A $50 million award pushes Shield AI's 22,000-pound VTOL jet toward ships with no flight deck, on the strength of ground tests rather than flight time.
Mach Industries' Atlas is a hybrid-electric, runway-independent strike drone being developed under DIU's RIMES program to carry 1,000-pound munitions 1,400 nautical miles from destroyer decks and austere sites — and come back to rearm.
A three-year-old startup just won the Pentagon's bet to put a 1,400-nautical-mile strike drone on the deck of a destroyer, no flight deck or runway required.