Defense

China’s Unitree Robotics — among the world’s biggest producers of humanoid and quadruped robots — based designs for its most successful robot dogs on innovations funded by the U.S. military, according to a former U.S. defense technology official and three top researchers involved in the project. Unitree’s $1,600 Go2 model, launched in 2023, helped the company rapidly dominate the global…

As she marked the 14th anniversary of the abduction of her son, Austin Tice, during a 2012 reporting trip to Syria, Debra Tice remained in recovery following her own multi-month health scare. Last October, CNN interviewed a former advisor to ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad who told the outlet that Tice, a veteran Marine Corps captain and freelance reporter, had died in 2013. Debra Tice…

This year marked the 15th deployment of U.S. Marines to Australia under the Marine Rotation Force-Darwin (MRF-D) initiative, but this year’s rotation looked different from the rest because of its certification as a Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (SPMAGTF). “This is the first rotation in the 15-year history of the program to be certified as a MAGTF, and that’s a big deal,”…

The Army is opening military test ranges to private industry, the service announced this month, including a Michigan site where companies can test drones and counter-drone systems against electronic warfare conditions modeled after those in Ukraine. Companies will be able to request range access even if they do not have an ongoing partnership with the government, according to the release. The…