In the South China Sea, naval innovation is no longer defined by larger hulls or longer-range missiles. It is increasingly driven by smaller, unmanned platforms designed to patrol, detect, and relay data in contested waters where persistence matters as much as firepower. Across Southeast Asia, this shift is accelerating under the combined pressure of territorial […]
The rapid expansion of uncrewed systems has already become one of the defining drivers of global military transformation. In just a few years, drones and other uncrewed platforms have moved from niche capabilities to central tools of modern warfare across land, air, surface maritime and undersea environments. Their proliferation is reshaping tactics, force employment costs, […]
Since 2022, the conflict in Ukraine has fundamentally reshaped the balance between offense and defense by demonstrating the operational effectiveness of low-cost drones used at scale. Systems such as the Shahed 136, estimated to cost between $20,000 and $50,000 per unit according to multiple open-source analyses, have enabled the saturation of air defense systems whose […]
Since 2022, the war in Ukraine has profoundly transformed the military use of drones. Russian forces regularly use Shahed-type attack drones to strike energy infrastructure, military installations, and urban areas. In response to these repeated attacks, Ukraine has sought to develop interception solutions that are less expensive than traditional air defense systems. The STING drone, […]
Naval debates have long illustrated the idea of the “cheap shot”: a relatively inexpensive means, used intelligently, can force a disproportionately costly response. On land, the concept is discussed less as a formula than as a reality. What can be described as imposed-cost warfare has become a fully developed operational grammar. In Ukraine, the change […]
From 2024 to 2027, the story is less a wholesale reset than a trajectory, one in which real capability will depend more on organization, training, and sustainment than on headline acquisitions. In Kazakhstan, two threads stand out: the move to formalize a territorial defense framework, and a push to build light, unit-level capabilities, especially through […]
In recent conflicts, drone-on-drone interception is not the result of theoretical debate, but of a very concrete reality: the growing difficulty of sustainably neutralizing low-cost drones using expensive and scarce ground-based defenses. In Ukraine, reconnaissance and attack drones assembled for only a few thousand euros have repeatedly forced forces on both sides to rely on […]
On Oct. 31, 2025, Anduril hit a visible milestone in the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) effort: its YFQ-44A prototype flew for the first time, bringing a jet-powered “loyal wingman” concept into measurable flight testing. Two weeks earlier, on Oct. 16, the Netherlands formalized cooperation through a letter of intent signed in Washington […]
The war in Ukraine has turned the Black Sea into a testbed for asymmetric naval warfare: explosive uncrewed surface vessels, long-range missiles, commercial ISR and systematic sea denial against a superior fleet. From Tokyo to Canberra, Indo-Pacific navies are watching these experiments closely, but they cannot simply copy-paste the Ukrainian playbook into the Pacific, where […]
Counter-drone laser systems are no longer lab curiosities. In 2025, two ecosystems are advancing in parallel: on one side, the NATO/Israel/Europe bloc, focused on integrating lasers into an already structured and demanding air-defense architecture; on the other, a non-NATO bloc, led by China, followed by India and a demand-driven Russia, prioritizing immediate, lower-power results to […]
