Rolls-Royce won US Navy certification for two mtu engine families in autonomous vessels, clearing the unglamorous gate that decides how long a crewless warship can actually stay out.
More than 400 pages released under a FOIA lawsuit show the Pentagon bought strategy advice and adversary briefings with the models, and OpenAI staff inside its commands.
L3Harris licensed Shield AI's Tracker counter-drone software onto VAMPIRE, putting the startup's detection stack on a launcher the US Army has already ordered up to $106 million of.
European financing and Ukrainian arms production constrain Washington’s ability to impose a bargain, while US weapons, intelligence and commercial services preserve US leverage.
Hermeus picked Anduril's Lattice to fly its Mach 3 Quarterhorse, the first time Anduril has put its mission autonomy on a large third-party airframe under a commercial deal.
GARC is a compact American uncrewed surface vessel developed by BlackSea Technologies for modular reconnaissance, sensing and strike missions, and first used in a US Navy live-fire exercise at RIMPAC 2026.
Anduril Pulsar is a family of software-defined electromagnetic warfare systems intended to detect, classify and counter changing radio-frequency threats across fixed-site, vehicle, airborne and portable configurations.
Anduril Omen is a runway-independent Group 3 autonomous aircraft co-developed with EDGE Group, combining vertical launch and recovery with wing-borne cruise and a hybrid-electric powertrain.
Anduril Copperhead is a family of compact autonomous underwater vehicles and expendable armed variants designed to extend uncrewed sensing and strike networks into the undersea domain.
The AIM-9X Sidewinder is a current-generation infrared-guided short-range missile used by combat aircraft and, through NASAMS, as a surface-launched interceptor against airborne threats.
The AIM-424 Malice is a Raytheon-built US Navy very-long-range air-to-air missile intended to engage aircraft beyond 463 km while fitting inside the F-35C's weapons bay.
The AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile is a classified US long-range air-to-air weapon designed to replace the AIM-120 AMRAAM while retaining a form factor compatible with internal fighter weapon bays.
Tiberius Invictus is an experimental ramjet-powered precision-strike family intended to deliver missile-like range from existing artillery and other launch domains, with the Invictus-200 claimed to reach 200 km at up to Mach 3.
Neros Archer is a US-made attritable FPV attack drone developed with Ukrainian and American military partners, selected by the US Army under its Purpose-Built Attritable Systems programme.
The AGM-158C LRASM is a low-observable, air-launched anti-ship cruise missile designed to identify and attack warships autonomously in contested electronic environments.
GMLRS is the 227 mm precision-guided rocket fired by HIMARS and M270 launchers, combining GPS-aided inertial guidance with ranges from 70 km to more than 150 km.
The M982 Excalibur is a GPS- and inertially guided 155 mm artillery projectile that gives compatible howitzers precision-strike capability at extended range, but its performance in Ukraine has exposed the vulnerability of satellite-guided ammunition to electronic warfare.
The XM30 is the US Army's competition for a hybrid-electric, heavily armed successor to the M2 Bradley, contested by American Rheinmetall's Lynx XM30 and General Dynamics Land Systems' Wolf.
TITAN is the US Army's mobile, AI-enabled intelligence and targeting ground station, built to fuse data from distributed sensors and accelerate target nomination for long-range fires.
Hermeus Quarterhorse is an American series of uncrewed high-Mach demonstrator aircraft intended to validate propulsion, inlet, airframe and mission-autonomy technologies for the planned Darkhorse military aircraft.
Raid Hunter is Northrop Grumman's developmental 50 mm gun-based air-defense system, combining precision-guided ammunition, a Bushmaster Chain Gun and networked fire control against massed drones and cruise missiles.
Phalanx CIWS is a self-contained, radar-guided 20 mm naval gun system designed to provide warships with a final defensive layer against missiles, aircraft, drones and surface threats.
Epirus Leonidas is a short-range, solid-state high-power microwave weapon designed to disable groups and swarms of uncrewed aircraft through one-to-many electronic attack.
Taiwan's indigenous high-altitude anti-ballistic missile system, designed to provide the upper interception tier of the planned T-Dome air and missile defense network.
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.
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.
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.
Quantum Systems' co-CEO says In-Q-Tel's Washington connections, not its capital, built the $8 billion German drone maker's first US government business.
A 21-day Pentagon ultimatum and the Aug. 31 Patriot/THAAD framework deals reveal the real constraint is funded orders and sub-tier suppliers, not factory space, opening room for a purpose-built entrant like Castelion.
The Department of War put OpenAI's ChatGPT Mil and Starshield AI's Grok on GenAI.mil the same day, and the limits each vendor accepts now differ more than the models do.
The American order has fixed quantities and deliveries running to 2033, while Taiwan's far larger domestic drone program was handed an annual ceiling already below what the defense ministry planned to spend next year.
The Air Force bought an enterprise open-source alerting subscription for the whole US military — competitively, and from a vendor that says it deliberately avoided frontier models.
The Army's autonomous breaching package finished two weeks of live fire at Fort Bragg built almost entirely from small-vendor hardware, and goes to Fort Irwin in October.
A binding TRISO fuel contract signed six days before the Army's Janus award is what lets Radiant promise sealed, pre-fueled microreactors to Fort Benning. The reactor was never the hard part.
Ukraine showed that drone warfare turns on the network connecting sensors and shooters. The US Army now has a working answer in NGC2, but the leaders and the unit that forced its adoption are being removed as the technology matures.
Mara closed a $7 million pre-seed for Spike, a counter-drone system built around a 250-gram autonomous interceptor priced to beat the FPV drones now driving most combat casualties.
The retrofit moves Hivemind beyond Shield AI aircraft, but five virtual satellites show how far the demonstration remains from autonomous fleet operations.
Motorola closed its $1.5 billion D-Fend purchase a quarter ahead of guidance and put D-Fend's chief executive over a standing counter-drone platform, a structure aimed at airports and stadiums rather than the front.
Deterrence has never held a Pentagon contract. Its first named assignment is the Mesquite line that took $533 million in Army funding and produced no usable shell.
Lockheed Martin bolted a JAGM launcher to the bow of a Saildrone Surveyor and the Navy's own fire control pulled the trigger at RIMPAC. The demonstration produced two shots and no order.
The Nigerian drone maker raised $52 million on a pitch about defense sovereignty, then aimed its expansion at Western capital and procurement institutions.
A two-year-old autonomy startup announced a $100 million Pentagon contract. The federal notice matching that description is a prize challenge offering up to $100 million across multiple awards.
The Army stood up a 600-soldier battalion in January to turn Ukraine's drone lessons into US tactics. Eight months later it is taking the drone mission away and has not said what replaces it.
Castelion's $1 billion Series C at a $13 billion valuation puts private money behind a Pentagon production plan that still depends on successful tests, a procurement contract and Congress.
Heaviside's $60 million Series B came with a warhead-supply agreement from Nammo, the Norwegian maker with 27 production sites. The startup still has no named program and no delivery date.
Lyntris priced below range, cut its IPO by seven million shares and fell 11.4% on debut. Public investors now want GAAP profit, lower leverage and core growth from defense tech, while private capital still entertains an Anduril valuation near $100 billion.
Six commercial trucks will carry mine-clearing, lane-marking and counter-drone payloads for combat engineers under a $14.3 million sole-source Overland AI contract due in October 2027.
The Army is paying $46 million for an autonomous hybrid-VTOL that can resupply several positions per sortie with no runway, no pilot and nobody at the drop point, and to make that work under jamming.
Blue Ops supplies the drone boats and Havoc supplies the fleet software. Planned test fleets in two states are the next step toward a defense customer.
An Air Force prototype agreement gives Xos a route into defense, but the commercial charging company must still adapt and deliver its mobile battery system for field use.
The Navy's $22.9 billion, seven-year Tomahawk award gives Raytheon the certainty to build toward 1,000 missiles a year. It does not buy back the 1,000-plus fired at Iran: rocket-motor lead times set the clock, while Ukraine's Fire Point builds 100 cheaper cruise missiles a month.
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.
Ukrainian operators dismantled a US armored brigade in a German exercise. The Army's FY2027 answer shifts drone selection toward soldiers and tests whether industry can keep pace.
Investors bet $3.4 billion on Monday that cheap interceptor missiles win the counter-drone war. The same week, the Pentagon capped what it will pay for them and funded two rival ways of killing drones.
Archer Aviation is acquiring Boeing's Insitu, Wisk Aero and SkyGrid for equity rather than cash, picking up a Group 3 drone maker with $200 million in revenue and customers in 35 countries.
An expanded contract gives NCSIST the ability to build AI pilots locally for drones that can keep operating when electronic warfare breaks the operator link.
Ukrainian operators lose the radio link before impact and the strike lands anyway. Over Edwards Air Force Base, an AI agent flew 27 intercepts on a passive infrared feed. Both ends of the price curve are solving the same problem.
Trump promised Kyiv a licence to build Patriot missiles, then took it back. The reason sits in a depleted US arsenal and a single Alabama factory, not in the president's mood.
Ukraine's $2,000 interceptor drones stop nine in ten Shaheds. Its ballistic defense depends on a Lockheed line building 52 interceptors a month, and Trump has withdrawn the licence that was Kyiv's way around it.
The M270 MLRS is a tracked, armored rocket-artillery launcher carrying two interchangeable ammunition pods for guided rockets and longer-range strike missiles.
Adversaries are winning with recontextualized real footage and propaganda aimed at the AI answer layer. Western money is still buying deepfake detectors whose accuracy collapses on exactly that content.
Prime contractors have joined a record $4.1 billion of venture rounds in 2026, per Dealroom. PitchBook's segment data shows the capital concentrating in autonomy software and systems integration rather than in platforms.
AeroVironment is buying its swarm autonomy from a $15 billion software house instead of building it, a split that tells you where the margin in launched effects is heading.
Task Force Talon Synapse puts about 20 US and Emirati AI specialists in Abu Dhabi, giving CENTCOM a forward model-development cell in the theater where it is already running a strike campaign.
Swarmer will pipe its combat-tested swarm software into Brightline's SpatialCore, trading Ukrainian telemetry for a wider training set and access to Department of War contracting lanes.
The Pentagon signed seven-year framework deals with L3Harris to nearly triple PAC-3 MSE and quadruple THAAD propulsion output, three days after interceptor-stockpile warnings paused the Iran campaign.
DIU tapped the two-year-old startup to plan sustainment for US Army Europe and Africa, starting with medical resupply and casualty evacuation for the Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative.
Five prototype teams will compete to pull US soldiers off high-risk resupply routes, with field testing alongside operational units set for early 2027.
A $9.25 billion Texas autonomy firm and one of Korea's three biggest shipbuilders will co-develop autonomous vessels and robot-driven production lines for American shipyards.
Reuters says investors are weighing a two-stage deal that would price the nine-year-old drone maker near Lockheed Martin's market value, a day after Bloomberg reported its Rheinmetall partnership shrank.
A $10 million award buys the Pentagon an orchestration layer rather than another airframe, software meant to hold a commander's intent across drones, boats and ground robots from any maker after electronic warfare kills the link.
A bilateral statement of intent opens a formal export channel for Ukrainian land, air and maritime drones into Pentagon testing, though neither government has confirmed it and it commits nobody to buy anything.
Forbes puts named contracts on a $1.2 billion startup whose only customer is the Pentagon and whose software runs offensive cyber campaigns hundreds at a time.
Allen Control Systems' autonomous turret joins L-MADIS under a prototype agreement worth about $6.2 million, adding bullets to a counter-drone platform that has run on jamming.
Anduril and Archer unveiled Thunder, an autonomous tiltrotor built to fly beside Apaches after lessons from Ukraine made attack helicopters some of the most exposed platforms on the battlefield.
A US Army-supported flight on July 16 put autonomous spectrum warfare in the air for the first time, pairing a prime's jamming stack with the AI pilot slated to fly the X-BAT fighter.
A Kansas City-launched firm cleared a gate in the Pentagon's search for a container that launches, recovers and refits drone fleets with a crew of two, the bottleneck sitting between the Army's million-drone plan and the air.
The first live missile shot from a US robotic wingman came ten months after first flight and ran on Anduril's own Lattice software, in the middle of a three-way autonomy contest the Air Force decides by summer 2027.
NATO is testing the $61 billion startup's AI software as the data backbone for air operations across 32 nations, with one of three platforms winning long-term implementation.
CENTCOM named the platform behind the first combat strike by American sea drones: three Saronic-built Corsairs hit Iran's Bandar Abbas naval port on July 12.
Teledyne FLIR's Black Recon is a vehicle-launched autonomous micro-drone system that lets a crew launch, operate, recover and recharge up to three UAVs without leaving the vehicle, delivering near-continuous GNSS-denied reconnaissance. Market-launched at Eurosatory 2026.
Lockheed Martin's GRIZZLY is a containerized missile launcher, tested in June 2026 firing a JAGM to intercept a Group 3 attack drone at Yuma, that fuses Lockheed's Sanctum battle-management software and Fortem R-40 radars into one counter-drone kill chain.
The Perennial Hornet is a ~$5,000 AI-guided one-way strike drone from Eric Schmidt's Perennial Autonomy — an optically navigated fixed-wing aircraft Ukrainian units use to burn Russian supply trucks 50-150 km behind the front, the workhorse of Kyiv's "logistics lockdown" campaign.
CACI's SkyValor is a long-range, autonomous counter-drone system that defeats UAS without gunfire, jamming their links and firing nets to capture them intact. The Pentagon validated it for use across the entire US Joint Force in June 2026 after a southern-border test.
