Defense

SESIMBRA, Portugal — An hour from Portugal’s capital, Lisbon, on a clear sunny day in late September, a large, penguin-like robot peeks above the sea surface. It circles a Portuguese Navy ship from a distance, hardly visible to the human eye, concealed by the deep blue waters of the Atlantic ocean. The system is the Greyshark from Germany’s EuroAtlas, an autonomous underwater vehicle…

More than a dozen service members have been suspended or relieved of duties for social media activity related to conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s death. Earlier this month, after Kirk was shot and killed during a Sept. 10 event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that any social media post celebrating or mocking the assassination of Kirk was…

PARIS — Robin Radar got into drone detection in the early 2010s, when the company needed predictable targets to validate its bird-spotting radars, founder and CEO Siete Hamminga recalls. The Dutch startup considered partnering with a pigeon club to release homing pigeons, the executive told Defense News in an interview at the DSEI UK defense show in London earlier this month. In the end, the…

Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll says he is locked in a “holy war” on Capitol Hill as he works to convince lawmakers to grant the service more flexible funding authority for electronic warfare, unmanned aerial systems and counter-drone efforts. The resistance Driscoll has encountered in his first eight months in the job is part of a longstanding tension between the Pentagon and Congress over the…