Daily digest, 12 October 2026

Priority 1. UAVs, counter-UAV, military AI and new technologies in conflicts

Strikes on digital infrastructure: Yandex has lost all three supercomputers, and recovery is constrained by the global memory shortage

Strikes on data centers have ceased to be a one-off action and have turned into a separate campaign. After the Vladimir site was shut down on October 11, the outage affected not only Yandex but also third-party businesses on its cloud. The main takeaway of the day: capacity cannot be restored quickly, and what stands in the way is not so much sanctions as the memory market.

Scale of the outage. The failure hit more than 80 services and components, including Yandex Go, Yandex Pro, Pay, Eda, Alice and Telemost. Yandex Pay alone received over 3.2 thousand complaints in an hour. Disruptions were recorded in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Serbia (source). The cloud was switched to emergency mode: the company explicitly called the remaining configuration "unstable." Partial recovery began only after about 13 hours.

What was knocked out. Sasovo housed the Chervonenkis and Lyapunov supercomputers, Vladimir housed Galushkin (ranked 134th in the global Top500) (source). As a result, all three of the company's computing clusters for training neural networks have been put out of action. Still operating are Mytishchi, Ivanteyevka and the Finnish site in Mäntsälä, which Yandex still controls through a renamed subsidiary, Global DC Oy (source). Customers are being urgently migrated to VK Cloud, Selectel and K2Cloud (source).

Why repairs will drag on until 2028. More than 75% of the memory Micron will produce in 2027 has already been sold, and negotiations are under way for 2028 deliveries. Producing HBM (high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators) takes three times more silicon wafers per bit away from ordinary memory (source). In other words, even with money and gray channels available, one can only get in line for 2028.

Secondary signals:

• Yandex added UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) and missile strikes to the force majeure clause of its user agreement in the version dated October 10 (source).

• The location of the data center in Mytishchi was hidden on maps after the first attacks.

• The application of Decree No. 604 of 24.08.2026 on temporary state management of critical infrastructure facilities whose owners have failed to ensure protection against UAVs is being discussed (source).

• The symmetry between the sides is complete. On the same day, the Russian side struck the TeNet data center in Odesa and the Ukrsibbank data center near Kyiv. The secretary of Iran's Security Council threatened that in a new war in the region, cables, data centers and "artificial intelligence facilities" would be destroyed (source).

A signal worth remembering: computing infrastructure has officially become a class of military targets in two theaters at once.

update Geran — an analysis showed: a 32-element CRPA defeats jamming but is useless against synchronous spoofing

Increasing the number of CRPA elements (Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna — an adaptive antenna array that places pattern "nulls" toward interference sources) from 16 to 32 on jet-powered Gerans doubles the number of jammers needed for suppression (source). However, a technical analysis by the "Payload" channel shows the limit of this race (source). [TECH] The post contains a classification of types of jamming and spoofing with numerical parameters and a diagram of which "floor" of the receiver the array operates on.

The essence of the analysis:

• The array operates before the correlator. It sees only what rises above the noise and places nulls there. Therefore any jamming, including wideband noise, is defeated as long as there are enough nulls and the ADC is not saturated. A loud simulator also goes into a null, and the "suppress first, then substitute" scheme breaks down: tracking is not lost.

• A synchronous spoofer and a repeater with power at the level of the satellites look like "sky" to the array and pass through the main lobe. For comparison: in 2012, Texas researchers led a drone 620 m off course this way, starting below the noise threshold.

• Using the TGTX9092 product as an example (the Gerans carry other arrays), this means 31 nulls in the L1/E1/B1 band; spoofing is not on the list of suppressed interference. An aperture of about 390 mm (roughly two L1 wavelengths) would be enough to check each satellite's direction of arrival against the one calculated from ephemerides and the INS (inertial navigation system). But to do this, the array and the receiver have to be designed as a single whole.

Two more signals sounded in the same loop. A Russian integrator is promoting facility protection with a network of synchronously activated single-channel spoofers: this way, scattered stations produce "multichannel" spoofing (source). This is a direct answer to the CRPA logic. Separately, UAVDEV showed that in the UMPK (universal gliding and correction module for aerial bombs), the antenna array "takes on a spatial form" to detect and filter out spoofing (source).

update Jet-powered Gerans — 110 of 160 drones in one night; Khmara: Russia is developing 800 km/h jet UAVs

Jet-powered vehicles have become the backbone of Russia's night raids, not an addition to them. According to the Ukrainian Air Force, on the night of October 10, 110 of 160 UAVs were jet-powered. Within a day, a "Geran-5" hit a hotel in Ivano-Frankivsk (three Ukrainian servicemen were killed), railway infrastructure in Sarny and the station area in Rokytne.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Yevhen Khmara stated that Russia is developing jet UAVs with speeds of up to 800 km/h (source). The channel's note gives this forecast: within 3–5 months, achieve consistent kills of jet drones, then expect their massed launches several times a week, and after that, vehicles at 800 km/h that "should more properly be called missiles." Other statements by the minister (source):

• There are already hundreds of heavy-caliber turrets against jet UAVs. Extended-range turrets are being developed.

• Ukraine is developing the production of jet engines. Demand for one of the types in 2027 could reach about 10 thousand units per month, which is already the scale of a mass-produced expendable item.

• It has been proposed to create special units to hunt down and destroy Russian UAV crews.

update Sky Sentinel — first footage of a Ukrainian counter-drone turret being hit by a Russian fiber-optic KVN near Kharkiv

Turrets being installed in Kyiv to protect against UAV raids have proved vulnerable to fiber-optic FPV drones (controlled from a first-person perspective). Fiber optics are not affected by EW (electronic warfare) and do not emit over the air. A Russian KVN drone hit a Sky Sentinel turret on a tower on the eastern outskirts of Kharkiv (source). According to the description, the turret was fenced with wire but showed no signs of operation. Turrets around Kharkiv were installed as part of a "private air defense" project (source).

The conclusion is simple: a stationary turret within reach of front-line FPVs itself needs cover. In Kyiv, meanwhile, the Southern Bridge was covered with nets following the Northern one (source).

The Pentagon has selected four directed energy systems for a counter-drone pilot program, including the Leonidas microwave system

Directed energy is moving from demonstrations to pilot operation with real-time feedback. The interagency group JIATF-401 selected an AeroVironment laser, the Epirus Leonidas HPM system (High-Power Microwave — high-power microwave weapon), the Kord Firefly laser and a compact Boeing laser (source). [TECH] The post gives the parameters of Leonidas and Firefly:

• Epirus Leonidas — solid-state GaN amplifiers; 1–3 GHz; pulses of up to 1 MW with a duration of 10–100 ns at a repetition rate of up to 100 kHz; electronic scanning; 1–2 km; engages single targets and swarms without expendable ammunition.

• Kord Firefly — a 50 kW fiber laser scalable to 100 kW; about 1.06 µm; 2–3 km; kill in 2–5 s; 360° azimuth coverage.

On the same day, the Russian KTsPN posted a translation of the JIATF-401 guide on countering small UAVs (source). Its main thesis: there is no universal solution. Specific products are listed:

• FS-LIDS — a fixed system of radar, optics and EW linked with Coyote interceptors;

• RD-SUADS — an air-transportable palletized system, up to four days of autonomous operation;

• Pulsar and Pulsar-L — software-defined EW, including against GPS and GLONASS;

• Ninja — targeted suppression of the radio link;

• EchoShield — a Ku-band radar, up to 400 targets with machine-learning bird filtering;

• KurFS — a multifunction weapon guidance radar.

The Russian 3D PKL passive coherent locator sees drones in radio silence using TV broadcast reflections

This is a response to the "switch everything off and fly on INS" tactic. The locator from the Rosel holding emits nothing and receives reflections of signals from TV and radio broadcast stations. It isolates a target by its Doppler shift (source). The station cannot be detected by electronic intelligence means or hit by an anti-radiation missile. It operates as part of the Zhnets system together with the SERP and PRES EW systems. Range and accuracy have not been disclosed, so its real applicability against small targets remains a developer's claim for now.

update Groza — the Z3-JM modification covers convoys with spoofing within a radius of up to 10 km

JSC KB Radar (presented by Goskomvoenprom) unveiled the Groza-Z3-JM mobile EW system for protecting groups of targets: facilities, vehicle convoys and armored groups (source). The system jams control, data transmission and satellite navigation channels. Its main feature is the creation of a false navigation field with a radius of up to 10 km. Integration with a radar is provided to catch drones flying in radio silence.

Interceptors: the 475th Regiment covers armor with FPV drones, and an AFU anti-aircraft missile and artillery regiment has become a brigade with four types of interceptors

Interceptor drones have moved beyond site air defense and become an escort for attacking armor. In an attack by the AFU's 475th Assault Regiment, a tank and a Bradley with "hedgehog armor" withstood several hits from Russian FPVs. The movement was covered by Vampire bombers and FPV interceptors that shot down Russian kamikaze drones (source). A Russian channel notes that this is already the second such sortie; the first was near Olkhovatka.

The AFU's 1020th Anti-Aircraft Missile and Artillery Regiment has been reorganized into a brigade within the Air Force (source). Its armament: Tunguskas, Skyranger 35, M2 machine guns and Sting, Besomar 3310, F7 LITAVR and P1-Sun interceptors. This shows how interceptors are being integrated into the regular air defense structure.

The developer Spektr Ugrozy announced the integration of a radar into its own interceptor for a close-in line of up to 2 km (source).

update TBF 8.2.2 — Ukrainian "smart EW" hijacks control of Russian FPVs, and the mil_hub authors point to an FHSS vulnerability

This is a rare public analysis of how EW is moving from suppression to takeover. Russian fighters reported that near the positions they lose control over the throttle and yaw axes. Changing frequencies, the "controller" and the bind phrase does not help (source). The TBF developers recorded a "new generation" of Ukrainian EW two weeks ago and released the 8.2.2 update.

The authors of the post, who do not analyze the firmware themselves, draw a harsh conclusion: firmware in which the UID can be guessed, the state of the FHSS (frequency-hopping spread spectrum) generator restored or the encryption removed "has no place on the line of contact." Regarding MILELRS, where even in the fifth version the FHSS state can be restored "quite easily," they make a caveat: it is actively used by the enemy, and the issue is not its reliability but the absence of smart EW at Russian positions. The signal is important because the cryptographic strength of control links is becoming a combat parameter on a par with range.

update Lazar — the video chain has been analyzed: Starlink, optical flow instead of GPS and a neural network tracker on a Raspberry Pi 5

The recovered heavy Lazar airframe shows how cheap the architecture of a long-range AI drone has become (source). [TECH] The post contains a full diagram of the video pipeline, the OSD composition and three options for recovering the video. The main points:

• A 720×480 USB camera on a Tarot gimbal is connected to a Raspberry Pi 5. A GStreamer script overlays the crosshair and telemetry.

• The stream goes in VP8 over WebRTC via Starlink inside a private VPN. The operator can be anywhere on the planet.

• Optical flow is computed from the same camera, i.e., its own speed and drift without GPS.

• On some variants, an object detector and a tracker capable of independently following a target run through a separate USB accelerator.

• Test frames with the coordinates of Lima (Peru) were found on the memory card. The authors believe this was how a coordinate spoofing module was tested to make Starlink work on the move.

update Kub — recipients report the start of mass use of the Russian version KUB-10ME

Recipients report the start of mass use of the Russian KUB-10ME loitering munition. It was captured by the camera of an AFU interceptor drone (source). The post gives no details of the modification; the signal is so far at the "spotted in the air" stage.

Unidentified mines with a magnetic target sensor are being dropped from drones

A sapper channel is collecting information on unfamiliar high-explosive fragmentation munitions (source). They are dropped from drones and, when dropped, stick even into asphalt. They are equipped with a magnetic target sensor and, according to unconfirmed data, can function as a bounding mine. Their origin is not stated in the post. If the description is confirmed, this means remote mining of roads from a drone with a non-contact fuze against vehicles.

update NC13 — results of "Vivaldi": 200 kills and 94 operations by strike UGVs, a plan to grow many times over in six months

Strike UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles) have for the first time been assessed as a factor in the success of an entire offensive operation rather than an auxiliary tool. According to NC13 commander "Makar," in the first phase the robots distracted the Russian side and forced it to reveal its surveillance and fire assets. While the hunt for the UGVs was going on, assault groups entered the combat formations. Then kamikaze UGVs and vehicles with weapon stations suppressed command posts and UAV launch points (source).

The result: more than 200 kills, 94 assault and sabotage operations and about 2500 lives saved. Janes adds that NC13 plans a manyfold scale-up within six months. Control is exercised through a combination of digital, analog and encrypted channels "from anywhere in the world" (source).

Other signals appeared alongside:

• Ukraine's TENCORE announced the launch of TENCORE ECOSYSTEM, which it calls the first integrated UGV ecosystem in Ukraine (source).

• The Ukrainian Cup in technology sports featured a race of UGVs with a payload capacity of up to 500 kg (source).

• Russia's Vostok group of forces reported pairing mobile fire groups with UGVs: the robot takes up a position, and the operator stays in the dugout (source).

The Polish StormRider 850 uncrewed boat carries launchers for Warmate drones

A USV has been shown as a carrier of strike UAVs. The Polish StormRider 850 was shown at exercises in Gdynia: it guards navy ships, conducts reconnaissance and launches Warmate loitering munitions (source).

Military AI: the US Army acknowledges both the degradation of command and the immaturity of the hardware

Two independent lines converge on one conclusion: the US Army handles AI planning better than autonomous systems on the ground. Military Review introduces the concept of "command without control": formally, authority rests with the commander, but real judgment is displaced by algorithms (source). From the PDF:

• Maven Smart System combines more than 170 intelligence sources and ranks targets.

• In the campaign against Iran, AI targeting processed more than 1000 targets in the first 24 hours.

• The integration of Claude (Anthropic) with Maven (Palantir) sparked a public debate about ethical boundaries.

• CGSC Bulletin No. 921 (August 2025) prohibited generative AI in officer evaluations.

• Cognitive "anchoring" is being recorded in war games: officers followed machine-generated courses of action even after they had been shown to be unsuitable.

Following Project Convergence Capstone 6 at Fort Irwin (9700 service members), the WSJ reports problems with the Anduril drones that were purchased: overheating, battery failures, signal loss, slow startup. Soldiers limited sorties to save batteries (source). At the same time, the NGC2 AI command architecture and Starlink improved the effectiveness of the division headquarters. The publication recalls that during exercises in Germany, Ukrainian UAV operators notionally routed an American armored brigade.

Background: according to Axios, the leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing for a possible major AI incident, considering a cyberattack on banks and power grids the most likely. Some of those interviewed expect it within the next 6–12 months, although OpenAI calls such scenarios risks rather than inevitabilities (source).

Other theaters: Saudi missile defense cannot cope even with single launches, the IRGC makes AIS a condition for passage through Hormuz

The Houthi strike on terminals 3 and 4 of Riyadh airport claimed 12 lives, and 309 people were injured. The video shows a vertical launch of an interceptor, presumably a THAAD (source). In the spring, there were rumors that Saudi Arabia had exhausted most of its Patriot PAC-3 and THAAD missiles. Strikes on Dammam followed.

In the Strait of Hormuz, at least two more tankers were blown up, and an American fighter disabled the bulk carrier Ocean Molica in the Gulf of Oman. In Mali, operators of the Russian "Africa Corps" continue to use Garpiyas.

Priority 2. Military innovation

Ukraine: drone procurement has tripled, the market is being moved to competitive lots

Ukraine's Defense Procurement Agency in 2026 contracted 300% more UAVs than in all of 2025. For FPVs, growth was 54%, and deliveries grew 3.7 times. By August, 2,470,288 FPVs and 121,228 multicopters had been delivered, compared with 341,644 FPVs in all of 2024 (source). FPV procurement is being split into many lots so that small manufacturers can take part. The competitive regime is being extended to bombers, deep strike and middle strike, optics and UGVs.

Russia: import substitution of power electronics for drone controllers

UAVDEV is testing new Russian PT4806 transistors made by VZPP-S on motor controllers (source). [TECH] The attached PT4806 datasheet gives the parameters: 60 V, 60 A, on-state channel resistance of 2.18–2.21 mΩ at 10 V and 50 A, input capacitance of 6.84 nF. Lower channel resistance than in the previously tested PT0206 is so far only promised. Belarus's ALEVKURP has completed work on the eight-channel MP8-Kh transmit module for AESAs (active electronically scanned arrays) (source).

Missiles and air defense

• On October 8, South Korea tested a hypersonic glide vehicle for the first time, according to one version with a Hyunmoo-5 carrier (source).

• [upd] Iskander — the designation 9M723-2F3 was found in debris shot down near Kyiv. Ukrainian intelligence linked this modification to an extended range in the summer (source).

• The US Navy awarded five contracts worth $743.57 million for the SLCM-N sea-launched nuclear cruise missile for Virginia-class submarines (source).

• The US Navy is preparing a contract to integrate LRASM on the B-52H, theoretically up to 20 missiles per aircraft (source).

• Pakistan tested the Fatah-4 cruise missile with a range of 700–900 km.

• The Bundestag budget committee approved four more F128 frigates (MEKO A-200 DEU), for a total of eight ships (source).

Ground and naval platforms

• Thales Australia and 3ME presented the BladeHaul cargo UGV based on the Bushmaster: up to 10 t, a 110 kWh battery, a range of more than 600 km (source).

• Britain's Supacat showed a mobile air defense system on the HMT 400 with a Moog module: a six-barrel M134 (about 1 km) and 19 APKWS II rockets (about 5 km) (source).

• AnySignal and Andrenam are developing a "seabed-to-space" link: underwater acoustic modems, gateway buoys and satellite communications. Deliveries are planned for the first half of 2027 (source).

• The DJI FlyCart 200 lifts 200 kg, and four aircraft in "leader-follower" mode under a single operator lift up to 600 kg (source). This is a civilian technology with direct military potential for logistics.

Priority 3. The conflict around Ukraine: trends and signals

Trump's "energy truce" was announced without timelines, conditions or a monitoring mechanism. Zelensky learned about it from the news. The same evening, Russian missiles hit Kharkiv's CHP-5, and at night Odesa was attacked by Banderols and drones. Overnight, Ukraine launched 479 drones at Russia (according to the Russian MoD) and for the fourth time in October struck the Samara line production dispatch station.

update RVSPK-50000 at the Samara line production dispatch station — after the fourth strike, the entire set of 50,000-class tanks and about 40% of the 20,000-class tanks have been damaged or destroyed

Repeated strikes on a single pipeline node show that the campaign has moved from one-off hits to systematic attrition (source). The strikes were carried out on October 2, 7, 10 and 11.

US pressure is growing. Washington is threatening to halt the PURL mechanism and intelligence support if Kyiv does not stop strikes on refineries. Trump and Musk publicly called on Ukraine to change its leader. Zelensky responded with a proposal to hold elections under a 60-day ceasefire. A Russian channel interprets this as an attempt to gain a pause to restore the power system before winter. Meanwhile, ADS-B tracking (via aircraft transponders) shows that Kalitta Air flights from Dover to Rzeszów with cargo for the AFU run almost daily.

At the front, DeepState noted a Russian advance near Rai-Oleksandrivka and Pryluky, minus 11.6 km² at once. The average pace in October was 5.1 km² per day versus 2.2 in September (source). Russian channels record an increase in Ukrainian activity in the Sumy direction. Ukrainian ones report positive dynamics in the Dobropillia direction and in the border area of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Kyiv and the region are living with emergency power outages, and 70% of the capital has been left without water.

A separate signal for the European defense industry: according to the FT, Western intelligence services have warned executives of defense companies, including small drone manufacturers, of a growing threat of assassination attempts by the GRU through criminal groups.

What to watch

• Strikes on data centers have become a full-fledged campaign. Yandex has lost all three AI clusters, and the queue for Micron memory effectively fixes the recovery date at 2028. The protection of computing nodes will now have to be designed like the protection of refineries.

• The navigation race has shifted. CRPA arrays have practically closed the jamming problem, so the next round will be about synchronous spoofing and networked spoofers. Here, what matters is the integration of the array with the receiver, not the number of elements.

• EW is moving from suppression to takeover of control. The cryptography of FPV links (FHSS, UID, encryption) has become a combat parameter.

• Ground robots have for the first time been assessed as a factor in the success of an operation: 200 kills and 94 NC13 operations in "Vivaldi." Ukraine plans a manyfold scale-up.

• Jet-powered Gerans have become the backbone of raids (110 of 160), and Ukraine is responding with hundreds of turrets. At the same time, Russian fiber-optic FPVs are already hitting stationary turrets, and the new air defense has acquired its own vulnerability.

What's new in UAVs and counter-UAV

• Jet-powered Gerans — 110 of 160 drones in one night. According to Khmara, Russia is developing an 800 km/h version.

• KUB-10ME — recipients report the start of mass Russian use.

• Sky Sentinel — first footage of a Ukrainian turret being hit by a Russian fiber-optic KVN.

• The Pentagon (JIATF-401) selected AeroVironment, Kord Firefly and Boeing lasers, as well as the Epirus Leonidas microwave system, for a pilot program.

• 3D PKL (Rosel, Russia) — a passive locator using TV broadcast reflections.

• Groza-Z3-JM — EW for convoys with spoofing up to 10 km.

• "Nabat-3" (Russia) — a 200–8800 MHz detector with video interception, according to the seller.

• The Russian Spektr Ugrozy interceptor is getting a radar for a line of up to 2 km.

• FPV interceptors as an armor escort in the AFU's 475th Regiment.

• Ukrainian "smart EW" takes over control of Russian FPVs on TBF.

• Lazar: Starlink, optical flow and a tracker on a Raspberry Pi 5.

• Unidentified mines with a magnetic sensor dropped from drones.

• Aselsan Gökalp (Turkey) — mobile air defense on two off-road vehicles with a radar and interceptors.

• StormRider 850 (Poland) — a USV carrier of Warmate.

Military space and space-derived data

China has for the first time publicly demonstrated the operation of the Guowang low-orbit constellation. Ships in the Arctic connected with the Antarctic Qinling station with a latency of less than a second and a speed of 30 Mbps (source). There are 180 spacecraft in orbit out of the planned 12,992; 400 are expected by the end of 2027, and 1300 by 2029. The parallel Qianfan project has 256 satellites, which should reach 324 by the end of the year.

The commander of the German Space Command, Major General Michael Traut, told Reuters that in May four Russian military satellites maneuvered near a spacecraft of the Finnish company ICEYE. It supplies reconnaissance imagery to the US and its allies, including Ukraine. According to the general, Starlink can be degraded without destroying satellites: it is enough to force them to evade and spend fuel (source). The Ukrainian side denies rumors of Starlink being switched off. For users with Russian phone numbers, it is still unavailable. Starlink has received a general license in Venezuela.

Access to data:

• [upd] Rassvet — the author of the findrassvet tracker (more than 80 thousand views) posted on GitHub a methodology for calculating the orbit-raising rate of the Bureau 1440 constellation. Altitude is calculated using the Brouwer model, and the rate as the slope of a least-squares line in a two-day window. Following his example, CISTrack was built in China for Guowang and Qianfan (source).

• The IRGC announced that vessels near Hormuz with their AIS (automatic identification system) switched off will be considered hostile. Switching off the transponder in the zone effectively becomes grounds for a strike.

• OSINT continues to work on top of open data. Satellite imagery revealed repair cranes at the D-4 unit of Togliattikauchuk. Thermal anomalies in the area of S-400 positions in Sochi are tracked using a fire map. Yandex outages were quantified through NetBlocks.

Under the radar

• An analysis of why a 32-element CRPA on the Gerans defeats jamming but not synchronous spoofing. It also describes a method for detecting spoofing before the correlator using gnss-sdr-1pps (source).

• Russian users of the TBF firmware describe the takeover of FPV control by Ukrainian "smart EW." The authors of the post assess the cryptographic strength of MILELRS and conclude that the links are insecure (source).

• The Rosel 3D PKL passive coherent locator — an approach to detecting drones flying in radio silence (source).

• Statistics on restrictions at Russian airports for October 5–11: 122 impositions at 38 airports, 493 airport-hours. Since the beginning of the year, restrictions are 3.3 times more numerous than in the same period of 2025, and 4.1 times higher in hours. Only 11 days out of 284 passed without a single restriction. Sochi has become an example of the transition from "Kovyor" to actual damage to infrastructure (source).

• The AnySignal and Andrenam combination of underwater acoustic modems, buoys and satellites — a bid for a "seabed-to-space" underwater surveillance network (source).

What are the Chinese comrades up to?

• According to CSIS, tactical solutions from the Ukrainian front make their way into Chinese military analysis in about four months. 4.5 months after Operation Spiderweb, the PLA held exercises with more than 20 strike drone operators and systems that recognize over 800 models of commercial UAVs (source).

• A regiment of the Southern Xinjiang Military District has set up a laboratory, the "Unmanned Systems Research and Development Center." It practices UAV reconnaissance, fire engagement through a unified command platform and interaction between manned and unmanned assets (source).

• China and Pakistan will hold their first joint ground exercise, "Karakoram-2026," near Korla in the second half of October, including the use of UAVs (source).

• [upd] J-36 — a stand with specifications was shown at an exhibition for the first time: takeoff weight 50–60 t, combat radius over 4000 km, RCS 0.001 m². It also claims that the aircraft is ahead of the American F-47 program. This is a propaganda presentation without independent confirmation (source).

• Test of Guowang on an Arctic – Antarctic link (source).

External analysis

• Janes confirms and supplements Ukrainian data on NC13. The unit calls EW interference irregular and quickly eliminated, and controls its UGVs remotely through mixed channels. This diverges from the thesis of Russian channels about UGVs being knocked out en masse (source).

• Defence Blog published a Ukrainian drone strike on a Pantsir on a counter-drone tower. This finding echoes the hit on the Ukrainian Sky Sentinel near Kharkiv: elevated stationary air defense on both sides itself becomes a target for small drones (source).

• According to Defense News, the PAC-3 Edge will cost roughly the same as the PAC-3 MSE, and planned production will be about 2000 units per year. This is three times the 600 Patriot interceptors per year announced by Schmidt, but still out of proportion to the mass of attacking drones (source).

• Ukraine's Buntar Aerospace raised $16 million, $30 million in total, and is moving from the Buntar-3 reconnaissance drone with the Copilot AI system to counter-drone and strike systems. European defense startups received $7.4 billion over the year, of which $4.7 billion went to drone manufacturers (source).

• America's Sesame Solar, Target Arm and AG3 Labs proposed an autonomous "nanogrid": solar generation and robotic launch and charging of drones from a mobile carrier. The solution closes the problem of powering forward-deployed crews, which is hardly discussed in the Telegram sphere (source).

Top military-tech signals of the day

1. ↗69 · 👁2156 · @fpvcovenant — Lazar's video transmission: how the frames reach the operator We continue to examine the heav…
2. ↗108 · 👁3867 · @china3army — 🛰Beijing tested the "Chinese Starlink" 🔻 China for the first time publicly demonstrated the capabilit…
3. ↗36 · 👁1390 · @payloadUAV — Hello, dear readers! Payload here👋 On domestic "Gerans…
4. ↗5 · 👁207 · @kapotta — 🚁DJI FlyCart 200 is revolutionizing the world of cargo drones! A parade of DJI new products…
5. ↗11 · 👁461 · @theaterVD — 🚀🛳🇺🇸 US Navy awarded $743.57 million in contracts to develop the SLCM-N nuclear cruise missile 🔷The US Na…
6. ↗11 · 👁465 · @theaterVD — 🚀🛳🇺🇸 US Navy awarded $743.57 million in contracts to develop the SLCM-N nuclear cruise missile 🔷The US Na…
7. ↗9 · 👁386 · @theaterVD — 🚙🇦🇺 Thales and 3ME unveiled the BladeHaul UGV On October 11, 2026, the compan…
8. ↗34 · 👁1757 · @poisk_mil — 🇺🇦 The AFU's 1020th Anti-Aircraft Missile and Artillery Regiment (A4647) reorganized into a briga…
9. ↗11 · 👁589 · @theaterVD — 🇬🇷🇪🇸🇺🇦🇺🇸🇪🇺 NATO and the EU are pressing Greece and Spain to hand over to Ukraine anti-air…
10. ↗14 · 👁794 · @mil_hub — The enemy booby-traps its own heavy drones by installing initiation boards that work,…