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With little chance of NATO membership for Ukraine, the country’s Western allies have bought into an alternate strategy for helping it repel Russian aggression: invest billions in Ukraine's weapons industry so it can better defend itself. If the strategy works, Ukraine's weapons industry will eventually be able to help equip U.S. and European armies, too, with cutting-edge drones and other military technology being developed in the midst of its war with Russia. “The Ukrainians are the leaders in the world in terms of drone technology,” Keith Kellogg, the Trump administration's special envoy for Ukraine said last week at a conference...

Newly released government reports have revealed five incidents near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio that have never been disclosed since the swarms of UFOs were seen along the East Coast in late 2024. Along with several sightings of unidentified drones around the secretive Air Force base in December 2024, federal officials now say a 'black cube'-shaped craft was spotted by a nearby airplane less than 80 miles from Wright-Patterson.

A Los Angeles computer game developer who admitted operating a drone that crashed into and damaged a Super Scooper firefighting aircraft battling the Palisades Fire was sentenced Monday to a mix of prison and home detention. Peter Tripp Akemann, 57, of Culver City, pleaded guilty in February to a federal class-A misdemeanor count of unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Akemann was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald to serve 14 days in federal prison, followed by 30 days’ home detention. He was also ordered to pay about $156,000 in restitution and...

Why no eyes in the sky ?

As a tugboat captain pulled an unmanned U.S. military drone boat out of Naval Base Ventura County in California recently, there seemed little danger. But then, the robot vessel suddenly turned itself on, zoomed forward and bashed into the vessel towing it, capsizing the tug and throwing the unfortunate skipper overboard. Weeks later, in another exercise, a military robo-boat stalled and was smashed into from the side by another speeding drone vessel. The fast-moving robot boat hit the stationary one's bow, flew into the air and over it, and landed with a splash. Details of the damage are unknown, but...

Five aviation companies are under contract to develop armed, unmanned aircraft and control systems for use on the Navy’s fleet of 11 aircraft carriers, USNI News has learned.General Atomics, Boeing, Anduril and Northrop Grumman are on contract for the conceptual design of the so-called collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA, according to a Navy presentation reviewed by USNI News. Lockheed Martin is under contract to build the common control system.The Navy wants “uncrewed, modular, interoperable, interchangeable and versatile platforms” that it can field from an aircraft carrier, reads the slide from Naval Air Systems Command’s program executive office for unmanned aviation...

Models for reconnaissance, rescue, interception and attack are changing the way both sides operate“It’s more exhausting,” says Afer, a deputy commander of the “Da Vinci Wolves”, describing how one of the best-known battalions in Ukraine has to defend against constant Russian attacks. Where once the invaders might have tried small group assaults with armoured vehicles, now the tactic is to try and sneak through on foot one by one, evading frontline Ukrainian drones, and find somewhere to hide. Under what little cover remains, survivors then try to gather a group of 10 or so and attack Ukrainian positions. It is...

Kyiv says it needs all its drones for the battlefield, but manufacturers insist the foreign revenue from exports would let them expand their production.KYIV — Foreign drone companies are swarming Ukraine, hoping to be a part of one of the most exciting unmanned vehicle production hubs in the world. There’s one problem: Ukraine’s drone makers are severely limited in exporting their production and know-how. Drone use and production have skyrocketed in the war between Ukraine and Russia, now in its fourth year, because of these machines’ low cost and deadly effectiveness. The constant battle-testing has accelerated the pace of evolution...

Waves of drones tumbled out of the sky above Camp Atterbury, Indiana, on Tuesday, their mechanical death throes punctuating what was otherwise a quiet morning.Why it matters: Drone swarms are a nightmare for security officials all over the world, whether they're overwhelming a Russian air base or hovering near an American airport.How it happened: Defense contractor Epirus this week demonstrated its drone-frying Leonidas to observers from various U.S. military services and foreign countries, including some in the Indo-Pacific. Axios was the only media on hand for the Atterbury tests, about 45 minutes south of downtown Indianapolis.In the climax of the...

Taking their cues from modern warfare, the far-right American terrorist movement sees off-the-shelf or home-built first-person viewer (FPV) drones as a critical weapon in their own future war against the US government, which has American authorities on edge. And there’s ample reasons for those fears: in the open and closed online spaces where far-right extremists congregate, talk is commonplace of how these cheap drones are revolutionizing current wars and will be the critical tools of a so-called second civil war. “The use of FPV drones in the war between Russia and Ukraine, the use of drones by terrorist groups such...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced today that he has directed Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll to formally establish a joint, interagency task force to counter hostile unmanned aerial systems, commonly referred to as drones. "Our job here at the Pentagon — when you think about it — is to prepare for the threats of the future and build a force to match them, and defeat them, and outpace them," Hegseth said via a video message released to the public. "And there's no doubt that the threats we face today from hostile drones grow by the day," he added. Noting that...

US President Donald Trump said America is studying Ukraine’s use of drones in warfare, according to remarks he made to reporters. Responding to a question, Trump noted that the war in Ukraine is being fought with drones in a way not seen before - and that the US is examining those lessons closely. Trump stated that there hadn’t been a war of that scale since World War II and that it was the most significant development in the history of military affairs. He added that it was a completely new form of combat, a drone war, something that hadn’t existed...

USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul recently seized more than $12 million in drugs in the Caribbean Sea, an example of how Littoral Combat Ships have found their niche with counternarcotics missions. The oft-maligned Littoral Combat Ship, or LCS, may have found its true calling: chasing down smugglers. USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul, a Freedom-variant LCS, recently stopped two suspected drug smuggling operations within 72 hours “through a combination of air and surface operations” while deployed to the Caribbean, according to the Navy. A Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment that is embarked aboard the ship and Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 50, Detachment Three helped the...

Haim Eshed, 87, former director of space programs for the Israel Ministry of Defense for nearly 30 years said the U.S. and Israel have been in contact with alien life forms representing a “galactic federation,” and President Donald Trump knows about it. Eshed told Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper that “humanity is not ready,” for the public disclosure of extraterrestrials who he claims currently are in talks with government agencies on our planet. "There is an agreement between the U.S. government and the aliens. They signed a contract with us to do experiments here," he said. Parts of the interview were...

Two bills in Congress could expand the UAP task force, or set up a permanent office to study sightings of these unknown objects. Section 1652 of H.R. 4350 — a provision added by Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego of Arizona — would establish a permanent office to study UAPs within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. If the provision remains unchanged when the bill becomes law, it will charge the new office with creating a database for recording UAP incidents and “evaluating links between unidentified aerial phenomena and adversarial foreign governments, other foreign governments, or non-state actors,” and whether the...

In Oregon, a man said his health deteriorated after a glowing blue orb passed through his body. A family in California reported strange lights and a gray figure with spindly legs in their orchard. A werewolf-like creature allegedly prowled around homes in suburban Virginia. All three incidents were probed as part of a secret Pentagon program investigating UFOs. The program, contracted by the Defense Intelligence Agency, plumbed the connection between the flying objects and the paranormal for two years, according to the men who ran it. It was the beginning of a years-long effort by UFO advocates that eventually led...

Megan Cerullo Reporter, MoneyWatch Megan Cerullo is a New York-based reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering small business, workplace, health care, consumer spending and personal finance topics. She regularly appears on CBS News 24/7 to discuss her reporting. Read Full Bio Edited By Updated on: August 21, 2025 / 11:48 AM CDT / CBS News If you look up at the sky in Texas and see what could be a flying burrito, you may not be imagining things: Chipotle on Thursday launched an autonomous aerial delivery service for digital orders in the Dallas area. Through a partnership with Zipline, a drone...

he U.S. Navy has released 35 brief reports regarding various incidents involving its ships and facilities and unidentified small uncrewed aircraft systems, or sUASs, across the entire span of the Pacific between 2016 and 2021. Not all of the reports appear to be notable, and some are clearly innocuous, but others absolutely provide additional evidence of concerning trends that The War Zone has been actively reporting on in recent years. Among the newly released reports, for instance, is one that covers a worrying encounter that the Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Paul Hamilton had with four drones in the Pacific...

Shenghua Wen, 42, received around $2 million (€1.7 million) from North Korean officials to ship firearms and ammunition from California. A Chinese national in California has been sentenced to eight years in prison for shipping firearms and ammunition to North Korea. North Korean officials paid Shenghua Wen around $2 million (€1.7 million) to ship two containers of weapons and other items from Long Beach in California to North Korea via Hong Kong in 2023, according to the US Attorney's Office in Los Angeles. The 42-year-old pleaded guilty in June to one count of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic...

With too many drones in the air and only so many radio frequencies, Ukrainian soldiers sometimes jam their own drones trying to stop Russian ones, Business Insider learned. Dimko Zhluktenko, a drone operator with Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces who has operated strike and reconnaissance drones, told Business Insider that his unit was recently the victim of friendly electronic warfare, or just EW. He said it's something that often happens with the big reconnaissance drones that both sides use because many of Ukraine's drones "use the same frequencies that enemy drones use." That's been the case, for instance, with Russia's Zala...