Department of Defense
Every UASFeed story on Department of Defense — across defense, counter-UAS, industry, commercial, policy, and tech, newest first.
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Policy & Regulation
Who Can Legally Shoot Down a Drone in the US — and Why the Answer Is Complicated
Federal aircraft law, the Aircraft Sabotage Act, and overlapping wiretapping statutes mean that almost nobody — not state police, not sheriffs, not private citizens — had clear legal authority to neutralize a rogue drone until Congress began carving out narrow exceptions.
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Counter-UAS
How Drone Detection Actually Works: Radar, RF, EO/IR, and the Fusion Stack
No single sensor can catch every drone. Here is how radar, RF analyzers, electro-optical/infrared cameras, and acoustic arrays each cover different gaps — and why military and federal planners are betting on layered fusion architectures to close them.
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Counter-UAS
Golden Dome Explained: The $1.2 Trillion Bet on Space-Based Missile Defense
Trump's Golden Dome extends U.S. homeland missile defense from rogue-state ICBMs to cruise missiles and drones — but a CBO projection of $1.2 trillion over 20 years, driven by a 7,800-satellite constellation that can only engage 10 missiles at once, exposes a gap between strategic ambition and reality.
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Counter-UAS
Shotgun vs. Sniper Rifle: How HPM and Laser C-UAS Weapons Actually Work
Two directed-energy technologies are competing to replace the $2-million missile shot against $500 drones — high-power microwave systems that blanket swarms in a single burst, and high-energy lasers that burn targets one at a time. The physics of each determines where they win and where they fail.
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Policy & Regulation
The American Security Drone Act, Explained: What the Federal UAS Ban Actually Covers
The American Security Drone Act of 2023, enacted in the FY2024 NDAA, banned federal procurement and operation of Chinese-made drones — effective December 22, 2025 — extending to every contractor and grant recipient spending federal money, not just agencies.
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Policy & Regulation
The Magnet Problem: How China’s Rare Earth Grip Threatens Every Drone on Earth
China controls 93% of global rare earth magnet manufacturing — the same magnets that spin every brushless motor in every military and commercial drone. When Beijing tightened export controls in 2025, the supply chain risk stopped being theoretical.
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Tech & Builds
What Makes a Drone Swarm: True Autonomy, Enabling Tech, and the C2 Gap
Most formations called 'drone swarms' aren't—they're centralized fleets, scripted salvos, or teleoperated aircraft. Here's what true swarm autonomy requires, which programs are closest, and why C2 software remains the binding constraint.
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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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Counter-UAS
JIATF-401 Validates CACI SkyValor for Joint-Force-Wide Deployment After Yuma Border Testing
After a two-day live evaluation at MCAS Yuma announced June 7 with Joint Task Force-Southern Border and CBP, the Pentagon's consolidated C-UAS task force cleared CACI's SkyValor system for deployment at any U.S. military installation worldwide — not just the southern border.
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Policy & Regulation
Is DJI Banned in the U.S.? A Precise Map of Six Overlapping Restrictions
"DJI is banned" is both true and false depending on which of six distinct legal instruments you mean. This explainer maps each layer — export controls, federal procurement, the DoD blacklist, the FCC Covered List, state laws, and the BVLOS draft rule — with its exact scope and status as of June 2026.
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Counter-UAS
Drone Jamming Explained: How It Works, Who Can Do It, and Where It Fails
Electronic jamming neutralizes more drones in Ukraine than any other method — roughly 10,000 per month — yet the newest generation of fiber-optic and AI-navigation drones is immune to it. A technical and legal primer on the RF physics, the US arsenal, and why civilians and companies have zero legal authority to jam.
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Defense & Combat
Loitering Munitions Explained: The Watching Weapon Reshaping Modern Combat
From Israel's 1989 Harpy to Ukraine's Lancet hunter-killer teams, loitering munitions fuse sensor and effector into a single expendable platform — a category distinct from both the cruise missile and the reusable drone, and now in procurement at scale across 50-plus countries.
