Brussels promised a shield against Russian drones. What exists is national border networks, NATO fighters still doing the shooting, and EU projects that became fundable two weeks ago.
Clean-spectrum demonstrations prove little. Autonomous systems should be judged on documented dependencies and tested behavior when links, GPS and assumptions fail, before the money flows.
The Army is about to test logistics and casualty-evacuation robots again. Its assessments should count interventions, recoveries and maintenance hours, as Ukraine’s experience shows.
The startup behind the Phantom robot cites $24 million in Pentagon contracts and trials in Ukraine. Published accounts and federal data differ on both.
Magnetic, visual, celestial and borrowed-signal navigation have all flown. Buyers still get percentage gains over drifting inertial units instead of error figures they can specify.
The Army picked four firms to prototype autonomous breaching. Ukraine’s 2023 failures show what a 2027 soldier assessment must prove before any production decision.
Explainer
The Defense Autonomy Review briefing
A proposed weekly email on the technologies, organizations, and decisions changing defense.
