Military

A 10-foot electric drone on eight wheels carries 2,200 pounds of a Marine squad’s water, ammunition and batteries, close to its own 2,500-pound weight, and the Marines are buying 12 more of them plus five kits that let it swim, where its load drops to 660 pounds

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 18, 2026

A German drone submarine 13.8 feet long and 882 pounds is built to fit a standard torpedo tube, swim four days on a 42-kWh battery and sit on the seabed listening for weeks, rated for the same 19,685 feet as the three-ton American one Iran hauled in

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 17, 2026

A German drone with an 8-foot manta-ray wingspan flaps over real defused bombs on a Baltic test range and picks up metal buried 20 inches in the mud, while 1.8 million tons of war munitions rust off Germany

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 16, 2026

A 24-foot British navy drone boat put a gouge in the stern of a 55-foot racing yacht inside Portsmouth Harbour, and seven of them still run there day and night, driven from a control room on shore under a rule that says keep 650 feet clear where possible

By Luis Reyes — Sep 14, 2026

A 26-foot Turkish drone boat that carries 551 pounds of explosive in its bow and hits by ramming went into the water for the first time at a naval yard on the Sea of Marmara, does 50 knots on a gasoline waterjet, and 40 of them are already on order

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 14, 2026

A 23-foot Ukrainian drone boat with a .50-caliber machine gun on a Norwegian remote mount ran down a Russian drone boat in the Black Sea, shot its antennas off from 3,300 feet so nobody could steer it clear, then sank it at close range, the first drone boat killed by another

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 14, 2026

A 19-foot American drone submarine rated for 19,700 feet sat dead in the water for more than a day at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, where the bottom runs 200 to 330 feet, until Iranian naval forces hauled it in, and the man who built it posted “rest in peace, little buddy”

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 13, 2026

A 36-foot British drone gunboat trades a towed sonar array for a strike package on the same deck in minutes, tops out at 50 knots on two diesels, runs 1,000 nautical miles at 30 and stays out a month, and an American company is setting up to build it on US soil

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 10, 2026

A UK company just showed a drone boat that takes loitering munitions, mini torpedoes, drones or sonobuoys as cassettes two people exchange in the field without touching the hull, and it says an Anduril ALTIUS has already gone out of one

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 9, 2026

A 17-foot aluminum drone boat that weighs 1,450 pounds empty and 1,900 with everything aboard ran two straight weeks of a Navy electronic-warfare exercise in Michigan with its aerial drones sealed inside the hull, and one operator is trained to run it in three days

By Luis Reyes — Sep 8, 2026

A drone boat that runs 930 miles carrying 4,400 pounds drove under an 899-foot tanker off Yalta and put its charge at the stern, where the engines are, while Russian aircraft dropped bombs at it and missed, and the oil stayed inside the tanks

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 8, 2026

The Navy rewired a destroyer from 450 volts to 4,160, dropped in generator sets making 4 megawatts apiece and a bigger chilled-water plant to carry the heat away, and every bit of that exists to feed one radar that it says does the work of two ships

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 8, 2026

A 30-kilowatt laser has to hold its beam on one square inch of a drone that is actively trying to get away, and the Army has just ordered dozens of them after four decades of burning targets on test ranges without ever buying a single one

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 7, 2026

A US Army Black Hawk fired a drone off its wing pylon over the Mojave, it joined others, one of them found a target and told the rest, and another hit it. Nobody in the helicopter steered any of it, and the Hellfire that crew usually carries reaches 6.8 miles

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 7, 2026

A 38-foot drone boat that once spent 192 hours alone at sea came up behind a float towed by a Navy ship off Virginia, pushed a fuel probe into it, took on 400 gallons over dozens of hookups and let go each time, and somebody was steering the probe on every one

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 6, 2026

A 250-pound drone keeps working through 30-foot seas that would send a survey ship back to port, and the only moment weather can touch it is when it surfaces every six hours to talk, so if the pickup boat cannot come out it lands on the bottom and sleeps

By Luis Reyes — Sep 6, 2026

A 39-foot drone boat that used to drive explosives into the sides of Russian warships now carries 18 nine-pound interceptors standing upright in boxes on its deck, and a pilot as far as 1,240 miles away flies each one into whatever comes in over the sea

By Luis Reyes — Sep 6, 2026

A 10.5-foot, 8,710-pound seabed drone found its own ship off Nova Scotia, latched onto a camera-guided hook and rode onto the deck with nobody at the controls. That job is still done by crews leaning over the rail with poles, on a machine built to pick potato-sized rocks off the ocean floor

By Luis Reyes — Sep 5, 2026

A 27-foot drone boat from a Canadian fireboat builder crossed hundreds of miles of open water alone and ran down a ship trying to get away, and the Pentagon put it in writing six years after a boat with the same name and builder guarded a missile range off Oahu for 30 days

By Luis Reyes — Sep 5, 2026

Five 70-pound ground drones are riding in the brackets on the side of a Bradley where the explosive reactive armor normally bolts on, and they roll into the trench first, while the squad sitting behind that armor stays buttoned up on a hull from 1981

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 5, 2026

A 6.5-pound drone thrown off a dock by hand sprints across the surface at 8 mph, stops, dives 197 feet straight down for a reading and pops back up, and the Navy spent two days in August watching pods of them hunt other underwater drones in a harbor

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 4, 2026

A 23-foot Danish drone submarine built out of a length of 20-inch fiberglass pipe carries 660 pounds, about what the warhead of a Mk 48 torpedo weighs, and that weapon needs a submarine with people in it to go anywhere. This one costs pickup truck money

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 4, 2026

A Danish drone boat sitting at anchor in the Baltic filmed a 330-foot Russian corvette running past at 650 feet with its transponder off, tagged the crew and the helicopter on the pad, and got the quadcopter wrong, from a hull 39 feet long that travels on a trailer

By Luis Reyes — Sep 4, 2026

A 268-pound torpedo would come off a bomb rack at 60,000 feet, pop its wings, glide to the target area on its own and only turn into a torpedo when it hits the water — 59,900 feet higher than a bare 607-pound one goes in today

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 3, 2026

A 39-foot drone boat wrapped in solar panels from bow to stern carries a turret under an armored hatch in its nose, gathers 24 kilowatt-hours a day against the 2.5 it spends holding position, and the yard that built the hull makes wake boats

By Chema Bonilla Díaz — Sep 2, 2026

A 39-pound tube shaped the way American sonobuoys have been shaped since 1942 pinged at underwater drones this summer, gave away its own position doing it, and sank, while a 21-inch reel unspooled nearby into a listening array and never made a sound