Missiles / Drones / Directed Energy

Range crews are not often surprised by conditions in Interior Alaska. They are used to below-freezing temperatures at sunrise rapidly changing to muggy noon haze and gusts off the Yukon River that will lay steel antennas sideways. What no one anticipated during the period 25-28 June Project Artemis was how fast two prototype loitering munitions would fold up when all navigation aids go silent.

Project Revolver has moved from lab study to fleet priority in less than three years. Senior officers at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) now describe the program as “an essential magazine-depth booster for fast-attack boats operating west of Guam.” Defense officials confirm that the latest engineering assessment, completed on July 6, cleared Revolver’s Multi-Vehicle Torpedo Tube Defense System (MVTTDS) for first-of-class sea trials with a Virginia-class submarine before the end of this quarter.

European armies just wrapped up three weeks of hands-on trials that pushed small drones and ground robots through the same last-mile supply missions now common on Ukrainian front lines. Engineers and soldiers moved ammunition, water, and medical kits without a single crewed truck entering the danger zone, then logged every fault, delay, and workaround for a rapid-fire lessons-learned cycle that ends later this month at Nettuno.

The Army is moving fast to fold a new hypersonic strike option into its tactical fires family. Budget lines for fiscal year 2026 outline Project HX3, a pathway that funnels $25 million toward Castelion’s Blackbeard Ground Launch missile and an autonomous launcher called Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher. Defense officials confirm the objective: prove a mature design in the first calendar quarter of 2026 and push ten flight-test rounds through a HIMARS rail before the fiscal year ends.

The U.S. Navy built its Fiscal Year 2026 weapons plan around one assumption. Congress will pass a one-time reconciliation bill that adds billions to the base defense budget. Inside that bill sits most of the money for 139 Standard Missile-6 interceptors. The service’s own accounts cover only ten rounds. Navy comptrollers describe those ten as “placeholders,” not a viable production lot.

The first taxi runs of Jiutian’s SS-UAV “drone mothership” at a private airfield in Sichuan on 16 June reflect how far China’s unmanned programs have moved in a single decade. According to industry sources, technicians completed telemetry checks in less than six weeks, after the 15-ton airframe left the final assembly hangar in early May.

PARIS — MBDA, Europe’s largest missile maker, has shown a new low‑cost drone called the One‑Way Effector (OWE). The idea is simple: send many cheap drones first, force the enemy to shoot them down, then fire expensive cruise missiles through the gaps. Company engineers began work only six months ago, a pace that matches the urgent need for mass seen during two years of drone‑heavy fighting in Ukraine.

The Navy has issued a $646 million contract option to Raytheon for four additional AN/SPY-6(V) radars. Defense officials confirm this is the fourth option exercised under a five-year hardware, production, and sustainment agreement signed in 2022.

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) signed a new deal on 10 June 2025. It is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $429 million with Integration Innovation Inc. (i3). The Huntsville firm must collect missile-test data, check its quality, and turn the results into clear reports for program leaders.