Texas-based Warhound was conceived by Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey and entrepreneur Ben Lamm, who started Colossal Biosciences, a company best known for its efforts to revive extinct species.

In a press release, Warhound chief executive David Spirk said the company aims to reduce the United States’ dependence on a “shrinking” European supply chain for working dogs.

“Our long-term goal is simple: healthier dogs, better-prepared teams, and more service members and first responders coming home safely,” Spirk said, adding that he cares deeply about “protecting people and helping the animals who support them.”

Before joining Warhound, Spirk held several defense-related positions, including senior counsel at Palantir Technologies and chief data officer at both the Defense Department and U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM.

According to the announcement, Luckey and Lamm conceived the idea for Warhound years ago at the annual Moonshots Summit, a gathering where entrepreneurs discuss ambitious ideas.

They recognized two challenges with military working-dog programs: Most of the canines never complete training, and the U.S. relies heavily on a foreign supply chain. 

According to Warhound, overseas suppliers provide 80% of military working dogs. The company also says the United States must train roughly 200 dogs to field 100, in part because so many fail to complete training.

Warhound plans to combine the founders’ respective areas of expertise to address those problems.

“Colossal’s science will help produce healthier dogs with characteristics suited to demanding missions, while Anduril’s technology will give dogs and their handlers greater awareness and protection in the field,” the company said.

Warhound also said it will work with the American Humane Society to safeguard the animals’ health and welfare. The company said its goal is to reduce training washouts, limit the number of dogs entering intensive training unnecessarily and enable safer, more effective missions.

Commander of I Corps Lt. Gen. Matt McFarlane told reporters at a media roundtable in Washington that the desire to see the platform deployed across the formation by the end of fiscal 2027 was dependent on what the service was able to provide.

“Scaling and speed up is based on resources available,” said McFarlane. “That’s not in my job jar.”

The Army’s NGC2 platform will permit technologies, weapons, sensors, devices and applications from across the force to co-exist on the same network, streamlining decision-making during combat environments.

As the service expands the new platform across the I Corps, which oversees troops across the Indo-Pacific, the Army will get a close-up look at how the system allows military personnel and machines to communicate with each other over vast geographical distances and in communication-contested environments.

Among its many responsibilities, the I Corps works with Security Assistance Group-Ukraine, a U.S.-led joint military command headquartered in Germany that provides weapons and training support to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

I Corps uses SAG-U to digest lessons learned from the unique military dynamics of the war in Ukraine and determine how to apply them to other potential conflicts worldwide.

The Army recently awarded defense tech company Anduril Industries a contract worth up to $1.8 billion to continue developing NGC2’s common data baseline, or software foundation.

Anduril, along with Palantir, Raft and Striveworks, has been refining the technology to help the service move NGC2 from the experimental phase to fielding.

The resources McFarlane referred to include funds, which are currently up in the air as the Senate still works to pass the National Defense Authorization Act.

With Congress currently in recess, the timeline for approval of those funds is murky.

The Army’s proposed budget for fiscal 2027 includes a $904 million request for the research, development and scaling of NGC2.

APKWS kits convert unguided 2.75-inch rockets into laser-guided munitions. All four services field them, and the weapon has become a cheaper alternative to air-to-air missiles for shooting down drones.

Congress still has to approve and fund the buy, the department said. BAE said it will increase production while the two sides work out a multiyear contract. Neither side announced the deal’s cost.

The framework also outlines a path to increase output to 35,000 kits a year for U.S. allies. The department said that added capacity will come online as partner nations formally request kits through the Foreign Military Sales program.

“By securing multi-year demand, this agreement keeps production lines running at capacity, provides our forces with interceptor inventory, and flips the cost calculus in the taxpayer’s favor,” Michael Duffey, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, said in the announcement.

BAE, which builds the kits in Hudson, New Hampshire, and Austin, Texas, said in February that it had delivered its 100,000th kit.

The 25,000 figure in this framework agreement matches capacity BAE has cited before. A company official said in 2023 that APKWS was in full-rate production with room to grow to 25,000 units a year.

“APKWS delivers proven, reliable and affordable precision at scale to counter evolving threats and ensure our warfighters maintain a decisive advantage,” said Tom Arseneault, president and CEO of BAE Systems Inc.

The Navy’s current five-year APKWS contract with BAE, awarded in August 2025, is worth up to $1.74 billion. It covers up to 55,000 kits for the Navy, the Army and foreign customers, with work expected to be completed by December 2031.

Among allied buyers, Saudi Arabia won State Department approval in July for a possible $1.96 billion package that includes up to 20,000 APKWS kits, split evenly between air-to-air and air-to-ground versions. Italy is also weighing a buy of 5,031 kits for counter-drone defense.

The APKWS agreement is the latest in a series of framework deals the Pentagon has signed this year to boost munitions production.

In January, Lockheed Martin agreed to more than triple production of the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement, or PAC-3 MSE, interceptor.

In March, BAE and Lockheed agreed to quadruple production of seekers for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, interceptor. A separate THAAD framework signed in January led to a June contract worth more than $35 billion for the interceptors themselves.

According to the Sept. 29 announcement, the five winners of the Army’s xTechHumanoid competition include ACES Group, IHMC Robotics, Hydroplane Limited, Ras Labs and Velocity Explorations.

Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, explained that through the program, the service tried to identify “the problems, mission needs, and opportunities” humanoid robots could best be used.

“xTech is our method of surveying the industry landscape and fast-tracking promising technology rather than falling victim to years-long studies,” Miller said.

“Humanoid robots are part of a broader autonomy push to increase the depth and breadth of robotic platforms and components industry can provide for a range of missions,” he added.

The expectation

For the competition, Army officials reviewed each company’s white paper proposal for its humanoid robot. They evaluated the concepts based on several criteria, including military utility, technical merit and technological maturity.

Of the 103 submissions, the Army selected 10 finalists, each of which received $25,000. The service then identified five winners through a live experimentation event.

According to the 2025 competition announcement, the event tested the robots on a series of collective tasks “in the context of a military small unit mission conducted in a combat situation.”

During the event, officials also reviewed the baseline system capabilities and advanced subsystems.

Examples of the former include checkpoint security, gap crossing or obstacle clearing and firefighting. Whereas the latter included technologies like thermal sensors, battery life and autonomy.

The reality

However, Robert Griffin, a senior researcher at IHMC Robotics, told Military Times that the competition’s individual requirements exceeded what current technology could achieve.

“The individual things that were outlined were, in any one element, beyond what is possible given the current state of the art,” Griffin said.

“For example, you don’t have a robot that can run 28 miles an hour while carrying 50 pounds and operating for 24 hours,” he said. “It’s not a thing that exists in the world.”

Because the Army’s “actual full desirements were beyond what can currently be done,” Griffin said, developers had to prioritize different elements of their robots’ capabilities for the demonstrations.

Griffin’s team focused on baseline capabilities.

“The big thing for us was to have the robot show up at the competition, move around in the world, unsupported, at a reasonable pace, and then respond to commands,” he said.

Video of the competition shows IHMC’s robot “Alex” following voice commands directing it to walk through a field and then, under the control of a human with a remote, through the woods and across gravel.

Alex also grasps a small shovel, begins to dig and attempts to pour dirt into a bucket. Although it doesn’t succeed, it demonstrates the movement. And finally, Alex collapses and has to be transported out on a gurney.

Testing subsystems

Other competitors focused on subsystems.

Hydroplane and ACES Group competed with their batteries, while Velocity Explorations entered software that enabled its robot to listen to radio traffic between people and understand their movements and tasks. Using that information to develop an understanding of the broader battlespace, the platform could then determine how to act.

Ras Labs tested highly sensitive fingertip tactile sensors that allowed a robot to handle delicate objects.

While multiple companies said they participated because it was a chance to test their products, Dr. Anita Sengupta, Hydroplane’s founder and chief executive, explained that her company has traditionally done work for large structures and aircraft, but recently started working on smaller and portable systems.

“We saw a good overlap between developing a power system for a humanoid, whether it’s a person or a robot, as well as the drone use case, so it just seemed like an interesting use case for us to take our technology to,” she said.

For the competition, her company adapted a 10-kilowatt system originally designed for the Marine Corps in 2024, but made it smaller because the humanoid only needed a few kilowatts. The device utilizes a fuel cell similar to what a generator uses, but instead of using diesel fuel, it uses hydrogen. Sengupta explained that the benefits are that it has about three times the energy density and a higher conversion efficiency.

Although Hydroplane didn’t directly power a humanoid robot with its fuel cell, the Army tested it to see if it could power a humanoid robot. In turn, Hydroplane helped establish those standards, with the intent to eventually collaborate with a humanoid robot team.

The future

In the recent announcement, the Army said the competition revealed a clear picture of “both the progress commercial industry has made in humanoid robotics and the technical challenges that remain.” The findings, the service said, will help it direct research toward technologies that offer the greatest return for warfighters.

But while humanoid robots might eventually take on more complex military tasks, Griffin said the industry is still a long way from developing machines like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 from The Terminator franchise.

“I don’t think that any person who has a modicum of ethics is going to say that we need to be having these robots making life or death decisions,” he said, noting how easily current AI models can be confused or manipulated.

Instead, Griffin said the future of humanoid robotics will depend in part on what investors want the machines to do. Industrial companies, for example, may see opportunities to automate tasks typically performed by humans.

“Our goal is to be able to make robots that remove people from having to do harmful tasks,” he said about his company, pointing to scenarios such as first responders entering burning buildings and nuclear cleanup.

Speaking at the Association of the United States Army Conference in Washington, Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank described an iterative human-in-the-loop process in which military personnel learn in real time how to balance giving AI agents autonomy and exercising control over them.

“It’s occurring daily and weekly inside of the headquarters as we watch agents learn and grow, and then determine what we should let them do on their own versus have a human in the loop,” Eubank said. “All work right now is safeguarded human-in-the-loop as we continue to learn across this very important emergent technology.”

Military personnel currently watch AI agents perform routine tasks, with a governance board within Army Cyber Command making decisions on whether that agent should be allowed to continue performing a task without human intervention or whether it should be allowed to work unsupervised.

During its current human-in-the-loop iteration, every machine AI team checked in with the human team daily and was not operating alone.

Every AI agent was also assigned the same work role as a human, so Army Cyber command trained those agents to be masters of their craft in the same way the Army did with the humans.

As the service worked through the iterative process, the uptick in speed that AI ushered in was drastic.

In two days, an AI agent could complete work that took an analytics support officer six months, Eubank said.

Army Cyber Command used artificial intelligence to operate, secure, defend and attack networks, and make sure that technology works hand in hand with the human workforce, according to Eubank.

Artificial intelligence also enabled the command to move faster than it had ever moved and sift through mountains of data at machine speed, which allowed humans to focus on solving critical problems.

The AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar, or G/ATOR, is the Marine Corps’ solution for defending against a broad range of airborne threats, particularly in the Pacific littorals.

It replaces five older radar systems, and last year received an extended-range software upgrade that boosted its capability and advanced its ability to differentiate friends or foes in the air.

In a call with reporters Oct. 7, Northrop Director of Mission Systems Paul Weaver said the company had delivered 43 of the 60 G/ATOR systems the Marine Corps has ordered, of which five are designated for the Air Force and one for Navy test and evaluation.

“Demand for the system in theater right now is high, and it’s based on that performance,” Weaver said. “We’ve been making modifications to the system based on customer input for the last four or five years. We’ve made some hardware modifications that extended its range, and we’re constantly making software improvements to adapt to the specific threat environment, whether that be [unmanned aerial systems], from the smallest to the largest, and other potential threats that they face.”

Weaver said the company was “actively engaged at the headquarters level” with the Marine Corps and the Air Force about how best to employ G/ATOR and had recently begun engagements with the Army as well. While he deferred on saying whether the Army had interest in acquiring the radar system, he said its capabilities had broad appeal across the services.

“When you put a number of these systems in the field, operating in a complementary way, you can stay in constant movement and complicate the adversary’s target cycle,” Weaver said. “That is of interest to every service that’s currently in conflict right now. So, to the level that we’re engaged with the Army and the Air Force, it all comes back to its current performance and the agility that this advanced platform potentially offers.”

At 9,000 pounds, G/ATOR is small and light enough to be transported by C-130 Hercules or MV-22 Osprey aircraft. It can be set up and emplaced by a four-person crew in under ten minutes, and can flex in power settings from 60 kilowatts for medium-range targets to 75 kilowatts for longer-range kills. Initial fielding to the Marine Corps began in 2018, and service leaders have suggested more recently that they might soon expand their acquisition plan.

“We learned that it’s much more capable than we thought,” Brig. Gen. Christopher Haar, now commander of the 3rd Marine Logistics Group, told Military Times last December. “And now there’s a demand for us to get that in more units, and to potentially increase the number of those systems that we buy.”

The War Zone reported last month that the Corps’ Pacific-based 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit had employed the service’s Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) concept for the first time in combat during operations in support of the Operation Epic Fury conflict with Iran. It’s not clear if the G/ATOR system was part of that concept employment. But Weaver did suggest that the current conflict is highlighting its strengths.

With its lightweight footprint and capable 360-degree active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, the system, he said, can be flown into an austere location to establish an expeditionary air base, allowing the establishment of a surveillance perimeter while also enabling airspace control. According to the company, the system can identify launch points of hostile fires ranging from mortars to artillery and serve as a ground-based air traffic control manager. Drone warfare, Weaver said, brings out other strengths.

“It’s proving in recent conflicts and around the globe to perform exceptionally well in clutter, which makes it very helpful in identifying all classes of UASs and cruise missiles,” he said. “It’s not only providing awareness of what’s in the airspace around it at all altitudes. It provides weapons quality data and that performance, which means the warfighter can not only see it but also connect it to any available countermeasure that it has, whether that be kinetic or non-kinetic, and address it appropriately.”

The Total Army Combat and Training Munitions Information System, or TACTMIS, is meant to replace the previously used Total Ammunition Management Information System, or TAMIS, once it retires on Oct. 30. TACTMIS aims to update how the Army plans, manages and reports munitions for training, testing, operational and combat activities, according to a recent release.

“TACTMIS is a foundational step in modernizing how the Army manages the munitions that enable readiness and warfighting,” Army Chief of Munitions and G-3/5/7 Deputy Chief of Staff John C. Hinnant said in the release. “It gives the Total Army a more authoritative, integrated and accountable way to generate requirements, manage authorizations and maintain trusted visibility of munitions data across the force.”

TACTMIS, developed under the Software Acquisition Pathway, was built using the Appian Platform to be a cloud-enabled, low-code “Software-as-a-Service” capability, the announcement says. The system supports a variety of inputs such as requirements calculations, authorization management, request processing and enterprise reporting.

Using a common organizational framework, the system is meant to reduce manual workload, improve data integrity and increase the visibility of munitions demand and fulfillment across the service and its joint partners.

The upgraded system can coordinate workflows across enterprise systems while maintaining the commanding role of the Army systems and data sources it interacts with, per the statement, supporting readiness planning while providing timely data to inform decision-making for senior leaders and defense industrial base requests.

“TACTMIS moves the Army from fragmented and manual munitions-management processes toward a modern digital capability built for the scale and speed of today’s force,” CW3 Deidre Burgos, TACTMIS program manager, said in the release. “Our focus is ensuring commanders and staffs have reliable tools to manage munitions requirements, authorizations, forecasts and expenditures with greater accuracy, transparency and confidence.”

The system is also aligned to support the Army’s broader modernization efforts such as Ammo360, which is a software initiative meant to boost ammunition accountability and unify the operating picture within the service’s network.

TACTMIS is designed to support over 10,000 users across the globe and operate without dedicated unit-level administrators. The system’s platform allows for TACTMIS to evolve in increments as the Army’s requirements, policies and mission needs change so redesigns are unnecessary for future enhancements.

Planned enhancements include a classified capability intended to support real-time combat munition requirements and expenditure reporting for readiness and logistics operations, the announcement reads.

“Delivering this initial release is an important milestone, but it is also the beginning of an enduring modernization effort,” Burgos said. “TACTMIS provides the digital foundation the Army needs to evolve alongside future operational requirements while maintaining uninterrupted support to the force’s ability to arm, train, and sustain.”

According to Monday’s announcement by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which manufactures the aircraft, the Arizona Guard will receive eight Gray Eagle 25Ms by September 2027 and four more by the end of 2029.

Patrick Shortsleeve, the company’s vice president of Defense Department strategic development, called the aircraft “an integral part of the Army Aviation team” as it works closely with advanced autonomy and manned rotary-wing systems to outpace threats.

“The Gray Eagle has a proven record of performance with 1 million hours of safe operations, including automatic takeoff and landing capability,” he said. “When you factor in its extensive capabilities, the Gray Eagle is a cost-effective UAS that excels as an enabler for Fires, Maneuver, Network, and Intelligence operations.”

The National Guard’s goal, according to General Atomics, is to create a UAS company in each of its eight infantry divisions. The Arizona Guard is part of the 40th Infantry Division, which covers 11 other states or territories and is headquartered in California.

“Once fully operational, the Gray Eagle 25M can deploy in support of global missions for Combatant Command (COCOM) commanders and defend against threats in the Western Hemisphere,” the company said, adding that currently, Congress has funded three Gray Eagle 25M guard units.

The Gray Eagle 25M, the newest edition of the decades-old Gray Eagle UAS, made its first flight in December 2023. That same month, the federal government awarded General Atomics a $389 million contract to develop the system.

According to the company, the “M” in the 25M stands for “modernized,” as the aircraft has been upgraded to use an open architecture design, advanced datalinks and a newer propulsion system.

The changes enhance its ability to modify capabilities, resist electronic threats and provide a greater payload capacity and longer flight time than its predecessor.

The company’s stationary Cheongwang laser air defense weapon and a 30-kilowatt-class vehicle-mounted laser took part in the live-fire event, held during the Army’s TIGER+ Future Warfare Integrated Combat Exercise. About 500 people attended, according to Hanwha, including Army Chief of Staff Gen. Kim Kyu-ha.

Cheongwang fired on a drone overhead that “caught fire and fell from the sky,” The Korea Times reported from the exercise at a training ground in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi Province. The laser was one part of a layered counter-drone demonstration that also included electronic jamming and a K21 armored vehicle firing on incoming drones.

Hanwha did not say which system destroyed which drones, what kinds of drones were used, what vehicle carries the newer laser or the range of either weapon.

The Oct. 14 demonstration followed a Sept. 16 event at South Korea’s 2026 Defense Drone Technology Exhibition, where Cheongwang downed four drones and two larger unmanned aircraft in succession, Hanwha said.

Cheongwang, meaning “light of the sky,” in Korean is formally known as the Laser Air Defense Weapon Block-I. Hanwha developed it under a program led by South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development. The company calls it the world’s first operationally deployed laser weapon.

South Korea first fielded the system in December 2024 and had about five units at major government facilities as of June, including the Ministry of National Defense building, according to Korea JoongAng Daily.

North Korean drones have repeatedly violated South Korean airspace. In December 2022, five crossed the border, one reaching Seoul. Fighter jets, attack helicopters and warning shots failed to bring any of them down, Defense News reported at the time.

Hanwha says each Cheongwang shot costs about $1.50, in line with the figure South Korea’s arms procurement agency gave in 2024. Unlike guns or missiles, the system uses no ammunition and can continue firing as long as it has power. The company asserts lasers can counter cheap drones used for surveillance and strikes without relying on much costlier missile-based air defenses.

Hanwha is also developing a 50 kW Laser Armored Vehicle in-house for export customers and displayed a model of it at the MSPO defense show in Kielce, Poland, in September.

At the show, Hanwha Systems manager Hyungun Park told Defense News that the company had built a prototype and planned to begin production by the end of 2027. He said Hanwha was in talks with potential buyers in Europe, Asia and the Middle East about exporting Cheongwang.

South Korea’s 2027 defense budget proposal includes funding to begin research on a mobile Block-II version of Cheongwang, UPI reported.

The gaming accessory is part of KBR’s Firefly, a mobile high-energy laser weapon system developed by Kord Technologies. Recently, the Pentagon selected the company for a pilot program to test defending U.S. military installations against adversarial drones. The system uses a concentrated beam of light instead of costly missile interceptors, potentially offering a less expensive way to bring down drones.

David Zoller Jr., senior director for KBR, said the controller “reduces the amount of time that it takes to train somebody because they already know what that feels like — what all the buttonology is.”

The pilot program will place directed-energy weapons at military bases across the country for a yearlong assessment, where service members will operate, maintain and collect data on the weapons. The Pentagon will, in turn, gather information on cost and logistics.

KBR subsidiary Kord has marketed Firefly as a palletized mobile laser. The company said the system — part of which looks like a futuristic, modular cell phone camera lens — can operate in temperatures ranging from negative 15 to 35 degrees Celsius. During an August demonstration in Alabama, company officials said that a truck-mounted system needs just a few seconds to down a small drone.

Here is how it works:

Identify the threat

When the radar system detects a potential threat, it sends a cue to the human operator to investigate further. The software also has target list capabilities, so it can help a human identify things that might be threats. The human can use built-in cameras to zoom in on the anomaly — whether that be a bird, plane or drone. The AI capability tracks automatically, but the human behind the joystick makes decisions. The system, Zoller said, “still has a person that decides not just when to fire, but also where to fire.”

Engage

Once the operator makes the requisite decisions, the system steps in, tracking the threat and aiming the laser at any specific part of the threat. The laser directs “weaponized light” to counter threats by burning a hole through, Zoller said, and can be as specific as aiming at a particular propeller, engine or fuel tank.

But Zoller cautions high-energy laser systems are “not a silver bullet.” The Firefly can only engage one threat at a time, so in a drone swarm, the highest threat would need to be prioritized. “As a swarm would come in, I would have multiple systems engaging on the most imminent threat,” he explained.