All articles
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Defense & Combat
IAI Heron and Heron TP (Eitan): Inside Israel's Dominant MALE/HALE Drone Dynasty
From a fiberglass Scout that dismantled Syrian SAM batteries in 1982 to a 26-meter turboprop platform operating above commercial airspace today, Israel's Heron family traces the arc of modern persistent ISR — and why Israel controlled 61% of global drone exports for three decades.
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Defense & Combat
The ZALA Lancet: Inside Russia's Most Effective Loitering Munition
From its distinctive double-X wing geometry to the contested AI claims and the container-launched Product-53 successor, a technical breakdown of the loitering munition that has hunted more Western-supplied artillery in Ukraine than any other single Russian system.
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Defense & Combat
MQ-25 Stingray: How the Navy's First Carrier Drone Solves a Decades-Old Tanker Problem
The MQ-25A Stingray is the U.S. Navy's first operational carrier-based unmanned aircraft — a purpose-built aerial tanker that doubles the combat radius of F/A-18s and F-35Cs while freeing multiple fighters per air wing from buddy-tanker duty.
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Defense & Combat
Pocket ISR: How Nano and Micro Drones Rewired Squad-Level Reconnaissance
From a 16-gram helicopter checking walls in Afghanistan to a 70-gram system with thermal imaging deployed across 50 countries, nano-UAS technology has pushed intelligence collection down to the fire team — and the next frontier is autonomous swarms constrained by battery physics.
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Defense & Combat
Russia's Orlan-10: The Drone That Tells Artillery Where to Shoot
The Orlan-10 has been Russia's most-deployed tactical UAV since the 2014 Donbas conflict — a catapult-launched reconnaissance and artillery-spotting platform built almost entirely from Western and Chinese components, now surging out of a sanctioned St. Petersburg factory at 53 times its pre-war rate.
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Defense & Combat
RQ-4 Global Hawk and MQ-4C Triton: America's Eyes at 60,000 Feet, Explained
The RQ-4 Global Hawk and MQ-4C Triton are the U.S. military's primary high-altitude, long-endurance ISR platforms — one headed for retirement after a decade of Congressional standoffs, the other cementing its role as the Navy's maritime surveillance backbone through the 2030s.
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Defense & Combat
Beyond the TB2: Turkey's Akinci and Aksungur Redefine the UCAV Export Tier
The Bayraktar TB2 put Turkey on the drone map, but two larger platforms—Baykar's Akinci UCAV and TAI's Aksungur—represent the next tier of Turkish strike capability, now operating in more than a dozen countries and carrying cruise missiles and air-launched drones.
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Tech & Builds
Who Pulls the Trigger? The AI Targeting and Autonomous Weapons Debate, Explained
From DoD Directive 3000.09's misunderstood three-tier framework to Ukraine's jamming-resistant FPV drones, this explainer maps the legal, ethical, and battlefield fault lines in the global debate over lethal autonomous weapons.
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Tech & Builds
What 'Autonomous Drone' Actually Means: A Field Guide to the Spectrum
The word 'autonomous' covers everything from a DJI's return-to-home button to a 103-drone swarm with no designated leader. Five competing frameworks — NIST ALFUS, LORA, SAE-adapted, DoD's loop taxonomy, and Exyn's aerial scale — each illuminate something different about a genuinely hard engineering problem.
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Tech & Builds
The 30-Minute Wall: Why Drone Endurance Is a Battery Physics Problem
Most commercial multirotors top out at 20–40 minutes per charge — a ceiling set by electrochemistry, not engineering ambition. Here's what actually limits drone endurance and what hydrogen, semi-solid cells, and smarter charging infrastructure are doing about it.
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Tech & Builds
What a Drone Can Do Depends Entirely on What You Hang Under It
The airframe is a delivery vehicle. The payload is the mission. A field guide to EO/IR cameras, LiDAR, SAR, hyperspectral imagers, gas sensors, SIGINT receivers, and the physics of endurance tradeoffs that govern every payload decision.
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Tech & Builds
eVTOL, Drone, UAV, UAS, RPAS: A Precise Guide to Six Terms That Aren't Interchangeable
Six overlapping terms describe aircraft that fly without an on-board human — or sometimes with one. Which label applies determines which regulations govern you, how DoD classifies a platform, and whether a Joby air taxi is legally a drone at all.
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