Dan Mercer

Articles by Dan Mercer

• Drone Motherships Explained: Air, Sea, and Ground Launch Platforms Compared
  Defense & Combat · 2026-07-12

  A taxonomy of the drone-mothership concept across air, sea, and ground domains — from robotic combat vehicles and containerized launchers to submarine tenders — and why range-stack…

• What Military Drones Actually Cost, Platform by Platform
  Defense & Combat · 2026-07-12

  A verified cost ladder across drone classes, from $500 FPV strike drones to a $618 million MQ-4C Triton, showing why unit cost, all-up-round cost, and program cost are not the same…

• How Military Drone Pilots Are Trained: Inside the UAS Pipeline
  Defense & Combat · 2026-07-12

  From Air Force officers flying MQ-9 Reapers to Army 15Ws at Fort Huachuca to squad-level FPV familiarization, a look at how the U.S. military actually trains drone operators, and h…

• AeroVironment Wins $500M Army Deal to Buy Commercial Counter-Drone Tech at Scale
  Counter-UAS · 2026-07-03

  The Army has handed AeroVironment a $500M, three-year ordering vehicle to buy layered commercial counter-UAS gear against Group 1-3 drones — a shift from bespoke buys toward a stan…

• Loitering Munition, Cruise Missile, One-Way Attack Drone: What's the Difference?
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  Loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones are routinely conflated in defense reporting. The distinctions -- in target acquisition timing, terminal human contr…

• Phoenix Ghost: The Air Force's Classified Loitering Munition Family Built for Ukraine
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  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…

• Raytheon Coyote Explained: The Army's Counter-Drone Interceptor and Its Cost Problem
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  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 bi…

• Russia's Shahed Swarm Doctrine: Saturation, Decoys, and the Cost-Kill Math
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  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…

• Ukraine's Baba Yaga Drones: From Fertilizer Spreader to Heavy Night Bomber
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  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…

• Warmate Explained: Poland's Combat-Tested Loitering Munition Scaling to 10,000 Units
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  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 …

• Russia's KUB-BLA: Inside Kalashnikov's Silent Loitering Munition
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  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…

• IAI Harpy and Harop: How Israel Invented the Loitering Munition
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  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 wa…

• UVision's HERO Family: Loitering Munitions Arming Marines, SOCOM, and NATO Allies
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  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 inte…

• How Azerbaijan's Drone Arsenal Dismantled Armenia's Army in 44 Days
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  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 …

• How Houthi Drones Closed the Red Sea: Incidents, Weapons, and the Cost Equation
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  From the seizure of the Galaxy Leader in November 2023 through two confirmed ship sinkings, the Houthi maritime campaign collapsed Suez Canal transits by 58 percent and pushed US N…

• ISIS Drone Warfare in Iraq and Syria: How Commercial Quadcopters Became a Military Weapon
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  In 2016, the Islamic State turned cheap commercial quadcopters into a documented, bureaucratized weapons program — the first non-state drone campaign to kill soldiers in combat and…

• Operation Spiderweb: Ukraine's Deep Strike on Russia's Strategic Bomber Bases
  Defense & Combat · 2026-06-20

  On June 1, 2025, Ukraine's SBU launched 117 FPV drones from cargo trucks parked near Russian air bases — some 4,500 km from the front — destroying at minimum 12 strategic aircraft …

• Counter-UAS at Airports: Why the U.S. Still Can't Stop a Gatwick-Style Closure
  Counter-UAS · 2026-06-20

  The 2018 Gatwick drone incident cost airlines £50 million and stranded 110,000 passengers — and the perpetrators were never found. Five years on, U.S. airports face hundreds of inc…

• Drones Over the Wall: How Aerial Contraband Became a Global Prison Crisis
  Counter-UAS · 2026-06-20

  In a single year, Georgia's Department of Corrections linked drones to $7 million in contraband and 876 confiscated cell phones. Drone sightings at UK prisons rose 770% in four yea…

• Counter-UAS for Stadiums and Mass Events: How the U.S. Closes the Airspace Gap
  Counter-UAS · 2026-06-20

  Federal no-fly zones have covered NFL stadiums for years, but local police could only watch unauthorized drones — not stop them. Here's how the legal authority gap developed, how t…