President Donald Trump has declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and says the United States is now in an “armed conflict” with them, according to a Trump administration memo obtained by The Associated Press on Oct. 2, following recent U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean.
A Ukrainian team is in Washington this week to craft a landmark agreement with the Trump administration that would involve Kyiv sharing its battle-tested drone technology with the U.S. in exchange for royalties or other forms of compensation, according to officials from both countries.
The Space Rapid Capabilities Office intends to award two vendors contracts by the end of the year to demonstrate that Space Force satellites can be equipped with small, inexpensive on-board radar systems to warn of potential threats from nearby satellites.
Sierra Nevada Corp. has revealed new details about a closely held new air defense system that it claims has already helped down scores of aerial threats, though it won’t say where. At last week’s annual Air & Space Forces Association conference outside Washington, the company for the first time publicly displayed the Battery Revolving Adaptive Weapons Launcher—Reconfigurable (BRAWLR), which SNC says can carry up to four types of rockets and missiles at once to take out enemy drones and cruise missiles from the back of a pickup truck, a trailer, or the ground.
The Pentagon’s chief information officer and the National Spectrum Consortium have awarded five contracts to industry and academia teams to conduct large-scale demonstrations of new spectrum-sharing capabilities.
"[Russian drone] incursions reveal a coordinated pattern in a new type of gray zone warfare—what we term ‘hybrid air denial’—that blurs the lines between peace and war. In this approach, adversaries use low-cost drones to access and deny commercial activity in the air littoral, producing outsized effects on security, the economy, and public confidence,” write retired Air Force Col. Maximilian K. Bremer and Kelly A. Grieco, fellows at the Stimson Center.
Wearing beards is a core religious tenet of some faiths, which has prompted the military to grant religious accommodations to Sikh, Muslim, Christian, and Norse Pagan service members for over a decade. But those days may be ending.
As Russian drone incursions across Europe spike, the European Union committed Oct. 1 to one of the most ambitious multi-nation defense projects in history: a Europe-wide “drone wall,” envisioned as a network of new sensors, artificial intelligence software, jammers, cheap missiles, and more to thwart small-drone attacks.
A report published last month by defense analyst Todd Harrison estimating the potential costs of the Golden Dome missile defense system landed like a fiscal bombshell. President Trump in May said it would cost $175 billion over three years. The Congressional Budget Office projected between $161 billion and $542 billion over two decades. Harrison’s “robust all-threat defense” scenario came in at $3.6 trillion over the same time period. During a meeting with reporters Oct. 2, Harrison opened the hood on exactly how he arrived at the jaw-dropping numbers—and challenged skeptics to run the calculations themselves.
On a late summer day in the driveway of his home, Senior Airman Harrison Friar came face-to-face with a gunman on a rampage through his neighborhood.
