On October 10, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary dedicated a ship called the Proteus in a ceremony on the River Thames. The vessel, which looks like someone started building a ship and then stopped halfway through, is the first in the fleet’s Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance program, and is a conversion from a civilian vessel. 

In its new role, the Proteus will keep a protective eye on underwater infrastructure deemed vitally important, and will command underwater robots as part of that task. Before being converted to military use, the RFA Proteus was the Norwegian-built MV Topaz Tangaroa, and it was used to support oil platforms.

Underwater infrastructure, especially pipelines and communications cables, make the United Kingdom inextricably connected to the world around it. While these structures are hard to get to, as they rest on the seafloor, they are not impossible to reach. Commercial vessels, like the oil rig tenders the Proteus was adapted from, can reach below the surface with cranes and see below it through remotely operated submarines. Dedicated military submarines can also access seafloor cables. By keeping an eye on underwater infrastructure, the Proteus increases the chance that saboteurs can be caught, and more importantly, improves the odds that damage can be found and repaired quickly.

“Proteus will serve as a testbed for advancing science and technological development enabling the UK to maintain the competitive edge beneath the waves,” reads the Royal Navy’s announcement of the ship’s dedication.

The time between purchase and dedication of the Topaz Tangaroa to the Proteus was just 11 months, with conversion completed in September. The 6,600-ton vessel is operated by a crew of just 26 from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, while the surveillance, survey, and warfare systems on the Proteus are crewed by 60 specialists from the Royal Navy. As the Topaz Tangaroa, the vessel was equipped for subsea construction, installation, light maintenance, and inspection work, as well as survey and remotely operated vehicle operations. The Proteus retains its forward-mounted helipad, which looks like a hexagonal brim worn above the bow of the ship.

Most striking about the Proteus is the large and flat rear deck, which features a massive crane as well as 10,700 square feet of working space, which is as much as five tennis courts. Helpful to the ship’s role as a home base for robot submersibles is a covered “moon pool” in the deck that, whenever uncovered, lets the ship launch submarines directly beneath it into the ocean.

“This is an entirely new mission for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary – and one we relish,” Commodore David Eagles RFA, the head of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, said upon announcement of the vessel in January.

Proteus is named for one of the sons of the sea god Poseidon in Greek mythology, with Proteus having domain over rivers and the changing nature of the sea. While dedicated on a river, the ship is designed for deep-sea operation, with a ballast system providing stability as it works in the high seas. 

“Primarily for reasons of operational security, the [Royal Navy] has so far said little about the [Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance] concept of operations and the areas where Proteus will be employed,” suggests independent analysts Navy Lookout, as part of an in-depth guide on the ship. “It is unclear if she is primarily intended to be a reactive asset, to respond to suspicious activity and potentially be involved in repairs if damage occurs. The more plausible alternative is that she will initially be employed in more of a deterrent role, deploying a series of UUVs [Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles] and sensors that monitor vulnerable sites and send periodic reports back to the ship or headquarters ashore. Part of the task will be about handling large amounts of sensor data looking for anomalies that may indicate preparations for attacks or non-kenetic malign activity.”

In the background of the UK’s push for underwater surveillance are actual attacks and sabotage on underwater pipelines. In September 2022, an explosion caused damage and leaks in the Nord Stream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. While active transfer of gas had been halted for diplomatic reasons following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the pipeline still held gas in it at the time of the explosion. While theories abound for possible culprits, there is not yet a conclusive account of which nation was both capable and interested enough to cause such destruction.

The Proteus is just the first of two ships with this task. “The first of two dedicated subsea surveillance ships will join the fleet this Summer, bolstering our capabilities and security against threats posed now and into the future,” UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said in January. “It is paramount at a time when we face Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, that we prioritise capabilities that will protect our critical national infrastructure.”

While the Proteus is unlikely to fully deter such acts, having it in place will make it easier for the Royal Navy to identify signs of sabotage. Watch a video of the Proteus below:

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On October 8, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean, as part of an American response to the surprise and staggering attack on Israel’s military and civilians by the armed group Hamas. Then, on October 14, Austin sent the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean. 

The United States Navy maintains 11 carrier strike groups, which are formations including not just the namesake carrier and its aircraft, but also an escort fleet of other ships. The carriers are the most visible, tangible expression of naval power abroad, and the deployment of two carrier strike groups is both a threat of force and shows where the US most wants to attempt to deter the outbreak of further violence through that show of force.

The attack that sparked the deployment of the two US carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean started with bulldozers, drones, motorboats, and paragliders. Gaza is home to two million Palestinians, of whom about half are under the age of 18. Hamas, the militant group elected to power in the Gaza Strip in 2006 and which has not held an election since, broke through the wall maintained by Israel around the Gaza Strip, and launched attacks killing an estimated 1,400 people in Israel, including civilians. Retaliatory airstrikes, launched by Israel’s military against Gaza, have killed over 2,700 people, including civilians, and rendered hundreds of thousands homeless. The death totals, especially in Gaza, continue to increase, as hospitals run out of supplies. The situation is evolving and has complex roots.

Beyond Hamas and Israel, there’s a chance that the outbreak of violence could expand to involve regional military players, like Iranian-backed Hezbollah north of Israel in Lebanon, Iran itself, or other countries in the region. President Joe Biden has traveled to Israel to meet with its government. 

An aircraft carrier, complete with escort ships and fighter firepower, is designed to fight the planes and ships of nations more than it is built to root out fighters with rifles hiding in city blocks. In the October 8 announcement of the deployment, Austin said the Ford Carrier Strike Group was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean to “bolster regional deterrence efforts.” In the October 14 announcement, the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group’s deployment was part of moves to “signal the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security and our resolve to deter any state or non-state actor seeking to escalate this war.”

To better understand the US force projection in response to this outbreak of violence, it is important to understand aircraft carriers, and the fleets that escort them.

What is a carrier strike group?

Alone, an aircraft carrier is a powerful weapon. The size of a small town, one carrier can be a tempting target. The Nimitz-class carriers, which make up most of the US carrier fleet at present, carry around 5,000 to 5,200 people. This crew is primarily devoted to operating and maintaining the ship, which is powered by a pair of nuclear reactors, while about 1,500 of that crew is dedicated to flying and maintaining the 60 or more aircraft flown from a carrier. 

Ford-class carriers, the planned replacement for the Nimitz class, are crewed by just over 4,500 people total, and can carry and launch over 75 aircraft. (Currently there is one Ford-class carrier in the fleet, which is the USS Gerald R. Ford.) Both Nimitz and Ford-class carriers are 1,092 feet long, their decks constituting the runway for takeoff and landing of planes at sea.

Because carriers are so large—by design, they have to be—they make enticing targets for enemies at war. “Carrier Group” as a phrase first appears in the Popular Science archives in a July 1985 story called “Invisible Subs” that describes ships as either “submarines or targets.” The ship-mounted weapons on carriers are largely defensive: anti-air and anti-missile Sea Sparrow missiles, Phalanx Close-In Weapon Systems designed to intercept rockets, and other projectiles with radar-targeted bullets.

Those weapons should be seen as a last line of defense for carriers. The first lines of defense are the other ships that accompany carriers as they move about the globe.

In Secretary Austin’s announcements, he names specific ships in each carrier group. The USS Gerald R. Ford is escorted by the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Normandy, as well as the Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyers USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney, and USS Roosevelt. The USS Eisenhower is escorted by the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea, guided-missile destroyers USS Gravely and USS Mason, and is carrying the nine aircraft squadrons of Carrier Air Wing 3. In general, a carrier group has between three and four surface ships escorting it, as well as an assumed (but not announced) attack submarine traveling near the fleet underwater.

Carrier Air Wing 3 includes four squadrons of F/A-18E Super Hornets, jet fighters that can fly over 1,200 nautical miles; these jets can carry a range of weapons including anti-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, guided and unguided bombs, and more. These planes are the primary strike force of the carrier group, allowing the US Navy to attack and destroy vehicles, people, and buildings far from shore. In addition to the strike fighters, a carrier air wing includes E-2C Hawkeyes, which are big flying tactical radars; EA-18G Growlers, which carry electronic warfare weapons for jamming and obscuring enemy sensors; and Seahawk helicopters, which can be used to launch anti-tank missiles and for submarine hunting, among other roles.

The Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers are, as the name suggests, armed with an array of missiles, including cruise missiles to hit targets on land, as well as anti-submarine missiles and torpedoes to protect against enemies underwater. Guided missile destroyers are similarly armed, with anti-air missiles as well as part of the regular complement.

Much of the equipment of a carrier strike group is built around the particular vulnerability of aircraft carriers to anti-ship missiles and submarines—threats that are unlikely to be a factor for deployments in the eastern Mediterranean. The offensive firepower, from cruise missiles to guided bombs dropped by fighter jets, enable the carrier groups to pose an outsized threat. 

The presence of a carrier strike group can be seen as a form of deterrence, and deterrence is a strategic bet that the presence of massive retaliatory power is enough to prevent an armed group from trying to advance their political aims through violence. If the actions of other armed groups in the region can be shifted, deterred, or delayed by the presence of the US Navy, this would be the force that can do it.

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On May 30, Canadian defense company Roshel Defence Solutions officially launched its new armored troop transport, the Senator model Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle. Part of the launch was surviving a series of tests to prove that the vehicle can protect its occupants. 

The testing was conducted by Oregon Ballistic Laboratories and done to a standard called NATO “STANAG 4569” level 2. (STANAG means “standard agreement,” and 4569 is the numbering of that agreement.) What that means in practice is that the Senator MRAP is designed to withstand a range of the kinds of attacks that NATO can expect to see in the field. These include bullet fire from calibers up to 7.62×39mm at roughly 100 feet (30 meters). Why 7.62×39mm caliber bullets? That’s the standard Soviet bullet, which has outlasted the USSR itself and is common in weapons used across the globe.

In addition, STANAG 4569 dictates that the vehicle must survive a 13 pound (6 kg) anti-tank mine activated under any of the vehicle’s wheels, as well as survive a mine activated under the vehicle’s center. Beyond the bullets and mines, the vehicle also has to withstand a shot from a 155mm high explosive artillery shell burst landing 262 feet (80 meters) away. 

All of this testing is vital, because a troop transport has to advance through bullet fire, keep occupants safe from mines, and travel through an artillery barrage. That NATO standards are designed to withstand Soviet weapons is a convenience for any equipment exports aimed at Ukraine, but also means the vehicles are broadly useful in conflicts across the globe, as an abundance of Soviet-patterned weaponry continues to exist in the world. 

To showcase the Senator MRAP in simulated attack, Roshel released two videos of the testing. The first, published online on May 29, features a bright green checkmark in the corner, “all tests passed” clearly emblazoned on the video as clouds of destruction and detonations appear behind it.

A second video, released June 16, shows the Senator MRAP in slow motion enduring a large TNT explosive hitting it on the side. The 55 lbs (25kg) explosive is a stand-in for an IED, or Improvised Explosive Device. IEDs were commonly used by insurgent forces in Iraq against the United States, and in Afghanistan against the NATO coalition that occupied the country for almost 20 years. While anti-tank mines tend to be mass-produced industrial tools of war, IEDs are built on more of a small scale, with groups working in workshops generally assembling the explosives and then placing them on patrol routes.

It was the existence of IEDs, and their widespread use, that prompted the United States to push for, develop, and field MRAPs in 2006. Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles were not a new concept. South Africa was one of the first countries to develop and field MRAPs in the 1970s, putting essentially a V-shaped armored transport container on top of an existing truck pattern. The resulting “Hippo” vehicle was slow and cumbersome, but could protect its occupants from explosives thanks to the V-shaped hull deflecting blasts away. 

MRAPS did not guarantee safety for troops on patrol, but they did drastically increase the amount of explosives, or the intensity of attack, needed to ambush armored vehicles.

“The presence of the MRAP also challenged the enemy, since the insurgents had to increase the size of their explosive devices to have any effect on these more survivable vehicles. The larger devices, and longer time it took to implant them, increased the likelihood that our troops would detect an IED before it detonated,” Michael Brogan, head of the MRAP vehicle program from 2007 to 2011, told the Navy’s CHIPS magazine in 2016.

The Senator MRAP features, like its predecessors, a V-shaped hull. It also benefits from further innovations in MRAP design, like mine-protected seats, which further reduce the impact of blast on their occupant. Inside, the Senator can transport up to 10 people, and Roshel boasts of its other features, from sensor systems to weapon turrets. For as long as IEDs and mines remain a part of modern warfare, it is likely we can expect to see MRAPs transporting soldiers safely despite them.

Watch one of the tests, below:

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On the second floor of the Walter E. Washington convention center in the District of Columbia sits a robot tanklet, designed to hunt drones. The uncrewed vehicle is the TRX SHORAD, and it is part of the display from defense giant General Dynamics Land Systems, assembled alongside the wares of over 650 other exhibitors for the annual Association of the United States Army meeting and exhibition. The TRX SHORAD suggests a future of robot-assisted combat, where attacks by drones are met with the automated speed and power of a companion robot built to destroy quadcopters.

TRX SHORAD is a composite name. TRX is the category name for General Dynamics 10-ton tracked robots, a platform that can accommodate a range of payloads including cargo and weapons. SHORAD is a military acronym for “Short Range Air Defense,” a category that is somewhat vague but broadly includes finding and destroying threats such as drones, helicopters, low-flying planes, and more.

“The TRX SHORAD is designed to bring a new dimension of combat power in SHORAD battalions and provides autonomy within a tiered, layered air defense,” reads the description from a General Dynamics video of the vehicle. 

[Related: The Army’s new 42-ton assault vehicle has a compelling backstory]

In the video, a blurred-out quadcopter with the rough contours of a DJI Phantom is spotted moving over a field. The TRX SHORAD tracks the drone across the sky, then pivots its turret, aiming what appears to be rockets and a large caliber gun at the drone. With a powerful “ka-thunk,” the robot’s turret fires on the quadcopter, and the still-blurred drone falls after a cloud of smoke. In a second demonstration, a similarly blurred-out quadcopter erupts into a smoke cloud and plummets. Unblurred, in the background of the video, is a drone that appears to be patterned like a DJI Inspire, which was likely used to capture much of the mid-air footage.

This is a kind of aerial warfare, but it takes place in the low sky, the space immediately above the heads of soldiers and vehicles. It’s a space previously occupied largely by projectiles, rockets and mortars and missiles. Drones, which offer greater scouting possibilities while also carrying weapons and facilitating attacks, change the fundamental dynamic of aerial threats to armies.

What is most crucial about the range of threats these weapons are designed to stop is that they exist at a cost, operational profile, and likely even altitude that is hard for the jet fighters of the Air Force to intercept and destroy in a timely way. In other words, a quadcopter can launch, scout, and return before a jet can be launched to respond. The Army used to maintain dedicated units called Air Defense Artillery to protect against aerial threats, but, as a report from the Congressional Research Service notes, “in the early 2000s, these ADA units were divested from the Army to meet force demands deemed more critical at that time. Decisionmakers accepted the increased risk that threat aircraft might pose to ground forces and other critical assets because they believed the U.S. Air Force could maintain air superiority.”

What has changed since the early 2000s is the preponderance of drones used by militaries. “Since 2005, potential threats from air and missile platforms that could threaten U.S. ground forces have significantly increased. The use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) has increased, and UASs have been used successfully by both sides in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict,” the CRS report notes.

These drones come in a range of sizes and variable threats. Small, hobbyist or commercial drones, like the DJI Phantom models used for anti-drone target practice, can carry cameras and be flown by anyone in minutes. In the summer of 2022, Russian infantry reported that moving in battle without quadcopters was like “fighting as ‘blind kittens.’” These drones can also be adapted to carry small bombs, the size of grenades or so. With a first-person view, or cameras allowing remote pilots to steer the drone as though they are on board, cheap drone bombers have been used to devastating effect in battle.

While commercial drones are commonly used in battle, drone scouts the size of small planes can fulfill a role once taken on by human-piloted aircraft, carrying weapons and intelligence missions at a greater distance than the short-range drones flown by infantry squads. Self-detonating drones, used as cheaper alternatives to cruise missiles, are abundant and deadly enough to constitute yet another new threat on the battlefield.

All of these threats pose a risk that is hard for an air force to directly address. This is the layer of layered defense that vehicles like the TRX SHORAD, or other SHORAD vehicles, are designed to fill. With bullets for small drones, larger projectiles for bigger and faster threats, and sensors to detect and track the movements of aircraft, TRX SHORAD could accompany soldiers, trucks, and tanks on maneuver, offering another line of defense against the crowded low skies of modern warfare.

Watch a video of TRX SHORAD below:

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The F-35 is built for a war fought with missiles. The United States’ newest stealth fighter comes in three flavors: F-35A for the Air Force, F-35B for the Marine Corps, and F-35C for the Navy. All variants are built around a shared architecture and mission: to destroy enemy targets, while evading detection long enough to return and fly another day. These missions are, thanks to the specific nature of stealth, at cross-purposes: weapons carried externally by a plane make it more visible to radar, undermining stealth, while only storing weapons internally limits what a fighter can bring to battle. 

On September 25, the Air Force publicly stated it had earlier that month awarded a contract to defense giant Northrop Grumman Defense Systems to start work on the Stand-in Attack Weapon, or “SiAW.” The contract, with a value of up to $705 million, is for “an advanced air-to-surface missile providing stand-in platforms the ability to rapidly strike a wide variety of targets.”

“Air-to-surface” encompasses virtually everything not in the sky or orbit as a potential target, and given that the F-35 is designed to fight at sea as well as over land, it includes ships, tanks, buildings, and anything else below. Northrop Grumman, in a September 25 release, emphasized that the SiAW will “provide strike capability to defeat rapidly relocatable targets as part of an enemy’s anti-access/area denial environment.”

“Anti-access/area denial” is modern military jargon for an old concept. The terms essentially mean weapons that will attack and threaten to destroy planes, boats, and other enemies that move too close to the defenses. Because weapon technologies adapt, the military uses a catch-all term, though some specific examples are useful for understanding these techniques. On land and in the sea, mines are a kind of denial technology, as they threaten anyone attempting passage with an abrupt and explosive end. For aircraft, anti-air missiles can deny aircraft safe flight, as can jammers that interfere with sensors like radar or GPS. For marines advancing up a beach, or soldiers fighting through a forest, artillery fire is an attempt to deny access. Anti-ship missiles, like their anti-air counterparts, threaten any ship that advances within range, promising a watery death should they hit a vulnerable enough spot.

In peacetime, these defenses serve as a warning, as an ominous threat of what a country could threaten should hostilities break out. Should the United States go to war against a country with such defenses, it will want to destroy as many of them as it can, while allowing its own forces to get close enough. This is where a weapon like the SiAW comes into play. 

The SiAW is designed to be carried internally by the F-35, Janes reports. That means the stealth fighters can use the weapon without compromising their stealth, as weapons carried externally make the planes more visible on radar. Stealth is largely a material and structural technology, where the specific shape and texture of a plane are used to minimize how few radio waves are reflected back towards the radar that emitted them. Earlier in September, the efficacy of this stealth was clearly on display, after an F-35B pilot ejected and the Marine Corps turned to the public for help tracking down the missing plane.

Stealth ensures that the F-35s can get closer to their targets than they would without it. Air and Space Forces Magazine reports that the Air Force is setting the targets for the SiAW as air defense radars, command posts, ballistic and cruise missile launchers, GPS jamming systems, anti-satellite systems, and “other high-value or fleeting targets.”  Destroying any and all of those targets make it easier for other parts of the military to advance and survive, including jets with more weapons that aren’t stealthy. 

The Air Force has declined to give the range for the new SiAW weapon, though the operating assumption is that it will be longer range than the High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM) air-to-surface missiles in use today. Those missiles have a stated range of over 30 miles. The Air Force aims to have the SiAW at an initial operational capability by 2026; it expects to buy 400 of the missiles by 2028, with up to 3,000 eventually.

Should the missile deliver as promised, it will allow F-35s to launch attacks on targets at useful ranges, giving the military more options than just long-range cruise missiles to destroy important targets in advance of an assault. Unlike cruise missiles, SiAWs fired from F-35s or other planes will be able to catch more mobile vehicles, ensuring that if there’s a weapon that can be relocated, the missile is a tool to destroy it before it disappears.

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A crewed submarine is, at its most elemental level, a machine designed to preserve a bubble of air underwater and keep the rest of the ocean out. The complexities of submarine design— everything from propulsion to sensors to controls—have to be designed with this overriding purpose in mind. Because the whole of the submarine needs to maintain this careful containment at all times, what might otherwise be a nothing part, like a deck drain assembly, is crucial to the longer-term viability of the submarine. On September 25, shipbuilders General Dynamics Electric Boat, along with Huntington Ingalls Industries, announced that they had successfully used additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, to create a part for the Virginia-class submarine Oklahoma.

The part printed is a deck-drain, and it was manufactured on land out of copper-nickel. The part still needs some machining to refine it before it is installed, but the printing of a replacement piece is a big step forward towards easier, on-demand parts for submarine repair in the future.

“This collaborative project leverages authorizations made by the Navy that streamline requirements for low-risk additive manufacturing parts. It is possible due to the foresight and longer-term development efforts by our engineers to deploy additive manufacturing marine alloys for shipbuilding,” said Dave Bolcar in a release. Bolcar is the vice president of engineering and design at the Newport News Shipyard, the Huntington Ingalls Industries division that worked on the 3D printed part.

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

Additive manufacturing has appeal and utility across the hobbyist, commercial, and industrial spaces for a host of reasons. The ability to rapidly prototype parts, and then produce physical approximations to refine, is useful. It’s still a major step to go from exploring a part through a printed design to a printed part being up to the task required of a completed piece.

Printing parts on land for repair allows naval suppliers to prove the technology is workable, and apply it to immediate needs.

On a ship, and on a submarine more than most other kinds of ships, every part needs to fit precisely, within set parameters so that the vessel can continue to remain watertight and airtight where it needs to be. Ships are also deeply constrained in space on board, so the availability of spare parts stockpiled for emergency or even just routine repair is finite and based on estimates before vessels embark. Onboard printers would allow repair underway, while printers at ports can ensure new parts are ready for docked vessels.

Just print it out

The Navy operates in confined spaces and on a global stage. With bases and ports scattered across the globe, managing the resupply of ships and planes means overseeing supply chains in places as far apart as Spain and Guam, and ports in-between. For the past decade, the US Navy has explored 3D printing as a way to ease that logistical load.

The premise of 3D printing is straightforward. If the raw material for many parts can be stored in undifferentiated form, and then produced as needed for repairs, that raw material and printer becomes far more flexible than having already assembled pieces stockpiled. Printers can produce errors in manufacturing, so the Navy has spent years working on how to create stuff with a minimum of error.

“We’re at the front end of this. There are parts that require airworthiness for approval and the non-air worthiness, the non-airworthiness are easier to do,” Lieutenant General Steven Rudder of the Marine Corps told USNI News in 2018. “You’re going to see additive manufacturing, both in industry and in our FRC’s [Fleet Readiness Center]. The Air Force is ahead of us on metal printing; you’re going to see that really take off. That’s just at the beginning of stages.”

The Navy also explored not just having 3D printers at ports of call, but also having printers onboard ships, ready to print spare parts while under way. 

In 2021, the Navy tested a large, almost room-sized, 3D printer from Xerox, which could create parts in aluminum at a base on land. In 2022, the Navy also installed an identical printer on board the USS Essex, a ship that in any other navy would count as a full-sized aircraft carrier, but for the US is classified as a Landing Helicopter Dock. The parallel trials of printers at sea and on land was to see if the conditions of being on the ocean, with the humidity and rocking waves, would produce different results than the same parts made on land. (Xerox ultimately sold its 3D printing division to another company in the additive manufacturing space.)

When it comes to printing parts for the submarine, space is already at a premium, even more so than on a surface vessel. Making the drain parts by additive manufacturing shows that, while submarines may not be able to print their own parts, the small, mundane yet vital pieces needed for ship operation can still be made to order. Every part of a ship seems mundane until it doesn’t work and needs to be replaced, and then suddenly it becomes crucial.

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Aerospace companies that create a new stealth aircraft as their signature achievement face a conundrum. They put years if not decades of work into its aerodynamic and industrial design and its state-of-the-art technology, creating a machine that carries terrible destructive power. And after all that, the contours of the design can be public but the details must remain somewhat obscured. This is true especially when it comes to the physical shape of the plane itself, as the exterior form of a stealth plane is part of what makes stealth possible. All of these concerns made it an unexpected surprise, and a planespotter’s delight, when the United States Air Force released two new photos of the stealthy B-21 Raider on September 12.

On the military media repository platform DVIDS (Defense Visual Information Distribution Service), the new photos are dated July 31. One shows the Raider, head-on, in the hangar. The other has the Raider outside the hangar, at sunset.

The details revealed in the photographs are remarkable, but it is important to start with what is left out of these images. The rear of the bomber, and especially the exhaust ports, are not visible. Stealth, as a family of technologies, is primarily designed to hide aircraft from detection by refracted radar waves. Jet engines, full of spinning blades at a sharp angle to the world, are refractive, so in stealth design the turbines are tucked away behind inlets. Exhaust ports, while not as radar-revelatory, will show up on sensors that look for infrared and heat. Missiles that seek heat are decades old, and looking for exhaust is one tried and true way to see what a low-visibility design on radar obscures.

The available angles on the B-21, including these new photographs as well as photos from the initial flashy December roll-out, all largely serve to obscure the control surfaces on the Raider’s flying wing body. One photo taken March 7 offers an angle somewhat from above, but that photo is at a much lower resolution than the others.

But while it’s easy to focus on what the new photos of the Raider don’t show, what’s at least as compelling is the new evidence contained in these latest releases. Tyler Rogoway of The War Zone focused in part on the “ejection hatch panels.” He observed: “They sit far back and are another indicator of just how limited the pilots’ visibility will likely be in this aircraft. They also speak to the challenge that is judging the proportions on the alien-like B-21. The cockpit is either very small or very tall. We are leaning toward the former. We also see the aerial refueling markings peeking out from atop the aircraft’s bulged spine.” (The War Zone is owned by Recurrent Ventures, PopSci’s parent company.)

Other hidden gems abound, and Rogoway’s analysis offers insight. One that is pertinent to future observations of the bomber is that the B-21 on display, serial number 0001, has a large probe affixed to it. This will collect data in-flight for testing purposes, whenever the Raider makes its first test flight later this year.

In addition to the two photos released by the Air Force on September 12, Northrop Grumman, makers of the B-21, released a photo of the bomber on the same day. This photo was paired with an announcement that the Raider is undergoing engine runs, part of the testing to ensure that the plane’s power plant works as intended in the aircraft. 

“Engine testing is an essential milestone for the program as the world’s first sixth-generation aircraft continues on the path to flight test,” reads the Northrop Grumman announcement. “The B-21’s first flight will remain a data driven event that is monitored by Northrop Grumman and the United States Air Force.”

Airplane generations vary depending on the exact counting, but it is important to note that the B-21 is not just a stealth flying wing, but a successor stealth flying wing to the B-2 Spirit. In more than most senses, this means the plane represents an era shift in design, even as it draws from similar lessons about form.

Rogoway notes that the quarter view of the Raider reveals “Just how deeply ‘buried’ the Raider’s [engine] inlets — one of the most exotic and challenging low-observable features of the design — truly are.” He added: “This is a good reminder of just how the Raider will conceal its engine inlets from adversary radars, especially those emitting from any aspect below the aircraft.”

Until the Air Force flies the B-21 for the first time, analysis and understanding of the plane will come in bits and pieces as new filtered images trickle out. That is, unless details about the bomber end up leaked to the War Thunder forums, as has already happened with classified documents about two different military aircraft this month.

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A white-hulled MQ-4C Triton accelerated down a runway in Guam before lifting off into dark clouds. The video, captured August 18 by the US Navy, was recorded to mark a modest milestone in the drone program. The Navy’s Tritons have now reached “initial operating capability,” meaning that enough aircraft, spare parts, and crew are available to use the vehicles as intended. The Triton, the Navy’s version of the RQ-4 Global Hawk flown by the Air Force since 2001, is an eye in the sky, tasked with watching the ocean.

Located over 3,700 miles west from Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and just over 1,800 miles east from the coast of China, Guam is a centerpiece literally and figuratively in the plans and ability of the United States to operate in the Pacific Ocean. The Triton is a flying sensor platform, built for long endurance and maritime domain awareness, or watching and tracking action on the sea below. The Navy’s P-8 Poseidon, a crewed maritime surveillance plane based on the Boeing 737 airline airframe, flies with a nine-person team on board. Being able to have drones perform some of this type of observation, with fresh human crews on the ground swapping out multiple times mid-flight, means that the Navy can maintain surveillance for an extended time.

It takes a team of five to operate the Triton. That means someone to manage the drone’s flight, two people to manage its different sets of sensors, one person in charge of the signals it sends and collects, and a coordinator in charge of the whole operation. The Triton has a wingspan of 130 feet, meaning that its wings stretch wider than those on a 737. It flies at a cruising cruising speed of about 368 mph.

[Related: The US military’s tiniest drone feels like it flew straight out of a sci-fi film]

“We have been successfully operating Triton in Guam for several years, and now we have expanded this platform’s capabilities far beyond those it started with,” said Josh Guerre, MQ-4C Triton program manager, in a release.

Two Tritons were first deployed to Guam, as part of the Navy’s Unmanned Patrol Squad 19 (shortened to VUP-19), in January 2020 through October 2022. That time allowed for significant observations to be made in how the drones operated, and meant that when the Navy redeployed them this summer to Guam, the drones’ sensors had received a major upgrade. 

Those sensors are likely the signals intelligence (SIGINT) sensor upgrades boasted about earlier by Triton maker Northrop Grumman: “Triton Multi-INT gets its name from the addition of two new SIGINT sensors: one that gathers electronic intelligence and one that gathers communications intelligence. We’ve also removed an older electronic support measures sensor and installed a new, more capable version of the electro-optical infrared sensor flying on Triton today, said Rob Zmarzlak, chief engineer for Northrop Grumman’s Autonomous ISR and Targeting Programs, in a release.

One of the distinct challenges of watching for activity on the ocean, as compared to scanning for action on the ground, is that the vast and largely uniform expanse of the sea can be especially devoid of human activity, outside of major sea lanes. By listening for the signals given off from boats and ships, the Triton can more reliably find useful activity onto which it can train its cameras.

Northrop Grumman boasts that the Triton can, from an altitude of 50,000 feet and on a mission lasting 24 hours, survey four million nautical miles. That’s a major delivery on the promise of the Triton, which first flew in 2013. As Popular Science said at the time, its high altitude flights will allow it to take in “a 2,000-nautical-mile view of the ocean in every direction” and then “it will be able to tell a container ship from a Chinese frigate from a surfacing Russian submarine–from up to 2,000 nautical miles away (we felt that point was worth stressing here). Triton’s strengthened airframe, augmented with de-icing technology, will then allow it to rapidly descend and ascend, so it can swoop in for a closer look at vessels of particular interest.”

Even as the Navy prepares for Tritons to become a regular part of operations, USNI News reports that the Navy is looking to halt the production of Tritons at just 27 total units, down from the original plan of 70. The Triton is useful for extensive watching of the sea, especially in conjunction with other tools, but it comes with a serious price tag. For 2022, the unit cost of each Triton was roughly $141 million.  Even as the US Navy scales down the number of Tritons it is looking to buy and maintain, Australia is looking to expand the number of Tritons it will use and operate from three to four.

Watch the Triton’s ascent in Guam below:

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At the DSEI international arms show held in London earlier this month, German defense company FFG showed off a tank-like vehicle it had already sent to Ukraine. The Mine Clearing Tank, or MCT, is a tracked and armored vehicle, based on the WISENT 1 armored platform, designed specifically to clear minefields and protect the vehicle’s crew while doing so. As Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine continues well into its second year, vehicles like this one show both what the present need there is, and what tools may ultimately be required for Ukraine to reclaim Russian-occupied territory.

The current shape of the war in Ukraine is largely determined by minefields, trenches, and artillery. Russia holds long defensive lines, where mines guard the approaches to trenches, and trenches protect soldiers as they shoot at people and vehicles. Artillery, in turn, allows Russian forces to strike at Ukrainian forces from behind these defensive lines, making both assault and getting ready for assault difficult. This style of fortification is hardly unique; it’s been a feature of modern trench warfare since at least World War I. 

Getting through defensive positions is a hard task. On September 20, the German Ministry of Defense posted a list of the equipment it has so far sent to Ukraine. The section on “Military Engineering Capabilities” covers an extensive range of tools designed to clear minefields. It includes eight mine-clearing tanks of the WISENT 1 variety, 11 mine plows that can go on Ukraine’s Soviet-pattern T-72 tanks, three remote-controlled mine-clearing robots, 12 Ahlmann backhoe loaders designed for mine clearing, and the material needed for explosive ordnance disposal.

The MCT WISENT 1 weighs 44.5 tons, a weight that includes its heavy armor, crew protection features, and the powerful engines it needs to lift and move the vehicle’s mine-clearing plow. The plow itself weighs 3.5 tons, and is wider than the vehicle itself.

“During the clearing operation, the mines are lifted out of the ground and diverted via the mine clearing shield to both sides of the lane, where they are later neutralized by EOD forces. If mines explode, ‘only’ the mine clearance equipment will be damaged. If mines slip through and detonate under the vehicle, the crew is protected from serious injuries,” reports Gerhard Heiming for European Security & Technology.

One of the protections for crew are anti-mine seats, designed to divert the energy from blasts away from the occupants. The role of a mine-clearing vehicle is, after all, to drive a path through a minefield, dislodging explosives explicitly placed to prevent this from happening. As the MCT WISENT 1 clears a path, it can also mark the lane it has cleared.

Enemy mine

Mines as a weapon are designed to make passage difficult, but not impossible. What makes mines so effective is that many of the techniques to clear them, and do so thoroughly, are slow, tedious, time-consuming tasks, often undertaken by soldiers with hand tools. 

“The dragon’s teeth of this war are land mines, sometimes rated the most devilish defense weapons man ever devised,” opens How Axis Land Mines Work, a story from the April 1944 issue of Popular Science. “Cheap to make, light to transport, and easy to install, it is as hard to find as a sniper, as dangerous to disarm as a commando. To cope with it, the Army Engineers have developed a corps of specialists who have one of the most nerve-wracking assignments in the book.”

The story goes on to to detail anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, which are the two categories broadly in use today. With different explosive payloads and pressure triggers, the work of min-clearing is about ensuring all the mines are swept aside, so dismounted soldiers and troops in trucks alike can have safe passage through a cleared route. 

The MCT WISENT 1 builds upon lessons and technologies for mine-clearing first developed and used at scale in World War II. Even before the 2022 invasion by Russia, Ukraine had a massive mine-clearing operation, working on disposing of explosives left from World War II through to the 2014-2022 Donbass war. The peacetime work of mine clearing can be thorough and slow.

For an army on the move, and looking to break through enemy lines and attack the less-well-defended points beyond the front, the ability of an armored mine-sweeper to clear a lane can be enough to shift the tide of battle, and with it perhaps a stalled front.

The post This massive armored vehicle has a giant plow for clearing Russian mines appeared first on Popular Science.

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For roughly 24 hours, between the afternoon of September 17 and the evening of September 18, the United States Marine Corps couldn’t find one of its F-35B stealth fighter jets. The pilot had ejected, but it took the military a spell to find the jet, and in the process it put out a call for the public to keep their eyes peeled for the plane. Joint Base Charleston confirmed Monday evening that a debris field was found two hours northeast of the base, believed to be the crashed plane. 

So how does the military lose a stealth jet? That’s the $100-million question. F-35 unit prices vary by model and the lot in which they are purchased; recent F-35B purchases have cost a high of $108 million per jet and a low of $78.3 million. On the other hand, F-35A models, which the Air Force fly, cost around $69.9 million now, though older lots cost up to $89.2 million. 

The nature of stealth helps explain how it’s possible, in 2023, for the Department of Defense to lose track of one of its own jets, prompting a call for citizens to help search. Stealth is a technology designed to hide planes from radar, so that stealth fighters and bombers can attack buildings, ships, vehicles, and other targets in war with less fear of getting detected and shot down by enemy aircraft and anti-air missiles. To achieve this sort of radar-invisibility, stealth planes have physical shapes that reduce radar signature, along with special coatings that dampen the reflectivity of radio waves.

Because the stealth characteristics are built into jets like the F-35 series, as well as the F-22 fighter, and the B-2 and B-21 bombers, they are just harder for radars to track. One way to keep track of where planes are is a transponder, which sends out a signal announcing the aircraft’s location. Transponders are useful for commercial and military aircraft, and required for almost all flights in US skies, as they allow aircraft to avoid each other. The Washington Post reported that the F-35B’s transponder was not working at the time the pilot ejected, leading the military to ask the public for help locating the plane.

Another way to make stealth jets more visible, and to conceal the true ability of their radar-avoiding shape, is to include high-radar-visibility augmentation, as is sometimes done at air shows. The military sometimes augments the F-35′s cross-section during public or semi-public flights so they will look different on a radar from how it would during an actual combat mission, retired Air Force General Hawk Carlisle told Defense News.

Public transponder records, as reported by the War Zone (which is owned by PopSci’s parent company, Recurrent), show the search pattern the Air Force used to try to locate the lost F-35B before finding the debris field. If other techniques were used to find the plane beyond visual search, it is likely the military will want to keep those secret, as details about how to find a stealth plane could undermine the massive investment already put into stealth jets.

Even if it briefly created a flurry of media attention, the case of the temporarily missing F-35B is just the latest incident of the US military losing control of something powerful and important. Here are several others.

Lost drones

For as long as the military has operated drones, some of those drones have gotten lost. Both of these instances have some similarity to this week’s wild F-35 hunt.

A plane called the Kettering Bug was built during World War I as an “aerial torpedo,” or a flying uncrewed bomb that would, in the fixed trench combat of the time, travel a set distance and then shed its wings to crash into an enemy position with explosive force. The war ended before the Bug could see action, but this predecessor of both drones and cruise missiles was tested as a secret weapon in the United States. 

On October 4, 1918, the biplane bomb took off, and then flew off track. The US Army searched the area near its Dayton, Ohio launch site, asking the public if they had seen a missing plane. Several of the witnesses reported what appeared to be a plane with a drunk pilot, and the Army went along with those stories, saying the pilot had jumped out and was being treated. The plane, as an uncrewed weapon, had no human pilot on board. Rather than reveal the secret weapon, the Army let witnesses believe they had seen something other than the aerial torpedo. The Army found the wreckage of the Bug, recovered its reusable mechanical parts, and burned the wrecked fuselage on the spot.

Almost a century later in 2017, the US Army lost an RQ-7B Shadow drone, which was launched from a base in southern Arizona on January 31, then discovered over a week later on February 9, having crashed into a tree outside of Denver. The Shadow drone has a stated range of under 80 miles, though that range is how far it can fly while remaining in contact with the ground station used by human operators. Shadow drones can also fly for nine hours, with a cruising speed of 81 mph, so the 630-mile journey was within the distance the drone could technically cover. While drones like the Shadow are programmed to search for lost communications signals, autonomous flight features mean that a failure to connect can lead to unusual journeys, like the one the Shadow took.

Lost jets

The F-35B that went missing in South Carolina is just the latest such plane to crash and require search and recovery. In November 2021, a British F-35B operating from the HMS Queen Elizabeth crashed into the Mediterranean. The pilot ejected safely, but the sunken stealth jet, once found, required a maritime salvage operation. 

Then, in January 2022, the US Navy lost an F-35C in the South China Sea. The plane approached too low on a landing, skidded across the deck, and then fell off the deck’s edge into the ocean after the pilot had ejected. The incident injured seven sailors, including the pilot.  The sunken stealth jet had to be recovered from a depth of 12,400 feet, using a specialized remotely operated vessel.

While in both cases these crashes featured witnesses in the general vicinity who knew where the lost planes ended up, the recovery took on a similar sense of importance, as even a crashed and sunken jet could reveal crucial details of the aircraft’s design and operation to another country, had one of them gotten there first.

Lost nukes

While jets are often the most expensive piece of hardware lost in a crash, there’s also the cargo to consider. In February 1958, the US Air Force lost a Mark 15 thermonuclear bomb off the coast of Tybee Island, Georgia, following a mid-air collision with an F-86 fighter jet. To date, the bomb has not yet been found in its watery resting place, despite extensive searching by the US Navy for the months after the incident.

In January 1961, a B-52 bomber transporting two nuclear bombs started to fall apart in the sky above North Carolina. The two bombs crashed into the ground, either as part of the plane or released independently (accounts vary), and neither bomb detonated. But both bombs did come close to detonation, as several safety triggers were activated in the fall, and the whole incident prompted a change to how easy it was to arm US nuclear bombs.

The incident over North Carolina was just one of several nuclear near-misses that came from the transport and failure of systems around US nuclear bombs. In January 1966, a US bomber collided with the tanker refueling it above the village of Palomares in Spain, releasing one nuclear weapon into the sea and three onto land, where two of them cracked open and dispersed the bomb’s plutonium into the wind. The three bombs on land were found and recovered quickly, and the fourth bomb was recovered from the sea after an extensive underwater salvage operation. Cleanup work on the site where the bombs scattered plutonium continued into the 2010s.

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On September 5, Swedish defense giant Saab announced a new feature for its existing camouflage netting. This netting is thrown over military positions, like artillery equipment or spots where soldiers are waiting in a forest, to conceal them from detection by hostile forces. Modern nettings are designed to hide not just the appearance of what’s underneath, but the radar signatures and radio signals, too, although that can make sending out communications hard. Saab is taking a stab at solving that problem with the “Frequency Selective Surface technology” for its Barracuda Ultra-lightweight Camouflage Screen. The netting, as promised, lets people underneath send out low-frequency radio signals, while preventing them from being seen on radar.

Camouflage is the technique of hiding in war. Netting is among the most basic forms, and it works along the same general principle as kids making a blanket fort in the living room—only instead of an opaque sheet concealing both occupants and outsiders from each other, the looser material of the netting, along with the way fabric and other material is hung off it, allows those inside to look out, and watch without being seen.

Initial camouflage netting was a response to visual observation by eyes and cameras, using the visual light spectrum. Radar, which sends out radio waves and then discerns where objects are located by how those radio waves are reflected back, can see through netting designed only to conceal visually. Infrared cameras, looking at heat instead of reflected visible light, can also see through netting.

Multispectral approaches

Newer solutions designed to take these sensors into account are called multispectral camouflage netting.

“Multispectral camouflage is a counter-surveillance technique to conceal [an] object from detection along several waverange of the electromagnetic spectrum,” reads a NATO study of multispectral nets published in 2020. “Traditionally, military camouflage has been designed to conceal an object in the visible spectrum. Multi-spectral camouflage advances this capability by contra measure to detection methods in the infrared and radar domains.”

Hiding from sensors is an evolving science—part of the constant interplay between defensive and offensive tactics and tools in military science. Militaries have interests in developing both better ways to conceal their own forces, and tools for revealing hidden enemies.

One major limit of existing multispectral netting is that, while it can protect people hiding underneath it from detection, the same netting interferes with communications sent out. Soldiers waiting in ambush, or artillery crews concealed and waiting to strike, would prefer to be in communication with their allies. Having to leave the netting to relay commands undermines the point of the netting itself.

Here’s where Saab’s solution comes into play. “Thanks to our expertise within signature management, we are taking camouflage to the next level with this novel feature. It changes how soldiers communicate while keeping multispectral protection, and so introduces a new era of tactical communication flexibility, offering unparalleled capabilities,” Henning Robach, head of Saab’s business unit Barracuda, said in a release.

To facilitate this communication, the Frequency Selective Surface technology “allows selected radio frequencies to pass easily either way through the camouflage net, while protecting against the higher frequencies of electromagnetic waves used by radar systems.”

Those facilitated frequencies could still be detected, but they represent a much less likely slice of the electromagnetic spectrum for foes to monitor, and it rules out entire categories of other sensors used today. The point of camouflage is not perfect concealment, though that certainly would be nice. What it needs to do to work in battle is confound enemies, confusing them about where the threat really is, and thus encourage foes to make mistakes or target incorrectly.

The roots of camouflage

While camouflage as a technique is so ancient it is regularly found in nature, the word itself was so new to English that Popular Science ran an article in August 1917 entitled “A New French War Word Which Means “Fooling the Enemy.””

The term gained familiarity and widespread use thanks to the hurdles of describing combat in World War I. (The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the first use of the word that it knows about occurred in the 1880s, and traces its first usage in a military context to around 1915 or 1917.) Here’s Popular Science on the popularization of the term.

“Since the war started the Popular Science Monthly has published photographs of big British and French field pieces covered with shrubbery, railway trains ‘painted out’ of the landscape, and all kinds of devices to hide the guns, trains, and the roads from the eyes of enemy aircraft,” read the article. “Until recently there was no one word in any language to explain this war trick. Sometimes a whole paragraph was required to explain this military practice. Hereafter one word, a French word, will save all this needless writing and reading. Camouflage is the new word, and it means “fooling the enemy.”

The article went on to describe a specific use of camouflage, wherein a dead horse was dragged out of the no-man’s-land between British and German trenches, and then replaced by an imitation horse with a soldier inside, allowing him to spy on and fire at the enemy from what had been just a grim feature of the terrain.

In July 1941, before the United States had formally entered World War II, Popular Science covered the work of camouflaging industrial plants from the possibility of bombing. A July 1944 story on artillery illustrated a 4.5-inch gun dug into a foxhole and covered with netting. In 1957, Popular Science showcased a Matador cruise missile under camouflage netting, concealing the weapon and its 50 kiloton nuclear warhead (more potent than both atomic bombs dropped on Japan combined). And an August 2001 story on hyperspectral imaging titled “Nowhere to Hide” showcased how satellites could see through camouflage, thanks to the different wavelengths at which actual vegetation and decoys reflected light. 

At present, it’s the tension between powerful sensors and advanced concealment techniques that make multispectral camouflage important for militaries. In the meantime, ensuring that the people under the netting can communicate with allies outside of it is a boon.

Watch a video about Saab’s camouflage netting below:

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On August 31, the Air Force announced that a California company called Oklo would design, construct, own, and operate a micro nuclear reactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. The contract will potentially run for 30 years, with the reactor intended to go online in 2027 and produce energy through the duration of the contract. Should the reactor prove successful, the hope is that it will allow other Air Force bases to rely on modular miniature reactors to augment their existing power supply, lessening reliance on civilian energy grids and increasing the resiliency of air bases.

Located less than two degrees south of the Arctic Circle, Eielson may appear remote on maps centered on the continental United States, but its northern location allows it to loom over the Pacific Ocean. A full operational squadron of F-35A stealth jet fighters are based at Eielson, alongside KC-135 jet tankers that offer air refueling. As the Department of Defense orients towards readiness for any conflict with what it describes as the “pacing challenge” of China, the ability to reliably get aircraft into the sky quickly and reliably extends to ensuring that bases can have electrical power at all times.

“If you look at what installations provide, they deliver sorties. At Eielson Air Force base they deliver sorties for F-35 aircraft that are stationed there,” Ravi I. Chaudhary, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Energy, Installations, and Environment, tells Popular Science via Zoom. “But if you think about all that goes with that, you’ve got ground equipment that needs powering. You’ve got fuel systems that run on power. You’ve got base operations that run on power. You’ve got maintenance facilities that run on power, and that all increases draw.”

And it’s not just maintenance facilities that need power, Chaudhary points out; the base also houses communities that live there, go to school there, and shop at places like the commissary.

While the commissary may not be the most immediately necessary part of base operations, ensuring that there’s backup power to send the planes into the air, and take care of families while the fighters are away, is an important part of base functioning. 

But in the event that the base needs more power, or an independent backup source, bases often turn to diesel generators. Those are reliable, but come with their own logistical obligations, for supplying and maintaining diesel generators, to say nothing of the carbon impact. As a promotional video for the Eielson micro-reactor project notes, the military is “the nation’s largest single energy consumer,” which understates the outsized role the US military has as a producer of greenhouse gasses and carbon emissions. 

This need is where the idea of a small nuclear reactor comes into play.

“When you have a core micro reactor source that can provide independent clean energy to the installation, that’s a huge force multiplier for you because then you don’t have to rely on more vulnerable commercial grids,” says Chaudhary. These reactors would facilitate a strategy Chaudhary called “islanding,” where “you take that insulation, you sequester it from the local power grid, and you execute operations, get your sorties out of town and deploy.”

The quest for a modular, base-scale nuclear reactor is almost as old as the Air Force itself. In the 1950s, the US Army explored the idea of powering bases with Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, or SL-1. In January 1961, SL-1 tragically and fatally exploded, killing three operators. The Navy, meanwhile, successfully continues to use nuclear reactor power plants on board some of its ships and submarines.

In this case, for its Eielson reactor, the Air Force and Oklo are drawing on decades of innovation, improvement, and refined safety processes since then, to create a liquid-metal cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor that’s designed to be self-cooling when or if it fails.

And importantly, the Air Force is starting small. The announced program is to design just a five megawatt reactor, and then scale up the technology once that works. It’s a far cry from the base’s existing coal and oil power plant, which generates over 33 megawatts. Adding five megawatts to that grid is at present an augmentation of what already exists, but one that could make the islanding strategy possible.

If a base can function as an island, that means attacks on an associated civilian grid can’t prevent the base from operating. This works for attacks with conventional weapons, like bombs and missiles, and it should work too for attempts to sabotage the grid through the internet, like with a cyber attack. Nuclear attack could still disrupt a grid, to say nothing of the resulting concurrent deaths, but Chaudhary sees base resilience as its own kind of further deterrent action against such threats.

“We’ve recognized in our national defense strategy that strong resilient infrastructure can be a critical deterrent,” says Chaudhary. “Our energy is gonna be the margin of victory.”

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On September 6, the Department of Defense announced $175 million in military aid to Ukraine. Included in this drawdown of existing US military equipment is “120mm depleted uranium tank ammunition for Abrams tanks,” making the United States the second country after the United Kingdom to not just supply Ukraine with tanks (due mid-September), but with depleted uranium ammunition for them. The ammunition, derived from nuclear refining processes, has immediate military applications as well as potential health impacts as an environmental pollutant after it’s been expended. 

The drawdown fact sheet includes the Abrams ammunition alongside rockets for HIMARS launchers, anti-tank missiles, artillery rounds, and over 3 million bullets for small arms (rifles and the like). It’s a list that largely matches the state of the war, where demolition munitions are paired with weapons designed to crack open enemy armor, and it reflects Ukraine’s longer goal of retaking territory occupied and held by Russia since the February 2022 invasion.

“We want to make sure that Ukraine has what it needs not only to succeed in the counteroffensive but has what it needs for the long term to make sure that it has a strong deterrent, strong defense capacity so that, in the future, aggressions like this don’t happen again,” said Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken ahead of his meeting in Kyiv with Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. 

Depleted uranium tank ammunition, built and designed for the Abrams tanks the United States is sending Ukraine, factors into this calculus. Depleted uranium has several properties that make it appealing as an ammunition. It is denser than lead, it sharpens in flight, and it is pyrophoric, meaning it ignites easily under high pressures and at temperatures between 1,100 and 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, which it reaches when fired as a round. All of this combines to create a dense, potent, incendiary armor-piercing round, useful for tanks fighting other tanks.

Where does depleted uranium come from?

The first time Popular Science covered depleted uranium, it was in 1953, as part of a story on nuclear reactors. Uranium occurs in nature, but to get to the most useful isotopes for weapons or reactors, uranium has to undergo a process of enrichment. As the useful isotopes get sifted out of the mix, the remainder is depleted. Some of this depleted uranium is used in breeder reactors to create plutonium. It can also be combined with plutonium oxide to create another kind of reactor fuel. 

Uranium naturally occurs in three kinds of isotopes: U-234, U-235, and U-238. Uranium for nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons is enriched, increasing its concentration of the U-235 isotope from a natural level of 0.72% by mass to “between 2% and 94% by mass,” according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The unenriched by-product is the depleted uranium, defined as having a U-235 concentration of less than 0.711 percent. “Typically,” states the IAEA, “the percentage concentration by weight of the uranium isotopes in DU used for military purposes is: U-238: 99.8%; U-235: 0.2%; and U-234: 0.001%.”

Finding other uses (besides reprocessing it to create more nuclear fuel) for depleted uranium took a while. In 1969, Popular Science called depleted uranium an “ugly duckling” with limited uses, saying, “Extra-heavy, it makes compact counterweights for aircraft linkage systems, and ballast for the launch-escape tower of the Apollo spacecraft.” It’s in ammunition and armor plating that depleted uranium really found its military use. In 1982, Popular Science included the Phalanx anti-missile system in a feature on smart missiles, emphasizing the weapons’ “radar-guided, computer-driven Gatling gun” that “blasts incoming missiles at a rate of 3,000 rounds a minute. Its ammunition is more potent than most because the core of each round is made of depleted uranium, the heaviest metal available, for maximum impact.” 

Tungsten is a heavier metal, but it’s specifically worse for armor-piercing projectiles because, as Scientific American noted in 2001, “Like its slightly denser cousin, tungsten, uranium can penetrate most heavy armor. But whereas tungsten projectiles become rounded at the tip upon impact, uranium shells burn away at the edges. This ‘self-sharpening’ helps them bore into armor.”

The Environmental Protection Agency records that the Department of Defense started making bullets and mortar shells out of depleted uranium in the 1970s, which was then expanded to making armor for tanks and weights for balancing aircraft. This was all possible, in part, because depleted uranium was an abundant byproduct of nuclear weapons production and nuclear reactors, making depleted uranium “plentiful and inexpensive.”

Cleanup costs and concerns

The EPA has a page on depleted uranium specifically because it can be an environmental hazard that requires cleanup. 

“Like the natural uranium ore, [Depleted Uranium] DU is radioactive. DU mainly emits alpha particle radiation. Alpha particles don’t have enough energy to go through skin. As a result, exposure to the outside of the body is not considered a serious hazard,” reads the fact sheet. “However, if DU is ingested or inhaled, it is a serious health hazard. Alpha particles directly affect living cells and can cause kidney damage.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency emphasizes that while depleted uranium poses some risk from radiation if ingested, the primary harms come from it being a heavy metal absorbed into a human digestive, circulatory, or respiratory system. The main way depleted uranium gets into such a system is through inhalation, when the uranium becomes aerosolized in the process of an explosion. That means the most immediate health effects will be borne by the people on the receiving end of weapons fire, but also on people who immediately go into a tank that’s been hit to try to rescue people inside.

After a battle, farmers returning to a field could possibly encounter depleted uranium in the environment, though the IAEA notes that the “risk will be lower because the re-suspended uranium particles combine with other material and increase in size and, therefore, a smaller fraction of the uranium inhaled will reach the deep part of the lungs. Another possible route of exposure is the inadvertent or deliberate ingestion of soil. For example, farmers working in a field where DU ammunitions were fired could inadvertently ingest small quantities of soil, while children sometimes deliberately eat soil.”

On June 23, 2022, compromised 30mm rounds of depleted uranium ammunition were found at the Tooele Army Depot in Utah. Cleaning up the rounds was the task of an Explosive Ordnance Demolition (EOD) team, who worked to separate the depleted uranium projectile from the explosive part of the round. In photographs of the work, the team can be seen wearing masks and protective gear to avoid ingestion and inhalation of uranium.

“Handling DU rounds is especially dangerous, so we take extra precautions and follow our procedures 100 percent,” said EOD technician Derin Creek at the time. “We have to ensure not only the safety of everyone in the area and my team, but to also protect the environment and eliminate radioactive contamination.” 

Depleted uranium rounds, like the tanks that will fire them, are part of Ukraine’s growing arsenal to repel the Russian forces that have invaded the country since February 2022. The ammunition will need to be handled with care, as the Tooele Depot demonstrates, and cleaning up afterwards will take some special attention, once the battlefields are no longer active. Ukraine has already received cluster munitions, which are a unique cleanup challenge, from the United States. With that hurdle already cast into the future, cleaning the same fields from depleted uranium should just be an incremental hardship on top of the long work of restoration that may come, when the war finally ends.  

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In late summer, in the deserts of southern New Mexico, a truck fired a rocket that then traveled 93 miles. Made and tested by defense giant Lockheed Martin, the Extended-Range Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System is a weapon with more than twice the range of the existing Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System used by the US and other countries. Should the rocket continue to perform well in tests, it could lead to a massive expansion of range and firepower for rocket artillery, especially the HIMARS system used by Ukraine. (The HIMARS in use by Ukraine have a range of 43 miles.)

Lockheed Martin announced the successful test on September 1. Its test took place at White Sands Missile Range, which is most famous for hosting the world’s first detonation of an atomic bomb, and also regularly hosts regular tests of weapons in its vast and open space. At 3,200 square miles, White Sands Missile Range is vast enough to be larger than Rhode Island. It’s a good place to see if weapons fly as expected in the open and unencumbered skies of a test range.

Test variables

To add realism to the test, “the rocket pod underwent Stockpile to Target Sequence (STS) testing. This effort simulates cumulative effects ER GMLRS will meet in the field between factory and launch for the life of the system and demonstrates durability of the missile and launch pod container,” Lockheed Martin stated in a release.

This kind of testing, which dates back at least to the 1960s, is designed to reflect real-world conditions. That can mean changes in temperature, jostling in transit along roads, rail, or air, humidity (or the lack thereof), and other such conditions encountered in the course of operations. A rocket that can perform in laboratory settings is a good start, but a rocket that will be mass produced and used in battle needs to work in the conditions it will actually encounter.

Lockheed Martin boasts it has already produced 60,000 rounds of the existing Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, with ongoing contracts to continue production. A second test of the new Extended Range GLMRS is expected in September, after which the Army may make the call to start including these longer-range rockets into its regular production of GMLRS.

In traditional artillery, explosive charges are loaded before the artillery round, allowing the crew to calibrate range on the fly. The blast from the charges propels the round. In rocket artillery, the explosive round comes with a rocket engine and guidance fins included, as one big unit. This allows for quick launch and long-range accuracy. The Extended-Range Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System that Lockheed Martin just tested is an example of rocket artillery—a self-propelled rocket that launches from a tube.

A range of options 

The HIMARS, or High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, is the expected launch platform for these extended range rockets, with testing of the integrated systems taking place at White Sands. With its existing regular guided rockets, HIMARS can hit targets up to 43 miles away. That’s well beyond the range of non-rocket artillery, which can be around 18 miles for towed howitzers. HIMARS proved especially crucial to the surprising success of Ukraine’s fall offensives in 2022. 

The arrival of HIMARS, and their judicious use against Russian leadership and ammunition depots, changed the contours of the war, and affected where the front lines settled. Now, as Ukraine’s spring offensive grinds through a long summer and dense Russian defenses over occupied Ukrainian territory, HIMARS still plays a role, but a less drastic one. 

There is another missile that Ukraine has sought to aid in its attempt to strike Russian forces far beyond their defensive lines. That’s the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, which has a maximum range of up to 186 miles. On August 7, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba again requested that the United States include ATACMS in its aid to the country. Larger than rockets, the ATACMS is a ballistic missile, and could be used to reach Russian targets not just in occupied Ukraine but deeper into Russia.

Russian forces have long since bombed the interior of Ukraine, and Ukraine has already launched attacks into Russia, like using local operatives and drones to destroy a parked bomber used for such bombings.

Whether or not the United States ultimately sends ATACMS to Ukraine, the existence of a longer-range rocket for the HIMARS—the ER GMLRS that just traveled 93 miles in the test—could still prove useful as a middle-range option between the two. 

If the war continues into 2024 or longer, which it shows all signs of doing, an artillery weapon that can outmatch and outrange other artillery could give new options to Ukraine, if the US were to provide it. In US use, too, having the extended range on HIMARS rockets would allow this type of ground-based artillery to play a more meaningful role in fights on islands, as might happen in any Pacific war.

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The Pacific Ocean is vast, strategically important, and soon to be patrolled by another navy with nuclear-powered submarines. Earlier this year, Australia finalized a deal with the United States and the United Kingdom to acquire its own nuclear-powered attack submarines, and to share in duties patrolling the Pacific. These submarines will be incorporated into the broader functions of Australia’s Royal Navy, where they will work alongside other vessels to track, monitor, and if need be to fight other submarines, especially those of other nations armed with nuclear missiles. 

But because the ocean is so massive, the Royal Australian Navy wants to make sure that its new submarines are guided in their search by fleets of autonomous boats and subs, also looking for the atomic needle in an aquatic haystack—enemy submarines armed with missiles carrying nuclear warheads. To that end, on August 21, Thales Australia announced it was developing an existing facility for a bid to incorporate autonomous technology into vessels that can support Australia’s new nuclear-powered fleet. This autonomous technology will be first developed around more conventional roles, like undersea mine clearing, though it is part of a broader picture for establishing nuclear deterrence in the Pacific.

To understand why this is a big deal, it’s important to look at two changed realities of power in the Pacific. The United States and the United Kingdom are allies of Australia, and have been for a long time. A big concern shared by these powers is what happens if tensions over the Pacific with China escalate into a shooting war.

Nuclear submarines

In March of this year, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom announced an agreement called AUKUS, a partnership between the three countries that will involve the development of new submarines, and shared submarine patrols in the Pacific. 

Australia has never developed nuclear weapons of its own, while the United States and the United Kingdom were the first and third countries, respectively, to test nuclear weapons. By basing American and British nuclear-powered (but not armed) submarines in Australia, the deal works to incorporate Australia into a shared concept of nuclear deterrence. In other words, the logic is that if Russia or China or any other nuclear-armed state were to try to threaten Australia with nuclear weapons, they’d be threatening the United States and the United Kingdom, too.

So while Australia is not a nuclear-armed country, it plans to host the submarine fleets of its nuclear-armed allies. None of these submarines are developed to launch nuclear missiles, but they are built to look for and hunt nuclear-armed submarines, and they carry conventional weapons like cruise missiles that can hit targets on land or at sea.

The role of autonomy

Here’s where the new complex announced by Thales comes in. The announcement from Thales says that the new facility will help the “development and integration of autonomous vessels in support of Australia’s nuclear deterrence capability.” 

Australia is one of many nations developing autonomous vessels for the sea. These types of self-navigating robots have important advantages over human-crewed ones. So long as they have power, they can continuously monitor the sea without a need to return to harbor or host a crew. Underwater, direct communication can be hard, so autonomous submarines are well suited to conducting long-lasting undersea patrols. And because the ocean is so truly massive, autonomous ships allow humans to monitor the sea over great distances, as robots do the hard work of sailing and surveying.

That makes autonomous ships useful for detecting and, depending on the sophistication of the given machine, tracking the ships and submarines of other navies. Notably, Australia’s 2025 plan for a “Warfare Innovation Navy” outlines possible roles for underwater autonomous vehicles, like scouting and assigning communications relays. The document also emphasizes that this is new technology, and Australia will work together with industry partners and allies on the “development of doctrine, concepts and tactics; standards and data sharing; test and evaluation; and common frameworks and capability maturity assessments.”

Mine-hunting ships

In the short term, Australia is looking to augment its adoption of nuclear-powered attack submarines by modernizing the rest of its Navy. This includes the replacement of its existing mine-hunting fleet. Mine-hunting is important but unglamorous work; sea mines are quick to place and persist until they’re detonated, defused, or naturally decay. Ensuring safe passage for naval vessels often means using smaller ships that scan beneath the sea using sonar to detect mines. Once found, the vessels then remain in place, and send out either tethered robots or human divers to defuse the mines. Australia has already retired two of its Huon-class minehunters, surface ships that can deploy robots and divers, and is set to replace the remaining four in its inventory. 

In its announcement, Thales emphasized the role it will play in replacing and developing the next-generation of minehunters. And tools developed to hunt mines can also help hunt subs with nuclear weapons on them. Both tasks involve locating underwater objects at a safe distance, and the stakes are much lower in figuring it out first with minehunting.

Developing new minehunters is likely an area where the Royal Australian Navy and industry will figure out significant parts of autonomy. Mine hunting and clearing is a task particularly suited towards naval robots, as mines are fixed targets, and the risk is primarily borne by the machine doing the defusing. Sensors developed to find and track mines, as well as communications tools that allow mine robots to communicate with command ships, could prove adaptable to other areas of naval patrol and warfare.

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On August 19, a Russian Tu-22M bomber was reportedly destroyed while it was parked in an airfield in northwestern Russia. Russia’s defense ministry, while downplaying the damage to the bomber, stated that it was hit by a copter-style drone. Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Directorate (GUR) has since claimed credit for the attack. The targeted bomber itself, a venerable Cold War design, has a long history, with its use against Ukraine only the latest chapter.

Evidence of the attack comes from multiple sources. The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence has been watching and offering public commentary on the war in Ukraine ever since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, and on August 22 the Ministry tweeted that the “Tu-22M3 BACKFIRE medium bomber of Russia’s Long Range Aviation [LRA] was highly likely destroyed at Soltsky-2 Airbase in Novgorod Oblast, 650 km away from Ukraine’s border.” (The Tu-22M’s NATO designation, or the term used by NATO countries to distinguish between Soviet-made planes, is “Backfire.”)

That strike, just over 400 miles away from Ukraine, is beyond the range of most Ukrainian weapons, unless someone were nearby to launch a close-in attack. It also illustrates the range that Russia’s bombers have been able to cover in order to attack people and places in Ukraine.

As the BBC notes, Russia has a fleet of 60 Tu-22M bombers, meaning the country can absorb the loss of one bomber while still operating at regular effectiveness. Nevertheless, photographic and satellite evidence indicate that despite claims from the Russian military otherwise, the bomber was almost certainly a complete loss. 

“Aside from showing the burned aircraft, the satellite images also show that Russia has since evacuated all other Backfires that had been parked at Soltsy-2” on August 16, reports The War Zone. (The War Zone is owned by Recurrent Ventures, PopSci’s parent company.) While the attack did not destroy all 10 bombers visible on satellite photography on August 16, it did destroy one, and likely forced the others to further interior air bases for safekeeping. 

Cold War origins

The Tu-22M is the second class of bomber under the Tu-22 name. The original Tu-22, named “Blinder” by NATO, was an early Cold War supersonic bomber, the first bomber capable of dashes at speeds faster than the speed of sound used by the Soviet Union. The design of the Blinder was underwhelming, with limited range and performance.  While the bomber saw use in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, in wars against foes with anti-aircraft missiles, Tu-22 Blinders were regularly shot down. Ukraine, which inherited its military equipment from the USSR, had Tu-22 Blinders in its inventory in 2000, though the plane has long since been retired with one left as a literal museum piece.

Meanwhile, the Tu-22M, while borrowing that “Tu-22” designation, is a wholly different design, meant to fill the same role. The Tu-22M has variable-geometry swept wings, meaning it can have the wings spread out wide for more efficient flight at subsonic speed, while the wings can fold back for reduced drag when flying supersonic, something like US-made F-14s. The Tu-22M’s original mission was to destroy US bombers and airfields.

While the first flight of a Tu-22M took place in 1969, the bombers were built up gradually over the 1970s and 1980s. Tu-22Ms saw use in the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and were largely mothballed in the early 1990s, as Russia’s strategic picture changed following the dissolution of the USSR.

The aircraft functions as a conventional bomber, the role the Tu-22M took in Afghanistan and presently performs above Ukraine. It was also built to be capable of carrying nuclear weapons, including both nuclear bombs and nuclear-armed cruise missiles. 

“The mission of the bomber, peripheral attack or intercontinental attack, became one of the most fiercely contested intelligence debates of the Cold War,” reports the Federation of American Scientists. “The key variable was the estimate of the range of the aircraft. A series of competitive analyses to determine the range produced divergent results and failed to end the debate.” 

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) initially assessed the Tu-22M’s range at up to 3,100 miles, while the CIA instead assumed 2,090 miles. Part of the complication is that the Tu-22M can be fitted with a probe to permit air refueling, though the probes are not permanently installed on the plane. Russian sources, since made public, attest to a range of 3,170 miles for the model that entered service in 1976, and 4,350 miles for the version that entered service in 1981. These ranges put the bomber, and its feared nuclear payload, squarely in the “intercontinental” range. Cruising speed for the Tu-22m is 560 mph, while maximum speed is 1,430 mph.

Modern warfare

Using the technology of the time, the Tu-22M is designed to evade defenses in two distinct ways. Supersonic speeds allow the bombers to strike fast and outpace missile interceptors. Subsonic flight, at low altitudes, is designed to let the bomber fly “below the radar,” or low enough to the ground that attempts to track it by radar would fail by getting extra feedback from the ground, confounding it. 

The first Tu-22M lost in combat occurred during Russia’s August 2008 five-day-long invasion of Georgia, the neighboring country in the Caucasus mountains bordering the Black Sea. While Russia handily bested its minuscule neighbor, the loss of any aircraft in combat was surprising. (The war ended with Russia’s military occupying and guaranteeing the breakaway of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two Georgian provinces.) 

At the time, the Russian military claimed that the Tu-22M lost was a reconnaissance variant. Former Russian air force chief Anatoly Kornukov told the Associated Press in 2008 that “Using the Tu-22 for a reconnaissance mission over Georgia was the same as using a microscope to drive nails.”

Above Ukraine in 2022, the Tu-22M was observed dumping unguided bombs on the then-Ukrainian held parts of Mauripol, the Black Sea city encircled by invading Russian forces as the military fought its way from the Donbas to Crimea. Carpet bombing is one of the oldest ways planes have been used in war, and because it does not deliver precision strikes, it is a reliable way to create swathes of indiscriminate desolation and brutality.

Beyond carpet bombing, the Tu-22M bombers were used as missile-launching platforms alongside other Russian bombers in the Long Range Aviation, part of the Russian Aerospace Forces. These bombers could hit targets deep from the frontlines, and importantly far from Ukrainian air defenses, by using their range and speed to launch anti-ship missiles against terrestrial targets, causing panic and destruction.

While capable of hitting targets at great range, a supersonic bomber built to penetrate Cold War air defenses being used to fire missiles and fly away is a far cry from its original purpose. Both Ukraine and Russia have struggled to establish control over the skies in the present conflict, leaving each side to adapt to new ways to ground the other’s aircraft.

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The B-2 Spirit bomber is an elegant machine for a war that never came. The flying wing stealth bomber, unveiled for the first time in 1988, represented the near-peak of the American Cold War defense industry. The first Spirit entered operational service in 1997, six years after the end of the Cold War, and only 21 of the bombers were ever built. Nineteen of those bombers remain in service (one was destroyed in a fire in 2008), and on August 9, Northrop Grumman announced the successful demonstration of transferring mission data from a ground station to an airborne bomber’s computer, thanks to new upgrades.

It is easy, given how futuristic the B-2’s appearance remains, to forget that the bomber was designed and built before the ubiquitous wireless data transfers of modern technology. Mission data, or information like where to fly and what targets to bomb, had to be inputted manually. B-2s are crewed by two pilots, and they fly long missions. An Air Force fact sheet lists the range as simply “intercontinental”; the Federation of American Scientists notes the range without refueling is 6,000 nautical miles (6,900 statute miles), and with air refueling the range of the B-2 can cover the entire globe. 

On such a long flight, or even a normal one, there’s always a chance a human pilot manually entering data will make an error.

The new technology is an “integrated airborne mission transfer,” which “delivers an advanced capability that enables the B-2 to complete a digital, machine-to-machine transfer of new missions received in flight directly into the aircraft,” Northrop Grumman stated in a release.

Machine-to-machine transfer is a big deal, especially ensuring that it is done securely. Every B-2 bomber is capable of carrying both conventional and nuclear weapons. Together with roughly half of the venerable B-52 bombers, these planes largely constitute the bomber third of the “nuclear triad,” a distribution of nuclear launch capabilities between ground-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles, and bombs dropped or missiles launched by planes. (US fighter jets are also capable of carrying some nuclear bombs, though these aren’t usually included in the discussion of the nuclear triad.)

Carrying nuclear weapons is a terrible responsibility, and films like Dr. Strangelove and Failsafe show what tragedy might happen when a nuclear bomber cannot receive new information in flight. The B-2’s manual system to input data mid-mission makes changes possible. But a human manually entering data can still make errors, even in the least stressful of contexts. A direct machine-to-machine update of mission data removes the possibility of human error from data entry, letting pilots devote their full attention to piloting and other tasks.

In addition, as Northrop Grumman told Air & Space Forces Magazine, this allows mission data to be uploaded to the bomber without interfering with any other computer processes, keeping flight and other critical systems secure. Introducing any connectivity can risk a possible exploit of that entry point by a malicious actor, though it appears the security concerns and risks are being taken seriously.

“We are providing the B-2 with the capabilities to communicate and operate in advanced battle management systems and the joint all-domain command and control environment, keeping B-2 ahead of evolving threats,” said Nikki Kodama, vice president and B-2 program manager, Northrop Grumman in a release.

Advanced Battle Management and Joint All Domain are military concepts, heavily pursued by the Pentagon in recent years, that make it so many different tools, from fighter squadrons to bombers to ships to tanks and infantry, can be used together in a fight together. Battle management is giving tools to the commanders in charge of parts, or all these forces, to be able to send new orders as the situation changes. If soldiers fighting on one island spy the deployment of anti-air missiles, and communicate that, a commander could then use that information to redirect bombers on a course out of range of those missiles, for example. In short, the Pentagon wants to make it easier for the military to share information with itself, in a timely fashion.

“The integration of this digital software with our weapon system will further enhance the connectivity and survivability in highly contested environments as part of our ongoing modernization effort,” said Kodama. 

Taking in new mission data, directly from machine to machine, reduces the steps in which error can enter the process. It’s the difference between handing someone a written note or playing a verbal game of telephone, where whispered messages can lose or change meaning at every step of the process.

While the B-2 fleet is small, upgrades like this could help ensure the stealth bombers can remain part of the US arsenal for years to come, while the new, more numerous B-21 Raider stealth bomber fleet is built and integrated into the Air Force. There is no retirement date set for the B-2 beyond the readiness of its planned replacement. New tools ensure that, for however long that transition takes, the US will still have a handful of stealth flying wings, ready to drop conventional or nuclear weapons across continents.

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For 18 months, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been fought largely from the ground. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has been able to establish air superiority, or the ability to completely rule the sky at the other’s expense. While Ukraine is working to gradually build up a new air force using NATO-model fighters like the F-16 (which nations including Denmark and the Netherlands have pledged to the country), it is also using a range of drones to drop death from the sky. On August 19, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense announced a small new armed drone for military use: the SkyKnight.

The announcement of the new UAV was posted to the Ministry of Defense’s Telegram account, and features an image of the SkyKnight drone. The vehicle is compact, and features four limbs like a common quadcopter, but each limb sports two rotors, making the drone an octocopter. A sensor is fitted on the front of the drone, with a camera facing forwards, and what appears to be batteries are strapped, in an unusual configuration, to the top of the drone’s hull. Underneath it holds a 2.5 kg (5.5 lbs) bomb. That’s between three and five times as heavy as a hand grenade, and would be a large explosive for a drone of this size.

“This can be used against stationary and moving targets – anything from tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and other systems, to infantry units on the move and in trenches, and against any target that is identified as a Russian military one,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “This payload can be effective and devastating against infantry units, as evidenced from multiple videos of similar attacks by quadcopters.”

Before the massive invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the country fought a long, though more geographically confined, war against Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas of Eastern Ukraine. Using quadcopters as bombers was a regular occurance in that war, like when in 2018 Ukrainian forces used a DJI Mavic quadcopter to drop a bomb on trenches. While the Mavic was not built for war, it is a simple and easy to use machine, which could be modified in the field to carry a small explosive and a release claw. Paired with the drone’s cameras and human operators watching from a control screen, soldiers could get a bird’s eye view of their human targets, and then attack from above.

This tactic persisted in the larger war from February 2022, where small drones joined medium and larger drones in the arsenals of both nations fighting. The war in Ukraine is hardly the first war to see extensive use of drones, but none so far have matched it in sheer scale.

“Never before have so many drones been used in a military confrontation,” writes Ulrike Franke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Many, possibly the majority, of the drones used by Ukrainian forces were originally designed for commercial purposes or for hobbyists.” 

The SkyKnight is described as domestically produced, a production of the present Ukrainian industry built for this specific war. It appears to share parts in common from the broader hobbyist drone market, and its assembly, complete with strapped-on batteries and exposed wires (at least according to how it’s depicted on Telegram), speaks to ease of assembly over finicky obsession with form.

In the announcement of the SkyKnight, the Ministry of Defence says that if the pilot has any familiarity with DJI or Autel drones, which stabilize themselves in flight, then the pilot can learn to fly the SkyKnight in about a week.

“DJI and Autel are a staple [Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle] across the Ukrainian military, with many thousands fielded since the start of the Russian invasion,” says Bendett. “DJI especially as a go-to drone for ISR, target tracking, artillery spotting and light combat missions. Ukrainian forces and drone operators have amassed a lot of experience flying these Chinese-made drones.”

Domestic manufacture is important, not just because of the shorter supply lines, but because DJI’s response to the conflict has been to ban the sale of its drone to Ukraine and Russia.

“The Chinese manufacturer DJI produces most of these systems,” writes Franke. “It officially suspended operations in Ukraine and Russia a few weeks into the war, but its drones, most notably the Mavic type, remain among the most used and most sought-after systems.”

By making its own self-detonating drone weapons, Ukraine is able to use the drones as a direct weapon, which can attack from above and is hard to see or stop. In a war where soldiers describe fighting without quadcopters as being “like blind kittens,” a flying camera with a bomb attached makes soldiers deadly, at greater range, and in new ways.

Beyond the airframe and remote control, the Ministry of Defense boasts that the SkyKnight has an automatic flight mode, and can continue to fly towards a target selected by the operator even if the operator loses communication with the drone.

“Ukraine is investing a lot of resources in domestic combat drone production to meet the challenge from the Russian military that is increasingly fielding more quadcopter and FPV-type drones,” says Bendett. “This SkyKnight needs to be manufactured in sufficient quantities to start making a difference on the battlefield.”

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The Pacific Ocean is vast, and when it comes to planning for how to fight a war in and across it, the United States is turning to a new airframe design—one that promises more efficient flight. In an event put on by the Air And Space Forces Association on August 16, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Ravi I Chaudhary announced the award of a contract, worth up to $230 million through 2026, for the development and production of a prototype “Blended Wing Body” airplane.

The plane was announced with concept art, showing an Air Force gray plane with a body that starts from a conventional pointy cockpit and broadens as it goes back, seamlessly sloping up into a large wing, with a pair of jets mounted on top of the plane at its rear. In the concept art, Rogers Dry Lake and the runways of Edwards Air Force Base are clearly visible, tying the new concept plane into the long history of experimental and innovative aircraft. When Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, he did it flying a plane out of Edwards.  

“Today is a historic day in the development of airpower,” Chaudhary told the assembled crowd of press and industry spectators, in person and on Zoom. He tied the announcement of this new plane to a record-setting endurance flight from August 1923, which saw repeated mid-air refueling, allowing a plane to continuously transit from Canada to Mexico without landing in between.

Blended Wing Body design offers greater lift, as it reduces drag and expands the lifting surface of the aircraft. The B-2 flying wing bomber is a kind of extreme blended wing. While this new plane will not be designed to the same exacting and stealth demands of a long-range bomber, the hope is that it will offer long range efficiency flight, allowing it to become a valuable transport and tanker. Should oceans become battlefields, this plane, which Chaudhary referred to as the X-BWB-1, would become a valuable way for the Air Force to ensure the rest of the US military to stay in the fight, despite the long distances involved.

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

 “All of you have recognized that we have entered a new era of great power competition in which the [People’s Republic of China] has come to be known as our pacing challenge, but honestly, I ain’t having it,” Chaudhary continued. “Today, we are going to set the pace by doing what we have always done. Design, build, and fly with blended wing technology.”

(While jet planes and new missiles certainly outline the parameters for a conventional war in the pacific, should one happen, nuclear weapons went unmentioned at the announcement. The US has over 5,200 nuclear warheads and China has the world’s third-largest arsenal, estimated at 410 warheads. Any conventional war between the US and China carries with it a risk of nuclear conflagration)

The last time the US fought a peer or near-peer competitor across the Pacific, the plane all used propeller engines, and operated either from aircraft carriers or fiercely contested island landing strips. Today, aircraft carriers and networks of bases are still part of the picture, but missile technology has advanced from its infancy to a durable, long-range threat.

The X-BWB-1, should it work, would provide logistical support for the US military’s planned “ACE,” or “Agile Combat Employment” strategy. Operating by these principles, the ships and planes and bases that house US forces will be distributed across the ocean, making them harder to target all at once. However, these resources can be assembled and concentrated during attacks, allowing the US to pick and choose battles as it sees fit. 

“Operational energy will be the margin of victory in a near peer conflict in the Indo-Pacific,” said Chaudhary. With efficient flight, longer range, reduced radar and audio signature, and useful cargo capacity, the X-BWB-1 isn’t a weapon itself, but a tool that could make the rest of the military’s operations in this area more effective. The design also promises shorter takeoffs and landings than conventional airframes, allowing for runways on small patches of land.

The military applications of the technology took center stage at the announcement, but the commercial applications of such plane design were also brought up. The X-BWB-1 is designed to use existing jet engines, so they can be easily integrated into the commercial market. The same aerodynamic advantages that make a plane useful for military resupply could also make such a craft an efficient long-haul carrier for airlines.

“The BWB is the best first step on the path to zero carbon emissions. It offers 50 percent lower fuel burn using today’s engines and the airframe efficiency needed to support a transition to zero carbon emissions propulsion in the future,” said JetZero CEO Tom O’Leary in a release. “No other proposed aircraft comes close in terms of efficiency.”

Many branches of the military, like parts of the commercial aviation industry, have expressed a commitment towards lower-emissions operations. In the case of the US Army, this means a climate approach that emphasizes meeting existing needs and missions, but with more efficient means, rather than scaling back operations.

With significant investment from the US military and a waiting commercial market, the Blended Wing Body program could build on decades of NASA research and deliver a useful, efficient aircraft that transports soldiers as easily as passengers. 

The first test flight of the X-BWB-1 is expected in 2027. Perhaps by then, the plane will have a better name.

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Popular artificial intelligence applications like ChatGPT or DALL-E are growing more popular with the masses, and the Department of Defense is taking note. To get ahead of potential uses and risks of such tools, on August 10, the DoD announced the creation of a new task force analyze and possibly integrate generative artificial intelligence into current operations.

AI is an imprecise term, and the technologies that can make headlines about AI often do so as much for their flaws as for their potential utility. The Pentagon task force is an acknowledgement of the potential such tools hold, while giving the military some breathing room to understand what, exactly, it might find useful or threatening about such tools.

While Pentagon research into AI certainly carries implications about what that will ultimately mean for weapons, the heart of the matter is really about using it to process, understand, and draw certain predictions from its collection of data. Sometimes this data is flashy, like video footage recorded by drones of suspected insurgent meetings, or of hostile troop movements. However, a lot of the data collected by the military is exceptionally mundane, like maintenance logs for helicopters and trucks. 

Generative AI could, perhaps, be trained on datasets exclusive to the military, outputting results that suggest answers the military might be searching for. But the process might not be so simple. The AI tools of today are prone to errors, and such generative AI could also create misleading information that might get fed into downstream analyses, leading to confusion. The possibility and risk of AI error is likely one reason the military is taking a cautious approach to studying generative AI, rather than a full-throated embrace of the technology from the outset.

The study of generative AI will take place by the newly organized Task Force Lima, which will be led by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. CDAO was itself created in February 2022, out of an amalgamation of several other Pentagon offices into one designed to help the military better use data and AI.

“The DoD has an imperative to responsibly pursue the adoption of generative AI models while identifying proper protective measures and mitigating national security risks that may result from issues such as poorly managed training data,” said Craig Martell, the DoD Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer. “We must also consider the extent to which our adversaries will employ this technology and seek to disrupt our own use of AI-based solutions.”

One such malicious possibility of generative AI is using it for misinformation. While some models of image generation leave somewhat obvious tells for modified photos, like people with an unusual number of extra fingers and teeth, many images are passable and even convincing at first glance. In March, an AI-generated image of Pope Francis in a Balenciaga Coat proved compelling to many people, even as its AI origin became known and reproducible. With a public figure like the Pope, it is easy to verify whether or not he was photographed wearing a hypebeast puffy jacket. When it comes to military matters, pictures captured by the military can be slow to declassify, and the veracity of a well-done fake could be hard to disprove. 

[Related: Why an AI image of Pope Francis in a fly jacket stirred up the internet]

Malicious use of AI-generated images and data is eye-catching—a nefarious act enabled using modern technology. Of at least as much consequence could be routine error. Dennis Kovtun, a summer fellow at open source analysis house Bellingcat, tested Google’s Bard AI and Microsoft’s Bing AI as chatbots that can give information about uploaded images. Kovtun attempted to see if AI could replicate the process by which an image is geolocated (where the composite total of details allow a human to pinpoint the photograph’s origin). 

“We found that while Bing mimics the strategies that open-source researchers use to geolocate images, it cannot successfully geolocate images on its own,” writes Kovtun. “Bard’s results are not much more impressive, but it seemed more cautious in its reasoning and less prone to AI ‘hallucinations’. Both required extensive prompting from the user before they could arrive at any halfway satisfactory geolocation.” 

These AI ‘hallucinations’ are when the AI incorporates incorrect information from its training data into the result. Introducing new and incorrect information can undermine any promised labor-saving utility of such a tool. 

“The future of defense is not just about adopting cutting-edge technologies, but doing so with foresight, responsibility, and a deep understanding of the broader implications for our nation,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks in the announcement of the creation of Task Force Lima. 

The US military, as an organization, is especially wary of technological surprise, or the notion that a rival nation could develop a new and powerful tool without the US being prepared for it. While Hick emphasized the caution needed in developing generative AI for military use, Task Force Lima mission commander Xavier Lugo described the work as about implementation while managing risk.

“The Services and Combatant Commands are actively seeking to leverage the benefits and manage the risks of generative AI capabilities and [Language Learning Models] across multiple mission areas, including intelligence, operational planning, programmatic and business processes,” said Lugo. “By prioritizing efforts, reducing duplication, and providing enabling AI scaffolding, Task Force Lima will be able to shape the effective and responsible implementation of [Language Learning Models] throughout the DoD.”

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On July 28, defense giant Lockheed Martin announced it was planning to scale its current laser technology up to a 500-kilowatt-class laser. This would be a substantial increase in output over the company’s existing 300-kW laser, and would be more powerful than existing laser weapons in development or in the field today. The move also illustrates one of the fundamental truths about modern laser weapons: when it comes to destruction by laser, more power equals faster results.

Laser weapons represent a substantial up-front cost during their development and research, with the promise that they will pay off down the road in lower costs per shot fired and object destroyed. Lasers are primarily defensive tools: High-powered light is used to melt through and disable income drones, mortar rounds, rockets, and other projectiles. Many of these targets are small, like hobbyist quadcopters or simple rockets, and can be defused as a threat by disabling a rotor limb or a guide fin. 

But when it comes to protecting big targets, like Navy ships, Army bases, or Air Force hangars, destroying threats quickly and effectively becomes an essential task of base defense. 

A laser with 500 kilowatts of energy would be powerful. In October 2022, when Popular Science got to go hands-on with a Raytheon laser weapon, it was a 10-kilowatt laser. Held steady against a drone by a professional, it could disable a quadcopter in as little as eight seconds. Used by PopSci, it took 15 seconds to stop the same style of drone.

What the 500-kilowatt laser in development promises is 50 times the same energy concentrated into a beam, likely melting drones in fractions of a second. The US Army has already selected Lockheed’s 300-kw laser to mount on armored vehicles and protect formations from rocket attacks.

“Lockheed Martin has invested in our production infrastructure in anticipation of the Department of Defense’s demand for laser weapons that have additional layers of protection with deep magazines, low cost per engagement, high speed of light delivery and high precision response reducing logistics requirements,” said Rick Cordaro, vice president of Mission Systems & Weapons at Lockheed Martin, in a release. “The 500-kW laser will incorporate our successes from the 300-kW system and lessons learned from legacy programs to further prove the capability to defend against a range of threats.”

While jargon-dense, Cordaro’s statement parses out to a comprehensive overview of why, exactly, the Pentagon wants laser weapons. “Additional layers of protection” means that these lasers will not replace existing defenses, but join them, letting lasers slot into use alongside protective measures like Patriot missiles and anti-helicopter rockets. “Deep magazines” refers to the capacity of a laser to fire as long as it has electrical power. This can come from batteries, generators, or from onboard power plants when used on ships. It’s a reference to magazines of ammunition, typically bullets or shells, used by guns and cannons. While those magazines are limited by physical constraints, like how many bullets can be prepared to feed into a gun before firing, the quantity of a laser’s shots are limited by its access to electrical power.

Additionally, “low cost per engagement” is the military and industry’s long promise to reduce the cost of each zap fired by a laser down to about $1. “Engagement,” here, means destruction of incoming targets. A cost per engagement is how much ammunition was used to destroy a threat. Patriot missiles, built to shoot down jets, cost about $4.1 million apiece, which is a lot of money, but can be worth it against expensive jets, or to prevent cruise missiles hitting more valuable targets. If lasers like Lockheed’s can offer cheaper ways to stop some threats, it can let the military save more expensive tools for threats lasers cannot hit.

Finally, Cordaro emphasizes “high speed of light delivery and high precision response reducing logistics requirements.” If the laser can quickly and accurately stop threats, especially threats that are hard to hit at present or take lots of ammunition to stop, then a more powerful laser can meet those threats at the price of electricity generated.

Lockheed is developing the 500-kW laser as part of the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative, a Pentagon program to develop lasers at the 300-, 500-, and 1000-kW power ranges. A Government Accountability Office report from April 2023 notes that “Such systems could eventually enable [high energy lasers] to engage powerful targets such as cruise missiles.”

For now, work at the 500-kW level is in development. Should it succeed, and should lasers be able to scale up even more, the promise is for weapons that, once in place, could offer unprecedented protection against major threats. For decades, missiles have presented an unbalanced threat to tanks, planes, and ships, where the missile is much cheaper than the vehicle it is designed to destroy. Lasers, while not cheap to develop, could make missiles less effective as a counter to such vehicles, because the directed energy would be able to zap them before they reached their targets. 

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It is the Department of Defense’s responsibility to secure the skies above the United States from potential threats. Following the transit across the US in February of a large balloon originating in China, the Air Force scrambled jets to shoot down new objects seen with more sensitive radar apertures. This led to the shoot-downs of several objects. Finding unknown objects in the sky is hard work, which is why the Pentagon commissioned think tank RAND to map public reports of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena across the United States.

RAND’s report was completed in May 2023, sent to the Department of Defense for review, and published on July 25. One day later, on July 26, former Department of Defense employee David Grusch testified before a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee, specifically offering statements on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs. The term is largely a modern rebranding of UFOs, after the latter abbreviation became shorthand for objects potentially connected with extraterrestrial life. The hearing attracted far-reaching headlines, as well as disputes regarding Grusch’s claims from news media and the Pentagon alike. 

The question of what people spot and keep spotting in the skies above the US is real. The RAND report, with access to great swathes of data, offers a good starting point for understanding this topic. When it comes to modern observations of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, the RAND study’s most concrete finding is that unknown aircraft are most commonly reported near Military Operations Areas (MOAs), or swathes of the sky designated for military practice and maneuvering. These areas are not necessarily near air bases.

The history of UFO sightings and Project Blue Book

For decades, air traffic over the United States was largely limited to commercial and military vehicles, with onboard human pilots. Other types of flying machines, like balloons or uncrewed target drones, were used within specific areas, and would sometimes show up in public reports of unusual phenomena. (The sensor-carrying balloon that crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico in June 1947 is likely the most famous of these.)

Following a flying saucer panic in the US in 1947, the Air Force collected public reports of Unidentified Flying Objects through Project Blue Book. An analysis of Blue Book sightings, conducted by the University of Colorado in 1969, found that at least 90 percent of sightings could be explained as naturally occurring phenomena, like Venus seen at dawn. Of the remaining 10 percent that could not be publicly explained, documents declassified in 1992 revealed that fully half of those sightings were Americans reporting the flight paths of US spy planes, like the U-2. These were flying objects known to the government, but not known to the public.

Area 51, the Air Force base that is almost synonymous in popular culture with alien research, was started as a place to test the U-2 spy plane. It is still in use to this day for flights of experimental craft, and the military secrecy around the bases’ contents and operations lend it an outsized air of mystery.

What the RAND report found about UAPs today

To understand where and why Americans are reporting unusual sightings in the sky, RAND researchers Marek N. Posard, Ashley Gromis, and Mary Lee started with the National UFO Reporting Center database. Established in 1998, the NUFORC is a nongovernmental entity that allows people to report sightings, and through a moderation process filters out obvious hoaxes. The researchers used that data to answer two questions at the heart of the report: where in the US are people likely to report such sightings, and what factors predict where people are more or less likely to report UAP sightings?

The sightings were matched to US census-designated places, then compared to places of interest, like military bases, MOAs, airports, and weather stations. The data set is big, with researchers finding 101,151 reported UAP sightings in 12,783 census-designated places from 1998 to 2022.

“The most consistent—and statistically significant—finding from our models was for reports of UAP sightings in areas within 30 km of MOAs,” write the authors. “According to the FAA, ‘MOAs are established to contain nonhazardous, military flight activities,’ including air combat maneuvers, air intercepts, and low-altitude tactics. Given this association, we suspect that some of the self-reports of UAP sightings to NUFORC are authorized aircraft flying within MOAs.”

A good example of an MOA is the Desert MOA, situated north of Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s near Nellis Air Force Base, but planes are also likely to fly from Nellis to Carson MOA, which is far from any air bases. 

Notably, reported sightings of UAPs went down when people were within about 19 miles (30 km) of an Air Force or Navy base, and they also went down further than 37 miles (60 km) away. Being within 37 miles of an airport reduced the rate of sightings. While weather stations did not change the frequency of sightings, weather did, as for “each additional 1 percent of cloudy days, the expected rate of all UAP sightings increased by 1.6 percent.”

Taken altogether, the research suggests that people are more likely to not report unusual sightings of aircraft when they are in an area where they expect aircraft to be, like by an Air Force base. 

“One possible explanation for this pattern of findings is that people located in more–densely populated areas, near airports and near weather stations, are more aware of the types of objects that fly overhead and nearby and are therefore less apt to report aerial phenomena,” write the researchers.

Identifying the unknown

New aircraft, like cheap high-altitude balloons or abundant hobbyist drones, are already changing how people see and understand the sky. Air Force sensors are geared towards identifying larger crewed aircraft. One policy choice posed by the RAND study is if there is value in the military turning to public reports of unusual aircraft.

The authors offer three suggestions. 

“First, we recommend that government authorities (e.g., local and state government officials, the FAA, and DoD) conduct outreach with civilians located near MOAs,” they write. This would help people near skies used by the military, but far from airbases, understand what exactly it is they are observing. Being near an airbase makes the presence of aircraft intuitive, but training areas exist largely on maps until they are abruptly in use, with no ground-based indicators highlighting what is happening. “Second, we recommend that government authorities conduct additional outreach to notify nearby civilians when there is airspace activity near a MOA,” the authors continue.

The authors’ third recommendation is a new evaluation to inform the design of a detailed and robust system for public reporting of UAP sightings. A new reporting tool could improve precision in location, in tools used to record sightings, and ideally would be designed to filter out hoaxes or known objects.

“In conclusion,” they write, “the U.S. government has a large swath of airspace to monitor at a time when there is greater access than ever to small, technologically advanced, and inexpensive aerial objects. If officials believe that public reporting could be a valuable tool to help manage U.S. airspace, it will be important to ensure that members of the public report actual threats. Greater transparency in how sightings are collected, investigated, and used may also help mitigate the conspiracy theories that have long surrounded aerial phenomena.”

It has been so long since the military first collected data about unusual sightings that the UFO term has transcended its role as a military acronym. Instead of relying on a non-governmental tool to capture reports from the public, a new government-created tool for civilians may offer a way to understand the skies better, but it is unlikely that reporting alone will be enough to dispel conspiracy theories.

Correction on August 9: This article has been updated to remove a reference in the first paragraph to a hobbyist balloon that had potentially been linked to a shoot-down of an object on February 11, 2023.

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On July 16, 1945, at 5:30 am, the first atomic bomb in history was detonated at what is now White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The Trinity test was named as such by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the first director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the central figure in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer. Getting the science of atomic fission correct was hard work—up to the moment of the test scientists were taking bets on whether or not the explosion would ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere (it didn’t). Important, also, was the difficult work of capturing the test on film, a feat that had never been done before.

Filming Trinity allowed the scientists to have a record of the test for analysis after the act. So much in an atomic reaction happens quickly, and any instruments that could normally measure blast details in proximity would be destroyed by a successful explosion. That meant relying on distance photography, and developing special high-speed cameras in order to capture in precise detail moments of the blast fractions of a second apart.

Photographing Trinity

Specialized cameras were used to study atomic processes in the laboratory setting, and then more advanced cameras were adapted to capture the test site. These cameras provided important and durable information, but the only color still photograph of the test happened to be captured by the personal camera of a civilian employee of the labs, Jack Aeby.

“[I] aimed the camera at the detonation point, which was roughly 6,000 yards away,” Aeby told the Atomic Heritage Foundation. He had four shots left on a roll of color film when he went down to the test site, and one of those shots ended up being the only color capture of the explosion. “I released the shutter, it closed, I cranked the exposure down to where it was reasonable, at about 1,000th of a second, and fired the other three shots in rapid succession. The middle one, by luck, turned out to be just about the right exposure—the other two were usable but not as clear or in focus.”

That photograph ended up being one of the first images of the Trinity test the Army released, and it was used by the researchers to confirm what they had calculated about the explosion.

“They actually did one of the first yield measurements by measuring the width of the fireball and estimated time of when that was made and they could back calculate something resembling a good estimate of the yield. It turned out to be in agreement with the other estimates they had,” said Aeby.

Beyond Aeby’s camera and his lucky shot, the Manhattan Project records that 52 different cameras were used to capture the detonation. Most of them were cameras used to record motion pictures, so many of the photographs that endure today from the blast are stills taken from film.

“I was just sitting there with the camera running. Everything was operated from the central control station. Turned on. So I didn’t have to do anything at the time but just sit there. The camera started running,” Manhattan project photographer Berlin Brixner told the Los Alamos Historical Society. Brixner had gone with scientist Kenneth Bainbridge to set up the Trinity site and the photography stations needed, and was managing the cameras for the test.

“Of course it was nighttime, I couldn’t see anything. But when the explosion went off, that welding glass seemed to just glow white, intense white like the sun. So it just blinded me, so I looked aside to the left, the Oscuras Mountains were at the left, and they were just lit up like daylight then. So I looked at that for a few seconds, and then I looked back through my welding glass and I saw that the terrific explosion had taken place. Just unbelievably large explosion. My camera was just sitting there, but soon the ball of fire was starting to rise and I thought, gee, I better get busy. So abruptly I raised it and photographed the ball of fire as it went up to the stratosphere. I kept photographing it for the next couple of minutes or so,” Brizner continued.

[Related: Survivors of America’s first atomic bomb test want their place in history]

Many cameras were set up at fixed locations, some as close as 800 yards from the explosion. To ensure that these cameras could work through the blast, they were set up in shelters, angled facing mirrors that were pointed at the blast. It was raining the night of July 15, and the rain did not let up until the early hours of July 16, so Brizner and a technician had to go and clean the lenses from water and dust to ensure the film worked. Most of the cameras worked, creating footage visible today.

Where can I see Trinity photographs?

Several collections of Trinity photographs exist online, with varying degrees of curation. Los Alamos National Laboratory, the great inheritor of the Manhattan Project’s theoretical division, has shared an album on Flickr of test photographs titled “Trinity to Trinity.” This album includes Aeby’s color photograph, pictures of the mushroom cloud at time intervals from 0.006 seconds to 16 seconds, as well as pictures of Gadget (as the explosive device was called) before the test, and the Trinity site afterwards.

[Related: Watch a 1953 nuclear blast test disintegrate a house in high resolution]

Los Alamos National Laboratory is part of the Department of Energy, and the Department of Energy’s Manhattan Project interactive history includes an animated gif made from film of the first 0.11 seconds of the Trinity explosion. The Atomic Archive offers a guided slideshow of Trinity site and test photographs. 

The Atomic Heritage Foundation has galleries of Trinity test footage, including shots of the specially modified military tanks used to test the soil after the detonation. One of the more haunting and unusual images of the blast is that captured by the only pinhole camera at the test, used by photographer Julian Mack.

The Atomic Heritage Foundation’s YouTube page also offers videos of the test. The test can be seen in black and white (embedded below, as well), color, and close-up.

Twice a year, the White Sands Missile Range opens up to the first 5,000 visitors at the site, who can go and walk around the Trinity crater. As part of the display, photographs of the Trinity test are mounted on the chain link fence surrounding the crater. For 2023, the Army expects a higher than usual number of visitors to the site. 

After images

Nolan’s film leaves out direct imagery of the people killed by atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though it does feature the audio from a filmed Manhattan Project report of the devastation wrought by the weapons. 

The Atomic Archive has galleries of damage at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and of Nuclear Effects on Humans, the latter of which carries a warning:  “These images can be quite graphic, and should be viewed with caution.”

One way to view photographs and understand the attacks on Japan, which are inseparable from the test at Trinity, is through the stories of hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors. A digital archive project, developed in 2010-2011, allows readers to click over digital maps of the cities, and view stories and images from the people who lived in them at the time of the bombing. Paired with photography from the devastation, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki digital archives offer a deeper perspective on the cities, beyond just targets on the map.

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American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan in the 2000s and early 2010s had a problem. The country’s terrain, with steep mountains, sharp hills, and deep valleys, made it easy for their enemies to hide, especially given their adversary’s local knowledge of the terrain. US airplanes and helicopters had uncontested control of the skies, but by the time a patrol was ambushed, had called for air support, and then the support arrived, the fight might be over. The Switchblade drone, originally developed as the Lethal Miniature Aerial Missile System, offered an answer to this threat. 

The Switchblade is a kind of piloted missile that can also be a scout. From its initial deployments with the US Army in 2012, to its inclusion in US military aid to Ukraine in March 2022, the Switchblade has expanded the power and ability of infantry. For example, in May 2022, Ukraine’s military released footage showing a Switchblade used to attack a Russian tank crew, who were on top of the tank. The human-portable missile, with an onboard camera to provide its operator a view as it attacks, offers soldiers air support they can bring to battle on their backs. Plus, its operator can call off a strike if the situation changes.

Why a miniature missile?

The Switchblade began development, like many drones, as a scout. According to Switchblade-maker AeroVironment, in 2004 the US Army asked the company to develop a drone that could be launched from the barrel of a 105 millimeter mortar, letting the artillery team do damage assessment after their attack without having to send anyone close to the site to check. While that program didn’t ultimately pan out, AeroVironment had succeeded in developing a tube-launched drone that could send real-time video back to human operators.

DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects agency, was interested in developing a “Close Combat Lethal Reconnaissance” tool, which was built on the same tube-launched premise. AeroVironment pitched an armed tube-launched drone to Air Force Special Operations, who were so impressed they offered funding for it in 2006, and by 2010 the US Army ordered the weapons as well. 

In Afghanistan, the main threats faced by US and coalition forces on patrol came from ambushes, snipers, and roadside bombs, or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Alone or in combination, all of these could prove fatal. One such adaptation was the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP, a vehicle that protected its occupants from the immediate harms of a roadside bomb. Another was the Switchblade, which offered a way to combine the scouting power of human-carried drones with an explosive charge, so it could be used like a missile against sniper nests or people setting up IEDs.

“Think about it—pairing switchblade aerial munitions with an [unmanned surveillance drone like a] Raven, Wasp, or Puma—a small team with those tools can know what is going on around them within about 15 klicks. Once they identify a threat, Switchblade lets them engage that threat immediately,” Steven Gitlin, a spokesman for AeroVironment, told Marine Corps Times in 2012.

For special operations forces, who are used to operating without air support, and for the mainline infantry of the Army and the Marine Corps, having a backpackable missile on hand expanded how they could fight in the field. In a pinch, the Switchblade offered a way out of an ambush, or just-enough firepower to drive an enemy back while waiting for more air support to arrive.

How does a Switchblade work?

The Switchblade is a flying camera robot with an explosive inside. These all-electric machines are weapons that will help find or attack nearby enemies, not far-away ones. 

Switchblades come in two sizes: the Switchblade 300 and Switchblade 600. Both can be carried by one person, though the weight difference is substantial—a 300 weighs just 5.5 pounds and can fit inside a backpack. The 600 is heavier, with the missile itself weighing 33 lbs and the components needed to transport it much heavier.

The Switchblade 300 can hit targets at a range of just over 6 miles, and can fly for a total of 15 minutes. The 600 has a range of 25 miles or a flight time of 40 minutes. The Switchblade contains cameras, and video from these sensors, as well as GPS information and image processing, is used to guide the Switchblade. The Switchblade is also designed to receive targeting information from other drones, allowing it to follow and find selected targets. That makes it one weapon among many that can be directed against a target with the targeting information provided by other drones.

What kind of targets could a Switchblade be used against?

Unlike other drones that are just used for reconnaissance, the Switchblade 300 carries a small explosive payload, the kind most likely used to hit people or unprotected weapons, like a mortar launcher or exposed machine gun emplacement. For the larger Switchblade 600, the payload is an “anti-armor warhead,” making it useful against vehicles.

If the humans directing the Switchblade see that it no longer has a target, it can be called off and then recovered. The brochure for the Switchblade 600 boasts that the weapon offers a rechargeable battery.

While these seem like a highly modern creation, there’s historical context: The Kettering Bug, a 1918 uncrewed biplane that’s considered a predecessor to both drones and cruise missiles, flew for a time before an internal signal released its wings and it crashed its explosive payload into the ground. 

[Related: What is DARPA? The rich history of the Pentagon’s secretive tech agency]

Modern loitering munitions typically fly for some time, using sensors to look for targets such as anti-air missile sites and radar stations. Even at the full endurance of the Switchblade 600, the drone can only fly for 40 minutes, and the short duration of a Switchblade 300 is barely enough to qualify it as a loiterer.

When the missiles were first proposed and tested, they were commonly referred to as either “kamikaze drones” or “suicide missiles.” Popular Science, in its coverage a decade ago, referred to prototype Switchblades as a “Flying Assassin Robot” and a “Kamikaze Suicide Drones.” All of those names capture something important about the category: when one of these weapons blows up, it cannot be used again or recovered. Today, in addition to calling such weapons “loitering munitions,” Popular Science uses the term “self-detonating drone.”

Is a Switchblade an autonomous weapon?

Like many drones, the Switchblade is directed by waypoint navigation, in which a human plots a path on a map and the robot, once launched, flies on its own accord.

“[Unlike] radio-controlled devices, the operator is not flying the aircraft, the operator’s simply indicating what he wants to look at, what he wants the camera to be pointing at, and the onboard computer flies the aircraft to that point and maintains on target,” Steve Gitlin, AeroVironment’s Chief Marketing Officer, told The War Zone in 2020. “We have a similar capability in our tactical unmanned aircraft systems. You could lock in on a target and the aircraft will basically maintain position on that target, autonomous.”

Other software on the Switchblade, like feature and object recognition, likely aids in its ability to find and track a target. That doesn’t make it an autonomous weapon in the strictest definition, but it is a weapon with autonomous features, which can change the ways people use them.

Focusing on whether or not it fits a strict definition of autonomous weapon is less important than understanding how, exactly, Switchblades use what autonomous features they have. “It’s therefore probably wisest to put the definitional debates aside and instead focus on the novel (as well as familiar) challenges and risks that are raised by the growing autonomy of weapon systems,” tweeted Arthur Holland Michel, a scholar of drones and autonomous war machines. “For example: Do the operators have sufficient situational awareness to make a decision on the use of force? Do the weapons provide a sufficient control surface for human operators to exercise precaution in attack?”

In battle, the short flight time between launch and impact for Switchblades, especially Switchblade 300s, means that the person firing the weapon is operating in a similar manner as someone firing an anti-air missile at a plane, with trust that the missile’s own targeting system will hit what it is supposed to hit. 

What is different for the Switchblade, compared to other missiles, is that the human operator has the possibility of calling off the attack if something changes, like a civilian walking into the area or the cameras revealing what the operator thought was a tank to be a school bus instead. That’s different from something like a high-flying Reaper drone, which fires missiles that can’t be turned around.

The ability to exercise that kind of control, to in effect un-fire a missile already airborne, is one of the big promises of control systems like this for weapons. For that promise to be realized, it requires that a human, launching weapons in battle, is able and willing to watch the missile’s own video feed until it ends.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on March 22, 2022.

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In 1957, the Soviet Union changed the night sky. Sputnik, the first satellite, was in orbit for just 22 days, but its arrival brought a tremendous set of new implications for nations down on Earth, especially the United States. The USSR was ahead in orbit, and the rocket that launched Sputnik meant that the USSR would likely be able to launch atomic or thermonuclear warheads through space and back down to nations below. 

In the defense policy of the United States, Sputnik became an example of “technological surprise,” or when a rival country demonstrates a new and startling tool. To ensure that the United States is always the nation making the surprises, rather than being surprised, in 1958 president Dwight D. Eisenhower created what we now know as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Originally called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, ARPA/DARPA has had a tremendous impact on technological development, both for the US military and well beyond it. (Its name became DARPA in 1972, then ARPA again from 1993 to 1996, and it’s been DARPA ever since.) The most monumental achievement of DARPA is the precursor to the service that makes reading this article possible. That would be ARPANET, the immediate predecessor to the internet as we know it, which started as a way to guarantee continuous lines of communication over a distributed network. 

Other projects include the more explicitly military ones, like work on what became the MQ-1 Predator drone, and endeavors that exist in the space between the civilian and military world, like research into self-driving cars.

What is the main purpose of DARPA?

The specific military services have offices that can conduct their own research, designed to bring service-specific technological improvements. Some of these are the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM). DARPA’s mission, from its founding, is to tackle research and development of technologies that do not fall cleanly into any of the services, that are considered worth pursuing on their own merits, and that may end up in the hands of the services later.

How did DARPA start?

Sputnik is foundational to the story of DARPA and ARPA. It’s the event that motivated President Eisenhower to create the agency by executive order. Missiles and rockets at the time were not new, but they were largely secret. During World War II, Nazi Germany had launched rockets carrying explosives against the United Kingdom. These V-2 rockets, complete with some of the engineers who designed and built them, were captured by the United States and the USSR, and each country set to work developing weapons programs from this knowledge.

Rockets on their own are a devastatingly effective way to attack another country, because they can travel beyond the front lines and hit military targets, like ammunition depots, or civilian targets, like neighborhoods and churches, causing disruption and terror and devastation beyond the front lines. What so frightened the United States about Sputnik was that, instead of a rocket that could travel hundred of miles within Earth’s atmosphere, this was a rocket that could go into space, demonstrating that the USSR had a rocket that could serve as the basis for an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM. 

ICBMs carried with them a special fear, because they could deliver thermonuclear warheads, threatening massive destruction across continents. The US’s creation and use of atomic weapons, and then the development of hydrogen bombs (H-bombs), can also be understood as a kind of technological surprise, though both projects preceded DARPA.

[Related: Why DARPA put AI at the controls of a fighter jet]

Popular Science first covered DAPRA in July 1959, with “U.S. ‘Space Fence’ on Alert for Russian Spy-Satellites.” It outlined the new threat posed to the United States from space surveillance and thermonuclear bombs, but did not take a particularly favorable light to ARPA’s work.

“A task force or convoy could no longer cloak itself in radio silence and ocean vastness. Once spotted, it could be wiped out by a single H-bomb,” the story read. “This disquieting new problem was passed to ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), which appointed a committee, naturally.”

That space fence formed an early basis for US surveillance of objects in orbit, a task that now falls to the Space Force and its existing tried-and-true network of sensors.

Did DARPA invent the internet?

Before the internet, electronic communications were routed through telecommunications circuits and switchboards. If a relay between two callers stopped working, the call would end, as there was no other way to sustain the communication link. ARPANET was built as a way to allow computers to share information, but pass it through distributed networks, so that if one node was lost, the chain of communication could continue through another.

“By moving packets of data that dynamically worked their way through a network to the destination where they would reassemble themselves, it became possible to avoid losing data even if one or more nodes went down,” describes DARPA. 

The earliest ARPANET, established in 1969 (it started running in October of that year), was a mostly West Coast affair. It connected nodes at University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Utah; and Stanford Research Institute. By September 1971 it had reached the East Coast, and was a continent-spanning network connecting military bases, labs, and universities by the late 1970s, all sending communication over telephone lines.

[Related: How a US intelligence program created a team of ‘Superforecasters’]

Two other key innovations made ARPANET a durable template for the internet. The first was commissioning the first production of traffic routers to serve as relay points for these packets. (Modern wireless routers are a distant descendant of this earlier wired technology.) Another was setting up universal protocols for transmission and function, allowing products and computers made by different companies to share a communication language and form. 

The formal ARPANET was decommissioned in 1988, thanks in part to redundancy with the then-new internet. It had demonstrated that computer communications could work across great distances, through distributed networks. This became a template for other communications technologies pursued by the United States, like mesh networks and satellite constellations, all designed to ensure that sending signals is hard to disrupt.

“At a time when computers were still stuffed with vacuum tubes, the Arpanauts understood that these machines were much more than computational devices. They were destined to become the most powerful communications tools in history,” wrote Phil Patton for Popular Science in 1995.

What are key DARPA projects?

For 65 years, DARPA has spurred the development of technologies by funding projects and managing them at the research and development stage, before handing those projects off to other entities, like the service’s labs or private industry, to see them carried to full fruition. 

DARPA has had a hand in shaping technology across computers, sensors, robotics, autonomy, uncrewed vehicles, stealth, and even the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. The list is extensive, and DARPA has ongoing research programs that make a comprehensive picture daunting. Not every one of DARPA’s projects yields success, but the ones that do have had an outsized impact, like the following list of game-changers:

Stealth: Improvements in missile and sensor technology made it risky to fly fighters into combat. During the Vietnam War, the Navy and Air Force adapted with “wild weasel” missions, where daring pilots would draw fire from anti-air missiles and then attempt to out-maneuver them, allowing others to destroy the radar and missile launch sites. That’s not an ideal approach. Stealth, in which the shape and materials of an aircraft are used to minimize its appearance on enemy sensors, especially radar, was one such adaptation pursued by DARPA to protect aircraft. DARPA’s development of stealth demonstrator HAVE BLUE (tested at Area 51) paved the way for early stealth aircraft like the F-117 fighter and B-2 bomber, which in turn cleared a path for modern stealth planes like the F-22 and F-35 fights, and the B-21 stealth bomber.

Vaccines: In 2011, DARPA started its Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics (ADEPT) program. Through this, in 2013 Moderna received $25 million from DARPA, funding that helped support its work. It was a bet that paid off tremendously in the COVID-19 pandemic, and was one of many such efforts to fund and support everything from diagnostic to treatment to production technologies.

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There are two kinds of fire fights in war. There’s an exchange of gunfire, where the fighting is done with firearms, and then there’s literal firefighting, where first responders and whoever else is on hand work to put out active flames caused by weapons. As Russia continues its war against Ukraine with missile attacks deep into the country’s interior, rapidly putting out fires is not just emergency response work, it’s part of the war effort. Earlier this month, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence announced that the country would provide 17 special firefighting vehicles to Ukraine.

Odessa, a Black Sea port city in western Ukraine, is somewhat removed from the front lines of the war, but missiles can cause destruction and terror far beyond the range of bullets and artillery. That’s what has happened this month, with Russian attacks wrecking a cathedral, an event that killed one and injured 19, in just one of the salvos launched against the city. After the missile hit, fire crews inundated the cathedral with water, clearing the flames, and prompting workers to bring documents and valuables out of the building, lest they be further damaged, reports NPR.

“These specialist firefighting vehicles will boost Ukraine’s ability to protect its infrastructure from Russia’s campaign of missile and drone attacks and continue our support for Ukraine, for as long as it takes,” said UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace in a statement. 

The vehicles being delivered to Ukraine are primarily from the Royal Air Force and Defence Fire and Rescue, with one coming courtesy of the government of Wales. There are two types: Major Foam Vehicles and Rapid Intervention Vehicles, which have been part of how the Royal Air Force and Defence Fire and Rescue decided to structure its firefighting needs in the 1990s. 

Major Foam Vehicles (MFV) use water and foam liquid to suppress fires by making it hard for the flames to catch new fuel. An MFV has a tank that holds up to 1,500 gallons of water, and another tank that holds up to 180 gallons of foam. Foam is especially important because for certain fires, like the oil of a car or jet, suppressing that fire requires a compound other than water. The foam can be sprayed from the roof, bumpers, and through the sides of the vehicle, allowing it to rapidly suppress a fire as soon as it arrives. The MFV has six wheels to support its full size, allowing it to be a major responder to fires.

Fire suppressant foam is over a century old. Popular Science first covered it in 1916, describing a test by Standard Oil Company of a carbon-dioxide foam used to control and extinguish fires. Before such systems, sand was “most frequently used in these emergencies, and water, used in the early days of oil fire-fighting, is now never used, since it is heavier than oil and causes the gasoline to overflow and thus spread the fire instead of confining it.” 

While such foams have over a century of use, many of the compounds originally used leave behind environmental toxins, leading governments to replace the kinds of foam they have on hand for fire emergencies so as to avoid future injury when treating an immediate crisis. 

The other vehicle that the UK is sending Ukraine for firefighting is the Rapid Intervention Vehicle, which is a four-wheeler. Its water tank capacity is 600 gallons, while its foam liquid tank holds just 75. Despite the smaller limits, the vehicles are useful for getting into places quickly, and treating fires with foam and water as required.

Part of what makes fire suppressant vehicles so important for an air force, enough that British fire fighting forces can have on hand extras to give away, is because one bad landing can turn a plane into an oily, fiery wreck. Stopping fires powered by jet fuel quickly makes it more likely to save the plane’s pilot and occupants, and possibly leave enough of the plane behind to salvage or repair. These vehicles, both the MFV and RIV, are made to deploy with the Royal Air Force when it operates away from domestic air bases, as the danger of fires is ever present at any operational runway.

In July 2020, the Royal Air Force replaced the MFVs and RIVs at Brize Norton, its largest air base. The larger High Reach Extendable Turret (HRET) strikers will fill the role of the MFVs, allowing fire suppressant to be placed at better angles. The smaller Multi-Purpose Response Vehicles (MPRV) are replacing the RIVs. With a new generation of firefighting vehicles tending to its own air bases, the UK is passing along its surplus firefighting tools to a country in direct need. 

Ukraine could use the vehicles for tasks like putting out fires caused by missiles, especially if such attacks hit vehicles and risk spreading through fuel. The vehicles would also be useful for ensuring that airports stay open, allowing crews to cool and clear struck vehicles from a runway. 

 “We are confident that the equipment provided to date, and associated training, will directly enhance firefighting capability, as we consider further opportunities to support the Ukrainian Military Fire Service moving forward,” said Defence Chief Fire Officer Sim Nex.

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On July 21, 2023, Christropher Nolan’s Oppenheimer entered wide release. The film follows J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who directed the US program to create the world’s first atomic bombs. The movie, shot in part in New Mexico, tells a story of the bomb and the early Cold War focused closely on Oppenheimer, his personal relationships, and the revocation of his security clearance in 1954. The film depicts a fairly mainstream understanding of the scientist’s life, triumph, and foibles.

Because Nolan’s camera is kept narrowly focused on Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, much of the bomb’s impact and early history is kept largely off screen. The film draws directly from American Prometheus, a 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, which offers a thorough portrait. Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Oppenheimer oversaw the bomb’s development, was founded as part of the atomic bomb effort and today remains an important center of American nuclear weapons research.

Any fuller story of the bomb needs to venture beyond the boundaries of laboratory grounds and test ranges. Here are three details of nuclear weapons and their development not captured in the film.

The bombs of today are much more powerful 

At the heart of an atomic bomb of any kind is a fission reaction. In this process, a mass of radioactive isotopes, like Uranium-235 or Plutonium 239, is compressed at high speed, breaking apart the atomic bonds in the isotopes and sending neutrons outwards with tremendous force. 

It’s a fission bomb that forms the centerpiece of Oppenheimer. In an attempt to get scientists to stop openly talking about bomb production, the first atomic bomb was named “Gadget.” It was tested at Trinity on July 16, 1945. 

It yielded an explosion equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, or 20 kilotons. Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, had a yield of 15 kilotons. Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had a yield of 20 kilotons. These weapons had a massive impact. In the US, Gadget’s fallout caused health impacts still observed in people downwind today. 

Initial estimates place the death toll from Hiroshima at 70,000 and the death toll from Nagasaki at 40,000 people. A later estimate puts the deaths at 140,000 for Hiroshima and 70,000 for Nagasaki. The methodology of both estimates is sound, and added to those estimates can be the tens of thousands injured by the bomb’s effects but not killed outright.

These numbers are the baseline for understanding how many people a fission weapon of such power can kill. Given the scale of an atomic blast, bombs will invariably kill civilians if used near any population center.

Another type of bomb, called the “Super” during the Manhattan Project, sought to use a small fission reaction to set off a larger fusion chain reaction. It’s also known as an H-Bomb, or more broadly a thermonuclear weapon, and the largest one ever detonated by the United States had a yield of 15 megatons. The largest H-bomb detonated by the Soviet Union yielded 50 megatons.

The current nuclear bombs in the US arsenal range from 0.3 kilotons up to 1.2 megatons, making yields like that seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the small end of what is presently fielded. Weapons with yields as small as Gadget, Fat Man, and Little Boy are sometimes described as “tactical” nuclear weapons, though that’s a broad adjective and not a particularly useful term. Most US nuclear weapons have larger—and often much larger—yields. Should a nuclear weapon be used by the United States in the 21st century, it would likely be at least one or two orders of magnitude more powerful than the only atomic bombs used so far in war.

There were complex, and costly, supply chains involved

Los Alamos is central to Oppenheimer’s story, and to the theory, design, and assembly of the atom bomb. Oppenheimer selected the location because of a fondness for northern New Mexico, and the US Army agreed to use the mesa that became Los Alamos because access to and from the lab could be easily controlled. The Army acquired the land in part by refusing grazing permits to families that previously used the mesa, as well as offering small cash payments or in some cases outright condemnation of the land—strong-arming inhabitants into leaving. 

Los Alamos was just one node at the head of a broader industry built to design and create the bomb. Some parts of the work were done at university laboratories. Other parts, especially in the field of enriching uranium or producing plutonium, had to be done elsewhere. The city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee was created to facilitate the enrichment of Uranium-235 isotopes from acquired naturally occurring Uranium-238. At the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington State, the Army commissioned reactors to produce plutonium. Environmental harms from the work at Hanford were discovered as possible in 1949, but not revealed until public investigation in the 1980s. 

Before uranium could be refined, it needed to be extracted from the ground. Some uranium existed in stockpiles outside mines, as before the war the element was not terribly sought after compared to radium, which resulted from decaying uranium. During World War II, the Belgian government in exile sold uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Congo to the US. Mining radioactive material is harmful to the miners, and Belgian employers worked miners at Shinkolobwe around the clock, with little surviving written record of the human toll of the operation. 

Uranium was also mined from areas on Navajo reservations within the United States. The health impact of this work, on miners and their families, was largely kept from people, until it spilled forth in disaster in the late 1970s in New Mexico. “On July 16, 1979, the Church Rock uranium mill experienced the largest release of radioactive material on United States soil. The south cell disposal pond experienced a massive, twenty foot breach in its wall — likely caused by numerous six-inch cracks in the cement,” records the Atomic Heritage Foundation. “The wall, which acted as a dam to keep the radioactive waste in the pond, was located directly next to Pipeline Arroyo, a tributary for the larger Puerco River. In all, 1,100 tons of solid radioactive waste and 93 million gallons of liquid waste ended up in the river.”

History is complicated, not tidy

The American creation of the bomb was motivated, in large part, out of a fear that the atomic bomb research undertaken by Nazi Germany was already further along. An American bomb could then be used in the war first, as the thinking at the time went. German decisions ended up not leading to anything like a productive bomb production effort, and as Los Alamos neared completion of the Gadget, Germany surrendered.

The first atomic bomb was tested and used in the window between when Germany had surrendered in the war and when Japan surrendered unconditionally. This timing is often used to argue that the dropping of the atomic bomb was a course of action directly chosen to end the war that otherwise would not have ended. One popular post-war narrative holds President Harry Truman as making the decision to drop the bomb rather than launch a massive invasion with US forces.

History is more complicated than that tidy tell, which itself was a postwar justification. What is notable instead is that President Truman, when he succeeded Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inherited a bomb program that was nearly ready for testing, and which was producing a weapon the Army expected to use. As historians like Alex Wellerstein have argued, there was never a specific moment at which a singular decision was made to drop the bomb.

“The day after Nagasaki,” writes Wellerstein in an article for The New Yorker, “Truman issued his first affirmative command regarding the bomb: no more strikes without his express authorization. He never issued the order to drop the bombs, but he did issue the order to stop dropping them.”

Correction on July 21, 2023: This article has been updated to correct an error regarding the names of the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Correction on July 24, 2023: This article has been updated to correct an error about the weight equivalent of 20 kilotons.

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In the series I Made a Big Mistake, PopSci explores mishaps and misunderstandings, in all their shame and glory.

Super Glue is a fascinating substance. A strong, quick-drying adhesive, it is useful enough to keep around the house as a handy tool, and so easy to use (and misuse) that it’s a regular source of trips to the emergency room. One such study highlights “patient carelessness” as responsible for nearly 80 percent of the cases involved, with “childhood curiosity and lack of parental supervision” clocking in at another 11 percent. The history of Super Glue’s creation is as wild as that of the stories that ER doctors could tell each other over drinks, and it starts in 1942, with an attempt to improve the accuracy of weapons.

Super Glue was twice invented by Harry Coover. The first time, he was working at Eastman Kodak on military research. Eastman Kodak is best known today as a film manufacturer, one whose present survival came thanks to a bailout from Hollywood film studios. As a side note, director Christopher Nolan, whose 2023 film Oppenheimer covers the most famous military research project of all time, was one of the leading forces behind Kodak’s rescue, emphasizing the specific qualities of the film.

In the 1940s, Eastman Kodak could point to decades of work in military technology. Its researchers, engineers, and technicians had designed gunsight lenses for fighter planes in World War I. Before World War I, the best-quality optical glass came from Germany, and other nations regarded its creation as a trade secret, leading the US to engineer its industry on its own. In 1942, Coover was continuing in that line of research, looking to design a new gunsight made of clear plastic. Plastic had the promise of making for a lighter sight, and one that could be made at scale if the right compound was found. 

Coover did not, in 1942, discover a better gunsight material. Instead, he had found a problem.

Sticky situation

What would become known as Super Glue was a cyanoacrylate, and the first impression was that it was worthless for the problem Coover was looking to solve.  

“I was working with some acrylate monomers that showed promise,” Coover recalled for Popular Science in the February 1989 issue. “But everything they touched stuck to everything else. It was a severe pain.”

Coover and colleagues were looking for a straightforwardly useful material. Cyanoacrylate presented only problems, and throughout World War II, Eastman Kodak would make its gunsight lenses in the tens of thousands out of glass.

[Related: Raytheon asks retirees for help making new Stinger anti-air missiles]

It would take the post-war world, and a move to Tennessee, for Coover to stumble on Super Glue a second time, and realize its unique value. In 1951, Coover’s job was moved to Kingsport, Tennessee, where he was assigned a team of chemists.

“He had been overseeing the work of a group of Kodak chemists who were researching heat-resistant polymers for jet airplane canopies. They tested cyanoacrylate monomers, and this time, Coover realized these sticky adhesives had unique properties in that they required no heat or pressure to bond. He and his team tried the substance on various items in the lab, and each time, the items became permanently bonded together,” notes an MIT profile of Coover.

In 1954, after this second discovery of Super Glue, Coover filed a patent for “Alcohol-catalyzed alpha-cyanoacrylate adhesive compositions.” This facilitated the commercialization of the discovery, as Eastman 910 industrial adhesive, in 1958.

Because glue forms a polymer where it contacts water, it can be used to seep into and seal small cracks and pores on the surfaces it is connecting, creating a powerful, tight bond. Under normal conditions, continued Coover in 1989 in Popular Science, “all surfaces have at least a monomolecular layer of water on them. It’s actually the water, or any weak base, that is the catalyst causing the polymerization.”

Coover once demonstrated this to comedic effect on a gameshow, where he demonstrated Super Glue’s strength by binding two pieces of metal together, and then holding on to one as it was lifted into the air. Show host Garry Moore jumped on as well, and still the glue held the metal together, enough for the men to both be lifted up. 

All patched up

Coover’s invention seems like it should follow a straightforward trajectory as a happy accident of military research, finding postwar use instead. What makes Super Glue remarkable is that it ended up on the battlefield anyway.

[Related: Super Glue could make it easier to recycle plastic]

In 1964, Eastman Kodak submitted an application to the FDA that Super Glue be considered for wound sealing. It would take years for a variation of the glue to be formally certified, but during the Vietnam War, the glue was reportedly used as a way to seal wounds and cuts, at least until better medical attention could be found. Today, specific medical variants exist. 

Skin adhesives specifically formulated for the task are a regular tool in hospitals, and while the Mayo Clinic doesn’t encourage the use of Super Glue as a way to treat small cuts and wounds, it acknowledges that it has been successfully used as such. So let that fact stick in your brain, and proceed at your own risk when using the substance.

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On July 12, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) announced that it wants a new way to make photorealistic virtual models. The organization’s mission is researching and developing new tools for intelligence agencies, like the CIA and the FBI, as well as others through the US government and the Department of Defense. Intelligence is the profession of finding useful, actionable information, and the new project on virtual renderings is a way to ensure that when people on the ground are sent to a building they’ve never visited before, they can find all the right side doors in.

Spy thrillers make it seem like government agencies have access to perfect information about the world, from the panopticon of 1998’s Enemy of the State through the superhumanly perceptive agencies of the 2000’s Bourne trilogy to the all-knowing and all-powerful AI “Entity” of 2023’s Mission: Impossible. Intelligence agencies guard knowledge of what they can and cannot do so as to not dispel that notion. This request, for a tool to create useful, 3D virtual models, suggests that movie scenes where an agent enhances a camera view until it’s a perfect life-size picture remain the stuff of fiction.

What IARPA wants help with, in brief, is the ability to give people, like soldiers or first responders, an explorable 3D map of a place made from real imagery, rather than a 2D depiction of the place.

The organization calls the initiative WRIVA. “The Walk-through Rendering from Images of Varying Altitude (WRIVA) program seeks to produce innovations that will advance 3-D site modelling capabilities far beyond today’s state of the art, giving personnel virtual ‘ground truth’ with unrivaled insights into locations that would be difficult, if not impossible, to view,” reads the announcement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Modeling in this instance conjures to mind specific renderings of locations made by computer software, which is the intent, but it’s worth considering how recently the models procured by the CIA were literal, physical models, with parts that might accompany an electric train set or a hobbyist wargame. 

“In support of the raid that resulted in the death of Usama Bin Ladin, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) modelers built Abbottabad Compound 1 Model,” notes the CIA’s description of the 1:84 scale model. Before Navy SEAL Team 6 went on the May 2011 raid, they used this model, where 1 inch matches 7 feet of the compound, to understand the compound and its surroundings. The CIA continues, “This model was used to brief President Obama, who approved the raid on the compound.”

The compound was under surveillance for a long time, and had the virtue of housing an occupant who was unlikely to leave. That allowed surveillance images to be collected for building the model, to ensure the SEALs found the highest profile target in the War on Terror. Not content with merely a miniature model, the SEALs also rehearsed the raid in a life-size mock-up of the compound in North Carolina.

WRIVA wants to offer that kind of detail and clarity, without the painstaking work of physical modeling, thus expanding who gets access to such walkthroughs.

“Imagine if the Intelligence Community (IC), law enforcement, first responders, military, and aid workers could virtually drop into a location and familiarize themselves before their feet even hit the ground,” reads the announcement.

In cases like the Abbottabad raid, where the mission was specifically about sending armed special operations forces into danger, knowing the external layout of a building and its surroundings allowed the raiders to move through the exterior parts of the compound with some familiarity. In rescue work, being able to pull up the outside of a building could give first responders en route a way to search for entrances and features familiar to locals but unknown to new arrivals.

DARPA, which tackles blue sky technological development for the military and is a type of cousin to IARPA, has explored development in a similar lane with its subterranean challenge. In this competition, competitors built robots that could go inside and map out buildings, creating useful tools for any humans that follow. This has immediate implications for rescue work, and also can be easily adapted to military use, where a robot explores a dangerous cave possibly filled by armed enemies, before any soldier is put at risk.

With IARPA’s project, it’s the observable outsides of buildings that become fodder for virtual model making. The announcement says the goal is to make “photorealistic virtual models using satellite, ground-level, and other available imagery.” (While IAPRA did not mention artificial intelligence in its announcement, the companies named as leads include Blue Halo and Raytheon, which have experience working with AI, which could be one way to tackle this problem.) The trio of satellite, ground level, and other available imagery sounds a lot like the methods used by open-source analysts to try and identify the location of videos and events in publicly available photography. With access to the resources on hand across the US intelligence community, what can be done in open source should be seen as just the beginning, not the end state, of what IARPA is asking companies to do.  

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On July 7, the White House announced the contents of its latest security assistance for Ukraine. These transfers of weapons and equipment have proceeded regularly over the last 18 months, since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The latest weapons include anti-air missiles, armored vehicles, anti-tank weapons, and a host of other systems. The most stand-out item, and the one that has attracted greater public response, is the inclusion of the Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munition (DPICM), otherwise known as cluster munitions.

A cluster bomb or cluster munition is a shell that, after it’s fired, opens and releases many smaller explosives, called submunitions. The ones being sent to Ukraine are rounds for 155m howitzers, an artillery piece that lobs shells at a high trajectory so they fly over obstacles and then descend to hit whatever is below. In a cluster bomb, the outer casing detonates away, allowing the spin of the shell to scatter cluster bomblets like so many deadly seeds. This dispersal means that the submunitions cover a larger area than the blast of a single conventional bomb would.

“With this announcement, we will be able to provide Ukraine with hundreds of thousands of additional artillery ammunition immediately. This decision will ensure we can sustain our support for Ukraine by bridging us to a point where we are producing sufficient artillery ammunition on a monthly basis across the coalition. We recognize the complexities here, which is why I want to quickly provide a few additional pieces of information on DPICM,” Colin Kahl, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, said at a press conference after the announcement. 

The use of cluster munitions in Ukraine predates the 2022 invasion, with both sides using the weapons during the long Donbass war between Ukraine and Russia from 2014 until the 2022 invasion. Russia has used cluster bombs in its invasion of Ukraine, with reports indicating use against both military targets and cities. Ukraine is currently waging a counter-offensive against Russian forces entrenched in Ukraine, and has sought cluster munitions as a tool worth firing in their own country because of the desired military effect against defensive positions, like trenches.

That ability to cover an area with small explosives represents both the military potential and the biggest post-war concern from the use of cluster munitions. Bomblets are small, and while they are all designed to detonate on impact, some may not. These duds can either be truly inert, where they will never detonate, or they can be set off at some point in the future, by civilians in the area or by mine-clearing crews. There is a risk of leaving unexploded duds with all bombs, but because each cluster munition scatters many small bomblets, it makes the number of unexploded bombs much greater per shell than it is for single munitions.

The history of cluster munitions

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed cluster munitions, alongside the development of precision-guided weapons. Like many Cold War weapons, they were originally designed for use in a massive ground war over Europe, and found use instead in the long running military campaigns, like the US in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Ukraine and Russia both inherited military equipment from the Soviet Union after the Cold War, including cluster munitions.

As a category, cluster munitions date back to World War II, and in a March 2022 report, the Congressional Research Service notes the weapons have been used by at least 21 countries since. These include use by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the United Kingdom in the Falklands War, by various factions in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and others. The United States used cluster munitions extensively in Southeast Asia, as part of the Vietnam War, “and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimates that in Laos alone, 9 million to 27 million unexploded submunitions remained after the conflict, resulting in over 10,000 civilian casualties to date.”

The United States also used cluster munitions in the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, but has reportedly not used the weapons since the first three weeks of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

Part of the challenge of making cluster munitions work is that potential for duds. From a human rights and laws-of-war perspective, duds are deadly because they pose a risk to people who are civilians—they’re not uniformed armed combatants, soldiers, or other members of the military. By threatening civilians, and by threatening them after a war is over, these weapons create an enduring risk; the small bomblets are costly to clean up and deadly to leave in place. The other reason duds are a problem for the military is that each dud fired in battle is a potential enemy left alive, making the weapon less effective than promised.

Dealing with deadly duds

There are a few ways countries have responded to the problems posed by cluster munitions and their duds. The first is the Convention on Cluster Munitions. This treaty, which is agreed to by more than 100 nations, entered into force in 2010.  The convention “bans the use of cluster munitions, as well as their development, production, acquisition, transfer, and stockpiling,” with two exceptions: if the cluster munition is designed to detect and hit a single target (like many small bombs hitting a tank) or if they are cluster munitions that include an electronic self-destruction or self-deactivating feature. That last feature lets munitions render themselves inert, reducing but not completely eliminating the risk to civilians posed by unexploded bombs.

Several nations have not signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, including Russia, the United States, and Ukraine, among others. While some NATO allies, like Canada, France, and the United Kingdom are signatories, the treaty does not prevent general or military cooperation with non-signatory nations.

The other way to reduce the risk of unexploded submunitions is to ensure that more of the submunitions explode.

This is the tack that Kahl emphasized, saying that “compared to Russian cluster munitions, the DPICM rounds we will provide Ukraine have an extremely low failure, or dud rate. The DPICM ammunition we are delivering to Ukraine will consist only of those with a dud rate less than 2.35 percent. Compare that to Russia, which has been using cluster munitions across Ukraine with dud rates of between 30 and 40 percent. During the first year of the conflict alone, Russia fired cluster munitions deployed from a range of weapon systems have likely expended tens of millions of submunitions, or bomblets, across Ukraine.”

The aftermath 

Unexploded bombs from this fighting were already a major postwar concern for Ukraine, because safely clearing explosives is slow, painstaking work. While Kahl gave a failure rate of 2.35 percent, the New York Times reports that “the Pentagon’s own statements indicate that the cluster munitions in question contain older grenades known to have a failure rate of 14 percent or more.”

With 72 small grenades in each shell of cluster munitions, a 14-percent failure rate translates to just over 10 failures per shell. (The number of submunitions in a shell varies, with reports ranging from tens to hundreds.) These are stockpiled weapons that the United States stopped using in 2003, and stopped procuring in 2008 as the failure rate was deemed too high under Pentagon policy.

In a press conference July 7, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan emphasized the nature of the war Ukraine is fighting as a justification for the weapons.

“The argument I’m making is that Russia has already spread tens of millions of these bomblets across Ukrainian territory,” said Sullivan. “So we have to ask ourselves: Is Ukraine’s use of cluster munitions on that same land actually that much of an addition of civilian harm, given that that area is going to have to be de-mined regardless?”

Kahl echoed that same sentiment, saying “Russia has been using cluster munitions indiscriminately since the start of this war in order to attack Ukraine. By contrast, Ukraine is seeking DPICM rounds in order to defend its own sovereign territory.”

These arguments anticipate and in part respond to the robust disagreement about the weapon’s transfer and use from allies and human rights organizations. On July 8, Canada’s government released a statement condemning the transfer, saying “We do not support the use of cluster munitions and are committed to putting an end to the effects cluster munitions have on civilians – particularly children.”

Legacy weapons—and the question of using them or not—are realities that present and future policy makers must grapple with. Like a submunition left undiscovered in a field until tragedy strikes, the decision to develop and field a weapon has implications in the immediate moments of the conflict, and in the long aftermath of a battle. The hastened end of a war may make the peacetime work of restoration and demining arrive sooner, but the way in which the war is fought will determine the scale of post-war repair needed.

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Stinger missiles are Cold War relics, and like many such relics, have seen action to lethal effect in Ukraine’s war against the Russian invasion. Nations like the United States and other NATO allies have given Ukraine their Stingers, putting the venerable human-portable surface-to-air missile to use against Soviet-designed aircraft, as it was originally designed to do. But the Stinger missile design is so old, and the stockpiles of the missiles being expended so quickly, that Stinger-maker Raytheon is asking for its retired missile makers to teach current workers how to restart production, Defense One reported in late June.

The US Army announced it was looking for a new Stinger missile replacement in March 2022, just a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The announcement came after the Biden administration had already announced the planned transfer of hundreds of Stinger missiles to the country. The Department of Defense’s June 27 factsheet on security assistance to Ukraine records over 1,700 Stinger anti-aircraft systems sent to the country. The missiles, which can be shoulder-fired or mounted on vehicles like Humvees, are being put to use, depleting what was already a finite supply of the weapons.

“Stinger’s been out of production for 20 years, and all of a sudden in the first 48 hours [of the war], it’s the star of the show and everybody wants more,” said Wes Kremer, the president of Raytheon parent company RTX, reports Defense One. Kremer’s remarks came at the Paris Air Show in June, an annual gathering and exhibition of aircraft and aircraft-related technologies. Kremer continued: “We were bringing back retired employees that are in their 70s … to teach our new employees how to actually build a Stinger. We’re pulling test equipment out of warehouses and blowing the spider webs off of them.”

The relevance of the Stinger to modern combat, combined with the manufacturing know-how being bound up in the minds of retirees, frames the machine as something of a useful relic. To understand the drive to restart Stinger production now, it is helpful to understand the circumstances under which the missile was first made.

Take the Redeye

The Army’s search for an anti-air missile can be traced back to 1951, after years of experimenting with anti-air guns found the weapons had insufficient range and accuracy to stop newer and faster planes. The HAWK missile, which has also seen action in Ukraine, is one of the early anti-air developments, but it is big, and needs vehicles to transport and launch it. Putting a missile in the hands of soldiers and marines on foot allows infantry to shoot down low-flying aircraft, including attack planes and increasingly helicopters. 

The first shoulder-fireable missile developed by the United States for this purpose was the Redeye, which used an infrared seeker to chase after the hottest object in the sky. It was first deployed for combat in 1967. The Soviet Union, working on a similar problem, developed the Strela shoulder-fired anti-air missile, which has seen use by both Ukraine and Russia.

The Redeye’s seeker meant it was easy to throw off targets with flares or even just the sun on a bright day, limiting the weapon’s usefulness, and it could not distinguish between friendly and enemy aircraft, meaning anyone firing a Redeye risked the missile turning and hitting a nearby friendly plane. The original Redeye was also slow, making it a weapon that could hit a low-flying plane after an attack run, but not stop it before an initial pass. 

The Stinger’s evolution

What became the Stinger started its development as the Redeye II. The program was renamed in 1972 and the missile became operational in 1981. The Stinger included a system that let the missile attempt to distinguish between friendly and hostile aircraft, by matching a coded friendly radio signal from the allied planes. The guidance system of the Stinger is still infrared, but once it gets close to a target the missile can navigate to hit other parts of the aircraft. 

The Stinger received significant upgrades over the course of its production, ensuring the weapons would remain useful for the duration of their service life, but the weapon is fundamentally based on technology and components from decades ago. While all military production is to some extent bespoke products, they exist in an ecosystem of parts that match commercial capabilities available at the time. 

Raytheon bringing back retirees to teach the basics of Stinger production will likely help with a lost transfer of knowledge, until the Army’s desired Stinger replacement is designed, tested, and improved. In the meantime, another option for the Army would be to reach out to allies like Japan and the United Kingdom, and see if their respective Stinger updates (Japan’s Type 91) or replacements (the UK’s Starstreak) are available for production. 

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On June 27, defense giant Northrop Grumman announced that it had successfully flown a plane with a new navigation system. Designed to work in situations where GPS signals may be difficult or impossible to get, this Embedded Global Positioning System (GPS) / Inertial Navigation System (INS) Modernization, or EGI-M, is a tool that could someday help fighter jet pilots and other aircraft fight through the jammed skies of a future war. 

For the May flight test, instead of trying the system on a fancy fighter or high-end military craft, the EGI-M was reportedly flown on a Cessna Citation V business jet.

“This flight test is a major step forward in developing our next generation airborne navigation system,” Ryan Arrington, a Northrop Grumman VP, said in a release. “The EGI-M capability developed by Northrop Grumman enables our warfighters to navigate accurately and precisely through hostile and contested environments.”

There’s many ways that a sky can be made inhospitable to intruding aircraft. Anti-aircraft weapons, primarily missiles and rockets but also fighter jets and sometimes anti-air guns, can all try to shoot a plane out of the sky. Jammers, or other tools and electronic warfare systems designed to interfere with signals in the electromagnetic spectrum, can block the information that pilots or drone operators need to operate their aircraft. The former kind of interference is referred to by the military as “kinetic” or physically destructive, the latter broadly is “electronic warfare.” Both kinds of interference can make for a hostile and contested sky.

The United States military has, for decades, operated in skies it could quickly and reliably control.

“Last time an American soldier died from an enemy aircraft was April 15th, 1953,” said James Hecker, a general in the U.S. Air Force, on a recent episode of the War on the Rocks podcast. “We’ve gotten a little bit spoiled, especially in the last 30 years. Desert storm, we had to fight for air superiority, but we got it really quick. Other wars that we’ve been in in the last 20 years, we got it uncontested.”

Hecker was speaking alongside Air Marshall Johnny Stringer of the British Royal Air Force, in a discussion about lessons learned about air superiority in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

“The biggest lesson learned that really the world has gotten out of this is what happens if you can’t get air superiority. What we’ve seen on both sides is that neither one was able to get air superiority,” said Hecker, who went on to note that the reason neither side can claim air superiority is because both sides have very good integrated air and missile defense systems.

While these defense systems are primarily missiles, being able to block out some of the signals used by planes and drones also impedes the aircraft’s ability to function. GPS systems, originally developed for military use, depend on aircraft receiving and using signals from space, and then being able to match that to a physical position on or above the earth. 

The EGI-M is designed to operate in GPS-contested and GPS-denied environments, or places where the signals face interference and complete obstruction. To get around that, an inertial navigation system uses sensors like gyroscopes to instead track changes and speed of movement from a known point, allowing the aircraft’s movement to locate it in space. To help in GPS-contested environments, the system can receive GPS-M signals, which is a higher code of GPS signal specifically reserved for military functions; it is designed to be harder to obstruct and more secure in transmission. 

In the May flight, the Cessna testbed carried three models of the system, which it used to capture three different kinds of navigational information. As outlined in a conference abstract, found by The Aviationist, the three types of navigational data were inertial only, GPS only, and a blended GPS/inertial management system that used both at once.

As designed, the EGI-M system will go into two planes upon launch. One of these is the F-22 Raptor, a stealth air superiority fighter exclusively flown by the United States Air Force, which will be crucial to flying into and fighting to open any contested sky. In addition, EGI-M is designed to launch on the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, a prop-driven plane operated by the Navy that features a large radar in a disk mounted above the plane’s fuselage. The Hawkeye is a command and control aircraft, used to perceive allied and enemy movement and direct battle while airborne. 

New navigation systems will not guarantee that US or allied aircraft can permanently clear a sky in the face of hostile foes, but they can expand the window in which such aircraft can reliably operate, and can make reasserting air superiority easier.

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On June 22, Denmark’s Ministry of Defense announced what companies would be building its next patrol ships. The new type of vessel is designed to be modular and upgradeable for years and even decades to come, allowing the same hulls and bones of the ship to serve even as the tools and technologies change with the times.

While Denmark is a small country, its possession of Greenland ensures it has an outsized role to play in the Arctic. With global climate change and thawing ice, the Arctic was already going to become a more trafficked and contested part of the globe. And that was before Russia’s invasions of Ukraine, first in 2014 and then at massive scale in 2022, put a deep freeze on cooperation between all of the Arctic states. As a founding member of NATO, Denmark has long been part of a defensive military alliance, ready to respond to Russian threats. New patrol ships will enable the country’s navy to operate more capably where needed for decades to come.

“A rethinking of the design will mean that we in the maritime domain are future-proof to handle changing needs. This applies, for example, to dealing with hybrid threats in a faster and more flexible way than before,” said Torben Mikkelsen, the head of the Danish Defense Ship program, according to Shephard News. 

Observers expect the new patrol vessels will be based on a ship template called the OMT MPV80, built by Odense Maritime Technology and SH Defence. OMT is a naval design and advising firm—it’s one of the three major parts of the named consortium responsible for producing Denmark’s new patrol vessels, alongside Terma, a naval military contractor, and PensionDanmark, a pension fund.

The OMT MPV80 debuted at the DSEI arms exhibition in 2021. It was built with SH Defense’s modular “Cube” system as an essential characteristic. CEO of OMT Kåre Groes Christiansen told Naval News that they had made “a ship that was born Cubed.”

Cubed? Christiansen is referring to the Cube modular system, made by SH Defense. It is a system of packaging equipment in modules that are all designed to fit the footprint of shipping containers. The Cube modules are designed to fit on decks or into storage, letting existing vessels use the system. The OMT MPV80, designed for Cube utilization, will have spots for a Cube to be loaded through open side panels. Once the Cube system equipment is slotted in, the ship can use that equipment while underway, and then when it returns to port after a patrol or a mission, the crew can swap out what modules it carries. 

Consider a ship designed for use with the Cube. Before it goes out on patrol, it could take on mine-laying modules, with shipping crate-sized mine storage and conveyor belts slotting in, letting the vessel turn the sea into an inhospitable domain, obstructing safe passage and protecting ports from hostile intrusion. 

Alternatively, the same kind of vessel could be outfitted with mine-hunting modules. Storage, a work station, and launch space for mine-hunting underwater robots could fit inside a crate. Rather than build a control station for the minehunting robots into the body of the ship, a shipping container-shaped control room can plug in, letting the vessel work as a minehunter when it needs to be, but also letting it take on other missions at other times.

Other possibilities abound. The vessel could carry extra torpedoes, anti-air missiles, or depth charges for more of a naval combatant role. The Cubes could contain salvage arms and rescue boats, allowing the patrol vessel to serve more of a coast guard and life-saving role. With a base design that accommodates some deck guns for protection and a helipad to launch crewed and possibly uncrewed aircraft, the OMT MPV80 design seems well positioned to perform whatever Denmark might ask of it, alone or in support of allied navies. 

The consortium’s announcement of the agreement for a new patrol vessel emphasized the modularity as a way to future-proof the ships. While naval operations entail risk, ensuring that the tools and equipment needed can be installed on the ships as soon as they are ready for use ensures that outdated weapons or sensors are unlikely to hinder such a ship.

These new patrol vessels are designed to replace Denmark’s existing fleet of Thetis ocean patrol ships, which operate in the icy waters around Denmark’s possession of Greenland and the Faroe Islands. These vessels are ice-rated, and entered service in the early 1990s. While sea ice has declined precipitously since then, it’s still a durable presence and risk in Arctic and near-Arctic operations. Designing for the future means designing for one where naval operations may follow the warming water north, and staying on the edge of the sea ice.

Watch a video about the type of vessel below:

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On June 26, the US Army announced a new name and a new acronym for what will replace the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. The program to do so was formerly known as the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, but the vehicle itself will now be known as the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle. Replacing the Bradley is no small task, as the Army has tried and failed to find a suitable next-generation version of its fighting troop carrier for decades.

Before the Army decides on a final model of the XM30, it has awarded contracts to two teams to design and build up to 11 prototype vehicles each. These teams are led by General Dynamics Land Systems, based in Sterling Heights, Michigan, and by American Rheinmetall, also based in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

“In recent years, peer and near-peer competitors of the United States have significantly increased their combat vehicle capabilities. The character of warfare has changed and our potential adversaries bring increased capabilities to the battlefield. The best way to respond is to ensure that our formations equipped with Infantry Fighting Vehicles can bring greater survivability, powerful lethality at stand-off range, and improved maneuver capabilities to the battlefield,” Dan Heaton, of the Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team, says via email. “The Bradley Fighting Vehicle continues to be a capable and reliable asset for our Army. As we consider the future fight, however, we need to invest in a new vehicle that can meet the needs of the Army of 2040.”

The Bradley’s origins date back to the late Cold War, when the Army sought a troop transport that could not just deliver infantry safely to battle, but whose crew could use the vehicle’s weapons and sensors to fight alongside the disembarked soldiers. This design was oriented, as with much of US military planning at the time, towards fighting in the European plains and steppes where the Army expected to face the forces of the Soviet Union.

Today, Bradleys can be seen leading armored assaults against Russian lines in Ukraine, as the country works to expel the invading army using machines passed down to it by the US and others.

For the new XM30, building upon the success of the Bradley while designing for the future means leaning heavily into automation, reducing the crew needed to operate the vehicle from three to two, while keeping room for six passengers on the inside. In addition, it’s expected the vehicle will be armed with a 50mm cannon mounted in a remotely controlled turret. It will also have anti-tank guided missiles and machine guns.

“The XM30 at initial fielding [will] include waypoint navigation, Artificial Intelligent Target Recognition (AiTR), and Advanced fire control systems all of which are designed to ease the cognitive burden of the two-person crew,” says Heaton. 

That’s just the start, though. The Army is also working on ways to develop software that is independent of hardware, enabling each side of the equation to be upgraded independently. If better targeting comes from better software on the same hardware, the XM30 should be able to incorporate that.

“We don’t know which technologies will emerge in the future or the rate at which they will be ready to incorporate into a combat vehicle,” says Heaton. “Through the use of Modular Open System Architecture, we are building a vehicle platform that is intentionally designed to allow new technology to be incorporated into the vehicle at the right time. The XM30 is being designed with future upgrades in mind.”

Automation, especially on vehicles designed for combat, requires striking a balance between letting the machine automatically do tasks that require little human supervision, while ensuring human operators are fully in control of major decisions.

While new tools will change the minutiae of how the XM30 operates, the overall role of the vehicle will be the same as the Bradleys it is designed to replace.

“The XM30 is an armored combat vehicle designed to maneuver through the enemy’s security zone to deliver Infantry to positions of advantage to accomplish the unit’s mission,” says Heaton. “The focus of the autonomous behaviors is on reducing the cognitive burden on the crew and allowing formations to generate combat power faster than our adversaries.”

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About 80 miles north-northwest of the Las Vegas strip, sits Groom Lake. The smooth, flat, dry lakebed is one of several across the Nevada desert, with more than a superficial similarity to Rogers Dry Lake, next to California’s Edwards Air Force Base. These spots in the desert, hospitable to people only with great effort, served as an ideal found resource for the United States in the 20th century. On lakebeds dry enough to land planes and far from the prying eyes of civilian life, the Air Force could test new and novel planes, with secrecy baked into the dusty earth around them. If Groom Lake sounds unfamiliar, that’s because it is also known by another name: Area 51.

For decades, the Air Force operations at Groom Lake and Area 51 were shrouded in deliberate secrecy. The base was established in 1955, but it would take until 1998 for the Air Force to acknowledge its existence. Previously, it has stated tersely: “Neither the Air Force nor the Department of Defense owns or operates any location known as ‘Area 51.’ There are a variety of activities, some of which are classified, throughout what is often called the Air Force’s Nellis Range Complex. There is an operation location near Groom Dry Lake. Specific activities and operations conducted on the Nellis Range, both past and present, remain classified and cannot be discussed publicly.”

But even before that, Area 51 had already made multiple appearances in a major series of arcade games by Atari (released in 1995), as a major plot point in the 1996 blockbuster alien invasion movie Independence Day, and it remains a staple in fiction and conspiracy theories about secret extraterrestrial research. It’s second perhaps only to Roswell, New Mexico, in the imagination of people who believe the US government is covering up the existence of aliens. However, aside from its notorious reputation, Area 51 instead has a long history as the holder of far more mundane, terrestrial secrets. Keeping that aura of secrecy up was partly what allowed speculation as to the true nature of the facility to run wild. During this time, the Air Force and CIA were able to test spy planes in the open desert with some degree of privacy.

All that U-2 can’t leave behind

In the early 1950s, the United States Air Force, recently spun off as an independent wing from the Army, set out looking for a high-altitude, long-range, long-endurance spy plane. This was early in the Cold War, and previous attempts to surveil the Soviet Union with balloons had produced extremely limited success. A plane offered far more control, and the reasoning at the time was that a high-altitude plane could stay beyond the range of Soviet radar and missiles. 

This plane ultimately materialized in the form of the U-2, which is still in service today (though the history of its development saw it built on CIA funding instead of Air Force money). While looking for a place to test and develop the new plane, the early U-2 design team spied Nevada’s Groom Dry Lake from the air and landed on the lake bed, proving the inherent viability of the site. Eventually, a paved runway was built. The purchase of land was made by the Atomic Energy Commission, and the boundaries of Area 51 are adjacent to what would become the Nevada Test Site, where the US would detonate nuclear warheads first in open air, then underground.

“The outlines of Area 51 are shown on current unclassified maps as a small rectangular area adjoining the northeast corner of the much larger Nevada Test Site. To make the new facility in the middle of nowhere sound more attractive to his workers, [Lockheed engineer] Kelly Johnson called it the Paradise Ranch, which was soon shortened to the Ranch,” reads a CIA history of the U-2 program, written in 1998 and declassified in 2013.

[Related on PopSci+: A CIA spyplane crashed outside Area 51 a half-century ago. This explorer found it.]

Secrecy was baked into Area 51 from the start, though it became hard to completely disentangle spy plane flights from UFO sightings. In 1947, a flying saucer panic led to public reports and inquiries into unknown aircraft, which helped make a surveillance balloon crash outside Roswell, New Mexico an enduring story. Project Blue Book, an official inquiry by the Air Force into UFOs, collected reports of official sightings, most of which could be dismissed as natural phenomena. One category the Air Force could dismiss internally, but not acknowledge publicly until 1992, was the number of U-2 flights reported as UFOs.

Stealth technology, now a defining feature of jets like the F-22 and F-35 family, was developed and tested at Area 51. In 1977, the US Air Force Special Projects Office tested HAVE BLUE, a stealth demonstrator, at Area 51. The two versions of HAVE BLUE both suffered crashes in their testing, and the wrecked planes were buried in the desert. Before the crashes, enough information was gleaned such that development of other stealth aircraft could continue. The F-117, the first stealth fighter, would be first tested at Area 51, before moving to a different, larger base in Nevada that could accommodate a full squadron.

Beyond developing new technologies, Area 51 has played host to foreign aircraft, acquired at times from defectors, allowing the US military to see just what tech other countries were flying and fighting with. One such incident was the loan from Israel to the United States of a MiG-21 in 1968, flown by an Iraqi pilot who had defected. This let the US get a close look at the most widely produced jet fighter in history, and one that was at the time serving capably in the skies above Vietnam.

In March 1994, Popular Science published “Searching for the Secrets of Groom Lake,” a dive into the development and history of Area 51, spurred by an Air Force’s ultimately successful request to give the Department of the Air Force control over 4,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management-owned territory around the site. This was an effort in part to deter people on the ground from spying on their operations at a distance. That story featured both a 1968 aerial photograph of the site taken by the US Geological Survey, and a 1988 photo taken by a Russian spy satellite that was then made commercially available. 

In October 2006, “New Secrets of Area 51” by Popular Science looked at the kinds of drones and other aircraft that might have been in development at the site. Among these is a sort of white whale for secret plane waters: the Aurora, a long-theorized ramjet powered hypersonic craft.

What, no aliens?

While Groom Lake and Area 51 has hosted plenty of secrets, there’s nothing to suggest it hosts the secret technology most synonymous with the name from popular culture: anything to do with aliens. Some of those claims can be traced back to a 1989 broadcast on Las Vegas television station KLAS, in which a man named Bob Lazar appeared “claiming to be a physicist hired by the government to reverse-engineer the propulsion systems of saucer-shaped alien spacecraft.”

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At the Paris Air Show this week, French defense contractor Turgis and Gaillard unveiled a new large drone: the AAROK. With over 24 hours of promised flight time, the drone is being heralded as Europe’s first Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) drone. It’s a form of uncrewed aircraft that is attempting to fulfill a similar role as drones like the MQ-9 Reaper and other drones of the War on Terror. AAROK’s debut in Paris offers a chance to consider what role such a drone may have in the decades to come.

The AAROK weighs 5.5 tons, can cruise at speeds of up to 287 mph, and reach altitudes of 30,000 feet. It has a wingspan of 72 feet, longer than the 66 feet of the MQ-9 Reaper. The Reaper, famously used by the United States for surveillance and targeted strikes as part of the War on Terror, is a direct comparison point to the AAROK, and already in service with the French military. The AAROK can carry up to 6,000 pounds of payload, of which half can be weapons. As promised, the AAROK is slightly faster than the Reaper, although with a lower service ceiling at present.

“We are proud to introduce our first prototype of remotely piloted aircraft, the AAROK unmanned aerial vehicle. Produced in our French factories, this UAV will meet the requirements of French and allies forces at a reduced cost, both in purchase and use,” said Fanny Turgis, president of Turgis and Gaillard Group, in a release.

What made the Reaper such a good fit for how the Pentagon used it is the way it combined powerful cameras, multiple missiles, and the ability to watch an area for targets for hours, with remote pilots and crews switching control of the vehicle mid-flight. In counter-insurgency warfare, where combat was dictated by looking for and tracking cells of insurgents operating in remote bases or moving in cities, the Reaper’s abilities shone, giving commanders enough information where they could feel comfortable making a kill order. (These orders did not, always, find the right targets, though the missiles certainly found people on the ground below.) 

But the Reaper was built for a specific kind of environment, one where the drone could operate in the sky for long stretches without fear of being shot down by hostile aircraft, and at most only experience a minor risk from human-portable anti-air missiles. As the grinding conventional war in Ukraine has shown, while plane-sized drones can play some role in scouting and targeting, they struggle against dedicated anti-air defenses, and especially against hostile air forces.

This makes the AAROK a curious new entry into the familiar Reaper pattern, loaded with sensors and bristling with bombs and missiles. “AAROK stands out with its robust design, its ability to take off and land from rough fields and operate on all weathers conditions as well as its flight endurance (more than 24 hours) and maximized payload,” Turgis and Gaillard Group said in a release. In addition, the company emphasized the drone’s powerful camera, radar, and communications detection and transmission tools.

Turgis and Gaillard expect the AAROK to be useful for patrolling “Exclusive Economic Zones,” or swaths of ocean claimed by countries that typically extend beyond territorial waters. France has overseas territories in the Indian and Pacific oceans, where over 1.5 million French citizens live. The French embassy in Malaysia notes that 93 percent of France’s exclusive economic zone is located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

In addition to scouting and surveilling existing French claims to the ocean, Turgis and Gaillard pitch the AAROK as an important “asset for operational dominance (intelligence, reconnaissance, and support for high intensity strikes even in contested areas),” suggesting that the drone’s design is useful and durable enough to make it useful in the face of hostile defenses. It can also function as a communications node, with the drone operating as an airborne relay between forces over distance, ensuring commands and information get from headquarters to forces in the field. 

At present, the AAROK is a promise more than a reality, with Patrick Gaiilard, director general of the company, telling Breaking Defense that the prototype “was finished just a few weeks ago and hasn’t yet flown.”

Still, the idea is a compelling pitch for not just the French military but other countries France might sell weapons to, like partner states in Africa or NATO allies. The AAROK can perform much of the missions expected of a legacy drone like the Reaper, but is built on modern tech, with an understanding of modern threats baked in. Part of that understanding comes with cost: the AAROK is pitched as cheaper than other similar vehicles, which makes it both more accessible to smaller militaries, and also somewhat more expendable for militaries with means.

As the aircraft is still in the prototype stage, it remains to be seen how much of the promise can actually be delivered. But the promise itself is compelling, a drone capable of both counter-insurgency and anti-submarine operations, built to be used and lost if needed.

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Under a cloudy sky above Pula, Croatia, on April 21, drones took flight like high-tech clay pigeons. The quadcopters, launched against a coastal backdrop, were testing tools for US soldiers, hobbyist types of the kind that soldiers can now expect to encounter on battlefields. Learning to defeat these drones, and using specific tools for the task, was one goal of Exercise Shield, an air defense and electronic warfare exercise that ran from April 19 through April 21. As the drones flew, soldiers pointed blocky gun-shaped tools into the air, and sent the quadcopters back to the ground.

The tool used at Exercise Shield is the Dronebuster 3B, made by Flex Force. It comes in a tan-beige plastic reminiscent of computers from the early 1990s, with the pistol grip transforming it from an electronic novelty to an especially curious weapon.

“The Dronebuster Block 3, and Dronebuster Block 3B were designed to interrupt the control of the drone by overwhelming the control frequency,” reads the description from Flex Force. “This causes the drone to either stop and hover, or return to the operator, depending on the model of drone. The drone operator has no control of the drone while the command link is being overwhelmed with RF [Radio Frequency] energy.”

In other words, the gun can jam the drone to uselessness over radio frequency channels. Also, Dronebusters can overwhelm Global Navigation Satellite Systems, like GPS, though there are several others. That is important, as one of the main ways hobbyist drones can mitigate loss of control is by navigating to known home coordinates by GPS.

Hand-held drone jammers are relatively new for militaries, with many developed over the 2010s and the 2020s. They are one of the more straightforward attempts to meet the evolving threats on modern battlefields brought about by the abundance of cheap commercial drones in the hands of everyone from professional militaries to insurgent forces. Scouting and bombing aircraft used to at least be large enough to contain a pilot, making them a big target for missiles or guns, but small drones are orders of magnitude cheaper. Finding and stopping them means using everything from high powered microwaves to lasers to, like the Dronebusters, handheld jammers.

In June 2016, Popular Science reported on an exercise undertaken at West Point, where the Army Cyber Institute anticipated the coming preponderance of drones in war, and found a way to train cadets in their use and defeat. These cadets, all future officer candidates at the Army’s foremost military officer training school, traditionally have to engage in an “urban assault,” where a platoon of 40 or so cadets attack a compound defended by a squad of 10 or so underclassmen. 

This “urban” area was a half-dozen cinder block buildings in the woods in New York, and for the drone part of the exercise, the defenders (with an instructor operating the controls) would fly a commercial Parrot drone as a scout, letting them call in simulated artillery on their mock enemies. To stop it, the assaulting platoon could employ a specially set up jammer rifle, configured to knock out that specific Parrot drone.

While the 2016 West Point scenario involved a jammer set up to specifically defeat the drone fielded, the lessons are ones being applied broadly today. A small drone, like the Parrot or many others that can be bought off the shelf, is enough to direct artillery fire, to spy on troop movements, and to make life dangerous unless it is defeated. For soldiers on the ground, shooting it with bullets could be an option, but the drone overhead can see the bright flashes of a rifle muzzle, especially at night, revealing soldiers hoping to stay hidden. Taking out the drone with jamming, instead, makes it useless to the drone operators.

Ukraine has seen drones used at war since the start of the Donbas war in 2014, with quadcopters even used to drop bombs on trenches. Since the February 2022 invasion by Russia, what is really new is the scale of these drones used, with one British think tank estimating that as many as tens of thousands of commercial drones are lost in combat a month. While some losses are simply wear and tear or battery burn out, for people fighting below, stopping a drone as soon as it is found overhead can mean life or death. To that end, militaries will keep fielding and testing jammers soldiers can bring with them into combat. Especially ones that come in a familiar, gun-shaped package.

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On June 14, the US Army celebrated its 248th year as an institution. Timed in anticipation of that anniversary, the Army also announced the new name for its latest armored turreted military vehicle, initially known and developed with the name MPF, or Mobile Protected Firepower. But the MPF designation is no more; the vehicle is now the M10 Booker.

The Army prefers that the M10 Booker be referred to primarily as a “combat vehicle,” though “infantry assault vehicle” is also used. The vehicle, with a heavy gun and tank-like mobility, is less armored than a main battle tank like an M1 Abrams. It’s designed to go places the Abrams cannot, and to fight against enemy vehicles, defenses, and forces without needing the ultra heavy armor that bulk up battle tanks.

The name announcement took place at the National Museum of the US Army at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia. After a shroud was removed from the vehicle’s 105mm cannon, the barrel revealed the name Booker.

There are two people, both deceased, with the surname Booker who are specifically honored in the naming. The first is Robert D. Booker, a soldier who fought as part of the US Army in North Africa in 1943. Fighting against Axis forces, Robert Booker used his machine gun to defeat one machine gun nest, and then despite receiving fatal injuries, guided his squad as they advanced, actions for which he was awarded a posthumous medal of honor. 

The second person honored is Stevon A. Booker, who was among the tank crew leading the April 2003 assault on Baghdad. After the machine gun mounted on the tank failed, he lay prone on top of the tank and guided his unit to defeat anti-tank fire, continuing until he was fatally wounded, actions for which he was awarded a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross.

“The M10 Booker Combat Vehicle is named in [their] honor because it will accomplish what they both did – enabling squads to continue pushing forward through heavy machine-gun fire while protecting our most important weapon system: our Soldiers,” Army Chief of Staff General James McConville said at the Fort Belvoir celebration of the Army’s 248th birthday.

As designed, the vehicle’s mobility and firepower make it a useful tool for clearing uneven terrain, like the contested road to Baghdad or the fields of Tunisia, and then using a powerful gun to destroy fixed defenses and any defenders left crewing them.

“Our Soldiers will now have an infantry assault vehicle in a protected sense with decisive lethality to destroy the threats that took the lives of these two incredible Soldiers,” Doug Bush, the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, said in an Army release.

The two namesake Bookers died almost 60 years apart, fighting in wars under drastically different circumstances, technologies, and stakes. In the thick of combat, distinctions between the world-existential crisis of World War II or the war of choice that was Iraq fade away for those in the field. What the Army is designed to do is deliver soldiers to where they’re needed, with the tools on hand to win the day, and both Bookers died protecting their comrades-at-arms. 

This is work that can be done by a tank, but the Army is explicit that this is not a task that can fall to a light tank. Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, Program Executive Officer for Ground Combat Systems, told Task & Purpose, “The historic use of ‘light tank’ is to perform reconnaissance functions, and this is not a reconnaissance vehicle, it’s an assault gun. Historically, it’s not actually a mission match, even though it looks like, feels like, and smells like [a tank].” (Task & Purpose is owned by Recurrent Ventures, PopSci’s parent company.)

The Army already had one mobile not-quite-tank with a high powered gun for similar purposes, the Stryker Mobile Gun System. That vehicle, armored and turreted but with eight wheels instead of treads, is one the Army is actively divesting from. The new M10 Booker will fill a similar role, in a body designed for the wars of the 21st century.

Some of those threats will feel familiar. Machine guns remain an efficient, durable, lethal tool for all militaries and insurgencies alike, and stopping one with force is a task well-suited to the M10 not-a-tank’s big gun. While the M10 is not light by any definition, its 42 tons is a significant drop down from the over 70 tons of the Abrams. That helps the M10s be delivered, two at a time, by C-17 cargo jets, making it armor that can follow infantry from a secured airfield. 

In total, the Army plans to acquire 504 of the M10 Bookers, priced at around $13 million apiece. While new counter-tank tools make armored assaults harder, and despite the military theorists who proclaimed the death of the tank in April 2022, the need for militaries to advance under fire persists. That makes tanks and tank-like vehicles a durable feature of modern armies, and while the Booker is named after medal awardees, the point of the machine is to win battles without needing such heroics. 

Correction on June 20, 2023: This article has been updated to change the word “metal” to “medal” in the final sentence.

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This post has been updated. It was originally published on June 12, 2023.

The most vulnerable part of a military truck is the driver. The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), tasked with finding and incorporating new commercial technology into the military, has set a deadline of June 13 for ideas about how to roboticize the military’s existing fleet of transport trucks. These vehicles could one day include rides like the Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck, or the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, although at first the program will focus on another machine, the PLS.

Under a program called Ground Expeditionary Autonomy Retrofit System (GEARS), DIU wants vendors to prove that they can automate the driving of vehicles, with six converted a year after the contract is awarded and up to 50 or more vehicles converted within two and a half years of the contract.

“Initially, those vehicles would include palletized load systems (trucks) and could move to more multipurpose trucks like the Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck, or the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV, also known as a Humvee) if shown to be successful,” a DIU spokesperson notes via email.

GEARS is the latest in what has been nearly two decades of effort by the Pentagon to solve an enduring problem from its recent wars. Deploying troops and equipment in a war zone, be it a whole country or even just a long front within one, means keeping people in places where supply infrastructure is limited, and that requires finding a way to resupply those soldiers. 

When there’s no threat of violence against cargo transport, military supply can mirror logistics in the domestic United States, where truck drivers bring gear as needed. When violence does threaten, as it does in both insurgency and conventional warfare, trucks face threats from ambushes, roadside bombs, or attacks from the sky in the form of missiles, artillery, or bombs. Robiticizing transport doesn’t remove that risk entirely, but it does mean that any vehicle that’s attacked results in just lost supplies and equipment, instead of killed or captured soldiers.

“The Department of Defense (DoD) has an existing fleet of military vehicles for its logistics operations. Today, however, these vehicles require human operators. In deployed situations, this creates unnecessary risk to service members’ lives and introduces limits to operational tactics,” reads the solicitation from DIU. “Human operators also have work-to-rest cycles, resulting in additional time constraints. In a fast-moving conflict, the ability to continuously move supplies from one hub to another will have significant impacts on the abilities to sustain operations while maintaining the safety of troops.”

[Related: The UK is upgrading military buggies into self-driving vehicles]

By replacing human drivers with uncrewed systems, the military can overcome the vulnerability of sending humans on milk runs, and such vehicles can push beyond the limits of humans who need to eat and sleep and rest. Continuous supply allows for cargo to be dispatched to where it is needed as soon as it is ready. 

Early in the US war in Iraq, getting supplies reliably and securely through the country meant deploying convoys, where several cargo trucks would carry guards and be escorted by other vehicles. While convoys allow supplies on the move to be protected, and take advantage of numbers to do so, they also present a juicy target. As the contours of fighting in Iraq changed over what’s now two decades of a US presence in the country, convoys persist as a target of opportunity for groups looking to harm or disrupt the US military in the country.

In 2004, DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing, launched a grand challenge, offering a prize for teams that could make a vehicle autonomously navigate a course in the desert. The 2004 challenge ended in a total bust, but multiple vehicles completed the 2005 version, in a moment widely covered as the start of autonomous driving for both commercial and military needs. 

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

With GEARS, DIU is looking to bring commercial tools and techniques back into the fold. To that end, the government is providing the vehicles to use as test beds for prototypes, consistent with the military’s existing cargo fleet and part of the Army’s Palletized Load System. In addition, the new add-on systems could eventually work with the Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck, or Humvees. By adapting these existing vehicles with new software and sensor hardware in what should be straightforward conversions, the Army can gain a new capability without requiring new advances in vehicle body to accommodate uncrewed operation.

“Solutions must have the ability to operate in environments inherent to military operations,” reads the solicitation. “Desired mission sets include, but are not limited to, convoy operations, waypoint navigation, and teleoperations. Solutions should be built to open architecture standards and be capable of integrating new hardware, software, and features as they become available.”

However the teams get there, the goal is to have vehicles that can run without the need for a human in the driver’s seat, or at least, move the human to a remote seat and have them drive from there. By removing the human operator from the road vehicle, the supply truck becomes essentially a reusable package for goods, instead of a prime military target. Goods may still be lost in attacks, though reliably remote navigation will let the military know when and where such attacks occurred.

In the meantime, the military can supply its bases less like caravans under attack, and more as nodes in a big transportation network.

This story was updated to include clarifications and a statement from the DIU about what types of vehicles will be retrofitted and in what order.

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On May 31, the Department of Defense announced $300 million worth of additional military aid to Ukraine. In this latest package are four kinds of anti-air missiles—meaning missiles meant to shoot down threats in the air—including the AIM-7 air-to-air missile.

The Air Intercept Missile-7 (AIM-7) Sparrow is a guided missile with its origins in the 1940s. It saw its first deployment in 1958, though the missiles of that era are a far cry from the weapons deployed today. The modern version, AIM-7M, substantially improved from early days, has been in service since 1982. It’s used by the US, NATO allies like Italy, Spain, Canada, and others, as well as countries like Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.

The AIM-7 is carried by aircraft to destroy other aircraft. In the May 31 package authorized for Ukraine, it is joined by three ground-based anti-air systems. These include Patriot missiles, which can target planes or cruise missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which are human portable and especially useful against low-flying targets like attack helicopters or strafing jets, and Avenger air defense systems. The Avenger mounts multiple Stinger launchers on a turret on the back of a HMMWV (better known as a Humvee) vehicle, and pairs those weapons with a heavy .50 caliber machine gun. This gives it range and flexibility against both aircraft in Stinger range, as well as a cheaper weapon that can hit other flying enemies, like small drones.

“Russia has continued to wage a brutal, completely unprovoked war against Ukraine, launching yet more airstrikes and bombarding Ukrainian cities across the country,” said National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby during a briefing at the White House. The release from the Pentagon paired that statement with the note that Russia recently launched 17 separate air assaults against Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in May.

“One of Ukraine’s most urgent requirements is ground-based air defense,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in the same briefing. “And this contact group will continue driving hard to help Ukraine defend the skies. In recent weeks, Russia has intensified its sordid bombardment of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. And the Kremlin’s cruelty only underscores Ukraine’s need for a stronger, layered ground-based air defense architecture.”    

The three ground-based air defenses make sense in light of this specific call. The AIM-7, which fits into an overall approach of arming Ukraine against Russian aircraft, requires aircraft to launch it. This May, several months after Ukrainian’s president Zelensky asked for artillery, tanks, planes, and Patriot missiles, the Biden administration joined other nations in agreeing to provide F-16 fighter-bombers to the country. These single-engine fighters, used widely across the world, are more than capable of carrying AIM-7 missiles, and while the US models may feature more advanced weapons, the AIM-7 is able to get the job done.

While the exterior form of the Sparrow has remained largely the same for its decades of service, how the missile finds and tracks targets has changed massively over the years. The first Sparrow missiles “used a beam-riding guidance system, in which an aircraft’s fire-control radar would lock on to a target and the missile would fly along the radar beam,” wrote Norman Friedman, in a history of the weapon. That fixed-beam path meant pilots had to keep their plane and radar directed in the same path as when they fired the weapon. It was a plausible use case for jets against propeller-powered bombers, but locking a pilot into a fixed route against a maneuvering plane like an enemy jet would render the missile easily beatable.

In April 1959, Popular Science boasted of an early improvement to the Sparrow III, noting the supersonic guided missiles “packs 50 percent more wallop than its predecessor.” Sparrow IIIs saw action in Vietnam, but the missiles were designed as a way for fighter pilots to shoot down bombers beyond visual line of sight. Over the skies of Vietnam, instead, pilots encountered fast flying and turning fighters.  

The AIM-7M version in use today uses better radar and maneuvering, allowing it to track targets more closely and without requiring the firing jet to maintain a lock on the target. It’s a weapon that had success when used by US pilots in 1990’s Persian Gulf War, and one that would likely prove straightforward to use by Ukraine, once the weapon is attached to planes that can launch it.

This latest military aid is the 39th transfer of such equipment to the country, dating back to August 2021, when Ukraine’s war was limited to reclaiming the Donbas. That was before Russia’s full invasion in February 2022 transformed the ongoing war into an existential threat to Ukraine.

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On May 9, under partly cloudy skies at Travis Air Force Base in California, the military invited an autonomous driving and flying robot to roll into a hangar and deliver a package. The machine, half of Elroy Air’s Chaparral delivery drone, was all exposed wires and metal brackets on four tall stands, and is a testbed for their autonomous driving program. With the demonstration, the Air Force got one step closer to adapting a useful cargo drone for military resupply missions, all without further strain on human pilots.

The Chaparral is a vertical takeoff and landing drone, with a large fixed wing, propellers for vertical thrust, and rotors that can provide vertical lift, enabling it to operate from small landing pads. None of that was present in the demonstration at Travis AFB, which was part of the Golden Phoenix Exercise. Instead, the ground autonomy system was mounted on a freestanding rig, with motors and wheels and sensors to steer around any obstacles it might encounter on a runway. Beneath it, and central to the Chaparral’s function, was a detachable cargo pod.

“One of the things that we showed at the event was our robotic ground tester, what we call ground bot. That demonstrated our autonomous taxing capability as well as our cargo pod pickup and drop off, and our cargo handling capabilities that we would use on the Chaparral,” says Amisah Prakash, director of customer programs at Elroy Air.

Autonomy for delivery on the ground is an important part of the overall vision for the drone, as it keeps the burden on human operators low while ensuring that the goods carried can get where they need to be. A runway is a complex environment, with planes and people and other vehicles moving around, to say nothing of the possibility of animals interloping on some of the more remote environments the drone is expected to operate. Getting the goods from point A to point B without incident is especially important when a runway collision might involve cargo that explodes.

“One of the use cases that we’ve been talking a lot with the Air Force on is logistics resupply types of missions, like, bringing cargo back and forth from different locations, whether that is fuel or munitions, anything that is needed for the ground troops to be able to do what they need to do,” says Prakash.

While shipping munitions is a more uniquely military mission, the Chaparral is intended as a truly dual-use aircraft, with an eye towards the commercial cargo market. As Popular Science reported last year, FedEx was interested in the plane, specifically taking advantage of the cargo pod’s 300-to-500-pound capacity, or about half the weight of what a typical delivery truck can carry. The drone will be able to deliver this at a range of up to 300 miles, and do so while flying faster than 100 mph.

If the comparison point for ground transport is a delivery truck, for remote delivery to small military bases a good point of comparison is a helicopter. During the US war in Afghanistan, both crewed and autonomous helicopters would deliver supplies to forward operating bases, austere outposts located where the fighting was and far from regular access to supplies. 

Imagine, says Clint Cope, chief product officer and co-founder for Elroy Air, that a mission commander is trying to send supplies somewhere, and triaging what is the most important use for an aircraft. “That decision-making gets a lot simpler when you can send a cheaper, in some ways expendable air asset, when you’re using an uncrewed system,” he says.

Cope offers as a comparison point a single helicopter making one supply run with 5,000 pounds of cargo. If that helicopter is shot down, it’s all lost in one go, and in order to make the mission, that full 5,000 pounds of load has to be assembled before any of it can go out for delivery. “You can go and load up a Chaparral [drone] and send a much smaller, almost right-sized amount of supplies where they’re needed and be able to have that much more rapid turnaround,” says Cope. 

In that way, using the drones changes resupply from fewer, higher-stakes missions, to more of managing a logistics flow through drones.

The Chaparral runs on jet fuel, like much of the Air Force, and has a generator to power its electric motors. It still needs human refueling, but the drone’s design, especially the pivot on its wing, is made so it can be transported inside larger cargo aircraft, like a C-130 or C-5, and flown from almost anywhere. 

While autonomous driving is useful for getting between the runway and the hangar, the loading ramp of a cargo plane is not a place to risk automated driving.

“We demonstrated how you can manually remote control the vehicle as well,” says Matt Michini, director of robotics at Elroy Air. “So if somebody on the ground wants to taxi it into a hangar or they want to move it to move it outta the way so that a plane can drive by or something, we want it to demonstrate how that’s possible as well without too much rigamarole.”

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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.”

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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. 

The post A snapshot of the world’s nuclear weapons—and how the numbers are changing appeared first on Popular Science.

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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

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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

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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 

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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

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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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