Drones

The U.S. Air Force responded to “suspected unauthorized drone activity” over RAF Lakenheath, America’s master fighter base in England, the Air Force has confirmed to TWZ. The confirmation was in response to our questions about social media reports of drone activity over several U.S. bases in England. On Nov. 9, we were the first to report that security levels had been raised at U.S. bases in England.

“This evening, USAF Security Forces personnel responded to suspected unauthorized drone activity over RAF Lakenheath,” an Air Force official told us. “No personnel, aircraft or infrastructure were affected.”

“We continue to work closely with our host nation counterparts to ensure the safety and security of our U.S. service members, U.S. and host nation civilians, contractors, and all of our families,” the official added. “Protecting our shared community is a joint responsibility, and we encourage everyone to support this effort by reporting any unusual or suspicious activity to local authorities.”

Earlier, the @defencegeek open-source intelligence X account stated that there were alarms going off at RAF Lakenheath, as well as RAF Mildenhall and RAF Feltwell. He posted video purporting to show the sound of sirens near RAF Mildenhall.

Germany’s military is phasing out Chinese-made drones used for training and restricting certain vehicles from military bases amid concerns that onboard sensors could transmit sensitive information to Chinese intelligence agencies.

A military counterintelligence investigation identified potential espionage risks involving cameras, microphones

Kratos has provided an interesting update on the price of its Valkyrie drones. The uncrewed aircraft currently cost roughly $6 to $8 million, depending on their configuration and without certain mission systems installed. Though this is a more expensive price point than Kratos has said it has been aiming for in the past, it still puts Valkyrie firmly at the lower end of the cost spectrum for Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) type drones based on available information, while still providing relatively high-end capabilities.

Kratos’ President and CEO Eric DeMarco shared the new cost figures, as well as other new details about the Valkyrie program, during a recent quarterly earnings call. He also spent considerable time talking about his view that affordability will be a central key factor for prospective customers for CCA-type drones going forward.

“I would not want to be anyone else than Kratos with the Valkyrie, that’s in production, that comes off the line, ‘white tail,’ six million dollars or something like that, maybe eight [million dollars], depending on configuration,” DeMarco said at one point during the call. “Missionized is more.”

Some more context is necessary before any more discussion of these cost figures. DeMarco’s remarks here were part of a lengthy response to a question about Kratos’ view of potential U.S. opportunities for sales of CCA-type drones in the next year.

The U.S. Air Force has been operating a small number of XQ-58As since the type first flew in 2019, in support of research and development and test and evaluation activities. The Marine Corps also experimented with the XQ-58A and is now in the process of acquiring a fully missionized version of the Valkyrie for operational use through that service’s CCA program. Those drones are sometimes referred to as the MQ-58Bs. Northrop Grumman is technically the prime contractor for the Marine effort, which falls under the umbrella of the larger Marine Air-Ground Task Force Uncrewed Expeditionary Tactical Aircraft (MUX TACAIR) program.

XQ-58 Valkyrie first flight with the USMC

Kratos has also secured at least two other contracts for Valkyries from other still-unidentified customers. At least one of them is outside of the United States and took delivery of drones back in the third quarter of 2025. The company is known to be pursuing a bid to supply a version of the Valkyrie called the U740 to the German Air Force, or Luftwaffe, through a partnership with Airbus. The U740 made its first flight at an unnamed test facility in northern Europe last month.

At the time of writing, Valkyrie drones fall into two main categories, at least that we know of. These are rocket-assisted takeoff (RATO) versions, which lack landing gear, and landing gear-equipped conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) types that operate from traditional runways. The U.S. Air Force’s XQ-58As, as well as the European U740, are RATO types. The MQ-58Bs the Marines are acquiring are CTOL versions.

Kratos has also developed a special launch trolley so RATO drones can take off from a runway. No matter how they get into the air, drones in the RATO configuration land via parachute at the end of a sortie. CTOL drones can also be launched via the RATO method, but then land on a traditional runway.

Kratos Valkyrie Trolley Launch System

In March 2024, before the CTOL version was officially disclosed, Kratos told TWZ that there were at least five distinct subvariants of the Valkyrie. The company has been steadily working to expand the performance envelope of the core design since its first flight in 2019, too.

Going back to the matter of the Valkyrie’s unit price, DeMarco had put the figure at around $6.5 million back in 2023. The following year, he told TWZ directly that the price range for RATO versions, specifically, was between $4 and $6 million. At that time, he said the $4 million figure reflected economies of scale benefits from a production run of 100 drones. Kratos had said years ago now that it was hoping to eventually be able to drive down the price point to $2 million apiece as production ramped up. As of August, the company’s stated goal was to get to an annual production rate of 40 airframes by 2028.

As noted earlier, even at $8 million, Valkyrie’s unit cost is deeply at the lower end of the known spectrum for CCA-type designs.

General Atomics and Anduril are both on contract now to build batches of their respective FQ-42A Vengeance and FQ-44A Fury drone designs under the first phase of the U.S. Air Force’s CCA program, or Increment 1. The service has said that it is aiming to have at least 500 of those uncrewed aircraft in inventory by 2032. The Air Force also expects to acquire additional CCAs, which could be of entirely different designs, through a follow-on Increment 2. Kratos could potentially submit a bid for that competition.

The Air Force has said that it is targeting a $20 million average unit cost for Increment 1 CCAs once full-scale production is achieved, but what the actual price point will be remains to be seen. There has been talk previously of the price range of the designs we are seeing now being between $20 and $30 million. Anduril has said that each Fury will be cheaper than that, but has yet to provide a hard figure. At the time of writing, it is unclear whether General Atomics has yet shared any hard cost data of its own.

Boeing’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat, another CCA-type design originally developed for the Royal Australian Air Force and in limited production now, offers another point of comparison. In 2024, authorities in Australia said Boeing was aiming for the Ghost Bat’s unit cost to be “10 per cent of the cost of a crewed aircraft such as a[n F-35] Joint Strike Fighter.” At that time, this would have translated to between $8 and $10 million based on publicly available F-35 cost data. How that cost projection has evolved since then, and how it applies to the larger Block 3 version Boeing now has in development, is unknown.

“Affordability is gonna win,” Kratos CEO DeMarco said on the recent earnings call. “We build 150 to 200 jet drones every year. I think more than anyone else in the world, Kratos does [sic], target and tactical. And our bill of materials across the target drones and the tactical drones is substantially the same, which gives us leverage on the supply chain. No one can hit our price points, cost points. Can’t do it.”

“I believe we’re going to win ultimately globally, including in the U.S. because of capability and affordability,” he added.

DeMarco also highlighted last month’s first flight of the U740 variant as another reflection of potential foreign sales opportunities for the Valkyrie.

“We’re flying internationally. What does that mean? We had to get State Department approval,” he explained. “You don’t see anyone else flying internationally, do you? They talk about it. We’re going to fly here. We’re going to fly there. We’re going to build it here. We’re going to build it there. No one’s done it but us. That is a huge, ginormous competitive advantage for us with international customers because we can bring them airplanes and fly them for them on their ranges, and, heretofore, no one else can.”

All this being said, it is important to remember that, despite Kratos’ significant success with Valkyrie in recent years, the drone’s continued development has not been without hurdles. TWZ was the first to report on the crash of one of these drones in a still-unknown “test configuration” on August 4. That mishap occurred at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, a known hub for uncrewed aircraft testing.

“No one was injured in the incident. As safety is our top priority, flight test operations for this system have been paused temporarily in an abundance of caution while we investigate the cause of the incident,” Kratos told TWZ in a statement at the time. “Kratos has additional test systems ready once the investigation is complete.”

“We push the envelope across all of our system types,” Steve Fendley, President of Kratos’ Unmanned Systems Division, also subsequently told TWZ. “The other thing I can say is we are constantly increasing the capability of the system, both for what we think it needs to be, and in other cases to satisfy what a particular customer may want to do to satisfy a certain mission.”

The crash at Dugway did not come up at all during the recent earnings call, despite it having occurred during the quarter under discussion.

Furthermore, DeMarco’s comments underscore just how much the CCA market is heating up, and not just in the United States. There has been an explosion in the development of relevant designs in recent years globally. This extends to potential adversaries, too, especially China.

Kratos is clearly hoping that Valkyrie’s price point, together with other attributes of the still-evolving design, will help it continue to stand out in this still-growing field of major competitors.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

A California robotics company called Machina has been issued a $9 million award for a containerized system to robotically mass-produce Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) airframes close to the point of need. As TWZ has frequently noted, LUCAS drones, and one-way attack weapons like them, are playing an increasing role in U.S. combat operations and military planning.

The award to Machina is the latest example of the Pentagon’s push to use containerized 3D printing and other advanced fabricating systems closer to the front lines to shorten supply chains that could get severely degraded in a major conflict. Decentralizing production of drones also allows units to be more flexible and tailor their own production to their specific needs at any given moment. For instance, a unit can produce variations of multiple designs that are best suited to an upcoming mission instead of having to use whatever they are shipped.

This 18-month contract from the Defense Department’s Organic Industrial Base Modernization Challenge calls for Machina to prove it can build LUCAS drones at deployed locations with its RoboCraftsman system, Ed Mehr, founder and CEO of Machina, told TWZ Friday afternoon. A decision on producing them at scale in many other locales will come later.

Creating containerized production of drones and components using 3D printing and other advanced manufacturing techniques at the forward edge is a burgeoning industry. The Machina system is one of a rapidly growing number of capabilities built around this concept, although many focus on smaller drones.

RoboCraftsman was built to manufacture where it’s needed. It folds & ships in 2 ISO 668 containers.

Building Drones Near The Point Of Need

Initially, the plan calls for Machina to set up so-called “Edge Factories” at two locations in the continental United States, said Mehr. However, the ultimate goal is to be able to deploy them to forward locations in countries like Kuwait.

The Edge Factories consist of the company’s containerized RoboCraftsman manufacturing cells, Mehr told us. A 20-foot by 36-foot system that weighs 120,000 pounds fully installed, it is essentially two robotic arms that form the airframe out of metal using reductive manufacturing based on a variety of requirements. Payload weight, range and other factors are punched into a software system designed by the nTop company and the robotic arms then cut the metal into the desired form factor based on the required specifications.

Machina uses metal instead of composites that many drones are made out of because “not only it is cheaper, it is more widely available and now can be processed with an automated process like ours versus composites, which are all done by hand layup,” Mehr explained.

The following Machina video shows how the RoboCraftsman system, guided by the inputs, forms the metal to craft the airframe.

Metal Drone Skins, Robotic Forming & the Future of Defense Manufacturing | Machina is the Factory

This avoids having to use equipment like dies and rolls, dramatically speeding the process and allowing production at scale, Mehr stated.

“Basically, the agentic AI agents can explore and generate whole different versions of an airframe with different parameters,” Mehr proffered. “Because now it’s parameterized, you can just change the parameters and you get another airframe, and then evaluate if that airframe is good for the requirement they want.”

This way, the RoboCraftsman system “can easily generate 20, 30, 40, 50 different designs just in software, and then put it through simulations to figure out which one actually meets the requirement for that,” the Machina CEO added.

“The concept is that we’re going to bring this capability closer to the point of need, so that you can build a different requirement for let’s say PACOM versus U.S. CENTCOM versus in Ukraine,” Mehr said. “They can easily switch and build a drone that they need.”

Under this contract, each Edge Factory will consist of one or two RoboCraftsman cells and each cell can make a LUCAS airframe in two to five days, depending on the size, Mehr said. A scaled deployment of 10 or more cells would take place under a new contract, he added.

The systems can make “anywhere from a one-off all the way to the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands,” Mehr said. It all depends on the number of RoboCraftsman systems that are ordered.

At the moment, Mehr envisions that each 12-foot airframe will cost “somewhere around $15,000 to $40,000,” depending on the complexity. This range is a relatively common price point for Russian Shahed-136 variants and U.S. knockoffs under the LUCAS program.

The company has already produced a six-foot, half-scale airframe that was recently tested at Edwards Air Force Base, said Mehr. However, that initial test proved problematic.

“The first design had some challenges with crosswind mitigation,” Mehr told us. “Since then, we have moved the location of the engine slightly to enable better crosswind mitigation, and now we’re running again. And the beauty is for us to go from one design to the next is just like a couple of months, a maximum of three months. Like we can just then try it again.”

Mehr said that Machina is not working with SpektreWorks, which designed and made the LUCAS drones previously supplied to the U.S. military and already used in combat. SpektreWorks declined to comment.

The Edge Factory contract is one of several Machina has been awarded to use these systems to help build and repair military hardware.

In July, Machina was issued a qualification contract by Lockheed Martin to produce fuel tanks for AGM-158 Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM).

That plan called for the creation of a 200,000-square-foot facility “designed to house up to 50 RoboCraftsman cells and support high-rate production of mission-critical metal structures for defense programs including JASSM,” according to a media release at the time. “By integrating forming, machining, welding, and assembly under one roof, Machina Factory 3 compresses production timelines from months to days.”

“Lockheed Martin Ventures invested in Machina Labs for its powerful combination of speed, flexibility, and scalability, and our teams have worked closely to transition key capabilities to production,” said Chris Moran, vice president and general manager, Lockheed Martin Ventures. “Machina’s work advances capacity, reduces risk, and helps ensure we can deliver mission-critical capabilities at scale. We congratulate Machina on this milestone as a supplier, which further strengthens an innovative and resilient American Defense Industrial Base.”

Earlier this year, a Machina RoboCraftsman platform helped repair a C-17 Globemaster III cargo jet that was damaged during a tornado, Mehr told us.

The system “fabricated a first-of-its-kind replacement part for the damaged C-17 without the need for dedicated tooling,” the company noted. “Machina deployed a RoboCraftsman at the RSO [Rapid Sustainment Office], where production for a left nose panel began in March 2026 and was completed in May 2026. The aircraft returned to flight on July 30, 2026 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.”

We asked the Pentagon for information about why they selected Machina and their metrics for success, but we have not heard back yet.

Pentagon Pushing For Deployable Manufacturing

The U.S. military has been pushing for several years for the employment of mobile additive and other forms of advanced manufacturing “to produce unmanned aircraft components in remote or austere environments and reduce dependence on traditional supply chains,” the Air Force’s innovation arm, AFWERX, noted last month.

The idea is to place these systems in a wide array of locations, produce the quantity needed and tailor the airframe for the mission.

In one such case, the Air National Guard and Air Force Special Operations Command partnered with the San Diego-based Firestorm company in 2023 “to create an expeditionary assembly unit capable of mass-producing unmanned aerial systems,” according to the Pentagon.

The result was called an Expeditionary Manufacturing Cell or xCell.

“It’s basically an expeditionary 3D printer,” Master Sgt. Richard Stone, 194th Air Support Operations Group innovation officer, explained at the time. “The basis of the technology is … it’s about the size of a [shipping container] and it can print out, for this specific use case, drones.”

“Inside this [shipping container], it’ll print out all the components,” said Stone “But then you have what’s called RPA, which is robotic process [automation.]”

The xCell “prints the individual pieces and then uses RPA to assemble the major components of the drone,” the Pentagon added.

“The user can take these components and, almost like Legos, put them together,” said Stone. “So if you want a longer drone with a specific payload, you can take those components and put them together and the computer will tell you, ‘This is where the wings go and this is where the center of gravity should be.”

The company went on to produce Tempest drones that were flying with 3rd Littoral Combat Team, 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, during Exercise Balikatan 2026 at Cagayan North International Airport in the Philippines, AFWERX noted.

Our own Jamie Hunter recently interviewed Craig Anders, senior vice president of growth at Aevex, about the company’s ForgeX containerized 3D drone printing system.

The ForgeX system “represents being able to take the fight further forward, print drones on demand, print them out towards the front of the lines, cut down the logistics trail, and absolutely revolutionize the battlefield,” said Anders. 

The goal is to be “able to kick these planes out the door on short timelines to go out and get the missions done, work within the local area to make sure that the mission can be accomplished by any means necessary,” he added.

Anders said the ForgeX printers fabricate three types of drones, the Vandal, Onyx and Raker. He added that the system can produce up to 880 a year.

AEVEX’s ForgeX containerized 3D printed drone mini factory

Growing U.S. Reliance On LUCAS

The U.S. military first announced it had begun fielding LUCAS, which was reverse-engineered from the Iranian-designed Shahed-136, in December 2025. This came just months after TWZ laid out a detailed case for why the U.S. military should start acquiring Shahed-136 clones in large volumes. LUCAS made its official combat debut in the opening phases of major combat operations against Iran earlier this year. The pusher-propeller, combustion-engine-powered kamikaze drones were first launched from the ground, a U.S. official told us at the time. They can also be fired from ships. In March, CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper told us the LUCAS drones were “indispensable.”

The following video shows Cooper answering our question about the LUCAS drones.

Now the Army is looking to expand the use of these weapons to the Pacific, Maj. Gen. Bernard Harrington, head of the 7th Infantry Division, told us during the Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) conference last month.

“So we see that playing a key role in order to be able to achieve that effect at mass, … [and] in an affordable manner, while also being able potentially to preserve something that’s more exquisite for something that requires an exquisite munition.”

“So as we start modeling out what it looks like to be able to penetrate a portion of the anti-access/area denial network in support of the joint task force in the PACOM [U.S. Pacific Command] area of operations, we started looking at, well, how do I bend – how do I achieve mass at a cost curve?” the 7th Infantry and MDC-PAC commander explained. “What effect am I really trying to achieve on a system in order to provide that window of opportunity for that joint force commander?”

“So maybe I don’t necessarily need to sink a ship, but if I take out certain systems on that vessel, well then it creates this temporal window opportunity,” he continued. “Then that joint force commander can surge in that carrier strike group or bomber task force.”

While the exact details of the LUCAS program requirements have been hard to pin down, it’s likely that multiple drone types from multiple manufacturers could become part of the program as time goes on. Ed Mehr gave us an idea of what that could look like:

“Shahed clearly inspired LUCAS, which stands for Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System. But we shouldn’t confuse the inspiration with the destination. The future isn’t about mass-producing replicas of one drone. Different theaters and missions demand different performance, and therefore different designs. That could mean a LUCAS-style drone or a wide variety of Group 2 and Group 3 unmanned aircraft. The real breakthrough is making that diversity affordable. We’re developing flexible manufacturing technologies that can produce many different designs cost-effectively using one of the cheapest and most proven aerospace materials: sheet metal. It’s what aircraft have been built from for generations. We’re bringing it into an era where manufacturing can adapt as quickly as the mission.”

We won’t know how the Machina contract ultimately pans out until sometime in mid-2028. Regardless, given the importance of both the LUCAS drones and deployable, additive and advanced manufacturing are becoming, this is likely a first step in what could be a whole new logistics concept that could underpin a significant portion of the growing LUCAS program.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

New footage of Australia’s Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle (XL-AUV) provides the first look at how the vehicle launches aerial drones, while also revealing a pair of deployable masts not previously seen on the platform. The video comes soon after we got a glimpse of some of the payloads that the Royal Australian Navy plans to integrate on the new uncrewed submarine, as you can read more about in our coverage here.

Published by manufacturer Anduril, the footage shows a Ghost Shark surfacing before doors on the top of its hull slide open. A launcher consisting of 12 angled tubes then emerges from a drone sub. Another launcher is seen in the other upper payload bay, but is not raised in the video. While it appears to be of the same type, the second launcher could also have a different arrangement of tubes.

The footage subsequently cuts to an ALTIUS-type drone being launched from one of the tubes, with Ghost Shark itself remaining surfaced.

The sequence provides a much more concrete look at the aerial-drone deployment concept — or one of them — than the photographs released previously, which offered the first public view inside Ghost Shark’s side payload bay.

The Australian government has said the vehicle is being developed for missions including persistent intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) and strike, but the precise configuration and operational capabilities of its weapons and how they are launched had not previously been disclosed.

The video does not identify which ALTIUS variant is being launched. However, Ghost Shark has previously been displayed at the Altus factory in Australia alongside derivatives of the ALTIUS-600 family. This includes the ALTIUS-600 for ISR, as well as the ALTIUS-600M, which is designed for strike missions. You can read more about this family of drones here. As we noted before, unarmed variants of the ALTIUS-600 are designed to be optionally expendable, and can be reused, although in many scenarios that isn’t possible. In terms of capabilities, the ALTIUS-600 has a maximum range of around 275 miles and can remain airborne for at least four hours, according to Anduril.

ALTIUS-600M Loitering Munition

Ghost Shark can clearly deploy a substantial number of aerial drones — two dozen in this case – in a single sortie, enabling swarms to be launched far from an adversary’s coastline. Depending on the drones carried and how they are employed, such a swarm could provide broad-area surveillance, wreak havoc on enemy air defenses via electronic warfare, or attack targets.

The concept could also have value below the threshold of open conflict. A mass launch of relatively inexpensive drones could be used to probe or stimulate an adversary’s air defenses, prompting them to reveal their locations, signatures and operating procedures for collection by other intelligence assets or even some of the drones themselves. There is a precedent for exactly this going back to the early Cold War years, which you can read all about here.

Ghost Shark could carry these capabilities deep into contested waters clandestinely without putting a crew at risk, unleashing their payload even at standoff distances or right next to the shore to give the drones maximum penetration and loitering time over target, depend on the risk profile.

At the same time, while the 12-tube launchers fit neatly into Ghost Shark’s hull architecture, the modular nature of the design means that the same space can accommodate many other payloads, which might include alternative types of aerial drones. This could be fewer larger, more capable types, or far more plentiful smaller, less capable ones.

The other notable development in the video is the appearance of two deployable masts. Their presence is particularly interesting given Anduril’s emphasis on designing uncrewed underwater vehicles without the kinds of protruding mast arrangements associated with traditional submarine designs. On UUVs, masts like these are generally used to support sensors, communications, and propulsion systems.

“We don’t have big masts running down the backbone of our vehicle that a lot of other designs do that then preclude the ability for the payloads to come out in different directions… of the payload module itself,” Dr. Shane Arnott, Senior Vice President for Engineering at Anduril and the company’s maritime lead, told TWZ back in 2024.

“So we have… in effect, unlimited flexibility in this design, just the way that we’ve configured the vehicle and the payload bay itself could be almost anything within a size configuration that you can dream up,” Arnott added. “We haven’t encountered a crazy idea yet from a customer that … we can’t fit.”

The larger mast that lies flat is actually a fairly traditional one for large UUVs. It lies along the centerline of the hull when stowed, between the upper payload bays. It then deploys upward in an arm-like motion and carries an antenna. The smaller mast is located farther aft and rises vertically from its own housing. Potentially, the tall mast supports a line-of-sight datalink to the drones, while the other being a satcom array, such as one connected to Starlink/Starshield, sends drone feed to controllers anywhere in the world. It’s also worth noting that Ghost Shark could just launch the drones and send them on their missions autonomously, without needing to stay surfaced at all. Other arrangements could exist, as well, such as Ghost Shark launching a dozen drones and one larger one capable of carrying its own satcom terminal. This would allow direct control of the drones by operators anywhere in the world without Ghost Shark remaining present near the surface.

Ghost Shark also has a lower-profile swept-back sail on top of its nose section, not visible in the video. Overall, the vessel would retain a very small signature above the waterline while connected to the drones, making it hard to detect by radar and electro-optical imaging systems.

The new video follows the recent disclosure of three payload concepts for the Royal Australian Navy’s Ghost Shark: the deployment of up to 12 sea mines in a mission, the placement of supply caches on the seabed, and the launch of aerial drones. Those capabilities expand the vehicle beyond conventional underwater surveillance into a broader range of undersea warfare missions.

The mine-delivery option could support operations in strategically important maritime areas, while seabed caches could provide a means of positioning equipment and supplies for later retrieval. The aerial-drone capability, as seen in the new video, would allow Ghost Shark to extend surveillance beyond the reach of its own sensors or potentially deliver strike effects without exposing crewed platforms to the same risks. Having 12 ALTIUS drones ready to launch (and potentially the same number in the adjacent upper payload bay) would allow multiple missions to be undertaken.

The modular design is central to Ghost Shark. As we have discussed, the payload section can be configured using different hull sections and mission-specific systems, allowing the same underlying vehicle design to accommodate different requirements. The newly revealed launcher provides a first look at how at least one of those payload concepts may be implemented in practice.

Australia has committed substantial resources to autonomous and uncrewed undersea warfare capabilities, with a planned fleet of Australian-designed and built Ghost Shark vehicles serving alongside the Speartooth large uncrewed underwater vehicle (LUUV) and the BlueBottle uncrewed surface vessel (USV). The Ghost Shark program is also part of the broader AUKUS effort to develop advanced maritime technologies alongside the United Kingdom and the United States.

The new footage provides a clearer picture of the practical design choices behind that effort. Most notably, how the underwater vehicle can operationalize its aerial drone launching capability and the quantity of those systems it could potentially deploy very quickly before slipping back below the waves.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The Ukrainian Armed Forces say they have carried out the world’s first frontline evacuation of a wounded soldier by aerial drone. The soldier, from the 30th Mechanized Brigade, is said to have been recovered successfully and is undergoing treatment and rehabilitation.

“This is a historic event, at least for our unit for sure,” said “Napalm,” a squad commander and programmer with the 92nd Assault Brigade’s uncrewed ground vehicle (UGV) company. The precise date and location of the operation have not been disclosed, and the claim of a global first has not been independently verified. However, a video of the event has been published by the 92nd, which you can watch below:

ТАКОГО ЩЕ НІХТО НЕ РОБИВ! В УКРАЇНІ ПРОВЕЛИ ПЕРШУ В СВІТІ ПОВІТРЯНУ ЕВАКУАЦІЮ ЛЮДИНИ З ЛІНІЇ ФРОНТУ

At this point, it should be noted that the footage has not been independently verified and could depict a staged demonstration rather than an actual combat evacuation. It should, at least, be treated with a degree of caution.

According to accompanying reports, the infantryman was wounded while holding his position. Mines and intense Russian drone activity prevented a conventional ground evacuation, prompting the 92nd’s specialists to attempt an aerial extraction. The video shows the soldier clipping himself to the underside of the drone via a harness before being flown to safety. The extemporized nature of the platform is underscored by the fact that, while in the air, the soldier dangles below its rigid landing legs.

The aircraft was a heavy hexacopter manufactured by Ukrainian company Gurzuf Defense, which provided it free of charge. A UAV operator from the 30th Mechanized Brigade piloted the drone. Throughout the recovery, the soldier remained in contact with the drone operator.

The operation involved the 92nd, 30th and 14th Mechanized Brigades, the 10th Army Corps and Gurzuf Defense.

Ukraine increasingly uses uncrewed ground vehicles to deliver supplies and evacuate casualties from exposed positions. According to Euromaidan Press, Ukrainian UGVs conducted approximately 112,000 logistics and evacuation missions between January and August 2026.

However, ground robots can struggle with mines, mud, and cratered terrain, while remaining vulnerable to drones and artillery. These obstacles make it especially difficult to conduct UGV operations in the battlefield’s “kill zone,” which can extend six to nine miles or more from the front line. You can read an in-depth account of Ukrainian UGV efforts in this previous story.

A video showing a Ukrainian UGV in action in the Donetsk region:

Ground Drones Evacuate Wounded Soldiers Under Fire In Ukraine | Ukraine Front Line Update

Aerial platforms are able to reach casualties in places where ground vehicles cannot safely travel, and can get there far quicker, without having to stick to specific routes.

The 92nd has not disclosed the evacuation distance or flight duration of the mission. If, as reported, the drone used was an Audag-6 model, this is stated to be capable of carrying a 200-pound payload over a distance of up to 15 miles.

Meanwhile, the recovery points to a growing trend in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Only days before the story of the evacuation broke, it emerged that Ukraine is also now testing the StarGate, a purpose-built aerial medical evacuation drone — also of the heavy hexacopter type — developed by the SkyFall company. This is a rather more tailored solution to the problem, with a covered, medical-grade stretcher slung below the drone. It has a reported payload capacity of around 330 pounds, uses AI-assisted navigation, and can also deploy nets against hostile drones attempting to intercept it.

Exclusive look at ‘StarGate,’ Ukraine’s drone that can evacuate wounded soldiers

The 92nd’s operation used a heavy-lift hexacopter adapted for an ad hoc casualty transport, rather than a more bespoke design. This means the soldier had to be adequately trained on how to strap in, and also had to be in a condition that they could actually perform this procedure. This would also be the case even if other soldiers were able to assist them in strapping in.

While these kinds of solutions may be new to the battlefield in Ukraine, using uncrewed aerial systems for personnel recovery and medical evacuation is far from new.

Back in 2016, the Army completed a demonstration of the Lockheed Martin K-Max helicopter in a casualty evacuation role. The K-Max can operate with and without a pilot and was used as a drone by the Marine Corps to deliver cargo in Afghanistan.

“Unmanned and autonomous platforms have the potential to completely rewrite the medical doctrine,” Army Col. Daniel Kral, head of the Army’s Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), explained during a conference at Fort Detrick in Maryland in 2017.

In 2019, TWZ reported on U.S. Army efforts to explore how uncrewed craft might speed up the casualty evacuation process. This work included evaluation of the Dragonfly Pictures, Inc. (DPI) DP-14 Hawk, a small, tandem-rotor drone with a 400-pound cargo capacity.

The emergence of autonomous air vehicles, or uncrewed ‘flying taxis,’ with short or vertical take-off and landing capabilities in the urban air mobility sector has also generated military interest. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, for example, has conducted studies into how craft such as these could be adapted for combat search and rescue, with the idea that they would be airdropped to recover a fighter pilot shot down while operating over hostile territory.

Closer to the Ukrainian hexacopter concept is the Flowcopter FC-100, a heavy-lift quadcopter drone that the U.S. Army tested in a medical evacuation capacity in Poland during the large-scale Saber Strike exercise earlier this year. Carrying a 220-pound payload, the drone has a range of more than 60 miles.

All of these concepts aim to address the inherent vulnerability of larger personnel recovery platforms in more contested environments.

In their favor, they offer the potential to rescue troops from more precarious situations, with the smaller drones touching down in relatively tight areas in mountainous, forested, or jungle environments. Autonomous navigation systems can guide the drones through smoke, dust, or bad weather, too.

On the other hand, these small craft have no space for a medic, pararescuemen, or other additional personnel. Bearing in mind their limited range and lower speeds, they also need to be in the right location to respond to emergencies as and when they occur.

For the Ukrainian Armed Forces, aerial medical evacuation drones are being rapidly developed and now fielded to help address another problem: the vulnerability of UGVs in areas of the battlefield that have long become far too hazardous for crewed medevac platforms to operate.

By now, both sides in the Ukraine war are relying heavily upon small, autonomous uncrewed aircraft to perform a wide variety of resupply, surveillance, communications, and strike roles on and around the front lines. With that in mind, the adaptation of these kinds of vehicles for casualty evacuation and personnel recovery missions is the next logical step.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

America’s adoption of long-range one-way attack munitions like the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) is evolving quickly. Training on how to fold these relatively low-cost, but potentially highly destructive systems into a joint force playbook for targeting adversaries on land and at sea, from the Pacific to Europe, and anywhere in between, continues.

How exactly LUCAS drones, and other types to come, will be used in future fights globally was highlighted during a panel at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual symposium earlier this week, at which TWZ was in attendance. The discussion was centered on how Army training is changing to meet the extreme combat demands of the future.

The U.S. military first announced it had begun fielding LUCAS, which was reverse-engineered from the Iranian-designed Shahed-136, in December 2025. This came just months after TWZ laid out a detailed case for why the U.S. military should start acquiring Shahed-136 clones in large volumes. LUCAS made its official combat debut in the opening phases of major combat operations against Iran earlier this year. The pusher-propeller, combustion-engine-powered kamikaze drones, which are employed from static launchers that can be positioned on the ground or installed on ships, and with the help of a small rocket booster, were subsequently praised as “indispensable” by America’s top commander in the Middle East.

With all that in mind, “long-range strike drones like LUCAS, how is that fitting into your planning and training?” our Howard Altman asked the panelists at AUSA.

“We’ve taken our Bayonet Academy, as we call it, a training area at JBLM [Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State], and have started incorporating the employment of long-range one-way attack. Like, how do I maintain it? How do I employ it? How does that then get orchestrated in order to achieve that effect?” Maj. Gen. Bernard Harrington, head of the 7th Infantry Division, responded. “So we see that playing a key role in order to be able to achieve that effect at mass, … [and] in an affordable manner, while also being able potentially to preserve something that’s more exquisite for something that requires an exquisite munition.”

Earlier this year, the Army brought the 7th Infantry and the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force together under the umbrella of what it now calls the Multi-Domain Command-Pacific (MDC-PAC). Maj. Gen. Harrington is also now the commander of MDC-PAC, and has talked previously about how he sees uncrewed capabilities as critical to overwhelming adversaries in future conflicts. The service’s MDTFs, of which there are now four, have been at the leading edge of fielding new long-range strike and other advanced capabilities.

In his response to Altman’s question, Harrington elaborated more on how he sees long-range one-way attack munitions like LUCAS factoring specifically into future fights in the Pacific, such as one against China. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has already established extensive anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) bubbles in the Western Pacific and is continuing to expand on that strategy.

“So as we start modeling out what it looks like to be able to penetrate a portion of the anti-access/area denial network in support of the joint task force in the PACOM [U.S. Pacific Command] area of operations, we started looking at, well, how do I bend – how do I achieve mass at a cost curve?” the 7th Infantry and MDC-PAC commander explained. “What effect am I really trying to achieve on a system in order to provide that window of opportunity for that joint force commander?”

“So maybe I don’t necessarily need to sink a ship, but if I take out certain systems on that vessel, well then it creates this temporal window opportunity,” he continued. “Then that joint force commander can surge in that carrier strike group or bomber task force.”

What the general is describing here is typically referred to as a mission kill. For years now, TWZ has repeatedly highlighted how long-range one-way attack drones and loitering munitions could be used in exactly this way against even larger warships. Damaging or destroying radars, communications antennas, and other subsystems could severely degrade a ship’s combat effectiveness and increase its vulnerability to follow-on attacks. The time and effort required for repairs could keep it sidelined for a protracted period of time.

“So when we started looking at that, we saw great value. That maybe I don’t have to use specifically or unmask an exquisite system to achieve that effect,” Harrington added. “If I can achieve [the] effect of mass utilizing lower cost systems, hey, maybe that will get me there. So we modeled that, and what we saw was, particularly with our unmanned surface vessels [USV], long-range one-way attack, long-range launch effects, the ability to synchronize and mass that could potentially get us to achieve that effect.”

As with long-range one-way attack drones, the adoption of kamikaze USVs by the U.S. military is evolving rapidly. America’s first use of this capability in real combat also came against Iran in July.

The term “launch effects” that Harrington used here is a catch-all term the U.S. military now routinely applies to a diverse array of uncrewed aerial systems designed to be launched from other platforms in the air, on the ground, and/or at sea. This includes loitering munitions, but also designs configured for surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare, signal relay, and other tasks. The lines separating long-range one-way attack drones, launched effects, and traditional cruise missiles and decoys are in many cases now very blurry.

None of this is limited to the Pacific region or the Middle East, either.

“So, in terms of launch effects, I think you mentioned LUCAS. Covenant’s out there. There’s other systems that are out there,” Brig. Gen. Steven Carpenter, head of Multi-Domain Command-Europe (MDC-E), another one of the panelists, also said in direct response to Howard Altman’s question. “In Europe, we like that, more than accepting risk in an area, maybe we’re disintegrating an anti-access/area denial bubble in the center, and then way up north, we’re going to go ahead and accept some risk there. We like to use those systems to create counter-fire parity, long-range fires parity with an adversary.”

Similar to the establishment of MDC-PAC, MDC-E was formed last year by blending together the 56th Artillery Command and the 2nd MDTF, both of which are forward-deployed in Germany.

The “Covenant” mentioned by Carpenter is a U.S.-Israeli company that has been developing a long-range strike weapon system called Anthem. It was just confirmed in September that the U.S. Army has been actively engaged in testing of Anthem. This includes a live-fire demonstration in Morocco earlier this year. You can read more about Anthem and the current plans for it here.

“The reason we like those types of systems is because they’re EMI [electromagnetic interference] resilient, they’re longer range, and they’re higher yield, so they can go ahead and destroy like SS-26 systems, SS-21 systems,” the MDC-E commander added.

SS-26 Stone and SS-21 Scarab are the NATO reporting names for Russia’s Iskander-M and the older Soviet-designed OTR-21 Tochka short-range ballistic missiles, respectively. They are both fired from road-mobile launchers. Russia and Ukraine have employed Tochka in the course of their ongoing conflict, though their role on both sides has steadily diminished amid shrinking inventories. Tochka is also increasingly limited in service elsewhere globally. Iskander-M is a much more capable design that has factored heavily into U.S. military planning in Europe for years now. The U.S. military has previously acknowledged that war in Ukraine has led to improvements to that missile that make it even more dangerous and difficult to intercept.

Long-range one-way attack munitions like LUCAS are well suited to striking surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missile launchers, along with other high-value and time-sensitive targets, as TWZ highlights regularly. It’s also worth noting that Iran’s Shahed-136, specifically, traces its roots back to pioneering Israeli developments in munitions of this kind, where the focus initially was explicitly on finding new avenues to neutralize hostile air defenses. Iran has shown Shahed-136s and other related designs being employed in exactly this way in large-scale exercises in the past, as seen in the video below.

Shahed 136 drone Great Prophet 17 drill

More recently, Iranian forces demonstrated just how effective these capabilities could be in a real-world context in retaliatory attacks on prized air defense radars on the opposite side of the Persian Gulf after the United States and Israel launched their open waves of strikes back in February. TWZ previously explored the far-reaching ramifications of this in a detailed feature that you can find here.

Overall, as we’ve previously written:

“When it comes to this class of drone, speed and advanced guidance concepts do not define its utility. Range and cost do. Survivability comes in numbers, and due to their smaller size, use of composite materials, and small internal combustion engine, as well as their slow speed. These attributes, along with their low-altitude flight profile, mean they possess a reduced signature and general level of detectability that can be a challenge for traditionally configured ground-based radars. Despite their smaller signature, the fact that they are still somewhat vulnerable to interception is actually a positive, but we will get to that in a moment.”

“Above all else, the Shahed-136 and other long-range one-way attack drones exist to put a relevantly-sized warhead on a target far from their launch position at the lowest possible cost. It was previously estimated that the Russian Shahed-136 variant costs around $50,000 per copy, with some estimates being far lower. This cost has also likely declined significantly since Russia has mastered the design and drastically ramped up serial production. By comparison, traditional cruise missiles with similar range have costs in the millions of dollars per round, so the price differential is very dramatic. The Shaheds are also just far easier to build and can be produced in much less time than a typical cruise missile.”

The ‘mass’ afforded by LUCAS and other long-range kamikaze drones also imposes problematic cost calculations for opponents when it comes to the air defense equation, and offers a way to rapidly drain an opponent’s stocks of vital interceptors. These are realities the U.S. military is currently grappling with after expending thousands of anti-air interceptors in conflict with Iran and in other crises in the Middle East in recent years, as well as supporting allies and partners, such as Ukraine.

LUCAS, specifically, is already in line to become even more capable through the introduction of a swarming capability, made possible by the Hivemind autonomy software package from Shield AI. As we’ve explained before:

“Using the software, multiple LUCAS drones will be able to share tasks and maneuver cooperatively, making saturation attacks even more effective. As well as the drones dynamically rerouting, avoiding air defenses, and otherwise adapting to changing battlefield conditions, an AI pilot makes it easier for missions to continue despite hostile jamming or loss of datalink connectivity. Indeed, using AI, drone swarms can maintain near-perfect combat efficiency even if it loses members. Drones can be configured with all different payloads, with the swarm’s makeup tailored to each mission, and the AI system can maximize their collective effectiveness at all times.”

The U.S. Army still has many questions to answer about how it will field LUCAS and other long-range one-way-attack drones on a more widespread basis, as well as train personnel to employ them. As evidenced by the establishment of the MDTFs, and now the MDC-PAC and MDC-E formations, the underlying force structure that will go along with all of this is still evolving, as well.

The remarks from Maj. Gen. Bernard Harrington and Brig. Gen. Steven Carpenter at AUSA this week show senior Army leaders are working hard now to lay the groundwork to answer these questions. A clear vision for how LUCAS and similar weapons will be employed in future fights against land-based and maritime threats is taking shape already.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com