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
Pentagon's Replicator Initiative: Thousands Promised, Hundreds Delivered
DoD's Replicator initiative launched in August 2023 with a promise to field multiple thousands of attritable autonomous systems within 18–24 months to counter China’s mass advantage. Two years on, hundreds have been delivered, the program has pivoted to counter-drone defense, and oversight gaps persist.
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Defense & Combat
From Wild Weasels to Loitering Munitions: How SEAD and DEAD Actually Work
Six decades of air-defense suppression trace how SEAD — the threat that forces radars off the air — and DEAD — the physical kill — evolved from Wild Weasel jets and anti-radiation missiles to autonomous loitering munitions that can outwait a radar gone silent.
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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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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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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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Defense & Combat
Autonomous Drone Boat Pulls Two Apache Pilots from the Sea Near the Strait of Hormuz
A Saronic Corsair unmanned surface vessel operated by Navy Task Force 59 located and recovered two downed U.S. Army Apache pilots within roughly two hours of their crash near the Strait of Hormuz on June 8 — the first confirmed use of an autonomous boat to retrieve military aircrew in real-world operations.
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Defense & Combat
Loitering Munitions Explained: The Watching Weapon Reshaping Modern Combat
From Israel's 1989 Harpy to Ukraine's Lancet hunter-killer teams, loitering munitions fuse sensor and effector into a single expendable platform — a category distinct from both the cruise missile and the reusable drone, and now in procurement at scale across 50-plus countries.
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Defense & Combat
DoD Drone Groups 1–5 Explained: The Classification That Governs Everything
The Pentagon's five-group UAS taxonomy determines who can buy a drone, which airspace it flies in, who is responsible for shooting it down, and what legal authorities apply. Here is how it works and why it is under strain.
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Defense & Combat
The Shahed-136, Explained: How a Lawn-Mower Engine Rewrote Air-Defense Economics
A reverse-engineered German piston engine, a delta wing, and a 50 kg warhead — the Shahed-136 has become the most-launched weapon of the Ukraine war and the template for a new doctrine of cost-imposition warfare that three militaries now build on.
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Defense & Combat
Ukraine's FP-5 Flamingo Strikes Complete Samara Refinery Hub Shutdown
Overnight strikes on the Kuibyshev oil refinery June 10 knocked out both primary crude distillation units, completing a sequential campaign that has taken all three Rosneft Samara-hub refineries offline. Fuel shortages now affect at least 25 Russian regions.
