Defense & Combat
Military drone news from UASFeed — UAS programs, battlefield lessons from Ukraine and beyond, loitering munitions, and how uncrewed systems are changing combat.
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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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Defense & Combat
How Houthi Drones Closed the Red Sea: Incidents, Weapons, and the Cost Equation
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 Navy munitions expenditure past $1 billion — using drones that, analysts estimate, cost a small fraction of the interceptors used against them.
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Defense & Combat
ISIS Drone Warfare in Iraq and Syria: How Commercial Quadcopters Became a Military Weapon
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 force NATO armies to rebuild air defense doctrine from scratch.
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Defense & Combat
The Kremlin Drone Incident of 2023: What Happened, Who Did It, and Why Nobody Knows
On the night of May 2–3, 2023, two drones detonated near the Kremlin Senate dome. Russia called it an assassination attempt, Ukraine called it staged, and U.S. intelligence offered a low-confidence attribution to a Ukrainian unit. Three years on, definitive attribution remains elusive.
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Defense & Combat
Langley's 17-Night Drone Siege: What Happened, What Failed, What DoD Still Doesn't Know
For 17 consecutive nights in December 2023, unidentified drone swarms penetrated restricted airspace over Joint Base Langley-Eustis, forcing the relocation of F-22 Raptors — while the military's C-UAS authorities and tools proved wholly inadequate to respond.
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Defense & Combat
Operation Spiderweb: Ukraine's Deep Strike on Russia's Strategic Bomber Bases
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 that Russia cannot replace.
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Defense & Combat
Abqaiq-Khurais, September 2019: How 18 Drones Erased 5% of Global Oil Supply
On September 14, 2019, a salvo of 18 UAVs and 7 cruise missiles struck Saudi Aramco's Abqaiq and Khurais facilities, eliminating 5.7 million barrels per day — the largest single-day oil supply disruption in history — while billions in US-supplied Patriot air defenses failed to intercept a single weapon.
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Defense & Combat
Venezuela's 2018 Caracas Drone Attack: First Confirmed UAS Assassination Attempt
On August 4, 2018, two commercially available DJI Matrice 600 hexacopters loaded with C-4 targeted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at a military parade in Caracas — the first confirmed drone assassination attempt against a sitting head of state, executed for roughly $10,000 in off-the-shelf hardware.
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Defense & Combat
AeroVironment RQ-20 Puma AE: The Hand-Launched ISR Platform That Lands in the Ocean
AeroVironment's RQ-20 Puma AE is a hand-launched, battery-electric small UAS that operates from ship decks to desert outposts, delivering day/night ISR without a runway. A two-decade operational record and front-line deployments in Ukraine make it the Group 1/2 benchmark for allied militaries worldwide.
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Defense & Combat
Bayraktar Kızılelma: Turkey's Jet-Powered UCAV and Its First BVR Kill Explained
Turkey's Bayraktar Kızılelma is a jet-powered, internally-armed, low-observable unmanned fighter that achieved the first-ever UCAV beyond-visual-range air-to-air kill in November 2025. Here's how the platform was built, what it carries, and where it's headed.
