Drones & Autonomous

The Navy's most important drone won't fire a single weapon. The MQ-25A Stingray is a carrier-based unmanned tanker that delivers 15,000 pounds of fuel at 500 nautical miles, freeing up F/A-18s from tanking duty and extending the carrier air wing's strike range by 300-400 miles.

During a U.S. Army experiment, an AI system identified, tracked, and generated firing solutions for 15 targets in a single hour, a process that normally takes human analysts days. The kill chain is compressing from hours to seconds, and the implications are staggering.

A single 35mm round costs roughly $100. A Patriot interceptor costs $3 million. Both can destroy a $20,000 Shahed drone. Germany was retiring the Gepard when Ukraine asked for it, and the Cold War anti-aircraft gun became the most cost-effective counter-drone weapon on the planet.

Russia deployed the densest electronic warfare environment in modern history to neutralize Ukraine's drone advantage. GPS signals vanished, HIMARS accuracy plummeted, and FPV drones lost their video feeds mid-flight. Then Ukraine adapted with fiber-optic tethers, $70 AI vision modules, and autonomous navigation, turning the invisible battlefield into the defining contest of the war.

The U.S. Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft program aims to pair autonomous drones with manned fighters. Anduril's YFQ-44 Fury, a jet-powered drone that can fly for 15 hours, carry AIM-120 missiles, and operate through AI-driven autonomy, is one of the first aircraft selected. Built in a 5-million-square-foot factory, it is designed to be produced in numbers that legacy defense contractors have never attempted.

Baykar built the TB2 drone that changed modern warfare. Now the company has built something far more ambitious: a jet-powered unmanned fighter with AESA radar, air-to-air missiles, and the ability to fly in autonomous formation. The Bayraktar Kizilelma is designed to fight in the sky, not just observe it.

Australia's Ghost Shark is an extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle designed to hunt submarines, lay mines, and conduct surveillance across the vast distances of the Indo-Pacific, without a crew, without a tether, and without surfacing for weeks at a time.

Australia is building a fleet of autonomous underwater drones that can dive to 6,000 meters, operate for 10 days without surfacing, and carry modular payloads for mine warfare, surveillance, and anti-submarine operations. The Ghost Shark XL-AUV represents a new kind of undersea warfare, one where unmanned systems do the dangerous work that submarines once did alone.

Boeing Australia built the first military aircraft manufactured in the country in over 50 years, and it flies alongside manned fighters as an AI-controlled wingman. The MQ-28 Ghost Bat is designed to scout ahead, jam radars, and carry weapons into contested airspace while keeping human pilots safe.

Russia's S-70 Okhotnik is a 20-ton flying wing drone designed to fight alongside the Su-57. It has already seen action over Ukraine, where it was shot down by its own wingman. Here is everything we know about the most ambitious combat drone Russia has ever built.

A technical breakdown of the components, engineering, and pilot training behind first-person-view attack drones, the $500 weapons systems reshaping modern ground warfare.

When electronic warfare made standard radio-controlled FPV drones unreliable, engineers ran a hair-thin fiber-optic cable from drone to operator. The result is a weapon that cannot be jammed, spoofed, or intercepted electronically, and it costs less than $100 more than the drone it replaces.