, while those used in heavy combat can be adapted to fit. 

Often those kits will have to be transported separately from the vehicle, which is still designed to be light enough that it can be carried underneath a cargo helicopter or inside a transport plane.

Ultimately, the JLTV will still serve alongside tens of thousands of Humvees. What it will bring to the fight is better protection against roadside bombs, a modern ecosystem of armor and upgrades, and the ability once more to speed ahead to the fight, letting soldiers set up in forests and foothills and ambush enemies as they find them.

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On July 1, the US Army announced it was opening up the competition to design a replacement for its venerable Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. The Bradley is a small troop transport dressed up as a tank, and it’s built for battle. Replacing the Bradley with a new vehicle means repeating what worked, while adopting new technology and new tools to fight battles deep into the 21st century.

To find its new Bradley, the Army is looking for an Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV). The request for proposal states that the new vehicle will (like the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle it’s replacing), be “tasked to maneuver through the enemy’s security zone as part of a combined arms team for the purpose of creating an advantageous position, relative to the enemy, and providing protection and direct fire lethality while manned or remotely operated.”

In other words, the OMFV will drive through breaks in enemy positions, move alongside other vehicles and soldiers, and then attack the enemy where their defenses are weak. What is new about the OMFV, relative to the Bradley and every other big ground vehicle the Army has fielded before, is that it will have the ability to fight this kind of attack while being remotely piloted.

“In the close fight,” the request continues, “the OMFV enables the ability of dismounted elements to maneuver by detecting and destroying targets at a range beyond the enemy’s capability.” By “dismounted elements,” the RFP means “infantry,” or soldiers fighting on foot. 

To understand what the OMFV will do differently, it helps to understand the vehicle it is designed to replace.

The Bradley

The existing Bradley isn’t a tank, though it’d be easy to confuse it for one at first glance. With sloped armor, treads, and a turret sporting a big gun, the Bradley is certainly tank-like, though its 25mm gun is much smaller than the 120mm cannon carried by an Abrams tank. The Bradley is also almost two feet taller than an Abrams, a concession to the 6 or 7 passengers it has to fit inside.

The Bradley’s design dates back to the middle of the Cold War, as the Army was looking to move beyond the armored transport that carried soldiers into battle. As envisioned, the Bradley was both a form of transportation and a threat in its own right, with its main gun and anti-tank missiles allowing the vehicle to take out enemy vehicles and support the dismounted soldiers in combat. While the Bradley never saw use in any massive European land battles against the USSR, as its Cold War designers planned for, it has still seen three decades of combat. The Bradley has been a mainstay of US interventions from the Gulf War through Iraq and Afghanistan.

Failed replacements

The Army has previously tried twice to develop a replacement for the Bradley, while continuing to upgrade and maintain existing vehicles. These two programs were known as the Future Combat System, canceled in 2009, and the Ground Combat Vehicle, canceled in 2014. The Future Combat System was designed to be a family of deadly, lightweight vehicles that could use advanced sensors to see enemies first, and then move out of the way of return fire, allowing for lighter armor and faster speeds. It was canceled for cost overruns before production had even begun.

The Ground Combat Vehicle program was also canceled for trying to make one vehicle tackle too many roles at once, all while incorporating technology that was not yet ready for the field. As the Congressional Research Service notes, the Ground Combat Vehicle “relied on too many immature technologies, had too many performance requirements, and was required by Army leadership to have too many capabilities to make it affordable.”

The Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle

The Army is hoping that the third time replacing the Bradley is the one that sticks. The OMFV program began with fits and starts in 2019. The first go failed in January 2020 after one contractor designing a prototype withdrew, and another failed to deliver a working prototype, and the Army did not want to be stuck with just the third remaining design by default. The Army launched the most recent iteration of the OMFV program in February 2020, and the latest proposal opens up this existing program to more companies, with the goal of bringing in new teams and new ideas.

While the previous attempts at Bradley replacements failed because the vehicle itself was built around too many undeveloped technologies, the OMFV is designed for modularity, allowing it to incorporate new tech as it is fielded. It’s also designed to work in a sensor-rich environment, with the proposal saying that the vehicle will be “rapidly generating, receiving, and passing information to dismounted elements, other vehicles, and command nodes,” like the TITAN.

This information-sharing will help vehicle commanders find appropriate targets for their weapons, with the OMFV “providing target acquisition data, shared situational understanding, and the lethal effects required to protect” and guide the soldiers on foot. Remotely piloted, the OMFV could provide cover fire after driving into position, with its crew, in the battlefield on foot, taking cover out of the line of sight of the enemy.

The post What the future holds for the Army’s venerable Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle appeared first on Popular Science.

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A soldier who goes to war is part of a massive data-rich enterprise. Connecting that data, from satellites to ships to planes to soldiers, is a difficult task, but it is one the Pentagon sees as vital for fighting and winning wars. As part of that task, on June 29, defense giant Raytheon announced that it had been awarded the second phase of an Army contract for the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) program. Understanding the node is key to understanding how the Army plans to use data in battles and wars in the 21st century.

The sensors that TITAN will draw data from already exist across many of the domains in which the military operates. Satellites in orbit relay communications, photograph the ground below, observe weather, and transmit geographic coordinates. Planes overhead, ships at sea, and trucks on the ground all carry sensors, each capturing vital information about where enemies might be, and how they might be moving. 

Meanwhile, TITAN is not a sensor itself, but it exists as a single intermediary point between soldiers and these pre-existing sensors.

TITAN is a computer intended for use in the field, and it is “designed to receive, process and disseminate data. It autonomously sifts through massive amounts of sensor data to rapidly find and track potential threats,” says Scott McGleish, executive director for space and command and control systems at Raytheon Intelligence & Space. “We’re talking from space to ground, intel feeds from different types of data. And we’re talking thousands of pieces of data that have different labeling systems as well.”

Much of the military’s data collection processes date back years or even decades, with proprietary systems made by one company formatted to share data with that company’s ground stations. This type of process harkens back to an era where the notion of a satellite talking to a ship or a plane sharing data with a tank was something of a distant possibility. These systems were also built to communicate securely, so that the various radio and other signals containing data would be useless if intercepted.

But TITAN will be different. To make it work, it needs to be able to take information from across all these varied sensors, process and format them so that all this data can be turned into useful, actionable intelligence, which humans can then communicate to other humans. 

TITAN is largely a data processing and software tool, complete with a graphic interface for sharing it, but physically it will look like a shipping crate on the back of a big truck.

“It’ll go down to the brigade level from a basic system on a JLTV platform vehicle,” says McGleish, referring to the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle that’s replacing Humvees in military service. The advanced version will go on the Army’s workhorse FMV trucks, with shipping-crate-sized shelters on the back, housing the system and room for people to work on it.

“Those shelters will basically have all the brains of the technology from the hardware, the communication suites, existing Satcom, and other communications. Inside there are a couple analysts that’ll be able to sit there and go through this,” says McGleish.

To help the human analysts understand all the information sent in, the TITAN will use processing algorithms to sort and filter data, converting more technical readouts into assessments of enemy positions and location. That will let TITAN help target attacks, from conventional weapons to effects like electromagnetic spectrum jamming, onto enemy forces.

In June, Raytheon equipment was used as part of the Valiant Shield 2022 exercise. “What we did is collect, process, [and] distribute targeting data across those military units,” says McGleish. The exercise saw Raytheon’s analytics, AI, and processing coordinate and relay data between a KC-135 tanker aircraft, a distant ground station, and a satellite. 

It’s the kind of experience that informs TITAN, and how the military will fight not as distinct branches, but as interconnected sensors, weapons, and platforms. What TITAN adds is not a new weapon itself, or a new sensor, but the ability for the Army to take existing sensors from across the military and share their targeting data, securely and in real time, with other units that could use them.

It is easy to envision a future where, aided by TITAN, a brigade commander dispatches soldiers to ambush an advancing enemy column, while at the same time directing artillery to fire a supply depot spotted by satellite.

“We’re gonna take all that intelligence,” says McGleish, “and we’re gonna bring it together and we’re gonna speed up the decision making process and have some kind of give the ability for a commander to make a decision, to put some kind of effect onto a target.”

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On June 23, the Department of Defense announced it was supplying four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, to Ukraine. These systems, which will join the four already sent to the country, are part of an ongoing effort to bolster its military in its fight against the Russian invasion. Eight artillery systems might seem small in the scale of a war that has killed thousands of people in just months. But HIMARS is a specific kind of artillery, and understanding rocket artillery is crucial to understanding how this particular stage of the war is being fought.

The additional HIMARS were part of a broader $450 million aid package, part of a cumulative effort of over $6 billion sent to the country. As enumerated by the Pentagon on June 24, this aid also includes over 1,400 Stinger anti-air missiles and over 6,500 Javelin anti-tank missiles. These weapons, while potent, have two big limitations: They are short range, and they are carried by soldiers into battle. A Stinger or a Javelin is effective if the soldiers can survive to get close enough to the enemy vehicle to use it, but artillery poses a big threat to soldiers on foot, and even in vehicles.

What is a HIMARS?

Developed by defense giant Lockheed Martin, the HIMARS is a rocket launcher mounted on the back of a dedicated truck. The HIMARS can carry six Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) rockets, which each have a range of more than 43 miles. Other ammunition can extend that range, but even with just the baseline rockets for it, the HIMARS can greatly outrange towed artillery. Other kinds of ammunition can greatly extend that range, but US supply to Ukraine is firmly limited to just the 43-mile ranged ammunition.

While towed artillery can be set up, fired, and then driven away from where it fired, self-propelled artillery like the HIMARS lets the vehicle drive away immediately after firing, taking full advantage of its range and mobility to attack enemies and escape retaliation.

[Related: Everything to know about Switchblades, the attack drones the US is giving Ukraine]

Each rocket carries a 200-pound explosive warhead, which is powerful enough to destroy a building, a group of soldiers in the open, other artillery, and any vehicle unfortunate enough to be hit. By firing a salvo of up to six rockets, a HIMARS can attack a whole armored column, blast a hole through a front line, or cause tremendous damage to an enemy camp near but not on the front line.

One possible use for the HIMARS is to shoot beyond the front lines and hit supply depots, hobbling the ability of Russian forces to resupply themselves close to the fighting. 

How long does it take to train a HIMARS crew?

The HIMARS is still a human-driven and human-operated system, and delivering a weapon also means training a crew on how to use it in combat. Lockheed Martin says it takes a three-person crew to operate in combat, though the whole apparatus of training, resupplying, and ensuring there’s a durable artillery corps can involve many people. 

Speaking to the press on June 27, a senior defense official said: “So in this case for the HIMARS training, you know, [it takes] a couple weeks.”

What about other artillery?

While HIMARS is the headlining artillery item, the United States has also provided Ukraine with 126 155mm howitzers and 260,000 rounds of ammunition for those howitzers. These are towed artillery, pulled into place by a truck and then set up to fire. These weapons can launch explosives at targets 14 miles away, further if the artillery shell is rocket assisted. This range makes artillery potent and powerful, and the mobility provided by trucks allows crews to “shoot and scoot,” moving away from a firing location before return fire can hit.

Both Ukraine and Russia inherited arsenals from the Soviet Union, which built a massive military that was heavy on artillery. That shared heritage meant that both countries used the same kind of 122mm and 152mm artillery pieces and ammunition. (Artillery pieces, like other guns, are measured by caliber, or the internal diameter of the gun barrel.) As the Washington Post reported, Russia was able to take advantage of this shared supply need by both targeting Ukrainian ammunition stockpiles and by buying up ammunition held by other countries.

As Ukraine switches to incorporating more US and NATO-made artillery pieces, its military is also transitioning into a different kind of targeting logic. Much US artillery relies on not just targeted salvos but guided shells, and the Pentagon is training Ukrainian forces to use Excalibur rounds, which can hone in on GPS and fall within 7 feet of the coordinates provided.

The post The US’s latest assist to Ukraine: Rocket launchers with a 43-mile range appeared first on Popular Science.

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Learning to walk is about learning from failure, and then trying again. Each new footstep carries with it a weight imbalance, and the possibility that the ground underneath will be a different texture or density than what it was before. A toddler who learns to walk while on the rocking deck of a ship may struggle when, on dry land, the ground under foot doesn’t move in the expected way. 

For DARPA, the military’s blue sky projects wing, teaching robots to walk on new terrain means embracing learning like a toddler. Learning to walk starts with a lot of failure, but by learning how to adjust to failure, robots could tackle wholly new environments based on intuition alone.

This is the domain of Machine Common Sense, a DARPA initiative about developing a kind of AI that allows robots, first in simulation and then in the real world, to emulate a toddler’s ability to understand, interact with, and navigate through the world. It includes efforts on processing language, manipulating objects, and moving across unfamiliar terrain.

“The inspiration for the program was that although AI has produced many very stunning systems that have shown expert level performance on many tasks, in general AI systems are brittle and tend to lack the common sense that any person in the street would have,” says Howard Shrobe, DARPA’s manager for Machine Common Sense. 

“The ultimate goal, though, is to enable computer systems and robotic systems to be able to be trained in much the same way that we train soldiers in technical areas that they work on within the military,” says Shrobe.

Just read the instructions

Shrobe imagines how useful it could be if machines could learn as adeptly as humans do. “Way down the road you could imagine a robot technician reading the instruction manual for how to do some motor repair on a vehicle and being able to take that language description and possibly some videos, and then just execute it, because it’s perfectly capable of figuring out how to take the motions it already knows how to do and compose them to do the things that are implied by the instructions,” adds Shrobe.

For that to work, an AI not only has to absorb a manual and be able to repeat the information it contains, but the AI would have to discern all the integral knowledge that’s not explicitly stated in the instructions, but vital to the process anyway.

[Related: Google taught a robot dog new tricks by having it mimic the real thing]

“You can imagine a recipe for making scrambled eggs, and it might start off by saying ‘put two eggs in a bowl.’ And even those of us who were pretty bad cooks understand that it didn’t literally mean put two eggs in a bowl. It meant crack the eggs and put ’em in the bowl. And it didn’t tell you where you would likely be able to find eggs or tell you how to crack them,” says Shrobe.

Cookbooks, like other instruction manuals, operate from the premise that a person opening the book already knows this kind of implicit information, so that the reader can focus on the task at hand. If military machines can be built with AI that can discern this common sense from reading, then the AI can perform specialized tasks without having to first be taught how to learn all the component parts of the task.

Can machines learn object permanence? 

Developing common sense for machines means revisiting how artificial systems perceive, incorporate, and adapt to new knowledge. Some of this is knowledge of how bodies work and exist in space, like walking over new and uneven terrain. Another part of this is teaching an image recognition program to have object permanence, so that if a camera sees a ball roll behind a wall it does not catalog the ball as a new object when it emerges from the other side. This is the kind of knowledge that comes intuitively to humans, though often through some trial and error, in infancy.

For machines learning physical tasks, that knowledge can be acquired not by reading manuals, but by performing and adapting with programming capable of taking unexpected changes and turning it into knowledge. One example is a four-legged robot learning to maintain balance even as weights are thrown onto its back. 

The machine common sense needed to navigate both manuals and obstacles is built on the same process of machine learning and deep reinforcement learning. In simulated environments the AI understands the parameters of the task set before it, and comes up with approaches for how to proceed when given new information. This means drawing from accumulated experience and attempting a strategy that approximates the present situation. And, crucially, then learning as the AI attempts to navigate the task in real life.

In simulation, a robot might walk over a hill, then stumble over some cinder blocks on the other side of it. In real life, that robot may summit a hill, and then encounter a fallen log. Thanks to stumbling in simulation, the robot could navigate the similar situation without tripping up.

[Related: A new tail accessory propels this robot dog across streams]

By learning what doesn’t work, and more importantly by learning and repeating what does work, the AI that DARPA is working to develop will navigate a machine through familiar tasks within unfamiliar environments. While Shrobe speaks of infants, it’s also the kind of general adaptation to the world that we expect from adults, especially the young adults who enlist in the military and are then expected to master tasks learned in training in countries across the world they may not have even heard of before arriving. 

While the fully capable robot technician Shrobe imagined is still a long way off, through DARPA’s Machine Common Sense program teams are working on developing and evaluating the component steps. This means not just repeating the text in a manual, or proving a robot can walk on uneven ground, but also testing to see if the AI can produce coherent next sentences in a language test, or if the robot can walk over uneven ground that suddenly becomes slick with oil.

One clean example of all this is training an AI in simulation to pass the same kind of tests for children to see if they’ve developed that aforementioned idea of object permanence.

“You show an object rolling behind a screen, and then it never comes out. And you can now ask the AI system, can you find the object? And if it navigates in the simulated environment to go behind the screen, then you can assume it has object permanence, because it assumes the thing rolled behind the screen and stayed there, as opposed to it rolling behind the screen and stopping existing,” says Shrobe.

Watch the AI direct a four-legged robot over terrain below:

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