Head of Army Cyber Command Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank on Monday at the Association of the United States Army conference in Washington gave an approximate timeline for when the service would be delivering the new unit devoted to the exact same mission as the 11th Cyber Battalion, dubbed the Leviathans.

“It should start standing up in earnest within the next couple months, and it will be an exact replica of the 11th Cyber Warfare Battalion,” Eubank said.

The new battalion will achieve initial operating capability within the next year and from there work toward full operational capability, according to the Cyber Command leader.

The battalion is currently working on behalf of Joint Task Force–Southern Border, providing radio frequency-enabled cyber effects as directed by the division commander, Eubank said.

The Leviathans was activated on Oct. 16, 2022, as the first scalable expeditionary capability to handle the Army’s current and future cyberspace objectives.

It was built with the specific intention of rolling out non-lethal and non-kinetic effects that include cyberspace and electronic warfare assets.

Its previous iteration, the 915th Cyber Warfare Battalion, was activated on June 6, 2018, before being renamed during the 11th Cyber Battalion’s activation.

At the time of the battalion’s creation, the Army said it planned to have 12 expeditionary teams it could deploy under the 11th Cyber Battalion by September 2027.

The service has labeled the battalion the first of its kind.

“Just as Gen. Patton led the modernization of tank warfare into WWII, the leaders and soldiers of the 11th Cyber Battalion spearhead concept development for the delivery of CEMA [cyber electromagnetic activity] combat power to the tactical edge of the contemporary battlefield,” said Lt. Col. Lou Etienne, who led the 11th Cyber Battalion until June 25.

Developers from 11th Cyber Command worked alongside the Cyber Solutions Development unit within the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade to develop new drone technology between July 2025 and July 2026.

The partnership project was performed to support the Army’s “Transforming in Contact” initiative, which delivers new unmanned technology to soldiers to track their feedback in real time as they utilize it in the field.

The 11th Cyber Battalion also participated in a demonstration at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, from August. 5-8, simultaneously deploying three new Army technologies and proving their efficacy in diffusing electromagnetic threats from enemies.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addressed AUSA attendees at the Project Agincourt panel on Wednesday, sharing that the Pentagon is requesting roughly $50 billion in reconciliation funding to support the push to scale autonomous and robotic systems.

This request is part of an effort to make the technology available in far greater numbers.

The figure is separate from the Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget request, which includes $53.6 billion for the Drone Dominance initiative. That request covers $16.9 billion for unmanned-system procurement, $14.4 billion for counter-unmanned systems, $13.5 billion for contested logistics, $4.5 billion for collaborative autonomy and $4.3 billion for institutional systems and personnel. The budget request does not establish that the reconciliation funding Hegseth cited is the same money or that it is dedicated entirely to drone purchases

Hegseth characterized the funding as a one-time investment rather than a recurring annual allocation, intended to accelerate the development and production of autonomous and robotic systems.

“Ultimately we will be dealing with hundreds of thousands of one-way attack systems this year and into the millions in years to come at a pace that this department’s never ever seen before.”

The Defense Secretary said the Pentagon must make it easier for new companies to compete in a defense market long dominated by established contractors and costly platforms. Traditional defense firms remain important, he said, but the department also needs lower-cost systems that can be manufactured at scale.

The Army’s Drone Dominance program offers a concrete measure of that ambition. In a December 2025 announcement, the Army said a $1 billion initiative would fund approximately 340,000 small unmanned aircraft systems for combat units over two years. The service said it expected to deliver tens of thousands of drones in 2026 and hundreds of thousands by 2027.

Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle said the service is broadening access to its programs for companies outside the traditional defense industrial base. The Army, he said, must make room for new entrants while continuing to work with established suppliers.

Telle also described plans to coordinate the Army’s autonomous-systems efforts while distributing capabilities to operational units. The service is developing an approach that incorporates drones, autonomous ground systems, autonomous fires and autonomous lift into future combat operations.

“We have an MOS in the Army, 390A, where warrant officers could keep the speciality and the skills over the duration to teach our soldiers how to do robotics,” Telle added.

Expanding access to Army test ranges is another part of that effort, Telle said. Greater access gives developers more opportunities to test systems and receive feedback from military users. He also described efforts to share lessons across the force rather than have individual units and organizations solve the same problems independently.

Hegseth said the department must remove bureaucratic barriers that slow the adoption of new technology, telling the panel, “I want you to tell me which rules can be signed away.” He urged officials to identify rules and directives that could be changed without involving new legislation to accelerate progress.

The service will pay a one-year total of $93.6 million, spread out across nine companies, to create applications for its Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, software.

“While the Army is providing capability we can deploy today, we’re also providing a blueprint and reference point for how industry can integrate in the future with interoperability and speed,” said Brig. Gen. Shane Taylor, portfolio management executive for the Command and Control Information Network.

The NGC2 will provide a shared network for technologies, weapons, sensors, devices and applications to operate within that will increase decision-making speed on the battlefield.

The chosen companies include General Dynamics Mission Systems, Air Space Intelligence Federal, Immersive Wisdom, LMI, Mente Systems, Stilman Advanced Strategies, Onebrief, Rune Technologies and AIR.

The applications will be hosted on the common data baseline, or software foundation, that Anduril Industries, Palantir, Raft and Striveworks have built in collaboration with the Army.

The NGC2 system, in conjunction with the applications the companies build for it, will allow information sharing that streamlines mission completion across the Army’s six warfighting functions of command and control, fires, intelligence, movement and maneuver, sustainment and protection, the service said.

The Army is currently in the process of delivering the NGC2 software to the I Corps, which commands service members in the Indo-Pacific.

The move will further test NGC2 software’s ability to host technologies and devices separated by thousands of miles, some in communication-contested environments.

The Army has spent the last year moving from the experimental phase to the fielding phase of NGC2, going from prototype development to placing software in the hands of soldiers at the 4th and 25th Infantry Divisions.

In July 2026, the Army hosted a 10-day event at Fort Irwin, California, entitled Project Convergence-Capstone 6, that asked 10,000 participants from U.S. and allied forces as well as industry partners using 90 technologies to test software for the NGC2.

The service conducted a joint force exercise shortly after in May at Fort Irwin that marked the end of the NGC2 prototype phase and came away stating that the new platform was ready to be scaled up.

The Army awarded Anduril Industries a $162.8 million contract on Sept. 30 worth up to 1.8 billion to continue refining the NGC2’s common data baseline, or software foundation.

Now, Pentagon officials say that some of that AI is not part of the current revamp of the polygraph interview process, after Defense News asked for a response to concerns about the earlier statements and the slides.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon’s Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, or DCSA, which vets security clearance holders and applicants, said in an emailed statement that “active research and development” for the “Modernizing Polygraph” effort “does not incorporate generative super intelligence, also known as artificial intelligence,” that creates new content — such as emails, graphics or voiceovers.

Nor does the effort include “large language models,” meaning chatbots like ChatGPT and other programs trained on giant data sets to engage in human conversation, DCSA added.

And the research does not involve “facial action coding [of emotions], micro-expression analysis or vocal analyses,” the statement said. “While those technologies are not part of the effort,” DoD will “continue to monitor emerging scientific capabilities to evaluate their potential utility down the road.”

DCSA did not address other types of AI models that, according to the slides, researchers had been developing to scan spoken and written language for “deceptive speech” patterns.

Wednesday’s statement came after Defense News sought a response to criticisms from national security lawyers, scientists and AI auditors about AI’s ability to analyze deception — meaning not just to lie, but to do so knowingly and willfully.

They warned that AI-aided scanning of speech patterns, vocal stress or facial expressions to read minds lacks scientific backing, will compound errors and may violate civil liberties in a domain where few such rights exist.

Defense News chronicled their concerns and the Pentagon’s prior research and development of AI-aided lie-detection and emotion-estimation tools.

The recent DCSA statement, including the project name “Modernizing Polygraph,” contrasts with several earlier DoD statements, 2027 budget documents and DCSA slides that Defense News obtained through an open records request.

In July, a Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the technology, explained the advantages of AI-driven sentiment and deception analysis.

“AI processes data in real time and enables standardized, objective data analysis,” the official told Defense News, via email. “AI-based analysis is a force multiplier for our human investigators, not a replacement.”

The official added, “The models are primarily trained on data from laboratory-controlled studies using volunteer participants.”

The DCSA slides, which include presentations from 2021 through 2025, show that the Air Force, DCSA and academic labs had been working on “sentiment analysis” AI models and “deceptive speech” AI-aided analysis since 2019, as part of a “Credibility Assessment Modernization” project.

In July, the DoD official described the AI models as part of a larger multi-year “transformation,” which the official referred to interchangeably as “Polygraph+” and Credibility Assessment Modernization.

Current budget materials price the Polygraph+/Polygraph Next project at $31 million, including costs for AI “scoring algorithms” and “decision aids,” thermal imaging tools to spot blood flow changes that can reflect stress and other non-contact sensors.

On Friday, DCSA declined to provide additional information, including the scope of the “Modernizing Polygraph” project and the decision not to include AI-based voice screening and facial expression analysis.

Trained on Twitter and Reddit

Over the summer, Farakh Zaman, a developmental leader at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, elaborated on the appeal of AI-aided deception analysis.

“By processing subtle physiological, vocal and linguistic cues, these developmental algorithms may help establish a more objective baseline for investigators and pinpoint specific areas requiring further human-led clarification,” he said by email in July.

Wednesday’s DCSA statement said that the Air Force is not involved in the “active” research and development phase.

One undated declassified DCSA slide describes the Air Force amassing “deception-related” text to create a “deep learning model,” an algorithm that analyzes hordes of data to find patterns. The Air Force trained an early model on text from websites including Twitter, Reddit and other vocabulary data sets such as WordNet, according to the slide.

“This baseline training helps the algorithms understand natural, modern linguistic patterns, slang and everyday vocabulary,” Zaman explained in July. He acknowledged the need for “further rigorous testing, validation and a clear transition path” before fielding a prototype.

A separate DCSA slide, dated May 2025, contains a flowchart that depicts an avatar — a computer-generated image of an interviewer — in front of a security clearance applicant. Next to the applicant, a camera and microphone feed audio, video and speech-to-text data from the interview into various large language models. The recording devices and algorithms interact to gauge the applicant’s emotional state, while a human investigator observes and keys in questions for the avatar to ask.

DCSA’s Wednesday statement said the university that drafted the chart is not involved in the current research and development stage.

According to another undated DCSA slide, DoD has set a goal for natural language processing technology to interpret an interviewee’s feelings with 75% accuracy.

In July, the Pentagon official said by email that a human investigator remains essential for “the contextual reasoning and emotional intelligence required in these sensitive interviews.”

‘I’ve caught AI lying to me’

Ahead of Wednesday’s statement, Mark Zaid, a national security attorney who reviewed the slides, warned that the danger of derailing a military officer’s career is too great for AI to misinform an investigator.

The polygraph device “is just registering the physiology of the person,” such as spikes in breathing rate, perspiration or blood pressure, he said. “Then a human examiner analyzes those reactions to render an opinion.”

Here, however, “AI would be taking the polygraph readings and rendering an opinion” to the human examiner, said Zaid, who has represented individuals on all sides of the polygraph table, from workers disputing revoked clearances to former government officials and polygraphers.

“Now, we’re starting to get into the movie Minority Report,” he said, referencing a 2002 Steven Spielberg film that depicts a government reliant on psychic children for tips to predict crimes and detain people accused of future crimes.

Zaid, whose own clearance was revoked temporarily after he represented a whistleblower pivotal in President Trump’s first impeachment, said, “That concerns me more than the polygraph,” if science does not back AI’s reliability.

So far, scientific studies do not.

Rather, decades of research have discredited theories, popularized by shows such as Lie to Me, that anyone — human or artificial — can recognize deception based on speech patterns, vocal stress or facial movements.

Another concern scientists and auditors have is bias: the Justice Department has warned that using emotion-recognition algorithms to measure worker competency can discriminate against high performers with intellectual or developmental disabilities, who algorithms do not always understand.

Also, “automation bias,” the tendency to take AI’s advice without question even when conflicting information exists, may further erode the polygraph system’s reliability, technologists warned.

“[T]here is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable,” the Supreme Court declared in a 1998 decision banning polygraph results and polygraphers’ opinions from military courts.

Zaid said he appreciates the attempt to retool polygraph testing but wants proof that the planned approach is in fact an improvement.

“Anytime we might be able to scientifically advance the ability to determine truth, with accuracy, would generally be a good thing,” he said. But “the first thing that jumps out at me with AI is how often it is wrong…I’ve caught AI lying to me.”

Greg Rinckey, a former Army Judge Advocate General Corps officer who now provides security clearance representation, said that today’s “technology is so outdated, where they’re using tubes around people’s chests and blood pressure and sweat, so, any way that you can get a more reliable test for security clearances, especially counterintelligence investigations [into leaks], is a step up.”

That said, he questioned, “What is the research saying on how accurate it is?”

At present, research suggests the odds of AI-aided speech, voice or face analysis pegging a lie are about 50:50.

AI is ‘assuming dishonesty’

“There are no – reliable – diagnostic cues for deception detection, and I have yet to see any evidence, whether it is with humans or with artificial intelligence, that goes against that trend,” said David Markowitz, a Michigan State University professor who studies AI’s ability to understand human communication.

For instance, “the leakage idea — that these microfacial expressions will leak out from our awareness, signaling veracity or deceit — there’s very little evidence to support that, unfortunately,” he said.

Markowitz expressed doubts about AI-based deception analyses that claim an accuracy rate of 75% because “that is not how accurately humans do it, and often these systems are a big reflection of how humans do it.”

For example, he pointed to a recent experiment in which he prompted a Google Gemini AI model to examine audio and video of mock interrogations of accused cheaters in a trivia game, all of whom claimed innocence and some of whom were lying. Prior studies had asked humans to observe the same interrogations. DoD has entered into agreements to run a secure version of Gemini on unclassified and classified networks.

Markowitz said that his study, “The [in]efficacy of AI personas in deception detection experiments,” found Gemini was just as inaccurate as humans, both faring no better than chance, when prompted to distinguish fraudsters from truth-tellers.

What’s more, compared to humans, AI was more likely to wrongly accuse a trivia player of lying.

Markowitz gave one possible reason for AI’s systemic distrust of trivia players: The AI “is assuming that someone must have done something wrong because why else would they be questioned,” he said. “Anytime that someone is in an interview setting where they might be accused of something, a large language model is assuming dishonesty.”

Supreme Court: The jury is the lie detector

The consequences of a machine, whether a heart monitor or a voice screener, potentially bungling a credibility assessment can last a year or longer, said Zaid, the national security lawyer.

When officers who have successfully passed exams without issue suddenly fail their latest polygraph test, DoD typically puts them “in a corner with a dunce cap on for a year before officials will re-administer another exam,” he said. “You can’t get promoted. You can’t get certain assignments. And you can’t go overseas, which, to case officers, is death careerwise.”

Further, civil courts routinely dismiss complaints when employees claim that inaccurate results cost them their clearances. Nearly 40 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the courts have no power over such national security matters.

Concerns about power imbalances and due process prompted the European Union to label AI-aided polygraph tools as “high risk” and place strict limits on law enforcement’s use of them.

Stateside, the Supreme Court, in forbidding polygraph evidence in military courts, noted that allowing it would meddle with the human’s role, or, as it were, the jury’s role, in determining credibility.

“A fundamental premise of our criminal trial system is that the jury is the lie detector,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the Court’s 1998 United States v. Scheffer decision.

Pointing to the court’s decision, Zaid said that he wants assurances of due process when staff undergo administrative proceedings to contest a revoked clearance resulting from misaligned algorithms. Comparing the situation to successful cases disputing speeding tickets caused by a miscalibrated street camera, Zaid questioned, “Would the person be provided the evidence? An understanding of the AI’s training?”

New biases

Pentagon officials have long stressed the desire for AI-based lie detection to help curb gender and cultural biases that human investigators may carry into an interview room.

At the same time, employers’ use of similar technology for pre-employment screening has faced allegations of other biases and system errors.

“Facial expression analysis is heaviest in terms of biases against individuals with disabilities,” said Jo Ann Oravec, a University of Wisconsin professor whose research focuses on AI, public policy and disability issues.

For instance, AI-powered video screening of job applicants tends to misinterpret the involuntary twitches or vocal outbursts of skilled people with certain disabilities — and thus pass over qualified applicants, said Oravec, author of the 2024 article “From Polygraphs to Truth Machines: Artificial Intelligence in Lie Detection.”

In response to concerns about such biases in July, the Pentagon official said via email that the credibility assessment modernization plan adheres to DoD’s AI Ethical Principles of “responsible, equitable and traceable” use of algorithms.

The Air Force’s Zaman, in his July email, said that his team’s work aligns with DoD’s Responsible Artificial Intelligence Guidelines.

Researchers “are actively engineering and testing these models” to account for “diverse, representative training data,” he stated. The testing covers “broad variations in speech, language and expression.”

Ryan Carrier, founder of ForHumanity, a global nonprofit that helps organizations audit AI systems, said that the Pentagon’s principles and guidelines are a skeleton of those that the European Union follows and that ForHumanity uses for inspections.

For example, the EU’s AI Act demands users of high-risk systems receive training to overcome a different kind of bias called “automation bias” — or the tendency to execute AI’s advice without questioning its accuracy. This bad habit can lead to incorrect data overriding correct decisions, Carrier said.

Also, multimodal systems, meaning AI systems that simultaneously parse audio (the subject’s voice), video (their facial movements) and text (interview transcriptions), tend to misalign data and results, yielding an irrelevant analysis, Carrier said.

The system “could be making determinations that a person is lying or trying to deceive me that are outside of the tool’s specifications,” he explained.

In response to concerns about multimodal systems in July, the Pentagon official had said, “Any automated output is treated strictly as auxiliary data for a highly trained, certified polygraph examiner.”

Similarly, Zaman, at the time, said that investigators who use AI-aided deception-detection systems are “trained to contextualize the tool’s findings, preventing automated outputs from dictating an outcome.”

To safeguard against mismatched data or results, the Air Force keeps a documented history of each piece of data’s origin and modifications and brings in independent white-hat hackers to try producing false correlations, he added.

“We recognize that multimodal AI systems present unique technical challenges, and mitigating these risks by hardening our systems is central to our engineering and testing protocols,” Zaman said.

Reason for suspicion?

In August, when the Pentagon administered a raft of polygraph exams to probe leaks alleging the Iran conflict is depleting U.S. arsenals, some observers suspected the endgame was not to find the leakers, but to crack down on disloyalty.

Critics of the planned system said that AI-based deception analysis may be best suited to achieve the same purpose.

“If it’s purely an intimidation technique, it may not be utterly useless from the point of view of large bureaucracies,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

The expectations for AI-powered trustworthiness testing resemble the hope that U.S. national security officials held out for the polygraph about 100 years ago, other lawyers said.

Polygraph devices “were seen as this magic-miracle-machine when they first came out,” and, over time, the government learned that when seemingly making deductions, the tools were “actually just flagging correlating factors, like heart rate and physiological factors that can indicate lying, but aren’t actually reflective of it,” said Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project.

He added, “Thinking that AI sentiment analysis tools are actually making an assessment or engaged in reasoning — that’s not what those machines are actually able to do.”

According to the competition’s leaderboard, Neros Technologies scored highest in the confined-environment testing category. Perennial Autonomy claimed the top spot in “deep-strike” testing, in which operators launched attacks beyond the range of enemy defenses.

The Pentagon uses the companies’ rankings to determine how many drones to buy, meaning higher-scoring companies receive larger orders. In total, the department ordered 14,000 drones from Neros — which also ranked third in deep-strike testing — and 8,000 from Perennial.

Neros, founded by competitive drone racers in 2023, identified its winning design as the Archer AI drone. The company said the 10-inch model was “built with Terminal Guidance functionality that allows the drone to fly itself to an operator-selected target, a critical feature in the comms-denied environments military operators face today.”

In a statement, Soren Monroe-Anderson, Neros’ chief executive and co-founder, called the Archer “highly modular and easily adapted to end-user needs.”

“Pairing real warfighter feedback with our deep engineering talent is the reason Neros is the only manufacturer to have placed in the top three across two fundamentally different mission sets — deep strike and close-quarters battle — with the same drone platform,” he said.

The Defense Department launched Drone Dominance in December 2025, with plans to invest $1 billion directly into the domestic drone market and build up the military’s supply of commercial drones.

Since then, the Pentagon has completed one-and-a-half phases, known as “Gauntlets,” along with three operational tests. Neros has ranked second, third and first in those competitions, earning the company roughly $100 million in orders.

Perennial said its design was “tested across rigorous find-fix-finish objectives at various long-range beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS) distances” and flown by operators during day and night missions.

“The systems proved their operational reliability under heavily contested conditions, to deliver precise, autonomous engagement when it counted,” the company said in a press release.

Earlier this year, the Defense Department awarded Perennial a $500 million contract through Joint Interagency Task Force 401, or JIATF-401, which is responsible for researching, testing and procuring counter-drone technology for the department.

The company was founded in 2023 by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and developed the Merops interceptor for Ukrainian forces to counter Russia’s one-way attack drones.

Beginning in October, the Drone Dominance competition will enter Gauntlet 2.5, in which officials will test bomber platforms. The third phase is expected to begin next spring, with the competition scheduled to conclude next fall.

The 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington came in a lawsuit by Anthropic challenging its March designation by the Pentagon as a national security supply chain risk, which the startup says has cost it billions of dollars in lost business and damaged its reputation ahead of a highly anticipated initial public offering.

The court’s majority said it was reasonable for the Pentagon to designate Anthropic after it refused to allow its products to be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance. It rejected Anthropic’s claim that the Pentagon had retaliated against it for its views on AI safety and ethics.

Siding with Hegseth’s argument that Anthropic’s safety restrictions could compromise military operations, the majority said, “The Secretary raises the deeply sobering prospect of overly constrained AI models shutting down unexpectedly and thus causing important military operations to fail,” in an opinion by Judge Gregory Katsas.

San Francisco-based Anthropic said in a statement Friday that it respectfully disagrees with the decision but remains confident in its position and is considering its options, including review of the three-judge panel’s decision by the full appeals court.

The White House and the Department of Defense did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

A federal judge in San Francisco last month struck down a parallel designation under a different law, finding the administration had unlawfully retaliated against Anthropic for its views on AI safety. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco also blocked Trump’s government-wide ban on Anthropic and Hegseth’s order barring military contractors from doing any business with the startup.

Hegseth designated Anthropic as a risk under two different laws after Anthropic refused to remove guardrails against its technology being used for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.

The unprecedented move came after months of negotiations ended in failure and public recriminations by Hegseth and Trump, who accused Anthropic of endangering American lives with ideological posturing.

Anthropic denied that characterization and said AI is not yet reliable enough to be safely used in autonomous weapons. The company also said it opposes domestic surveillance as a violation of fundamental rights.

Thales announced the availability of HexaForce last week, after testing it during NATO’s Coalition Warrior Interoperability Exercise, or CWIX, in Poland in June. The company is positioning the system as a multi-domain C2 “overlay” that can plug into legacy and national systems from the strategic to the tactical level, while allowing users to choose their own AI models and avoid vendor lock-in.

NATO is increasingly turning to AI to harness growing amounts of data in command and control, and already operates a C2 system supplied by United States-based Palantir Technologies. Meanwhile, the European Union is looking to accelerate development and deployment of European capabilities amid concern about sovereign control of the technology underpinning them.

“I don’t want to go too much into detail. but we are quite advanced in some discussions with some NATO countries so far,” Moreau told Defense News in a Sept. 24 interview.

As European and NATO militaries look to scale operations from brigade-level formations to army corps of more than 100,000 troops, AI will be key to processing more complex data, shortening planning cycles and improving situational awareness, Moreau said.

France to test its own AI-powered battlefield command in June NATO exercise

HexaForce is aimed at providing command and control from the army corps level down to the battalion, according to the executive. Thales defined a goal with end users to be able to plan 1,000 target missions a day, a tenfold increase.

The system has an open architecture built around NATO standards, allowing countries to plug in existing systems for tasks such as mission planning, or use the large language model of their choice, according to Moreau. In addition to the LLM component, HexaForce includes agentic AI for tasks such as targeting mission preparation.

It has a fully distributed architecture designed to rely on mesh capability, allowing the system to be spread over different data hubs within different command posts, in line with new operational concepts to not rely on central computing, according to Moreau.

By interfacing with legacy solutions, HexaForce can add “AI-powered capability” to systems already in use by the armed forces, according to Moreau. HexaForce is a command-and-control system, and users still need dedicated tactical systems to provide sensor data, he said.

The executive said the aim at CWIX was for end users to test HexaForce and its interoperability with existing and legacy systems. The system implements NATO standards related to the Data-Centric Security and Federation Mission Networking frameworks, he said.

For threats identified at the strategic command level, HexaForce can propose different courses of action, including firing options using air or land forces, according to Moreau. The operator can then choose a course of action, with the system sending the targeting mission to the tactical level.

“Of course it remains up to the operator to choose to push the button, and to choose the best option proposed by HexaForce,” Moreau said. “There is no automated action.”

In addition to connecting to systems that provide tactical awareness, Hexaforce could include commercial ship-tracking data or cyber threats to provide a more complete picture, Moreau said.

While developed with input from the French Army, the executive repeatedly stressed that the Thales system is designed as a NATO solution rather than a France-specific system. Asked how it compares with existing systems such as Systematic’s SitaWare or Airbus’s Multi-Domain Combat Cloud, Moreau instead focused on the interoperability of the Thales system.

Moreau said HexaForce is ready and already in the hands of the armed forces, with the first version taking nine months from design to making it available to the French Army.

France is developing its sovereign C2 system Arcadia, and Moreau said that while Hexaforce could be “a cornerstone” of the French system, the decision is not up to Thales.

The push comes after restrictions by the United States on satellite access in Ukraine and the Middle East over the past two years underscored the risk of dependence, executives and policy makers said at an industry conference here last week.

“Sovereignty” was a recurring theme at the World Space Business Week, held from Sept. 14 to 17 in Paris, and the two-day Space Defense & Security Summit side event.

U.S. firms touted their ability to build satellites in Europe or operate free from International Traffic in Arms Regulations, while European companies highlighted their ability to provide local clients with complete satellite systems.

“The drive to sovereignty, we all have customers that want to go there,” said Noam Segal, the chief executive officer of Israeli firm ImageSat International, or ISI. “Any of the defense customers we are dealing with can find themselves in a geopolitical situation in which one of the suppliers will not be able to deliver. I think this is the driver.”

The war in Ukraine has highlighted both the importance of satellite data on the modern battlefield and the reliance of Western militaries on U.S. suppliers for critical space capabilities. Restrictions on Starlink access in Ukraine, a halt in U.S. intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March 2025 and imagery restrictions over the Middle East in 2026 are pushing European countries to seek sovereign alternatives.

The lesson from Ukraine has been to show how critical space has become for defense, as well as “the importance of indeed not being reliant on solutions you don’t control,” said Guillaume de la Brosse, head of the defense policy and innovation unit at the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm.

He said there is a “clear imperative” to accelerate development of sovereign space-based capabilities in Europe, meaning a minimum backbone of public assets owned by either the EU or member states, and an EU-based industry able to provide sovereign services “that we can control all the time.”

“Sovereignty very much matters, this is what we’ve learned from Ukraine,” De la Brosse said. “That does not preclude the fact that we need cooperation, whatever happens, but that as a pre-requirement has sovereignty. It’s good to cut dependencies where we need to cut dependencies, and that’s very much the agenda of the upcoming years.”

Recent history showed space sovereignty is the only ultimate guarantee of having the freedom to “assess and act when conflict breaks out,” said Jean-Baptiste Paing, a deputy director at France’s Directorate General for Armament whose responsibilities include intelligence and space operations. He cited the difficulty obtaining commercial satellite communications over Afghanistan and, more recently, access to commercial imaging during the various crises in the Middle East.

The emergence of New Space, the shift from a government-dominated to a private space industry that has cut the cost of launchers and satellites, is allowing European governments to establish space sovereignty even with relatively limited budgets, executives said.

The number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites for defense purposes, “a key priority for most nations,” is expected to increase more than fourfold through to 2035, according to industry consultancy Novaspace, which organized the conferences.

New Space provides “an incredible opportunity” for countries that didn’t have a space industry to develop their own sovereign capabilities, said Vincent Dedieu, the CEO of Sodern, a unit of France’s ArianeGroup. He said Sodern has been working with countries such as Poland, Bulgaria and Finland, which are taking advantage of New Space to catch up in both defense and commercial space.

The fact that customers are now able to own space assets at a “completely different cost point” from the past means the push for sovereign capabilities “is a strong trend that’s going to be there for the future,” according to Segal at ISI.

There is a “seismic shift” in how industry and governments deal with space capabilities, said Julia Gottfriedsen, chief technology officer at German thermal-imaging startup Constellr. She cited the example of Germany buying data from ICEYE and Rheinmetall for its brigade in Lithuania, through a service-level agreement that shifted the risk for data supply to the companies.

“So this is pretty modern and new, while in parallel, of course, the governments are also looking into procuring their own infrastructure,” Gottfriedsen said.

Executives at U.S.-based geospatial intelligence firms such as Planet Labs, BlackSky and Vantor all noted that their satellites can be delivered ITAR-free, with several highlighting their European presence or ability to manufacture their satellites outside the Untied States.

HawkEye 360 CEO John Serafini said partnerships with Italy’s Leonardo and Czechia’s ERA and having a Luxembourg subsidiary means he’s confident that “even as a U.S. company,” the firm can meet the requirement of European militaries “regardless of how those customers want the sovereignty delivered to them.”

Planet Labs cut the ribbon on a new facility in Berlin this week, and co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Robbie Schingler said the company’s first German-built Pelican satellite is set to come off the production line by the end of the year and sent into orbit on a German-built Isar Aerospace rocket launched from Norway “sometime early next year.”

Meanwhile, Finland’s ICEYE is taking sovereignty “to a whole different level” to fulfill a German order for a 40-satellite constellation, setting up a manufacturing site in western Germany controlled by a German-owned entity and keeping the entire supply chain within the country, according to CEO Rafal Modrzewski. That does require a sufficiently large order to justify the investment, he said.

For European customers that own and operate a smaller number of ICEYE satellites, such as Sweden, Finland, Poland and the Netherlands, the company is now offering a software layer that allows countries to “federate their assets at the tactical level” and borrow each other’s capabilities to cover areas of interest, Modrzewski said.

One element of sovereignty is assurance and control, another is choice, said Schingler at Planet Labs. The federation approach allows countries to network their systems for an ad hoc mission, “and that choice also gives a lot of sovereignty,” he said.

The European Commission is pushing for international cooperation to remain the way of doing things in space, including through discussions with NATO about space security, even if “that cooperation is very much challenged, and there is a need for Europeans to do much more, investing in their freedom of action,” De la Brosse said.

He said that as EU members invest heavily in space, one challenge is to avoid “renationalization of space policies,” and the commission is using the EU budget to provide an incentive to member states to coordinate investments and pool space resources rather than develop constellations without taking other member states into account.

Germany’s plan to invest a “massive” €35 billion in sovereign military space capabilities by 2030 may raise concern among some EU members that the country will “fly solo,” but the investment is a legitimate sovereign choice, said Paing at the DGA.

“I cannot speak for sovereignty myself without recognizing the same capacity in other countries, and I think it should be seen more as a model to follow for others rather than something to be afraid of,” Paing said. “That being said, I believe that this investment should nevertheless be put at the service of building a stronger Europe.”

Sovereignty also includes the ability to get satellites into orbit, executives said, with several remarking on the scarcity of launch slots. Nicolas Lefort, the head of new markets at MBDA, said France’s Toutatis project to bring a maneuverable satellite into low-Earth orbit is still waiting for a launcher.

François Lombard, the head of connected intelligence at Airbus Defence and Space, said he’s optimistic about new European players offering launchers capable of carrying one-ton payloads into LEO, citing a recent successful launch by Germany’s Isar Aerospace, as well as ArianeGroup’s MaiaSpace coming to the market “pretty soon.”

“In that case, European alternatives, which is good,” Lombard said. “There are a few satellites we cannot launch from other continents, so it’s important that we have also the sovereign access to space for this class of satellites in a competitive manner.”

The concern, critics say, is not limited to weapons that can select and engage targets on their own.

At the hearing, titled “Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain: Implications for Human Rights,” witnesses told members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission that AI can influence human decisions leading to a strike while leaving the individual formally responsible for the final call.

“The approval button alone does not demonstrate the control,” Anna Mysyshyn, a Ukrainian AI-governance researcher, told lawmakers.

The issue comes as the Pentagon pushes to use AI to accelerate military decision-making. The Pentagon’s 2023 AI adoption strategy identified “fast, precise and resilient kill chains” as a desired outcome, while its 2026 AI strategy calls for becoming an “AI-first” warfighting force by redesigning military workflows and operational concepts around current AI capabilities.

Mysyshyn questioned whether a person supervising multiple AI-enabled systems can recognize an incorrect recommendation and intervene fast enough before harm occurs. She cited Ukraine as an example of AI compressing decisions from hours to minutes.

In many scenarios, a human making the final decision does not necessarily have enough information, time or the ability to challenge the system’s recommendation, she said.

The Defense Department’s 2023 directive on autonomy in weapon systems requires autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.

Wednesday’s testimony focused on a broader question: whether that judgment remains meaningful if AI is influencing targeting faster than a human can authenticate.

Amanda Klasing, national director of government relations and advocacy at Amnesty International USA, warned that AI can compress the military “kill chain” in ways that make it difficult to determine whether meaningful human discernment actually occurred before a strike.

Joseph Chapa, a former military officer and scholar of military ethics, argued that the debate should not focus solely on how autonomous a system is. He urged policymakers to consider whether an AI system relies on statistical inference, what happens when it fails in a particular operational environment and whether its decisions can be audited afterward.

Statistical AI systems can fail differently from traditional software, Chapa said, including producing substantially different outputs from relatively small changes in inputs. More complex systems can also make it difficult to reconstruct how a particular recommendation was produced after the fact.

He called for greater AI education across the military, including specialized training for personnel working with targeting and intelligence systems.

Witnesses on Wednesday also pointed to a larger accountability problem: determining what happens when an AI-assisted decision results in civilian harm.

The Defense Department established its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan in 2022, including a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence intended to serve as a hub for analysis and training. Federal law requires the Pentagon to operate the center.

But a Defense Department inspector general review released in May assessed the department’s implementation of the civilian-harm framework and found problems including the loss or reassignment of personnel, the end of funding for a civilian-harm data-management platform and the failure of a senior steering committee to continue meeting.

That matters in the case of AI because, as Klasing noted, the military currently has limited ability to determine whether AI may contribute to improper targeting of civilians.

On the first day of the U.S.-Iran war, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed — more than 100 of them under the age of 12, according to UN and Iranian officials.

The school building sat fewer than 100 yards from a long-time Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval installation and was previously located within the IRGC compound perimeter until a wall appeared between 2013 and 2016, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by Amnesty International.

By the time the U.S. and Israel launched their first strikes on Feb. 28, the school had been established several years prior. It was active on social media and had its own website, a Reuters investigation found.

More than 120 House Democrats sent a letter to the Pentagon on March 12, demanding clarity on whether artificial intelligence, “including the use of the Maven Smart System, [was] used to identify the Shajareh Tayyebeh school as a target.”

U.S. military investigators in the wake of the incident stated that the strike was likely carried out by U.S. forces. The Pentagon, however, has still not released its investigative findings.

Klasing proposed adding information about AI involvement to the Pentagon’s annual civilian-casualty reports required under Section 1057 of the National Defense Authorization Act. The existing reporting requirement calls for information about civilian casualty mitigation efforts and investigations, but does not specifically require the department to identify whether AI contributed to an incident.

Steve Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Pentagon should collect data from military operations and conduct after-action reviews to determine whether AI-assisted systems accurately identified intended targets and whether errors contributed to civilian casualties.

“A bigger question is to what extent is the Pentagon collecting data and verifying the target accuracy of all these 1000s of strikes?” Feldstein said.

Feldstein also cautioned against treating AI itself as the source of every potential problem. AI can be used to help verify intelligence, detect changes in imagery and prioritize defensive responses to threats such as drones and ballistic missiles.

But if a human-influenced system is built around assumptions that certain demographic traits make someone a lawful target, Mysyshyn said, AI would not correct that underlying premise.

Feldstein similarly pointed to the rules humans establish before an AI system is used. If commanders determine that a particular level of civilian harm is acceptable in pursuit of a military objective, he said, the machine is operating within a human-defined framework.

The challenge is particularly acute when systems operate faster than people can meaningfully assess recommendations.

The commission opened Wednesday’s hearing with an example from Iraq. In 2004, Army squad leader Nick Ellison encountered two young men firing a machine gun from a car during a census patrol in Kirkuk.

Ellison made eye contact with one of the men, saw panic and ordered his soldiers to hold fire. The men turned out to be brothers of a newly married groom, and the gunfire was celebratory.

Mysyshyn said testing should examine bias, reliability, civilian protection, realistic time pressure, whether operators can interrupt systems and whether decisions can be traced throughout an AI system’s lifecycle.

Chapa said some AI systems may be difficult to audit after the fact, while Deborah Brown of Human Rights Watch said information about military AI use has often emerged through investigative reporting and whistleblowers rather than government disclosures.

The growing challenge, according to witnesses, is no longer making a machine pull a trigger, but whether the human who approves the trigger pull has enough time, information and authority to make a meaningful choice before disaster.

Military Times reporter Katie Livingstone contributed to this report.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the project will pave the way for the launch of a Starlink-like system for the nation.

“The culmination of the process that began today can and will be a Polish Starlink,” Tusk said Sept. 9 at the MSPO defense show in Kielce, referring to SpaceX’s satellite network. “Anyone closely following the Russian-Ukrainian war knows how important communications are. It is absolutely critical. Without communications, you have nothing to look for on the modern battlefield.”

In a statement, PGZ said that the program is to be implemented from 2026 to 2030.

ICEYE has an ongoing cooperation with PGZ on an Earth observation system for the Polish Armed Forces. The Finnish company has delivered synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites to the country’s military under its MikroSAR program. The system is designed as the first component of the military space capabilities toolkit Warsaw plans to develop in the coming years. The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has fueled Poland’s efforts to ramp up its reconnaissance ability.

“The cooperation is to draw on the experience gained through the MikroSAR program and is to include the development of a space segment based on a distributed architecture, the development of domestic ground infrastructure, and the establishment of industrial capabilities enabling the system to be independently developed and maintained in Poland,” PGZ said.

The Finnish manufacturer said in a statement that its collaboration with the Polish group is to be based on the partners’ complementary roles.

“ICEYE will act as the technology partner, while PGZ will contribute its industrial and organizational capabilities,” the space company said. “ICEYE will be responsible for developing the satellite system architecture, designing and manufacturing the space platforms, and conducting satellite operations. PGZ’s role will be to organize the program’s domestic industrial base by identifying the group’s companies that will contribute their production capabilities, expertise and technical infrastructure.”

The U.S. military and Anduril have downplayed the significance of the drone falling into Iranian hands. The vessel, a Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicle designed for long-range surveillance and other undersea missions, is among a new generation of military drones intended to operate for days with little human intervention. Washington has previously treated the loss of advanced drones to Iran as a serious matter.

After Iran captured an RQ-170 Sentinel stealth reconnaissance drone in 2011, then-President Barack Obama publicly asked Tehran to return the aircraft. Iran later claimed it had reverse-engineered the drone and subsequently unveiled domestically produced models that appeared to draw heavily on its design.

More recently, the U.S. military moved swiftly to prevent Iranian forces from taking possession of uncrewed maritime technology. In 2022, a U.S. Navy patrol ship and MH-60S Seahawk helicopter were deployed after an Iranian naval vessel attempted to tow away a Saildrone surface vessel in the Gulf, according to the Navy.

Analysts say Iran is unlikely to gain a decisive military advantage from the captured drone, but the episode nonetheless represents a propaganda victory for Tehran and an awkward setback for Washington’s efforts to project technological superiority.

IRANIAN EMBASSIES MOCK U.S.

Iranian embassies around the world have mocked the U.S. for losing its drone. Iran’s embassy in Ghana, in a post on X, boasted about picking the submersible up in “a strait controlled by people who can hear a shrimp sneeze,” adding that, “Our guys picked it up like a plastic bottle in a fishing net. Fully intact. Still blinking like an idiot. Condolences to whoever was holding the joystick.”

U.S. Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins of U.S. Central Command said the “defective drone was an older model that neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment.” Anduril did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Of course Iran will take every opportunity as a propaganda win,” said Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It can help the (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) make better versions of their own designs.”

Iran will almost certainly try to pry open the drone’s hardware, but the drone’s software carries built-in defenses, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute. Iranian engineers “could definitely reverse-engineer the mechanical systems,” he said, pointing to Tehran’s track record with captured American aircraft.

“Unboxing ceremony by our reverse engineers, tomorrow morning!” Iran’s embassy in Hyderabad wrote on X.

The incident has also highlighted a disconnect between the messaging of Anduril and its customer, the U.S. Navy.

Navy officials said the Dive-LD was an older-model vehicle that suffered a malfunction and was recovered by Iranian forces after being left “dead in the water.”

Anduril has promoted the Dive-LD as “the most reliable and flexible” large autonomous underwater vehicle available, saying it is capable of operating for up to 10 days in demanding conditions. In addition to its use by the U.S. Navy, the Dive-LD was the testbed vehicle for the development of Australia’s new Ghost Shark large underwater drone.

“This is something that Iran has proven very adept at exploiting for its own benefit in terms of seeking to frame the narrative as one of U.S., in this case, ineptitude and their ability to sort of retain control over the Strait of Hormuz,” said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The sarcophagus of Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy, who died in 1389 and is revered by Russian nationalists for defeating the Mongol Golden Horde at the 1380 Battle of Kulikovo, was uncovered this summer during restoration work at Moscow’s Cathedral of the Archangel inside the Kremlin.

Putin personally inspected what experts said were the prince’s well-preserved remains in August, hailing them as “an absolutely unique and marvellous discovery” which reinforced the foundations of Russian history.

The Russian Orthodox Church, which has backed Putin throughout the conflict, said it had dispatched a fragment of Donskoy’s right hand to Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian regions Putin said he had incorporated into Russia in 2022, a move Kyiv rejected as an illegal land grab.

Referring to Donskoy as “the holy commander,” the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church said part of his remains had been sent to the front to stand invisibly shoulder-to-shoulder with Russian troops.

“A fragment of the Grand Prince’s right hand – the very same right hand with which he wielded his sword on Kulikovo Field – has been sent to the front to strengthen the soldiers’ spirits,” it said in a statement.

The relic, held in a small ornate casket beneath toughened glass, will be shown to Russian combat units along the more than 1,000-km front line, it said.

Donskoy, whose name was given to a Soviet tank column funded by the church in World War Two, was declared a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1988.

Patriotic push

The carefully choreographed effort to use his remains in a public relations exercise to boost patriotism and morale comes ahead of a parliamentary election later this month.

Russian military and church officials have presented the discovery as a fortuitous find that could help Russian forces prevail in Ukraine, now in the fifth year of a grinding war.

The tour also comes as Russian forces seek full control of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine and as diplomatic efforts to end the war have yet to yield a breakthrough.

Donskoy’s relics were carried through the streets of Moscow at the weekend in a huge Orthodox procession.

At a ceremony at a World War Two memorial in Donetsk on Tuesday, Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy Kremlin chief of staff, joined military commanders and the Russian-installed regional head in kissing the relic and making the sign of the cross as a priest read a prayer.

“Both our military personnel and the people who live in Donbas need strengthening from above, need God’s help and the blessing of our saints,” Metropolitan Vladimir of Donetsk and Mariupol, a senior Moscow-appointed cleric, said. Donbas is a broader area incorporating Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk which Russia controls almost in its entirety.

Elsewhere, commanders have presented Donskoy’s remains as evidence that God is on Russia’s side.

The Defence Ministry on Wednesday released footage of troops in the Sverdlovsk region attending a church service carrying icons and Orthodox flags, alongside an interview with a commander who said the relics would support Russia’s victory.

Critics, however, have accused the Church of breaking with religious protocol to please the Kremlin. They have also questioned why Donskoy’s remains, whose location was broadly known for decades, were recovered and venerated only now, 38 years after he was declared a saint.

“By the fifth year of war, the Church leadership in Moscow began to wonder what else it could do to show its support for what Russia terms its ‘special military operation’,” Alexander Zanemonets, an Orthodox priest and historian based outside Russia, wrote in a note for the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center whose director Russia has designated a “foreign agent.”

“It had already sent priests to the front lines, instituted mandatory prayers for Russian victory in every church, and flown icons over cities. A state embroiled in war will try to compel all institutions, including religious ones, to participate in it.”

The goal, as military officials and industry executives often describe it, is to give commanders the information they need to make consequential decisions as quickly as possible.

But no matter how fast or accurate the analysis is, there’s still a gap between identifying what needs to happen and acting on it. Much of that AI processing happens on computers and servers miles from the battlefield, leaving troops to receive the information through radios, tablets or other devices.

That means the next step in military AI may be putting the technology directly on the bodies of those in the field. While some companies are exploring wearable technology like helmets equipped with heads-up displays, Smack Technologies thinks the answer may be much simpler: Instead of putting AI in a helmet, put it on an operator’s wrist.

The California-based defense tech startup recently raised $61 million in Series B funding to develop Alpha, a wrist-worn device designed to connect operators in the field to real-time data collected and processed through Smack’s Omega AI software.

Andy Markoff, Smack’s co-founder and chief executive, told Military Times that his company started with the software because it could train its AI around day-to-day operations.

“Alpha tackles a much harder problem because you have to make the model work in the field with hardware and little to no connectivity, but we’ve always known this is what has to happen to enable decision dominance,” he said.

During an interview, Markoff walked Military Times through the concept of Alpha, from how operators would wear the device to how it’s used.

As a former Marine Raider, Markoff said he and his team of former military personnel believe the wrist is a more convenient place to access intelligence in the field.

“The form factor we’re building replaces what I literally used to wear on my forearm, only here I’m exchanging a whiteboard and grease pencil for a flexible computer screen that has our models’ capabilities on it,” he said.

He likened the concept to a QB sleeve, which allows a quarterback to see plays at a glance.

“Our sensors that are out collecting information about enemy forces and their location are sending that information to a screen on my forearm along with actionable decision options informed by campaign equities and adjacent units,” he said.

Markoff said he recognizes that a heads-up display could be useful for some missions, but he also sees drawbacks, particularly in hot or humid environments.

“If you’ve ever walked in the jungle at night, you know you’d actually rather risk having an eyeball poked out by a tree than wear shooting glasses that fog up and prevent you from seeing anything,” he said.

However, Markoff said that the hardware is the easy part of building an AI-enabled wearable. The more difficult problem is figuring out what information an operator needs in the field.

He explained the fundamental idea behind Alpha is to decentralize command and control in environments where operators cannot communicate directly with commanders.

“To do this, we’re essentially encoding commander’s intent: here’s our goal, here’s what makes the most sense for the theater and the theater’s goals, and here’s context around how everyone at the front lines should be going after that goal, including constraints and contracts with adjacent units,” he said.

He added that the goal isn’t to have AI make decisions, but to give the operator enough information to make better ones, potentially increasing effectiveness while reducing wasted time and resources.

Alpha has been in development for only about four months, but Markoff projects that Smack will have a working prototype within the next year and could secure contracts for the device within two years.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command said in a statement that the operation took place late Tuesday and early Wednesday and used the Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser.

The military did not give the precise location of the strikes nor make clear whether it took place over U.S. or Mexican territory. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has said any unilateral U.S. action on Mexican soil would be a grave breach of her country’s sovereignty.

The military said the drones posed “a physical threat” to U.S. military and U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel.

“Cartel networks are increasingly employing unmanned aircraft systems to facilitate illicit human-smuggling and actively spy on our personnel and law enforcement partners,” Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, the commander of Joint Task Force–Southern Border, said in a statement.

The announcement comes as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to clamp down on immigration and cartels, seeking to fulfill promises from his 2024 presidential campaign.

Since its establishment in 2025, the border task force has conducted tens of thousands of detection and monitoring patrols and thousands of observation flights, the task force said.

The military did not specify the manufacturer of the laser system.

AeroVironment Inc delivered its first two multi-purpose high-energy lasers to the U.S. Army last summer. The U.S. Army has previously deployed AeroVironment Inc’s LOCUST system. The deployment of that system led to a seven-hour airspace shutdown near Texas’ El Paso International Airport earlier this year.

In February, the military accidentally shot down a U.S. government drone using a laser-based anti-drone system, congressional aides told Reuters at the time.

U.S. security officials have expressed concern about the use of drones by Mexican cartels, which mostly employ crudely adapted versions of off-the-shelf models to drop drug packages or surveil trafficking routes.

In parts of Mexico farther from the U.S. border, cartels have used drones to drop explosives in deadly attacks. U.S. and Mexican authorities are working together to combat the rise of drones in the border region.

The company said the shared architecture allows Strigo hardware to be reconfigured for different missions, including air defense, missile defense and air-to-surface strike.

Lockheed calls the Strigo Product Center a storefront for “ready-now and near-ready” hardware that it said can be adapted to customer needs. The company said the modular approach also lowers life cycle costs, though it stopped short of citing dollar figures. Lockheed said it has made a $250 million internal investment in the product center to date.

The center was established less than two years ago and has already carried several concepts from initial design through testing, according to the release. The company said the center can move a concept from sketch to tested solution in months rather than years, allowing it to have parts on the shelf before the military even asks for them, in some cases.

Stacy Kubicek, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Sensors and Global Sustainment, said in the release that the product center’s emphasis on early research allows the company to “test and deploy new solutions at unprecedented speed,” adding, “That’s how we turn ‘what if’ into ‘what’s next’ faster than ever before.”

Lockheed said technologies developed through the Strigo family played a role in developing the Increment 2 seeker package for the U.S. Army’s Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), which is replacing the Army Tactical Missile System. The seeker package adds a sensor in a missile’s nose that locates and tracks its target in the final phase of flight.

Lockheed said it flew Increment 2 for the first time in March, travelling 350-kilometers, or more than 217 miles, in a flight that gathered performance data. The company did not report an intercept.

Strigo is the latest in a string of announcements this year in which Lockheed has pitched itself as building weapons faster and cheaper. In March, the company opened a Rapid Fielding Center that builds prototypes and early production runs under one roof, part of a larger plan to build or upgrade factories.

In July, it introduced the PAC-3 ACE, a Patriot interceptor it says will cost less than half as much as a PAC-3 MSE. These latest moves are pitched as supporting the Arsenal of Freedom, the Pentagon’s term for the munitions industrial base buildup.

Lockheed’s release was short on details regarding the size, structure or location of the Strigo Product Center. It did not name any contracts, customers or delivery timelines beyond the PrSM reference.

The previously unreported findings offer a rare glimpse into how military and security-linked institutions in China are leveraging cutting-edge U.S. AI models as a shortcut to developing specialised systems of their own, despite Washington’s efforts to restrict Beijing’s access to advanced chips and other strategic technologies.

The documents show widespread use of a technique known as “model distillation,” in which outputs from a powerful AI system are used to train smaller, specialised models that can be deployed locally without the enormous computing requirements needed to build frontier AI systems from scratch.

Reuters’ review, which included research compiled by the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation and shared exclusively with the news agency, showed distillation is widely used by researchers linked to the People’s Liberation Army and other military institutions.

The papers suggest Chinese defense institutions see leading U.S. AI models as both a source of technical insight and a way to close the gap with American rivals.

The dispute centres on unauthorised extraction, not distillation itself, a widely used industry practice.

The issue has emerged as a major flashpoint ahead of U.S.-China talks on AI governance and safety. U.S. officials have accused some Chinese entities of using distillation to extract capabilities from American AI models, potentially undermining export controls and infringing intellectual property rights.

China has rejected the accusations, saying Washington is pursuing AI “hegemonism” while arguing that U.S. firms have engaged in similar practices.

Chinese developers have also disputed claims that their AI advances rely on foreign models. AI startup Moonshot last week denied allegations by the Trump administration that its Kimi K3 model was built using distillation, saying it was driven by proprietary innovations.

Sunny Cheung, a Jamestown fellow who analysed over 60 of the papers, said Chinese military scientists are systematically capturing the reasoning steps of Western models to adapt them for surveillance, cyber warfare and tactical decision-making.

“Teaching a model the right answer is one thing but teaching it the reasoning behind the answer is much harder,” said Cheung.

“These papers show Chinese military-linked researchers are trying to transfer that expensive, proprietary reasoning from Western models into smaller systems they can control and deploy locally.”

Reuters verified the academic literature and identified an additional two dozen military-linked case studies.

One paper published last year by researchers in PLA Unit 96941, a military intelligence and cyber-warfare unit in Beijing, described using OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 to process sensitive military source code.

The researchers said third-party models were unsuitable for handling classified information. To overcome that limitation, they used GPT-3.5 to summarize software code and trained a domestic model on those summaries to run entirely within Chinese military networks.

The White House, Pentagon, China’s foreign ministry, the PLA and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.

WIDE USE, FROM MONITORING TO MILITARY

Chinese researchers have used distillation for purposes ranging from content monitoring to military deployment, Reuters’ and Jamestown’s review of the papers showed.

At the North University of China, which has close links to the country’s weapons industry, researchers used Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku to generate synthetic training data for a text classification model for social media monitoring and content moderation.

Anthropic said it does not provide commercial access to Claude in China or to Beijing-controlled firms and uses monitoring systems to detect policy violations.

The company added that distilled models may lose the original systems’ safety safeguards, potentially allowing sensitive capabilities to be transferred to models beyond its control.

A 2024 paper from the PLA’s National University of Defense Technology described using distillation to shrink an image-processing model for deployment on unmanned aerial vehicles, allowing drones to analyse live video and support navigation and targeting decisions in real time even when communications are cut.

Similarly, researchers at China’s Academy of Military Sciences used distillation to run a target-recognition model on tactical hardware during simulated maritime operations involving drones, ships and unmanned submarines, a study published earlier this year showed.

BENEFITS AND LIMITS

China has embraced distillation as it seeks to compete with the U.S. in frontier AI while facing constraints on advanced computing resources due to Washington’s export controls on high-end chips.

Central and local governments have promoted “model lightweighting” and edge computing, directing subsidies and research funding toward technologies that enable AI models to run on drones, satellites and other devices with limited processing power.

Experts caution, however, that distillation has significant limitations.

As Chinese AI models close the gap with their U.S. counterparts, military researchers are also examining distillation as a potential security risk.

In January, researchers at the Army Engineering University published a paper on the threat of “data-free distillation,” a method of reverse-engineering a model’s capabilities without direct access to its core parameters.

To counter that vulnerability, they proposed defense mechanisms designed to mask the hidden logical information exposed in a model’s public outputs.

Distilled models also inherit only selected capabilities and cannot fully replicate the broad intelligence of frontier systems.

Trevor Koverko, co-founder of AI data company Sapien, said distilled models remain less capable than their teacher models.

“It is best understood as transferring selected capabilities into a cheaper, locally controlled system, not achieving independence from frontier AI.”

But instead of a service member resting a finger on the trigger well in preparation for the next shot, in video footage of the Bullfrog weapons system, a hulking, metal machine tilts the weapon just slightly, refocusing itself.

As the U.S. contends with steep expenses to counter cheap drones, Allen Control Systems, or ACS, announced Monday that the Marine Corps has chosen the Bullfrog autonomous weapon system to integrate into its airborne defenses.

The futuristic apparatus is an AI-enabled weapon system that detects, tracks and then automatically aims firearms against aerial threats like drones. That Marine Corps selected the system under its Ground Based Air Defense, or GBAD, program, which develops and fields capabilities to protect forces from airborne attacks.

The service plans to incorporate the Bullfrog into its Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System (L-MADIS), a counter-unmanned aircraft system mounted on two vehicles that relies heavily on electronic warfare.

The system is already in use in the Army and Navy and has been approved by Joint Interagency Task Force 401, the Pentagon’s unit established to streamline the acquisition of counter-drone technology.

The Defense Department’s focus on countering drones comes as conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have underscored the increasingly important role of cheap drones on the modern battlefield. The Pentagon has placed a growing emphasis on developing and fielding counter-drone technology that is more scalable and less pricey.

Their prevalence has exposed the economic imbalance of U.S. air defense, as small, relatively inexpensive drones have forced the country to expend expensive interceptor missiles that can cost millions of dollars to make.

The challenge has become especially pronounced during the U.S. war with Iran, where American forces have relied heavily on costly defenses to counter Iran’s Shahed drones, which can cost around $35,000 compared to around $4 million for some interceptors. Experts have warned that the cost of a prolonged war may drastically deplete U.S. interceptor stores.

An ACS press release on the Marine Corps deal linked to the Bullfrog M240, which is compatible with the U.S. military’s belt-fed, fully automatic M240 machine gun. According to the company, the M240 system has a maximum effective range of nearly half a mile and can attack medium and large drones weighing up to 1,320 pounds. Without ammunition, the system weighs 300 pounds.

According to the company, which also has variants that support the M2 machine gun and M320 chain gun, the M240 system has “a cost-per-kill as low as $10.”

Other defense firms are also working to procure more affordable counter-UAS defenses. This week, Lockheed Martin announced a cheaper Patriot interceptor missile that they say will have a price tag of less than half of what other multimillion-dollar interceptors cost.

The New Mexico-based firm this week pulled the curtain back on Buckler, an interceptor designed to kill Group 3 drones — UAS weighing up to 1,320 pounds and flying below 18,000 feet at under 250 knots — for a cost of under $100,000 per unit.

Buckler is designed to knock out UAS at supersonic speeds, according to a company release, and is assembled with an airframe and propulsion system manufactured entirely at X-Bow factories, thus eliminating a production bottleneck that has plagued myriad high-priced systems reliant on multi-company components. Axios first reported about the X-Bow Buckler.

The unveiling at London’s 2026 Farnborough Airshow this week is the latest push by U.S. industry to solve an interceptor enigma that has become increasingly glaring as the nation’s war with Iran drags on.

U.S. troops in the military’s Central Command area of operations have continued to face the onerous task of leaning on exorbitantly priced interceptors to contend with Iran’s vastly cheaper, mass-produced Shahed attack drones.

The use of a single PAC-3 interceptor to knock one Shahed-136 out of the sky comes with a $4 million to $35,000 tradeoff, or a 114-1 cost-per-kill ratio.

“You can’t win a war of attrition trading million-dollar interceptors against thousand-dollar threats,” X-Bow founder and chief executive officer Jason Hundley said in a release. “Buckler has flown, it comes in under $100,000, and we build its airframe and propulsion ourselves — the part of the industrial base that is so stressed by today’s munitions demands. This is our answer to the call from the U.S. and its allies: affordable capability, at scale.”

X-Bow’s announcement comes after the firm’s recent test of the Buckler munition — one that derives its name, as TWZ noted, from a Medieval era shield — that demonstrated its propulsion and flight performance, the company announced.

Following a similar theme at Farnborough, Lockheed Martin on Monday introduced what it hopes will be another low cost per kill solution to the ever-evolving unmanned threat.

The defense giant this week introduced the Morfius X-Rotor, a ground-launched “one-to-many” airborne high power microwave counter-UAS system the company says can “neutralize more than 50 enemy drones in a single flight.”

Morfius is built, most notably, to be recovered and reused.

Lockheed also introduced a cheaper Patriot interceptor.

Such has been the case at London’s 2026 Farnborough Airshow, where Lockheed Martin on Monday introduced what it hopes will be a low cost per kill solution to the ever-evolving unmanned threat.

The Morfius X-Rotor is a ground-launched “one-to-many” airborne high power microwave, or HPM, counter-UAS system the company says can “neutralize more than 50 enemy drones in a single flight.”

Built, notably, to be recovered and reused, the Morfius is capable of using any command and control system and does not rely on any unique sensor or fire control radars, the company announced.

Morfius “sets a new benchmark for counter-drone capability — delivering a high kill rate while keeping the cost per kill low,” Randy Crites, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control Advanced Programs, said in a release. “By leveraging a lightweight, field reusable high-power microwave architecture, we provide the most effective, low-cost solution on the market today.”

The company announced it is accelerating prototype production of both the drone and its HPM payload in the interest of getting it into the hands of frontline troops.

The system was recently flight-tested in Arizona, California and Oklahoma, the company stated, where it also demonstrated interception and lethal capabilities. Additional tests are slated in the months ahead.

Monday’s announcement comes as the U.S. looks to reduce dependence on cost-prohibitive interceptors to defend against cheaper munitions, a juxtaposition that has come under increased scrutiny as U.S. forces have quickly expended interceptor stockpiles to combat Iranian missiles and Shahed drones.

Lockheed Martin on Monday also introduced a cheaper Patriot interceptor as a potential off ramp to the reliance on exorbitantly priced interceptors.

Frank Kendall, the Air Force’s 26th secretary who served under former President Joe Biden, said in a Thursday roundtable hosted by Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies that gathering experience in the field and through simulations help operators establish trust with autonomous systems, like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft.

“You have to accumulate a basis for trust over time, and so I think we just need to think carefully about how we structure things in order to make that opportunity,” Kendall said during the roundtable.

Earlier this week, the Air Force announced that it conducted the first-ever live-fire test of an inert AIM-120 from an Anduril-made YFQ-44A. The CCA recently completed an end-to-end, beyond-line-of-sight strike against a simulated target, the service announced, but did not specify when the exercise occurred.

The Air Force is scheduled to continue live-fire testing with General Atomics’ YFQ-42A this fall.

Kendall said that using the aircraft in Red Flag, the service’s leading large-force aerial combat training simulation held at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, will be “fascinating,” but he worries about the force using initial setbacks as an excuse to “retreat” instead of pushing ahead.

The former secretary was optimistic that institutional support will be enough to overcome those setbacks, saying that enthusiastic operators want to see the aircraft’s full potential realized.

Kendall recalled when he once asked an Air Combat Command crew who were developing CCA tactics why there wasn’t more resistance.

“[A young fighter pilot’s] answer was, ‘Sir, these things are going to save our lives.’” Kendall recalled.

The simulations define the exercises, he added, saying that it showcases how the aircraft protects crew fighters effectively right now even as the force needs to develop more sophisticated tactics.

“The guys with the CCAs are beating the crap out of the guys without them, and not losing any manned fighters,” he said.

AI-controlled fighter jet takes Air Force secretary on historic ride

Kendall said that computerized, man-in-the-loop simulations are the best tool to assist operators in learning how to use the aircraft effectively since more trials can be completed. Integrated simulations have been used by the Air Force for roughly 30 years.

“In simulators with cockpits their sensors are showing them simulated threats as well as their friends, and then they basically fight a battle together,” he explained.

Kendall referred to a time when he took a flight in an F-16 modified by artificial intelligence. In flight, the aircraft’s testers would collect data points, he said, and run a million simulations to adjust the software overnight to complete the flight again the following day.

The first increment CCA aircraft in the program are “all the same” as weapons carriers, but in Increment II, Kendall stipulates that the force can begin equipping them with sensors and possibly distributed electronic warfare capabilities.

China is working on this autonomous system capability as well, he added, stating that air battles could soon be CCA versus CCA. Intelligence is going to play a significant role in how well the U.S. understands their systems, tactics and vulnerabilities, he said, noting that it’s a “hard game” to play.

In Increment I, the Air Force showed interest in obtaining 100 to 150 aircraft, the first phase of a longer-term goal of eventually fielding 1,000 CCAs.

The sea service “is exploring the industrial base’s capacity to deliver highly capable, autonomous platforms optimized for operations from Ford-class and Nimitz-class Nuclear Aircraft Carriers,” according to the RFI. The response deadline has been set for Aug. 13.

The drones the service is targeting, part of the Air Wing of the Future Family of Systems, can be designed as “a single-role platform, a multi-role platform, or a modular FoS [family of systems],” according to the service.

But whatever the solution, the Navy wants the platforms to be capable of performing eight different missions: strikes against surface ships, strikes against land targets, anti-submarine warfare, air-to-air combat against enemy aircraft and missiles, electronic warfare, ISR, aerial refueling, and resupply flights for a naval task force.

The service is soliciting “industry expertise to identify a mix of platforms that can provide affordable mass, risk-tolerant platforms that can perform the above missions to counter current and emerging threats,” the request states.

The RFI lists a few specific requirements, including a minimum 1,000-nautical mile range for strike missions.

Drones must also possess “flight autonomy (e.g., carrier pattern, taxiing) and mission autonomy (e.g., dynamic tasking/retasking, threat evasion, automated aerial refueling) maturity.”

Additionally, they must be compatible with existing Unmanned Carrier Aircraft control systems, according to the RFI.

Significantly, while the RFI mostly focuses on carrier-based drones, the Navy also wants vertical-takeoff UAVs that can operate from other types of vessels, such as destroyers and mobile sea bases.

“The Navy is interested in novel concepts that can operate from any air capable platform in addition to the CVN (e.g., DDG, ESB) using Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL),” the RFI said.

The RFI is indicative of the Navy’s desire to eventually move on from fourth-generation carrier air wings to an air wing composed of fifth- and sixth-generation manned and unmanned aircraft.

The new drones “must demonstrate increased combat effectiveness over current fourth generation platforms at a given spot factor.”

The Air Wing of the Future, as designed, appears to be modeled for an old-fashioned battle of attrition, in which combat is waged by affordable — and expendable — drones rather than a handful of expensive platforms.

Contractors responding to the RFI are asked to “detail how your production approach supports rapid scaling and elasticity in a surge scenario,” and what techniques they will use to “keep unit recurring flyaway (URF) and sustainment costs within sustainable limits.”

Companies should also explain how their proposed designs will minimize maintenance requirements and fit into existing naval supply chains, according to the RFI. Potential manufacturers should also submit “planned capital investments (CAPX) or Internal Research and Development (IRAD) commitments to mature the solution.”

The Air Wing of the Future Family of Systems is part of the Trump administration’s Golden Fleet expansion plan for the Navy.

Existing family-of-system drone projects include the MQ-25A Stingray tanker and the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA.

The system is called the Arctic Over-The-Horizon Radar (A-OTHR), and the deal is worth some US$1.75 billion to Australia.

Gordon Frazer – Founder and CEO of the Australia-based HF radar technical services company FrazerLab – told Defense News Canada’s decision would fill an urgent need.

“I used to say to people, you could fly a jumbo jet from Beijing to Canberra if it had its transponders off and no one would know,” he said, arguing the same is likely true for Canada.

“Russia could fly a Tu-95 from one of their bases, Engels Air Base or something like that, to Canada and possibly no one would know.”

He added, “That’s why NORAD is so concerned, and why they’ve been pushing so hard to get this sort of technology done.”

Frazer was formerly an engineer involved in Australia’s OTHR program known as the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN).

Expanded surveillance coverage

While NORAD maintains the North Warning System, a line of microwave radars in Canada’s frozen north, Frazer said it would be “almost a trivial problem to defeat it” by flying at low altitude between these known and stationary radar sites.

Instead, because OTHR bounces high-frequency signals off the ionosphere, it can look down on airborne targets — and sometimes even surface vessels — with ease, including aircraft and missiles.

An over-the-horizon radar results in radar coverage stretching far beyond what traditional line-of-sight radars can achieve due to the curvature of the Earth.

With its particular A-OTHR contract, BAE Systems Australia will transfer technology and expertise for Canada to build its own OTHR radar sites to monitor its periphery. Officially, Canberra says JORN can detect targets 3,000 kilometers (1,700 miles) away, but its capability almost certainly reaches far beyond that.

Ottawa stated in a press release: “The signing formalizes Canada’s partnership with Australia and enables the delivery of Australia’s proven OTHR technology in support of Canada’s A-OTHR program. It marks a major milestone in the program, transitioning A-OTHR from the planning phase into delivery phase.”

Natural challenges

Canada has already been researching the application of OTHRs in its north, where environmental and solar conditions are far different than they are in Australia.

Furthermore, significant differences exist between operating OTHRs in equatorial, mid-latitude, high-latitude and polar areas. Frazer pointed out that Canada, despite the “Arctic” in the A-OTHR nomenclature, is actually buying a high-latitude system.

Polar regions present even more complicated challenges for OTHRs due to the Earth’s magnetic field, which creates serious background clutter. In fact, some 40% of Canadian territory lies above the Arctic Circle.

Although it may sound counterintuitive, Frazer said Canada’s A-OTHR radar facilities would be built as far south as possible. This is in order to bounce radar signals off the ionosphere ahead of the zone where the worst distortion occurs.

However, Canada will also have the future opportunity to expand its OTHR network with trans-polar coverage, which would allow it to see deep into Russia.

Positioned thus, the technology could enable NORAD to see Russian strategic bombers taking off or ballistic missiles being launched, for example.

If Canada does seek transpolar radar coverage, it would likely want to place those radar installations as far north as possible, Frazer explained.

Australia has three JORN radar sites, but it is unclear how many sites Canada will establish. In North America, Frazer expects the Pacific west coast will be covered by an American system, the Atlantic east coast will be covered by Canada, and then an additional system can cover the north. If NORAD wants 360-degree coverage, Frazer suggested five or six radar installations would be needed.

Australian expertise

Craig Lockhart, CEO of BAE Systems Australia, said: “Canada’s acquisition of a cutting-edge Australian OTHR system supports the strategic interests of both nations through enhanced detection and tracking of threats to North America, strengthening Five Eyes situational awareness.”

Frazer said Australia developed world-leading OTHR talent “because of multi-generational consistency” in its investment in the technology.

The New Zealand-born engineer pointed out that around 15% of the cost of OTHR technology sits in equipment to inform human operators how to set the radar’s parameters to account for constantly changing atmospheric conditions.

Frazer highlighted that OTHRs are bespoke, national systems built only once per generation. However, he hopes the Canadian deal will benefit both countries.

“I think you’re starting to get the critical mass of being able to keep the technology pipeline from design to sustainment to upgrade to far-reaching tech.”

Because over-the-horizon radar coverage can vary drastically due to solar conditions, other methods help plug surveillance gaps.

Airborne early-warning aircraft, for example, are complementary to OTHR. In May, Canada selected Saab’s GlobalEye as its future airborne early-warning platform.

Canada expects its A-OTHR to reach an initial operational capability by December 2029.

The equipment office of the German armed forces signed a contract with MBDA Deutschland and Rheinmetall Waffe Munition in June to develop the full system, from reconnaissance to target tracking and engagement, the companies said in statements on Thursday. The contract value is in the “mid three-digit” million-euro range, Rheinmetall said.

Several European navies are working on laser weapons, with the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy planning to fit the DragonFire directed-energy weapon on a destroyer by 2027, in work led by MBDA in partnership with Leonardo and QinetiQ. Naval vessels are particularly suited to deploy powerful lasers, as they can provide the physical space, electrical power, sensors and cooling required.

“The laser weapon system will provide our personnel deployed on naval vessels with a significantly higher level of protection, particularly when it comes to countering drones,” Roman Koehne, head of Rheinmetall’s weapons and ammunition division, said in a statement.

The laser weapon system from MBDA and Rheinmetall has a “very high level” of technological maturity, the companies said. The demonstrator has been deployed on the German frigate Sachsen, covering 28,000 nautical miles from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, and firing over 1,000 shots at air, sea and land targets in more than a year of testing, according to MBDA and Rheinmetall.

The containerized laser effector will also be a cost-effective weapon for port security, MBDA Deutschland Managing Director Thomas Gottschild said. The system can focus power on an area measuring just a few centimeters, and has proven to be effective even in adverse weather conditions, according to Rheinmetall and MBDA.

The MBDA-Rheinmetall joint venture will place “particular emphasis” on German supply chains and local systems expertise to secure national sovereignty in the technology, the companies said. Serial production will “largely” take part in Germany, according to Koehne.

In other weapon-development news, the French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis said it tested its electromagnetic railgun outdoors for the first time in June, moving the system out of laboratory conditions. The institute will now work on higher energy levels and longer distances as a path towards a possible future deployable system, it said in a statement on Thursday.

Railguns use electromagnetic acceleration rather than chemical propellants to fire a projectile, and could provide a possible counter to hypersonic threats.

Meanwhile, Belgium said it will buy 20 of Rheinmetall’s Skyranger 30 anti-drone cannons as well as 14 Thales GM200 radars, in addition to a previously announced plan to buy 10 NASAMS air-defense systems from Kongsberg. The country is investing €3.1 billion ($3.5 billion) to build up a layered air defense system, after two decades of going without, Defense Minister Theo Francken said.

The search comes after dozens of MQ-9s were swatted out of the sky during the Iran war, according to a May 13 Congressional Research Service report.

With the Air Force currently possessing about 135 Reapers — which cost approximately $30 million apiece — such a loss rate is not sustainable, especially against a force like Iran, whose air defenses are less sophisticated than those of China or Russia.

“The Joint Force’s reliance on low-density, high-value ‘exquisite’ (>$30 million) manned and unmanned aircraft is unsustainable against adversaries utilizing layered defenses enabled by increasingly low-cost antiaircraft capabilities,” warned the Defense Innovation Unit solicitation for a new drone, which the Pentagon wants to “execute missions that the MQ-9A performs today.”

Rather than build a better Reaper, DIU is opting for an expendable replacement. The Massed Modular Aircraft, or MMA, project aims to develop a UAV designed to operate in such large numbers that it can absorb heavy losses and still overwhelm enemy defenses.

Particularly of interest is the size of the MMA. Drone swarms may be the next big thing in unmanned warfare, but generally those hordes are made up of small, inexpensive UAVs with limited range and payload.

But the DIU solicitation envisions a drone that has long range and a heavy payload — and is still inexpensive enough for mass production. The solicitation calls for a payload of at least 2,800 pounds, a bit less than the MQ-9’s 3,800-pound capacity.

The MMA should also have an unrefueled combat range of at least 2,300 nautical miles, according to the solicitation, and a one-way transfer range of at least 8,000 nautical miles. Additionally, the drone should reach speeds of at least 200 miles per hour and have the ability to operate from a 6,000-foot runway or improvised airstrips.

The DIU solicitation states that the drone should have “sufficient available size, weight, power (25kW), and cooling (5kW) to host a variety of internal and/or external payloads,” with a level of autonomous operations that would allow one operator to control several drones.

The solicitation does not specify the MMA’s dimensions, though the specifications suggest a drone comparable in size to the MQ-9. It also did not list a desired price point, though presumably it would be less than the $30 million price tag of an MQ-9.

The timeline for the MMA project, meanwhile, is ambitious. DIU is calling for “full-scale prototype flight testing within 21 months of award, with a targeted Initial Operating Capability (IOC) in FY2031. IOC for MMA is envisioned as 20 mission-ready aircraft delivered to an operational unit, able to be deployed.”

Pentagon solicitations continue to reflect a mindfulness of lessons from the Ukraine War, as well as the experiences during the Iran War. In both conflicts, the defender exhausted interceptors before the attacker ran out of drones.

“Keeping a constant airborne MMA presence to launch weapons, gather intelligence, perform electronic warfare missions, or relay communications will force an adversary to stay on the defensive,” DIU said. “This relentless pressure will exhaust the adversary, forcing them to burn through expensive anti-aircraft missiles and resources faster than they can be replaced.”

That’s according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, which found that three versions of the augmented-reality “all-weather fighting goggle” developed between 2018 and 2025 were deemed not ready for fielding and will stay in a warehouse rather than ever reaching soldiers.

The news, tucked within the GAO’s annual weapons systems assessment, was first reported this month by Task and Purpose. The watchdog agency did note that the vision of IVAS is not completely dead; the prototype will be transitioned to a separate effort with similar goals related to improving soldier awareness, and development will begin again. But that leaves almost 10,000 pricey headsets that appear bound for shelf real estate next to the Ark of the Covenant.

“An Army evaluation reported that soldiers found the headsets difficult to wear and noted that they did not perform better than existing equipment,” the GAO report said. “As a result, the nearly 10,000 units that were produced are obsolete and will remain in storage.”

Those 10,000 units include versions 1.0 and 1.1 of IVAS. Version 1.2, which “was expected to address reliability and wearability issues identified in the previous versions such as comfort and low-light performance,” according to the report, will be used instead to inform the new rapid prototyping effort, known as Soldier Borne Mission Command.

Some 400 of the version 1.2 goggles will inform the design of SBMC, in a contract now held by Anduril, who received funding from IVAS in April after the Army reprogrammed the money. Microsoft had previously held the contract.

Anduril announced it had gotten the $159 million contract award for initial prototyping last September, saying the award represented “the largest effort of its kind to equip every soldier with superhuman perception and decision-making capabilities—fusing the best of night vision, augmented reality, and AI into a single system.”

Like IVAS, SBMC aims to overcome the challenges built into legacy night-vision goggles, including lack of a common networked picture and battlefield data integration, resulting in siloed information.

Anduril’s solution, which it touted as developed with the benefit of 260,000 hours of soldier input from the IVAS program, purports to give troops “superhero-like abilities” with an augmented-reality battlefield picture overlaid onto advanced night vision capabilities.

Yet despite the billions invested in IVAS over seven years, the end result was worse than the legacy headsets it purported to replace, investigators found.

“While IVAS used limited elements of leading practices in its prior efforts, the program’s minimal implementation of these contributed to IVAS concluding with no fielded capability. Problems that users reported with the 1.0 and 1.1 versions were not adequately addressed in 1.2,” the report found. “These included poor performance in low-light conditions and the added weight on users’ helmets. The program’s failure to adequately incorporate user feedback into design updates resulted in a product that users report is less useful than legacy equipment.”

Investigators faulted the program for moving into production with “limited evidence from testing in an operational environment” to show that the goggles actually did what the soldiers needed them to do. After a wave of negative feedback on the 1.0 version of IVAS, the program did not even conduct operational testing on the 1.1 version, the report said.

“This runs counter to our prior work, which found that systems-integrated testing in an operational environment helps ensure product designs meet user needs before significant funding is spent on production,” the report stated.

Moving forward, according to the report, the new contractor, Anduril, will conduct continuous operational assessments on the latest version of the goggles, getting user feedback from brigades via the Army.

“The program expects to use these assessments to collect feedback and inform the first phase of SBMC, which aligns with leading practices to make improvements in subsequent iterations,” GAO investigators said.