Defense Innovation Unit
Every UASFeed story on Defense Innovation Unit — across defense, counter-UAS, industry, commercial, policy, and tech, newest first.
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Tech & Builds
Hoverfly's New 'Elements' Division Bets That the Pentagon's War on Chinese Drone Parts Is Just Getting Started
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.
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Tech & Builds
The Full Attack Surface: How UAS Systems Get Compromised
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.
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Tech & Builds
How Drones Navigate When GPS Is Gone: The Full Toolkit
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.
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Defense & Combat
The Undersea Drone Explained: UUV Categories, Programs, and the Race Below
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.
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Defense & Combat
Pentagon's Replicator Initiative: Thousands Promised, Hundreds Delivered
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.
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Defense & Combat
Ukraine's Drone Industry: How 7 Manufacturers Became 500 Under Fire
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.
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Counter-UAS
Layered Counter-UAS Defense: How the Kill Chain Actually Works
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.
