Every UASFeed story on Defense Innovation Unit — across defense, counter-UAS, industry, commercial, policy, and tech, newest first.
DIU's new Massed Modular Aircraft solicitation seeks a cheap, mass-producible drone that can fly 2,300 nm combat radius with a 2,800-lb payload to take over Reaper missions and absorb combat losses.
Read the story →The Defense Innovation Unit is soliciting a low-cost, modular strike/ISR drone to replace the MQ-9A Reaper after nearly 30 were lost in recent Iran operations, with bids due July 23, 2026.
A memo signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth creates a new joint office with milestone authority over nearly all Pentagon drone programs, pulling buying power away from the individual armed services.
Redmond, Oregon approved a $410,762, five-year financed Axon contract for six Skydio drones to replace its DJI fleet — a 3.5x price jump driven by the federal NDAA ban, not operational need.
At InnovateEnergy Week in Texas, UAS leads from Southern Company and Entergy described moving off DJI onto Blue UAS-vetted American drones — and warned that the binding constraint on scaling storm-response flights is data management, not the FAA's pending Part 108 BVLOS rule.
At XPONENTIAL 2026, Hoverfly launched Elements, an NDAA-compliant drone components line — motors, ESCs and anti-jam GPS modules — built to meet the Pentagon's Drone Dominance Program deadlines for purging Chinese parts from $6.6B in sUAS buys.
From command-link hijacking to GPS spoofing and supply-chain malware, every layer of a drone system is a potential entry point. Here is how the attack surface breaks down—and what serious operators are doing about it.
Russian jamming dropped FPV hit rates from 40–60% to under 30%. Ukraine's response accelerated every GPS-denied navigation technique in the book — from inertial sensors and visual odometry to quantum magnetometers and $50 autonomy modules. Here's how each layer works.
Uncrewed undersea vehicles now patrol the same cables that carry 97% of global communications. From man-portable REMUS scouts to 85-ton Orca XLUUVs, this is how the U.S. Navy classifies, builds, and struggles to field them — and why China is moving faster.
DoD's Replicator initiative launched in August 2023 with a promise to field multiple thousands of attritable autonomous systems within 18–24 months to counter China’s mass advantage. Two years on, hundreds have been delivered, the program has pivoted to counter-drone defense, and oversight gaps persist.
In three years of full-scale war, Ukraine built one of the world's most battle-tested drone industries from scratch—capable of 4 million units per year—while racing to cut a near-total dependency on Chinese components.
From Langley's 17 nights of unidentified drones to the Navy's billion-dollar Red Sea munitions bill, the pressure to build coherent counter-drone architecture has never been higher. Here is how the layers — detect, identify, decide, defeat — actually work, what each one costs, and why none of them works alone.
Free daily briefing — military UAS, counter-drone, industry moves, and the rules of the sky.
You're in. ✓
Check your inbox to confirm your subscription.No spam. Unsubscribe any time. Read our privacy policy.
