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Tech & Builds
Zephyr S: Inside the Solar Stratospheric Drone That Stayed Aloft for 64 Days
Airbus's Zephyr S occupies the stratosphere at 70,000 feet, loitering for months with ISR and 5G connectivity payloads on power equivalent to a single light bulb. Here's how the platform works, what the 2022 Army record flight proved, and where the newly spun-out AALTO HAPS company is taking it.
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Defense & Combat
How a $300 FPV Drone Rewrote the Economics of Precision Strike
Ukraine's FPV war has inverted battlefield cost logic: a $300-to-$500 commercial quadcopter competes with munitions costing fifty times more. A breakdown of the bill of materials, cost-exchange math, industrial-scale production, and the fiber-optic upgrade now driving a global supply crisis.
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Defense & Combat
Loitering Munition, Cruise Missile, One-Way Attack Drone: What's the Difference?
Loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones are routinely conflated in defense reporting. The distinctions -- in target acquisition timing, terminal human control, cost, and payload -- determine which arms control regimes apply and how international humanitarian law governs each weapon's use.
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Defense & Combat
Phoenix Ghost: The Air Force's Classified Loitering Munition Family Built for Ukraine
AEVEX Aerospace's Phoenix Ghost — developed under a classified U.S. Air Force program before Russia's 2022 invasion — grew from a 121-drone Ukraine announcement into a $576 million, 5,000-unit program encompassing four named variants across two UAS groups. Here's what's confirmed, and what remains classified.
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Defense & Combat
Raytheon Coyote Explained: The Army's Counter-Drone Interceptor and Its Cost Problem
The Raytheon Coyote began in 2014 as a disposable ISR drone. It is now the U.S. Army's primary counter-drone interceptor — fielded in kinetic and non-kinetic variants under a $5 billion contract — and caught in an unresolved cost-exchange equation that defines modern C-UAS.
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Defense & Combat
Russia's Shahed Swarm Doctrine: Saturation, Decoys, and the Cost-Kill Math
Russia's 54,000-drone Shahed campaign against Ukraine has evolved far beyond crude attrition into a disciplined saturation doctrine — multi-directional swarms integrated with decoy drones, coordinated missile strikes, and countermeasure upgrades designed to exhaust defenses faster than they can be rebuilt.
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Defense & Combat
Ukraine's Baba Yaga Drones: From Fertilizer Spreader to Heavy Night Bomber
Ukraine's "Baba Yaga" heavy multirotors — repurposed agricultural octocopters carrying up to 30 kg of ordnance — have become the conflict's most psychologically potent drone weapon. How a volunteer-built cottage industry turned crop-spraying platforms into triple-redundant, AI-guided night bombers.
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Defense & Combat
Warmate Explained: Poland's Combat-Tested Loitering Munition Scaling to 10,000 Units
WB Group's Warmate has delivered thousands of rounds in Ukraine while Poland locks in a 10,000-unit domestic framework — making it the most combat-proven European-origin loitering munition in active service and a model for how NATO allies are rethinking mass precision strike.
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Defense & Combat
Russia's KUB-BLA: Inside Kalashnikov's Silent Loitering Munition
Russia's KUB-BLA is a compact delta-wing loitering munition built by ZALA Aero, a Kalashnikov subsidiary. Quieter and lighter than the Lancet, it targets manpower and soft vehicles — and its evolving warhead, AI-targeting upgrades, and export push reveal a platform far from static.
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Defense & Combat
IAI Harpy and Harop: How Israel Invented the Loitering Munition
Israel Aerospace Industries invented the loitering munition category with the Harpy in the 1980s. Four decades on, the evolved Harop is combat-proven across two Nagorno-Karabakh wars and serving eight operators — reshaping how militaries think about radar suppression and precision strike.
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Defense & Combat
UVision's HERO Family: Loitering Munitions Arming Marines, SOCOM, and NATO Allies
Israel's UVision Air builds the HERO loitering munition family in five variants — from a 3 kg squad-portable round to a 125 kg strategic weapon — all sharing a common operator interface. The Hero-120 was selected for the U.S. Marine Corps' OPF-M program in 2021 and has since drawn SOCOM, NATO, and U.S. Army interest.
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Defense & Combat
How Azerbaijan's Drone Arsenal Dismantled Armenia's Army in 44 Days
In autumn 2020, Azerbaijan combined Turkish TB2s, Israeli loitering munitions, and a Cold War biplane deception tactic to systematically dismantle Armenia’s armor and air defenses in 44 days — producing one of the first documented drone-dominant conventional conflicts.
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