The Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering described a three-layer approach to embedding AI into warfighting — and…
Richard Thomas
Two Minutes Instead of Days: Inside a SOF Week Demo of AI “Warfighting Agents”
At SOF Week’s solution stage, a Vannevar Labs presentation titled “Mission-Ready AI: Accelerating Decisions with Agent Control Plane and Mission…
The Army Is Building Its Autonomy Enterprise From the Integration Up
Activated in February, the Army’s new Capability Program Executive for Mission Autonomy is assembling an acquisition organization unlike any that…
Scaling What Works: Drone Dominance Moves from Demand Signal to Industrial Reality
The XPONENTIAL keynote panel confronted the question the Drone Dominance Program answered first—and what it exposed in doing so. For…
Gauntlet II: What the Drone Dominance Program Is Asking Industry to Do Next
Program leadership laid out the structure, quantities, and competitive logic of Phase II at XPONENTIAL—and spent an hour in open…
Meeting the Operator Where They Are
DroneShield’s Tom Branstetter on U.S. Manufacturing Expansion, Multi-Domain Integration, and an Unprecedented Moment of C-UAS Alignment Tom Branstetter has spent…
Merlin Labs: Bringing Autonomy to the Air Force’s Bread-and-Butter Fleet
The U.S. Air Force’s autonomy future may rest less on next-generation platforms than on the 400 C-130Js and 300 KC-135s…
Amprius Technologies Scales Silicon Anode Batteries for Defense Drone Market
The company’s silicon anode cells deliver twice the flight time of standard lithium-ion. The race to build a compliant domestic…
At the Perimeter
The C-UAS deployment at the 2026 FIFA World Cup was visible, acknowledged—and only part of the picture. The hex-rotor was…
Inside PEO-TIS: SOCOM’s Tactical Information Systems Office
At SOF Week 2026 in Tampa, the program managers of U.S. Special Operations Command’s Program Executive Office for Tactical Information…
The FCC’s New Role at the Center of the U.S. Drone Market
A supply chain security framework that began with a sweeping December 2025 prohibition on foreign-produced UAS is now generating its…
Anatomy of an American Autonomy System on a Chip
How Hyfix’s H1 brings the autonomy stack into a single architecture—making autonomous systems more trusted, more scalable, and better suited…
FCC Opens Drone Comment Period as Covered List Takes Shape
The Federal Communications Commission is soliciting public comment on a broad slate of regulatory reforms aimed at accelerating domestic unmanned…
Europe’s UAS and Counter-UAS Reset: NATO Standardization, EU Industrial Policy
Europe is moving from episodic counter-UAS buys toward something closer to an architecture: shared standards, testable assurance, common data formats,…
Regulating Autonomy: Lessons from the Connected Vehicle Rule
The Commerce Department’s connected vehicle rule offers a practical preview of what comes after the FCC’s drone gate—from subsystem definitions…
The Army’s New Fast Lane for C-UAS Tech
The U.S. Army is standing up a new “fast lane” for counter-UAS and tactical edge systems, and it’s starting to…
How Federal Cyber Guidance Is Shaping the UAS/C-UAS Market
As Washington recasts drones and counter-drone systems as networked IT and AI infrastructure, a web of CISA, GSA, FAA, DoD…
