About 20 miles to the northwest of Eielson on a sparse, dirt range just outside the Army’s Fort Wainright, a very different kind of testing and training demonstration overlapped with the latter half of Red Flag. The Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s commercial technology hub, chose a handful of companies to trial small, long-range attack drones designed to navigate and hit targets amid attempts to jam their signals.

While much smaller in size and scope than the venerable Red Flag drill nearby, DIU’s tests hit on themes that may be just as consequential for the future of aerial warfare — the role of drones in modern combat, and whether the Pentagon can help stimulate the expansion of the domestic industrial base and transform its own internal bureaucracy in a way that allows it to buy those systems in meaningful quantities.

The Pentagon for years has talked about the importance of autonomous systems in military operations and the prominent role drones have played on the battlefield of Ukraine. More recently, the Trump administration has signaled an interest in investing in the commercial drone industry and reducing some of the policy barriers that make it harder to buy, test and field these systems.

In a July 10 memo, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took that further, directing sweeping reforms to how the military services acquire small, uncrewed air systems and giving troops on the ground more authority to directly test and buy them.

It’s not clear yet whether the U.S. government’s more recent push to invest in domestically-produced drones and the Pentagon’s new reform efforts will lead to change. While the language is stronger and the directives are coming from the White House, past efforts to change DOD acquisition and funding processes and realign priorities within the military services have yielded little progress.

Amid that churn of momentum and uncertainty, DIU’s testing offered a snapshot, though incomplete, of the current readiness of the military’s acquisition system and the U.S. drone industry’s ability to meet the moment.

Defense News traveled to Alaska to observe the testing, which DIU officials said highlighted the challenges of moving fast in a stovepiped bureaucracy that wasn’t designed for speed.

Trent Emeneker, who leads several autonomy projects for DIU, said the event underscored a reality that many in the national security community are already grappling with — the U.S. military’s aerial-drone capabilities are lagging behind its competitors.

“There is so much that we need to do right now in the uncrewed systems space,” Emeneker told reporters. “We are just really far behind, and we have to catch up.”

A project without a partner

Staged over four days, the drone testing was part of a DIU project called Artemis, which aims to identify — and then buy en masse — low-cost commercial UAS that can fly at long ranges, strike enemy targets and operate through electronic warfare countermeasures like signal jamming and spoofing.

On the range in Alaska, DIU officials wanted to see if the Artemis drones could acquire and maintain targets and then hit them with some degree of accuracy when their navigation and communication signals were disrupted.

Four companies are on contract for the project: AV —previously AeroVironment — Dragoon and two Ukrainian firms that are each paired with a U.S.-based software firm, one with Swan and the other with Auterion.

Only AV and Dragoon were in Alaska for testing. The Ukrainian firms, which haven’t been disclosed due to security concerns, are flying their drones in operations at home. One of the firms has already met its contractual testing requirements, Emeneker said. The second was recently targeted in a Russian attack that destroyed its production facilities and is now working to rebuild. It hopes to start testing in the coming weeks.

AV brought a prototype system with an experimental software baseline that it designed specifically for Artemis. The rail-launched drone, built for the one-way attack mission, uses a navigation system that isn’t dependent on satellites like GPS.

Dragoon’s Artemis offering is a vertical take-off-and-landing drone called Sender, which it initially designed under a small contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The aircraft was designed to balance affordability and flexibility with the ability to fly longer-duration missions.

Like most DIU projects, Artemis was created to rapidly test and validate capabilities that military users have said they need in the field.

The effort originated as part of a supplemental spending package for Ukraine that Congress approved last year. In response to requests from operators in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, lawmakers gave DOD around $16 million to quickly identify a solution.

In just seven months, DIU solicited proposals, reviewed submissions and put four companies on contract to build prototypes — much faster than a traditional DOD acquisition program.

A key feature of the organization’s approach is that it partners with acquisition offices in the military services and combatant commands to buy and field the commercial capabilities it validates. Without an acquisition partner, projects flounder, victims to the infamous “valley of death” — the often-terminal phase between when an effort begins and when it’s adopted by an end user.

Despite the heavy use of cheap attack drones in Ukraine and the Middle East and the Pentagon’s stated desire to increase its inventory of uncrewed systems, DIU has struggled to find an acquisition partner in the services for Artemis.

Emeneker and his team have been pitching the project to program offices since last year but have come up short. Services are hesitant to buy in and put time and resources toward a system that isn’t tailored to their specific requirements, he said.

“We continue to make phone calls every day and talk to program offices, talk to people who are interested that theoretically have money. I don’t have a great answer. We don’t have a partner,” he said. “That’s what I have spent the most time on with this project.”

The hope going into testing was that the systems’ performance would help DIU make its case, but the results were not what Emeneker envisioned. If DIU can’t find an office that wants to take over the effort, companies that meet the contract’s requirements will still receive what’s called a “success memo” that allows them to quickly enter into a production contract if a DOD office wants to buy their system.

But even if some firms are ready to transition, Emeneker said, it’s possible Artemis capabilities could end up without a home.

Testing troubles

While the companies made progress throughout the test event, neither performed as well as DIU expected.

In one scenario during the second day of testing, AV’s drone failed repeatedly to find its target when jammed and ultimately crashed into a hill. In another run on the same day, Dragoon’s system flew past its target, made impact and went up in flames.

Critically, neither system performed well under EW conditions.

Emeneker said it’s too early to diagnose why the drones underperformed or to declare the project a failure.

“Without looking at the data and analyzing it, it’s really hard to know because understanding the interplay of the jamming… software bugs, it gets complex,” he said. “I don’t want to jump to conclusions but it was not what I would have hoped for or wanted to see.”

He also noted that while the platforms weren’t perfect, that’s not the goal. The objective of Artemis is to identify a baseline throw-away drone capability that offers a more affordable option than high-end munitions. By the end of testing, the systems had both made impacts and were closer to hitting their targets.

Still, Emeneker is concerned about what the preliminary outcome says about the state of the U.S. drone industrial base.

“If we had to go to war tomorrow, do we have what we need?” he posited. “No. So, how do we fix that? That’s what we’re trying to do is fix that capability.”

Pendulum swing

DIU has been trying to address some of the challenges that plague the U.S. drone industrial base for years.

In 2020, it started a project called Blue UAS to make it easier for units in the field to buy small drones. Chris Bonzagni, a former DIU program manager who now runs his own defense and dual-use consulting firm, was part of the team that helped stand up the project, which vets commercial drones to make sure they comply with U.S. laws that restrict the military from buying uncrewed systems whose key components are made in China.

Bonzagni, who was onsite to support Artemis testing, said Blue wasn’t designed for program managers or bureaucrats — it was intended to meet the needs of tactical units.

“The vision for Blue UAS was, we’re all infantry guys; I’m a former enlisted guy. How do I get a list of drones that, if I’m a staff sergeant in Iraq at the time, they can just purchase with their [government purchase card],” he told Defense News. “That was the original intent.”

While Blue has since become the standard across the U.S. government for validating drone compliance, Bonzagni sees the effort as a failed attempt to get cheap drones into the hands of the troops who need them.

A lack of resources and a convoluted DOD acquisition system prevented the program from scaling. And policies that required companies to prove compliance with every hardware or software upgrade hampered innovation. Just as Ukrainians were fielding drones by the thousands to hold ground in their resistance to Russia’s invasion, the U.S. was struggling to even get systems to its own operators.

DIU is working to address some of the issues with Blue and recently announced changes designed to expand its cleared list to more companies. Hegseth’s recent memo calling for “drone dominance” directs the Defense Contract Management Agency to help scale the effort, which could drive additional resources toward the project and reduce some of the policy barriers that has stifled its potential.

Emeneker said that through projects like Blue UAS and Artemis, DIU is trying to help refocus the Defense Department’s acquisition apparatus on tactical units in the field. Another new effort called Project GI aims to test “ready-now” drones in operational environments — crucial for ensuring that a system will actually work as intended in real-world conditions.

“That’s who we want to focus on. It’s not a lab. It’s not the colonel. It’s not the sergeant first class. It’s the people on the front line,” he said. “The pendulum is all the way over here. We’re trying to swing it back to get more to that end user.”

(Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the system AV brought to the Artemis demonstration.)

Hegseth announced the policy changes in a video recorded on the Pentagon’s front lawn. With Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” playing in the background, a quadcopter delivered a memo announcing the policy changes, which Hegseth then signed.

“While our adversaries have produced millions of cheap drones, before us we were mired in bureaucratic red tape,” he said in the video, which he posted from his official X account. “Not anymore.”

The memo lists three broad goals: bolstering the U.S. drone manufacturing base, delivering thousands of low-cost systems to military units over the next few years and integrating drone operations into training programs.

“Next year I expect to see this capability integrated into all relevant combat training, including force-on-force drone wars,” Hegseth wrote in the memo.

The announcement builds on a June 6 White House executive order that calls for normalizing drone operations and integration into the national airspace as well as investment in production and emerging technologies across commercial, civil and national security sectors.

Specifically, Hegseth’s expansive memo rescinds past policies established by the Defense Department in 2021 and 2022 that provide guidance for implementing congressional mandates that restrict the U.S. military from buying drones and components produced by Chinese companies. It gives procurement authority to combat units to buy, test and train with small UAS that comply with statute and encourages “local innovation” like 3D printing parts.

The memo also references a Defense Innovation Unit-led effort called Blue UAS — established in 2020 as a process for certifying commercial drones for military use. According to the memo, DIU will now work with the Defense Contract Management Agency to scale its “Blue List,” an inventory of compliant drones.

“The Blue List will be dynamic, retaining all previous component and supply chain findings, and including updated performance evaluations from testing and key lessons learned from training,” the memo states.

The document says that DOD has failed to field UAS at speed and in the numbers that the modern battlefield requires. It calls for department-wide reforms to how the military services buy drones and directs the secretaries of each department to “modify or delete” any policies that overregulate testing, training, procurement and fielding.

Further, it directs the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps to each create active duty formations by September, built for the sole purpose of scaling the use of small drones across DOD — with initial systems delivered to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command by 2026.

The services must also create and resource “unsubordinated program offices” focused entirely on rapidly acquiring drones. The memo also tasks them to identify, by September, any existing programs whose requirements would be better met by uncrewed systems. The services will be required to detail improves they’ve made to acquisition processes as part of their fiscal 2027 budget submissions.

Hegseth also tasks the Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Strategic Capital with presenting financing options — like direct loans or advance purchase commitments — to inject funding into the U.S. drone industrial base.

“Our adversaries have a head start in small UAS, but we will perform a technological leapfrog and establish small UAS domain dominance by the end of 2027,” Hegseth wrote. “We will accomplish this urgent goal by combining the Nation’s best qualities, including risk-taking. Senior officers must set the tone. Accelerating this critical battlefield technology requires a Department of War culture.”

AFRL’s Collaborative Low-Altitude Uncrewed Aircraft System Integration Effort, or CLUE, fuzes data from radars, counter-UAS systems and other sensors to create a shared operating picture for air traffic controllers, security forces and UAS operators.

John Sawyer, a UAS analyst for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment — which is leading efforts within DOD to partner with the Federal Aviation Administration to improve airspace integration — said CLUE is a game changer.

“Your security teams see more than just what their Counter UAS sensors are seeing. Your air traffic controllers can now see the drones. Your UAS operators can now see everyone else,” Sawyer told Defense News on the sidelines of a June 25 Defense Innovation Unit drone test in Fairbanks, Alaska. “That makes it a lot easier to integrate.”

Managing both manned aircraft and unmanned drones operating in the same airspace is a growing challenge for both civil and military air traffic controllers. For the Defense Department, which provides about 20% of the air traffic control services in the United States, solving the problem helps enable its plans to increase its own UAS inventory while also protecting bases and troops from enemy drones, Sawyer said.

CLUE began development in 2016 at the lab’s information directorate in Rome, New York. In 2022, the service took the system to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida for initial testing. Then last year, AFRL — in partnership with DIU, the Pentagon’s acquisition office and several companies — integrated several UAS platforms into the uncrewed traffic management system. During the demonstration, CLUE provided operators with a visual tool to help with air traffic deconfliction, UAS identification and FAA compliance.

Sawyer said the system has shown “a lot of promise” in these demonstrations and tests and DOD plans to install CLUE at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany later this year. At the same time, the Pentagon is close to establishing a requirement for the system that could start the process of acquiring and fielding it at DOD installations.

“I would hope that within the next month the senior leadership says, ‘Yes, that’s a requirement that we need this ecosystem to develop. It’s an operational requirement to have an ecosystem that enables us to integrate those mission sets on an installation,’” he said.

Beyond CLUE, Sawyer said the FAA and DOD are making progress normalizing integrated manned and unmanned airspace operations. He highlighted a new FAA regulation in the works, Part 108, that provides a framework for agencies and companies operating drones to fly beyond the visual line of sight with fewer restrictions and without the need for constant waivers.

“I think that’s going to do a lot to move the ball forward with beyond visual line of sight operations and really codifying unmanned traffic management,” Sawyer said. “There is definitely progress.”

“It took us a while to find the right customers and end users who were excited about the technology and wanted to move very quickly,” Soren Monroe-Anderson, Neros CEO and co-founder, told Defense News during a recent Defense Innovation Unit test event here.

But the company believed strongly there was military utility for small, cheap, attack drones — a reality playing out daily on the battlefield in Ukraine. So, in the firm’s early days, Monroe-Anderson and others traveled to the war-torn country to better understand how the systems were being used and what capabilities were needed.

Those visits helped sharpen the company’s focus in three areas: production, supply chain and rapid iteration, said Monroe-Anderson, a 22-year-old professional drone racer and hobbyist turned weapons-maker.

Neros worked quickly to raise the private capital it needed to build a 15,000 square foot facility in Los Angeles from funders like Peter Thiel and Sequoia Capital. It scoured its supply chain for alternatives to Chinese components. And it continuously upgraded its systems based on lessons it was seeing in Ukraine, where it has since established an office.

That early work is starting to yield results for the firm. In February, Neros won a contract from the International Drone Coalition to provide 6,000 drones to Ukraine over six months. The IDC was formed to help fuel the country’s drone supply — factories in Ukraine produced more than 2.2 million drones in 2024 — and the contract is among the largest known awards to a U.S. supplier.

Neros is now building about 1,500 of its Archer drones per month, an 8-inch quadcopter that has a range of over 12 miles and can carry a 4.5 lb. payload. Two-thirds of those systems go to Ukraine and the remaining 500 to the U.S. military, including the Marine Corps, Army and U.S. Special Operations Command, Monroe-Anderson said.

The company is currently one of two FPV companies on DIU’s list of firms whose drones meet DOD’s supply chain requirements, which prohibit the use of Chinese suppliers for key components. Last December, Neros was placed on a list of 13 U.S. defense companies sanctioned by China. The firm called the move “a badge of honor.”

Monroe-Anderson said Neros wants to increase its production capacity to 10,000 drones monthly by the end of this year. Its longer-term vision is to build a factory that can produce one million drones per year with the U.S. Defense Department as its primary customer. It’s a target that Monroe-Anderson says is “absolutely required” for the U.S. to defend itself in future wars.

“Even if the government right now isn’t handing out a contract for a million drones a year, we know that’s what the country needs,” he said. “That’s what we believe as a company, that’s what our investors believe.”

The Pentagon in recent years has made a rhetorical push to increase its inventory of low-cost, throwaway drones, but has struggled to restructure its acquisition and funding processes and realign priorities within the military services to follow through on its claims.

In 2023, the department launched a program called Replicator to address the challenge, pledging to field thousands of drones by August of this year and create a repeatable process for scaling innovation in the department. The results of that effort are due next month, and while DOD leaders say it is meeting its target, experts say the numbers it’s aiming for are much lower than what the department actually needs.

Trent Emeneker, who oversees several DIU autonomy efforts, said demand in DOD is growing for FPV drones similar to what Neros is building. The challenge is matching that demand, which is largely flowing from troops on the ground, with resources and programmatic support.

“There is enormous demand, but that demand is not backed up by funding and it’s not backed up by the program offices,” he told Defense News.

Monroe-Anderson said that as a company trying to sell to the department, he’s seen a significant posture shift in the last year. In fact, he called today’s demand “pretty aggressive” compared to Neros’ early days.

“We’ve gone from having conversations where we’re sort of trying to do the convincing to now we’re just constantly getting cold outreach asking us about our systems, asking if we can train soldiers on FPV drones,” Monroe-Anderson said. “It’s basically gone from nothing to some of our customers doing live-fire demonstrations to senior leaders in 12 months, which is a really, really fast timeline.”

While the company may not have a contract in hand that requires a major production ramp up, Monroe-Anderson said its strategy is to be ready to fulfill higher orders when that time comes.

That applies to the near-term expansion to 10,000 systems per month and the longer-term push for one million annually, which he noted will require a revamp of the company’s entire manufacturing approach.

“Availability is one of the most critical things here,” he said. “I think the companies who are going to win in this space are the ones who are able to ramp production capacity very quickly. Part of that looks like actually just proving it out to ourselves so we can go to our customers with something we believe in versus just overpromising and underdelivering.”

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 Kyiv has prohibited the export of military goods to other countries to guarantee that the Ukrainian armed forces are supplied with the equipment they need to continue defending their territory.

While the ban has allowed smaller local defense companies to grow at a fast rate, thanks to an initial boost of orders by the state, the policy is now hurting their business, Anatolii Khrapchynskyi, deputy director general of Piranha Tech said.

“It has opened up opportunities for private companies to produce weapons and led to the emergence of numerous firms that, in two and a half years, have grown from garage-based startups to stable companies capable of fulfilling a large number of orders,” he told Defense News. “At the same time, as firms have scaled up their capabilities, they’ve accelerated to a level the state cannot fully procure from.”

Piranha Tech has specialized in the development and production of electronic-warfare systems, radio-jamming as well as drones and counter-drone systems since 2014.

Khrapchynskyi noted that most of the investments in research and development came either from the companies’ own funds or small grants provided by platforms like Brave1, a Ukrainian government entity responsible for fast-tracking the delivery of weapon samples to the frontlines.

At the rate defense systems have evolved on the battlefield, research and development has become more expensive, and having the state as the sole customer is no longer sufficient for many firms, the argument for lifting the export ban goes.

According to Ukrainian media, a government working group on arms exports has been working since August on assessing risks that would come with the country re-entering the global arms market, and setting conditions that could make this possible.

Khrapchynskyi told Defense News he supports the initiative, saying reconnaissance drones could serve as a test case because they are useful in military and civilian applications alike.

“Security and the end-user are of the utmost importance – we could also consider selling earlier versions that are not cutting edge, but companies must guarantee that state contracts remain a priority and be fulfilled on time,” Khrapchynskyi said.

A requirement to invest some of the profits into company research and development also should be on the table, he added.

One of the biggest issues associated with lifting the wartime ban on these weapons is the possibility for Russian forces to get their hands on information and technology.

“We see how Russia circumvents sanctions, so we understand that they will certainly start looking for ways to obtain certain means for copying [weapons] or developing countermeasures against them,” Khrapchynskyi said.

Developed by Eprius, the long-pulse, high-power microwave technology known as Leonidas Expeditionary can drop swarms of drones with massive and pointed walls of electromagnetic energy.

Epirus has already delivered high-powered microwave systems to the Army as part of a $66 million contract last year.

It developed its latest Leonidas capability in partnership with the Office of Naval Research, Joint Counter-Small UAS Office, the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO).

The company unveiled the system on Sept. 23 and is expected to deliver the completed system to the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab by the end of this year.

So far there are four iterations of the Leonidas system including the newest, which is formally known as the Expeditionary Directed Energy Counter-Swarm, or ExDECS.

Earlier Leonidas offerings have included systems that can be attached to vehicles or air drones.

Leonidas ExDECS is another systems entry on the smaller side, capable of “swarm defeat,” with a transportable profile that’s highly mobile and provides a low physical signature, according to Andrew Wargofchik, a spokesperson for Epirus.

The crown jewel of the Epirus system, aside from its microwave system, is a technology called Line Replaceable Amplifier Module, or LRAM. It’s an architecture that allows the company to scale systems up or down.

“We like to think of them as sort of very scalable Lego blocks,” Wargofchik said.

The announcement of the Leonidas Expeditionary comes on the heels of the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference, where AI’s role in the defense industry was the talk of the town.

But as the future of warfare arrives, Wargofchik said Epirus doesn’t buy into the concept that killer robots are on the horizon.

He noted projects like the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or unmanned fighter jets, as a better embodiment of what lies ahead.

Half-man, half-AI is the defense landscape the company envisioned – manned systems existing harmoniously alongside unmanned ones.

“Our CEO, Andy Lowery, likes to call it centaur warfare,” Wargofchik said.

While some in the industry criticize the Defense Department for not adopting existing and emerging AI and machine learning technologies quickly enough, Epirus is more optimistic.

One of the main challenges involves bridging the gap between research and development to mass production, Wargofchik said.

Though the company began with the explicit goal of providing high-powered microwave systems for counter-drone missions, it’s expanding the development of the same systems as a counter for any-and-all electronics.

In April, Epirus demonstrated its capability to effectively take out certain vessel motors at sea during a Navy event.

“We’re kind of arriving at the shores of a whole new beach of maritime applications,” Wargofchik said.

This brave new world in Army electronic warfare was on display recently during the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division’s rotation this month at the Joint Readiness Training Center.

The U.S. military in general, from the Pentagon to each service branch, is prioritizing such capabilities, both how to use artificial intelligence and drones and how to defend against an enemy using the same technology.

During the 101′s recent rotation, soldiers used a new app called “Shrike,” which identifies targets with minimal information and spits out a ready-to-go, call-for-fire mission.

The app is the brainchild of Army Futures Command, featuring software that uses an artificial intelligence capability mounted on any fielded drone. Each drone’s small circuit board draws on a large-language model backbone.

Soldiers flew the drone with the attached device and software over their enemy’s motor pool to scan their adversary’s vehicles.

Once data has been processed, a subsequent flight can identify a netted and camouflaged vehicle from an exposed wheel, bumper or part of a windshield and recognize what kind of vehicle it is, said Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, 101st Airborne Division commander.

The program then generates a call-for-fire mission automatically for the human user to approve or disapprove.

But the application has another layer.

Once the fire mission is complete, the drone can scan the area immediately, conduct a battle damage assessment and generate another fire mission to destroy the target, Sylvia said.

The Army standard is five to eight minutes to identify and get rounds on target in a traditional fire mission, though some take as long as 15 minutes, the two-star said, but 101st soldiers using this software have done so in less than a minute.

More tech tricks are in the toolkit of soldiers headed to training and deployment as part of the Army’s Transformation in Contact, an effort focused on injecting five years’ worth of modernization into three separate brigade combat teams, including brigades from the 101st, the 25th Infantry Division and the 10th Mountain Division.

The Army’s professional opposition force, or “enemy” troops, in combat training center rotations such as the one here use homemade sensors to detect an electromagnetic “reading” or “snapshot” of the Army units they fight.

During this August rotation, the 101st took some notes and brought their own sensors, drones and even homemade decoys. Soldiers took $30 circuit boards and used them as decoys to mimic electronic signatures with fake names such as “command post laptop” or “Garmin smartwatch,” tricking the adversary into thinking that what they’re scanning is an actual headquarters.

In one of the first fights, soldiers mimicked the electronic signature of their own command post using these decoys and placed the decoys in the opposite direction of their actual command post.

The trick worked.

“The enemy spent 50% of their artillery against the dirt, where we had those decoys,” 2nd Brigade commander Col. James Stultz told reporters here.

The brigade brought 250 such decoys with it on its 500-mile air assault from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, down to Louisiana for the training, he said.

And even in new-era training, the enemy learns too, pushing the soldiers to play a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the enemy’s reconnaissance drones.

During the first week of the exercise, an enemy drone locked onto the brigade’s mobile, Humvee-based command post.

Soldiers with the brigade set up a kind of invisible “net” of counter-drone defense gear and tried to lure the enemy drone into the “net” using their command post as bait.

The colonel said they didn’t trap the drone, but the soldiers did manage to shake the drone off the Humvee’s tail and avoid a strike that would have taken out the headquarters.

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.

South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration said that it will deploy at least one anti-air laser weapons system called “Block-I” by the end of this year and more in coming years.

An agency statement said the “Block-I” system is capable of launching precision attacks on small incoming drones and multi-copters. It said the system, developed by local company Hanwha Aerospace, costs just 2,000 won (about $1.50) per shot.

“We face North Korea on our doorstep and its drones pose present threats to us, so that’s why we’ve been aiming to build and deploy laser weapons soon to cope with them,” an agency official said, requesting anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to media on the issue.

He said that other countries like the United States and Israel are ahead of South Korea in laser weapons technology, but their primary focus has been on higher-powered laser guns that can shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. South Korea also hopes to develop such anti-missile laser weapons, which its defense procurement agency called “a game changer” in future combat environments.

The “Block-I” system is meant to hit circuit boards and other equipment in enemy drones to make them malfunction and crash on the ground. Tests of the weapons system in 2022-2023 were successful and proved its credibility, the official said.

Some experts questioned the technology.

Lee Illwoo, an expert with the Korea Defense Network in South Korea, doubts how effectively South Korea can use its laser weapons since its anti-air radar systems aren’t advanced enough to detect North Korean drones well. He said the range of a laser weapon is relatively short, so high-power microwave weapons would be better when enemy drones are flown in large numbers simultaneously.

Jung Chang Wook, head of the Korea Defense Study Forum think tank in Seoul, said South Korea is likely about five years away from acquiring a functioning laser weapon that can shoot down the drones used by North Korea.

North Korea has periodically flown drones across its heavily fortified border with South Korea for several years, in what observers have called tests of South Korean readiness. In December 2022, South Korea accused the North of sending drones across the border for the first time in five years. South Korea fired warning shots and launched fighter jets and helicopters but failed to shoot down any of the drones.

In a key political meeting in December 2023, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to introduce various types of unmanned combat equipment such as attack drones for 2024. Foreign experts say Kim likely regards drones as a cheap yet effective method to trigger security jitters and an internal divide in South Korea.

Animosities between the two Koreas, split along the world’s most heavily fortified border, have deepened in recent months, with North Korea flying trash-carrying balloons toward South Korea in response to South Korean activists floating political leaflets via their own balloons.

This same weapon is widely used by Ukrainian soldiers against Russian invaders, plus Taiwan recently had a USD $60.2 million Foreign Military Sale of 720 of these loitering munitions approved.

Canberra’s announcement did not mention quantities or price, but it said the first examples would reach Australia later this year and enter Australian Defence Force service in 2025.

The Switchblade 300, which has a 3.69-pound (1.68kg) warhead and 19-mile (30km) range in its latest Block 20 variant, will “boost the ADF’s arsenal of drones, including those capable of being armed,” according to a Department of Defence statement.

The weapon can be transported in a backpack, before being launched from a tube.

“With autonomous weapon systems increasingly prevalent, the Defence Strategic Review made clear that new technology and asymmetric advantage are important priorities,” said Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy. “The delivery of this proven precision loitering munition demonstrates the speed at which we are introducing capabilities to the ADF.”

However, his reference to speedy introduction is incongruous. Ukraine has been demonstrating the utility of loitering munitions for the past 2.5 years of combat, and yet Australia is only now introducing this class of weapon.

Indeed, Travis Reddy, CEO of the Australian firm DefendTex, criticized the ADF for its tardiness in acquiring any loitering munitions. His company manufactures the D40 drone, essentially a flying 40mm grenade.

He told Defense News the Australian government even prevented DefendTex from exporting warhead-equipped D40s to Ukraine, because its fuse had not “been through all the certification and qualification stages”. Therefore, the Australian company could send only camera-equipped D40s.

Conversely, the “U.K. took a pragmatic approach” and delivered to Ukraine 300 warhead-equipped D40s that it had commercially procured from DefendTex. Reddy said this D40 case “very much talks about this risk-adverse culture that exists within Defence”.

“We’re running programs right now to develop Australian drones,” Conroy said. “And we’re hoping to get them into the inventory as soon as possible.”

One example is the One-Way Loitering (OWL) munition developed by Western Australia-based firm Innovaero.

Innovaero officials didn’t immediatelyrespond to Defense News requests for details, but it is known the OWL is being trialed by Australian Army special forces, and more will be delivered to the army this year.

The OWL is in a different class to the Switchblade 300, since it has a 125-mile range, 100-minute endurance and carries a 15-pound anti-armor or fragmentation warhead.

Another Australian firm delivering drones to Ukraine is Sypaq Systems. Amanda Holt, Sypaq’s CEO, previously told Defense News that her firm had been delivering 100 low-cost Corvo drones per month, and that Ukrainian troops often jury-rigged them with explosives to act as loitering munitions.