💰 Hegseth wants $50B to mass-produce drones

Army Materiel Command's Liz Miranda said the service expects "some impact" in January as suppliers struggle to drop critical minerals from adversary nations under a White House order.

Companies must map supply chains down to raw materials, a bar Miranda said the Army has not yet reached, though she expects no catastrophic outcomes.

The Army's new "manufacturing rodeo" is designed to expose supply chain and manufacturing risks the service may not yet know about.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group deployed to the Middle East with Leidos' Seahawk, the first unmanned surface vessel (USV) to sail with a carrier group.

The 145-ton trimaran navigates autonomously under international collision rules, has demonstrated GPS-denied navigation, and is built to run for months without crew or routine maintenance.

Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao called Seahawk a force multiplier, moving medium USVs from Office of Naval Research prototype to frontline carrier operations.

Powerus unveiled Guardian-3 at the Association of the US Army (AUSA) show, a fully autonomous counter-drone interceptor that needs no pilot input after launch authorization.

It takes off vertically, hovers, then shifts to nose-first cruise on its own, with a gimbal-mounted GPS receiver keeping its antenna skyward and a cooling channel protecting motor electronics.

Powerus will release availability details for industry partners later, as each Guardian generation shifts more of the intercept workload off the operator.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told AUSA the Pentagon wants roughly $50B in one-time reconciliation funding to scale autonomous and robotic systems from thousands of units to millions.

The ask sits outside the fiscal 2027 request, which already holds $53.6B for Drone Dominance, including $16.9B for unmanned procurement and $14.4B for counter-drone systems.

Hegseth projected hundreds of thousands of one-way attack systems this year and asked officials to name rules that can be waived without new legislation.

The FBI searched more than 40 Texas homes and seized 187 laptops and devices that let North Korean operatives hold US remote jobs under false identities.

CrowdStrike said the wider campaign hit more than 70 US companies, including aerospace, defense engineering, and government technology firms, with earnings helping fund North Korea's weapons programs.

CrowdStrike expects only a temporary, local slowdown as operatives adapt, and the Justice Department says the investigation remains ongoing.

Israel signs for 12 AH-64E Apache helicopters — Read More

France goes solo on Rafale successor after FCAS collapse — Read More

Anduril's Steelfin interceptors share one core across missions — Read More

South Korea flies its first homegrown hypersonic glide vehicle — Read More

Thales Australia's BladeHaul robot hauls 20-foot containers — Read More

MineReader finds buried RDX instead of metal casings — Read More

2nd Cavalry makes drones and counter-drone the new basics — Read More

Former Italian Navy officer launches maritime autonomy firm Sentiq — Read More

Honeywell's SAMURAI fuses counter-drone sensors into one screen — Read More

Task Force Easy targets faster drone adaptation cycles — Read More

Pentagon seeks standards for blast-induced brain injuries — Read More

Army plans larger footprint in Central and South America — Read More