South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration said that it will deploy at least one anti-air laser weapons system called “Block-I” by the end of this year and more in coming years.

An agency statement said the “Block-I” system is capable of launching precision attacks on small incoming drones and multi-copters. It said the system, developed by local company Hanwha Aerospace, costs just 2,000 won (about $1.50) per shot.

“We face North Korea on our doorstep and its drones pose present threats to us, so that's why we've been aiming to build and deploy laser weapons soon to cope with them,” an agency official said, requesting anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to media on the issue.

He said that other countries like the United States and Israel are ahead of South Korea in laser weapons technology, but their primary focus has been on higher-powered laser guns that can shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. South Korea also hopes to develop such anti-missile laser weapons, which its defense procurement agency called “a game changer” in future combat environments.

The “Block-I” system is meant to hit circuit boards and other equipment in enemy drones to make them malfunction and crash on the ground. Tests of the weapons system in 2022-2023 were successful and proved its credibility, the official said.

Some experts questioned the technology.

Lee Illwoo, an expert with the Korea Defense Network in South Korea, doubts how effectively South Korea can use its laser weapons since its anti-air radar systems aren't advanced enough to detect North Korean drones well. He said the range of a laser weapon is relatively short, so high-power microwave weapons would be better when enemy drones are flown in large numbers simultaneously.

Jung Chang Wook, head of the Korea Defense Study Forum think tank in Seoul, said South Korea is likely about five years away from acquiring a functioning laser weapon that can shoot down the drones used by North Korea.

North Korea has periodically flown drones across its heavily fortified border with South Korea for several years, in what observers have called tests of South Korean readiness. In December 2022, South Korea accused the North of sending drones across the border for the first time in five years. South Korea fired warning shots and launched fighter jets and helicopters but failed to shoot down any of the drones.

In a key political meeting in December 2023, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to introduce various types of unmanned combat equipment such as attack drones for 2024. Foreign experts say Kim likely regards drones as a cheap yet effective method to trigger security jitters and an internal divide in South Korea.

Animosities between the two Koreas, split along the world’s most heavily fortified border, have deepened in recent months, with North Korea flying trash-carrying balloons toward South Korea in response to South Korean activists floating political leaflets via their own balloons.

This same weapon is widely used by Ukrainian soldiers against Russian invaders, plus Taiwan recently had a USD $60.2 million Foreign Military Sale of 720 of these loitering munitions approved.

Canberra’s announcement did not mention quantities or price, but it said the first examples would reach Australia later this year and enter Australian Defence Force service in 2025.

Pentagon to issue guidance on open radio access networks to support 5G

The Switchblade 300, which has a 3.69-pound (1.68kg) warhead and 19-mile (30km) range in its latest Block 20 variant, will “boost the ADF’s arsenal of drones, including those capable of being armed,” according to a Department of Defence statement.

The weapon can be transported in a backpack, before being launched from a tube.

“With autonomous weapon systems increasingly prevalent, the Defence Strategic Review made clear that new technology and asymmetric advantage are important priorities,” said Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy. “The delivery of this proven precision loitering munition demonstrates the speed at which we are introducing capabilities to the ADF.”

However, his reference to speedy introduction is incongruous. Ukraine has been demonstrating the utility of loitering munitions for the past 2.5 years of combat, and yet Australia is only now introducing this class of weapon.

Indeed, Travis Reddy, CEO of the Australian firm DefendTex, criticized the ADF for its tardiness in acquiring any loitering munitions. His company manufactures the D40 drone, essentially a flying 40mm grenade.

He told Defense News the Australian government even prevented DefendTex from exporting warhead-equipped D40s to Ukraine, because its fuse had not “been through all the certification and qualification stages”. Therefore, the Australian company could send only camera-equipped D40s.

Conversely, the “U.K. took a pragmatic approach” and delivered to Ukraine 300 warhead-equipped D40s that it had commercially procured from DefendTex. Reddy said this D40 case “very much talks about this risk-adverse culture that exists within Defence”.

“We’re running programs right now to develop Australian drones,” Conroy said. “And we’re hoping to get them into the inventory as soon as possible.”

One example is the One-Way Loitering (OWL) munition developed by Western Australia-based firm Innovaero.

Innovaero officials didn’t immediatelyrespond to Defense News requests for details, but it is known the OWL is being trialed by Australian Army special forces, and more will be delivered to the army this year.

The OWL is in a different class to the Switchblade 300, since it has a 125-mile range, 100-minute endurance and carries a 15-pound anti-armor or fragmentation warhead.

Another Australian firm delivering drones to Ukraine is Sypaq Systems. Amanda Holt, Sypaq’s CEO, previously told Defense News that her firm had been delivering 100 low-cost Corvo drones per month, and that Ukrainian troops often jury-rigged them with explosives to act as loitering munitions.

Speaking in Alaska at the onset of NATO’s large-scale Arctic Defender drills, Boris Pistorius announced that Germany would propose a joint procurement scheme at the alliance’s summit this week in Washington, D.C.

The summit, marking the alliance’s 75-year anniversary, is expected be dominated by talk about countering the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.

The German defense minister said he expected the summit to result in the formal announcement of a command in the German city of Wiesbaden to coordinate the provision of military material and training to the Ukrainian armed forces. Germany will be “represented at a high level in the leadership,” he said Monday.

The new command, the name of which is still being debated, will have a staff of 700 people, the U.S. State Department has announced. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stressed that “these efforts do not make NATO party to the conflict.”

Russian state media and government officials have repeatedly said they consider the war in Ukraine a conflict between their country and NATO as a whole and the U.S. specifically due to their crucial support of Kyiv.

Pistorius also announced that Germany will buy “tens of thousands of rounds” of armaments this year through the Czech munitions initiative. He pledged to continue the military support of Ukraine more broadly, noting that the third German-donated patriot system had recently arrived in the eastern European country and was already operationally deployed.

In Washington, Germany will present a plan for NATO to buy drones “from German industry” on behalf of the Ukrainian armed forces, Pistorius said. This proposal would serve as “a foundation for our partners for the joint procurement of drones of all kinds,” he said while speaking to the press in Fairbanks.

According to the German government, the country has already provided 537 surveillance drones to Ukraine, mostly VECTOR and RQ-35 HEIDRUN models. The proposed initiative would encourage NATO to jointly procure these and other German-made drones on Kyiv’s behalf.

As of the end of April, Germany had provided a total of €10.2 billion ($11.03 billion) in military goods to Ukraine since the onset of the invasion, putting it second only to the U.S. on the list of Kyiv’s most dedicated supporters. In 2024 alone, the government in Berlin has already authorized the export of €4.88 billion in armaments to Ukraine, contributing to record military export volumes.

“You will see more of them on the frontline,” said Oleksandr Kamyshin, speaking with reporters on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington. “That’s one of the game changers we expect in the nearest 12 months.”

Uncrewed weapons have been key to Ukraine’s self defense to this point in the war. Naval drones have afflicted Russia’s fleet in the Black Sea — which has needed to move farther east after having around 20 ships sunk or damaged. And aerial drones have become crucial for targeting and attacks on the front lines, where some 10,000 are lost every month.

Air Force, Space Force on track for Bring-Your-Own-Device enrollment

Dressed in his usual black polo and fatigue-style pants, Kamyshin spoke at an event to promote Ukraine’s state-owned defense industry: Ukroboronprom. His comments followed a presentation on what Kyiv could produce on its own and where it needs help from foreign governments, defense companies and venture capitalists.

The increase in ground robotics Kamyshin predicted will come from manufacturers inside Ukraine, a sprawling network of volunteer, commercial and state-backed efforts. It also includes American companies partnering with Ukrainian firms to help improve their own kit.

Adam Bry, head of the drone maker Skydio, told Defense News in an interview last month that Ukrainian drone builders are the most advanced in the world. The land-based drones will perform a variety of missions, Kamyshin said, including demining, medical evacuation and combat itself.

Their main use, though, will be lightening some of the burden on Ukrainian soldiers fighting near the 600-mile front line. Ukraine lowered its eligible draft age from 27 to 25 earlier this year to help with some of its personnel shortages while fighting a much larger neighbor.

“The main point [is that] we try to get our people back from the front line,” Kamyshin said.

In addition, he said Ukraine’s aerial drones were already using artificial intelligence to target Russian positions and that the use of such software would expand in the coming year.

The Pentagon itself is pushing to use more autonomous as it faces a size disadvantage of its own: against China in the Indo-Pacific. In the last several years, the U.S. government has reviewed its policies on artificial intelligence and warfare, one part of the Replicator initiative — an effort to rush more drones to military leaders in the Pacific.

“We do our best to keep in mind all those ethical things, but at this point we have to work out a solution that will get more Russians out of my country,” Kamyshin said. “That’s the ethical dilemma we have now.”

Drones are one of Ukraine’s many equipment needs.

The country is still trying to source more artillery shells after a yearslong ramp up in the west. To do so, Kamyshin said, it will need two things: explosive components like TNT and money. The U.S. State Department, along with other countries, announced $2 billion in Foreign Military Financing for Ukraine’s defense industry earlier this year.

The money will help mature Ukraine’s domestic production in the long-term, but Kamyshin said it wasn’t enough.

“We are looking for another $10 [billion] to $15 billion,” he said.

While these supplies are traditionally delivered to Navy vessels via manned aircraft, such assets are expensive and facing manning shortages — causing delays that drones could remedy, according to Navy officials.

The Curtis Wilbur conducted flight tests using the Skyways V2.6 Unmanned Aerial System and PteroDynamics X-P4 Unmanned Aerial System, launching and recovering six drones between from June 19 to June 24 as part of the Just In Time Delivery logistics effort with the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division.

“The Navy continues to drive rapid experimentation and implementation of new technologies,” Cmdr. Yilei Liu, commanding officer of the Curtis Wilbur, said in a statement. “While easy to configure and ready to deploy, it is vital to evaluate these technologies in different environmental conditions to define and scope the operating envelopes of these highly capable platforms.”

Navy finalizes plans for next Rim of the Pacific exercise

In 2021, Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division awarded PteroDynamics a contract to deliver three vertical take-off and landing drone prototypes to the Navy to assist delivering repair cargo.

“Embedding autonomous platforms into our already-existing systems will define the nature of combat operations in the future,” Liu said. “Once tested, autonomous systems can provide independent defensive and offensive capabilities in a contested environment. These systems can perform potentially dangerous, high-risk evolutions with maximum efficiency and minimal risk to personnel.”

Exercise Rim of the Pacific, known as RIMPAC, is a biennial exercise held near the Hawaiian Islands and involves nearly 30 nations and more than 25,000 personnel.

The exercise concludes on Aug. 1.

The focus of the Ramstein Legacy drill, held June 3-14, was on developing the alliance’s integrated air and missile defense with an additional eye on combating Class 1 unmanned aerial system threats — a reference to small, mini and micro drones.

Participating units hailed from Romania, Germany, Portugal, Hungary, France, Turkey and Poland, supported by British and Finnish fighter jets. In addition, three companies were invited to introduce some of their counter-drone equipment, including the U.S.-based firm Echodyne, the French CS Group, and German electronics specialist Rohde & Schwarz.

“Class 1 UAS have become one of the most important threats we observe at the moment in military conflicts. Where for many years having air superiority was one of the pillars of the NATO doctrine, we have seen recently that’s no longer the case,” said Cristian Coman, chief scientist at the joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance center at NATO’s Communications and Information Agency (NCIA).

On the first day of the training, participants were asked to get familiar with the capabilities of the systems at the exercise, including electronic warfare equipment, radars, and command-and-control systems.

The following days were focused on practical exercises and hands-on training, with each scenario increasing in difficulty. Part of the personnel involved in this segment were officers from the Italian C-UAS Center of Excellence, who performed the job of the enemy.

“We are here acting in the role of the red team in this exercise, where we are the threat the trainees need to identify and counteract. We are flying the drones, which are common civilian ones,” Italian Navy Lt. Cmdr. Federico Fugazzotto told reporters.

Some of the models displayed included the American-made Parrot Disco first-person-view drone as well as two Chinese-made DJI types. Exercise participants were instructed to use their detection equipment for picking up the drones’ electronic signatures.

According to Fugazzotto, increasingly complex scenarios entailed flights of varying lengths, hiding the drones’ points of departure on the ground, and attacking with multiple systems at once.

Crimea mirage

As the training unfolded, experts with NCIA confirmed to Defense News that GPS spoofing was detected and affected some of the drones, though officials did not name the source. The interference method feeds false coordinates to drone navigation systems in an effort to crash or disorient them.

“When I had the hand-held device from the drone, where you basically have the controller, my hand device would ‘be’ on a foreign location in Crimea,” Mario Behn, the principal scientist at NCIA, told Defense News. “But the drone was still here, which of course is physically impossible, as it is a huge range,”

On both days of Ramstein Legacy, data provided by the website GPSJam showed a high level of GPS interference that encompassed all of Constanta.

Military personnel here were vague about anti-jamming techniques and equipment used to mitigate interference, citing security concerns in revealing Western countermeasures.

The extensive level of jamming was also apparent in the area surrounding the nearby Mihail Kogalniceanu air base, where Finnish F/A-18 fighter jets and British Eurofighters were deployed. The exercise marked Finland’s first foreign deployment for NATO since joining the alliance in April 2023.

When asked if he was used to flying amid this amount of jamming, Lt. Col. Rami Lindström, commander of the Finnish F/A-18 detachment in Romania, acknowledged the GPS interference but appeared unfazed about it affecting the equipment.

“We have a lot of reports in Finland about the same kind of jamming, so we are used to that. But the F-18 is a warhorse and is resistant against that,” Lindström told Defense News in an interview.

“You can say we know our neighbor and we like to share this knowledge with our allies,” the Finnish official added, referring to Russia.

Back to school

In 2019, NCIA established an academy in Oeiras, Portugal, to provide training on NATO systems devoted to communications, air command and control, and cybersecurity. With drones omnipresent in today’s military thinking, the school’s emphasis is about to change.

“Our idea would be to add a counter-UAS curriculum with educational courses followed by enhanced practical training, which would be very easy to integrate at the Portugal academy,” Behn said.

There are some hurdles to that end, however, especially when it comes to standardizing hands-on training.

For one, the drone arsenals of NATO countries are so diverse that finding cross-cutting training approaches will be tricky. That is in addition to the ceaseless cat-and-mouse game of buying improved drones and superior countermeasures.

“Procurement processes take years, except we don’t have years to defend against those small drone threats,” Coman said.

The attacks in the war-torn Donetsk region have prompted a scaled-up evacuation effort by Ukrainian rescue services. Local officials said that powerful Russian glide bombs have also been used in the town, the latest eastern front flash point as Russian attacks continue to put stretched Ukrainian front-line units on the defensive.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that Russia had dropped more than 800 glide bombs in Ukraine in the past week alone.

“Ukraine needs the necessary means to destroy the carriers of these bombs, including Russian combat aircraft, wherever they are. This step is essential,” he wrote in an online post.

Glide bombs are heavy Soviet-era bombs fitted with precision guidance systems and launched from aircraft flying out of range of air defenses. The bombs weigh more than a ton and blast targets to smithereens, leaving a huge crater.

Police rescuers in Toretsk helped older residents out of their homes, carrying one woman out of her bed and onto a stretcher.

“It’s a terrible situation, because for three days we could not evacuate,” Oksana Zharko, 48, told The Associated Press while leaving the town in a police van with family members and a cat in a plastic carrier box.

“Yesterday there was an attack and our house was destroyed — very strong, there are no walls left. Everyone is stressed, emotional, in tears. It’s very scary.”

Russian attacks in recent weeks have focused on the town of Chasiv Yar farther north, as Ukrainian commanders in the area say their resources remain stretched, thanks largely to a monthslong gap in military assistance from the United States.

Ukraine is still struggling to stabilize parts of its front line after desperately needed military assistance was approved by the United States in April.

Zelenskyy called on countries assisting Ukraine to further relax restrictions on using Western weapons to strike military targets inside Russia.

“Clear decisions are needed to help protect our people,” he said. “Long-range strikes and modern air defense are the foundation for stopping the daily Russian terror. I thank all our partners who understand this.”

Hours after Zelenskyy spoke, Ukrainian officials said Russian glide bombs had struck near a postal warehouse in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city in the northeast, killing an employee and injuring nine people including an 8-month-old baby.

According to a statement by Nova Poshta, the private postal and courier company that operates the site, the strike set at least seven delivery trucks ablaze, while damaging at least three others and the warehouse itself. One driver died as a result.

As many as nine people remained trapped under burning wreckage, and rescue teams were combing the site on Sunday evening, regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said on Telegram.

Less than a day earlier, Russian missiles slammed into a town in southern Ukraine, killing seven civilians, including children, and wounding dozens, local authorities reported.

Ukrainian officials published photos of bodies stretched out under picnic blankets in a park in Vilniansk, and deep craters in the blackened earth next to the charred, twisted remains of a building.

At least 38 people were wounded in Saturday evening's attack, authorities said, and declared a day of mourning on Sunday. Vilniansk is in the Zaporizhzhia region, less than 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the local capital and north of the front lines, as Russian forces continue to occupy part of the province.

Russia-appointed officials in Donetsk, which is partially occupied and illegally annexed by Moscow, said that Ukrainian shelling on Sunday wounded a 4-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl. According to Russia’s Emergencies Ministry, four of its staff also came under shelling Sunday as they attempted to put out a fire in the Kremlin-occupied local capital, also called Donetsk.

The Russian Defense Ministry on Sunday reported its forces overnight shot down three dozen Ukrainian drones over six regions in Russia’s southwest. It later said that a total of 72 were downed on Saturday and during the night.

Debris from one drone fell on a village in the Kursk region, blowing out windows and damaging roofs and fences, according to a Telegram post by regional Gov. Aleksey Smirnov.

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Associated Press writer Joanna Kozlowska in London contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

The Russian Defense Ministry noted a recent “increased intensity” of U.S. drones over the Black Sea, saying they “conduct intelligence and targeting for precision weapons supplied to the Ukrainian military by Western countries for strikes on Russian facilities.”

“It shows an increased involvement of the U.S. and other NATO countries in the conflict in Ukraine on the side of the Kyiv regime,” the ministry said in a statement.

It noted that “such flights significantly increase the probability of incidents involving Russian military aircraft, which increases the risk of direct confrontation between the alliance and the Russian Federation.”

“NATO members will bear responsibility for that,” it added.

The ministry said that Defense Minister Andrei Belousov has directed the General Staff to “make proposals on measures of operative response to provocations.”

Washington and Moscow have clashed before over U.S. drones in the Black Sea. In a 2023 incident, a Russian fighter jet damaged an American drone there, causing it to crash. A repeat of such a confrontation could further fuel tensions over the war in Ukraine.

On March 14, 2023, a Su-27 fighter jet of the Russian air force intercepted and damaged a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone, causing it to crash into the Black Sea. The incident marked the first direct clash between the Russian and U.S. forces since the Cold War.

The Pentagon and U.S. European Command said after the incident that two Russian Su-27 aircraft dumped fuel on the MQ-9, which was conducting a routine surveillance mission over the Black Sea in international airspace.

The Russian Defense Ministry said then that the U.S. drone was flying near the Russian border and intruded into an area that was declared off-limits by Russian authorities.

Russia has declared broad areas near Crimea off-limits to flights. Ever since Russia's 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and long before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow has accused U.S. surveillance planes of flying too close to its borders while ignoring the notices issued by Russia.

Friday's Russian statement follows a Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol over the weekend with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles, which killed four and injured about 150, according to Russian authorities.

Russian officials have claimed that the U.S. was directly involved in the attack by providing intelligence and targeting and warned to take retaliatory measures.

Amid a sharp increase in one-way drone attacks on U.S. and allied forces by Iraq, Syria and Houthi rebels, CENTCOM is working with the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI office to identify sensors that can detect adversary systems and be integrated into a command and control framework. Earlier this month, the command’s innovation team solicited proposals from industry for the effort, dubbed Desert Guardian.

Army Maj. Bryan Cercy, an innovation officer at CENTCOM, told C4ISRNET the innovation team will choose sensors this summer to participate in a U.S.-based exercise in October focused on spotting UAS threats. Early next year, it will stage a second exercise — this one at a base in the Middle East — focused on integrating those sensors into a single interface used by operators in the field.

“Our proof of concept is that there’s a world in which all of these different sensors are integrated together, and they provide the user, the operator one common picture of the threats to the base,” Cercy said June 25 during an interview at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Fla. “Maybe we don’t accomplish everything, but we’re inching one step closer to make the operators, on a day-to-day basis, more effective.”

The command’s innovation office regularly runs technology sprints to identify operator challenges and try to find solutions. The upcoming demonstrations are part of a series of sprints the team has been running this year focused on countering UAS threats.

The effort began in March with several fact-finding missions. CENTCOM’s innovation team traveled to the Middle East to observe operators and hear first hand about the challenges they face in conducting their missions.

CENTCOM also leveraged its technology residency program, which temporarily embeds private sector experts within the command to help solve technical challenges. It sent its resident at the time to observe operators tracking UAS threats and better understand their capability needs.

As Rinderer compiled his findings, CENTCOM conducted its own market research to find out what other organizations were doing to meet counter UAS needs and whether there was a gap for the innovation team to focus on.

“Counter UAS is a very broad problem that a lot of organizations across the department are trying to solve right now,” Cercy said. “We owe the due diligence to the warfighter to really see, is there already something out there that might close that gap, even just a little bit.”

It became clear through this work, he said, that while base defense operators have access to many sensors, they lack an integrated picture of the threat.

“You’ve got operators that are operating on different systems that are trying to protect against threats to the base, and sometimes those systems don’t necessarily talk to each other,” he said. “They’re not integrated, and so it’s a lot of swivel chair action that’s happening . . . between the different operators to make sure that they’re all detecting a threat.”

Following the two exercises, if the team identifies a capability it thinks could benefit operators, it will work to find an acquisition pathway within the Defense Department to get that to the field. That could mean drafting a joint urgent operational needs request or feeding findings to the Pentagon’s Joint Counter UAS Office or a program office that might be looking for a similar capability.

Air Force Col. Nate Huston, CENTCOM’s director of innovation and capability integration, said in the same interview that part of the intent behind technology sprints like this is to demonstrate a process for identifying innovative solutions to problems in the field and validating whether there’s a capability that can address it.

“What we want to say is like, ‘Hey, we started at this point, we got these disparate folks together, we showed that this could be integrated,’” he said. “The other part of this is . . . we fully understand some integration will not work exactly right, and we’ll learn from that.”

CEO Adam Bry described the work in an interview with Defense News Wednesday, hours before he testified before Congress.

“I’ve never met drone users as sophisticated as the folks in Ukraine,” Bry said. “We want a team there.”

For now, the hires are in the single digits, with employees focused on engineering and customer support. Bry said he could see Skydio manufacturing drones in the country later on, but thinks building smaller components — like the equipment that helps prevent jamming — is more realistic at first.

The war in Ukraine is the first to feature widespread use of small, commercial style drones. In the last two years, it’s become a sandbox for companies around the world trying to test their equipment. U.S. firms including AeroVironment to Shield AI have sent their products to help defend Ukraine and see how they perform in intense electronic warfare environments.

That said, most of the drones used in Ukraine so far have been made in China, the world’s dominant manufacturer in the sector.

Bry went as far to say that Ukraine’s needs are driving Skydio’s product development, even when that doesn’t overlap with the U.S. government.

His company’s main defense contract is with the Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance program, which Skydio won in 2021. Defense firms are now competing for that contract’s second iteration, to be selected in 2025, and Skydio is putting forward its new X10D drone to do so.

Ukraine is also interested in that drone. Its Ministry of Interior has formally requested “thousands” of them — though Bry wouldn’t specify how many — atop the thousand or so drones Skydio has already sent Kyiv since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.

The requirements laid out by the Army are similar to what Ukraine needs, Bry said, but they’re not one for one.

“This has been a shift in strategy for us,” he said. “Where there’s discrepancy, we’re prioritizing what we’re seeing in Ukraine.”

The main difference between the two sets of requirements is in resiliency. Ukraine’s biggest need is for drones that can counter intense Russian jamming. That is not what the short-range reconnaissance program has focused on to this point, Bry said.

Still his argument is that Ukraine is the “proving ground” for small drones. If they can survive there, that should be a good sales pitch for the U.S. military as well. But that’s not guaranteed, Bry acknowledged.

“It’s a risk from a business standpoint,” he said. “But I think it’s a risk worth taking.”

The first phase of the effort, championed by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, is focused on attritable drones and other uncrewed systems. The goal is to deliver thousands of these platforms by the summer of 2025, and in the 10 months since it was announced, the Pentagon has solicited and selected systems and started fielding them.

With the first round of Replicator in full swing, Hicks told C4ISRNET June 25 that the Defense Innovation Working Group — which vets and recommends systems for the effort — has been discussing what the next round, Replicator 2.0, will look like.

“We are beginning those discussions at my level,” she said during an interview at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla. “They’re more mature at lower levels already. The DIWG are actively having conversations about 2.0. The fact that there’s a lot of enthusiasm for different potential capability areas just shows that there is buy-in to the value of the process.”

Hicks wouldn’t offer any insight into what specific capabilities the group is considering, but highlighted several attributes Defense Department leaders will factor into their decision. The systems should meet a near-term operational need, she said, and should be a capability that would benefit from senior leader backing.

“It’s not just happening on its own . . . it could benefit from this attention and focus at the senior level and probably across the enterprise,” Hicks said. “It’s that it’s senior and that it’s synchronized across multiple different areas that affect capability delivery.”

If the department identifies a capability that meets those criteria, it will work to include funding in its fiscal 2026 budget proposal, which the Pentagon will submit to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget in September.

“We would be proposing to include it in the ‘26 budget,” she said. “Of course, it’s the President’s budget, but that would be how we would envision including it.”

The Pentagon plans to spend a total of $1 billion on the first round of Replicator in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 with funds drawn from various sources including prior year appropriations, a reprogramming request, a national security supplemental approved in August and the department’s yet-to-be approved FY25 budget proposal.

The FY25 request didn’t include projections for future-year funding, but Hicks said the Pentagon will provide those to Congress as part of its FY26 request.

“We’re now inside the normal budget process, and so we will be able to put into the ‘26 budget and display for Congress how we plan to fund any follow-on Replicator efforts,” she said.

Hicks said she’s confident the Pentagon will meet its schedule and delivery targets for the first iteration of Replicator, noting that she thinks its performance to this point validates that the process is working.

“That is clearly bearing fruit in terms of the years we’re shaving off the timeline,” she said. “The ability to stick to schedule and cost itself is a significant improvement over what we too often see in the department.”

Leonardo had told unions in Rome that the plant at Grottaglie would need to shut down for four months to deal with a decrease in the usual amount of work performed for the 787 Dreamliner passenger.

Boeing told its staff in April it expected a slowdown in production and deliveries of the 787 Dreamliner because of a shortage of component supplies. The hitch followed quality issues that suspended deliveries for nearly two years, ending in 2022.

“Lower growth in the production and delivery of the Boeing 787 required a four-month plant shutdown to align production volumes with the short-term reduction in demand,” Leonardo said.

To fill the gap, Leonardo has started work at the facility on the wing of the new Eurodrone UAV — being built by a team of European governments and their local defense industries — and on the fuselage of the prototype of Leonardo’s remotely piloted Proteus helicopter.

Leonardo is also working on the fuselage of the VX4 electric aircraft at Grottaglie on behalf of the British firm Vertical Aerospace, the Italian company said, adding that the projects are employing 100 people.

Next, Grottaglie is to host the production of Leonardo’s AW609 tiltrotor, which the firm expects will be certified next year.

Built for civil customers with an eye on military applications, the AW609 is a long-term project that started life as a collaborative program with Bell before the U.S. business pulled out in 2011.

Leonardo said it is also focusing research work into new composite materials for aircraft at Grottaglie.

Leonardo has said delays at Boeing may cost it €50 million (U.S. $54 million) this year.

The shift is playing out on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, where invading Russian forces and defending Ukrainian soldiers have employed tactics to that effect. Now, other militaries are starting to explore the use case, says Italian gun manufacturer Benelli Armi, owned by the Beretta Holding.

“The use of different types of guns in this capacity in Ukraine has accelerated the demand we get for our shotguns to be sold in a counter-drone configuration – we’ve received a lot of request for information for this from NATO countries,” Mauro Della Costanza, head of sales at Benelli’s defense division, told Defense News at the Eurosatory trade show here.

The company supplies shotguns combined with special drone ammunition, which are already in use with the French and Italian armed forces. Dubbed the ALDA round, short for anti-light drone ammunition, this type of projectile is dedicated to shooting down moving targets such as small drones, weighing less than 25 kilograms, at distances between 80 and 120 meters.

Della Costanza said that the growing interest in using shotguns to neutralize these low-flying threats has to do with the cost-effectiveness and ease of operation these weapons offer to forces.

“Considering the size of these drones and the high price of some of the more complex countermeasures used to shoot them down – a shotgun with 1,000 [of these] rounds is at maximum three thousand euros,” he said.

In a video shared with Defense News of a recent customer trial, one of the company’s shotguns is seen successfully countering a small quadcopter at a distance of 90 meters in a matter of seconds.

Another firearms manufacturer in the counter-drone business is Belgian firm FN Herstal. A company representative told Defense News that the firm began testing suitable weapons several years ago, but that the war in Ukraine has attracted new inquiries.

In March 2022, the company took part in a NATO-led counter-drone exercise in Italy, for which it developed a container-based perimeter defense system incorporating a range of sensors connected to kinetic and non-kinetic effectors.

The hard-kill weaponry included a remote weapon station that can be fitted with medium or heavy machine guns or an automatic grenade launcher with airburst munition, all from the Belgian company’s product line.

When faced with first-person-view exploding drones, soldier-carried infantry weapons may seem like an unlikely defense. But, as one Ukrainian shotgun instructor stated in an interview with Ukrainian state-run news agency ArmyInform, small-arms “are a very good chance compared to running, believe me.”

Among the dead were five people — including two children — who were hit by falling debris from Ukrainian missiles that were shot down over a coastal area in Sevastopol, a port city in Russia-annexed Crimea, said Mikhail Razvozhayev, the city’s Moscow-installed governor. Another person died in Grayvoron city in Russia’s Belgorod region, bordering Ukraine, regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said.

Razvozhayev said 151 people were wounded in Sevastopol. Falling rocket fragments caused a forest fire of over 150 square meters (1,600 square feet) and set a residential building alight, RIA Novosti said, noting that a fifth missile had exploded over the city.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said both Ukraine and the U.S. bore “responsibility for a deliberate missile strike on civilians.” It said that U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles were used in the Ukranian attack.

Razvozhayev declared Monday a day of mourning in Sevastopol, with public events canceled.

Air defenses overnight shot down 33 Ukrainian drones over Russia’s western Bryansk, Smolensk, Lipetsk and Tula regions, the Russian Ministry of Defense said Sunday. No casualties or damage were reported.

A fresh attack on Kharkiv killed at least one person and wounded 11 on Sunday, according to local officials. Mayor Ihor Terekhov said the city was attacked by a guided bomb and that around half of Kharkiv was without electricity because of the strike.

Sunday’s attacks came after Russia struck Kharkiv on Saturday afternoon with four aerial bombs, hitting a five-story residential building and killing three people. Regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said that 41 people were still being treated for injuries on Sunday.

In a video address following the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Ukraine’s partners to bolster its air defenses.

“Modern air defense systems for Ukraine — such as Patriots, accelerated training of our pilots for F-16s, and most importantly, sufficient range for our weapons — are truly necessary,” he said.

Two people were wounded by falling debris when two Russian missiles were shot down over the Kyiv region overnight, Ukraine’s air force commander Mykola Oleschuk said.

Regional Gov. Vadym Filashkin of Ukraine’s partly occupied Donetsk region said that Russian attacks on Saturday killed two people and wounded four.

In other developments, the Ukrainian Navy released photos Sunday that it says confirm the destruction of a warehouse in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region used to launch and store Iranian-designed Shahed drones.

Navy officials said training instructors and cadets were killed in the attack on Friday night. Moscow has not yet commented on the reports, but officials said air defenses shot down a number of drones in the region overnight on Friday.

___

Morton reported from London.

Gen. James Mingus, the Army’s vice chief of staff, revealed the quantity for the first time during a June 21 House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing, hosted at the Defense Innovation Unit’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Built by AeroVironment, the Switchblade 600 loitering munition is one of a handful of systems the Defense Department plans to buy in the first tranche of the Replicator program and is the only one officials have identified by name. Others include an unspecified fleet of maritime drones procured through a DIU solicitation, a batch of uncrewed surface vehicles and a set of counter-drone systems.

The intent of Replicator, which Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced last August, is twofold. In the near-term the Pentagon wants to field large numbers of attritable drones to counter China. But the larger goal is to develop an enduring process for buying technology to meet the department’s most urgent operational needs.

The Pentagon plans to spend a total of $1 billion on the effort in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 with funds drawn from various sources including prior year appropriations, a reprogramming request, a national security supplemental approved in August and the department’s yet-to-be approved FY-25 budget proposal.

Switchblade has featured heavily on battlefields in Ukraine, Syria and Iraq. The Army had already planned to buy the system through its Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance program, though in smaller quantities, before it was selected for Replicator. Last October, the service announced that it would procure 100 Switchblades to test and field within Army units.

“That was an innovation that we had worked collectively together, it’s a loitering munition, which we then included as part of Replicator Tranche One,” Mingus said during the hearing. “And we are now going to scale and scope that to over 1,000 over the next year or so.”

Hicks announced last month that the department started fielding Replicator systems to Indo-Pacific Command in early May. The Pentagon declined to say what systems had been fielded nor would it disclose quantities.

“This shows that warfighter-centric innovation is not only possible; it’s producing real results,” Hicks said in a statement. “Even as we deliver systems, our end-to-end capability development process continues.”

The proposals came in two separate amendments to the House’s version of fiscal 2025 defense policy legislation, which the panel adopted June 14. Both were put forward by Iowa Republican Rep. Zach Nunn.

The Taiwan provision calls for the Defense Innovation Unit to study the feasibility of establishing a “strategic partnership” with the country’s ministry of defense. That could include coordinating on things like defense industrial priorities and dual-use technology development as well as helping Taiwan establish pathways for startups research and development efforts.

The Israel amendment emphasizes similar opportunities, but also calls for DIU to work with the Israeli military to counter Iran’s development of dual-use defense technologies and “harmonize global posture through emerging technology.”

The U.S. has vowed support for both nations, sending Israel more than $12.5 billion since the start of its war with Hamas last October. In April, Congress approved $4 billion in aid to Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific partners as part of a $95 billion package that included funding for Ukraine and Israel.

The call to deepen that support through more collaboration on commercial technology comes as DIU looks to be more embedded with partners around the globe — a key component of its vision for growth in the coming years, a strategy called DIU 3.0. The goal is to create a pathway for DIU innovation to be shared with allies who may also need it.

“We must connect the solutions created by U.S. tech companies to allied and partner acquisition organizations when appropriate — and connect capabilities developed by our partner nations’ companies to our own needs and to one another — especially in a conflict, when speed is critical,” according to the DIU 3.0 strategy, which was released in February.

As part of that effort, DIU is bolstering its relationships with existing innovation initiatives in partners countries — including India, the United Kingdom and Australia — and helping those without such organizations to establish them.

DIU is also embedding itself within the Defense Department’s combatant commands. To date, it has units in five of the seven COCOMs.

Matthew Way, who leads DIU’s counter uncrewed aerial systems portfolio, said these partnerships with combatant commands not only bring the organization closer to the operators but they also give commanders another tool to leverage technology from commercial and non-traditional companies.

For example, DIU is heavily involved in U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s Joint Mission Accelerator Directorate, which is designed to ensure the command’s top priority technology projects have a network of support within DOD and industry.

“That’s really helped flatten communications,” Way said during Applied Intuition’s June 13 Nexus Conference in Washington, D.C. “The way we approach our problem sets is really working with combatant commands and end users.”

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency’s June 18 approvals included 291 Altius 600M-V loitering munitions from Anduril, plus 720 Switchblade 300s from AeroVironment. The former is valued at $300 million and the latter at $60.2 million.

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The Altius 600M-V package includes warheads and electro-optic/infrared cameras, pneumatic launchers, transport trailers and ground control stations. The 47lb (12kg) aircraft has a 276-mile (440km) flight range and 4-hour endurance.

As for the Switchblade 300, it comes with both anti-personnel and anti-armor warheads. It is smaller, with a 3.69lb (1.68kg) weight and just a 20-minute endurance.

Chen Kuo-ming, a Taipei-based defense analyst, told Defense News the Switchblades are suitable for anti-personnel use, and the Altius against armor.

The weapons should be delivered in 2024-2025.

“In the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s frequent military operations around Taiwan, the U.S. side in this case agreed to sell arms items that will have reconnaissance and immediate strike capabilities and can respond quickly to enemy threats,” Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said in a statement.

The U.S.-Taiwan Business Council also applauded the potential sales. Council President Rupert Hammond-Chambers noted they “add substantially to Taiwan’s inventory of mobile smart munitions, which can be used during on-island fighting all the way through to attacking People’s Liberation Army assets off Taiwan’s coastline”.

Chen said he believes these loitering munitions are good for Taiwan, since they can be used by independent units, even if the country’s navy and air force have been defeated.

However, he expressed concerns about their price compared to the cost of antitank missiles, for example. He also questioned the ability of Taiwanese frontline units to see and therefore target enemies beyond visual range.

Chen said the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology – Taiwan’s defense research and development agency – had displayed various drones, including a loitering munition – at a 2023 Taipei defense exhibition. However, “Until now, we have no real loitering munition for the army to use. So after about nine months, the U.S. government decided to sell these to Taiwan.”

Hammond-Chambers also noted, “Taiwan currently has domestic companies who are working with foreign partners to develop their own indigenous mobile smart munitions. In conjunction with Foreign Military Sales cases such as these, we should expect the Ministry of National Defense to also start procuring locally to meet their defensive requirements.”

At last month’s Shangri-Li Dialogue in Singapore, Adm. Samuel Paparo, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, outlined a plan to strike back if China attacks Taiwan. “I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities … so that I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect that the per-unit cost of an Altius loitering munition, which the manufacturer has declined to name on the record, cannot be reliably inferred from the overall price tag of the foreign military sale.

While anti-drone systems are lagging and “leave the sky open to things that are cobbled together but which are extremely fragile,” countermeasures are being developed, Schill told reporters during a tour of the French Army stand at the show June 19. Already today, 75% of drones on the battlefield in Ukraine are lost to electronic warfare, the general said.

”The life of impunity of small, very simple drones over the battlefield is a snapshot in time,” Schill said. “Right now it’s being exploited, that’s clear, and we have to protect ourselves. Today, the sword, in the sense of the aerial drone, is powerful, more powerful than the shield. The shield is going to grow.”

This year’s edition of Eurosatory featured dozens of anti-drone systems, including shotguns, cannons and missiles, while companies including Safran, Thales and Hensoldt presented soft-kill solutions to eliminate drones by electronic means. Schill said vehicles in France’s Scorpion collaborative combat program will all be anti-drone systems in two years time, linking their detection capability with turrets that can fire a missile or a 40mm airburst grenade.

First-person view drones currently carry out about 80% of the destruction on the front line in Ukraine, when eight months ago those systems weren’t present, according to Schill. The general said that situation won’t exist 10 years from now, and the question could be asked whether that might already end in one or two years. Schill cited the example of the Bayraktar drone, “the king of the war” at the start of the conflict in Ukraine but no longer being used because it’s too easy to scramble.

The general said he doesn’t consider that the war in Ukraine calls into question the French choice of a maneuvering army built around medium armor, with a focus on speed and mobility. The vehicles that the Army is introducing as part of the Scorpion program -- the Griffon, Serval and Jaguar – can be equipped with either active or passive protection, even if a strong emphasis of mine protection means they’re “quite massive.”

Griffons, Servals

The French Army is receiving around 120 Griffons and 120 Servals every year as part of Scorpion, as well as more than 20 Jaguars. The vehicles are equipped with “extremely powerful” information systems, and a vehicle such as the Griffon may contain more lines of code than a Rafale fighter jet, according to Schill.

Vehicles developed before the Scorpion program, such as the Leclerc main battle tank, are being reconfigured to become part of the collaborative combat system, which for example allows a target detected by one vehicle to be attacked by another. Scorpion was “extremely ambitious,” works, and has met expectations, according to Schill.

“Everything we had planned is perfectly in place, but it’s just a question of cost effectiveness on certain capabilities,” the general said.Something not considered five years ago is the rapid development of microprocessors, which means the gathered data can now be analyzed within the vehicle rather than externally. In combination with on-board artificial intelligence, that will allow for capabilities such as immediate threat detection, including of drones.

When looking to draw lessons from Ukraine, there needs to be a distinction between what is situational and related the type of terrain and battles being fought, and what is structural, the general said. The war in eastern Europe doesn’t mean the issues of the past 30 years around risk and crisis management will disappear. “We must remain a versatile army.”

The French choice has been to not separate the army into distinct parts suited for different theaters, for example an intervention army that is agile and mobile and a mechanized armor army prepared to fight a war like the one in Ukraine today, with “perhaps more rugged, lowered vehicles, but which, when they hit a mine will kill crews.”

Schill said he wants to preserve the “warrior aspect” of the French army, in which every soldier is aware they can be deployed in operation, rather than a soldier in a territorial defense army “who will never do anything.”

The pace of military drone development means that Army can’t commit to large buying programs, because an acquired capability can become obsolete in five months, according to the general. Schill said today’s drones fly better than those two or three years ago, with more computing power onboard that is capable of terrain-based navigation or switching frequencies to escape jamming.

Drones can’t be compared to 155mm shells, which can be stocked and will remain relevant in 10 years time, and the Army needs to find “the right system in this fast-moving world of new technology,” Schill said. The challenge is creating an industrial model that can produce in mass if necessary, and sufficiently standardized.

Future buying of electronic gear such as drones but also small radios and smart phones may be done in batches to allow for technology evolution, for example renewing equipment at the brigade level rather than multiple-year programs to equip the entire Army with a new piece of equipment, Schill said.

‘Just not possible’

The general also commented on the future French-German Main Ground Combat System, which will consist of several vehicles, some of them manned and others automated, combining anti-drone weapons, close-defense anti-aircraft capabilities, missiles and a canon. Putting all of that on a single tank would create a vehicle weighing 80 metric tons, which “is just not possible.”

Development of the system is going to 10 to 15 years because the land-based robotics are “not completely mature yet,” according to Schill.Schill said he doesn’t know whether the right main gun for the future tank system will be 120mm, 130mm or 140mm, saying that will depend on issues such as stealth and mobility requirements, as well as what the gun bore would add in terms of penetration. KNDS, which is involved in the MGCS program, presented a gun that can swap its barrel to fire either 120mm or 140mm shells.

The French Leclerc tank probably won’t get a second upgrade beyond the current XLR version being rolled out, according to the general. He said the French-German agreement is for the next-generation system in 2040, making the Leclerc question a secondary issue.

It’ll be in France’s interest to piggyback on any capability additions made by the United Arab Emirates, another Leclerc user, between now and 2040 as a way to finance intermediate innovations, Schill said. The introduction of the MGCS won’t immediately mean the end of the Leclerc, which the general expects to be in service in the French Army until 2045.

During last week’s debate over the annual defense authorization bill, House lawmakers inserted language in the massive military policy measure to require a new assessment from the Defense Department on “the threat of rifle-toting robot dogs used by China” in potential future conflicts.

The issue has gained public attention in recent weeks after Chinese military officials showed off armed robotic quadrupeds during recent military drills with Cambodia.

In a video released by state-run CCTV on May 25, a 110-pound dog-like robot is shown carrying and firing an automatic rifle. A spokesman for the Chinese military said the robot, which can perform many tasks autonomously, could “serve as a new member in our urban combat operations.”

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Drone warfare is not new to the U.S. or foreign militaries, and the American military for years has experimented with robot dogs for use in reconnaissance and unit support roles.

But the idea of a robot version of man’s best friend shooting at American soldiers was enough to prompt House members to demand that the secretary of defense investigate “the threat such use poses to the national security of the United States.”

The amendment was adopted without objection from any members of the chamber. But it will have to survive negotiations with senators on the broader defense measure in coming months before it can become law.

The Senate is expected to hold floor debate and make possible amendments to its draft of the legislation in the next few weeks.

French Armed Forces Minister Sebastian Lecornu signed a “defense UAV pact” at the Eurosatory defense show here on Monday that provides the basis for working with the nation’s industry on defense drones below 150 kg (331 lbs), French armament agency DGA said.

The country “may have run up a bit of a delay” in the area of drones, and rather than developing drones for the coming years, France will cooperate with UAV makers to make a technological jump to the next generation of drones for the early 2030s, Lecornu said in a speech at Eurosatory.

All aerial drones that France sold to Ukraine were developed in-house by manufacturers without development input from the French armed forces, retired Maj. Gen. Claude Chenuil, a fomer military-acquisition executive, said during a round table discussion at Eurosatory. He said the Ukrainian armed forces will be using 1 million drones this year, compared with a French Army target to buy “a few thousand drones.”

France is investing €5 billion ($5.4 billion) in drones through 2030 as part of its military programming law, with the stated goal of developing a French loitering-munitions industry by the end of this decade, as well as achieving swarm-flight capability. The defense budget law included a target for the Army to have 3,000 tactical drones by 2025.

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Drones are changing combat, from loitering munitions to intelligence gathering, “and if we’ve fallen behind, it’s high time that we catch up,” said Maj. Gen. Erwan Salmon, the head of the ground combat management unit at DGA.

France needs to be able to acquire drones quickly and renew them as required by the pace of drone innovation, as well as be able to mass produce UAVs, “that’s the whole point of the defense drone pact,” Salmon said. That will require changing acquisition strategies to avoid ending up with drone systems “completely out of step with the innovations.”

French defense contracts often start from an armed forces requirement, after which the armament directorate drafts the specifications before organizing a contract, leading to programs that can take 10 years between the expression of a need and delivery, said Bastien Mancini, the CEO of French drone manufacturer Delair.

“Structurally, this is not possible with drones,” Mancini said. “Technologies are evolving fast. We need to be able to shorten lead times.”

The armament directorate will probably need to set up some financing to be able to quickly buy and test off-the-shelf products, to determine whether they should be acquired in larger numbers, Salmon said. The directorate’s acquisition service is looking into financing of technology bricks that could underpin the development of new systems, he said.

The defense UAV pact will be a useful forum for industry cooperation, including between smaller French drone makers and larger defense firms, according to Éric Lenseigne, vice president for drone warfare at Thales. Given the size of the French market, exports will be needed to reach critical size, and export commitments could be an area of further cooperation, Lenseigne said.

Thales estimates the global market for drones of less than 150kg to be worth more than €2.5 billion, with growth rates of 14% per year, according to Lenseigne, with the market expected to remain “dynamic” even in case of cessation of hostilities in Ukraine.

Four French drone makers – Parrot, Eos Technologie, Delair and Hexadrone – have delivered drones to Ukraine, where they seem to be doing “a good job,” Mancini said.

Still, the industry for military UAVs in France is fragile, with the development of an industrial-scale drone requiring an investment of €5 million to €10 million, compared with revenue for Delair of around €30 million this year, according to the CEO. “So consolidation is bound to come naturally.”

There will be a minimum threshold of buying required to allow the French drone industry to develop new solutions and payloads, according to Col. Hervé Mermod, program coherence officer with the French Armed Forces General Staff. France would need to finance a strategic reserve that would pay for maintaining an industrial capacity to scale up drone production in case of need, he said.

The Navy is looking for a system it can easily integrate with a range of platforms to defend against such adversary drone attacks, DIU said June 14. The program, dubbed Counter NEXT, aims to quickly test prototypes and field them on vessels around the globe.

“It is expected that solutions will be capable of expeditious worldwide deployment, integrated with a variety of naval platforms and must display the ability to be easily integrated into the existing sensors onboard a naval vessel,” DIU said in a statement.

Since last fall, Iran-backed groups have used drones, uncrewed surface vessels and anti-ship ballistic vehicles to launch dozens of attacks on U.S., allied and commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea. The incidents have disrupted global trade in key waterways and killed three merchant sailors.

According to a June 13 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, 65 countries and 29 major energy and shipping companies have been affected or have had to alter their routes in response to these aggressions.

“The growing threat of adversarial unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) poses significant risks to U.S., allied and partner forces, naval vessels, and commercial vessels transiting key maritime routes across the globe,” DIU said. “The U.S. is committed to protecting commercial maritime trade and, more importantly, service members conducting maritime operations in contested environments.”

DIU has a portfolio dedicated to leveraging commercial and off-the-shelf technology to defend against these types of drone threats. Matthew Way, who leads that effort, said counter UAS is a high priority for the organization, adding that DIU plans to use a portion of the $800 million budget increase Congress provided in fiscal 2024 to fund efforts like Counter Next.

“We’ve really got to focus on, how do we get after those more advanced capabilities . . . and how do we protect ourselves from adversarial threats that are employing this technology as well,” he said during Applied Intuition’s June 13 Nexus conference in Washington, DC.

Pentagon officials have emphasized that defending against enemy drones will require a layered approach, including electronic warfare and kinetic effects.

Counter Next is focused on kinetic systems that cost less than a traditional missile or air defeat system and rely on mature technology that can be ready for testing within 90 days of a contract award. And while it’s not required, DIU may prioritize proposals that demonstrate the ability to take out surface vessel threats.

Companies must also be able to deliver at least five systems within 12 months of being selected.

The four-month old initiative, which was born in mid-February and now counts 14 participating nations, outlined an ambition to deliver at least one million unmanned aerial vehicle systems to the embattled country.

“The caveat in this goal is to specify that while, yes, quantity is important, so is providing quality systems – so with this number we aren’t only talking about providing one type of drone but the full spectrum of them, including electronic warfare and counter capabilities,” Latvian Defense Minister Andris Spruds said during a panel at the Eurosatory trade show here.

According to the official, the drone alliance has received over €500 million euros ($590 million) in international pledges, which he expects will increase further in the future.

Spruds added that the coalition, which is spearheaded by his home country and the U.K., recently gained two new members – Italy and France – following a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels.

On a national level, Baltic states have accelerated their drone procurement and training programs, with a special focus on first-person-view types, which have come to dominate the battlefield in Ukraine.

“FPV drones are a game-changer for the current and future battlefield – the most expensive pieces of equipment will be destroyed by these cheaper drones,” Linas Idzelis, Commander of Lithuania’s Riflemen’s Union, a paramilitary non-profit organization supported by the Lithuanian government, told the audience.

The officer said that the country is currently training roughly 6,000 cadets on how to use these cost-effective weapons, with a teaching course taking about 60 hours to complete.

According to Arunas Kumpis, a volunteer soldier in Ukraine who also operates FPV drones, one team typically launches between 30 and 35 of these systems daily to hit assigned targets.

The soldier detailed the usual setup of three-person FPV teams in Ukraine, which hide in concealed and entrenched locations such as bunkers and can operate up to 100 meters away from antennas.

These platforms have proven to be a headache for armored vehicles near the frontlines in recent weeks, with reports that the threat even led U.S. officials to request that donated Abrams main battle tanks no longer be deployed to these areas.

“If armored vehicles are 10-15 kilometers from the frontlines many of these drones can generally hit them – you need to move fast as FPVs have a fast reaction time, around one minute to start, and ten minutes to fly to a target,” Kumpis said.

Since the appearance of a Russian unmanned ground vehicle, or UGV, in Ukraine in April 2022, several new prototypes have popped up across the battlefield.

The robot craze has seemingly engulfed both Russia and Ukraine, as evidenced by the former’s plan to make them an integral part of its military and the latter’s intention to create an army of robots. But the popularity of such systems predates the war by several years.

“Prior to its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military was one of the global leaders in UGV research, development and evaluation. It developed multiple types and started trialing them, but did so in a very limited format,” according to Samuel Bendett, a Russia defense expert at the U.S.-based Center for Naval Analyses think tank. “It likely did not have enough time to develop tactics and concepts for integrating larger UGV numbers and types into combined arms formations.”

For its part, Ukraine approved the use of ground robots in military operations in 2016, but some limitations regarding their deployment have persisted, according to Serhii Kuzan, a former adviser to the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.

The two main issues he identified relate to the lack of higher numbers of UGVs present in military units and their vulnerability to different Russian countermeasures.

“Currently, the main problem is the relatively low saturation of such unmanned systems in Ukrainian units, but it is worth noting here that no European army could at the moment fully meet the needs for these robotic platforms,” said Kuzan, who is now the chairman of the analytics organization Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center.

UGVs are as much of a target for enemy drones as are crewed armored vehicles, he added, except that the robots are also highly vulnerable to Russia’s electronic warfare tools.

Given the number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drones flying above the battlefield, developing larger “pre-February 2022 UGV types is a costly affair,” Bendett said, referring to the month Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Another factor constraining the use of robots in combat is the absence of fully autonomous navigation in many platforms, hence the necessity for additional equipment dedicated to their protection.

“As there is no truly autonomous UGV yet that can navigate itself to [a] target, the vehicle’s remote control today is also aided by drones providing tactical overwatch, helping to guide it towards intended destinations in logistics, supply and evacuation operations,” Bendett said.

This makes sending out these vehicles “very manpower-intensive,” he added.

Despite these limitations, there are many examples of the effective use of such systems by Ukrainian forces. Experts agree Western countries are drawing lessons from these instances.

Kuzan noted that ground robots have predominantly proved successful in demining and cargo-transport missions, specifically citing the Ratel S UGV as a valuable system that can also be used as a ground-based munition.

These newer applications could signal a trend, as Russia is moving beyond using land robots in a primarily logistics role, with the development of its latest Buggy UGV designed to detonate upon reaching its target.

“What the Russian military is doing is emulating the concept of a loitering ammunition drone but basing it on an uncrewed ground system — same functionality, but driving to the target instead of flying into it,” said Alain Tremblay, the vice president of innovation and business development at Rheinmetall Canada.

Remotely operated or autonomous robots are the platforms of choice for this, as they can generally “embark a much larger explosive charge,” Tremblay added.

The company will use its own money, plus some support from the state of Rhode Island, to establish the factory in Quonset Point.

The factory is set to open in late 2025, being operations in early 2026, and then reach full capacity by the end of that year: 50 hulls a year, with the ability to scale up to 200 a year if customer demand calls for that.

Until the facility opens, the company will continue to build Dive-LD hulls in its Quincy, Massachusetts, maritime engineering center. Anduril in February received a contract to provide the Defense Department with Dive-LD vehicles through Defense Innovation Unit’s Commercial Solutions Opening process. The U.S. Navy subsequently awarded the company an $18.6 million award using that contract vehicle.

Anduril’s chief strategy officer, Chris Brose, told reporters June 11 the company proved the maturity and utility of its Dive-LD vehicle during a swim-off event last year that led to the DIU contract. But a remaining and recurring question from the government has been, “can Anduril ramp production to really hit high-rate manufacturing numbers?”

He said the Quonset Point factory will “show the U.S. government that we are ready to and able to deliver on large contracts, if those contracts are forthcoming.”

The standup of the 100,000-150,000 square foot production facility will create more than 100 jobs in the next five years.

It will also allow Anduril to try to realize its vision to build a massive fleet of AUVs. A company statement notes the Dive-LD family of vehicles is “designed from the ground-up for production at scale, with a heavy emphasis on commercial-off-the-shelf components with robust supply chains, a modular design, and advanced, scalable manufacturing techniques that enable rapid iterations based on customer needs.”

The company can build 12 Dive-LD vehicles at the Quincy facility today, or could scale up to 24 a year if needed by adding extra shifts.

“We’re out of space in terms of our ability in the Quincy facility to meet the demand that we’re seeing from the Navy at present, let alone where we believe that’s going in the future,” Brose said.

“This is the challenge that I think all defense companies have in terms of, how much to facilitize in order to meet a demand that is not always crystal clear,” Brose continued. “Our approach to that is, we’re going to lean forward. We’re going to invest in ourselves; we’re going to invest in our ability to produce these kinds of systems in a totally different way. And we’re going to put the facilities in place to meet a demand that that we expect to grow,” rather than wait for the government to award a contract and have to play catch-up in building a larger factory.

As for the location in Quonset Point, Brose said the region is a “phenomenal center of undersea expertise and production.”

“Nav[al] Undersea Warfare Center, other major contractors that are performing on significant undersea programs, access to the water — you just have an enormously rich environment of undersea expertise, talented workforce, and it’s phenomenal for Anduril to be a part of that and plug into that,” Brose said.

The U.S.-led campaign against the Houthi rebels, overshadowed by the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, has turned into the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II, its leaders and experts told The Associated Press.

What the Navy is learning from its fight in the Red Sea

The combat pits the Navy’s mission to keep international waterways open against a group whose former arsenal of assault rifles and pickup trucks has grown into a seemingly inexhaustible supply of drones, missiles and other weaponry. Near-daily attacks by the Houthis since November have seen more than 50 vessels clearly targeted, while shipping volume has dropped in the vital Red Sea corridor that leads to the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean.

The Houthis say the attacks are aimed at stopping the war in Gaza and supporting the Palestinians, though it comes as they try to strengthen their position in Yemen. All signs suggest the warfare will intensify — putting U.S. sailors, their allies and commercial vessels at more risk.

“I don’t think people really understand just kind of how deadly serious it is what we’re doing and how under threat the ships continue to be,” Cmdr. Eric Blomberg with the USS Laboon told the AP on a visit to his warship on the Red Sea.

“We only have to get it wrong once,” he said. “The Houthis just have to get one through.”

Seconds to act

The pace of the fire can be seen on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, where the paint around the hatches of its missile pods has been burned away from repeated launches. Its sailors sometimes have seconds to confirm a launch by the Houthis, confer with other ships and open fire on an incoming missile barrage that can move near or beyond the speed of sound.

“It is every single day, every single watch, and some of our ships have been out here for seven-plus months doing that,” said Capt. David Wroe, the commodore overseeing the guided missile destroyers.

One round of fire on Jan. 9 saw the Laboon, other vessels and F/A-18s from the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower shoot down 18 drones, two anti-ship cruise missiles and a ballistic missile launched by the Houthis.

Navy authorizes combat awards and devices for Red Sea operations

Nearly every day — aside from a slowdown during the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan — the Houthis launch missiles, drones or some other type of attack in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait that connects the waterways and separates Africa from the Arabian Peninsula.

The Navy saw periods of combat during the “Tanker Wars” of the 1980s in the Persian Gulf, but that largely involved ships hitting mines. The Houthi assaults involve direct attacks on commercial vessels and warships.

“This is the most sustained combat that the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II — easily, no question,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage. … If you let it fester, the Houthis are going to get to be a much more capable, competent, experienced force.”

Dangers at sea and in the air

While the Eisenhower appears to largely stay at a distance, destroyers like the Laboon spend six out of seven days near or off Yemen — the “weapons engagement zone,” in Navy speak.

All the Houthi-US Navy incidents in the Middle East (that we know of)

Sea combat in the Mideast remains risky, something the Navy knows well. In 1987, an Iraqi fighter jet fired missiles that struck the USS Stark, a frigate on patrol in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war, killing 37 sailors and nearly sinking the vessel.

There’s also the USS Cole, targeted in 2000 by boat-borne al-Qaida suicide bombers during a refueling stop in Yemen’s port city of Aden, which killed 17 on board. AP journalists saw the Cole patrolling the Red Sea with the Laboon on Wednesday, the same day the Houthis launched a drone-boat attack against a commercial ship there that disabled the vessel.

That commercial ship was abandoned on Friday and left adrift and unlit in the Red Sea, the British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said.

Rear Adm. Marc Miguez, the Navy’s commander for its Carrier Strike Group Two, which includes the Eisenhower and supporting ships, said the Navy had taken out one underwater bomb-carrying drone launched by the Houthis as well during the campaign.

What Navy destroyers bring to the Red Sea fight

“We currently have pretty high confidence that not only is Iran providing financial support, but they’re providing intelligence support,” Miguez said. “We know for a fact the Houthis have also gotten training to target maritime shipping and target U.S. warships.”

Asked if the Navy believed Iran picks targets for the Houthis, Miguez would only say there was “collaboration” between Tehran and the rebels. He also noted Iran continues to arm the Houthis, despite U.N. sanctions blocking weapons transfers to them.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations told the AP that Tehran “is adept at thwarting the U.S. strategy in a way that not only strengthens (the Houthis) but also ensures compliance with the pertinent resolutions.”

The risk isn’t just on the water. The U.S.-led campaign has carried out numerous airstrikes targeting Houthi positions inside Yemen, including what the U.S. military describes as radar stations, launch sites, arsenals and other locations. One round of U.S. and British strikes on May 30 killed at least 16 people, the deadliest attack acknowledged by the rebels.

The Eisenhower’s air crews have dropped over 350 bombs and fired 50 missiles at targets in the campaign, said Capt. Marvin Scott, who oversees all the air group’s aircraft. Meanwhile, the Houthis apparently have shot down multiple MQ-9 Reaper drones with surface-to-air missile systems.

“The Houthis also have surface-to-air capabilities that we have significantly degraded, but they are still present and still there,” Scott said. “We’re always prepared to be shot at by the Houthis.”

A stalemated war

Officers acknowledge some grumbling among their crew, wondering why the Navy doesn’t strike harder against the Houthis. The White House hasn’t discussed the Houthi campaign at the same level as negotiations over the Israel-Hamas war.

There are several likely reasons. The U.S. has been indirectly trying to lower tensions with Iran, particularly after Tehran launched a massive drone-and-missile attack on Israel and now enriches uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels.

Meanwhile, there’s the Houthis themselves. The rebel group has battled a Saudi-led coalition into a stalemate in a wider war that’s killed more than 150,000 people, including civilians, and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.

The U.S. directly fighting the Houthis is something the leaders of the Zaydi Shiite group likely want. Their motto long has been “God is the greatest; death to America; death to Israel; curse the Jews; victory to Islam.” Combating the U.S. and siding publicly with the Palestinians has some in the Mideast praising the rebels.

While the U.S. and European partners patrol the waterways, Saudi Arabia largely has remained quiet, seeking a peace deal with the Houthis. Reports suggest some Mideast nations have asked the U.S. not to launch attacks on the Houthis from their soil, making the Eisenhower’s presence even more critical. The carrier has had its deployment extended, while its crew has had only one port call since its deployment a week after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Meanwhile, the Houthi attacks continue to depress shipping through the region. Revenue for Egypt from the Suez Canal — a key source of hard currency for its struggling economy — has halved since the attacks began. AP journalists saw a single commercial ship moving through the once-busy waterway.

“It’s almost a ghost town,” Blomberg acknowledged.