🇺🇸🇨🇳 The US Navy is Building a Drone Fleet to Take on China. It’s Not Going Well.

U.S. military leaders, seeing the outsized impact of maritime drones in the Ukraine war, have repeatedly said they need autonomous swarms of aerial and maritime drones to hinder a potential advance by China across the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan itself has begun acquiring its own maritime drones.

The drones being developed in Ukraine, which often look like speedboats without seats, and are capable of carrying weapons, explosives and surveillance equipment, are primarily remote-controlled and cost close to $250,000 – making them optimal for kamikaze missions that have effectively neutralized Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

The U.S., meanwhile, is aiming to build an autonomous naval fleet that can move in swarms and without human command – a more ambitious task at a higher price point; as much as a few million dollars per speedboat.

The recent test failures highlight the challenges facing the Navy’s effort to deploy the nascent technologies, said Bryan Clark, an autonomous warfare expert at the Hudson Institute. It will need to adapt its “tactics as it better understands what the systems can do and what they can’t do.”

But the Navy’s problems go beyond getting the boats to work: its autonomous maritime drone acquisition unit has also been rocked by the firing of its top admiral, and a top Pentagon official voiced concerns about the program in a candid meeting with Navy brass last month, Reuters found.

Since the most recent incident, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which had acquired technology for the tests, has indefinitely paused a contract – valued close to $20 million – with L3Harris LHX.N, one of the companies providing autonomous software used to control some of the vessels, according to two people familiar with the matter.

https://gcaptain.com/the-us-navy-is-building-a-drone-fleet-to-take-on-china-its-not-going-well/

🇮🇱🇸🇾🇱🇧 'Greater Israel': The Israeli settlers eyeing land in Syria, Lebanon, and beyond

As Israel seeks to reshape the region, the settler movement senses an opportunity to make 'Greater Israel' a reality, eyeing land in Syria, Lebanon, and beyond

https://www.newarab.com/analysis/israeli-settler-push-greater-israel-syria-lebanon