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.”

The vehicle was the latest version of the company’s Mission Master series, shipped to Portugal to partake in NATO’s Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping using Unmanned Systems, or REPMUS, from Sept. 1-26 in local waters.

The drill, led by the Portuguese Navy, brought together 24 participating countries that tested 276 unmanned systems for maritime operations.

For the first time abroad, the Canadian-made UGV successfully navigated from high seas to shore, demonstrating its potential for amphibious operations.

“The Mission Master was embarked on a warship that navigated into challenging waters and was dropped into the sea, with a crane, and its mission was to effectively navigate back to the beach near the testing site,” Étienne Rancourt, director of international business development at Rheinmetall Canada, told Defense News here.

The bulky ground robot stood out at the Portuguese Navy Operational Experimentation Centre, located on the Tróia Peninsula, a coastal area south of Lisbon, as it was surrounded mainly by naval and aerial drones.

The amphibious variant displayed here, which Rancourt called the Mission Master 2.0, was equipped with an internally developed mast, a tethered drone from the French company Elistair, a radar from U.S. manufacturer Echodyne, and electro-sensors.

“The version you’re seeing here is with upgrades all based on feedback from current operators, including the U.S., Norway, the UK, etc. These are mainly all focused on increased robustness and stability of the vehicle,” Rancourt said.

Global militaries are increasingly looking to unmanned robots for supporting roles in amphibious operations. These systems can serve as advanced scouts, sent ahead of human troops to collect intelligence about the terrain or enemy positions, and are also able to provide logistic support during complex water-to-land transitions.

In April, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense approved the deployment of the Ukrainian-made UNEX amphibious UGV to the front lines.

Displayed alongside the Mission Master was the Hero-120 loitering munition, offered in partnership with American-Israeli manufacturer Uvision as part of Rheinmetall’s portfolio for European customers.

A representative from Uvision USA told Defense News that the system was used in an exercise scenario as a quick-reaction force.

“We were shortly notified of our mission, and within two minutes of receiving the coordinates of the target, we were set up on the beach to launch and strike it,” he said.

“Unmanned systems pose both an urgent and enduring threat to U.S. personnel, facilities, and assets overseas,” the Pentagon said in a statement Thursday announcing the strategy. “By producing a singular Strategy for Countering Unmanned Systems, the Secretary and the Department are orienting around a common understanding of the challenge and a shared approach to addressing it.”

One-way aerial drone attacks have spiked in recent years, and the Pentagon has grown increasingly concerned by the threats they pose to the U.S. and its allies. For more than a year, Iran-backed Houthi rebel groups have been using small unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, to target ships in the Red Sea, and killer drones have featured heavily in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

DOD officials have said the department is taking a layered approach to defending against enemy drones, meaning the U.S. will pursue a range of capabilities to disable these systems, from electronic warfare to kinetic weapons. The military services have a number of ongoing programs to develop and field this technology.

Austin’s strategy is aligned with these and other high-level DOD efforts, including those led by the Joint Counter-Small UAS office, which was established in 2019 to coordinate counter-UAS development, tactics and training across the military services.

The strategy also closely follows the second phase of Replicator, which is focused on rapidly fielding off-the-shelf counter-drone technology. Austin, who announced Replicator 2 in September, said the Pentagon plans to request funding in fiscal 2026 and set a two-year timeline for delivering “meaningfully improved” counter-UAS systems.

An unclassified fact sheet released Thursday sheds some light on the department’s strategy, laying out five lines of effort it plans to pursue. These include: improving its ability to detect, track and characterize drone threats; launching focused campaigns to counter “threat networks”; making counter-drone defense a core piece of its doctrine, training and policy; quickly fielding counter-UAS technology and prioritizing funding for these capabilities; and placing a greater emphasis on countering unmanned systems in its force development and design efforts.

The strategy emphasizes the need for partnerships with Congress, defense and commercial industries and allies. It also pledges to create clear metrics to track its progress, though it’s unclear if those details will be publicly released.

“This strategy marks a critical next step in the Department of Defense’s efforts to counter unmanned systems, but much work lies ahead,” the fact sheet states. “Although the rapidly evolving nature of the threats posed by adversary use of unmanned systems means that the department will need to continually reassess our efforts, this strategy sets a foundation for action to meet this challenge.”

France and the U.K. are moving to stand-off mine countermeasures, a choice also made by the Netherlands and Belgium, while others including Italy and Germany are sticking with crewed minehunter vessels augmented by remote vehicles and drones, said Chris Cunnell. the Thales product line manager for autonomous mine countermeasures.

“Navies are going one of two routes,” Cunnell told Defense News at the Euronaval industry show outside Paris last week. “They’re either going to complete standoff – U.K., France, Belgium, Netherlands, the U.S. are all going a very similar route: They want to have crew outside of the minefield. Other navies have a philosophy that they continue to want to have a crewed mine-hunting capability, so that’s a vessel that will go into the minefield.”

The fully remote option has only now become really possible, according to Cunnell. Thales spent nearly 10 years developing the system it is delivering to France and the U.K., and started sea trials towards the end of 2020.

“If you look at what the Italian Navy are doing, if you look at Germany, very different philosophies,” Cunnell said. “From a Thales perspective, we respect the fact that navies have different approaches, we can provide a toolbox and a system for both. It’s up to them.”

The systems for France and the U.K. include a portable operations center, unmanned surface vehicles using detection methods including towed sonar, and a remotely-operated vehicle to neutralize mines. Autonomous functionality in the system includes deployment and operation of payloads, as well as navigation by the unmanned surface vehicles, according to Cunnell.

The towed sonar provided by Thales uses multi-aspect synthetic aperture that is “very operationally efficient” at reducing false positives, which combined with system maturity and the open architecture makes the Thales system “the best out there,” according to Cunnell.

Thales sees “a lot of export opportunities” for the system, CEO Patrice Caine said in an interview at Euronaval “There are a lot of countries looking at it and saying, `We also want to keep our sailors safe,’ so to say.”

He told Defense News the company is in talks with potential customers, declining to provide further details.

As part of the program, France is buying eight autonomous underwater drones from French firm Exail equipped with high-resolution sonar from Thales, with an option to acquire eight more, the Armed Forces said in a statement late Thursday. The first drones are expected to be delivered in the first half of 2028, with eight drones delivered to the Navy by mid-2030.

The drones will have a length of 5 meters and a diameter of around 47 centimeters, weigh 500 kilograms, have 10 hours of mission autonomy and an ability to dive to 300 meters.

The autonomous minehunting system is designed to replace all of France’s current mine warfare resources, including minehunters, sonar-towing vessels and diving vessels, the ministry said.

Mine detection is also evolving, and Thales has been experimenting with light detection and ranging, “lidar” for short, for mine hunting, analogous to how radar uses electromagnetic waves and sonar uses sound propagation.

The testing is linked to the Royal Navy’s Peregrine program, which has Thales working with helicopter-drone maker Schiebel to supply the U.K. with a naval surveillance UAV. The companies are looking at new payloads and capabilities to integrate, including lidar, James Dickie, product line architect for mine warfare systems at Thales in the U.K., told Defense News.

The biggest challenge for lidar lies in applying sufficient energy so there’s enough light in the water column, and Thales for that reason is looking at applications for mine detection in relatively shallow waters of up to about 20 meters.

Lidar will probably not replace sonar, and Thales for now sees the technology as complementary. One advantage is that light can be used for detection in the turbulent upper layers of the ocean, the “bubble layer,” where sonar is less dependable as it doesn’t work in air, according to Dickie.

Sonar “finds it’s really hard to travel through bubbles,” Dickie said. Thales is focused on using lidar for the layer of 3 to 5 meters “where we do have the challenge with acoustic technology.”

One of the reasons why Thales has looked at lidar is the surface mine threat in the Black Sea, where mines have broken free from their tether and are floating around. Black Sea countries are going to need a solution for drifting mines, according to Dickie.

“They’re really difficult to manage,” Dickie said. “The solution today is a person with binoculars looking for them. That’s not very reliable.”

The company is looking at a range of sensors for mine detection, including electro-optical, thermal, long-wave infrared and millimeter radar, for use from airborne platforms such as drones, but also from unmanned surface vehicles. Dickie said he expects lidar to have underwater applications, complementary to other detection methods.

“We’re not saying one is better than the other, it’s more about how we can use them for the given context,” Dickie said. “If it’s a poor-visibility day, camera is not going to work, but you’re going to get some utility from lidar and you’ll get some utility from radar. So it’s about finding the right sensor for the job.”

Mines are starting to be designed with geometries and materials to make acoustic sensing less effective, and lidar may have a role to play there, as well as technologies such as quantum magnetometers, according to Dickie.

While many aspects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resemble World War I — trenches, barbed wires, heavy exchanges of artillery — the innovative use of drones has been game-changing. Unmanned systems are altering the character of warfare, and the ongoing integration of AI and robotics will further accelerate this dramatic shift. It is why these were my top modernization objectives during my tenure as Army secretary and secretary of defense.

The potency of unmanned systems is most pronounced when it comes to small aerial drones — essentially robots — that are used today to conduct the same tasks that soldiers performed in the past: reconnaissance, surveillance, targeting and direct attack. But they do it far more efficiently and accurately. For instance, when I was a platoon leader decades ago, it typically took a couple infantrymen to destroy a tank at a max range of 3,750 meters. Today, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can do the same at far greater distances, with better success, and at much less cost.

To date, Ukraine has destroyed over 10,000 Russian vehicles, nearly one-third of which are tanks. Many of these were killed by UAVs. Ukraine has also had great success using unmanned surface vehicles to sink or damage a number of Russian ships in the Black Sea.

The introduction of drone swarms — think of dozens or hundreds of UAVs being employed simultaneously — will make the battlefield more lethal than ever before. From a production perspective, generating such a number is not an arduous task. At a gathering this summer of the Aspen Strategy Group that focused on AI, I co-led a panel discussion where one former U.S. official reported that Kyiv is acquiring well over 50,000 drones a month. The speed and cost at which the Ukrainians can do this compared to the United States is shocking.

As important, because the software on these drones is easily modified, Ukraine’s military can keep up with the changing threats and tactics of the modern battlefield. This is something many of our existing platforms, which are defined — and usually trapped in time — by their hardware, often cannot do. The good news is that this can be remedied with more investment in American innovation and process changes.

AI is also revolutionizing a wide range of administrative and logistical functions far removed from the front lines. It will do what AI does best: improve the speed, accuracy, cost and quality of decision-making. Artificial Intelligence can be used for preventive maintenance to reduce the likelihood of equipment breaking down during the fight; it can ensure the right supplies get to the right place at the right time; it can improve talent management in the force; transform supply chain risk management in the defense industrial base; and the use of large language models can hyperpower military staffs. This is the future for a broad range of ordinary military tasks, in addition to enhancing our warfighters’ effectiveness and survivability on the battlefield.

All this demands that DOD accelerate its across-the-board adoption of AI and advancement of robotics and autonomy. It is an asymmetric advantage the U.S. must master first and retain preeminence over. This means investing far more in these technologies, adopting commercial standards and processes as much as possible, capturing all the department’s data in a central repository, prototyping and testing far more aggressively and showing a willingness to deploy needed systems even when one’s confidence level is less than 100%. At the same time, the Pentagon must continue to do these things responsibly, beginning with the ethical principles for AI that I established in February 2020.

As the war in Ukraine rages on, we must heed the lessons from it and do everything in our power to ensure our military has the advanced AI, robotics and autonomy tools it needs to fight — and win — the battles of tomorrow. Doing so, and with a far greater sense of urgency, will serve us incredibly well in any future conflict; especially if we must face off against our greatest strategic threat today — a People’s Republic of China — with the world’s largest and most concentrated armed forces.

Dr. Mark T. Esper was the 27th secretary of defense and author of the New York Times bestseller, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times.” He is also a partner and board member in the AI venture firm Red Cell Partners.

In addition to delivering two Naval Strike Missiles for the Corps’ anti-ship missile system, the autonomous low-profile vessel the Marine Corps is experimenting with also aims to better get critical supplies like food to forward deployed and distributed Marines, Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Simon Doran said at the Defense News Conference on Wednesday.

“Truth be told, this is just a narco-boat,” Doran said. “We stole the idea from friends down south. And so this is 55 feet long, completely autonomous. It’s able to go hundreds or thousands of miles. It’s able to carry weapon systems that we have that are new. … It can carry pretty much anything you want to put in it.”

Inspired by narco-boats, which are used by traffickers to smuggle illicit substances across bodies of water, the unmanned vessel remains close to the water-surface level to cut down on the likelihood of detection as it assists with logistics capabilities.

The service tested the logistics supply drone at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone in February at Camp Pendleton, California, where the Marine Corps trained a cook in 21 days to operate the system off the islands of Japan.

The Army spearheads the Project Convergence to test out advanced technology and capabilities in modern warfare as part of a joint, multinational exercise.

The autonomous low-profile vessel is particularly important because it allows forces to resupply food, fuel and ammunition without jeopardizing the safety of Marines, Doran said.

“If you have that unit located inside a weapons engagement zone, contested logistics and the ability to maneuver in the littorals becomes key,” Doran said. “And for that, what we’re looking at is trying to acquire systems that we deem risk worthy, meaning that we don’t necessarily want to just waste them, but we’d rather put something in there that’s autonomous, that doesn’t have humans on it that can do some of these higher risk missions without having personnel put in that riskier situation.”

This system is something the Marine Corps wanted “yesterday,” but testing is ongoing, Doran said. The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory received two prototypes in 2023.

The vessel is expected to join the III Marine Expeditionary Force based in Okinawa, Japan, for further evaluation this fall, he said.

The service hopes to purchase the vessels in the next several years, Marine Corps leaders said at the 2023 Defense News Conference.

The “Palianytsia” was created due to urgent necessity, Ukrainian officials said, as Russia has dominated the skies since the outbreak of the war in February 2022 and Ukraine’s Western allies have placed conditions on use of their long-range missiles in Russia. On Monday, a wave of Russian missiles and drones targeted Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure in the largest such attack in weeks.

“Defenders of life should have no restrictions on weapons, as long as Russia uses all kinds of its own weapons,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a Telegram message following the attacks.

Zelenskyy confirmed Saturday the existence of the Palianytsia, named after a type of Ukrainian bread and a word so notoriously difficult to pronounce correctly that it was used to unmask suspected spies early in the war. The Ukrainian president called it “a new class” of weapon.

Saturday, which marked Ukraine’s 33rd anniversary of independence from the former Soviet Union, also saw the first use of the new weapon, targeting a Russian military installation in the occupied territory, officials said without providing details.

Defense Minister Rustem Umerov promised Monday the weapon would be used again soon in response to the overnight attack on Ukraine.

“Ukraine is preparing its response. Weapons of its own production,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “This once again proves that for victory, we need long-range capabilities and the lifting of restrictions on strikes on the enemy’s military facilities.”

A Ukrainian military video hinted that its range is up to 430 miles — on par with the U.S.-supplied ATACMS. It showed a map with various airfields, including Russia’s Savasleyka air base, which lies within that range, adding that the Palianytsia can reach at least 20 Russian airfields.

The United States and other Western allies provide long-range weapons to Ukraine but restrict it from launching them deep into Russia for fear of escalating the war. Ukraine can target the border regions but wants to go deeper to attack Russia’s military infrastructure.

The Institute for the Study of War said Russia was “leveraging sanctuary space in deep rear areas.” It estimated at least 250 militarily significant targets in Russia were within range of the ATACMS missiles, but current restrictions allow Ukraine to strike only 20 of them.

Ukraine’s technology minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, told The Associated Press in his first interview about the new weapon that the next step was to scale up the production.

“I think this will be a game changer because we will be able to strike where Russia doesn’t expect it today,” he said.

Fedorov declined to elaborate on the range or current supply, citing security reasons, but said that he has been involved in the projects for developing domestic missiles since the end of 2022.

Ukraine’s battlefields have become a deadly testing lab for new weapons and new adaptations of old ones. Both Ukrainian and Russian forces have rigged off-the-shelf equipment with explosives and military-grade infrared cameras; Russia has retrofitted Soviet-era unguided bombs with GPS harnesses; and Ukraine’s underwater drones have crippled Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

But the new weapon has been a long-term goal of Ukraine.

One of the specialists involved in the long-range missile project said it was “a completely new development, from scratch” that began about 18 months ago.

“This is not an extension of an old Soviet project,” said the specialist, speaking on condition of anonymity to safeguard the project’s secrecy. The missile has a solid-fuel booster that accelerates it, followed by a jet engine, the specialist said.

Ukraine says its inability to fight back against Russian long-range weapons has deadly consequences. Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi said Russia has launched 9,627 long-range missiles and Ukraine’s defense shot down only a quarter of them, and that more than half the Russian targets were civilian.

The specialist and Fedorov said each missile costs less than $1 million, and the military is turning to the private sector to bring down production costs further. “The private market generates solutions incredibly quickly,” the minister said.

As of this year, private companies have become the main suppliers of drones for the Ukrainian army, including those now striking inside Russia and the underwater ones that have repeatedly struck the Russian Black Sea fleet, said Fedorov.

“All types of missiles will be available in Ukraine,” he said. “If we have our own weapons like this, we will feel more independent and confident.”

Fedorov added that he believed Russia’s vast size could also be its vulnerability.

“It’s impossible to produce enough air defense systems to protect such a large territory,” he said. “For us, this opens up the possibility of operating deep behind enemy lines.”

Associated Press writer Illia Novikov contributed from Kyiv.

North Korean test photos showed a white drone with X-shaped tails and wings supposedly crashing into and destroying a target resembling South Korea’s main K-2 battle tank. Most combat drones stand off from targets and fire missiles.

The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said Saturday’s test involved various types of drones built to fly different ranges to attack enemy targets on land and sea and flew along various routes before accurately hitting test targets. After the test, Kim pledged to spur the development of drones that explode on impact, conduct reconnaissance or attack targets underwater to boost his country’s war readiness, saying the North’s military should be equipped with advanced drones “as early as possible,” KCNA said.

The drone test came as the U.S. and South Korean militaries conduct the large-scale Ulchi Freedom Shield drills, which continue through Thursday. The exercises focus on enhancing their readiness against North Korean threats and include computer-simulated war games and live-fire training, with a combined aerial drill involving 60 warplanes that began its three-day run on Monday.

South Korea’s air force said the drill, which kicked off with precision-bombing demonstrations that included South Korean F-35 and F-16 fighter jets, is aimed at coping with North Korean threats posed by drones, cruise missiles and artillery.

The United States and South Korea also began Monday a separate amphibious landing drill involving dozens of aircraft and vessels from their navies and marines, including U.S. F-35 fighters and amphibious assault ship Boxer. South Korea’s military said the Ssangyong Exercise, which will continue through Sept. 7, is aimed at sharpening combat interoperability.

Lee Chang Hyun, spokesperson of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a briefing that South Korea’s military was closely examining North Korea’s drone capabilities and that the South’s military is equipped with systems to detect and intercept them, without providing further details.

Some analysts suggest the North Korean drones shown in state media photos resemble Russia’s Zala Lancet-3 drones, and Lee said the South was looking into the possibility Russia had helped North Korea acquire its drone capability.

“We are aware that during the past exchanges between North Korea and Russia that some (drones) were given (to North Korea) as gifts,” Lee said. “We would need to analyze various aspects, including whether (North Korea) would have modified to improve their capabilities or other possibilities.”

North Korea and Russia have been aligning closely in the face of their separate confrontations with the U.S. Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin held summits this June and in September last year.

Washington and its allies have accused the countries of expanding an alleged arms arrangement in which North Korea provides Putin with badly needed munitions to prolong Russia’s fighting in Ukraine in exchange for economic aid and technologies to upgrade Kim’s nuclear-armed military.

Animosity on the Korean Peninsula is high as Kim uses Russia’s war against Ukraine as a distraction while he strengthens his nuclear-armed military and issues verbal threats of conflict toward Washington and Seoul. While most of the international attention has been focused on his long-range missiles designed to reach the U.S. mainland, Kim has also been expanding weapons targeting rival South Korea, most notably short-range missiles and artillery systems the North has described as nuclear-capable.

Earlier this month, Kim staged a huge ceremony in the capital, Pyongyang, to mark the delivery of 250 nuclear-capable missile launchers to frontline military units and called for a ceaseless expansion of the military’s nuclear program. This added to concerns as he demonstrated an intent to deploy battlefield nuclear weapons along the North’s border with South Korea and claimed his military could react with preemptive nuclear strikes if it perceived the leadership was under threat.

In a closed-door briefing to lawmakers on Monday, South Korea’s spy agency said it’s unclear whether North Korea is currently capable of producing enough missiles to fill up those launch vehicles, which are each designed to fire multiple missiles with potential range to cover most of South Korea’s greater capital area and central regions.

The agency said the North has been focusing its manufacturing capacities on producing missiles and other military equipment that are being supplied to Russia, according to the office of lawmaker Park Sun-won, who attended the briefing.

Analysts say Kim may seek to dial up pressure in a U.S. election year as he advances his long-term goals of forcing Washington to accept the idea of the North as a nuclear power and negotiate economic and security concessions from a position of strength.

The ground control station was part of a multiyear effort that took place aboard Bush during multiple ship maintenance stints and between deployments, Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, said.

Along with the required software and hardware, the drone nerve center features the first fully operational and integrated unmanned carrier aviation mission control system that the command says is critical to using the Stingray in operations.

Bush will conduct at-sea testing of the center early next year, according to NAVAIR.

The control station is the latest step toward getting the Stingray into the fleet, where it will refuel fighter jets midflight, helping the sea service’s strike arm to stay airborne longer — a capability that would be particularly helpful should war with China break out in the watery expanse of the West Pacific.

Standing up the Bush’s drone control room “lays the foundation” for how the Navy will operate and control unmanned aircraft, Unmanned Carrier Aviation (PMA-268) Program Manager Capt. Daniel Fucito said in a statement.

While such systems will initially support the Stingray, they will also be used for other services’ unmanned systems, such as the Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft program, which seeks to pair air drones with unmanned aircraft in a so-called “air wing of the future.”

Such systems are also being planned for installation aboard fellow carriers Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan beginning in fiscal 2025, according to NAVAIR.