Reuters first reported on March 5 that an initial, internal U.S. military investigation showed U.S. forces were likely responsible for the fatal strike in Minab on the opening day of the war with Iran.

The group of more than two dozen U.S. senators, including the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jack Reed, requested in a letter the U.S. military finalize its investigation, brief Congress and present a plan to ensure such a mistake does not happen again.

“There is no justification for withholding an unclassified accounting of what happened, what went wrong, and what the Department is doing to prevent recurrence,” their letter said.

Asked for comment, a Pentagon official told Reuters: “The investigation is ongoing. We do not have any updates to announce at this time.”

The strike killed more than 175 children and teachers, Iranian officials say. The lawmakers’ letter notes that would make it the U.S. military’s largest civilian casualty incident since 1991, when it mistakenly bombed a shelter in Iraq, killing more than 400 civilians.

Deadly Iran school strike casts shadow over Pentagon’s AI targeting push

Archived copies of the Iranian school’s official website show the school is adjacent ‌to a ⁠compound operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the military force that reports to Iran’s supreme leader.

Reuters, citing sources familiar with the matter, has reported that U.S. officials responsible for creating targeting packages appeared to have used out-of-date intelligence.

U.S. Admiral Brad Cooper, head of ​Central Command, which is directing the war effort, testified in May that the investigation was “complex” given ‌that the school was located on an active Iranian cruise missile base.

Trump, however, has cast doubt on whether the U.S. military will ever know what happened given the amount of military activity at the start of the war.

“Somebody said it was our missile, maybe ​it wasn’t our missile but I have seen nothing to lead me to believe ‌it ⁠was.” Trump remarked on June 24, adding: “I don’t think it was us.”

Iranian officials have pointed to the strike on the school as a U.S. war crime. The U.S. has said it never intentionally targets civilians.

In the letter, the lawmakers ask Cooper and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to submit an unclassified version of the findings to Congress and the U.S. public. They also ask for a prevention and remediation plan “that identifies the specific corrective actions the Department will take to ensure this does not happen again.”

“The United States military has a legal and moral obligation to take all feasible precautions to prevent civilian harm,” the letter said.

“When a U.S. strike kills civilians, the Department owes Congress, the American people, and the victims’ families a clear accounting of what happened and a credible plan to prevent future failures.”

The blockade, covering all of Iran’s ports, oil terminals and coastal areas, will be enforced for all vessel traffic — regardless of flag — from 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on July 14, the center said in an advisory.

“Any vessel suspected of entering or departing the blockaded area without authorization is subject to interception, diversion, and capture. Non-compliant vessels may be legally compelled with force,” the statement said.

The center said neutral transit through the Strait of Hormuz heading to or from non-Iranian destinations will not be impeded.

The latest round of strikes by the U.S. comes after it revoked a license on July 7 that allowed Iran to sell oil. U.S. President Donald Trump declared the ceasefire between the two nations — which began on April 8 — to be over, but ceded that Iran had agreed to continue to negotiate.

The U.S. military said it hit dozens of Iranian military targets on Sunday, which included the first-ever combat use of Corsair USVs to assist in degrading Iran’s ability to continue to attack commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

Built by Saronic, the Corsair is a 24-foot USV that has a range of over 1,000 nautical miles and a payload capacity of 1,000 pounds while surging at 35 knots.

According to the company, “it supports a variety of missions including ISR, surface surveillance, and logistics in both permissive and contested environments. Its embedded AI stack and open architecture allow rapid integration of sensors and autonomy software, making it a flexible platform for modern naval and defense applications.”

While it is the USVs first display in combat, the U.S. Navy has been testing and utilizing Corsair vessels for various missions over the past two years.

Just last month, two soldiers were picked up by a Navy-operated Corsair USV after their Army AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed during a patrol operation near the Strait of Hormuz.

The unique mission marked the first publicized use of the craft outside of testing.

“The surface drone that assisted in last night’s rescue of the Apache crew off the coast of Oman was a U.S. Navy Corsair unmanned surface vessel operated by U.S. 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59,” Capt. Tim Hawkins, a U.S. Central Command spokesperson, said in a statement in June. “The Task Force began fielding these drones in theater in late March.”

In January 2024 the Navy stood up Unmanned Task Group 59.1, nicknamed “The Pioneers,” to focus on the deployment of unmanned systems in maritime operations teamed that can be teamed with specialized operators to “bolster maritime security across the Middle East region,” according to a press release.

Unmanned Task Group 59.1 is under the aegis of Task Force 59 in the U.S. Fifth Fleet Area of Operations.

At the time, Lt. Luis Echeverria, the commanding officer of the Navy’s Bahrain-based Pioneers, was assigned to “stress-test” unmanned surface vessels.

According to previous Navy Times reporting, a handful of unmanned vessels were launched from Aqaba, Jordan, into the Red Sea with a broad-edged surveillance mission: to observe the “pattern of life” in the region and increase maritime domain awareness.

With the latest Corsair attacks on the Iranian port, that mission has shifted to incorporate strikes.

“The trends are moving in the right direction,” Jerry McGinn, who co-authored the study for the Center for Strategic and International Analysis think tank, told Defense News.

However, the study — described as a progress report on reforms to the defense manufacturing and acquisition system — still found numerous problems with ramping up and sustaining wartime production.

For example, “according to several measures — manufacturing lead times, critical munitions and materials stockpiles, and supply chain security — the U.S. industrial base has a long way to go to achieve resilience,” warned the analysis by CSIS’s Center for the Industrial Base.

CSIS did find measurable improvements since November 2025, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vowed to “transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime footing.”

Hegseth also promised to “inspire American industry to become a wartime industrial base that focuses on speed and volume.”

Most striking is the number of new companies in the defense field.

“Roughly 10,000 new firms have entered the market in the past two years and nontraditional companies received over $120 billion in contract obligations in FY 2025, adding competition and innovation to the sector,” CSIS noted. “Munitions contract obligations have risen 330 percent since FY 2010. Spurred by this increased demand and depleted inventories, the Pentagon is signing multiyear agreements with munitions producers and suppliers on a historic scale.”

The military is also responding to depleted stockpiles of expensive guided weapons that have been rapidly consumed by the Iran and Ukraine wars.

The Pentagon’s 2027 budget request for munitions allocated 49% to low-cost munitions — defined as costing less than $600,000 apiece — rising to 70% by 2031.

The U.S. is also strengthening its defense supply chain, such as “multiyear procurement agreements, direct-to-supplier investments, and leaner acquisition pathways,” as well as investing in defense companies such as L3Harris Missile Solutions, according to CSIS.

However, while this signals government commitment to defense production, it “also complicates competitive dynamics within the industry as new entrants and established suppliers alike seek to meet rapidly growing demand for munitions at scale.”

Also notable is federal investment in rare earths, which has seen production soar from 95 tons in 2022, to 8,900 tons in 2025. Nonetheless, “the erosion of domestic rare earth manufacturing capacity and the rise of Chinese control took decades to unfold, however, and it will take several years of enduring effort for the United States and its allies to build, scale, and sustain the production capacity of these key defense inputs.”

Exports of U.S. arms, or cooperative multinational projects such as the F-35 fighter, have also become a pillar of America’s defense industry. Foreign Military Sales, or FMS, have more than tripled, from less than $20 billion in 2015 to more than $80 billion in 2025.

The Trump administration wants to take this further with the “America First Arms Transfer Strategy,” launched in February 2026.

“The United States will use foreign purchases and capital to support domestic reindustrialization, expand production capacity, and improve the resilience of the United States defense industrial base,” the White House executive order declared.

Ultimately, the federal government can control defense production through the products it demands, the prices it is willing to pay, and the incentives it offers.

“It’s a monopsony,” McGinn said. “Government sets the market. Government can regulate the market. So, if the government wants different outcomes, it changes how it buys.”

Munich-based Helsing raised the funding in a Series E funding round, with investor demand “significantly” exceeding the available allocation, the company said in a statement on Monday. The company remains predominantly European-owned after the fund raising, Helsing said.

The latest round raises Helsing’s valuation from a reported €12 billion in June 2025, and follows a $1.2 billion funding round for German defense-tech firm Quantum Systems this month that valued that company at $8 billion. Defense technology has been one of the fastest-growing areas of venture capital funding on the back of rising military budgets worldwide, and in Europe in particular.

“This latest investment will accelerate Helsing’s mission to develop and integrate entirely new AI platforms into the defense capabilities of its growing number of partner nations,” the company said.

Investor demand reflected strong and growing confidence in AI-driven and software-defined defense technology, Helsing said. The company’s valuation puts it among Europe’s most valuable defense companies despite having been founded only in 2021.

The German company’s offer includes the HX-2 strike drone and the Altra AI-enabled battlefield-operations software as well as concepts including the proposed CA-1 autonomous fighter jet, and the firm works with the likes of Rheinmetall, Kongsberg and Saab to implement its AI solutions.

Other mega rounds in Europe this year include the United Kingdom’s Kraken Technology, which makes autonomous vessels, and which raised $175 million this month in a Series B funding round that valued the startup at $1 billion. A mega round is shorthand in the investment industry for a fund raising of $100 million or more.

German unmanned-systems maker Stark raised €500 million in June ($570 million) at a reported valuation of €3.2 billion, while Finland’s ICEYE, whose radar satellites are being ordered by militaries all over Europe, raised €450 million in a Series F round last month. French defense-tech startup Harmattan AI raised $200 million in January in a Series B round led by Dassault Aviation that valued the company at €1.4 billion, creating the country’s first defense unicorn.

Helsing said new and existing investors participated in the funding round, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and General Catalyst. The company’s existing investors include Prima Materia, Accel and Greenoaks.

The company said its board remains unchanged with Daniel Ek and Tom Enders as co-chairmen, members Jeannette zu Fürstenberg and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Transformation Gen. Denis Mercier, and co-founders Gundberg Scherf, Niklas Köhler and Torsten Reil.

The system is called the Arctic Over-The-Horizon Radar (A-OTHR), and the deal is worth some US$1.75 billion to Australia.

Gordon Frazer – Founder and CEO of the Australia-based HF radar technical services company FrazerLab – told Defense News Canada’s decision would fill an urgent need.

“I used to say to people, you could fly a jumbo jet from Beijing to Canberra if it had its transponders off and no one would know,” he said, arguing the same is likely true for Canada.

“Russia could fly a Tu-95 from one of their bases, Engels Air Base or something like that, to Canada and possibly no one would know.”

He added, “That’s why NORAD is so concerned, and why they’ve been pushing so hard to get this sort of technology done.”

Frazer was formerly an engineer involved in Australia’s OTHR program known as the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN).

Expanded surveillance coverage

While NORAD maintains the North Warning System, a line of microwave radars in Canada’s frozen north, Frazer said it would be “almost a trivial problem to defeat it” by flying at low altitude between these known and stationary radar sites.

Instead, because OTHR bounces high-frequency signals off the ionosphere, it can look down on airborne targets — and sometimes even surface vessels — with ease, including aircraft and missiles.

An over-the-horizon radar results in radar coverage stretching far beyond what traditional line-of-sight radars can achieve due to the curvature of the Earth.

With its particular A-OTHR contract, BAE Systems Australia will transfer technology and expertise for Canada to build its own OTHR radar sites to monitor its periphery. Officially, Canberra says JORN can detect targets 3,000 kilometers (1,700 miles) away, but its capability almost certainly reaches far beyond that.

Ottawa stated in a press release: “The signing formalizes Canada’s partnership with Australia and enables the delivery of Australia’s proven OTHR technology in support of Canada’s A-OTHR program. It marks a major milestone in the program, transitioning A-OTHR from the planning phase into delivery phase.”

Natural challenges

Canada has already been researching the application of OTHRs in its north, where environmental and solar conditions are far different than they are in Australia.

Furthermore, significant differences exist between operating OTHRs in equatorial, mid-latitude, high-latitude and polar areas. Frazer pointed out that Canada, despite the “Arctic” in the A-OTHR nomenclature, is actually buying a high-latitude system.

Polar regions present even more complicated challenges for OTHRs due to the Earth’s magnetic field, which creates serious background clutter. In fact, some 40% of Canadian territory lies above the Arctic Circle.

Although it may sound counterintuitive, Frazer said Canada’s A-OTHR radar facilities would be built as far south as possible. This is in order to bounce radar signals off the ionosphere ahead of the zone where the worst distortion occurs.

However, Canada will also have the future opportunity to expand its OTHR network with trans-polar coverage, which would allow it to see deep into Russia.

Positioned thus, the technology could enable NORAD to see Russian strategic bombers taking off or ballistic missiles being launched, for example.

If Canada does seek transpolar radar coverage, it would likely want to place those radar installations as far north as possible, Frazer explained.

Australia has three JORN radar sites, but it is unclear how many sites Canada will establish. In North America, Frazer expects the Pacific west coast will be covered by an American system, the Atlantic east coast will be covered by Canada, and then an additional system can cover the north. If NORAD wants 360-degree coverage, Frazer suggested five or six radar installations would be needed.

Australian expertise

Craig Lockhart, CEO of BAE Systems Australia, said: “Canada’s acquisition of a cutting-edge Australian OTHR system supports the strategic interests of both nations through enhanced detection and tracking of threats to North America, strengthening Five Eyes situational awareness.”

Frazer said Australia developed world-leading OTHR talent “because of multi-generational consistency” in its investment in the technology.

The New Zealand-born engineer pointed out that around 15% of the cost of OTHR technology sits in equipment to inform human operators how to set the radar’s parameters to account for constantly changing atmospheric conditions.

Frazer highlighted that OTHRs are bespoke, national systems built only once per generation. However, he hopes the Canadian deal will benefit both countries.

“I think you’re starting to get the critical mass of being able to keep the technology pipeline from design to sustainment to upgrade to far-reaching tech.”

Because over-the-horizon radar coverage can vary drastically due to solar conditions, other methods help plug surveillance gaps.

Airborne early-warning aircraft, for example, are complementary to OTHR. In May, Canada selected Saab’s GlobalEye as its future airborne early-warning platform.

Canada expects its A-OTHR to reach an initial operational capability by December 2029.

The remaining year of the Hydis program will focus on advancing critical technologies to at least Technology Readiness Level 3, Europe’s Organisation for Joint Armament Co-Operation said in a separate statement on Friday. That level corresponds to experimental proof of concept.

Hydis is one of two European projects to develop a counter against hypersonic threats, competing with the Hydef program led by Germany’s Diehl Defence and coordinated by Spain’s SMS Sistemas de Misiles de España. The European Defence Fund plans to allocate €100 million ($114 million) for an endo-atmospheric interceptor as part of its 2026 work program, with only one of the proposals to be funded.

Completion of the final concept review is “a significant step forward in the development of a future European capability to counter hypersonic threats,” OCCAR said. The organization, which manages the program on behalf of France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, said the four countries validated “the most promising interceptor concept proposed by the Hydis industrial consortium.”

The interceptor will be designed to defeat threats including hypersonic glide vehicles, hypersonic cruise missiles and maneuvering ballistic missiles, and the concept was assessed against threat models developed by Italy’s research organization Centro Italiano di Ricerca Aerospaziale, France’s Onera and Dutch technology institute TNO.

The final concept review focused specifically on the terminal phase of interception by the kill vehicle, according to OCCAR, which said the program enters the next phase with a “clear path” toward technology maturation.

Avio worked on the architecture of the solid rocket motor propulsion, ArianeGroup and MBDA’s Roxel on the final interceptor stage control mechanism, and Lynred on the terminal infra-red sensor, according to MBDA, with the missile maker handling the integration into a coherent concept.

Thales provided performance data for naval and ground-sensor suite options, while GKN Fokker worked on integration of the ammunition into the MK41 naval launcher, MBDA said.

“This new milestone demonstrates the consortium’s full expertise in the fields of hypersonic and ballistic threats, backed by in-depth knowledge of air defense systems.” MBDA said in its statement on Friday.

The EDF has provided €80 million in funding for the three-year Hydis program, with the four partner countries jointly providing around €60 million. The largest share of EDF funds for Hydis has gone to MBDA, with more than €60 million allocated across seven MBDA entities in the program.

Meanwhile, Hydef has received €100 million from the EDF, and another €10 million from participating countries Belgium, Germany, Norway, Poland and Spain. Diehl is the biggest beneficiary of the European funding for Hydef, accounting for €34.7 million.

Hydef originally won the EDF competition to develop a hypersonic interceptor in 2022, with the European Commission funding Hydis as a second effort after objections from France and MBDA, which had already been working on hypersonic technology for years. MBDA presented its counter-hypersonic interceptor concept Aquila at the Paris Air Show in 2023.

Both programs are linked to the broader European project Twister to detect, track and counter hypersonic threats with space-based early warning and endo-atmospheric interceptors.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, detailing the deal on Thursday after he and Trump met at the NATO summit in Turkey earlier in the week, said the two have resolved it “as leaders” and that Ukraine has been “recognized by America as a country that is ready” to build the system.

“Thank you for the positive decision regarding the license for the production of Patriots,” Zelenskyy said, noting that Trump “repeatedly emphasized that today only two or three countries in the world can produce Patriots, because others are not technologically ready.”

Zelenskyy has pressed Washington for the interceptors for years, as Russia has fired ever more ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities. Trump’s offer to let Kyiv produce Patriots could hand it an edge both on the battlefield and in its standing with allies and foes alike, but only on a timeline that will take years and cost billions of dollars.

“Our groups, our diplomats, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense need to agree on all the other technical matters,” Zelenskyy told journalists on Thursday. “The sooner we agree, the sooner we will be able to produce Patriots.”

The promise moves Ukraine from a war it entered reliant on Western arms toward building the most sought after air defense weapon of the conflict itself, a milestone for Kyiv and a measure of how far Washington has shifted. It also moves Kyiv a step closer to defending itself without leaning on allies who have rationed what they send.

So far, the nuts and bolts of the deal remain largely undecided from both government officials and industry leaders — and unsigned. The manufacturer has also not been entirely brief.

“We haven’t informed the company of that yet,” Trump said of Lockheed Martin, which builds the interceptor, while announcing the agreement.

The Patriot’s PAC-3 interceptor destroys its target on impact, a “hit-to-kill” design, and is one of the only weapons able to stop a ballistic missile, making it among the most closely guarded technology the United States exports.

A Patriot interceptor brings together an entire ecosystem of weapons: a radar, a command post, along with the launchers and the interceptors themselves. Ukraine is aiming for permission to manufacture the PAC-3 MSE, the newest and the hardest to build.

Japan is the only other country that builds Patriots under a U.S. license today. Germany, the Netherlands and Spain are jointly standing up a European production line, and Berlin is separately negotiating its own license.

Washington licenses it sparingly because of fears the tech could end up in enemy hands. That caution has only deepened now.

The U.S. fired between 1,060 and 1,430 Patriots in this year’s war with Iran at roughly $3.9 million apiece, many more than the hundreds Ukraine received from all of its Western allies over a span of four years.

Each interceptor takes 24 months to build and 30 for its solid rocket motor, and a single Boeing plant in Huntsville, Alabama, makes the seeker for each one, a Foreign Policy Research Institute analysis found.

That single plant turned out between 650 and 700 seekers last year, a bottleneck that paces the whole line.

Although the Pentagon signed a separate deal in April to triple the key part’s production, even the interceptors ordered under an accelerated $4.8 billion contract this year are not expected for delivery until 2030.

“Fewer such missiles are produced worldwide each month than the enemy fires at Ukraine in that same period,” Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said.

Lockheed Martin delivered 620 of its top PAC-3s last year. A January framework with the Pentagon aims to lift that to 2,000 a year by 2030, according to a Foreign Policy Research Institute analysis.

And Ukraine has no anti-ballistic system of its own — yet.

Zelenskyy this week announced Ukraine is pouring resources into a homegrown version, a cheaper, mass-produced answer to the Patriot he calls FREYA, built around a Ukrainian-made missile and European radars, launchers and command systems.

He plans to present it to partners in France in the coming days, he said Thursday.

Russia’s ballistic missiles are its deadliest weapon against Ukrainian cities. A mass attack overnight on Sunday killed at least 22 people in Kyiv, with all of Russia’s 29 ballistic missiles dodging air defenses, Ukraine’s air force said.

More than 16,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since Russia’s 2022 invasion, the U.N. human rights office has verified.

Zelenskyy has called those strikes Russia’s “only advantage” left and named Patriot production his “priority number one.”

Ukraine is “working in different directions” at once, he said, pursuing the American license, European financing and French systems side by side.

The French-Italian SAMP/T, a costly system Zelenskyy called an “analogue of Patriot,” is already arriving under agreements he struck with French President Emmanuel Macron. It is the only other weapon in Ukraine’s arsenal built specifically to stop a ballistic missile.

“Production is very small, queues are very long, involving different countries,” Zelenskyy said of the Patriot and the French systems.

The president acknowledged that none of these solutions will end Russia’s onslaught of Ukrainian cities overnight, making the development of domestic defense systems Kyiv’s top priority.

“Then we will close Ukraine’s sky with our own capabilities,” he said.

The push follows this week’s NATO summit in Ankara, where allies pledged €70 billion ($80 billion) in military aid for Ukraine this year.

U.S. President Donald Trump also pledged to allow Ukraine a license to build its own Patriot interceptors, a long-awaited goal of Kyiv. “We’ll give them the right to make Patriots,” he said.

“This is a European model,” Zelenskyy said Thursday. “FREYA is our Ukrainian anti-ballistic system...an analogue in terms of intercepting ballistic targets, an analogue of Patriot, but a system for more mass production and a cheaper system.”

Long-range missile and drone strikes caused 45% of Ukraine’s civilian casualties in May, the worst monthly toll since April 2022, according to a U.N. report.

Ballistic missiles remain the one threat Ukraine still can’t intercept with a system it built itself. Freya could change that, potentially shifting Kyiv’s position on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.

Freya centers on the FP-7.X interceptor, produced by the Ukrainian company Fire Point, and is designed to hit a ballistic target at roughly 15 miles altitude.

Like Patriot interceptors, Freya is an entire system and will rely on allies for production support.

“A system needs not only a missile and a launcher. It needs radars, command and control, and many different elements,” he said.

“To create our anti-ballistic system very quickly, we need European partners who have production of those things that Ukraine does not yet have for its own anti-ballistic system.”

Fire Point has signed a memorandum with Germany’s Hensoldt for radar technology and is in talks with France’s Thales, Italy’s Leonardo and Norway’s Kongsberg to supply tracking and command-and-control systems.

Zelenskyy said the Freya coalition, which he described as comprising roughly eight partner nations, will speed up the production process and make a faster timeline possible.

“We can do it ourselves, but years will pass,” he said.

Fire Point is targeting a per-shot cost near $700,000, versus roughly $3.8 million for a Patriot PAC-3.

The missile was flight-tested in early June, the company said, and is aiming to mass-produce three a day starting in August and intercept its first ballistic missile by the end of 2027.

The upcoming meeting in France may yield the next updates as Zelenskyy said the current plan depends on partner nations, their manufacturers and their production capacity signing on.

“God willing, the partners will support it, and God willing, our manufacturers will succeed with all of this,” he said.

The ongoing Exercise Valiant Shield became the proving ground for III Marine Expeditionary Force personnel, as Marines at Camp Blaz successfully used the MRIC to intercept an aerial target on June 30, 2026.

The MRIC is a “significant leap in operational capability,” a service release stated. The system bridges the gap between the shoulder-fired Stinger Man-Portable Air Defense System and the long-range Patriot missile system and is designed for the “expeditionary nature of Marine Corps operations.”

Deployed via trailers carrying 20 interceptors each, MRIC systems can down targets from two to 43 miles away.

The deployment of the system allows Marines to provide an “air defense umbrella” that moves with Marine forces as they maneuver inside an enemy’s weapons engagement zone, all while defending critical assets like expeditionary air bases, runways and forward arming and refueling points, according to a service release.

In 2023, the service announced that it would incorporate technology from Israel’s Iron Dome system to help furnish the Corps with its first medium-range air defense system in decades.

According to the service’s Force Design 2030, three batteries of MRIC are slated to be fielded by 2028.

“Before the MRIC, we were primarily a short-range air defense capability,” Maj. Emi Gutierrez, commander of the firing battery, said in the release. “The Marine Corps employed the Stinger for years, but that capability is significantly different. With the evolution of air defense weapon systems, we saw a need to adapt.

“Our ability to rapidly insert and fill critical gaps within an integrated air defense system is critical not only to the Marine Corps but also the joint force as a whole,” Gutierrez continued. “The MRIC fits into expeditionary warfare perfectly because of its ability to be rapidly deployed.”

The equipment office of the German armed forces signed a contract with MBDA Deutschland and Rheinmetall Waffe Munition in June to develop the full system, from reconnaissance to target tracking and engagement, the companies said in statements on Thursday. The contract value is in the “mid three-digit” million-euro range, Rheinmetall said.

Several European navies are working on laser weapons, with the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy planning to fit the DragonFire directed-energy weapon on a destroyer by 2027, in work led by MBDA in partnership with Leonardo and QinetiQ. Naval vessels are particularly suited to deploy powerful lasers, as they can provide the physical space, electrical power, sensors and cooling required.

“The laser weapon system will provide our personnel deployed on naval vessels with a significantly higher level of protection, particularly when it comes to countering drones,” Roman Koehne, head of Rheinmetall’s weapons and ammunition division, said in a statement.

The laser weapon system from MBDA and Rheinmetall has a “very high level” of technological maturity, the companies said. The demonstrator has been deployed on the German frigate Sachsen, covering 28,000 nautical miles from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, and firing over 1,000 shots at air, sea and land targets in more than a year of testing, according to MBDA and Rheinmetall.

The containerized laser effector will also be a cost-effective weapon for port security, MBDA Deutschland Managing Director Thomas Gottschild said. The system can focus power on an area measuring just a few centimeters, and has proven to be effective even in adverse weather conditions, according to Rheinmetall and MBDA.

The MBDA-Rheinmetall joint venture will place “particular emphasis” on German supply chains and local systems expertise to secure national sovereignty in the technology, the companies said. Serial production will “largely” take part in Germany, according to Koehne.

In other weapon-development news, the French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis said it tested its electromagnetic railgun outdoors for the first time in June, moving the system out of laboratory conditions. The institute will now work on higher energy levels and longer distances as a path towards a possible future deployable system, it said in a statement on Thursday.

Railguns use electromagnetic acceleration rather than chemical propellants to fire a projectile, and could provide a possible counter to hypersonic threats.

Meanwhile, Belgium said it will buy 20 of Rheinmetall’s Skyranger 30 anti-drone cannons as well as 14 Thales GM200 radars, in addition to a previously announced plan to buy 10 NASAMS air-defense systems from Kongsberg. The country is investing €3.1 billion ($3.5 billion) to build up a layered air defense system, after two decades of going without, Defense Minister Theo Francken said.

Police who filmed and wiretapped an alleged Russian military intelligence officer quizzing an accused informant in Italy heard him demanding information on systems like Europe’s Samp-T, which has been given to Kyiv, and the Michelangelo Dome, an air defense system developed by Italy’s Leonardo due to be tested in Ukraine in November.

The Russian accused of being an officer with Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU was followed as he met with Gavino Piras, 59, a former member of Italy’s secret service, who was arrested this week along with a second former Italian intelligence official.

Piras is accused of using cash supplied by the Russian official, Mikhail Astakov, to recruit informants in the Italian military who fed him secret information Astakov asked for. Five alleged informants are under investigation.

Court documents seen by Defense News allege that Astakov — who was a military attaché at the Russian embassy in Rome — gave Piras lists of information requests from his superiors at secret meetings and was given microSD cards packed with information which were left in a hole in a wall for collection.

The Russian paid out €4,000 ($4,600) in cash for each package of information, the investigators said.

“All that I can give you, I will give you, tell your boss that,” Piras told Astakov.

The requests show a determination to find out exactly how Europe was helping Ukraine defend itself from Russian missile and drone attacks.

Following a demand for information about the European Samp-T air defense system supplied by Italy and France to Ukraine, Piras refers to data about the battery he has passed over, and he also fields requests about the MBDA CAMM-ER air defense missile, which Ukraine is in talks to assemble.

Astakov also asks about Leonardo’s planned Michelangelo Dome, an air-defense system designed with open architecture to allow partner countries to link existing assets and make them interoperable.

Leonardo management has said the system will be trialed in Ukraine in November.

One note delivered in September 2025 requested information on a variety of topics including “Efficiency of attacks on Iranian nuclear structures, damage to the program, prospects of work restarting,” as well as Italy’s plans to purchase Storm Shadow missiles, rearmament plans for Italy, EU and NATO, “Priorities and objectives of EU defense” and “Help for Ukraine to build long distance missiles.”

The Russian was also curious about a Leonardo sub-sea drone he says the firm is testing in La Spezia in Italy.

In the transcripts reported in the court documents, Piras tells the Russian that British, not Italian, intelligence is assisting Ukraine in its long range strikes against Russia oil facilities.

Piras also claims that Italian experts are studying the workings of the Russian T90 tank. “They don’t understand how the machine gun mounted on it works autonomously. If they manage to steal the secret they will, so be careful,” he tells Astakov.

In April 2025, Astakov requested information on Avio, the Italian propulsion firm, months after it partnered with the US Army to supply missile solid rocket motors.

After Piras was arrested on Tuesday, his lawyer denied he had passed any classified information to Russia.

On Thursday, the Italian government announced it was expelling two Russian military attaches working at the Russian embassy, including Astakov.

“Moscow continues to use hybrid warfare to attack the West and Italy,” said Italian foreign minister Antonio Tajani. “This is serious and unacceptable interference in Italian institutions and national security,” he added.

The confirmation came a day after U.S. President Donald Trump at the NATO summit in Ankara pledged the U.S. would give Ukraine a license to build its own Patriot interceptors, a long-sought goal for Kyiv as a global shortage of the missiles and intensifying Russian strikes leave its cities exposed.

Zelenskyy stopped short of tying the license to the multibillion-dollar drone deal, presenting the two as separate tracks working towards the same general goals.

“There are some documents that have already been signed so that the American side can receive from Ukraine various types of systems in which the United States is interested for testing,” Zelenskyy said in response to a question by Military Times.

“And they are receiving these from us.”

Kyiv pitched the multibillion-dollar drone partnership to Washington more than a year ago and has waited for a sign-off that never came, with U.S. officials publicly cool on it as recently as last month.

Zelenskyy’s account that the testing is underway and going well is the first real movement on the deal in months.

He named “aerial drones, maritime drones and other technological items” as the systems already changing hands.

“That testing is now underway, and that we are receiving very positive feedback, is a fact,” he said. “After this, we will move to another, next stage, to the drone deal.”

The full drone deal, a partnership Zelenskyy has valued at $35 billion to $50 billion, would reportedly set up a 50-50 production venture with the U.S. drawing on up to 200 Ukrainian companies.

But that deal remains unsigned, held up for months awaiting Trump’s approval.

Zelenskyy pointed to Ukraine’s wartime standing, calling its defense industry “at NATO level, and already one of the best” and saying Kyiv is “ready to share our own development and technologies.”

Days before the summit, the cost of the shortage was written in the rubble of Kyiv after Russia fired 68 missiles and 351 drones at Ukraine overnight, according to Ukrainian Air Force officials.

The shortage that makes a Ukrainian Patriot line so appealing sharpened this spring, when the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran burned through American interceptor stocks.

Gulf defenses fired as many as 1,430 Patriot interceptors in 39 days, a CSIS analysis found, draining inventories Ukraine had counted on.

By late April, Ukrainian crews were rationing mid-attack, firing one interceptor at incoming ballistics instead of the standard two to four to stretch what remained.

Air Force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said the Patriot force was down to a “starvation ration,” according to Euromaidan.

Even while minimizing the use of interceptors, Ukrainian air defenses downed roughly 92% of the Shaheds Russia launched in May, according to the Air Force, and cheap interceptor drones now do more of that work.

Ukraine built 100,000 of those drones in 2025 and doubled the pace in the first four months of 2026.

By the time Zelenskyy proposed a formal “Drone Deal Initiative” at NATO’s Ankara summit on July 7, several countries had already signed bilateral drone agreements with Kyiv.

He also arrived with a NATO intelligence assessment endorsed by all 32 members that Russia could invade a member state by 2029.

Ukraine’s mission chief to NATO, Alyona Getmanchuk, told allies in Brussels on July 2 that Ukraine helps guide the alliance’s only joint center, red-teams its war games and has a record number of members backing its membership.

She cast Ukraine not as an aid recipient, but as the only NATO partner actually implementing the alliance’s Strategic Concept and backed by drone-export permits, testing deals and combat-proven systems.

The Patriot license and the drone testing deal are the first fruits of a budding relationship between equals, officials hope.

“Everyone respects our army, everyone respects the country, everyone respects our technology companies,” Zelensky noted. “We are ready to share our own development and technologies.”

The trip to Turkey for the NATO summit, the first international travel for the new plane, took place as hostilities escalated with Iran, a country that borders Turkey.

The unexpected plane switch followed months of scrutiny over the luxury gift intended to serve as a temporary replacement while Boeing struggled to deliver long-delayed next-generation Air Force One planes.

Critics questioned the cost, security and pace of the retrofit.

Trump said on Truth Social that he would use an older baby blue Air Force One plane “for old time’s sake” to fly from Ankara to RAF Mildenhall in Britain while the new plane stopped at the same base so U.S. service members stationed there could tour the aircraft.

Video late on Wednesday showed Trump boarding the new Air Force One gifted by Qatar at the British base as it prepared to fly to the U.S.

The new plane, with red, white, dark blue and gold livery chosen by Trump, is a Boeing 747 gifted to the United States by Qatar last year and refitted by defense contractor L3Harris Technologies.

Trump, asked in Ankara if a threat of assassination prompted his decision to change planes for his departure from Turkey, did not answer directly but acknowledged the potential threat.

“I’m number one on the kill list for Iran,” he told reporters at a news conference as the NATO summit concluded. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you that but I don’t really care.”

In a first, Trump will travel aboard Qatari-donated Air Force One

The upgrades to the jet from Qatar were completed so quickly that some experts expressed concern the plane may not be as secure as the existing Air Force One aircraft.

‘So the soldiers can see it’

Trump had said in Turkey the new Air Force One would travel to two or three big military bases in Europe before returning to the United States “so the soldiers can see it because it’s truly magnificent.” But it appeared the plane’s only stop was at the British base.

Trump wrote late on Wednesday on social media that he had landed at RAF Mildenhall “and met up with our new Air Force One.”

Service members at the base “were very excited, picture enclosed. It was on our way back to the States from Turkey, with virtually no deviation of flightpath,” he said.

The Qatari jet’s acceptance had drawn scrutiny. Retrofitting the luxury plane required security upgrades, communications improvements to prevent eavesdropping and missile defense capabilities, experts said.

Democratic lawmakers estimated the conversion cost more than $1 billion and raised concerns about its security.

A second aircraft that can operate as Air Force One is always on standby during presidential trips.

The Air Force’s fast-track effort to ready the jet skipped some planned modifications for the next-generation presidential aircraft in order to deliver an interim version sooner.

Officials have said the plane still meets presidential standards.

Boeing is working to deliver two purpose-built 747-8s under a $3.9 billion fixed-price contract signed in 2018.

That program is now four years behind schedule, with delivery not expected until mid-2028, meaning a new, U.S.-built plane may not be ready before Trump’s term ends in January 2029.

Costs on the Boeing program have grown to more than $5 billion, with the company booking billions of dollars in charges tied to the project.

The figure is less a single procurement contract than a financing and coordination structure meant to knit together a scattered set of national and bilateral missile programs that have been building since 2024.

The announcement leans heavily on the idea of pooling, not building, new technology. British officials described the initiative as a mechanism to “share expertise, technology advances and deepen industrial collaboration to rapidly advance NATO capabilities,” rather than a specification for a single new weapon.

The breadth of range requirements involved − everything from 300 kilometers to systems eventually exceeding 2,000 kilometers − spans engineering problems likely too disparate to be solved by a single missile design.

Instead, the $50 billion appears to aggregate work already underway. The British contribution to the sum is £3 billion ($4 billion), according to a press release by the prime minister’s office, which was split across a bilateral project with Germany and trilateral work with Italy and France on the Stratus missile.

The U.K.-Germany Trinity House program targets the development of stealth and hypersonic weapons beyond 2,000 kilometers for entry into service in the 2030s. The Stratus effort, meanwhile, recently secured a fresh £1.4 billion ($1.9 billion) U.K. commitment over four years toward a Storm Shadow successor.

In the same announcement, London also said it is joining the U.S. and Australia in the Precision Strike Missile program, which is designed to replace the American ATACMS missile.

Separately, a day earlier, NATO said six of its members − Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, Turkey and the United Kingdom − had launched a “multinational Ground-Based Precision Strike Capabilities High Visibility Project to explore the multinational development of novel deep precision strike capabilities, including new launchers and missiles” under the auspices of the alliance. The relation to the U.K. announcement was not immediately clear.

The U.K. government did not specify which “around a dozen European partners” it had in mind for its $50-billion deep-strike scheme.

The new British announcement also sits against the broader backdrop of ELSA, the European Long-Range Strike Approach that France, Germany, Italy and Poland launched in July 2024, later joined by Sweden and the U.K. Analysts have described ELSA as a multi-pillar framework rather than a unified acquisition drive, and the new $50 billion commitment could be intended to inject momentum into an initiative that had struggled to gain real traction over its first two years.

The European scramble for deep-strike capabilities comes as the war in Ukraine has shown the devastating impact of these weapons on military supply lines far from the frontline. It has been instilled with further urgency by the partial U.S. withdrawal of troops from Germany, which has left Berlin scrambling to replace those capabilities domestically. Such capabilities had not been a key element in military planning across the continent until recently.

Merz told lawmakers he had sealed the deal with the U.S. government on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Ankara, adding that the meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday had exceeded his expectations.

“We are closing a critical strategic gap in our defence, while simultaneously working to develop our own European systems and station them in Europe,” he said.

According to German government sources, Washington committed to granting approval in August for Germany to procure Tomahawk missiles and corresponding ground-based Typhon launchers in a letter of intent signed on Tuesday.

The number of missiles and launchers Germany plans to acquire has not been disclosed as it is classified information.

The planned purchase appears to fit with U.S. President Donald Trump’s push for European allies to pay for their own security, for example by buying U.S. weapons.

The fate of the Tomahawk supply had been unclear after Trump announced in May that he would reduce U.S. military presence in Germany.

German defense minister laments long-range strike ‘gap’ caused by planned US drawdown

That was seen as a cancellation of a plan under the previous administration to deploy a U.S. battalion equipped with long-range Tomahawk missiles to Germany.

It was intended as an interim solution that would serve as a powerful deterrent against Russia while Europeans developed their own version of such weapons.

Germany makes its own cruise missiles, the Taurus, but their range of around 311 miles is three to five times shorter than the Tomahawks’.

The company is in talks with a French producer to launch manufacturing of its solutions abroad and is also looking for partners in other European countries, according to a senior company representative.

Oleksii Konik, the co-founder of Trinity Robotics, told Defense News that the company initially planned to make around 1,100 UGVs this year, but, with the Ukrainian military increasing its orders, the business is ramping up throughput at its facilities in Ukraine.

“We work with the [Ukrainian] military procurement agency and more than 20 military units directly,” Konik said. “The most important mission that we have now is the robotization of the battlefield, because only this will allow our country to win the war.”

The company’s flagship UGV, Konyk One, is suitable for performing logistics and medical evacuation tasks. At the same time, Trinity Robotics is working on a new variant that will be fitted with a turret. This will enable users to deploy the UGV for combat operations, according to the co-founder.

While some Ukrainian officials expect the country’s ban on exporting weapons could be lifted this year, local defense companies are currently prohibited from exporting their wares. Meanwhile, Trinity Robotics is discussing cooperation with partners from allied countries to produce its unmanned vehicles abroad.

“We are looking for partners, manufacturers from Europe that manufacture trucks, vehicles, military parts,” Konik said. “We have an opportunity to create a joint enterprise in Europe … to produce our UGVs.”

“This will allow us to give additional volumes of our UGVs to our end users who are interested in that,” he said.

Under Kyiv’s Build with Ukraine program, joint manufacturing isprimarily intended to cover the needs of the country’s armed forces, but surplus output can be exported to other countries.

The company’s co-founder said that Trinity Robotics is currently negotiating with an unnamed French producer to launch a joint venture and produce its UGVs abroad. The Ukrainian manufacturer is also working to secure funds for its expansion, with recent investors including Sweden’s Front Ventures and Hede Capital Partners.

In its standard version, Konyk One weighs 460 kg (1,014 lb) and has a load capacity of up to 300 kg, according to data from the producer.

The search comes after dozens of MQ-9s were swatted out of the sky during the Iran war, according to a May 13 Congressional Research Service report.

With the Air Force currently possessing about 135 Reapers — which cost approximately $30 million apiece — such a loss rate is not sustainable, especially against a force like Iran, whose air defenses are less sophisticated than those of China or Russia.

“The Joint Force’s reliance on low-density, high-value ‘exquisite’ (>$30 million) manned and unmanned aircraft is unsustainable against adversaries utilizing layered defenses enabled by increasingly low-cost antiaircraft capabilities,” warned the Defense Innovation Unit solicitation for a new drone, which the Pentagon wants to “execute missions that the MQ-9A performs today.”

Rather than build a better Reaper, DIU is opting for an expendable replacement. The Massed Modular Aircraft, or MMA, project aims to develop a UAV designed to operate in such large numbers that it can absorb heavy losses and still overwhelm enemy defenses.

Particularly of interest is the size of the MMA. Drone swarms may be the next big thing in unmanned warfare, but generally those hordes are made up of small, inexpensive UAVs with limited range and payload.

But the DIU solicitation envisions a drone that has long range and a heavy payload — and is still inexpensive enough for mass production. The solicitation calls for a payload of at least 2,800 pounds, a bit less than the MQ-9’s 3,800-pound capacity.

The MMA should also have an unrefueled combat range of at least 2,300 nautical miles, according to the solicitation, and a one-way transfer range of at least 8,000 nautical miles. Additionally, the drone should reach speeds of at least 200 miles per hour and have the ability to operate from a 6,000-foot runway or improvised airstrips.

The DIU solicitation states that the drone should have “sufficient available size, weight, power (25kW), and cooling (5kW) to host a variety of internal and/or external payloads,” with a level of autonomous operations that would allow one operator to control several drones.

The solicitation does not specify the MMA’s dimensions, though the specifications suggest a drone comparable in size to the MQ-9. It also did not list a desired price point, though presumably it would be less than the $30 million price tag of an MQ-9.

The timeline for the MMA project, meanwhile, is ambitious. DIU is calling for “full-scale prototype flight testing within 21 months of award, with a targeted Initial Operating Capability (IOC) in FY2031. IOC for MMA is envisioned as 20 mission-ready aircraft delivered to an operational unit, able to be deployed.”

Pentagon solicitations continue to reflect a mindfulness of lessons from the Ukraine War, as well as the experiences during the Iran War. In both conflicts, the defender exhausted interceptors before the attacker ran out of drones.

“Keeping a constant airborne MMA presence to launch weapons, gather intelligence, perform electronic warfare missions, or relay communications will force an adversary to stay on the defensive,” DIU said. “This relentless pressure will exhaust the adversary, forcing them to burn through expensive anti-aircraft missiles and resources faster than they can be replaced.”

We have soldiers for land, sailors for sea, airmen for air, and guardians for space. But in cyberspace, a borderless domain where American forces are engaged with adversaries every day, we still do not have a military service whose central purpose is to build a quality, expert force, equipped with the most cutting-edge capabilities, for war-fighting in the cyber domain.

For more than a decade, Washington has tried to patch this problem instead of fixing it. Congress has granted U.S. Cyber Command new authorities. The Pentagon has adjusted organizations, budgets and training pipelines. Senior leaders have made the current structure work better than it should. But those reforms have not changed the basic fact that there is no military service that sees organizing, training and equipping forces for the cyber domain as its first and primary priority.

Cyber Command’s job is to employ cyber capabilities in military operations. But it still depends on the existing services to recruit, train, retain, and develop the people who carry out those missions and equip them with the capabilities to do so. In the rest of the military, that division of labor is clear: services build forces, and combatant commands employ them.

Cyber remains the exception. The Navy must build fleets, the Army must build land power, the Air Force must attain air superiority, and so on. Each service has cyber responsibilities, but each also has core missions that naturally, and appropriately, come first. Cyber matters to all of the services, but it is not the central organizing mission of any of them.

The result is a weaker cyber force than the country needs. The military’s cyber enterprise still struggles with inconsistent recruiting and retention problems. A young American who can write code, spot weaknesses in software or understand how digital systems break may be exactly who the country needs, even if that person does not fit the standard mold the existing services were built to recruit, promote and retain.

Cyber talent does not grow by accident. It must be recruited deliberately, trained continuously and retained through a career model that rewards technical mastery, instead of forcing top operators to move into command or management roles just to advance. The country needs people who can spend years becoming experts in offensive and defensive cyberspace operations, not personnel forced through systems that were never built for the mission.

The threat is evolving too quickly to justify continuing marginal fixes to the current system. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and criminal actors are targeting U.S. networks, critical infrastructure and military systems. Artificial intelligence will only increase the speed and scale of cyber operations. The United States cannot keep relying on a cyber force stitched together across multiple services, each with different priorities, incentives and personnel rules.

A new report from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows how to build a Cyber Force with a clearly defined mission, not a sprawling bureaucracy. Its job should be to organize, train and equip forces for offensive and defensive cyberspace operations. It should not take over every military information technology network or absorb every technology function inside the Department of Defense. The existing services should continue to operate and secure the networks and systems tied to their own missions.

A Cyber Force would also strengthen Cyber Command. Too much of this debate treats a new service as a judgment on Cyber Command’s performance. It is not. Cyber Command houses some of our nation’s most talented cyber warriors. What they need is a better force-generation system behind them.

The U.S. military has adapted before when new domains became central to warfare. The Air Force was created because airpower became too important to remain secondary to another service’s priorities. The Space Force was created because space needed its own culture and focus. Cyberspace has reached the same point: American forces are already in daily contact with adversaries online, cyberattacks can disrupt military operations and civilian infrastructure alike, and artificial intelligence is making the domain faster and more dangerous.

For too long, cyber has been treated as everyone’s responsibility, and therefore no one’s first priority. Our adversaries are not waiting for us to get organized. They are building capabilities, probing our defenses, and preparing for the next conflict. The United States should not enter that fight with cyber forces generated as a side mission by services built for other domains.

If cyberspace is truly a domain of warfare, it deserves its own service built to fight in it.

Dr. Erica Lonergan is an assistant professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and previously held several positions at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery served for 32 years in the U.S. Navy and is now the senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

They both served on the CSIS-FDD Commission on U.S. Cyber Force Generation.

“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving ‘em enough,” Trump said at a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the NATO summit in Ankara.

“It’s a defensive weapon, which I like better than an offensive weapon,” Trump said.

The U.S. president’s comments were quickly picked up by Russian state media, which keeps a keen eye on all news coming out of the NATO summit in Ankara.

Initial reporting was factual and brief, relaying the American president’s decision verbatim. State-aligned media had previously panned the idea as reckless and amplified Western skeptical voices calling the move a risk to U.S. national security over concerns the technology could fall into Russian hands.

Russia’s foreign ministry has criticized the Trump administration for continuing to back Ukraine, with Moscow’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying that Washington was giving up its role as an “honest broker” and shifting back toward more decisively supporting Kyiv.

Reporting by the FT from late June indicated that this was causing disillusionment with Trump amongst Putin’s close associates.

Wednesday’s announcement comes just days after Kremlin spokesperson Dimitry Peskov dropped Russia’s longstanding euphemism of the “special military operation” in Ukraine. Instead, speaking to Russian media on Sunday, it had become a “real war” due to the involvement of Western nations, Peskov said.

While Trump was unambiguous in Ankara about the licensing offer, some specifics would remain to be worked out with the U.S. contractors involved. It was unclear, for example, which type of interceptor missile - the simpler PAC-2 or the more capable PAC-3 - Trump intends to allow Ukraine to build.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly pleaded for the U.S.-made interceptors — the only weapon in Ukraine’s arsenal that can shoot down ballistic projectiles, whose high velocity and steep flight path make them difficult to stop.

He was expected to raise the issue with Trump during their meeting.

Trump said pressure could be applied to companies to produce Patriot missiles. “We have great power over the companies, those companies that make the Patriot,” he said.

“We haven’t informed the company of that yet, but that’ll work out all right. I’m sure they will be thrilled,” he said.

Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the interceptor missiles that go in the Patriot system.

Russia fired ballistic missiles at Kyiv again overnight, officials said on Wednesday, a third attack on the Ukrainian capital in less than a week exploiting Ukraine’s critical shortage of U.S.-made air-defense interceptors.

While Ukraine’s air defenses intercepted 139 of the 169 drones during the overnight strikes on the country, they were again unable to down any of the five ballistic missiles used by Russia, air force data showed.

Trump said both sides in the war would like to see it end, but Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have both been “difficult.”

“We’ve settled a lot of wars, and this one is the one that I thought maybe would be the easiest, but Putin is a difficult character, and this guy’s a difficult character,” Trump said, referring to Zelenskyy, who was sitting next to him.

Zelenskyy said he wanted to discuss “some very important details” with Trump.

“I’m sure you will do everything to stop this war,” he told Trump.

Moscow has stepped up its air war on Ukraine in recent months as its ground advances have largely stalled and Ukrainian attacks on its military logistics and oil industry triggered widespread fuel shortages.

Speaking in the Turkish capital Ankara, Trump called Madrid a “terrible partner” in NATO as he railed against allies for not supporting the war on Iran and ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to halt all trade with Spain.

Trump’s remarks, also declaring the fragile ceasefire with Iran to be over, overshadowed a summit that European leaders had hoped would project unity and support for Ukraine and cap a series of rows that have threatened to tear the military alliance apart.

Trump spoke alongside NATO Secretary Mark Rutte, who has assiduously tried to assuage his concerns over defense spending, Iran and Greenland, while lavishing praise on the president for bringing such issues to the fore.

They also undercut the carefully crafted pre-summit messaging that European NATO countries had stepped up to the plate on military spending, which saw at least $50 billion in defense initiatives unveiled on Tuesday.

Eight NATO allies launch HALO satellite constellation initiative

Washington and Madrid have been at loggerheads, with Spain explicitly rejecting Trump’s demands for European countries to sharply increase military spending and pay for their own defense. Madrid’s Socialist leadership has also refused to let the U.S. use its airspace or bases on its territory for the Iran war.

“Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore,” Trump said. “By the way, I’d like to cut it off. Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don’t participate, they don’t pay. I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, including visits.”

In response, the office of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said it was treating Trump’s statements as business as usual, adding that bilateral relations benefited both countries.

Spanish Health Minister Monica Garcia was more blunt.

“We are a sovereign, democratic country that defends multilateralism and peace,” she said on X. “What’s terrible is confusing diplomacy with bullying.”

Asked about Trump’s remarks, a NATO diplomat said: “The answer to every question POTUS raises is clear: build a more European NATO. That’s what we’re doing in Ankara.”

Trump calls Iran ‘sick people’

The U.S. has unleashed new military strikes on Iran and revoked a license allowing Iran to sell oil in response to attacks on three tankers. It was the latest blow to a fragile ceasefire agreement in a war that is deeply unpopular in Europe.

“It’s a very interesting question. To me, I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them,” Trump said when asked whether the interim accord with Iran that envisaged hammering out a long-term peace deal by mid-August was over. “They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people.”

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them,” he said.

Rutte defended the new U.S. strikes and played down Trump’s disappointment with allies over the Iran war as “isolated cases.”

“I think what you did last night was absolutely necessary. It was a very strong response,” Rutte told Trump. “When you have a ceasefire and Iran is basically violating the ceasefire, I think it is totally crucial that the U.S. forcefully react.”

He also praised Trump for making European countries raise their game on defense spending.

“It’s really important when it comes to NATO, what you have achieved, and this is a huge win,” he said.

Trump has accused European nations of failing to let U.S. forces use their airspace and bases on their territories during the war.

European officials have said they largely honored their commitments to U.S. forces, despite not having been consulted about a conflict that roiled their economies.

Trump also demanded that his country control Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, reviving an issue that has put severe strain on the alliance that has underpinned Western security since the start of the Cold War.

“Greenland is very important for the United States, but it’s not important for Denmark,” he said. “In fact, when Denmark was overrun by the Nazis in less than one day - Hitler beat them out in one day, took over - they asked us to take care of Greenland. In fact, we took Greenland, and then stupidly we gave it back.”

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen reiterated that Greenland was not up for grabs.

“We are ready to defend every inch of NATO, including our own territory,” she said.

Suddenly in June it was showcased for the first time in official Chinese media, as analysts tell it, and described as one of China’s top military assets as English-language subtitles extolled its battlefield capacities.

Experts say the broadcast answers Asia-Pacific military exercises by other countries and aims to warn the U.S. military that the missiles better known as DF-17s, for short, have what it takes to cause particular pain in any war with China.

“Video footage might be political signaling or mild deterrence, because the DF-17 is very hard to defend against, especially for large surface targets,” said Alexander Huang, chairman of the Council of Strategic and Wargaming Studies in Taipei. “It’s a big threat to carriers and other assault ships.”

The medium-range missiles are equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle, which means they can fly at lower altitudes in unpredictable directions.

DF-17s have existed for at least 12 years and been available to the People’s Liberation Army since 2019, according to a paper by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.

The release of DF-17 into the Chinese media syncs up time-wise with the ongoing U.S.-led 2026 Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) maritime military exercises near Hawaii and the U.S.-Japan drills in late June.

“The other exercises were pretty tough and harsh, clearly targeting Chinese possible actions,” Huang said.

By showing the DF-17s after RIMPAC, China wants to suggest that the missiles can evade interception and make “saturation strikes” at the same time, said Chen Yi-fan, assistant professor in the Diplomacy and International Relations Department at Taiwan’s Tamkang University.

“This signaling is intended to underscore the PLA’s growing confidence in its capacity to overwhelm regional missile‑defense systems and complicate operational planning” by any military opponents, Chen said.

The missiles, as shown during a drill in an English-language YouTube video by the Chinese state-run media outlet CGTN, can make “ultra-precise” strikes and “penetrate advanced defense systems”, per the video.

CGTN said the missiles may be used without fixed launch sites and in any kind of weather.

“The coordinated salvo launches greatly improve strike efficiency and battlefield safety, demonstrating China’s advances in military technology,” CGTN said.

The U.S. think tank describes the DF-17 missiles as 11 meters (36 feet) long with a range of 1,800 to 2,500 kilometers (1,118 to 1,553 miles). It says they can carry conventional or nuclear payloads. China has 1,300 missiles and 300 launchers.

“As one of the PLA’s premier strategic assets, the DF‑17 is likely reserved for the most consequential scenarios, such as foreign military intervention perceived as supporting Taiwan independence,” Chen said.

American military bases in Hawaii, Guam and Japan are monitoring the uptick in People’s Liberation Army naval drills around Taiwan and Beijing’s tiffs with the Philippines in the South China Sea.

China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan, a de-facto U.S. ally. China and the Philippines – a U.S. treaty ally – contest sovereignty over small islets in the sea between them.

The DF-17’s hypersonic glide vehicle would give the missiles an edge in battle, said M. Taylor Fravel, Security Studies Program Director at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“This maneuverability means that it is much harder to defeat than a ballistic missile without a hypersonic glide vehicle,” Fravel said. “It can more easily penetrate missile defenses.”

Earlier DF-series missiles flew the traditional path of a surface-to-surface missile, meaning they were easier to predict than the flight course of a DF-17, Huang said.

U.S. forces may need to expand their long-range radar technology to spot any DF-17s launchers and respond preemptively in the case of any conflict, analysts said.

The U.S. is already developing systems “similar” to the DF-17, Fravel said. He said those include the U.S. army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon missile system as well as hardware that may defeat hypersonic glide vehicles.

A long-range hypersonic system is designed to strike well defended targets from thousands of miles away.

“Washington must accelerate the development and deployment of its own hypersonic weapons to establish credible mutual deterrence,” Chen said.

During May demonstrations at Camp Grayling, Michigan soldiers remotely fired the Autonomous Volcano for the first time before later having it lay two separate minefields without human assistance, Picatinny Arsenal announced Tuesday.

The test represents the Army’s latest move to modernize legacy equipment, systems tactics and munitions with emerging technology. In the combat engineering world, the service is experimenting with using unmanned aerial systems to drop grappling hooks, and it is trying to send drones — instead of humans — into the breach.

The Army has also tested autonomous vehicles for mortar resupply and autonomous boats for information gathering.

The autonomous Volcano variant paired the service’s decades-old M139 Volcano dispenser with a driverless Palletized Load System truck — an upgrade designed to keep combat engineers out of danger. The system also automatically logs locations and uploads it to the Army’s shared battlefield map, or common operating picture.

Soldiers from 4th Engineering Battalion remotely fired inert mine canisters from the dispenser in the demonstration’s first live-fire scenario. Then, the system autonomously and simultaneously emplaced two minefields.

“Autonomous Volcano leverages low-cost modernization to turn a legacy platform into a high-yield autonomous asset — securing asymmetric overmatch and closing a critical area-denial gap,” Col. Vinson Morris, who oversees the Army’s project manager for close combat systems, said in a statement.

The project was developed jointly by the U.S. and United Kingdom, according to the release, with defense contractor Forterra integrating the existing Volcano mine dispenser onto the automatic vehicle.

The Army plans to test the system in a series of realistic battlefield scenarios later this month.

But berthed in port — or sailing on the surface while transiting to and from port — these powerful yet fragile boats can be sitting ducks for drones, mines and even anti-tank rockets.

What once seemed the plot of thriller novels has become reality. Ukraine claims it successfully used an underwater drone to damage a Russian submarine in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk last year. Guerrillas and terrorists lurking along a waterway could use anti-tank guided missiles or handheld anti-tank rockets to ambush an unwary sub.

To face the new threat, the U.S. Navy is looking to develop better methods of protecting its missile subs, as well as the shore installations that support them.

These defenses include “prototype technologies to detect, track, identify, deny, and defeat unmanned systems across all domains,” according to a Sources Sought announcement. “This area seeks scalable solutions for shore-based installations and afloat operations in Port, Harbor, Littoral, and Waterways (PHLW) and open ocean environments.”

The Navy is also searching for ways to escort and protect its missile subs as they transit to and from port.

The goal is to “ensure the zero-failure secure movement of strategic maritime assets,” the announcement said. “This area seeks advanced maritime situational awareness, physical security enhancements for escorting SSBNs [nuclear missile subs], and the detection, avoidance, and mitigation of maritime mines, and the defeat of direct-fire kinetic threats (e.g., shore-launched ATGMs/RPGs) during transit through PHLW to and from dive points.”

The threat of anti-tank weapons even extends to the truck convoys hauling ICBMs to sub bases. The Navy is interested in active protection systems — sensors and shotgun-like launchers mounted on armored vehicles to destroy incoming anti-tank rockets — “for ground transport and convoy operations of strategic weapons and equipment.”

US Air Force wants more armored transporters for ICBM warheads

Other security items in the Sources Sought announcement, which lists 22 “focus areas” that the Navy’s Strategic Systems Program wants to address, include sensors to protect harbors. The Navy is also interested in security robots, including “Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) for waterside patrol, Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) for perimeter screening, and robotic inspection platforms that seamlessly integrate with existing response forces.”

Artificial intelligence has also emerged as a threat in the form of drone swarms or cyberwarfare.

The Navy is searching for countermeasures that “focus on defeating autonomous swarms, disrupting AI-enabled Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) directed at nuclear facilities, and hardening strategic security networks against AI-driven cyber-physical attacks or spoofing.”

The best defense for submarines is simply not to be detect in the first place. To that point, the Navy is seeking “prototype technologies that may mitigate the generation, radiation, propagation, and scatter of a variety of signal types (acoustic, chemical, optical, electromagnetic, radiological, hydrodynamic, and cyber) associated with submarine and unmanned system operations, to include both peacetime and wartime operations.”

“I’m really pleased to announce that eight allies are launching a project to explore the development of a mega-constellation called HALO, opening a new chapter in allied space operations,” said Radmila Šekerinska, the NATO deputy secretary-general.

HALO — Hybrid Alliance Layered Operations in Space — will focus on improving connectivity and integration of sovereign, nationally owned and controlled military satellites into a networked constellation.

Denmark, Canada, Finland, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and Turkey are part of the effort. It aims to improve alliance resilience and military advantage in space, enabling high-speed communications, intelligence and missile tracking.

Individual satellite constellations run independently by member countries are vulnerable to cyberattacks, jamming or physical destruction, while also being too slow to relay large amounts of data, Šekerinska said.

“So this new model will be particularly helpful for high-speed communications, intelligence and missile tracking, overcoming the cost, the time and coverage limitations of single-nation satellite fleets,” she added.

Meanwhile, at the NATO Summit Defence Industry Forum, several nations declared their contributions to the space domain. Canada became the 15th member of NATO’s STARLIFT multinational initiative, which explores ways to develop a network of launch capabilities that will help allies launch assets on short notice from spaceports across the alliance.

Spain became the 19th country to join NATO’s Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space initiative. Madrid will contribute by increasing coastal surveillance through imagery from its “Atlantic Constellation” satellites.

Turkey announced plans for the development of two additional high-resolution satellites to complement space capabilities in the region.