#fury-drone

#fury-drone

"War is terrible, war is terrible, war is terrible," he intones, holding my gaze and giving voice to a universal chorus.

"To accelerate current weapons development timelines, DARPA is considering an alternative development paradigm to increase the nation's magazine depth and breadth."

All you would need is a ship under a foreign flag positioned offshore to launch hundreds of drones, or even a truck carrying them. When I served as deputy administrator at the National Nuclear Security Administration, overseeing nuclear programs, the drone threat was something we were deeply concerned about.

Hydrogen-powered unmanned aerial vehicles are not a new concept. Drones running on hydrogen fuel have been in experimental forms for over a decade, but this is for the first time, a drone has been fully designed and deployed on full-scale combat duty in an active war zone. The drone is a hybrid version of the Raybird USA developed by Skyeton and is deployed with the Ukrainian Defense Forces.

This flight test showcases the potential of airpower built on mission autonomy. Across platforms, domains, and environments, Hivemind provides resilient mission autonomy, proving that software is central to the future of airpower. Our collaboration with Anduril reflects a new era of defense acquisition, where autonomy is treated as a foundational warfighting capability on par with the aircraft itself.

The drone, launched from Lebanon by an Iranian-backed group, was found to contain a Kometa-B navigation system, which highlights Moscow's collaboration with Tehran on drone technology. Analysts say the wreckage recovered by British intelligence signals a new and dangerous phase of drone warfare targeting UK forces.

ŠIAULIAI AIR BASE, Lithuania - A Spanish fighter wing deployed to the Baltics for air patrol missions alongside anti-drone defenses for the first time, a reaction to growing uncrewed threats to European infrastructure. Spain's 15th Wing arrived at Šiauliai Air Base in December to begin a four-month rotation contributing to NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission, designed to protect the airspace around Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Crow counter-drone system came with it.

Facing an existential crisis, the Ukrainians had to develop a way to counter hostile forces cheaply yet with mass. That meant figuring out how to turn inexpensive drones into weaponry, a step that quickly and fundamentally changed how the war was being fought. Now, drones carry out 80% of all battlefield hits and are responsible for most combat casualties.

The first hours of the operation included precision munitions launched from air, land, and sea. Additionally, CENTCOM's Task Force Scorpion Strike employed low-cost one-way attack drones for the first time in combat.

More than 1,000 drones a high proportion of which are likely to be Shahed 136s have targeted Iran's Gulf neighbours since the US and Israel first attacked Tehran on Saturday morning. On Monday afternoon, the UAE said it had been attacked by 689 drones and had downed 645 meaning 44 drones, a little over 6% of the total, got through.

The Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, or LUCAS, is a one-way attack drone that looks nearly identical to the Iranian-designed Shahed. Russia has used Shaheds extensively against Ukraine and now fields its own domestically produced variant.