With the European drone market fragmented, the new marketplace will “significantly shorten” the process of buying mission-ready drones, Intelic said in a statement on Monday. The company said defense ministries can use the platform, called BASE, to shop for drones from different manufacturers that can work together via its Nexus command-and-control software.

“Our main principle is that governments here can buy plug-and-play systems they know will work within their organization, without having to adjust training and such too much,” Intelic Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Maurits Korthals Altes told Defense News in an emailed reply to questions.

BASE was inspired by procurement models developed in Ukraine, according to Intelic. Ukraine’s Brave1 platform, which connects frontline units with drone manufacturers, has been credited with helping the country field new unmanned capabilities at an unprecedented pace and turning Ukraine into a crucible for drone-warfare innovation.

The company is finalizing an agreement to provide the Royal Netherlands Army’s drone units with its Nexus software that will also give the Dutch access to the procurement platform, Korthals Altes said. Intelic is in talks with several other European ministries of defense, though the CEO declined to name them, saying that could hurt ongoing talks.

Drone manufacturers signed up for the marketplace include Portugal’s Tekever and Beyond Vision, the Netherlands’ DeltaQuad, Avy, Acecore Technologies and Height Technologies, Germany’s Highcat, Latvia’s Origin Robotics and Slovakia’s Airvolute, according to Korthals Altes. The partners also include drone makers from France, the United Kingdom and Ukraine, Intelic said.

Delivering drones acquired via the BASE marketplace will be the responsibility of the manufacturers, and is not something Intelic will guarantee, the CEO said. Intelic will, however, guarantee interoperability through its Nexus software, though Korthals Altes said additional software developers could join in a later phase.

The Intelic marketplace specifically targets unmanned aerial vehicles for now, with plans to add other types of unmanned systems in the future, the CEO said. He said the drone makers signed up for the first stage are expected to generate combined sales of more than €1.5 billion (US$1.76 billion) this year.

BASE will allow defense ministries to explore systems that are ready to be used in a coalition framework, according to Korthals Altes. One difference with Brave1 is that Ukrainian military units can buy directly from their marketplace, something European Union procurement is not set up for, the CEO said.

The platform will allow buyers to access confidential information about the systems and their use cases, as well as the application of the Nexus software, Korthals Altes said. In a next step, Intelic will add “full life-cycle support,” for example by adding feedback and maintenance requests, he said.

Interoperability between drones from different manufacturers is achieved by having them all run on Intelic’s Nexus command-and-control software, unlike systems offered on a generic marketplace, according to Korthals Altes. “Ultimately, it all comes down to addressing fragmentation.”

Intelic’s Nexus software has been in use in Ukraine since 2025, including by Gurzuf Defence for its Heavy Shot family of drones, and the Dutch startup has also been working to integrate its software on Skyeton’s Raybird UAV platform.

Nexus has “some overlap” with products such as Anduril’s Lattice command-and-control software, according to Korthals Altes, though he said there are important differences, with Intelic’s software primarily platform-agnostic. “We don’t sell hardware; that makes us flexible and much more ecosystem focused.”

Being able to quickly identify interoperable capabilities available in Europe has become a strategic priority, yet procurement remains fragmented, slowing down deployment and reducing visibility of what systems are available, according to Intelic. Ensuring interoperability before any purchasing decision reduces integration risks and cuts time to deployment, the company said.

“For many MoDs, it’s still very much a matter of figuring out exactly what they need and how all of that should work together,” Korthals Altes said. “A large part of accelerating the process therefore also involves supporting the MoD in that decision-making process.”

The CEO said the next steps will be to add more drone manufacturers and countries to BASE. “Our goal is to persuade Europe.”

Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, Zelenskiy has sought to strengthen Kyiv’s alliances, both with Western allies and with countries of the “global south,” to restrict Russia’s diplomatic sway.

The Iran war has confirmed how central drones are to modern warfare and handed Zelenskiy a diplomatic trump card at a time when U.S. support for Kyiv appears unreliable, analysts say.

During the war, Ukraine has invented cheap and highly effective ways to counter drone attacks instead of relying only on state-of-the-art defensive missile systems such as the costly U.S. Patriot, used by the U.S. in the Gulf. Kyiv has also developed long-range attack drone capabilities to hit Russian energy infrastructure.

This month alone, Ukraine signed defense and drone deals in Germany, Norway and the Netherlands, following long-term security partnerships with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in late March.

Zelenskiy has in recent weeks also agreed security cooperation with Turkey and Syria, and signed agreements at the weekend with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on defense and energy.

“Zelenskiy is really trying hard to show that Ukraine is an asset and not a liability and that it has an answer to the changing nature of war,” said Orysia Lutsevych, head of the Ukraine Forum at Chatham House, a London-based think tank. “Ukraine now needs to organize itself to actually deliver.”

Export obstacles

Ukraine’s drone manufacturers say they have significant spare capacity, but the government has approved only a handful of defense export licenses.

Ukraine has begun drone manufacturing overseas, including in Germany and Britain, but that production is earmarked for its own military needs.

“In Ukraine, the choke point is the export control: basically it’s an export ban,” Lutsevych said, adding that Ukraine needed to streamline the rules. “It needs to find a balance between its war needs and exports.”

Zelenskiy, in his evening address on Tuesday, said Ukraine’s defense industry had 50% spare capacity in some areas and would soon begin exporting weapons. Authorities would simplify the bureaucratic procedures for export, he said, while taking steps to ensure Ukrainian technology and weapons do not end up in Russian hands.

Another challenge for Ukraine is that its success has mostly been in developing effective systems — such as coordinated layers of interceptor drones, machine guns and jamming devices for drone defense - rather than cutting-edge technology.

As a shop window for these techniques, Ukraine has deployed about 200 experts to the Gulf to help defend against Iran’s Shahed long-range drones.

Kurt Volker, a former U.S. NATO ambassador and Ukraine envoy during President Donald Trump’s first administration, said Kyiv was rightly cautious about sharing its wartime systems too widely.

“Much of what the Ukrainians have done is develop process and mentality,” Volker said, adding Ukraine was concerned about Russia learning how its systems operate. “What any business would do is protect your IP for as long as possible. That’s what makes it valuable. So of course they’re doing that.”

Human operators

Ukraine’s low-cost air defenses rely on the training and skill of the operators of its interceptor drones, said Fabian Hoffmann, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Defence University College.

That has been highly effective against propeller drones, such as Russia’s Geran-2, but the gradual introduction of jet-powered models that can fly at 400 km (250 miles) an hour are making it harder for human operators.

“Ukraine has been moving towards autonomously guided interceptor drones but, so far, the operators have done a lot of the heavy lifting,” Hoffmann said, adding that European companies such as Tytan in Germany and Frankenburg in Estonia were developing autonomous systems that might erode Ukraine’s advantage.

Military exports would bring economic benefits to Ukraine, experts say. About 400,000 people already work in Ukraine’s defense industry, according to UCDI, a manufacturers’ association. A better-capitalized defense sector could also reduce reliance on Western financial and military support, and fuel economic growth after an eventual ceasefire.

Zelenskiy hopes drone diplomacy can help secure energy supply deals with Middle Eastern states and markets for Ukraine’s agricultural produce.

He also wants to strengthen Ukraine’s missile defenses. The U.S.-Israel war with Iran has raised concerns in Ukraine that supplies of Patriot systems - used to bring down Russian ballistic missiles – could dry up as Washington prioritizes its own needs.

Ukraine’s $4-billion defense pact with Germany this month included supplies of Patriots and pledges of cooperation to create a European ballistic missile defense. Zelenskiy has said Ukraine needs its own anti-ballistic missile defenses within a year.

Hoffmann said the challenges of building an interceptor capable of downing modern maneuvering ballistic missiles was enormous: the Patriot PAC-3, with a success rate of perhaps 60%, was the fruit of decades of work, he said.

Underlying Ukraine’s push, analysts say, is concern over Washington’s reliability as a partner.

“He (Zelenskiy) understands that America stopped being an ally,” Lutsevych said. “The Ukrainians also understand that they need to walk a fine line by keeping America on side as long as possible.”

When U.S. Navy leaders declared that “the dream of a laser on every ship can become a real one” earlier this year, they apparently had one particular ship in mind.

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush shot down multiple drones with a high-energy laser weapon stationed on its flight deck during a first-of-its-kind live-fire test in October 2025, the Navy recently revealed.

Photos published to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service on April 20 show a 20 kilowatt Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) system — based on the LOCUST Laser Weapon System from defense contractor AV and on loan from the U.S. Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) — ahead of testing in the Atlantic Ocean.

The laser weapon “tracked, engaged, and neutralized multiple target drones, including drone swarms” from the deck of the Bush, AV officials said in a press release, “marking a major milestone toward fielding operational directed energy capabilities across all domains and platforms.”

John Garrity, AV vice president for directed energy systems, told Laser Wars that the live-fire test involved 17 drones.

Beyond the containerized P-HEL, which has been protecting U.S. service members from low-cost weaponized drones overseas for years, the Army currently possesses at least four LOCUST systems integrated onto M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicles and Joint Light Tactical Vehicles through the service’s Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) initiative.

The U.S. Marine Corps also awarded a contract to AV in November 2023 to deliver a LOCUST laser weapon for integration into a JLTV, although it’s unclear if the service has taken receipt of that system yet.

As previously reported, AV predecessor company BlueHalo had been in discussions with the Navy since at least 2024 to test the LOCUST not just on aircraft carriers, but potentially on submarines as well.

The live-fire aboard the Bush represents a departure from the Navy’s previous shipboard laser weapon efforts.

As Laser Wars has previously noted, the service’s Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers that host the 60 kW High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) and lower-power Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN) systems are inherently strapped for juice due to existing power demands from capabilities like the Flight III variants’ new AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar systems.

As Garrity told Laser Wars, the Bush live-fire showed that LOCUST can not only recharge from an aircraft carrier’s nuclear reactors with ease, but that power requisition aboard Flight III destroyers should prove no significant obstacle to keeping the system in a fight.

Then there’s the space element.

While the Navy had previously integrated the HELIOS and ODIN systems directly into Aegis Combat Systems across the service’s Arleigh Burke fleet, the employment of a palletized LOCUST is firmly in line with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle’s vision of a future surface fleet augmented by modular, containerized capabilities that can be rapidly configured for specific missions and deployed aboard warships without a costly and time-consuming integration process. (Indeed, HELIOS maker Lockheed Martin is also developing a containerized version of the laser weapon, a company executive revealed in August 2025.)

“Missiles and [unmanned surface vehicles] are not the only thing that can fit inside of these, from towed-array-systems, to drone swarms, to electronic attack systems, to high-powered lasers,” Caudle stated at the McAleese Defense Programs conference in Arlington, Virginia, on March 17. “I want to containerize everything.”

At first glance, the aircraft carrier seems like the ideal naval platform for laser weapons, containerized or otherwise, simply because it does not suffer the same power or space constraints as smaller surface combatants.

This isn’t a totally new concept: Navy Capt. William McCarthy, at the time the commander of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George Washington, argued in a study for the U.S. Air Force Center for Strategy and Technology in 2000 that “given the sheer size and the margin of power available, the [Carrier Vessel Nuclear] is the best-suited warship to integrate the directed energy technologies” like laser weapons.

Just as importantly, aircraft carriers sit at the center of the Navy’s most valuable and threatened formations — prime targets for drone and cruise missiles attacks and other asymmetric threats like explosive-laden drone boats.

The service has increasingly fielded novel counter-drone capabilities like Coyote and Roadrunner interceptors to carrier strike groups deployed to the Middle East for this exact reason following attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen on military and merchant vessels in the Red Sea.

With their low cost-per-shot and relatively deep magazines, laser weapons and other directed energy systems could potentially offer carriers a “robust self defense capability” so they can save their limited kinetic interceptor stockpiles for higher-end threats, or as McCarthy put it, a capability that may also come with restored maritime mobility.

“Freed from the need for a layered defensive screen of ships, the nuclear powered carrier, operating in tandem with a nuclear powered submarine, could exploit its inherent speed and self-sufficiency to deny its adversaries an opportunity for conducting asymmetric attacks,” McCarthy argued.

“By dispersing the battle group, each platform could choose the optimum location for its primary mission of launching cruise missiles, defending against theater missiles, protecting commerce, or maritime interdiction,” he continued. “This flexibility will become increasingly important as the Navy moves to a smaller and more capable force that operates in the littoral region close to the shore.”

Of course, the challenges that come with employing laser weapons in a maritime environment do not simply evaporate on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. As Laser Wars previously noted, atmospheric instability wrought by water vapor, dust, salt aerosols and temperature fluctuations can all contribute to bending, diffusing, or bleeding off energy from a laser beam — reducing even the most powerful system’s effectiveness.

Meanwhile, access to a potent power source like a carrier’s nuclear reactors can’t overcome the fact that laser weapons require dwell time to neutralize incoming targets, meaning they can be easily overwhelmed by saturation attacks like those that have defined the rise of drone warfare.

Sure, a single successful strike that squeaks through is nowhere near powerful enough to sink an aircraft carrier, but adversaries could plausibly exploit these dwell time constraints by using drones to run interference against laser emplacements or deplete interceptor arsenals to pave the way for devastating anti-ship cruise missiles.

But the more significant problem for carrier-based laser weapons may be actually using them during a high-intensity combat engagement.

The flight decks on carriers are arguably among the most congested and dynamic airspace in military operations, with multiple aircraft launching and recovering during combat. Introducing a weapon that requires a stable, uninterrupted beam (that’s also invisible to the naked eye) adds a punishing layer of complexity to an already crowded battlespace, requiring meticulous deconfliction with friendly aircraft and sensors to avoid a catastrophic mishap.

Now imagine that deconfliction playing out against, say, a swarm of incoming Iranian Shahed-136 drones. A carrier obviously does not suffer from the same jurisdictional or governance ambiguity that yielded the airspace-closing laser shootdown in El Paso, Texas in February, but the same risk of friendly fire remains a valid concern even with automated safety layers like those integrated into the LOCUST system

The Bush live-fire proves that laser weapons are a natural fit for large, power-rich aircraft carriers, but the more pressing question is whether they can function effectively within the compressed and chaotic battlespace that such capital assets are designed to survive.

Once thing is certain: when the Navy’s laser carrier is ultimately put to test, it will almost certainly be a trial by fire — or, in this case, light.

The cruise missile-killing high-energy laser weapon the U.S. Defense Department envisions as part of its “Golden Dome for America” domestic missile defense shield is beginning to take shape.

The new Joint Laser Weapon System — a collaboration between the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy that Laser Wars first reported about in June 2025 — will initially consist of a containerized 150-kilowatt system with the potential to scale to at least 300kw to defeat incoming cruise missile threats, according to the Navy’s fiscal 2027 budget request.

The system will also include a Joint Beam Control System “capable of supporting” a 300-500kw laser weapon, the documents say.

The JLWS effort will leverage research and development lessons from the Navy’s 60kw High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system, which is currently installed on the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Preble, and the Army’s 300 kw Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) system, the first prototype of which the service plans on taking delivery of later this year.

The Navy will also “conduct upgrades” to its High Energy Laser Counter Anti-Ship Cruise Missile Project (HELCAP) test bed “as appropriate” in support of future JLWS testing.

While last year’s Army budget request detailed $51 million in mandatory funding for JLWS through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reconciliation bill under its Expanded Mission Area Missile program element, this year’s request does not contain any R&D funding for fiscal 2027. Instead, the proposal details plans for $337.8 million in spending starting in fiscal 2028 and running through fiscal 2031.

Based on the budget documents, it looks as though the service plans on closing out its IFPC-HEL activities first before kicking off its part of the JLWS effort.

The Navy, however, isn’t waiting around.

The service requested $94.825 million under its Directed Energy and Electric Weapon Systems program element in fiscal 2027 — up from just $14.5 million in fiscal 2026, as Laser Wars previously reported.

That amount includes $79.84 million under its Surface Navy Laser Weapon System effort to jumpstart JLWS R&D, sustain the service’s lone HELIOS system for future testing activities and upgrade the HELCAP test bed, which is also receiving a separate $14.978 injection, according to the service’s budget request.

The service plans on investing an additional $243.3 million into JLWS R&D under that program element through fiscal 2031.

Together, the Army and Navy requests total a vision of $675.93 million in R&D spending for the JLWS through fiscal 2031. The Navy plans on awarding $31.7 million in contracts for JBCS development as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026 and the $30 million in contracts for the procurement and testing of containerized JLWS by March 2027, according to budget documents.

It seems likely that Lockheed Martin will receive those contract. Not only is the defense prime the technical lead on both the HELIOS and IFPC-HEL efforts that will inform the JLWS, but it’s also already developing a containerized version of the former, a company executive revealed in August 2025.

While the Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget request also contains $452 million in R&D spending for the “development, integration, and assessment” of directed energy weapons in support of Golden Dome, the exact relationship with the Army and Navy’s JLWS efforts is unclear.

Pentagon seeks funds for Golden Dome, drones, AI in largest-ever budget request

The Navy budget documents state that the $79.84 million allocated under SNLWS also includes funds to “begin development of a consolidated implementation plan” for all Golden Dome-related directed energy projects, “leveraging synergy and common weapon architectures between these efforts where possible” in coordination with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.

The dream of a laser weapon capable of shooting down cruise missiles is nearly as old as the laser itself.

The Pentagon first demonstrated the concept in the 1970s with the Navy ARPA Chemical Laser, or NACL, a deuterium fluoride system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that successfully engaged small missile targets but proved far too large and complex for practical deployments.

Those same challenges would befall its successor, the megawatt-class Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser, or MIRACL, despite the system successfully neutralizing a supersonic MQM-8 Vandal missile during testing in 1989.

The Gulf War briefly revived this dream in the U.S. Air Force’s ill-fated Airborne Laser program, which consumed more than $5 billion over nearly two decades before its cancellation in 2012.

More recently, the Navy’s Layered Laser Defense system, developed by Lockheed Martin in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research, successfully downed a target drone simulating a subsonic cruise missile in a 2022 demonstration at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the military’s latest attempt to validate the concept under realistic conditions.

The US Navy brought a ‘one-of-a-kind’ laser weapon back from the dead

The Pentagon clearly hopes that the JLWS will finally push its laser-based cruise missile defense efforts over the finish line. But as Laser Wars previously reported when the JLWS first became public in June 2025, such threats pose a far more complex challenge for directed energy weapons than the low-cost weaponized drones that are reshaping warfare on battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East.

Cruise missiles fly low and fast, hug terrain and execute evasive maneuvers that compress reaction time, while their hardened casings require far more sustained energy to defeat than the soft-bodied drones that current tactical lasers are optimized for.

Compounding the challenge, atmospheric interference can scatter or absorb beam energy before it reaches the target; even at 300kw power levels, laser weapons demand a degree of beam control and aim-point precision that no known system has yet demonstrated against a realistic cruise missile threat.

After years attempting to scale laser weapons to power levels suitable for cruise missile defense, the Pentagon’s push for a containerized solution also represents a departure from past vehicle-mounted or warship-integrated systems.

For the Navy in particular, Chief of Naval Operations and noted laser weapon champion Adm. Daryl Caudle has explicitly emphasized the pursuit of modular capabilities that the service can rapidly swap across its surface fleet for particular missions without lengthy and expensive stays in shipyards.

Look no further than the service’s October 2025 live-fire test of the Army’s 20kw Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) system, based on the LOCUST Laser Weapon System from defense contractor AV, from the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush.

The JLWS isn’t the only modular laser weapon the Navy is exploring.

The aforementioned Directed Energy and Electric Weapon Systems program element also includes $4.82 million in funding to support the “development, integration and marinization” of the Army’s Enduring High Energy Laser systems — the modular, 30kw laser weapon based on lessons from P-HEL and the aborted Stryker-mounted 50kw Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense system that the service envisions as its first directed energy program of record.

The US Army is already ditching its most powerful laser weapon yet

The Army planned on procuring two E-HEL units in fiscal 2026 and another pair the following year, according to the service’s budget request, with plans to “produce and rapidly field” up to 24 systems total in the coming years.

With its LOCUST system proven as a counter-drone capability both abroad and at home, AV appears the leading contender to clinch that contract in the coming years.

With institutional support for developing and fielding directed energy weapons at scale at a historic high, JLWS may prove a significant opportunity for the Pentagon to finally make its dream of missile-killing laser weapons a reality.

But the history of counter-cruise missile laser development is littered with programs that cleared every bureaucratic hurdle only to stumble on the physics and operational realities.

A containerized 150kw system may be a more modest and achievable goal than the behemoths that came before it, but whether JLWS can survive contact with both the budget process and real-world complexities of blasting cruise missiles out of the sky remains the open question.

The U.S. military is once again pursuing flying directed energy weapons to counter threats to American airspace, according to the Defense Department’s missile defense boss.

Speaking to members of Congress during a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces hearing on April 15 on the Pentagon’s planned missile defense activities for fiscal year 2027, U.S. Missile Defense Agency director Air Force Lt. Gen. Heath Collins stated that his organization was “all in” on “bringing directed energy to the fight,” including integrating such weapons into unmanned platforms for domestic air defense against hostile missiles and drones.

“We are certainly putting more attention into bringing potentially game-changing directed energy capabilities to bear in an unmanned platform,” Collins stated in response to a question from Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-New Mexico) regarding the MDA’s adoption of directed energy weapons.

“[An] air platform is what we’re focused on, so we can bring that capability to the edge of the fight and thin the herd on [unmanned aerial vehicles], potentially air threats and the like.”

While Collins did not identify specific directed energy capabilities of interest to the MDA, his written statement to the subcommittee notes that the agency is “accelerating the operational use of high-energy lasers on various platforms” to add a “critical, non-kinetic layer” to the existing U.S. missile defense architecture.

It’s unclear how much the MDA plans on spending on these efforts. While the “skinny” version at the Pentagon’s historic $1.5 trillion fiscal year 2027 budget request published in early April includes a significant boost to directed energy research and development for homeland missile defense under the Trump administration’s “Golden Dome for America” initiative, the documents do not contain any R&D or procurement efforts explicitly tied to the agency.

As Laser Wars readers likely already know, the Pentagon has been examining airborne laser weapons for missile defense since the 1970s, when the U.S. Air Force established its Airborne Laser Laboratory (ALL) program to explore the development of a laser-armed “aerial battleship” to protect strategic bombers from incoming interceptors.

In 2010, the service’s Boeing 747-based YAL-1 Airborne Laser Test Bed successfully destroyed several ballistic missiles in flight during testing but was subsequently canceled the following year due to “significant affordability and technology problems,” as then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it at the time.

As military laser weapons have evolved from bulky chemical-based systems to more compact and efficient solid-state designs in recent decades, U.S. military planners have increasingly explored integrating them into unmanned airborne platforms.

The High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) effort, initiated in 2003 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sought to develop a 150-kW system to integrate into both manned and unmanned aircraft before grinding to a halt in 2015.

The MDA itself pursued outfitting drones with laser weapons for ballistic missile defense for more than a decade through its Low Power Laser Demonstrator (LPLD) initiative before then-Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin threw cold water on the effort in 2020, citing the unique technical and environmental challenges inherent to mounting lasers on aircraft.

“I think it can be done as an experiment, but as a weapon system to equip an airplane with the kinds of lasers we think necessary — in terms of their power level, and all their support requirements, getting the airplane to altitudes where atmospheric turbulence can be mitigated appropriately — that combination of things doesn’t go on one platform,” Griffin told reporters in May 2020, per Breaking Defense. “So, I’m just extremely skeptical of that.”

Griffin isn’t wrong. Despite advances in laser technology, engineering a directed energy weapon that’s both powerful enough to destroy an incoming target and compact enough to integrate onto a relatively small airframe like a multirole combat aircraft or drone is a significant challenge.

Even if an integration were technically simple, operational feasibility is an major question: atmospheric conditions are limiting factors for laser weapons in any domain, but turbulence is a particularly thorny one for fast-moving airborne platforms tasked with maintaining a coherent beam long enough to successfully neutralize targets moving at equally high speeds.

Despite this skepticism, the dream of laser-armed drones appears alive and well. As recently as 2024, the MDA was gearing up for another run at airborne lasers, albeit with an initial focus on low-powered systems for tracking before ramping up to high-energy weapons.

In January 2025, the U.S. Navy released a slick vision of future naval operations that included notional drone wingmen outfitted with directed energy weapons running interference for manned aircraft. And in the last year, defense contractor General Atomics has released multiple renderings of its MQ-9B SkyGuardian and MQ-20 Avenger drones outfitted with laser weapons, although a company spokesman cautioned reporters that the systems were not designed for “any specific government program or contract.”

Directed energy weapons offer an alluring alternative to traditional missile-based air defenses, with low cost-per-shot, deep magazines and the ability to engage targets at the speed of light.

But the Pentagon has been here before: airborne laser concepts have repeatedly surged on waves of optimism, only to collapse under the weight of technical complexities and ballooning costs.

Indeed, the Air Force’s Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) and Self-Protect High-Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) efforts, which respectively sought to mount laser weapons on an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship and F-15 Eagle fighter jet, proved too challenging to even advance to airborne tests. (Undeterred, the service is poised to restart airborne laser efforts in fiscal year 2027 amid a surge in broad institutional support for directed energy. Time is a flat circle.)

Whether the MDA is barreling towards a genuine directed energy inflection point or just another familiar R&D cycle remains an open question.

For now, the message from Collins is clear: when it comes to determining whether airborne laser weapons are a viable missile defense capability, the U.S. military is once again willing to find out the hard way.

Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy said the plan is to “more than double the funding that we’re allocating to counter-drone defenses,” to the tune of A$7 billion.

These figures – $5 billion in U.S. dollars – emanate from the Integrated Investment Program (IIP) released by Canberra on Apr. 16.

As the Australian Defence Force (ADF) seeks weapons able to count medium-sized drones and small-drone swarms when deploying overseas or to protect domestic infrastructure, Conroy touted two development contracts on Apr. 21.

AIM Defence was awarded an A$21.3 million contract for its Fractl laser system, whilst Sypaq Systems received a A$10.4 million deal to develop an interceptor drone.

The fourth-generation Fractl is a portable, high-energy laser system able to track a dime-sized object at speeds exceeding 100km/h, and powerful enough to burn through steel.

The funding will enable AIM Defence to enhance Fractl’s capability and combat readiness to counter individual and swarms of drones.

As for Sypaq, the Department of Defence said it will “develop the Corvo Strike, an interceptor drone designed to track, target and destroy larger drones now commonly employed on battlefields.” This winged interceptor powered by four propellers is also a loitering munition.

Both products will eventually integrate into a command-and-control system being developed under the Army’s umbrella Land 156 counter-unmanned aerial system (C-UAS) program.

Conroy’s A$7 billion “for drone defenses” also includes diverse capabilities like naval missiles, the NASAMS air defense system, a new medium-range air defense system and upgrades to fighters, for example.

Dedicated counter-drone systems are just one of seven categories listed in the IIP. That document mentioned the “acquisition and introduction of dismounted and vehicle-mounted systems to protect deployed forces from low-altitude aerial threats, including uncrewed air systems and helicopters.”

The two contracts worth a combined A$31.7 million pale in comparison to the A$3.9 billion going toward AUKUS submarines this year alone. Furthermore, they are only development contracts, so the Fractl and Corvo Strike are not yet ready for widespread fielding.

“With the war in Ukraine and conflicts in the Middle East showing how uncrewed aerial systems are increasingly being employed in conflict, the development of sovereign counter-drone solutions is essential to ensure the ADF can detect, assess and respond to these threats,” Conroy stated.

Ukraine is expected to produce an estimated 4.5 million drones and counter-drone systems in 2026.

The same censorship apparatus the Party built to control its people is now corrupting the AI systems its leaders depend on. The United States, by leaning into an open marketplace of information and ideas, will gain advantage as it takes a different path.

AI is increasingly training newer, faster AI models. This typically involves scraping the internet for content and then loading it into datasets for new programs. The problem: online content used for training is increasingly generated by AI. As a result, each generation of technology drifts from reality.

AI researchers refer to this as “model collapse,” a phenomenon in which models trained on their own synthetic outputs degrade over successive generations. The only defense is a constant influx of fresh, honest, human-generated information. Without it, the system folds in on itself.

China’s Great Firewall cuts off that influx, expediting the impact of model collapse within its borders. The first generation of large language models worldwide was trained on massive datasets of publicly available human-generated text. These human-derived pieces of information built an algorithmic approximation of how people think, argue, explain, and communicate.

Now, the internet is filling with AI-generated content at a rate inconceivable five years ago. Marketing copy, product descriptions, social media captions and news summaries are increasingly produced by AI systems and published online. They’ve all become generic and detached from human signals.

Outpaced by the US, China’s military places selective bets on artificial intelligence

With each cycle of new AI, the models drift further from their human origins. The newer systems amplify the patterns AI systems favor while losing nuance and amplifying existing biases. Each successive AI generation is one step further removed from the humans these programs were originally built to serve.

In China, the Great Firewall accelerates this problem. The Chinese Ministry of Public Security built the Great Firewall of China in the late 1990s to censor the Chinese people. It is now the most sophisticated information control infrastructure in human history. The Great Firewall does not just restrict what Chinese users can see. It shapes the data used to train Chinese AI systems. By design, it strips out politically sensitive events, dissenting viewpoints, and independent reporting. Left behind is a curated record of reality aligned with the Party’s narrative. That filtered record of information becomes the raw material for LLMs.

The training data fed into LLMs in China does not contain any criticism of the government, fair reportage of controversial topics, or accurate information about Chinese history. Events such as the the Uyghur detention camps exist inside the Firewall only as the state chose to describe them.

Now add model collapse on top of this. Chinese AI companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance and dozens of others aggressively deploy AI-generated content across their platforms. This material becomes training data for the next generation of Chinese AI models. With independent reporting locked out, model collapse expedites inside the Great Firewall with no escape valve. The practical consequences of this divergence are already visible and will accelerate.

Chinese LLMs struggle with tasks that require new observation, original synthesis or human complexity that the training data was designed to suppress. If asked about repression in Chinese history or controversial current events such as the Uyghur detentions, these LLMs either do not answer or produce a response indistinguishable from a Party press release. A Chinese trade official relying on domestic AI to model the economic impact of Western sanctions is working from a system incapable of providing an honest account of how those sanctions functioned or failed in comparable historical cases.

The West has a milder version of this problem.

Western AI models are trained on increasingly synthetic content, but human reporters regularly push new information into the ecosystem. Free and open societies have structural advantages to retain the capacity to reason about what is happening in the world rather than what previous AI systems described. When asked about Tiananmen Square, Western accounts typically focus on the 1989 protests and the crackdown. By contrast, Chinese models either refuse to answer or return state-aligned language. This information gap becomes part of the training data for the next generation.

To maintain a competitive AI advantage over China, Washington should treat human-generated data as a strategic asset and invest in journalism, open web archives, and synthetic-content labeling. Preserving the integrity of American training data is a defense imperative, not a tech problem.

Chinese leaders deploying AI products to make decisions about economics, geopolitics, and public health will make those decisions based on systems trained on what China’s information control apparatus wants people to believe. That is not an intelligence system. It is a mirror. And the tragedy of model collapse is that a mirror that has been looking at itself long enough no longer reflects anything.

Joe Buccino is a retired U.S. Army colonel and the author of “When Every Word Counts: How to Earn Trust, Command Attention, and Communicate Clearly in Any Situation.”

The munition, called the GBU-75 Joint Direct Attack Munition Long Range, or JDAM-LR, was operated from an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter during testing at the Navy’s Point Mugu Sea Range, California.

The JDAM-LR builds on the existing Joint Direct Attack Munition, a Boeing-developed guidance kit that converts unguided “dumb” bombs into precision-guided munitions. Standard JDAMs rely on a tail control system and GPS while functioning as gravity bombs with ranges of roughly 15 nautical miles, depending on release conditions.

The long-range variant is an upgraded version of this guidance kit that adds a compact propulsion system, including a small Kratos-made turbojet engine and deployable wings by Ferra Engineering, that extend the bomb’s range to hundreds of miles.

The system is designed to integrate with existing aircraft already capable of hosting JDAM weapons, which allows for rapid fielding.

The JDAM-LR’s successful flight demonstrations included validating safe separation from aircraft, testing its ability to conduct controlled flight while navigating to its target, and ensuring compatibility with existing onboard systems, according to an April 20 Navy release.

The April 1 test involving the F/A-18 Super Hornet saw the munition fly approximately 200 nautical miles in 34 minutes and strike within meters of its intended target, according to Boeing.

For the next test, on April 3, teams flew a second planned flight profile that included altitude changes and weapon maneuvering, while the rest of the flight remained similar.

Capt. Sarah Abbott, the program manager for Precision Strike Weapons (PMA-201), said the capability allows pilots to “engage targets from significantly safer distances, maintaining a tactical advantage in contested environments.”

In a company statement, Boeing said that the extended-range capability provides a low-cost option for long-range strike missions and builds on existing inventory.

“This weapon brings the cruise missile concept to the JDAM family at a lower cost, enabling large production quantities,” said Boeing’s Bob Ciesla, Precision Engagement Systems vice president, in a statement.

The JDAM-LR team is now focused on additional testing and integration efforts as the Navy moves toward operational deployment of the capability.

The move has stakeholders urging not to lean too hard on algorithms to distinguish, for instance, a scientist-spy sharing secret nano-energy plans with China from a Chinese professor publishing AI safety studies. Hanging in the balance lies troops’ technological edge, veteran intelligence officials and academics say.

AI’s confusion over the timing and nature of research partnerships may obscure real espionage if humans are not the ultimate judge of foreign influence, they warn, with some academics fearing an AI-work slop redux of the “China Initiative,” where the first Trump administration charged dozens of ethnic Chinese scientists with fraud, only to drop nearly all charges.

“Automated vetting tools are extremely useful for vetting large datasets and identifying patterns of concern. But those tools are for decision support to help the people, the human analysts, assess context and intent,” said David Cattler, who, until September, led the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, which screens personnel seeking security clearances.

The renewed focus on academic research security comes as tensions between the U.S. and China over AI intensify, with China ramping up both the development of low-cost AI models and its alleged exploitation of U.S. models.

The U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment reports that China “aims to displace the U.S. as the global AI leader by 2030,” in part, “by using its sizeable talent pool, extensive datasets, government funding and burgeoning global partnerships.”

Partnership is a complicated term in military “fundamental research” — studies that are publishable, rather than proprietary or classified, with potential defense applications.

For instance, mere co-authorship with a China-based scientist does not suffice to deny a U.S. researcher money, according to evolving academic research rules targeting foreign influence. Rather, to make the call, the Pentagon must assess each academic’s disclosures of external funding sources and affiliations.

According to a recently-declassified May 2025 inspector general report, such disclosures went unchecked because the Pentagon had not “requested additional government full-time equivalent employees to thoroughly review… and to conduct oversight of over 27,000 academic research awards.”

Defense News first obtained the report and the Pentagon’s response to a draft version through an open records request.

When asked about additional staffing, a Pentagon official pointed to orders in a January research security directive for the Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) to identify “automated vetting and continuous monitoring capabilities” and create a common research grant database.

The mandate also calls for a year-long “damage assessment” of selected research transactions, including cases that the House Select Committee on China flagged, in part, using AI tools.

A September GOP-led Committee report alleged that the Pentagon subsidized 1,400 academic papers published between June 2023 and June 2025 involving partnerships with the Chinese government.

The Pentagon said in an emailed statement on Thursday that the department “is committed to protecting the integrity of U.S. research while fostering international collaboration. Our approach leverages advanced analytical tools to augment human expertise, ensuring a rigorous and fair review process.”

Machines Make the Same Mistakes

Several university representatives, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of policy discussions, note that AI-assisted risk assessments have, in the past, drawn false assumptions about U.S.-China research collaborations.

For instance, the AI-aided GOP House report mislabeled the state-backed Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics as the sponsor of a collection of nine essays, whereas the Wuhan lab supported only one essay that involved no U.S. authors or federal funding.

The report also mistook a Chinese military-affiliated author’s publication on single-electron transistors for a DOD-funded project, when it merely referenced work funded by the U.S. military.

House Select Committee officials declined to comment on the cases.

Averting foreign interference “is not as easy as just having better AI capacities, because we know that some of those AI mistakes were the same human mistakes that led to inaccurate charges brought against researchers under the China Initiative,” Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities, said after learning of the AI gaffes.

About 30% of the China Initiative’s 77 cases involved academics not disclosing Chinese partnerships or funding sources, though disclosure was often not required, or no such partners or funding existed.

A jury found only one professor, Harvard nanochemist Charles Lieber, guilty, after he lied to Pentagon investigators about his participation in a Chinese talent recruitment program and made other false statements.

Smith said that relying on proxies — such as co-authorship, affiliation or nationality — to deduce security concerns led investigators to confuse co-authorship with direct interaction or shared data access, and to misinterpret historical ties as active partnerships.

“AI systems trained on bibliometric data,” or citation analytics, “and affiliation records can inherit the same flawed assumptions that underpinned the China Initiative,” he said. “The core lesson from the China Initiative is that identifying genuine research security risk requires judgment, context and proportionality — qualities that automated systems should support, not replace.”

Gisela Perez Kusakawa, executive director of the Asian-American Scholar Forum, said that the Pentagon has not communicated the types of data that the new AI tools will collect, use and share, nor sought community feedback, heightening concerns about ethnic profiling.

In an emailed statement, the Pentagon responded, “It is the standard practice of the department to not provide specifics regarding the criteria and weighting for threat assessments conducted, whether by manual or automated process.”

Kusakawa said, “We should be making sure that our research environment is welcoming, that we are encouraging these talents, especially in AI, to come to the United States and, frankly, have family in the United States, and make this a country that they contribute to and invest their and their children’s future in.”

Increasingly, that AI talent is not coming. Statistics suggest that Chinese AI experts are staying in China, even as America has managed to keep earlier expats.

Of about 100 Chinese-origin AI scholars who were researching at U.S. institutions in 2019 — when their papers were accepted at the world’s most elite AI conference, NeurIPS — 87% remained stateside as of 2025, according to Carnegie Endowment for International Peace figures.

At the same time, the share of Chinese home-grown talent not moving abroad has skyrocketed since 2019, based on an Economist tally of similar data. In 2019, about 30% of NeurIPS authors educated in China were still in China. By 2022, that population had jumped to 58%, and up to 68% in 2025.

‘Key’ Financial Disclosures Were Missing

To ensure that no country has a stranglehold on general knowledge, “the goal cannot be to close the U.S. research system altogether,” said Cattler, the former Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency director and now founder of consultancy Ironhelm Works. “The goal must be to ensure that collaboration strengthens national security rather than inadvertently weakening it.”

Last year’s inspector general report concluded that Pentagon agencies that partner with academic institutions “could be at an increased risk of exposure to foreign influence” because military units were “missing key documents” that can help discern scientists’ foreign financial sources, outside employers and other details related to potential conflicts.

For instance, about 80% of Air Force funding transactions sampled in the report were missing documents that can reveal problematic relationships. Also, the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — which bankrolled the Internet’s inventors — told evaluators that they had not, as required, annually checked that researchers named in progress reports were not involved in banned talent recruitment programs.

In response to questions about the screening lapses, the Pentagon said in an emailed statement that the department “is aware of the OIG’s findings in the report and the impacted directorates are working with [the Office of the Undersecretary for Defense and Engineering] to address the items identified.”

Jeffrey Stoff, a Chinese linguist and intelligence community analyst for 18 years who resigned in 2021 due to frustration with research security, maintains that DOD still needs more human expertise in language, culture and the minutiae of research restrictions.

“AI can and should be used for unsophisticated, labor-intensive tasks,” such as cross-referencing foreign organizations in financial disclosure forms against the names of blacklisted parties, but humans still need to inspect AI’s work, as not all nefarious ties are machine-readable, said Stoff, who now advocates for tighter safeguards as head of the nonprofit Center for Research Security and Integrity.

Cattler, giving more credit to AI, said that the scale of research collaboration demands that the Pentagon upgrade its approach to clocking potential spies.

With such a large population of research institutions and affiliated scientists, as well as a bombardment of often duplicative alerts, automation “improves the signal within that noise and can help orient the humans on really important matters,” he said.

“Sometimes people are deliberately deceptive when they are processed, and that could happen in a human exchange just as much as it could happen in something that a computer can see, but together, a human review and a computer review are incredibly powerful.”

The force’s Experimental Operations Unit conducted hands-on testing with Anduril’s YFQ-44A aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base, California, in an effort to utilize “principles of the new Warfighting Acquisition System,” according to a Thursday Air Force release.

Previously, the concept employed by the force was fully human-piloted drones, and now, “there is no operator with a stick and throttle flying the aircraft behind the scenes,” Jason Levin, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering for air dominance and strike, said in an October 2025 company release.

The testing took place sometime last week, according to a Thursday Anduril social media post written by vice president of autonomous airpower Mark Shushnar.

Shushnar said in the post that the EOU gained experience launching, recovering and turning the aircraft during the exercise, and it conducted the pre- and post-flight checks and clearances, weapons loading and unloading and direct tasking of the air vehicle during taxi and flight.

The EOU operators used a ruggedized laptop to upload mission plans, initiate autonomous taxi and takeoff, task the in-flight aircraft and manage post-flight data, Shushnar said, taking out the previous need for fixed infrastructure of a large, established base.

Shushnar highlighted how the YFQ-44A is designed to be easy to maintain with a small crew compared to traditional unmanned aerial vehicles. The exercise demonstrated that, he said. With only a couple days of training, a handful of EOU maintainers were able to turn the aircraft between sorties.

The exercise showcases a move toward “operator-driver experimentation” to find ways to speed up the capability process, per the Air Force’s release.

“By embedding the operators from the EOU with our acquisition professionals, we create a tight feedback loop that lets us trade operational risk with acquisition risk in real-time,” Col. Timothy Helfrich, portfolio acquisition executive for fighters and advanced aircraft, said in the release.

From beginning to end, the exercise was executed by EOU airmen, working alongside Air Force Material Command’s 412th Test Wing, to polish procedures for deploying and sustaining CCA, a trailblazer for the Warfighting Acquisition System, in contested environments, the announcement says.

The release recognized that the EOU’s main objective is to place operators at the center of this process to ensure that the CCA is workable for future conflict by “embedding the warfighter’s voice as the driving force from the beginning.”

The Air Force announced in April 2024 that Anduril and General Atomics were selected to design and create this first batch of drone wingmen. Anduril began flight testing in October 2025 and announced the production for the YFQ-44A Fury CCA in March 2026.

General Atomics announced that their ground testing began May 2025.

Although it is not yet clear how many YFQ-44As the Air Force has ordered from the defense companies, the service has noted they want a fleet of at least 1,000 CCAs for tasks, such as conducting strike missions, carrying out operations and flying alongside manned aircraft, like the F-22, F-35 and F-47 fighter jets.

Despite Anduril and General Atomics both developing aircraft for the Air Force’s CCA program, the service may choose to move forward into the production phase with only one. The Air Force is expected to make that decision sometime this year.

The tracker was discovered while sorting mail on board, though only after Omroep Gelderland had been tracking the Evertsen for 24 hours, the broadcaster wrote on its website on Thursday. The Dutch Ministry of Defence said it’s taking measures in response, according to the broadcaster.

The tracker incident comes after a Le Monde reported in March it was able to locate a French officer taking a 7-kilometer run around the deck of the Charles de Gaulle while the carrier was at sea, through data from the officer’s connected watch via the running and cycling app Strava.

“You do want to be able to intercept such a tracker,” Rowin Jansen, assistant professor of national security law at Radboud University in Nijmegen, told Omroep Gelderland. “Commercial satellite images are currently released with a delay for good reason. You certainly don’t want to make it easy for terrorists to send a similar package and track a ship’s location in real time. You then run the risk of having missiles fired at you.”

The broadcaster described sending the Bluetooth tracker, a gadget used for example to find keys, to the frigate in an envelope using the military postal service, following online instructions from the MoD on how to send mail to military personnel.

While the ministry checks whether prohibited or dangerous items are sent by mail by X-ray scanning packages, Omroep Gelderland noted that online videos showed envelops not being scanned, so decided to pack the tracker in a postcard, with the gadget going undetected and simply mailed.

“In a large-scale conflict, everyone needs to ask themselves: What can I contribute to the safety of our men and women?” said retired Lt. Gen. Mart de Kruif, as cited by the broadcaster. “So you should no longer rely on existing rules, but on what is necessary. We’re still a bit naive, and that mindset needs to change.”

Omroep Gelderland mapped the route of the tracker from the Dutch naval base in Den Helder to Eindhoven Airport, and then on to the port of Heraklion in Crete, where webcam images showed the Evertsen moored at the quay.

With the frigate departing the port on March 27, the broadcaster said it was able to track the vessel sailing west along the coast of Crete before setting an eastward course. The tracker then went permanently offline 24 hours later near Cyprus, it said.

The MoD has made adjustments in response to the reported incident, including no longer allowing greeting cards with batteries to be sent to the Evertsen, and the ministry will further review the guidelines for military mail, a spokesperson told Omroep Gelderland.

The tracker was found during mail sorting aboard the frigate after it set sail, and while the vessel could be tracked at sea, this would not have posed an operational risk, according to the MoD.

Defence Minister Dilan Yeşilgöz informed parliament about the incident on Thursday evening, Omroep Gelderland said.

A global outage across Elon Musk’s satellite network affecting millions of Starlink users had left two dozen unmanned surface vessels bobbing off the California coast, disrupting communications and halting operations for almost an hour.

The incident, which involved drones intended to bolster U.S. military options in a conflict with China, was one of several Navy test disruptions linked to SpaceX’s Starlink that left operators unable to connect with autonomous boats, according to internal Navy documents reviewed by Reuters and a person familiar with the matter.

As SpaceX rockets toward a $2 trillion public offering this summer – expected to be the largest ever – the company has secured its position as the world’s most valuable space company in part by being indispensable to the U.S. government with an array of technologies spanning satellite communications to space launches and military AI.

Starlink, in particular, has proved key to crucial programs - from drones to missile tracking - with a low-earth orbit constellation of close to 10,000 satellites, a scale that provides the military with a network resilient against potential adversary attacks.

But the Navy’s mishaps with Starlink for its autonomous drone program, which have not been previously reported, highlight the challenges of the U.S. military’s growing reliance on SpaceX and the risks it brings to the Pentagon.

“If there was no Starlink, the U.S. government wouldn’t have access to a global constellation of low earth orbit communications,” said Clayton Swope, a deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Pentagon did not respond to questions about the drone test or SpaceX’s work with the Navy. The Pentagon’s chief information officer, Kirsten Davies, said the “Department leverages multiple, robust, resilient systems for its broad network.”

The Navy and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite facing growing competition from Amazon.com, which announced an $11.6 billion agreement this week to acquire satellite maker Globalstar, SpaceX remains far ahead in low-earth orbit communications.

Beyond drones, SpaceX has cemented a near-monopoly for space launches and provides satellite communications with Starlink and its national security-focused constellation, Starshield, generating billions of dollars for the company.

Last month, U.S. Space Force said it had reassigned its upcoming GPS launch to a SpaceX rocket for the fourth time, due to a glitch in the Vulcan rocket made by the Boeing and Lockheed Martin joint venture United Launch Alliance.

WARNINGS ABOUT RELYING ON SPACEX

Democratic lawmakers have warned the Pentagon about the risks of its reliance on a single company led by the world’s richest man to deliver crucial national security capabilities. More recently, the Defense Department’s disagreements and blacklisting of AI startup Anthropic quickly revealed how an over-reliance on one AI vendor could create problems should that vendor be dropped.

Reuters reported last year that Musk unexpectedly switched off Starlink access to Ukrainian troops as they sought to retake territory from Russia, denting allies’ trust in the billionaire.

In Taiwan, SpaceX faced criticism over concerns it was withholding satellite communications to U.S. service members based there, “possibly in breach of SpaceX’s contractual obligations with the U.S. government,” according to a 2024 letter sent by then-U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher to Musk, reported by Forbes at the time. SpaceX disputed the claim in a post on X.

Reuters could not determine whether SpaceX has since provided Starlink service in Taiwan to U.S. service members. The Pentagon and SpaceX did not respond to questions about Taiwan.

“As a matter of operational security, we do not comment on or discuss plans, operations capabilities or effects,” an official said in a statement.

STARLINK ‘EXPOSED LIMITATIONS’

SpaceX’s Starlink broadband has been crucial to the Pentagon’s drone program, providing connection to small unmanned maritime vessels that look like speedboats without seats, and include those made by Maryland-based BlackSea and Austin, Texas-based Saronic.

In April 2025, during a series of Navy tests in California involving unmanned boats and flying drones, officials reported that Starlink struggled to provide a solid network connection due to the high data usage needed to control multiple systems, according to a Navy safety report of the tests reviewed by Reuters.

“Starlink reliance exposed limitations under multiple-vehicle load,” the report stated. The report also faulted issues linked to radios provided by Silvus and a network system provided by Viasat.

In the weeks leading up to the global Starlink outage in August, another series of Navy tests was disrupted by intermittent connection issues with the Starlink network, Navy documents reviewed by Reuters show. The causes of the network losses were not immediately clear.

Despite the setbacks, the upside of Starlink – a cheap and commercially available service – outweighs the risk of a potential outage disrupting future military operations, said Bryan Clark, an autonomous warfare expert at the Hudson Institute.

“You accept those vulnerabilities because of the benefits you get from the ubiquity it provides,” he said.

Of the total, €675 million ($796 million) will support 32 capability development projects, and €332 million ($391 million) will go to 25 research initiatives. The selected projects involve 634 entities from 26 EU member states plus Norway, with small and medium-sized enterprises making up more than 38% of participants and receiving over 21% of the total funding, according to a summary of the spending plan.

The most striking cluster of projects marks a shift to 21st-century warfare, with at least four separate initiatives − EURODAMM, LUMINA, SKYRAPTOR, and TALON − devoted specifically to loitering munitions and affordable mass drone production.

The concentration reflects an uncomfortable lesson absorbed from the war in Ukraine: cheap, expendable strike drones have reshaped the battlefield, and Europe’s defense industry has been slow to catch up. Lessons learned in Ukraine are referenced repeatedly throughout the EDF’s materials on the funding round and individual projects.

That battlefield knowledge is now being plugged into the fund’s architecture. For the first time, Ukrainian entities are eligible to participate in EDF projects as subcontractors and third-party recipients, marking a significant step toward integrating Ukraine’s defense-technological and industrial base into the European ecosystem. In the coming months, Kyiv and Brussels are expected to complete the required association agreement to allow Ukraine full participation on equal terms with EU member states in the future.

The EU Defence Innovation Office in Kyiv, established under the European Defence Industrial Strategy in 2024, has been the institutional engine behind that push. One flagship project, STRATUS, will develop an AI-powered cyber defense system for drone swarms and includes a Ukrainian subcontractor, a model the Commission explicitly frames as bringing “direct battlefield experience” into EU-funded R&D.

More than 15 of the 57 projects are tied to the Commission’s four European Readiness Flagships, a set of priority capability areas the bloc identified last year as critical to near-term operational readiness. Project AETHER, for instance, will develop propulsion and thermal management systems in support of the Drone Defence Initiative.

To widen the industrial base, several projects focused on mass-producible drone munitions will launch sub-calls specifically for startups as well as small and medium-sized firms, including Ukrainian ones, that can receive up to €60,000 each to integrate innovations into larger consortia. It is a modest sum, but the intent is structural: to lower the barrier to entry for firms without prior defense experience at a moment when the Commission is under pressure to demonstrate that its defense spending is generating real industrial capacity outside of the usual suspects of established prime contractors.

The 2025 funding awards are separate from both the 2026 EDF Work Programme, which carries a €1 billion ($1.18 billion) budget adopted last December, and the European Defence Industry Programme, whose €1.5 billion ($1.77 billion) work program was adopted in March. Taken together, the three tranches reflect an EU defense funding environment that has expanded dramatically in scale and ambition since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and one that is now deliberately building Kyiv into its foundations.

The armed forces are working with partners on a system to provide what Desmeulles called “true distributed working capability” centered on data and using advanced AI, “a sovereign system that will essentially be the equivalent of Maven.”

The system could be available within a few months, and available for exercises in September 2027, the general said, declining to provide specifics.

Project Maven is a Pentagon program that uses AI to process drone and surveillance data to automatically detect and track objects, using technology provided by contractors including Palantir Technologies. Maven has faced controversy amid questions about AI-assisted targeting in Iran, with concerns about speed, accountability, and harm to civilians related to automated kill chains.

“We’ve really positioned data as the center of everything we do,” Desmeulles said in a briefing with three reporters on Saturday at the Montmorillon military camp in western France, describing data as the ammunition of the command post.

“The centrality of data is something that’s well understood by the corps, the Army, and the French forces,” he said. “So, we’re really focused on that.”

The armed forces are on track to develop “a true distributed working capability, based on highly advanced artificial intelligence and centered on data,” Desmeulles said. “We’re following that logic, to remain sovereign, and that’s an area where we are strong.”

Desmeulles said his corps is already seeing “very, very good” results from a data-centric approach, even if there is “still a little way to go before it’s practically perfect in my eyes.”

France has several AI companies that are active in defense, including Comand AI, ChapsVision and Safran’s AI business, and is also home to a major developer of large-language models with Mistral AI. France in 2024 created an agency under the Armed Forces Ministry that works on AI for defense.

The department premiered WarMatrix for its inaugural use at the March 27 GE 26 Benchmark Wargame, marking the system’s move from development into operational capacity, according to a Tuesday Air Force release.

WarMatrix, described by the force as an “active wargaming environment,” is an AI-powered system that integrates existing models, data and workflows while expediting analysis.

The Air Force at the end of 2025 said it was looking for technology capable of producing simulations 10,000 times faster than real time.

WarMatrix is a “human-machine teaming system” meant to keep human judgment integral to planning and decision making, according to the release.

The use of WarMatrix during the event served as the system’s initial operating concept evaluation, signaling a change in how the Air Force conducts operational analysis and wargaming.

“Designed by wargamers for wargamers, WarMatrix provides transparency, auditability and speed, enabling decision-makers to better understand assumptions, outcomes and tradeoffs,” the statement reads.

Air Force leaders portray WarMatrix as an evolution in wargaming rather than a replacement, and the release says that the use of WarMatrix provided a more “connected and traceable wargaming process.”

It also said that the system’s design allowed for faster scenario development, repeat findings and increased collaboration with joint and coalition partners.

The two-weekslong event, hosted at Systems Planning and Analysis in Alexandria, Virginia, was attended by more than 150 people, including technical experts, Air Force leadership and allied planners.

Attendees during the event fulfilled more than six 24-hour “game-time moves” that balanced physics- and simulation-based models to ensure outcomes were realistic.

The defense technology firm introduced the system, known as MAYHEM 10, which expands upon its Switchblade family.

The Army in February announced a $186 million purchase that includes two variants of Switchblade one-way attack, or “kamikaze,” drones: the Switchblade 600 Block 2 variant and the Switchblade 300 Block 20 variant.

The difference is that MAYHEM 10 is multifunctional, meaning it can perform tasks in addition to striking. The new system can carry a 10-pound payload and has a range of over 62 miles, per the release.

The system is capable of 50 minutes of endurance, with a launch assembly that can be done in under five minutes, the statement says. It can also be launched from the air, ground or maritime platforms.

“By integrating advanced autonomy, multi-domain payloads, and rapid adaptability, we empower our forces to sense, disrupt, and strike with precision — even in the most contested environments,” Wahid Nawabi, AeroVironment’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, said in the statement.

Last year, U.S. soldiers tested the Switchblade 600 system, which has a range of 27 miles and is designed to engage a target using onboard cameras.

The Switchblade 300 Block 20, unlike the heavier 600 variant, is small enough to be carried in a backpack. For the first time, according to a February AeroVironment announcement, it will come equipped with an Explosively Formed Penetrator, a deadly warhead that is made to penetrate armored vehicles.

The Baltic nation will instead direct the funds toward drones, counter-drone measures and air-defense systems, while squeezing more service life out of the country’s existing fleet of second-hand CV90 vehicles.

Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur announced the move, which pauses a €500 million ($590 million) acquisition, last week, saying it was based on lessons drawn from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Tallinn will “extend the service life of the existing CV90 vehicles by at least 10 years,” Pevkur was quoted in a statement issued by the government.

The move is in contrast with actions by the other two Baltic States, Latvia and Lithuania, which have made decisions to buy new CV90 and Ascod vehicles, respectively.

“We have decided that, at present, it is more rational to modernize the existing infantry fighting vehicles rather than replace them. Modernization will ensure the sustained preservation of capability and the efficient use of resources,” Andri Maimets, spokesman for the Estonian Centre for Defence Investments (ECDI), the country’s military procurement agency, told Defense News.

Under the modernization plan, the vehicles are to be fitted with new electronics, and their weapon and targeting systems will be upgraded, Maimets said.

Estonia secured 44 used CV90s from the Netherlands that were delivered in 2019, and sourced additional 37 hulls of vehicles made by BAE Systems Hägglunds for Norway, subsequently rebuilding them into support vehicles.

Raimond Kaljulaid, an Estonian lawmaker who represents the opposition Social Democratic Party on the parliament’s National Defence Committee, told Defense News the decision should be viewed in the context of Estonia’s rising military expenditure.

“Estonia spends over 5% of its GDP on defense, and this is real spending on our military which is above NATO’s 3.5 percent target to meet the capability targets,” Kaljulaid said. “This means that, if we want to invest more in counter-drone technologies or combat drones, the money must come from the existing budget,” he added. “If our threat assessment and priorities change, we need to adapt our spending accordingly.”

The lawmaker said the National Defence Committee will “keep a close eye on the adapted approach to make sure that everything is done the right away to ensure national security.”

As Tallinn advances plans to select a foreign supplier for the planned domestic ramp-up of 155 mm artillery ammunition production, Kaljulaid also said that projects to attract international defense industry players to Estonia must be accelerated.

“The past five-six years have brought remarkable success to the development of Estonia’s defense industry, with unmanned technologies as one of the prime examples. At the same time, we must make efforts to ensure that Estonia continues to be competitive with regards to other countries in the region,” he said.

The U.S. military is paving the way for the regular deployment of high-energy laser weapons on American soil for air defense amid the expanding threat of low-cost weaponized drones.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Defense Department have reached a “landmark safety agreement” regarding the use of laser weapons to counter unauthorized drones at the US-Mexico border following a safety assessment that concluded such countermeasures “do not pose undue risk to passenger aircraft,” the FAA announced Friday.

The assessment and resulting agreement were the direct result of two laser incidents along the southern border of Texas in February, which prompted the FAA to abruptly close nearby airspace amid concerns over the potential impact on civilian air traffic. The incidents involved the U.S. Army’s 20 kilowatt Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL), a vehicle-mounted version of defense contractor AV’s LOCUST Laser Weapon System.

In the first incident, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol personnel used an AMP-HEL on loan from the Pentagon to engage an unidentified target near Fort Bliss, triggering an airspace shutdown above El Paso on Feb. 11. In the second, U.S. military personnel used an AMP-HEL near Fort Hancock to neutralize a “seemingly threatening” drone that turned out to belong to CBP, spurring another shutdown on Feb. 27.

“Following a thorough, data-informed Safety Risk Assessment, we determined that these systems do not present an increased risk to the flying public,” FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement. “We will continue working with our interagency partners to ensure the National Airspace System remains safe while addressing emerging drone threats.”

The “first of its kind” safety assessment, conducted in early March by the FAA and the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401) counter-drone organization at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, reportedly yielded two significant conclusions: 1) the LOCUST’s automatic shutoff mechanism will consistently prohibit the system from firing under unsafe circumstances, a point that AV executives have emphasized in recent weeks, and 2) in the event of a system failure, the laser beam itself cannot inflict catastrophic damage even on aircraft flying at its maximum effective range, let alone those at cruising altitudes.

Here’s how Aaron Westman, AV senior director for business development, described the LOCUST’s safety protocols in a company blog post on March 23:

Every time an operator presses the “fire” button, the system runs through a series of automated checks. Some examples include:

• Is the laser pointing away from protected “keep-out” zones?
• Are all internal subsystems operating within safe parameters?
• Is the system properly locked onto a target?
• Are safety interlock switches engaged?
• Are all software safety checks satisfied?

Each of these checks acts as a safety “vote.”

If any subsystem registers a “no vote,” the laser simply will not fire. An operator can press the trigger — and nothing happens. The system refuses to engage until all conditions are verified as safe.

These automated safeguards are built into both the hardware and the software of the system.

Here’s how DefenseScoop described the LOCUST’s potential effects on passing airframes based on an account from Army Col. Scott McLellan, JIATF-401 deputy director, of the testing at White Sands:

McLellan said the evaluation involved “localized” firing of the AMP-HEL from various distances at the fuselage of a Boeing 767 airliner that testers lugged on to White Sands to assess the system’s damaging effects, “or lack thereof” on aircraft material. He said it aimed to “disprove some myths” about the capability, noting “that energy clearly dissipates over time and space and doesn’t have the effect everyone thinks it does as far as lasers are concerned.”

A JIATF 401 spokesperson said the laser was fired at its “maximum effective range for up to 8 seconds” at the grounded fuselage, “demonstrating that even at full intensity, the laser caused no structural damage to the aircraft.”

As drone warfare spreads beyond distant conflicts, laser weapons are an increasingly attractive domestic countermeasure. While kinetic interceptors and electronic warfare may be considered suitable for chaotic battlefields, their potential for collateral effects makes them far too risky for consistent domestic applications. And even if collateral damage wasn’t a concern, expending expensive missiles on the 1,000 cartel-operated drones that cross the border with Mexico monthly is economically unsustainable, especially for a Pentagon that’s already rapidly burning through munitions as part of Operation Epic Fury against Iran. On paper, the argument seems obvious: Why not save those critical interceptors for high-end threats overseas and let domestic laser emplacements, with their deep magazines and minimal cost-per-shot, pull counter-drone duty at home?

Using laser weapons for domestic air defense wouldn’t be unprecedented. France deployed two 2 kw High Energy Laser for Multiple Applications – Power (HELMA-P) systems to secure the airspace over the country’s Île-de-France region during the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics. This past September, China’s People’s Liberation Army deployed several laser weapons across Beijing during a major military parade marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat at the end of World War II. As of January, the U.K. Ministry of Defense was reportedly drawing up plans to build a domestic laser screen, albeit composed of lower-power laser dazzlers, to protect military installations and other critical infrastructure. The Pentagon has even already considered laser weapons to reinforce the airspace above Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s residences at Fort McNair in Washington following a series of unauthorized drone incursions there.

Indeed, there’s a distinct possibility that laser weapons could see increasing domestic applications amid the U.S. military’s growing appetite for novel drone defenses. On April 2, JIATF-401 announced that it had funneled $20 million in counter-drone systems like the Dronebuster EW handset and Smart Shooter computerized riflescope to the U.S.-Mexico border in just four months.

Days later, the task force announced $100 million to enhance counter-drone capabilities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup starting in June “to protect stadiums and fan zones in 11 cities across nine states,” part of larger $600 million surge in counter-drone systems that also allocated $158 million to “defend the nation’s highest-priority defense critical infrastructure.”

With the Pentagon asking for $580 million in R&D funding just for JIATF-401 in its fiscal year 2027 budget request (and potentially $800 million in procurement cash), the task force appears poised to explore any and all possible solutions to the drone problem — and operationally, the FAA-Pentagon safety agreement helps establish laser weapons as a viable option.

That said, the safety agreement on its own is unlikely to open the floodgates for a sudden spate of laser weapon deployments along the U.S.-Mexico border, let alone for major events like the World Cup or critical infrastructure just yet. First, the agreement doesn’t appear to clarify who has final say in authorizing a laser engagement when U.S. military, CBP and FAA jurisdictions overlap — the precise ambiguity that yielded February’s airspace closures and, until resolved, will complicate future engagements during a fast-moving crisis. Second, the U.S. military’s arsenal of operational laser weapons is currently limited despite a stated goal of rapidly fielding new systems at scale within three years. Even with clear plans to surge directed energy research and development for homeland defense under President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome for America” missile shield, the age of sleek beam directors quietly standing watch along the US-Mexico border remains a long way off.

The FAA agreement may end up laying the foundation for a true domestic laser air defense architecture — a “Laser Dome” in all but name. Whether the U.S. military actually builds it, however, will depend not just the Pentagon’s promise to deploy laser weapons at scale, but whether Washington can finally sort out who’s in charge when a beam crosses into civilian airspace.

The Army Data Operations Center’s April 3 debut is part of an enormous push to further integrate data and machine learning into military operations, according to a Pentagon release.

The armed forces have used data from military, intelligence and business sources for the past several years.

Historically, that has been a somewhat cumbersome process, as different datasets are often separated from one another, necessitating different security clearances, or housed on different systems. The ADOC is meant to mitigate those issues, functioning as a kind of information hub.

“We don’t have a data problem. We have a data management problem, and data becomes the ammunition that we need to provide to our senior leaders in order for them to make quick and informed decisions and gain decision dominance,” Lt. Gen. Jeth Rey, deputy chief of staff for the Army G-6, said in the release.

The office will be housed under Army Cyber Command, the release states. It is scheduled to run as a pilot for six months, with the Pentagon potentially adopting it as a model, DefenseScoop reported.

OTHER INITIATIVES

The establishment of the ADOC, meanwhile, is just one step in a series of separate initiatives undertaken by the service in recent years to embrace AI’s role in the battlefields of tomorrow.

Experts say broadening the technology’s application is long overdue.

“Most of the AI development had all been toward enemy-centric targeting, looking for and refining that enemy target and helping us basically build out target sets and hit more faster, essentially target more faster in one way or another,” Wes Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force joint terminal attack controller and Pentagon whistleblower, told Military Times.

“But you didn’t really have much of anything related to the civilian environment,” Bryant continued. “That was one thing we were working on at the [Pentagon’s Civilian Protection] Center of Excellence — looking at ideas for AI integration in civilian environment mapping, in updating no strike lists in given areas.”

Jon Lindsay, associate professor at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said that AI is best suited to more mundane organizational tasks, such as “planning, intelligence, logistics administration.”

The Department of Defense has also put out contracting opportunities for commercial data centers on four U.S. military bases.

Two bases, Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and Fort Bliss, Texas, have entered into agreements already, according to a March 2026 release.

Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, are also listed as potential sites for the data centers, which provide the computing power and hardware for AI models and cloud services.

Under the agreements, the data centers would be operated by civilian firms but would provide computing power for the military’s use, according to Task & Purpose.

Those data centers are part of a government-wide effort to pursue “a golden age for American manufacturing and technological dominance,” per a July 2025 executive order.

The effort to achieve artificial general intelligence is a “race that has a very short-term horizon,” Ismael Arciniegas Rueda, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, told Military Times.

Housing the data centers on Army bases could provide an extra level of security for the centers, which are vulnerable to cyber and kinetic attacks.

But they also present potential downsides to the communities where they are built, like tremendous energy consumption.

That, combined with an aging power grid, is likely to drive up energy costs in the surrounding areas.

The contract, which follows a framework agreement announced in January, will allow Lockheed to “deliver record numbers of combat-proven interceptors for American and allied forces this year,” the company announced Friday.

“Our investments in our facilities, workforce and supply chain ensure we can deliver at scale and with speed,” Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said in a release. “With the right tools, proven processes and skilled employees in place, we are positioned to deliver a record number of munitions in support of the warfighter and our allies.”

The PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement works by identifying and tracking a range of threats — using Boeing-made PAC-3 seekers — from ballistic missiles and hypersonics to hostile air platforms.

Once the seeker identifies the target, the highly maneuverable all-up interceptor round, which uses a two-pulse solid rocket motor, engages and eliminates threats via direct body-to-body contact.

Boeing earlier this month announced it had reached a framework agreement with the Defense Department to triple production of its PAC-3 seekers.

Lockheed’s framework agreement announced in January included a target of increasing annual PAC-3 interceptor production from approximately 600 to 2,000 over a span of seven years.

Recent contract announcements come as the U.S. military’s reliance on costly interceptors against cheap munitions, particularly those deployed by Iran during Operation Epic Fury, has come under increased scrutiny.

Contrast the $35,000 average cost of an Iranian Shahed drone with an estimated $4 million price tag of a PAC-3, and the cost exchange, if successfully engaged, is 114-1 in favor of Iran.

Despite the lopsided cost exchange, the Pentagon in March also announced a deal with BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin to quadruple production of infrared seekers for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptor.

That deal aligns with a contract agreement in January between the Pentagon and Lockheed to quadruple the company’s annual production of THAAD interceptors from 96 to 400.

French defense firms have been slow to set up joint companies with Ukrainian partners, with just one joint venture created so far, compared to 11 for Germany and five for Spain, said Ihor Fedirko, the chief executive officer of the Ukrainian Council of Defence Industry. He was speaking at a press briefing late Wednesday after a day of meetings organized with French land defense industry group GICAT.

Ukraine has developed unmatched expertise in Europe in drone warfare after four years of fighting Russia’s invasion, coming up with new use cases and doctrine as well as scaling up drone production to millions of units per year. Meanwhile, France is home to some of Europe’s biggest defense firms and is the world’s second-biggest arms exporter.

“We have to establish a win-win strategy with the defense industry of France, to find our best partners,” Fedirko said. “We want to know as well how you produce your products, your production culture, your standards. That’s what you can bring to our industry.”

Ukraine was present with 27 companies, most of them drone makers, while nearly 60 French firms showed up for the day of match making, according to Fedirko. He said some Ukrainian companies would follow up with visits to French manufacturers on Thursday.

Co-producing Ukrainian defense products with strategic partners, on their territory, means an additional flow of equipment to send to the front, said Oleksandr Kamyshin, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and former minister of strategic industries. He said allied governments buying co-produced kit to donate to Ukraine “is the fastest and the best way how we can support our front line.”

Kamyshin said Ukraine’s industry has historically been integrated “into the East” and now needs to become part of the European defense framework, while Europe’s defense industry will become stronger by integrating capabilities learned and developed in Ukraine.

“We come with our lessons learned,” Kamyshin said. “We offer a model which is definitely beneficial for your country, for your industry, for your economy. And we want to do more together.”

Fedirko said no other European country has a defense industry like that of France, active in deep tech and completely independent, with the French industry strong in aerospace and “classic weaponry.” With France able produce everything from missiles and radars to night-vision equipment, what Ukraine can bring is knowledge, technologies and innovations in the field of drones, he said.

“When we will combine our experience and expertise and your deep technologies, your standards, your production culture, we can establish something pretty new,” Fedirko said.

French companies may announce at least one or two drone joint ventures with Ukrainian partners in the coming weeks, said Clément Requier, GICAT’s director of export and European partnerships. He noted France’s defense industry already works with Ukraine’s industry in formats other than joint ventures.

Ukraine is offering a level of industrial collaboration that wouldn’t have been available five years ago, and is open to sharing what it learned to produce, in the interest of integrating with European industry, according to Kamyshin. The Ukrainian official said in turn he sees strong interest in cooperation from the French side.

Wednesday’s meeting was the fourth between the French and Ukrainian defense industries since July 2023, and the first in France, according to Requier. France often frames cooperation with other countries in terms of delivering stand-alone solutions, and should think more about also being a provider of critical components and equipment, he said.

Ukraine has the expertise it needs, with more than 1,000 companies active in defense, most of them producing unmanned systems, said Kamyshin. He said Ukrainian drones have sunk Russian ships and submarines, saying it “looks like Lego drones work well,” an oblique reference to reported comments by Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger widely seen as dismissive of Ukraine’s drone innovation.

France has deep knowledge and expertise in artificial intelligence, and “we would be happy do to more in that domain,” according to Kamyshin. Ukraine sees France as a strategic partner, and the focus is on promoting collaboration and co-production in France, rather than sales, the special adviser said.

Ukraine in March raised the possibility of sharing battlefield data with partners to train AI models, and Kamyshin said Ukraine would be happy to share datasets with countries with which it starts co-production, and “not only in Ukraine,” with an announcement on partnerships expected on April 13.

With regards to what France can bring to the table, Ukraine could benefit from more sharing of strong standard setting in Europe, said Éloi Delort, public affairs director at Alta Ares, a French defense AI firm. He said France’s Directorate General for Armament puts “a lot of stress” on French companies to secure systems and ensure technology is not getting stolen.

One of Wednesday’s participants, Ukraine’s MOWA Defense, which provides training and advisory services for defense, sees France as a key market, co-founder Fedir Serdiuk said. Operating in France would require a local partner, which the executive says he hopes to have found, with a possible final agreement or at least a letter of intent in coming months.

Ukrainian drone maker eDrone came to Paris looking for new partnerships, chief commercial officer Pavlo Valenchuk said. He cited the example of a French company with radars, a good drone-tracking system and software, “everything to develop a really good system” to protect strategic objects in France, but lacking interceptor drones. “This type of partnership we’re looking for.”

French company SBG Systems, which makes low-cost inertial navigation systems in France that are used by Ukraine in strike drones, is looking to qualify partnerships to relocate some production to Ukraine, CEO Thibault Bonnevie said. Some manufacturing may be difficult to move because it relies on machine tools from Switzerland, with export restrictions for countries in conflict, he said.

SBG is working to enhance feedback on its products from the front line, a key issue in Ukraine because of the fast-evolving battlefield and Russian electronic-warfare, Bonnevie said. The company’s customers are manufacturers rather than the armed forces directly, which means relying on the drone makers for user feedback, something that was “discussed a lot” on Wednesday, the CEO said.

Meeting with Ukrainian companies in Paris was a way to meet potential new partners rather than sign contracts, according to Bonnevie.

“The next step is usually to go visit those companies directly in Ukraine, because there is nothing really happening in Ukraine for European companies without stronger links,” Bonnevie said. Even if discussions center around drones and robots, “there is still a story of humans working together and trust that needs to be built between the companies,” he said.

In the weeks since the Department of Defense’s troubled relationship with Anthropic burst into public view and led to the company being kicked out of the U.S. military, new defense-focused AI companies like Smack Technologies and EdgeRunner AI say they have experienced a shift in interest that would have been unimaginable just months ago. They have received a surge of overtures about possible contracts and meeting requests and been approached by investors who previously showed no interest.

The Pentagon’s growing animosity toward its top AI provider, Anthropic, has opened up opportunities for smaller rivals, who have long sought a foot in the door to the most lucrative government contractor in the world. A defense contract can lead to more business with other branches of the U.S. government, and is a useful signal of trust and safety for potential commercial clients.

“We’ve seen a massive increase in demand from customers and the government to get AI solutions fielded since Anthropic was declared a supply-chain risk,” said Tyler Sweatt, CEO of Second Front, a company that helps technology firms meet the requirements needed to operate on secure Pentagon networks. “Our customers are turning to us as the Pentagon turns to them to deploy quickly in the wake of the Anthropic blowup.”

Since the Pentagon deemed Anthropic’s products a “supply-chain risk” in March and the two sides became embroiled in a lawsuit, the military has expressed increasing interest in AI startups like Smack Technologies, saying, “We want more, we want demos, let’s talk about how we can move faster,” said Andrew Markoff, co-founder and chief executive of the 19-person startup based in El Segundo, California. In late March, a judge temporarily blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic.

Tyler Saltsman, co-founder and chief executive of EdgeRunner AI, described a similar experience. His company had been waiting more than a year for a Space Force contract to clear the Pentagon’s procurement machinery. It was signed within weeks of the Anthropic situation breaking into the open. “I can’t prove that the Anthropic drama sped this up,” Saltsman said, “but I have a sneaky suspicion it did.”

“The Pentagon will continue to rapidly deploy frontier AI capabilities to the warfighter through strong industry partnerships across all classification levels,” a Pentagon official said.

One Pentagon technologist has previously told Reuters that the falling-out with Anthropic, and the realization that the Defense Department was heavily dependent on one AI provider, forced the department to diversify AI providers.

Smack’s Marine Corps contract speeds up

For Smack, the clearest example of the post-Anthropic acceleration involves the Marine Corps. The company won a contract with the Marine Corps in March 2025 and delivered a successful prototype by October — software that compresses what is normally a months-long operational planning process into roughly 15 minutes.

Despite the successful prototype, momentum stalled. Full production had been budgeted for fiscal year 2027 — meaning October 2027 at the earliest. Through the 2025 holiday period and into early 2026, there was no clear direction.

Hegseth wants Pentagon to dump Claude, but military users say it’s not so easy

Then the Anthropic uproar occurred. Within weeks, Smack was invited to multiple meetings with the Marine Corps focused on a single question: how fast can this move into production this year? Markoff said there was “very specific guidance and movement and energy” toward getting the prototype ready for combat operations in 2026 — an acceleration of more than a year.

The shift extended beyond the Marines. Smack holds contracts with the Navy and Air Force, and Markoff said interest came in nearly immediately from U.S. Special Operations Command, and others.

EdgeRunner, which is deploying with the Army Special Forces groups and has received a contract with the Space Force, said the Navy has also dramatically sped up engagement. Meetings that had been biweekly or monthly are now happening multiple times a week.

Both EdgeRunner and Smack are now racing to get their systems operating at higher security classification levels — the gateway to the most operationally significant use cases and the largest military contracts.

EdgeRunner said the military has told the company it can get to IL-6, a security designation enabling access to secret and top-secret data, within three months — a timeline Saltsman described as remarkable, given that the process normally takes 18 months or longer. The acceleration, he said, is being driven partly by pressure from Pentagon leadership to cut through procurement bureaucracy, and partly by the urgency the Anthropic situation has injected into the department’s AI strategy.

The website cited a state-run media report and experts calling the vessel a “major leap in integrated combat capability” that “positions the vessel among the most advanced frigates in service today”.

A slew of announcements such as that one from March 30 shows AI expanding across a military that aims to “intelligentize” as it prepares for potential conflicts in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. But analysts say China is picking its AI battles carefully rather than expecting quick domination of the technology or short-term parity with the United States.

China is taking a “cautious official posture” toward AI in the armed forces, said Sophie Wushuang Yi, postdoctoral teaching fellow with Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University.

“China’s concept of intelligentized warfare has been embedded in official defense white papers since 2019,” Yi said. “But the open-source academic literature is frank that China cannot currently close the overall gap with the United States in military AI capability.”

Still, AI is becoming a force within the forces.

An institution under the People’s Liberation Army in January used AI to test drone swarms and, according to a test run shown on Chinese state television, one soldier supervised some 200 of the autonomous vehicles at the same time.

AI is taking on a greater role as well in the military’s use of space and cyberspace, said Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst for defense strategy and national security with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. In space, he said, it can manage “complex orbital operations,” while in cyberspace it can plan and conduct operations against critical information infrastructure.

The military’s ability to use AI at machine speed would potentially let it exploit a faster “observe-orient-decide-act” loop compared to purely human-controlled systems, Davis said.

“That’s something that’s being demonstrated by the U.S. and Israel now in operational planning in the Iran war, where AI is playing a key role in identifying targets and planning mission packages,” the Canberra-based analyst said. “There’s no reason that the PLA won’t learn from that and utilize a similar capability.”

A testament to AI’s reach throughout the military, a March 26 PLA Daily report notes its use in battlefield perception, intelligent decision support and autonomous control systems.

PLA leaders particularly value AI decision-making because most of their people lack battlefield experience, unlike American counterparts, said Sam Bresnick, a research fellow with the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University.

He said its priorities include layering AI on top of computer networks, gathering volumes of data and the autonomy of unmanned systems such as uncrewed underwater vehicles.

Chinese officials want to surpass the U.S. in military AI use, Bresnick noted, but the government today fears information that AI could use or generate. “The data could go against Xi Jinping and Communist Party ideals,” he said. “They don’t want to lose control over it.”

The U.S. armed forces now have a “commanding” AI lead over China, the Modern War Institute at West Point said in a March 17 study.

It says the United States has more than 4,000 data centers versus some 400 in China. Four-year-old U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors shipped to China limit Beijing’s access to AI-related hardware, the study adds.

“China’s publicly stated position is considerably more cautious and more hedged than is commonly assumed in Western coverage,” Yi said.

“The PLA lacks the volume of real operational data that the U.S. military has accumulated over decades of expeditionary warfare, and there are unresolved doctrinal tensions between the decentralized decision-making that effective AI-enabled operations require and the PLA’s deeply embedded centralized command culture,” said Yi of the Schwarzman College.

China may have surpassed the United States in AI for drone swarms, however, said Chen Yi-fan, assistant professor in the Diplomacy and International Relations Department at Tamkang University in Taiwan.

“With the addition of drone carriers already in service, the PLA has taken the lead over the U.S. military in this category of AI military applications,” he said.

The Qinzhou frigate was commissioned last year and did a combat drill in the South China Sea, where Beijing disputes maritime sovereignty with five other governments.

The deal includes dozens of launchers and rockets with ranges of 25 to 186 miles (40-300 kilometers) and is the first sale of the Israeli PULS system to Greece. The PULS system is capable of launching unguided rockets, precision-guided munitions and missiles at various ranges, and is fully compatible with existing wheeled and tracked platforms.

The deal has been underway for the past two and a half years, but its closing had been delayed, in part due to the ongoing war in the Middle East. It was launched after its approval by the Greek parliament in December 2025 as a government-to-government deal, in which Israel and Greece themselves guarantee its implementation, with the Israeli Ministry of Defense emphasizing that it “reflects the growing defense cooperation between Israel and Greece.”

Israel’s Elbit looks to cash in on European artillery appetites

The PULS is expected to be delivered over the next four years, along with a decade of support and maintenance services by the Israeli system’s manufacturer, Elbit Systems, which will also serves as the prime contractor for the Greek project.

In a supplementary announcement issued by the Israeli company, it was stated that “Elbit will collaborate with local Greek industries for the production of the system, including technology transfer and sharing of know-how.”

Elbit established a joint venture with the German KNDS to market a PULS system in Europe called “EuroPULS” GmbH. It is divided equally between the founding companies, and its headquarters is to be established in Kassel, Germany. The company also stated that within the framework of the government-to-government agreement between the Netherlands and Israel, Germany — as a partner — ordered five EuroPULS launchers in an initial operational capability configuration, with delivery and training planned for 2027.

The latest PULS sale to Greece is one of several defense deals with Israel approved by the Greek Parliament as part of its “Achilles Shield” project. Under the project, approved in mid-March, Greece will purchase Barak MX missile batteries from Israel Aerospace Industries, as well as David and Spider mobile launcher systems from Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

The air-defense interception rate has been steadily rising in recent months, according to data from Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, climbing to 89.9% in March from 85.6% in February and 80.2% in December. At the same time, Russian attacks increased to 6,600 last month from 5,345 in February, the ministry said in a social media post on Wednesday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week visited Middle Eastern countries facing Iranian drone attacks, offering to share the interception expertise Ukraine has built up over four years of Russian air war. With air-defense missiles in short supply and costly, Ukraine has turned to solutions ranging from AI-assisted machine guns on pickup trucks to electronic warfare and interceptor drones.

“The frequency of attacks is increasing but air defense performance is improving,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said.

Russia is promoting its own air-defense successes, with TASS reporting on Tuesday that a so-called Donbass Dome is making Ukraine’s high-speed Skat drone ineffective, citing claims by the Russian Federal Security Service Directorate. The air-defense system is able to repel “virtually any drone of this type,” the state-owned news agency said.

Ukraine is building a multi-layered air defense system and stepping up production of interceptors in order to protect civilians and critical infrastructure, according to a war plan presented by Minister of Defense Mykhailo Fedorov in February. The goal is real-time detection of all aerial threats, and intercepting at least 95% of them.

The country could produce 2,000 drone interceptors a day, provided it has sufficient funding, Zelenskyy told Reuters in an interview in March. In the Kyiv region in February, more than 70% of Russian Shahed-type drones were destroyed by interceptor drones, according to Ukraine’s commander in chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi.

Recent Ukrainian interceptor-drone models include the JEDI Shahed Hunter, a multi-rotor drone that can hit speeds of more 350 kilometers per hour, and the winged Shvidun with a speed of more than 250 kilometers per hour and an operational range of more than 70 kilometers.

Beyond equipment innovation, Ukraine is also experimenting by allowing private companies to develop their own air-defense capabilities to protect infrastructure, while being part of the broader command-and-control system. One company already shot down several drones in Kharkiv Oblast, with another 13 firms authorized to set up air-defense groups, the Ministry of Defense said on Monday.