All articles
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Defense & Combat
Switchblade 300, 400, and 600: AeroVironment's Loitering Munition Family, Explained
From a 1.77-kilogram backpackable drone that proved itself in Ukrainian urban combat to a 65-pound tank-killer now in battalion-level service, AeroVironment's Switchblade family is the U.S. Army's answer to the loitering munition era — built around a single patented capability: the ability to abort at the last second.
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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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Defense & Combat
Collaborative Combat Aircraft Explained: Loyal Wingmen, Attritable Economics, and the Autonomy Problem
Collaborative Combat Aircraft are semi-autonomous armed platforms built to fly alongside crewed fighters, running strikes, EW, and ISR while the pilot sets objectives rather than flies the drone. From the USAF's competing YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A to Australia's Ghost Bat, here is the full picture.
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Industry & Contracts
Airbus and Kratos Unveil U740 Valkyrie at ILA Berlin, Targeting Luftwaffe Service by 2029
Airbus Defence and Space has teamed with Kratos to bring a Europeanized XQ-58A Valkyrie to ILA Berlin as the U740, targeting German Luftwaffe operational use by 2029 — alongside a reveal of the all-European Ravenstorm UCCA concept aimed at the early 2030s.
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Industry & Contracts
Alta Ares Closes €50M, Then Lands Airbus Partnership 48 Hours Later
The two-year-old French counter-drone startup secured a €50M round on June 9, then signed an MoU with Airbus Defence and Space at ILA Berlin on June 11 — giving its Ukraine-tested interceptors a direct path into NATO battle-management networks.
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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
China Closes the E-Commerce Loophole on Drone Component Exports
Beijing's new customs declarations — Announcements No. 77 and No. 78, effective June 30 — don't expand the controlled-items list. They demand paper trails that make it impossible to move drone components through platform intermediaries without explicit disclosure of every party in the chain.
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Tech & Builds
Helsing's CA-1EA: An EW-First Combat Drone Built Around the Jammer
At ILA Berlin 2026, Helsing unveiled the CA-1EA, a collaborative combat aircraft designed from the outset as an electronic-attack platform — jamming and radar suppression as the primary payload, not an afterthought. IOC is targeted for 2031, though the airframe has yet to fly.
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Defense & Combat
Iran Hits Three US Bases in One Night as Ceasefire Talks Near Collapse
An overnight IRGC salvo targeted Navy Fifth Fleet HQ in Bahrain, the F-35 base in Jordan, and positions in Kuwait simultaneously — CENTCOM responded with three waves against ~20 Iranian targets even as Qatari mediators were hours from a deal.
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Policy & Regulation
The Layer Import Bans Can't Reach: Congress Targets Drone Magnet Supply Chain
A bipartisan House bill introduced June 10 pairs tiered production credits with an OEM demand-side incentive to pull rare-earth permanent magnet manufacturing out of China's grip — reaching the one chokepoint that banning Chinese drones outright cannot fix.
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Commercial & Delivery
Matternet Goes Public: The First Pure-Play Drone Delivery Stock
Matternet completed a reverse merger in late May and closed a $33M oversubscribed placement, becoming the first publicly traded pure-play drone delivery company — a structural first that finally lets investors own the sector directly, not as a footnote inside Amazon or Alphabet.
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Defense & Combat
Rooftop SAMs and Seven New Towers: Moscow's Pantsir-SMD-E Drone Cordon
Russia is mounting missile-only Pantsir-SMD-E systems on civilian high-rises and has built seven new dedicated air-defense towers around Moscow — a visible admission that Ukraine's drone campaign has punched through every previous layer of homeland defense.
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