🛡️ Army mounts a shotgun turret on a self-driving truck

Joint Interagency Task Force 401 will run a directed energy shoot-off in December, director Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross told reporters at a task force summit in Alexandria, Virginia.

Systems that perform effectively could trigger an immediate purchase order to stand up production lines, Ross said, under a pilot fielding lasers and high-powered microwaves at five installations.

The structure compresses evaluation and procurement into a single event, giving directed energy vendors a near-term path from prototype to fielded counter-drone capability.

Saab revealed a full-scale concept model of the A3-001 uncrewed combat air system at the Jubilee Air Show at Malmen Air Base in Linköping, Sweden.

The design targets electronic warfare, suppression of enemy air defenses, and precision strike in contested airspace, with high autonomy, low observability, and multi-domain capability.

Saab intends to fly uncrewed demonstrators with fighter-like characteristics before 2030, positioning the A3 system as a mid-2030s option should Sweden pursue it.

The Army live-fired a modified Ford F-250 carrying Forterra's AutoDrive autonomy system and an Edda weapon station from Austin-based firm 9 Mothers.

The 50-pound Edda turret detects drones acoustically, then hands off to visual tracking, engaging targets as small as seven inches out to 100 meters without emitting.

Trialed under Project Sandhills 2.0 at Fort Bragg's Range 63, the pairing points toward uncrewed vehicles carrying passive counter-drone guns into maneuver formations.

Satellite imagery dated August 11 shows Antelope Reef transformed into a nearly 1,500-acre artificial island after roughly ten months of continuous dredging, with dredgers now departed.

The teardrop-shaped island runs 3.7 miles long and includes a deep-water port, a 2,200-foot quay, and grading about halfway complete for a 10,000-foot runway.

Sitting 160 nautical miles south of Hainan, the outpost would extend radar and electronic surveillance coverage and add a dispersed airfield across the Paracels.

SOCOM commander Adm. Frank Bradley said in Honolulu that malign actors using simple AI tools are eroding military and civilian leaders' confidence in digital information.

A US counter-intelligence official said AI has made deception scalable, citing synthetic voices, cloned faces, and fabricated identities convincing enough to fool people who know the real person.

Bradley said the same tools speed intelligence fusion, pointing to April's rescue of a downed F-15 pilot, and that shielding those data sets from agentic AI attacks is now a priority.

Artificial intelligence will be a budget priority for Army Cyber Command through at least the next fiscal year, principal cyber advisor Brandon Pugh said at TechNet Augusta.

Army Cyber Command cannot fund AI work from its operational budget alone, Pugh said, and the solutions are often joint rather than Army-only.

An April tabletop exercise with industry executives spawned a rapid cyber defense systems effort, now narrowed from roughly 20 candidate capabilities to three initial lines of effort.

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