The Wire · live □ GRID-REF 37°47′N 122°25′W
DISPATCH 04/26 · 23 Oct 2026
BattlePolicy
Startup to front line. Strategy to consequence.
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  1. Fedorov Takes Ukraine's Defense-Tech Playbook Private With Karp's Backing The ousted defense minister has found American capital for his procurement-and-data model while Kyiv's own export channel has issued no permits and charges 20% to 30% up front. Ukraine · USA · Funding
  2. Army Awards AeroVironment $465 Million to Produce LOCUST X3 Lasers The Army's first production contract for a laser weapon puts a 30-kilowatt drone killer on tactical vehicles while the Iran war drains Patriot and THAAD stocks. USA · air defense · aerovironment
  3. Igla-SPro A shoulder-fired infrared missile that Russia now launches from helicopters to hunt Ukrainian drones — and bolts to Shahed airframes so the drone can shoot back at the aircraft sent to intercept it. Russia · Ukraine · air defense
  4. Strela-10Pro A 1976 Soviet missile system built to shoot down low-flying jets, now hunting Lancets and Hornets. Its infrared seeker was never designed to find something the size of a quadcopter — which is why Ukraine bolted an electro-optical sight to nine of them. Russia · Ukraine · air defense
  5. ZSU-23-4 ShilkaPro A 1965 Soviet anti-aircraft gun built to shoot down jets, now one of the cheapest ways Ukraine kills Shahed drones. Sixteen modernised Shilkas funded by a charity recorded their first Shahed shootdowns in December 2025. Ukraine · Russia · air defense
  6. KonkursPro A wire-guided missile that requires its operator to hold the crosshair on a tank for the whole flight — up to four kilometres, several seconds, motionless. In a battlefield watched continuously by drones, that is the hardest thing a soldier can be asked to do. Russia · Ukraine · Land
  7. RPG-7Pro A 1961 shoulder-fired launcher that found a second career nobody designed: its PG-7 shaped-charge grenade is one of the most common warheads bolted onto FPV attack drones, so much of the armour destroyed in this war is hit by RPG ammunition. Russia · Ukraine · Land
  8. 2S3 AkatsiyaPro The 152 mm half of the Soviet self-propelled artillery pair still fighting on both sides. It outranges and outweighs the Gvozdika, it trails only the Msta-S in Russian self-propelled artillery losses, and drones now kill it before it fires. Russia · Ukraine · Land
  9. 2S1 GvozdikaPro The amphibious 122 mm howitzer that both armies still fire daily, and that both are losing faster than they can replace. Oryx has documented about 400 Ukrainian losses of the type — and Russia is reported to be stripping barrels off its own. Russia · Ukraine · Land
  10. T-62Pro A tank designed in 1961, pulled from Siberian storage yards and sent to Ukraine because Russia has run out of newer ones. At least 334 have been destroyed, and the T-62's real significance is as a measure of how far the Russian tank reserve has been drained. Russia · Land · main-battle-tank
  11. T-64Pro A Kharkiv-built Soviet tank from 1966 that is still the backbone of Ukraine's armoured force in 2026 — kept alive by depot reactivation, Oplot transmissions and anti-drone cages, because Western donations could never replace it at scale. Ukraine · Russia · Land
  12. Kh-31Pro A ramjet missile that homes on the radar trying to detect it. The Kh-31P is why Ukrainian Patriot crews cannot leave their radars radiating, and why the air-defence problem in Ukraine is as much about emissions discipline as about interceptor stocks. Russia · China · missiles
  13. Kh-22Pro A 1960s anti-ship missile carrying nearly a tonne of explosive at Mach 4.6, fired at cities it was never designed to hit. Its error is measured in hundreds of metres, which is why its record in Ukraine is a record of civilian casualties. Russia · missiles · anti-ship-missile
  14. Kh-59Pro The precision half of Russia's air-launched arsenal. Where the Kh-22 lands within half a kilometre of where it was aimed, the Kh-59MK2 is credited with metres — and it is the missile Ukrainian air defence reports intercepting one at a time. Russia · missiles · cruise-missile
  15. Arena-MPro Russia's radar-cued hard-kill tank shield, and the first serial Russian active protection system credited with shooting down FPV drones. In its combat debut one tank killed seven drones, then ran out of ammunition and died. Russia · Land · active-protection-system
  16. KalinkaPro Russia's answer to Starlink is not a jammer. Kalinka listens for the uplink a terminal sends to the satellite and works out where the operator is sitting — turning a communications link into a targeting cue. Russia · Space · electronic-warfare
  17. KN-30Pro North Korea's heavyweight Hwasong-11 — a solid-fuel ballistic missile more than ten metres long, claimed to carry a 2.5-tonne warhead roughly five times an Iskander's, transferred to Russia in 2026 and deployed within range of Ukraine. Russia · China · missiles
  18. ParodiyaPro A plywood aircraft with no warhead and a metal-coated sphere in the fuselage. The Luneburg lens makes it read on radar as a Shahed, so Ukrainian air defence must treat every one as lethal — which is the entire weapon. Russia · missiles · decoy
  19. Shahed-131Pro The small Shahed. About two-thirds the weight of a Shahed-136 with roughly a third of the warhead and a rotary engine, it entered Russian service as the Geran-1 in 2022 and is still a separately planned production line four years later. Iran · Russia · missiles
  20. RavenPro Britain took ASRAAM missiles awaiting disposal, bolted them to launch rails cut from retired Tornado, Hawk and Jaguar jets, and welded the result to a Supacat truck. The improvisation has claimed over 400 aerial targets in Ukraine. Ukraine · Europe · air defense
  21. ERAM (AGM-188 Rusty Dagger)Pro The US Air Force went to two firms almost nobody had heard of, asked for a cruise missile cheap enough to run out of without regret, and got flight tests in four months. ERAM is the West's answer to the cost-exchange crisis Shahed created. USA · Ukraine · missiles
  22. GravehawkPro A British air-defence system inside a shipping container that fires Ukraine's own Soviet-era R-73 air-to-air missiles from salvaged fighter launch rails — built because Ukraine had missiles it could not launch and targets it could not reach. Ukraine · Europe · air defense
  23. Garpiya-A1Pro Russia's second Shahed line — built not at Alabuga but by Almaz-Antey subsidiary Kupol in Izhevsk, with Chinese engineering help. Heavier warhead than a Geran-2, now sold abroad by Rosoboronexport and fielded in Mali. Russia · Iran · missiles
  24. Alexa SpatiumPro Ukraine's first domestically built jet-powered interceptor drone, codified in August 2026 to close the speed gap that Russia's turbojet Geran-4 and Geran-5 opened over the cheap propeller interceptors that had been beating the Shahed. Ukraine · drones · interceptor drone
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