Iran strikes on US Mideast bases first took out early-warning systems, analyses finds



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Master Sgt. John Healy/Multi-Domain Command - Europe
US Army soldiers in Europe are readying for large-scale combat and the kind of overwhelming missile and drone attacks Ukraine is facing, where the massive number of threats can make it difficult for humans to keep up, and are looking to software for solutions.
Concern that the speed and scale of future warfare could be too great for humans to handle without help is growing; however, Army officials have said artificial intelligence can help soldiers process large amounts of data from sensors and networks to deliver potential responses in a fight.
At the Association of the United States Army convention in Washington, DC, last month, service leaders and soldiers spoke about using AI to process battlefield data and help troops make decisions without removing humans from the process.
"I think it's important to use super intelligence… for things that humans aren't necessarily good at, and that's speed and scale," Brig. Gen. Steven Carpenter, head of Multi-Domain Command Europe, told Business Insider, "but I also know we shouldn't take humans completely out of the loop."
Earlier this year, Carpenter told reporters that US forces in Europe needed to be prepared to process more than 1,500 potential targets a day while also defending against as many as 1,200 incoming missiles and drones.
That volume of targets and threats could overwhelm human analysts, but AI could help them keep up.
In a conflict, soldiers could use AI to analyze battlefield data and targets based on a commander's objectives and other parameters. The system could then assess available military capabilities and recommend responses, from conventional weapons strikes to electronic warfare or cyber operations.
The entire process is intended to move quickly, but officials say speed isn't the only benefit. AI can also remember or recognize patterns that humans might forget or not even notice in the first place. And all of that information provides commanders with options.

US Army photo by Sgt. Collin Mackall
"So again, the human is making the decision, the final call, looking at everything that you need to do in order to prosecute a valid target within the Law of Armed Conflict," Carpenter said.
He said the intent "isn't to replace those analysts," but rather to ultimately help "unburden them so that they're focusing on the really tough targets," such as a dual-use facility or other potential targets that need more analysis.
Carpenter said that the estimates for targets and threats reflect "what we think Ukraine's worst day is," underscoring the scale of attacks US forces could face in a future conflict. Russia's war against Ukraine has involved frequent, heavy drone and missile bombardments. These strike packages are complex, consisting of ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as one-way attack drones, more and more of which are equipped with jet engines that make them faster and harder to kill.
Earlier this year, a joint US Army and NATO exercise in Europe saw troops use a homegrown AI system to consume and sort data. The AI was in beta-testing; Army officials said they aimed to test it on a larger scale at a future exercise.
The integration of AI across the military is moving fast, spanning from autonomous features in drones, weapons, and targeting to agentic processes for sorting through data and referencing information. Beyond the battlefield, US personnel are using new tools to change institutional processes and workflows.
The Army is also incorporating AI into its Next Generation Command and Control, the service's new warfighting system. NGC2 uses AI and machine learning to provide commanders and soldiers with real-time data on targeting, capabilities, ammunition levels, maintenance needs, intelligence feeds, and simulated enemy attacks.

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The war in Ukraine continues to demonstrate for other militaries the importance of rapid adaptation and innovation, a US Army commander said.
Lessons from Russia's war against Ukraine have ranged from drone warfare and autonomous systems to air defenses. While US officials have said that not everything from Ukraine is applicable, certain tactics and the rapid pace of change in battlefield technology are not going ignored.
At the Association of the United States Army conference in Washington, DC, earlier this month, service leaders and soldiers spoke about how the Army is learning from the conflict.
Brig. Gen. Steven Carpenter, head of Multi-Domain Command Europe, told Business Insider that the war in Ukraine has "shown us that he or she that adapts, wins," pointing out that "the battlefield we've seen in Ukraine is not the same battlefield that we saw in February 2022."
Russia has ramped up production within its defense industry, while Ukraine, he said, has been "innovating so rapidly, and they're learning from the changing environment on the battlefield, and they're rapidly changing how they produce weapon systems and their capabilities based on what they're seeing on the battlefield."

Alex Nikitenko/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
Ukraine's defense has, in part, depended on amassing substantial quantities of adaptable uncrewed systems for combat across air, land, and sea, while its homegrown drone industry continually uses battlefield feedback to update systems. The US military is paying attention. It's also taken lessons from the way Ukrainian soldiers 3D print parts for drones and build the systems based on specific mission sets or countermeasures.
More recently, autonomous drone capabilities have been getting attention. Ukraine is increasingly using AI to help ground robots and drones navigate supply routes and reach targets. An uncrewed ground vehicle recently completed almost an entire 12-mile supply run on its own. The unit called it a first under combat conditions.
The US military is likewise expanding its use of autonomy for tasks such as navigation and data processing.
Multi-Domain Command Europe has created an AI system that helps soldiers process significant amounts of data from sensors and networks. Officials say that it could be valuable for supporting decision-making by human analysts.
At AUSA, other Army officials said that air defense fights in Ukraine have also provided useful lessons for the US. Russian forces have hunted MIM-104 Patriot surface-to-air missile system batteries and other air defenses while also trying to overwhelm them with complex barrages of one-way attack drones and missiles.
Lt. Gen. John Raffery, the head of Army Space and Missile Defense Command, told reporters that air defenders have been "probably the most aggressive community in the Army for learning lessons from Ukraine," with an emphasis on concealment, survivability, protecting assets, and mobility.
At the same time, the Army and broader US military have said that not every observation out of Ukraine is always relevant. Officials have pointed out that Ukraine's drone innovation was born out of necessity, specifically a lack of critical capabilities, and will not replace the advanced American weapons, aircraft, and naval power.

Dmytro Smolienko/ Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Ukraine is using a growing fleet of war robots to take dangerous roles away from humans, but soldiers sometimes still need to risk their lives to keep the machines running.
Ukraine wants to replace as many human soldiers in dangerous missions and roles as possible with robots and drones, and the technology has advanced enough that operators can now control some war robots from tens of kilometers away, according to Ukrainian brigades.
That can keep operators away from Russian fire, but while the robots, known as uncrewed ground vehicles, or UGVs, can replace soldiers on dangerous missions, other troops may still need to venture closer to the fighting to prepare, launch, maintain, and recover them.
For Ukraine's robotic missions, "at present, human involvement is both mandatory and indispensable," Oleksandr Yabchanka, head of the robotic systems for Ukraine's Da Vinci Wolves Battalion, told Business Insider.
"Someone must swap out batteries, perform maintenance, and troubleshoot technical issues," he said. Keeping a robot functional can mean replacing damaged parts, fixing punctured tires, and reloading ammunition.

Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu via Getty Images
The robots are typically designed to be relatively cheap and expendable, limiting the cost of losing one. Because their purpose is primarily to protect soldiers, units may decide that a damaged robot isn't worth risking a life to recover, but human support remains essential to keeping the fleet operational.
Many robots are designed to be reconfigured for different missions, allowing soldiers to swap equipment rather than use a separate machine for every task.
David Roberts, the CEO of ARX Robotics UK, the British arm of the German defense technology company of the same name, told Business Insider that the company's robots, some of which are in Ukraine, are designed so that it takes "literally seconds" to swap between a logistics setup, a communications payload, or whatever troops want to use it for.
That flexibility makes it easier to switch missions, but soldiers still need to be close enough to the front lines to reconfigure the machines.
Supporting soldiers will try to stay as far back from the fighting as they can, but factors like robots' range limit what's possible. Yabchanka said that "our philosophy is, above all, to preserve our personnel. Therefore, we strive to position our fighters as far as possible from the line of contact and the zones of highest risk—the so-called 'kill zones.'"
This applies in particular to operators and specialists in electronic warfare. "The exact distance to which they can be moved back depends on specific conditions and technical capabilities, but the general direction is precisely this."

Ukrinform/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Some companies in Ukraine also send their staff to areas near the fighting to keep robots running. Ukrainian UGV maker DevDroid says robots "operate in extreme conditions — dirt, overheating, impacts, and electronic warfare. After several missions, they require diagnostics, updates, or repairs." It sends mobile teams out to units, including to front-line regions, to keep robots working.
Another challenge is that "the autonomy of UGVs is still in the early stages of development," Yabchanka said.
Though there have been technological breakthroughs, most of the ground robots still rely heavily on remote control rather than navigating and completing missions independently. That can leave them stranded if something goes wrong.
Their dependence on continuous communications can also limit how safely operators can position themselves on the battlefield.
There is a similar dynamic in play with aerial drones. Ukraine is developing technology that allows pilots to stay much farther from danger, but support crews still need to work closer to the fighting. Some drone operators can control their drones from relatively safe locations hundreds or even thousands of miles away, but someone still has to prepare, arm, and launch the aircraft in the area where it's needed.
Satellite communications technology means units are "able to put our pilots in any place when there is a stable internet connection for them," Dmytro "Liber" Zhluktenko, a former drone operator who now serves as a lessons-learned analyst with Ukraine's 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment "RAID," told Business Insider.
"But this doesn't remove the need for the ground groups, people who actually attach the explosive, put the drone outside of the bunker, et cetera," he said.
Ukraine is working to reduce those risks by improving the range, reliability, and off-road mobility of its robots, as well as connectivity solutions, allowing support crews to operate farther from the front.

Ukrinform/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Ukraine is also increasingly using ground robots to recover other ground robots rather than sending human crews, and companies are designing parts and batteries that can be replaced more quickly to shorten the time soldiers spend servicing them in the field.
Greater autonomy is another priority, potentially allowing robots to operate with less human control. An uncrewed systems unit announced this week that a robot had successfully completed a 12-mile supply run almost entirely on its own. The unit said the mission was the "first of its kind under combat conditions."
Mykyta Rozhkov, the chief business development officer for Ukrainian defense tech company Frontline Robotics, told Business Insider that "right now more and more systems are getting autonomous features."
Yabchanka said the future of drones and robots "lies in the development of autonomy. Therefore, we need software solutions that will enable these systems to perform more functions independently, thereby reducing their reliance on a continuous connection with an operator."
Despite their limitations, robots are helping keep Ukraine's soldiers from having to do some of the battlefield's most dangerous jobs themselves.
Yabchanka said that "ground-based robotic systems are becoming an integral part of combat operations for most units deployed along the line of contact."

Talia Lakritz/Business Insider
The National Air and Space Museum's flagship location in Washington, DC, is one of the most-visited museums in the US, but the building isn't large enough to display all of the aircraft and spacecraft in its collection.
That's where the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center comes in. The National Air and Space Museum's lesser-known second location, a hangar-like structure in Chantilly, Virginia, offers 340,000 square feet of exhibit space with over 200 aircraft and spacecraft on display.
"What you're going to see are the first, the last, the only, the last remaining, the most significant. So it's an A-plus, as far as the collection," Holly Williamson, the museum's public affairs specialist, told Business Insider.
I visited the Udvar-Hazy Center in January 2026. Here are the coolest things I saw.

John M. Chase/Getty Images
Unlike at the National Air and Space Museum's flagship DC location, where timed-entry tickets help manage large crowds in the smaller space, reservations are not required at the Udvar-Hazy Center.
Admission to the museum, which is about 25 miles from DC, is free, and parking costs $15.

Talia Lakritz/Business Insider
At 164 feet tall, the observation tower educates visitors about the history of air traffic control and provides a 360-degree view of the modern airport in action.
Inside the tower, I watched planes take off and land at Washington Dulles International Airport while listening to live ATC audio.

Talia Lakritz/Business Insider
Visitors can watch restoration work happen in real time from a balcony with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the hangar.
Among the works in progress when I visited were "Flak-Bait," a Martin B-26 Marauder that flew 202 combat missions during World War II and participated in D-Day, as well as a Sikorsky JRS-1 seaplane that was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked on December 7, 1941.

Talia Lakritz/Business Insider
On August 6, 1945, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber Enola Gay dropped the first-ever atomic bomb used in warfare on Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 people.
The "Little Boy" atomic bomb weighed 9,700 pounds, forcing the aircraft to remove most of its protective and defensive armament in order to carry the enormous weight.
The Enola Gay exhibit sparked controversy when the plane was first displayed in 1995, as veterans' groups and anti-war activists debated how the historical narrative around the use of the atomic bomb should be presented.

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In the 1950s, Boeing set out to build a jet aircraft that could serve as a passenger or cargo plane, or as a tanker for midair refueling.
Boeing began building this prototype jet in 1952, and it flew for the first time two years later. It traveled 100 miles per hour faster than the de Havilland Comet, the world's first jetliner developed in the UK, and had a range of over 3,500 miles, revolutionizing air travel.
Known as "Dash 80," the developed version of the aircraft entered service as the first jetliner in the US: The Boeing 707.

Talia Lakritz/Business Insider
The governments of Britain and France collaborated to create the first supersonic commercial jets, which operated commercially from 1976 to 2003.
Traveling at twice the speed of sound allowed the planes to cross the ocean in record time. Concorde's fastest flight from New York City to London lasted just 2 hours, 52 minutes, and 59 seconds.
The museum's Concorde jet, which flew for Air France, measures 202 feet and 3 inches long with a wingspan of 83 feet and 10 inches.
Other retired Concordes can be found at museums in New York City, Seattle, Paris, and England, among others.

Talia Lakritz/Business Insider
The Lockheed SR-71A, a supersonic reconnaissance aircraft, was designed to fly high and fast enough to avoid Russian missiles during the Cold War. It was capable of flying at an altitude of over 85,000 feet and at speeds exceeding three times the speed of sound, or about 0.7 miles per second.
The aircraft became known as "Blackbird" for its black paint, which was designed to absorb radar signals.
This Blackbird logged 2,801.1 hours of flight time over 24 years of service before retiring in 1990.

Talia Lakritz/Business Insider
It's hard to capture the full scale of Discovery in a photo, but I found it awe-inspiring to see such an enormous, historically significant spacecraft in person.
The shuttle measures 122 feet long, 78 feet wide, and 57 feet tall, towering over the other artifacts in the hangar. When fully loaded for missions, the orbiter weighed around 250,000 pounds.

Talia Lakritz/Business Insider
Discovery flew its first mission in 1984 and returned from its last in 2011, spending a total of 365 days in space.
Among its many historic accomplishments, Discovery deployed the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 and became the first space shuttle to dock with the International Space Station in 1999.

Talia Lakritz/Business Insider; Encyclopaedia Britannica/UIG Via Getty Images
The Manned Maneuvering Unit was a backpack propulsion device powered by nitrogen jets that allowed McCandless to fly around 300 feet away from the space shuttle Challenger.
His untethered spacewalk was immortalized in an iconic photo of the lone astronaut floating above the Earth.

Talia Lakritz/Business Insider
My phone's step counter recorded nearly 10,000 steps on the day I visited the museum. There's an incredible amount of ground to cover and objects to see.
I can't believe I didn't know that the National Air and Space Museum had a second location when I started planning my visit to Washington, DC. Now, I'm recommending it to all of the air and space enthusiasts I know.
Editor's Note: This story was originally published in March 2026 and most recently updated in October 2026.











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Ukraine is opening grant money for home-built air-to-air missiles and radars, aiming to shoot down Russia’s fastest drones without paying a huge price. The Defense Ministry, the Ministry of Digital Transformation, and the Brave1 defense-tech cluster are launching the competitions, Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara announced in an address to manufacturers, adding that a grant contest for turbojet engines will follow.
Ukraine is being forced to use expensive air defense missiles against relatively inexpensive Russian drones and cruise missiles. Developing cheaper interceptors, domestically produced radars and engines could change the economics of warfare.
The move comes as Russia leans harder on faster, jet-powered drones that strain the cheapest layer of Ukraine’s defenses. It also follows an earlier round of Brave1 grants that had already flagged anti-bomb systems and Ukrainian radars as priorities.
Khmara laid out the threats the money is meant to answer: ballistic missiles, cheap cruise missiles, high-speed drones and guided bombs.
From Ukrainian producers, the ministry wants domestic navigation systems, stronger electronic warfare, radars able to pick out low-signature targets, and affordable designs that can be developed in quantity.
“Our requirements are clear: effectiveness, affordable cost, interoperability between systems, and sufficient volume of supply,” Khmara says.
The grants are one tool among others, meant to carry developments that can later scale for the Security and Defense Forces. Earlier, the ministry and Brave1 ran a large-scale test of drones with AI-assisted targeting.
The minister singled out a separate job for manufacturers: new ways to counter Russia’s guided aerial bombs, known in Ukraine as KABs, and to blunt their use.
These are the glide bombs Russian aircraft release from a distance, and Ukraine has struggled to answer them without reaching the launch aircraft themselves.
“It is important to create innovative solutions that let us act ahead and prevail. We need asymmetric effect. We need technologies that change the rules of the game in our favor,” he argues.
Grants for turbojet engines, the ministry says, are the next step after the missiles and radars.

Courtesy of SkyFall
Izyum thought he was going to die. A devastating blast had taken part of the Ukrainian infantryman's left foot, and he had lost a lot of blood. To make matters worse, Russian soldiers were closing in on his position, and there was no easy escape.
Then came a drone — a massive six-rotor aircraft with an enclosed stretcher underneath. It landed roughly 10 meters away from Izyum's position, in tall grass beside a minefield. Fiber-optic cables were strewn across the area, and he worried the hazards would prevent the rescue drone from taking off.
Dizzy and nauseous, Izyum's comrades helped him over to the unusual aircraft. Summoning what little strength he had left, he hoisted himself into the stretcher capsule. As the drone lifted off, he breathed a little easier, at last feeling some sense of relief.
Izyum is one of two Ukrainian soldiers who have been airlifted out of combat by the StarGate uncrewed aircraft, the first specialized drone for aerial evacuation, which was recently unveiled by Ukrainian company SkyFall. The wounded soldiers were medically evacuated this month in back-to-back rescue missions.
Izyum and KVN, a drone pilot in Ukraine's 475th Separate Assault Regiment who flew StarGate during the rescues, described the missions to Business Insider in interviews this week. Both spoke through a translator and were identified only by their call signs for security reasons.
Casualty evacuation by aerial drone is a new concept being pioneered in Ukraine. This month's rescue missions were among the first of their kind in combat. Skyfall, other defense industry officials, and soldiers say they expect to see more of these missions in the future and believe this experimental tactic is a critical capability, especially in moments when neither medical teams nor robots can reach wounded troops.

Courtesy of SkyFall
Right now, this approach is seen as a last resort — a break-glass option for when battlefield conditions prevent all other evacuation methods.
KVN's first daughter had just been born when the call came in. The 475th assault regiment, known as CODE 9.2, was preparing for a special operation, and leadership needed him to fly the main drone. A car was on its way to pick him up.
He soon arrived at an undisclosed location in Ukraine for the operation, the rescue of a wounded soldier from the 129th Separate Heavy Mechanized Brigade.
At the center of the operation was StarGate, a heavy hexacopter that SkyFall developed specifically for casualty evacuation purposes. The drone — which SkyFall said is the first of its kind — was unveiled in mid-October, only days before KVN's mission.
Ukraine is increasingly turning to robots to evacuate wounded soldiers in combat. With surveillance and attack drones swarming the front lines, almost any movement carries tremendous risks, making it dangerous for teams to retrieve casualties. Ground robots are one solution, but tough terrain can limit where they can go.

Courtesy of SkyFall
Heavy hexacopters have emerged as an option when other extraction methods are not possible. Earlier this month, Ukraine carried out its first casualty evacuation using an aerial drone, rescuing an infantryman from the 30th Separate Mechanized Brigade with a Heavy Shot Ayudag-6 heavy lift drone developed by Gurzuf Defence.
There have since been two more missions. KVN was the pilot for both, flying Skyfall's StarGate drone.
KVN recalled that his first evacuation happened at night. There were dozens of people — most of them from CODE 9.2, but some from other military units — involved in the rescue operation. The SkyFall team also participated in the planning.
KVN was nervous.
Reaching the casualty meant flying 20 miles out and back through areas flooded with Russian drones and electronic warfare that threatened to derail the mission.
So the Ukrainians assembled something akin to a strike package, with more than a dozen drones flying alongside StarGate to protect it from attack, draw Russian attention away from the rescue, and bomb enemy positions near the evacuation point.

Courtesy of SkyFall
Russian first-person-view (FPV) drones initially prevented the rescue drone from taking off with the wounded soldier, but eventually the skies cleared. KVN said his hands were shaking, but he relied on StarGate's built-in stabilization technology and his teammates' support to steady the drone and his nerves.
The first evacuation took 30 minutes. StarGate didn't have the range for the full 40-mile round trip, so KVN had to land it halfway on each leg so ground teams could swap out the batteries.
After the mission, KVN grabbed some much-needed sleep. When he woke the next morning, he learned that a second evacuation had been approved and would soon be underway.
Izyum, an infantryman in Ukraine's 1st Territorial Defense Brigade, sat down on the ground to rest.
His team had been tasked with holding a position they had just assaulted. When Izyum stood up, he triggered a blast that tore off part of his left foot. His comrades pulled him into a dugout and immediately applied a tourniquet.

Courtesy of SkyFall
They radioed back to their commanders that Izyum had suffered a severe injury and needed evacuation.
The situation was dire. Any attempt to walk to higher-level care would mean navigating roughly 20 miles of Russian drone and mine threats. Izyum had lost so much blood, and his strength was fading fast. Given the severity of his injuries, he would never have been able to make that trek on his own. His fellow soldiers would have had to risk their lives to help him make the journey.
And ground robots, increasingly used by Ukraine to evacuate wounded soldiers as the front-line kill zone grows more perilous, couldn't reach his position because ponds, small rivers, and tree lines blocked their path.
Brigade leadership concluded that the only option was to evacuate him by air. And with crewed helicopters effectively out of the question, they needed a drone. StarGate was chosen for the mission.
Izyum didn't think he was going to make it home. His crew was so deep on the front lines, and the Russians were close. At one point, the enemy was only 5 meters out.
Eventually, the rescue drone arrived. As the StarGate drone landed amid a mess of mines and cables, Ukrainian forces used Vampire drones, smaller hexacopters made by SkyFall, to bomb the Russians and keep them at bay.

Courtesy of SkyFall
KVN said landing near the minefield was one of the biggest challenges he faced during the mission, though Russian drone and electronic warfare threats were also problems. He said he had to fly "like a ninja" to avoid them.
Even with new technologies such as drones and ground robots, evacuating wounded soldiers isn't an easy process, and it takes time to plan, prepare, and execute. Nearly two days passed between Izyum's injury and his rescue. When he landed and opened the capsule to see friendly faces, he finally felt safe for the first time since the blast. KVN, too, felt an overwhelming sense of relief when the mission was finally over.
Izyum had four surgeries and is missing half his foot. He will soon be transferred to a rehabilitation facility. Speaking from a hospital in northeast Ukraine, he said that he is grateful to everyone who saved his life.
Some Ukrainian officials have acknowledged that large rescue hexacopters could be easy targets for Russia and said that they should only be used in the most extreme circumstances.
Both KVN and Izyum, however, said that aerial drone casualty evacuations should be expanded as standard practice; CODE 9.2, for instance, plans to create dedicated units for these missions, and SkyFall is aiming to build out a department within the firm specifically for evacuations.
StarGate drones — which cost roughly $50,000 a unit, can carry up to 330 pounds, and can fly at speeds over 60 miles per hour — are equipped with survivability features, such as artificial intelligence-enabled navigation and communication redundancies. SkyFall said it aims to be able to make 1,000 drones a month by the end of 2026.