The department premiered WarMatrix for its inaugural use at the March 27 GE 26 Benchmark Wargame, marking the system’s move from development into operational capacity, according to a Tuesday Air Force release.

WarMatrix, described by the force as an “active wargaming environment,” is an AI-powered system that integrates existing models, data and workflows while expediting analysis.

The Air Force at the end of 2025 said it was looking for technology capable of producing simulations 10,000 times faster than real time.

WarMatrix is a “human-machine teaming system” meant to keep human judgment integral to planning and decision making, according to the release.

The use of WarMatrix during the event served as the system’s initial operating concept evaluation, signaling a change in how the Air Force conducts operational analysis and wargaming.

“Designed by wargamers for wargamers, WarMatrix provides transparency, auditability and speed, enabling decision-makers to better understand assumptions, outcomes and tradeoffs,” the statement reads.

Air Force leaders portray WarMatrix as an evolution in wargaming rather than a replacement, and the release says that the use of WarMatrix provided a more “connected and traceable wargaming process.”

It also said that the system’s design allowed for faster scenario development, repeat findings and increased collaboration with joint and coalition partners.

The two-weekslong event, hosted at Systems Planning and Analysis in Alexandria, Virginia, was attended by more than 150 people, including technical experts, Air Force leadership and allied planners.

Attendees during the event fulfilled more than six 24-hour “game-time moves” that balanced physics- and simulation-based models to ensure outcomes were realistic.

The defense technology firm introduced the system, known as MAYHEM 10, which expands upon its Switchblade family.

The Army in February announced a $186 million purchase that includes two variants of Switchblade one-way attack, or “kamikaze,” drones: the Switchblade 600 Block 2 variant and the Switchblade 300 Block 20 variant.

The difference is that MAYHEM 10 is multifunctional, meaning it can perform tasks in addition to striking. The new system can carry a 10-pound payload and has a range of over 62 miles, per the release.

The system is capable of 50 minutes of endurance, with a launch assembly that can be done in under five minutes, the statement says. It can also be launched from the air, ground or maritime platforms.

“By integrating advanced autonomy, multi-domain payloads, and rapid adaptability, we empower our forces to sense, disrupt, and strike with precision — even in the most contested environments,” Wahid Nawabi, AeroVironment’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, said in the statement.

Last year, U.S. soldiers tested the Switchblade 600 system, which has a range of 27 miles and is designed to engage a target using onboard cameras.

The Switchblade 300 Block 20, unlike the heavier 600 variant, is small enough to be carried in a backpack. For the first time, according to a February AeroVironment announcement, it will come equipped with an Explosively Formed Penetrator, a deadly warhead that is made to penetrate armored vehicles.

The U.S. military is paving the way for the regular deployment of high-energy laser weapons on American soil for air defense amid the expanding threat of low-cost weaponized drones.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Defense Department have reached a “landmark safety agreement” regarding the use of laser weapons to counter unauthorized drones at the US-Mexico border following a safety assessment that concluded such countermeasures “do not pose undue risk to passenger aircraft,” the FAA announced Friday.

The assessment and resulting agreement were the direct result of two laser incidents along the southern border of Texas in February, which prompted the FAA to abruptly close nearby airspace amid concerns over the potential impact on civilian air traffic. The incidents involved the U.S. Army’s 20 kilowatt Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL), a vehicle-mounted version of defense contractor AV’s LOCUST Laser Weapon System.

In the first incident, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol personnel used an AMP-HEL on loan from the Pentagon to engage an unidentified target near Fort Bliss, triggering an airspace shutdown above El Paso on Feb. 11. In the second, U.S. military personnel used an AMP-HEL near Fort Hancock to neutralize a “seemingly threatening” drone that turned out to belong to CBP, spurring another shutdown on Feb. 27.

“Following a thorough, data-informed Safety Risk Assessment, we determined that these systems do not present an increased risk to the flying public,” FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement. “We will continue working with our interagency partners to ensure the National Airspace System remains safe while addressing emerging drone threats.”

The “first of its kind” safety assessment, conducted in early March by the FAA and the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401) counter-drone organization at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, reportedly yielded two significant conclusions: 1) the LOCUST’s automatic shutoff mechanism will consistently prohibit the system from firing under unsafe circumstances, a point that AV executives have emphasized in recent weeks, and 2) in the event of a system failure, the laser beam itself cannot inflict catastrophic damage even on aircraft flying at its maximum effective range, let alone those at cruising altitudes.

Here’s how Aaron Westman, AV senior director for business development, described the LOCUST’s safety protocols in a company blog post on March 23:

Every time an operator presses the “fire” button, the system runs through a series of automated checks. Some examples include:

• Is the laser pointing away from protected “keep-out” zones?
• Are all internal subsystems operating within safe parameters?
• Is the system properly locked onto a target?
• Are safety interlock switches engaged?
• Are all software safety checks satisfied?

Each of these checks acts as a safety “vote.”

If any subsystem registers a “no vote,” the laser simply will not fire. An operator can press the trigger — and nothing happens. The system refuses to engage until all conditions are verified as safe.

These automated safeguards are built into both the hardware and the software of the system.

Here’s how DefenseScoop described the LOCUST’s potential effects on passing airframes based on an account from Army Col. Scott McLellan, JIATF-401 deputy director, of the testing at White Sands:

McLellan said the evaluation involved “localized” firing of the AMP-HEL from various distances at the fuselage of a Boeing 767 airliner that testers lugged on to White Sands to assess the system’s damaging effects, “or lack thereof” on aircraft material. He said it aimed to “disprove some myths” about the capability, noting “that energy clearly dissipates over time and space and doesn’t have the effect everyone thinks it does as far as lasers are concerned.”

A JIATF 401 spokesperson said the laser was fired at its “maximum effective range for up to 8 seconds” at the grounded fuselage, “demonstrating that even at full intensity, the laser caused no structural damage to the aircraft.”

As drone warfare spreads beyond distant conflicts, laser weapons are an increasingly attractive domestic countermeasure. While kinetic interceptors and electronic warfare may be considered suitable for chaotic battlefields, their potential for collateral effects makes them far too risky for consistent domestic applications. And even if collateral damage wasn’t a concern, expending expensive missiles on the 1,000 cartel-operated drones that cross the border with Mexico monthly is economically unsustainable, especially for a Pentagon that’s already rapidly burning through munitions as part of Operation Epic Fury against Iran. On paper, the argument seems obvious: Why not save those critical interceptors for high-end threats overseas and let domestic laser emplacements, with their deep magazines and minimal cost-per-shot, pull counter-drone duty at home?

Using laser weapons for domestic air defense wouldn’t be unprecedented. France deployed two 2 kw High Energy Laser for Multiple Applications – Power (HELMA-P) systems to secure the airspace over the country’s Île-de-France region during the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics. This past September, China’s People’s Liberation Army deployed several laser weapons across Beijing during a major military parade marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat at the end of World War II. As of January, the U.K. Ministry of Defense was reportedly drawing up plans to build a domestic laser screen, albeit composed of lower-power laser dazzlers, to protect military installations and other critical infrastructure. The Pentagon has even already considered laser weapons to reinforce the airspace above Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s residences at Fort McNair in Washington following a series of unauthorized drone incursions there.

Indeed, there’s a distinct possibility that laser weapons could see increasing domestic applications amid the U.S. military’s growing appetite for novel drone defenses. On April 2, JIATF-401 announced that it had funneled $20 million in counter-drone systems like the Dronebuster EW handset and Smart Shooter computerized riflescope to the U.S.-Mexico border in just four months.

Days later, the task force announced $100 million to enhance counter-drone capabilities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup starting in June “to protect stadiums and fan zones in 11 cities across nine states,” part of larger $600 million surge in counter-drone systems that also allocated $158 million to “defend the nation’s highest-priority defense critical infrastructure.”

With the Pentagon asking for $580 million in R&D funding just for JIATF-401 in its fiscal year 2027 budget request (and potentially $800 million in procurement cash), the task force appears poised to explore any and all possible solutions to the drone problem — and operationally, the FAA-Pentagon safety agreement helps establish laser weapons as a viable option.

That said, the safety agreement on its own is unlikely to open the floodgates for a sudden spate of laser weapon deployments along the U.S.-Mexico border, let alone for major events like the World Cup or critical infrastructure just yet. First, the agreement doesn’t appear to clarify who has final say in authorizing a laser engagement when U.S. military, CBP and FAA jurisdictions overlap — the precise ambiguity that yielded February’s airspace closures and, until resolved, will complicate future engagements during a fast-moving crisis. Second, the U.S. military’s arsenal of operational laser weapons is currently limited despite a stated goal of rapidly fielding new systems at scale within three years. Even with clear plans to surge directed energy research and development for homeland defense under President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome for America” missile shield, the age of sleek beam directors quietly standing watch along the US-Mexico border remains a long way off.

The FAA agreement may end up laying the foundation for a true domestic laser air defense architecture — a “Laser Dome” in all but name. Whether the U.S. military actually builds it, however, will depend not just the Pentagon’s promise to deploy laser weapons at scale, but whether Washington can finally sort out who’s in charge when a beam crosses into civilian airspace.

The Pentagon announced the CAMP program last April with the release of a solicitation calling for a new class of XL-AUV, or extra large underwater vehicle.

The solicitation called for a large underwater vessel that could maneuver in GPS-denied environments, dive over roughly 656 feet (200 meters) deep and drop “various payloads to the sea floor.” It specified that the vessel had to stay underwater for prolonged periods and be able to be transported and recovered easily by commercially available freight and logistics equipment.

Anduril was chosen for the CAMP program after wrapping the longest-ever XL-AUV demonstration, per a company statement. It will conduct an extended demonstration of its Dive-XL platform within four months of contract award.

“The subsea domain currently is patrolled and serviced by a very small number of exquisite capabilities,” Dr. Shane Arnott, senior vice president of Anduril’s maritime division, told reporters at a March 11 roundtable. “The Pacific and also the High North, which is the new fight that’s starting around the Arctic, are water-based fights. So it’s a no-brainer that robots are needed to supplement the crewed systems.”

The Dive-XL meets many of the desired features noted in the original CAMP solicitation. The vehicle is propelled by an all-electric powertrain that allows it to speed through the depths without needing to break the surface and can travel in excess of 2,000 nautical miles.

It has a highly flexible design that be modified for different mission types, including reconnaissance, and can carry up to three payload modules at once. These loads can include smaller unmanned underwater vehicles, effectively making the Dive-XL an type of mothership for even smaller drones that can conduct surveillance or strike underwater.

Additionally, the Dive-XL platform fits into commercial freight containers and can be transported via train or trucks, which corresponds to the Navy’s demand for a modular, easy-to-use system.

Anduril’s selection for the project follows its formal adoption last September by the Royal Australian Navy to deliver a fleet of AI unmanned submarine called Ghost Sharks within the next three years.

Video released Wednesday shows the next-gen munitions being launched in open desert terrain from M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems as part of Operation Epic Fury. The operation against Iran has seen a variety of precision munitions launched from land, sea and air, according to CENTCOM.

“I just could not be prouder of our men and women in uniform leveraging innovation to create dilemmas for the enemy,” Adm. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM commander, said in a release.

The PrSM is enhanced with GPS capabilities to navigate in flight and can accurately strike targets from around 250 miles away. Its warhead is designed to deliver a fragmentation effect when it explodes, increasing power on impact. The missile, meanwhile, is reportedly built to withstand turbulent in-flight conditions.

The PrSM is among a wide array of advanced technological assets the U.S. military has deployed during its ongoing operations in Iran.

Other notable weapon deployments in the ongoing conflict include Patriot Interceptor Missile Systems and THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems. LUCAS one-way attack drones were also used for the first time in combat by the U.S. Special Operations Command-led Task Force Scorpion Strike.

Specific details about the targets engaged by the PrSMs have not been provided as of publication.

Prior to its combat debut, the U.S. Army was working with Lockheed Martin to ramp up production capacity for the munition, Defense News reported last October.

The Army tested its short-range and long-range capabilities on White Sands Missile Range in April and September of last year. Tests saw the munitions fired from HIMARS systems as well as the M270A2 Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS.

Operation Epic Fury has seen over 2,000 military targets across Iran destroyed, the Pentagon said, including a naval frigate that was sunk in the first torpedo kill by a U.S. Navy submarine since World War II.

The Defense Department’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 announced the agreement with Perennial Autonomy on February 4, which will see deliveries of the Bumblebee V2 start next month.

The Bumblebee V2, a first-person view drone with four rotors, acts as its own drone hunter-killer system. Advanced artificial intelligence software enables it to identify other unmanned aerial vehicles and engage them in combat. It attacks other drones and knocks them out of the sky with a direct physical collision.

“This decision puts kinetic [counter-small] UAS capability into the hands of our troops immediately,” Army Brig. Gen. Matthew Ross, JIATF-401 director, said in a statement.

“The Bumblebee V2 provides a cost-effective, reliable interceptor that can neutralize threats without endangering our own forces or surrounding infrastructure. On the modern battlefield, where drones are a constant threat, having a low-collateral kinetic option is not just an advantage; it is increasingly becoming essential for protecting our forces.”

Direct physical strikes on unmanned aerial vehicles, known as “hard kills,” can produce a blast radius and scatter sharp debris when munitions are used.

With a drone-on-drone strike, the Bumblebee minimizes these risks. Having one flying drone tackle another eliminates the need for bullets and potentially harmful explosions. This potential could see the Bumblebee used efficiently in urban areas.

Additionally, the system is compliant with updated regulations in the National Defense Authorization Act, which has strict requirements for the use of foreign components. Drones with NDAA compliance, such as the HANX drone developed by the U.S. Marines, can be adopted for military use with immediate effect.

The Army’s Global Response Force will assess the system in support of the Lt. Gen. James M. Gavin Joint Innovation Outpost, a new facility opened at Fort Bragg on Jan. 3 to bring together soldiers, academics and private industry to develop and test new technology.

The vulnerability to such “prompt injection attacks” exists because large language models, the backbone of chatbots that digest hordes of user text to generate responses, cannot distinguish between malicious and trusted user instructions.

“The AI is not smart enough to understand that it has an injection inside, so it carries out something it’s not supposed to do,” Liav Caspi, a former member of the Israel Defense Forces cyberwarfare unit, told Defense News.

In effect, “an enemy has been able to turn somebody from the inside to do what they want,” such as deleting records or biasing decisions, according to Caspi, who co-founded Legit Security, which recently spotted one such security hole in Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot.

“It’s like having a spy in your ranks,” he said.

Former military officials say that, with greater reliance on chatbots and hackers backed by China, Russia and other nations already instructing Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Copilot to create malware and fake personas, a prompt injection that orders the bots themselves to copy files or spread lies looms near.

Microsoft’s annual digital defense report, released last month, for the first time said, “AI systems themselves have become high-value targets, with adversaries amping up use of methods like prompt injection.”

What’s more, the problem of prompt injection has no easy solution, OpenAI and security researchers say.

An attack simply involves hiding malicious instructions — sometimes in white or tiny text — in a chatbot or content that the chatbot reads, such as a blog post or PDF.

For example, a security researcher demonstrated a prompt injection attack against OpenAI’s new AI-based browser, ChatGPT Atlas, in which the chatbot responded, “Trust No AI,” when a user asked for an analysis of a Google Docs file about horses that concealed malicious commands. Also, last month, a researcher tipped Microsoft off to a prompt injection vulnerability in Copilot that may have allowed attackers to trick the chatbot into stealing sensitive data, including emails.

In an emailed statement, Microsoft said its security team continuously tries hacking Copilot to find any prompt injection vulnerabilities, blocks users who try to exploit any found and monitors for abnormal chatbot behavior, among other tactics.

“Microsoft ensures its generative AI systems remain resilient against evolving threats for all our customers, including defense and national security,” the statement said.

Responding publicly to criticism on X, Dane Stuckey, OpenAI’s chief information security officer, wrote that “prompt injection remains a frontier, unsolved security problem, and our adversaries will spend significant time and resources to find ways to make ChatGPT agent fall for these attacks.”

Along the same lines, Caspi said, “You cannot prevent the prompt injection [fully], but you need to limit the impact.” He advised that organizations limit an AI assistant’s access to sensitive data and limit the user’s access to other organizational data.

For instance, the Army has awarded contracts worth at least $11 million to deploy Ask Sage, a tool that lets users restrict which Army data Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Gemini and other AI models can access to run queries and tasks. Ask Sage also isolates Army data from user prompts and external data sources.

Caspi, who is not an Army contractor, likened a prompt injection attack against an organization running Ask Sage to a lockdown situation where “you’ve got this insider, but it’s sitting in one room, and it can’t leave the room or carry out sensitive information.”

Andre Slonopas, a Virginia Army National Guard member and former Army cyber and information operations officer, uses Ask Sage and voiced confidence in the Army’s defensive AI tools, if not those of nuclear power plants or manufacturing entities, largely in rural, poorer areas.

The Virginia National Guard joined with essential services, such as power utilities, to help defend their networks against AI-powered cyberattacks, as part of a September simulation, given that service disruptions can jeopardize military preparations.

Typically, an adversary encrypts its network traffic to evade detection, but, for the sake of an experiment, organizers did not encrypt the AI offender’s traffic because “we wanted the blue team [of humans] to see exactly what the AI was doing,” Slonopas said.

“The blue team was absolutely defeated,” despite being able to watch the AI scanning its networks, creating fake usernames to gain unauthorized access and executing instructions to defeat the team’s systems.

“Whether the AI is doing prompt injection, spoofing or maybe even some sort of a brute force attack, the speed of AI is so unbelievably immense that simply human beings cannot counter it,” and, therefore, “you have to make cybersecurity AI more accessible and more affordable,” Slonopas said.

“If a water utility has to pay, say, $30,000 for a defensive AI license, well, it will amplify one person to be like 40″ or dozens of personnel, he said.

In response to questions, Army Cyber Command spokesperson Kyle Alvarez said in an emailed statement, “Due to the current lapse in appropriations, ARCYBER was unable to accept or respond to any media engagements or requests.”

Army contractors, too, are under attack from state-affiliated AI.

“China is using offensive AI like nobody else,” said Nicolas Chaillan, the founder of Ask Sage and a former U.S. Air Force and Space Force chief software officer.

“We see so many attacks coming after us,” all of which the company has stopped, Chaillan added.

A military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the geopolitical sensitivity of the matter, said that China does “appear” to be the most skilled in offensive AI. However, the official added, AI spoofing and translation allow the United States, China, Iran, other countries, hacktivists and financial cybercriminals to masquerade as one another.

For example, the official said, “Right now, with ChatGPT, I can program in Chinese. I don’t speak Chinese, but because of the ChatGPT capabilities that I have, I can do that.”

Aliya Sternstein, J.D., is an investigative journalist who has covered technology, cognition, and national security since Napster shut down, working for various outlets including Atlantic Media, Christian Science Monitor, Daily Beast, Forbes Magazine and Just Security. She is also a research analyst at Georgetown Law.

In 2021 the 1st Multidomain Task Force, 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade at Joint Base Lewis-McChord received all equipment — except for the actual live rounds — for the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon capability it calls Dark Eagle.

The Washington state-based unit was supposed to get the missiles in fall 2023 but several aborted test events forced the Army to push back its fielding plans.

The first three missiles were distributed to the unit earlier this year, with the last of the munitions arriving in July. The fourth round is currently going through acceptance checkouts at Lockheed Martin’s facility in Cortland, Alabama, Lozano said. The final eight are expected to be delivered “by the end of December,” Lozano said.

The Army is also aiming to conduct a hypersonic missile test around the same time.

“That will complete the basic load for battery one, up at JBLM,” he added. “Then … we’ll start working on Battery Two.”

The fielding of the munitions follows a lengthy delay in the testing process. Several tests of the round were aborted in 2023 due to challenges at the range and the hiccups in the process of firing up the missile for launch.

Testing the all-up round was considered critical to ensure the system was safe, effective and ready for fielding.

The U.S. is presently in a race to field the capability and develop systems to defend against hypersonic weapons, which China and Russia are actively developing and testing.

The Army conducted an end-to-end successful flight test of its hypersonic missile at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii in May 2024, which put the initial fielding to the first unit closer on the horizon.

While the process of equipping the Army with the weapon has taken nearly two years longer than planned, service officials have been quick to point out that missile development programs typically take about 10 years. The LRHW program, meanwhile, is only just beyond the five-year mark.

The Army has worked with Leidos’ Dynetics for years to build the industrial base for the Common-Hypersonic Glide Body that will be used by both the ground service and the Navy, as the domestic private sector has never built a hypersonic weapon.

The service also separately produced launchers, trucks, trailers and the battle operations center necessary to put together the first weapon battery.

Lockheed Martin is the weapon system integrator for the Army’s hypersonic capability that will be launched from a mobile truck.

In preparation for receiving the all-up rounds, the Army completed its delivery of the first hypersonic weapon capability — minus the rounds — to the Multi-Domain Task Force unit at JBLM two days ahead of its end-of-fiscal 2021 fielding deadline. The unit has been training on the system since the delivery.

The next phase of production will ramp up quickly once delivery to the first battery is complete.

“The second tranche of production is both Battery Two and the Battery One reload,” Lozano said. “That’s a very complex missile system. Although we’ve gotten through the testing of the system and we’re confident that it works, we’re still working through how to take a prototype system that’s complex and transition it into production, where you have a very repeatable process that drives out quality defects.

“We’re in the middle of that process right now,” Lozano added. “Things that we’re wrestling with every day is we’ll build up part of the missile and we’ll take the boost phase rocket motor and mate it to the missile midsection and then the inspector will come by and we’ll find some defects that we will have to work and address. … We’re learning as we build these missiles.”

Speed, of course, brings added challenges, Lozano acknowledged.

“Just the nature of having gone so fast — if you were doing a typical 10- or 15-year missile program, you drive all this risk out of the program and you’d be delivering on time. You’d just be delivering 10 years from now.”

Yet, “the good news is that we’re making progress now,” he said. “We just have to keep our foot on the gas pedal and continue to push forward and make more progress.”

The system is the Greyshark from Germany’s EuroAtlas, an autonomous underwater vehicle measuring 6.5 meters in length and weighing as much as a delivery van. It is one of the naval drones the German Navy brought to the Portuguese coastal town of Sesimbra to partake in NATO’s Dynamic Messenger and REPMUS exercises.

These drills, which focused on testing over 200 unmanned systems, ran for three weeks in local waters.

An important portion of the training was dedicated to mine countermeasures warfare and the protection of critical underwater infrastructure. European navies are in the process of retooling their naval de-mining procedures with the help of autonomous systems and forward-deployed sensors to keep human divers away from the dangerous work.

Exercise participants employed different types of naval drones to perfect mine hunting operations, which entails the complex work or coordinating the work of multiple robots simultaneously.

“Command and control, for instance, is much more complicated than it was before, because you’re bringing more [robotic] systems into the network – it requires more coordination, more people and a bigger orchestration of small tasks,” Cmdr. Andreas Montag, head of the maritime unmanned systems 3rd Minesweeping Squadron at the German Navy, said.

During REPMUS, the Greyshark, equipped with four high-resolution sonars, LIDAR scanners, electromagnetic detection and two camera systems, was tested for hunting submarines and searching for decoy mines. Officials said that it can reach ranges of up to 8,000 nautical miles, or from Sesimbra to New York and back.

The German Navy also demonstrated two other naval drones from vendor EvoLogics: the Sonobot unmannedsurface vessel and the Quadroin AUV.

The Sonobot was described as acting as a “surface gateway” throughout the exercise, providing underwater positioning and data networks – both wifi and GPS underwater – to other autonomous systems. It is also in use with the Ukrainian military to survey water bodies and detect dangerous objects.

The Quadroin is the underwater variant of the Sonobot, and up to six were used simultaneously during certain missions to look for mines as a swarm.

“For the first time this year, we were able to not only detect mines but also identify them and get a video picture from each one during a single mission – for this the Quadroins split up their roles, some ran a sweep search of the sea floor while others directly swarm to the target and took a picture,” Rui Madeira, commander of the divers group of the Portuguese Navy said during a demonstration on Sept 23.

From manual to machine

Each week, the scenarios and tasks assigned increased in difficulty to test the readiness of the different units. For example, diver groups initially knew the zone they had to work in, but would later on find out only shortly before their missions and faced strict time constraints to complete the objective.

The French Navy tested the A9-M AUV, manufactured by Exail, during naval mine warfare operations. The platform was first deployed to survey the seabed, the sonar data were then evaluated on shore, and the potential mines were confirmed by divers or remotely operated vehicles.

For Louis, an officer with the French EOD diver group, the next phase regarding the use of unmanned technology in mine warfare operations will be the integration of artificial intelligence.

“Integrating AI into these drones would allow them to independently classify the threats they detect in the field – currently, the majority of the classification of sonar data is done by human operators after they’ve extracted the data from the system and analyzed on a computer onshore,” the officer, who withheld his last name for security reasons, told Defense News.

While technology is progressing quickly, some hiccups remain.

This was the case with the British Navy, which relied on the REMUS 100 AUV from the company HII to carry out collaborative missions with the U.S. and Dutch Navies.

One naval officer said that on a few occasions during the training, the vehicle overheated due to high temperatures experienced earlier this month. Ad-hoc solutions included keeping the drone cool with blankets and deploying it earlier in the day.

Another mishap involved two Sonobots from the German Navy that collided during a demonstration. Plus, at one point, a Portuguese fishing boat ventured into the exercise zone and struck the French A-9M system, damaging the drone enough that officials had to take it out of the demonstration.

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said Monday that Anduril’s collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA, will take its first flight in mid-October. Meink made his comments in a roundtable with reporters at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Space Cyber conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

Anduril’s drone, designated the YFQ-44A, is one of two that the Air Force is considering for its first increment of the CCA program, along with General Atomics’ YFQ-42A. General Atomics’ CCA took flight for the first time in August at an unidentified location in California.

In a briefing with reporters Monday, Anduril officials said they were “within spitting distance” of the YFQ-44A’s first flight, and expressed confidence in their ability to adhere to the program’s schedule.

Developing a fleet of semiautonomous CCAs to fly alongside advanced crewed fighters like the F-35 and F-47 is a top priority for the Air Force. The service wants a fleet of at least 1,000 CCAs to conduct strike missions, collect reconnaissance, carry out jamming operations and even serve as decoys to lure enemy fire away from the fighters.

The Air Force announced in April 2024 that Anduril and General Atomics had won the first CCA contracts, and the service plans to develop additional CCA versions in an incremental approach.

In a graphic posted online in May, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said CCAs would have stealth comparable to that of the F-35, a combat radius of more than 700 nautical miles — greater than the F-35A and F-22 — and be operational later this decade.

Anduril is now in the final stages before beginning the YFQ-44A’s flight testing, with multiple vehicles undergoing ground testing at the company’s test facility, said Diem Salmon, the company’s vice president for air dominance and strike.

Having several copies of its CCA available will make it easier to launch a “more expansive flight test profile” in 2026, Salmon said.

Anduril deferred to the Air Force when asked about Meink’s prediction of a mid-October first flight.

From the start, Salmon said, Anduril’s goal has been to ensure its CCA is semiautonomous in all aspects, from takeoff to flight to landing. The YFQ-44A has already been conducting semiautonomous taxiing, she said, which means “we hit a button, it goes to the points that’s been designated by that vehicle, completes its taxi [and] returns.”

Similarly, she said, Anduril wants the YFQ-44A’s first flight to involve takeoff and landing at the push of a button.

“There is no stick and throttle,” Salmon said. “It will be able to execute the actual first flight profile, preplanned, using autonomy software on the vehicle.”

While the YFQ-44A’s first flight will not be remotely piloted by humans, Salmon said, there will still be humans on the ground overseeing what the CCA does.

General Atomics spokesman C. Mark Brinkley said it conducts first flights of all new aircraft, including the YFQ-42A, with remotely piloted flights to better collect data and minimize risk.

“The performance data obtained this way is invaluable to the success of our aircraft programs,” Brinkley said. “We have no reason to and no interest in doing it any other way.”

Brinkley said General Atomics’ autonomy track record is proven, and drones such as the Gray Eagle, Reaper, Avenger and others regularly use the company’s automatic takeoff and landing capability.

“YFQ-42A is designed for semiautonomous flight, and that’s not even in question,” Brinkley said. “This is like saying I never expected my baby to crawl, but go straight from the crib to the Air Force Marathon.”

Salmon said Anduril’s decision to jump straight to semiautonomous flight with the YFQ-44A meant its engineers had to work hard to get the software right, and that has taken more time.

“The team has been heads down, getting to that goal for CCA,” Salmon said. “There’s just a little bit more on the software development side that needs to get wrung out. That’s what’s currently driving our schedule right now.”

But achieving semiautonomous flight early, even if it means a later first flight, will allow Anduril to progress through testing more quickly, she said.

“That’s going to allow us to leapfrog the overall test plan, because we are tackling that hard part first,” Salmon said.

Jason Levin, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering for air dominance and strike, also said the company did not have its own ground control station for a human to handle takeoff and landing, and would have had to develop one if it didn’t go straight to semiautonomous flight. That would have been “a step backwards, because we really want to get to this semiautonomous thing and wring out that problem.”

Levin said development of the company’s CCA has moved quickly, from passing its preliminary design review in 2024 to launching ground testing in May. That is the same month General Atomics’ CCA began ground testing.

The software required to semiautonomously fly the YFQ-44A required a major in-house development effort and a “clean sheet” design, Levin said. The company has developed similar software for other products, he said.

“But to get to the level of rigor and complexity for CCA has been a different beast to handle,” Levin said. “It’s been a parallel effort, [with] the hardware teams working everything from electrical systems, avionics, fuel system and the jet itself, as well as the software” at the same time.

Levin said Anduril’s CCA will first fly with only its semiautonomous flight capabilities intact, and the programming to carry out missions will come later.

Integrating the software with the YFQ-44A’s avionics and other hardware has been the greatest challenge so far, Levin said.

Anduril’s timeline for first flight is a slight slip from its predictions earlier this year. After Anduril’s CCA entered ground testing in May, the company said it expected to begin flight tests this summer.

Anduril officials downplayed the significance of conducting their first flight in the fall instead of the summer.

“It was not a race to get to first flight as fast as humanly possible,” Salmon said. “It was, how do we field this really advanced and novel capability as fast as we can? And with that comes the recognition that the autonomy is the hard part here.”