Tag: drones

Manta Ray High-Endurance Underwater Drone Unveiled

Northrop Grumman has completed the construction of its first full-scale Manta Ray uncrewed underwater vehicle, or UUV, prototype. The company is developing the drone under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Manta Ray program, which seeks to demonstrate critical technologies for a new class of very long-endurance payload-capable UUVs. 

The news was announced by Northrop earlier today, along with the release of the first image of its full-size testbed, seen in the feature image of this article. Now that its assembly has been finalized, the next step will be to actually test it, which Northrop has previously said will take place at some stage this year.

While details on the overall dimensions of the prototype have not been made public, Northrop describes it as an “extra-large glider” that draws inspiration from the “graceful glide” of the manta ray. In mimicking the shape and movement of the fish after which it’s named, Northrop’s drone features a lifting body that has sea glider-like properties, but is not a glider in the true sense of the term (i.e., it does not strictly employ variable-buoyancy propulsion alone instead of thrusters or propellers to move it forward).

In the video below, released by Northrop in 2022, we see computer-generated footage of Manta Ray being propelled via four small propellers. Imagery of the full-size testbed released by Northrop today also shows the presence of rear propellers, of which there appear to be two, rather than four.

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Zelensky Tries to Go Nuclear: Ukrainian Drone Strikes Russian-Controlled Nuke Site

Ukraine was Criticized by the International Atomic Energy Agency after carrying out a drone attack on the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant – striking a dome on top of a reactor that has been shut down.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, the IAEA director general, said in a statement that such a “detonation is consistent with IAEA observations.”

“I urge to refrain from actions that … jeopardize nuclear safety,” he said.

The power plant is the largest nuclear facility in Europe.

Grossi has been an outspoken critic of the fighting that has been occurring near the facility and has warned that “something very, very catastrophic could take place” if there is not some kind of “security protection zone.”

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Ukrainian Drones Hit Russia’s Third-Largest Oil Refinery, Prompting White House Anger

As discussed in our morning wrap, US equity futures are dipping lower as bond yields in the US continue to move higher as crude continues to surge and is up another 2% on growing fears of middle-eastern escalation after a senior Iranian commander was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Syria yesterday, with Iran immediately vowing revenge, and as Ukraine once again struck oil infrastructure targets deep inside Russia, overnight hitting Russia’s 3rd largest refinery, ~800 miles from the front lines.

As OilPrice details, Ukrainian drones hit the primary refining unit of Russia’s third-largest refinery southeast of Moscow more than 800 miles from the front line, Reuters reported on Tuesday. Ukraine keeps striking Russian oil assets despite the Biden admin’s unequivocal demands for a hard stop, suggesting that diplomatic fallout is now imminent.

The Taneco refinery of Russian company Tatneft in Tatarstan, an industrialized region southeast of Moscow, was attacked by Ukrainian drones in the latest such attack from Ukraine on Russian refining infrastructure.

The refinery has a capacity to process 340,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude. Its primary refining unit, with a capacity to process about 155,000 bpd, was hit in Tuesday’s attack, according to pictures seen by Reuters. The unit caught fire, which was swiftly extinguished, Russian media report.

They also quote Ramil Mullin, the mayor of the city of Nizhnekamsk, where the refinery is located, as saying that there have been no injured people in the attack.

“There are no injuries or serious damage,” Mullin wrote on Telegram. “The technological process of the enterprise has not been disrupted,” the mayor added.

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Navy to Test Microwave Anti-Drone Weapon at Sea in 2026 

The U.S. Navy plans to mount a high-powered microwave prototype system on one of its vessels as early as 2026, according to the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget documents.

The system will come from the Navy’s Project METEOR, which is developing a directed energy weapon system prototype that the service plans to integrate on ships in 2026.

METEOR will “provide capability with low cost-per-shot, deep magazine, tactically significant range, short time engagement for multi-target approach, dual deception and defeat capability,” according to the budget documents.

This system will be the Navy’s first high-powered microwave, a type of directed energy weapon system that the Army, Navy and Air Force are exploring to counter cheap unmanned aerial systems.

Unlike other directed energy systems the Navy uses, the METEOR prototype will use a different kill mechanism to disable targets. Instead of a focused beam of light, HPM systems use microwave energy to inflict damage to electronics inside targets.

The Navy believes that this mechanism, which is unique to HPM systems, will be useful in defeating anti-ship ballistic missiles like the ones fielded by China’s People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force.

“Currently, the Joint Force suffers from a lack of redundant, resilient hard kill/soft kill options against stressing stream raid threats of Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles (ASBM),” reads the FY 2025 budget documents.

“The issue is particularly acute in the [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility] due to the vast geographic distances involved, ship magazine size and adversary actions.”

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Niger Ends Military Relationship With US, Says US Presence No Longer Justified

Niger announced on Saturday that it was suspending military cooperation with the US and that the US presence in the country was no longer justified, signaling Washington will have to withdraw its troops.

Col. Maj. Amadou Abdramane, spokesman for the military-led government that’s been in power since last year’s coup, made the announcement after a US delegation visited Niger. He said the US officials did not show respect for Niger’s sovereignty.

“Niger regrets the intention of the American delegation to deny the sovereign Nigerien people the right to choose their partners and types of partnerships capable of truly helping them fight against terrorism,” Abdramane said.

The US has a major drone base in Niger, known as Air Base 201, which it uses as a hub for operations in West Africa. Before former President Mahamoud Bazoum was taken out of power last July, the US had about 1,100 troops in Niger. As of December, the US has 648 troops stationed in the country.

The US formally declared the ouster of Bazoum a coup, which requires the suspension of aid, but was looking for ways to cooperate with the junta to maintain its military presence. However, there are signs the US was preparing for the possibility of getting kicked out. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that the US was in talks with other West African states to base drones on their territory, including Benin, the Ivory Coast, and Ghana.

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Mysterious Drones Swarmed Langley AFB For Weeks

Langley Air Force Base, located in one of the most strategic areas of the country, across the Chesapeake Bay from the sprawling Naval Station Norfolk and the open Atlantic, was at the epicenter of waves of mysterious drone incursions that occurred throughout December. The War Zone has been investigating these incidents and the response to them for months. We know that they were so troubling and persistent that they prompted bringing in advanced assets from around the U.S. government, including one of NASA’s WB-57F high-flying research planes. Now the U.S. Air Force has confirmed to us that they did indeed occur and provided details on the timeframe and diversity of drones involved.

This spate of bizarre drone incursions deeply underscores the still-growing threats that uncrewed aerial systems present on and off traditional battlefields, and to military and critical civilian infrastructure, issues The War Zone has been highlighting in great detail for years.

“The installation first observed UAS [uncrewed aerial systems] activities the evening of December 6 [2023] and experienced multiple incursions throughout the month of December. The number of UASs fluctuated and they ranged in size/configuration,” a spokesperson for Langley Air Force Base told The War Zone in a statement earlier today. “None of the incursions appeared to exhibit hostile intent but anything flying in our restricted airspace can pose a threat to flight safety. The FAA was made aware of the UAS incursions.”

“To protect operational security, we do not discuss impacts to operations,” the statement added. “We don’t discuss our specific force protection measures but retain the right to protect the installation. Langley continues to monitor our air space and work with local law enforcement and other federal agencies to ensure the safety of base personnel, facilities, and assets.”

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Drone Whistleblower Subjected To Harsh Confinement Finally Released From Prison

Drone whistleblower Daniel Hale was released from prison in February after spending 33 months in some of the harshest confinement conditions ever imposed on a person for disclosing classified information to the press.

Hale remains in federal custody but is living in home confinement until July.

Though President Donald Trump’s Justice Department indicted Hale, his case became the first major Espionage Act conviction secured by prosecutors under President Joe Biden.

In an opinion article for Al Jazeera English, Hale marked his freedom by weighing in on the decision by Special Counsel Robert Hur to not recommend charges against Biden for mishandling classified information.

Hale noted the similarities between what he did and what Hur said Biden did and powerfully illustrated the disparate treatment that he survived.

Both Biden and Hale kept classified information “outside of a secure facility” at their homes and offices. Both spoke to a reporter about the information. Both expressed concerns about official United States policy, with Biden objecting to the 2009 “surge” in Afghanistan and Hale objecting to the “consequences” of prolonging the war.

“Biden [was] let off the hook because he did not mean any harm,” Hale wrote. “In contrast, the government’s pre-trial motions in my case argued that I not be allowed to present evidence of what it called my ‘good motives.’”

“Afraid my motives might make me appear too sympathetic to a jury, I—like every other whistleblower before me—was rendered effectively defenseless because of a legal technicality in the way the law is written. Given no other choice, I was forced to plead out to avert a costly, unwinnable trial,” Hale recalled.

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US Deploys Anti-Drone Laser Systems in the Middle East to Field Test Prototypes

The Department of Defense has deployed four laser systems designed to intercept drones and rockets in the Middle East. The Pentagon has been developing a laser-style interceptor to reduce the cost of shooting down UAVs and rockets. 

Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus announced the new deployment of Directed Energy Maneuver Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) prototypes to the Middle East. The Army developed the weapons system in coordination with RTX, formerly Raytheon. The former employer of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, RTX, has received over $100 million to develop the platform. 

DE M-SHORAD, according to RTX, is a 50-kilowatt vehicle-mounted laser designed to intercept drones, missiles, and rockets at short range. RTX and the Pentagon believe laser systems will be a cheaper alternative for downing cheap drones and rockets. 

The four interceptors deployed to the Middle East are mounted on Stryker armored vehicles. The 2024 Pentagon funding bill authorized nearly $700 million in spending on the development and procurement of DE M-SHORAD systems. 

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So They’re Experimenting With Military Robots In Gaza Now

One of the most horrifying facts about this dystopia we live in is that large-scale military operations are routinely used as testing grounds for new war machinery, using human bodies as guinea pigs for experimentation in what amount to giant blood-soaked field laboratories — all to benefit the strategic objectives of empire managers and the profit margins of the military-industrial complex.

Haaretz has a new article out titled “Gaza Becomes Israel’s Testing Ground for Military Robots”, which reports that “In an effort to avoid harming soldiers and dogs, the IDF has been experimenting with the use of robots and remote-controlled dogs in the Gaza War.”

(Yeah because my gosh, can you imagine how terrible it would be if Israeli soldiers and dogs got harmed while carrying out a genocide?)

The article’s author Sagi Cohen reports that drone-mounted robot dogs and remotely controlled bulldozers are two of the new apocalyptic horrors currently being battle-tested in Gaza, saying “defense establishment officials confirm that there has been a leap in the use and sophistication of robots on the battlefield.” Which is a pretty disconcerting sentence to read.

This news comes out at the same time as a new Public Citizen report warning of the likely imminent arrival of autonomous weapons systems which will kill people with minimal instruction from human pilots, saying “The most serious worry involving autonomous weapons is that they inherently dehumanize the people targeted and make it easier to tolerate widespread killing, including in violation of international human rights law.” 

The more normalized robots become within the world’s militaries the closer we come to this point, and steps are already being taken in that direction. As Common Dreams’ Thor Benson notes in an article about the Public Citizen report, “Israel has purchased and at times deployed self-piloting, lethal drones.”

Back in January I wrote that “Gaza is a live laboratory for the military industrial complex,” saying “Data is with absolute certainty being collected on all the newer weapons being field-tested on human bodies in Gaza (just like has been happening in Ukraine) to be used to benefit the war machine and arms industry.”

What sparked this comment at the time was reports and first-hand witness accounts we’d seen coming out about the prolific use of IDF “sniper drones” in Gaza since October, with Israeli forces frequently shooting Palestinians with quad drones armed with rifles. Copious records are most assuredly being compiled on the effectiveness of these newer weapons and tactics in ending human lives, which will then be used to help market those weapons to other states and to improve their efficiency in killing.

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Strange ‘Flying Saucer’ Filmed by Reconnaissance Drone in Ukraine

A group of Ukrainian soldiers were left scratching their heads when their reconnaissance drone spotted a sizeable saucer-shaped object hovering in the sky. The peculiar UFO sighting reportedly occurred earlier this month as the country’s 406th Battalion was using a thermal-imaging UAV to keep an eye out for Russian adversaries. The exercise took a strange turn, however, when the drone caught sight of a cylindrical craft off in the distance.

The weird anomaly understandably sparked a spirited debate among the soldiers operating the UAV with one of the men wondering what the object could be and why it was not moving. As the group observed the object, one of the soldiers marveled that it was a UFO, while another expressed confusion over the fact that the sizeable object was not firing on the drone. Although they attempted to get a closer look at the oddity by zooming in on it, this provided little clarity as it simply resembled a floating disc.

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