Washington: The program manager for the Navy’s Fire Scout rotary wing unmanned air system and the admiral responsible for UAVs rejected much of a highly critical review of the drone by the Pentagon’s top operational tester. The director of the Defense Operational Test and Evaluation office said all of the drone’s flights during training took… Keep reading →

Washington: A relatively small unmanned aircraft struck a C-130 cargo plane over Afghanistan, injuring no one but raising questions anew about whether drones can fly safely in American airspace. For more news and information on the swiftly-changing defense industry, please sign up for the Breaking Defense newsletter. You can also catch us on Twitter @BreakingDefense.… Keep reading →

Washington: Bigger might not necessarily be better when it comes to the future of Army unmanned aircraft, according to a senior service official. Army field commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan have gotten the most bang for their buck from the smaller-class of unmanned drones, like the Shadow and Puma, for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions,… Keep reading →

Washington: Falling budgets will force the Army to boost adoption of unmanned systems and to look more closely at the ethical and moral implications of killing people using autonomous systems, two senior Army officers said Tuesday. Although the Army has been working with unmanned programs for decades, it still is not moving as fast as… Keep reading →

Washington: The future of armed unmanned aircraft will remain more man than machine, at least for members of the Army and Marine Corps. “We will always have a man in the loop,” Col. Stewart Hatfield, chief of the lethality branch in the Army’s unmanned requirements shop, said today at the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems… Keep reading →

Washington: The end has finally come for the Army’s Multifunction Utility Logistics Vehicle, better known inside the Pentagon as the Army MULE. The Defense Department’s procurement chief Ash Carter put the final nail in the program last week, issuing an Acquisition Decision Memorandum canceling the program on July 29, according to recent news reports. A… Keep reading →