Tag: military industrial complex

New Atlas Aircraft Targets Long-Range Strikes Without Runways Or Large Flight Decks

Mach Industries has won a Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) contract to develop a long-range unmanned aircraft designed to launch from austere locations and ships without large flight decks.

The aircraft, called Atlas, is being developed for the DIU’s Runway Independent Maritime Expeditionary Strike (RIMES) program. Mach Industries will serve as the aircraft integrator, working with propulsion company Whisper Aero.

According to the solicitation, the Department of the Navy is seeking an unmanned aerial system capable of conducting long-range strikes while operating from expeditionary sites with minimal infrastructure or from ships that lack conventional runways.

Mach said Atlas is designed to meet those requirements with a hybrid-electric propulsion system, runway-independent operations, a 1,000-pound payload capacity, and a range of 1,400 nautical miles.

Built For Austere Operations

The aircraft combines Mach Industries’ platform development capabilities with Whisper Aero’s JetFoil propulsion technology.

Unlike conventional fixed-wing aircraft that require runways, Atlas is being designed to operate from unimproved landing zones while retaining the control characteristics of a fixed-wing platform. The companies say the approach could give military units greater flexibility in contested environments where traditional airfields may be unavailable or vulnerable.

The aircraft is also intended to support distributed operations, a growing focus for the U.S. military as it prepares for conflicts in which logistics networks could come under attack.

In recent testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael identified contested logistics as one of the Pentagon’s critical technology priorities. The challenge centers on sustaining military operations when transportation routes, supply chains, and support infrastructure are disrupted.

Mach says Atlas addresses that challenge by reducing infrastructure requirements for launch and recovery while simplifying maintenance through a highly redundant propulsion architecture and a lower part count.

“Mach’s speed to prototype and production, coupled with Whisper Aero’s novel aerodynamics and propulsion makes Atlas a revolutionary air mobility platform,” said Nathan Diller, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Mach Industries.

Quiet Propulsion Advantage

A key feature of the aircraft is Whisper Aero’s JetFoil technology, which the company says improves efficiency while reducing acoustic signatures.

The system is designed to generate lift and thrust more efficiently than traditional approaches, helping extend range while allowing operations from confined locations. Lower noise levels could also make the aircraft more difficult to detect during missions.

“We developed JetFoil to propel the next generation of conventional, short, and vertical takeoff and landing aircraft silently and efficiently,” said Mark Moore, CEO of Whisper Aero.

According to Moore, the technology allows Atlas to meet RIMES requirements while operating from smaller naval vessels. “With JetFoil, Atlas can effectively meet the needs of the RIMES mission to operate even from destroyer class vessels.”

The award adds to Mach Industries’ expanding defense portfolio. Founded in 2023, the company says it is currently flying five different platforms and has manufactured more than 250 aircraft. Over the past two months, it has also conducted flight operations in four countries under complex electromagnetic conditions.

If successful, Atlas could provide the Navy and joint force with a long-range strike platform capable of operating from locations where traditional aircraft cannot, while reducing dependence on large runways and established air bases.

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Trump’s Ankara Reversal — Ukraine Gets Patriot Manufacturing License As NATO Wraps Summit With €70B Pledge

The Ankara NATO summit closed Wednesday with Trump performing one of his signature pivots: arriving hostile, leaving warm. The substantive headline is real regardless of the theater around it — Trump told Zelenskyy the US will grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air defense interceptors domestically, something Kyiv has requested for years and Washington had consistently refused. “We’re gonna give you a license to make Patriots. We’ll show them how to do it,” Trump said at a joint press conference. “I think they can produce them pretty quickly.”

Whether they can is a separate question. Patriots are expensive, technically complex, and take time to produce at scale — the manufacturing license addresses the supply-chain bottleneck in principle but is not a short-term battlefield fix. Ukraine’s air defense remains critically thin right now, not in 18 months when domestically built interceptors might plausibly come online. The real-money test is what bridge supply the US is providing in the interim. That was not spelled out publicly.

On the collective declaration: NATO allies pledged €70 billion in military equipment, assistance, and training for Ukraine in 2026, with a commitment to sustain equivalent levels in 2027. The Guardian noted — correctly — that this “largely reflects commitments already made.” It is a re-packaging of existing pledges rather than new money, a pattern NATO communiqués repeat with reliable consistency.

Trump also used the summit to publicly savage Spain as “a terrible partner in NATO,” repeating threats to cut off trade after Madrid declined to join the US Iran campaign. He arrived demanding European allies’ support in Iran and left praising “unity” — neither characterization was quite accurate. NATO Secretary-General Rutte, for his part, called the US strikes on Iran “absolutely necessary” and told Trump: “I’m with you on this.” Whatever you think of the Iran strikes, having the NATO chief functioning as a presidential cheerleader on a non-Article 5 unilateral US military campaign is worth watching.

Meanwhile, Denmark’s PM Frederiksen felt compelled to state publicly that her country is “ready to defend every inch of NATO including our own territory” after Trump reopened the Greenland question at the summit itself. That a NATO summit requires an ally to publicly reaffirm sovereignty over its own autonomous territory speaks to how strained the foundational norms have become.

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Canada Taps Germany for Naval Demand

Canada has officially selected Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) as the preferred builder for a new fleet of 12 submarines. The program is expected to cost roughly C$60 billion, making it one of the largest military procurements in Canadian history. Prime Minister Mark Carney is making the announcement just before the NATO summit, where member states are once again pledging even higher military spending. This is not simply about replacing aging submarines. It is another step in the global rearmament that I have warned was inevitable once governments abandoned diplomacy in favor of perpetual confrontation.

Canada’s existing Victoria-class submarines are reaching the end of their operational lives, but what stands out is who won the contract. Germany’s Type 212CD submarine was chosen over South Korea’s competing bid. The 212CD was jointly developed with Norway and is specifically designed for NATO operations, utilizing advanced air-independent propulsion, non-magnetic steel to reduce detection, and enhanced capabilities for operations in northern waters. Germany has openly stated that this contract would draw Canada closer to Europe strategically, not merely commercially. That should tell everyone this was as much a geopolitical decision as it was a military one.

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Ukraine Plans To Hyper-Innovate Humanoid Robot Soldiers

At the start of February, we pointed out that “humanoid warfare nears” and suspected these war bots were headed for Ukraine for testing. 

That hunch was confirmed by early March, after a TIME Magazine article reported that Foundation Robotics, a U.S.-based startup developing humanoid robots for industrial and military applications, had recently sent two Phantom MK1 robots to Ukraine for testing. 

Mike LeBlanc, co-founder of Foundation… 

The modern battlefield across western Eurasia has become the world’s AI weapons lab, where drones, autonomous systems, electronic warfare, and ground bots are being stress-tested in real time. 

For any ‘war unicorn’ startup trying to validate AI-enabled killing machines, Ukraine has become the proving ground, and soldiers on the front lines will quickly tell these startups whether their products work or not – that’s the part of hyperinnovation that people aren’t seeing yet, but it is becoming visible as low-cost AI killing systems begin to spread across the world. 

Last month, we were the first to debut a new video showing the Phantom MK1 robot operating a mobile light mortar system during a live-fire training exercise in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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The Chancellor, the Asset Manager, and the Missiles

There is a particular kind of arrangement that no law forbids and no scandal quite captures, because nothing in it is hidden. It sits in plain view, in regulatory filings and procurement requests, and it works precisely because everyone involved can say, truthfully, that they broke no rule. Friedrich Merz’s Germany is building one of these in real time.

Start with the weapons. In July 2025, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told Washington that Germany wanted to buy the American Typhon launch system and Tomahawk cruise missiles — the system’s first foreign sale, the decision left entirely to the United States. Trade outlets, citing Politico, put the order at three launchers and some 400 Tomahawk Block Vb missiles, north of €1 billion. Nearly a year later, Washington has not answered. The request stalled after Merz criticized the American war on Iran and Trump pulled 5,000 troops out of Germany and canceled a planned long-range-fires deployment. Europe’s would-be military leader, it turns out, cannot get deep-strike capability without American factories and a president’s goodwill. So much for sovereignty.

Now follow the money, because that is where the story actually lives. The Tomahawk is built by RTX, formerly Raytheon, where BlackRock sits among the largest institutional holders. The Typhon launcher is Lockheed Martin’s, where BlackRock has disclosed beneficial ownership above 5 percent in a Schedule 13G filed with the SEC. And BlackRock is where Merz spent four years before climbing back into politics: from 2016 to 2020 he chaired the supervisory board of its German arm. The man asking Washington to sell Germany missiles was, until lately, the public face of a firm that profits when the missiles are sold.

His time there was not quiet. In November 2018, while Merz chaired its supervisory board, prosecutors raided the Munich offices of BlackRock Asset Management Deutschland over cum-ex trades — the dividend-stripping fraud that drained the German treasury of tens of billions of euros. The conduct under investigation predated his arrival, prosecutors named him no suspect, and he called the practice “completely immoral” and ordered the firm to cooperate. Note the pattern all the same: this is a man who has spent his career adjacent to the machinery, never holding the smoking gun, always in the room.

Then came the policy. The fiscal lock came off before Merz was even sworn in. As leader of the election-winning CDU and chancellor-in-waiting, he drove through the outgoing Bundestag — on March 18, 2025, weeks before he took office, and deliberately before the newly elected parliament could convene — the amendment exempting defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the constitutional “debt brake.” The borrowing limit Germans had treated as sacred since 2009 was gone, replaced by an open tap. German military spending rose 24 percent in 2025 to $114 billion, the largest in NATO Europe. Merz has pledged more than €750 billion for the armed forces.

And BlackRock holds the contractors cashing in. It disclosed a 6.91 percent stake in Rheinmetall, the tank-maker whose shares have soared since 2022, with the ownership chain running through the very German subsidiary Merz once chaired. It crossed the 5 percent threshold in the sensor firm Hensoldt. These are not idle positions. They are the firm collecting on a rearmament its former chairman set loose.

Merz, naturally, denies the whole framing. “I never accepted a lobbying mandate,” he told Die Zeit. The transparency group LobbyControl notes that BlackRock’s own description of his job included cultivating contacts with governments and regulators — which is what lobbying is, whatever euphemism rides on the business card.

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Creepy, Armed Robot Dogs Cleared For Evaluation By U.S. Military

K-9s have provided invaluable service over the years. They will continue to serve for a long time. But in the higher risk environments, robotic K-9s are rapidly approaching service.

For years, you’ve probably seen the interesting and cute Boston Dynamics Robo Dog in person or YouTube videos.

Get ready for kinetic steel, thunder, and bark on four robotic legs.

These new military grade dogs will be very useful in urban and field settings while biological K-9s are reserved for less hostile situations.

The real K-9s will be around for years, it will be interesting, or scary, if the robo dogs can be networked and led by real K-9s.

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In the shadow of Minab: Inside the US testing of ‘new missiles’ on Iran’s Lamerd

In Lamerd, in Iran’s southern Fars province, the threat of war gave way to reality when previously untested missiles struck a school, sports grounds and nearby neighbourhoods.

The attack came just six hours after the double-tap strikes on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab on 28 February, over 400km away in Hormozgan province, where 120 children, 24 staff, seven parents, a school bus driver and a pharmacist were killed.

Four missiles from a new weapon system, the Lockheed Martin Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), which had never before been seen or deployed, would be field-tested on the town of 30,000 people.

At 5.11pm (1.41pm GMT), the missiles struck a residential area where a row of homes adjoined a few neighbourhood shops.

Rounia Fakori, 12, was at volleyball practice when the first explosion shook the school building.

“We were in our practice when we heard the first impact. We rushed to the door,” she recalled.

Then another missile struck, plunging the girls and their coaches into darkness as smoke and heat filled the sports hall. The force of the blast slammed the doors shut.

“We couldn’t see anything,” the girls’ volleyball coach, Rahimeh Shehabi, told Middle East Eye. “We could only hear the screams of the children.”

As the missiles struck the school and sports hall, a football game was underway outside.

Eleven-year-old Mahdiar was playing with his friends, including 12-year-olds Ilya Khatami and Abdulmosavar Rahmani, when explosive shrapnel tore through the area.

According to Mahdiar, he and one of his friends ran towards the canopy, where their football coach, Mahmoud Najafi, called out: “Come here quickly, it’s dangerous there.”

Ilya and his coach then rushed towards the building to help open the door for the girls and women trapped inside as a fourth missile struck, rattling the sports hall.

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Ukraine Closes Week Of Record Drone Attacks On Russia By Hitting Important Weapons Plant

Ukraine announced Saturday that it used its Flamingo cruise missiles overnight to strike Russia’s Titan-Barrikady weapons plant, which reportedly manufactures parts for its powerful Oreshnik missile.

The military plant is in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, which is a major industrial city in southwest Russia. Writing on X, President Zelensky described it as a “major industrial complex” where Russia “produces artillery systems and specialized military equipment, including components for missile launch systems.”

“Every Russian defense facility involved in the war against Ukraine is a legitimate target for our long-range strikes,” he wrote.

The Associated Press reports, “Volgograd Gov. Andrei Bocharov confirmed an attack on a business in the region’s Krasnooktyabrsky district, saying 10 people had been wounded and taken to a hospital. He said production facilities at the site were damaged but did not identify the company.”

Additionally, “Ukraine’s state security service said Saturday morning that Ukrainian forces also struck an oil pumping facility in Russia’s Vladimir region that supplies fuel to Moscow, for the second time this month.”

But on the other side of the border, Ukrainian media reports that Russia was also busy with now nightly airstrikes:

Russian forces targeted production facilities belonging to the Naftogaz Group, Ukraine’s largest national oil and gas company, in the Poltava and Kharkiv regions.

The barrage of attacks included 129 drones, of which 113 were destroyed or jammed by Ukrainian forces, Ukrainian media reported.

The Russian overnight attacks on Ukraine killed two people and injuring more than 20, according to state officials.

At a moment much of the globe’s attention remains fixated on Iran and the fate of energy shipping through the largely blocked Strait of Hormuz, the Ukraine war is rapidly escalating.

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China’s Expanding Biological Warfare Capabilities: Fueled by Military-Civil Fusion and AI

U.S. intelligence assessments warn that China is combining artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and military-civil fusion in ways that could significantly expand its biological warfare capabilities.

The United States government has long assessed that China operated an offensive biological weapons program from the early 1950s through at least the late 1980s. Two facilities in Beijing and Lingbao City, according to the State Department, weaponized ricin, botulinum toxin, anthrax, plague, cholera, and tularemia during that period. China acceded to the Biological Weapons Convention on November 15, 1984, which prohibits the development, production, and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons.

Beijing has consistently maintained it has never possessed such weapons and is in full compliance. The State Department’s position, however, is that China likely continued operating an offensive program after signing the convention and that the earlier program was never verified as dismantled, a requirement the treaty imposes on all signatories. Beijing canceled a bilateral BWC-related meeting with Washington in early 2022 and has declined to provide the treaty’s required disclosures.

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Alibaba Sues Pentagon to Remove ‘Chinese Military Company’ Label

Chinese tech titan Alibaba filed suit against the U.S. Department of War on Wednesday, arguing there was “no basis in fact or law” for the Pentagon to label it as a “Chinese military company” earlier this month.

The Department of War maintains a list of companies that perform services for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China, known as the “1260H List” after the legislation that created it. Since 2021, the list has been updated and refined to paint a full picture of China’s fusion between “private” firms and its military-intelligence complex.

The Pentagon added several big corporate names to the list on June 8, including Alibaba. The listed companies, and the Chinese government, objected to the designations as unfair and arbitrary.

“The U.S. should stop its wrong practice and create a fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese companies,” the Chinese embassy in Washington said, as soon as the updated 1260H list was announced.

Alibaba was particularly aggressive in claiming that it was “not part of any military-civil fusion strategy,” and immediately declared its intention to “take all available legal action against attempts to misrepresent our company.”

Alibaba made good on that threat with a petition to the San Jose division of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. Another Chinese firm, WuXi AppTec, filed its own challenge in the District of Columbia on June 11.

Both Chinese companies claimed they have suffered damages from what they viewed as an unfair designation. Alibaba said it was losing business partners in America, which could severely hinder its U.S. ventures.

A key issue in the lawsuit was Alibaba’s challenge to the Pentagon’s claim that the company is linked to China’s State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

SASAC is an agency controlled directly by the powerful State Council of China. It manages the “shares” owned by the Chinese Communist government in partly-independent companies, as well as assets that are fully owned by the state.

When Alibaba was added to the 1260H list, the Pentagon said it was “indirectly affiliated” with SASAC, while its ties with MIIT make it a “military-civil fusion contributor to the Chinese defense industrial base.”

Alibaba’s suit contents it is merely “regulated” by those agencies, not “affiliated” with them, and it has no choice about complying with their regulations.

“The relationship is no different from Alibaba’s dealings with United States government agencies. A regulator is not an affiliate,” the company contended.

The Chinese company further claimed its designation interferes with its First Amendment rights, because lobbyists that work for companies on the 1260H list can be restricted from doing business with the Department of War.

“The designation thus does not merely impose commercial costs – it strips Alibaba of its ability to speak, to petition the government through its chosen representatives,” the petition said.

On Monday, the Chinese government added ten American firms to its export control list, seemingly in retaliation for Alibaba and other firms being placed on the 1260H list.

Chinese state media said the move was “a response to Washington’s repeated weaponization of unilateral sanctions and entity lists to suppress Chinese enterprises, including its groundless addition of Chinese firms to its so-called military-industrial entity list.”

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