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
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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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.
