Let's get into the map and math.

US defense-tech company CHAOS Industries introduced its Vespid interceptor family in Washington on 12 October, as the Association of the US Army (AUSA) annual meeting opened there, the company announced. CHAOS pitches the drones as low-cost defense against small and mid-size drones and one-way attack munitions. The company expects initial production capacity of 12,000 interceptors a year, expandable to 50,000 as demand grows.

The pitch lands as Russia moves its strike drones to jet power. Russia has stopped building the Geran-3, an earlier jet model, and makes about 3,000 faster Geran-4s and Geran-5s a month, Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) told Militarnyi in August. In mid-September, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said two Ukrainian companies had passed combat tests with interceptors against such drones, while 67 were still working on them. Ukrainian defense outlet Defense Express measured the new US drones against exactly that threat.

One to carry, one to launch in batches

The Mk 1 made its first public appearance on 12 October aboard a Forterra MESA autonomous ground vehicle, Army Recognition reported. It fires from tubes on launchers such as the 10-round ISS Aerospace HAL10. It takes midcourse guidance from CHAOS radars or external command systems, then an AI-assisted infrared seeker handles the final approach, the company says. An electric ducted fan rather than a jet engine drives it, which CHAOS says cuts cost and logistics compared with turbojet interceptors.

The smaller Mk 0 is man-portable and needs no operator input once fired, its product page says. Both are rated to reach a target in under 100 seconds, with a listed range of 10+ km. Defense Express called that range a serious weakness that more launchers around a city could offset.

CHAOS lists cruise speeds of 100 m/s (360 km/h) for the Mk 0 and 150 m/s (540 km/h) for the Mk 1. Defense Express said those speeds may be enough to intercept the Geran-4 and Geran-5, which it puts at 340 km/h and 450–600 km/h.

Ukrainian makers say their interceptors already down jet Gerans

Wild Hornets’ Sting interceptors downed several of the slower jet-powered Geran-3s in November 2025. An unnamed Wild Hornets representative told NV, in an interview published on 22 September, that the company’s new interceptor had destroyed about ten Geran-4s and several Geran-5s in limited use. The company plans mass production within a month of finishing combat tests.

On 12 October, former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said he and Pavlo Yelizarov, commander of Lasar’s Group, had created a new interceptor with troops and engineers. He said it downed two Geran-5s headed for Kyiv.

Crews from Lasar’s Group, which Fedorov has called a National Guard special unit, flew those combat tests, he said. Separately, Fedorov reported in August that a Ukrainian jet interceptor with a top speed above 600 km/h had entered combat testing.

Ukraine and NATO have unveiled two artificial intelligence (AI) tools in Vilnius, Lithuania, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry reported on 13 October. One forecasts Russian drone attacks near the front and is ready to join the Armed Forces’ situational awareness systems. The other helps plan artillery fire and is still in testing.

A forecast of where, when, and which drones will fly targets the main source of losses near the front. In March, Ukraine’s military put the share of front-line casualties caused by FPV drones at up to 80%. In May, Ukraine’s drone forces commander Robert Brovdi said Russia was copying Ukraine’s model to grow its drone forces. A month earlier, Presidential Office head Kyrylo Budanov wrote that adding more drones no longer fundamentally changes the battlefield. The next stage, he said, is full integration of AI.

Forecasting Russian drone attacks

The NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training and Education Center (JATEC) presented both at a three-day seminar in the Lithuanian capital. NATO’s Allied Command Transformation and Ukraine’s Armed Forces built the tools with JATEC’s support.

“The solution has already been validated using real-world datasets. It has been refined and is ready for integration into the Armed Forces of Ukraine's situational awareness systems,” the ministry said.

Model No. 13 works from past data, weather, and the current battlefield situation. The ministry said it can identify the intensity of attacks, the areas, the time windows, and the types of drones with a high probability.

Ranking artillery options

Model No. 32 is a decision-support module. It tests whether artillery plans can be generated automatically. It weighs the mission’s requirements and current operational data, including available weapons, ammunition, firing positions, and constraints.

First, it applies logistics, ballistics, and impact-zone parameters to throw out unworkable options. Then it scores and ranks the rest. That means less hand-based comparison, faster decisions, and a more efficient fire loop, the ministry said. The prototype is now with the Ukrainian military for trials. If the trials succeed and it is validated, it could be expanded to other units that strike Russian forces.

Manville’s academic psychologist finds herself trapped in a tower block wasteland in 1980s Warsaw. Bizarre and surreal details add to the sinister vibe

Part cold war thriller, part Kafkaesque reverie, this movie takes us back to the sinister drear of Poland in 1981, when General Jaruzelski has just introduced martial law in reaction to the dangerous new mood of freedom occasioned by the Solidarity trade unions. The director is Kasia Adamik, daughter of The Green Border’s Agnieszka Holland; the film is adapted from a story by Olga Tokarczuk, called Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw.

Lesley Manville plays Professor Andrews, an academic clinical psychologist (like Tokarczuk) from Britain with testy, peremptory mannerisms; her indulgence is a fondness for taking Polaroid photos. She has attained a certain level of celebrity for a book on dreams, despite claiming that she never dreams herself. Andrews has been invited to give a lecture in Warsaw, during which she begins to outline views on mental illness not unlike those of Laing or Foucault; but her speech is chaotically disrupted by students shouting that Poland itself is an oppressive asylum.

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© Photograph: Danny James/Courtesy of Signature Entertainment

© Photograph: Danny James/Courtesy of Signature Entertainment

© Photograph: Danny James/Courtesy of Signature Entertainment

Feedback from the U.S. Army has led to an improved A1 version of the service’s still very new 6.8x51mm M250 light machine gun. Manufacturer Sig Sauer has shortened and lightened the barrel, reduced the overall weight, changed the buttstock, and made various other improvements to improve reliability and ease of use. The evolution of the M250 mirrors the transformation of Sig’s M7 rifle for the U.S. Army into the M8 carbine, where weight and bulk were major points of criticism of the original design.

Jason St. John, senior director of strategic products for the Defense Strategies Group at Sig Sauer, talked about the new M250A1 with our Howard Altman at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual convention today. The U.S. Army has already been acquiring and fielding baseline M250s as part of its Next Generation Squad Weapons (NGSW) program. The NGSW family also includes the M7 rifle and now the M8 carbine from Sig, both also chambered to fire the 6.8x51mm round. The Army chose Sig as the winner of the NGSW competition in 2022. The service is still in the early stages of fielding the NGSW family as replacements for a substantial portion of its existing 5.56x45mm M4A1 carbines and M249 Squad Automatic Weapons (SAW).

“We continuously and constantly evaluate and evolve our designs, and we discover things,” St. John told us. “Parts that might be able to be manufactured a little bit easier with a little bit of a design change. They might be more reliable, more durable than you currently have. You might look at the system and say, hey, we have an ability to make these recommendations because we see this from other customers across the board. We hear it from our inputs of soldiers that are in our ranks, and you know maybe old relationships out in the field.”

“The [NGSW] program office represents the entire formation, so they get feedback in the totality of every single unit that has them [M250s and other guns in the NGSW family] in their hands,” he continued. If “a systemic issue or something that needs to be addressed, then they run the soldier touchpoint events, which we’re fortunate enough to be a part of. And then we get unfiltered feedback from soldiers that day in the field while they’re encountering something that they have a concern about.”

As noted at the start, the most immediate standout feature on the M250A1 being shown at AUSA this week is the new 13-inch barrel. M250s entering Army service now have roughly 16-inch-long barrels. The Army’s official fact sheet says the machine gun was originally expected to come with a 17.5-inch barrel.

“We shortened the barrel to 13 inches, but the Army’s also buying the 16-inch barrel,” St. John explained. “So in some ways, you could consider it mission-configurable, whether they want to utilize a 13-inch barrel or a 16-inch barrel, to what they’re doing.”

“You’re going to maintain the same basic ballistics that you had with the M7 [rifle’s] 13-inch barrel, and then you’re going to have more maneuverability because you’re going to have a shorter weapon system,” he added. “You add the 16-inch barrel, and you get that lethality requirement with the length of barrel that they originally required. So you have some flexibility there.”

“You shorten the barrel, you’re going to lose velocity,” St. John did acknowledge. “We did not change the ammo. The Army had determined with the barrel change that they were meeting their ballistic and lethality goals with that length of barrel.”

With the current 6.8x51mm ammunition, “we’re operating in the mid-70s [sic; 70,000 pounds per square inch] as far as pressure, and the case has 125K psi potential,” he also noted. “If you wanted to shorten the barrel and you did have some lethality concerns or wanted more performance, all you need to simply do is just increase the little bit more pressure in the cartridge case, and you overcome that shortness.”

“We didn’t do that. The Army said it wasn’t necessary, but you know, as the battlefield evolves and defensive postures change, if that becomes necessary, one of the great things about the NGSW program is the ability for the weapon systems and the ammunition to grow in their performance capacity,” he continued.

In the case of the 13-inch barrel, “we tapered the barrel down a little bit to add a little bit of weight savings,” he noted.

TWZ has reached out to Sig about getting more complete specifications for the M250A1, including overall length and total weight with different barrel options. The baseline version weighs some 13 pounds, empty, and without optics and other accessories, according to the Army’s fact sheet. As already mentioned, the M7 rifle also got progressively shorter and lighter before giving way fully to the M8 carbine, in part through reprofiling of the barrel. The empty weight of the M8 with its 10-inch barrel is close to one pound less than that of the 13-inch barreled M7.

Different barrels can be readily swapped out on the M250A1, as well as the baseline M250. However, the new variant features significant changes to the quick-change barrel arrangement on the gun and associated elements of the design.

“It was interchangeable before, but it didn’t have a quick-change barrel handle. It wasn’t meant to be changed, and therefore it didn’t need the insulation of [sic; for] a hot barrel like you get with a barrel with a quick-change barrel handle,” according to St. John. “I think initially with the [M]250 program, it wasn’t necessary, and potentially might not have been desired initially. And why put that weight burden on there if we weren’t going to utilize it, right?”

St. John did not elaborate further on why these features were initially deemed unnecessary.

“When you look at the top cover of the forearm, that used to be loose, and now it’s captured, meaning that when you change the barrel, it actually came off completely in your hand,” he also noted. “We utilized a similar design to our .338 MMG [Medium Machine Gun], and then we make it captured now, so you’re not going to lose it.”

“We added a funnel to guide your gas piston in, so that when you’re doing barrel change operations, you don’t have to be precisely lined up,” he added. Now, “you have something that’s going to guide it in a stressful environment, to get that into position to do your barrel change.”

The M250A1 features a host of other changes that are unrelated to the barrel.

Sig also “improved our gas system a little bit, just to make it more reliable and durable,” to include modifications to keep it better “insulated from carbon and things like that.”

“We opened up the trigger guard to incorporate the Arctic fight, the Arctic glove, more so than just the operational normal tactical gloves,” according to St. John. “We opened it up a little bit more to accomplish that.”

The Arctic is an ever-more strategic region where the U.S. faces growing geopolitical competition, especially from Russia and now China. Army officials also regularly point out that the harsh environment presents challenges when using standard equipment designed around use in more temperate locales.

“We improved the buttstock, and we improved the interface … to the receiver,” St. John explained. “We’ve made the interface between that more robust because through IMTing, and over time, and the buttstock getting slammed on the ground, and just normal military training and operations, we noticed that we had a tendency for some of them to loosen up and have some play in them.”

“The entire buttstock is a different buttstock than they had,” he added. “They [Army soldiers] preferred that buttstock over the buttstock that we had on it. So we just put soldiers’ preference on there. … It’s just a commercially available [design from] Magpul that they thought was better than the other Magpul that day one we were using.”

Changes were made to points where the M250 is designed to be attached to tripods on the ground or pintle mounts on vehicles.

“We put cross-bolts through the receiver to provide more durability,” he explained. “Initially, it was like an M-LOK type of lockup, and you can just think of a steel nut on an aluminum receiver being vibrated over a life cycle of the weapon system, it has some unfortunate wear characteristics. So, putting these cross pins redirects that force, and the way we lock it down with a saddle screw prevents that from happening and provides long-term durability to the receiver in the pintle and T&E [traverse and elevation] tripod-mounted configuration.”

The continued evolution of the M250 is not new. Sig talked to TWZ at AUSA last year about changes, including to the bipod and top cover, that were already making their way into the design.

The Army has yet to formally adopt the M250A1 configuration, and further changes could be made before service moves to officially acquire an improved version of the gun.

“This is likely to be the accepted configuration. We anticipate that acceptance,” Sig’s St. John told us. “We just finalized the acceptance on the M8, and they’re moving into the acceptance of the [M]250s. We anticipate right now, with the feedback that we’re getting from the program office, that the majority, if not all, of these changes are likely to be accepted.”

It’s important to reiterate that changes to the M7 rifle, and then the Army’s decision to transition fully to the further evolved M8 carbine, followed significant criticism of the core design of those guns and their ammunition, as well as the underlying doctrine. Sig has repeatedly pushed back on those critiques, and the Army continues to push ahead with the entire NGSW program.

Despite the steadily shortening barrels on guns in the NGSW family, the Army’s position remains that the weapons chambered for the new 6.8x51mm round offer essential additional accuracy, range, and terminal effectiveness over existing 5.56x45mm types. The genesis of the NGSW program had been heavily informed by the war in Afghanistan, where there were regular reports of U.S. ground units being outranged by their opponents. Adversary body developments were also a factor.

It is also important to point out that teething troubles are not at all uncommon in major weapon system programs, including when it comes to small arms. Sig has drawn attention to the less than positive reception that the AR-15/M16 family initially received in the mid-1960s, which led to a host of changes to that design. Rifles and carbines in that pattern are now in widespread service across the U.S. military and with dozens of armed forces and security services globally.

Regardless, even with the Army still very early on in the process of fielding the entire NGSW family of guns, the M250 light machine gun’s design is now evolving significantly.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post Sig Sauer’s M250 Machine Gun Gets Shorter And Lighter After Army Feedback appeared first on TWZ.

An Algarve and Alentejo environmental platform has come out strongly against plans for the Foupana dam, warning that the project could cause lasting damage to biodiversity and encourage the expansion

The post Environmental groups oppose Foupana dam over biodiversity fears appeared first on Portugal Resident.

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, is preparing what could be the largest initial public offering in history, raising more than $100 billion, according to The New York Times, at a valuation near US$2 trillion. According to Reuters, which reviewed the draft prospectus (the document has not yet been made public), the company […]

The post Postpone AI public offerings until US Congress acts appeared first on Asia Times.

For the second time in two weeks, Ukraine's 475th Assault Regiment has demonstrated how armored vehicles can fight and survive on a battlefield buzzing with enemy drones.

The regiment encased a tank and an American-made M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle in metal frames and welded hundreds of metal spines onto those frames, transforming them into "hedgehog" vehicles. The cage makes the tank impossible to identify from the footage, and the regiment hasn't said what model it is. The frames support the spines, which trigger incoming drones' warheads a safe distance from the vehicles' hulls.

But that's not all. To shepherd the two-vehicle formation across the disputed gray zone for a close engagement with a Russian position, presumably somewhere in northeastern Ukraine's Kharkiv Oblast, the 475th Assault Regiment deployed drones: both single-use first-person-view models and grenade-dropping, reusable Vampire models.

The Code 9.2 Regiment once again used the element of surprise, bringing a tank and a Bradley onto the battlefield—transformed into steel hedgehogs and covered by drones from the air. With a combined strike, the assault troops drove the enemy from several positions in… pic.twitter.com/Uq3mlWTsJq

— MilitaryNewsUA (@front_ukrainian) October 11, 2026

The vehicles and their crews didn't fight alone. They fought in mixed ground-air "combined arms" formations. The tank and fighting vehicle provided the firepower. The escorting drones provided the aerial protection. Vampire drones drop grenades to suppress Russian positions and clear mines and loitering Russian drones. FPV drones dive down to intercept the Russians' own FPV drones as they zoom in to strike the vehicles.

The 475th Assault Regiment cut together a video montage of the most recent assault. The video depicts the tank and the Bradley rolling along a well-traveled route as at least one friendly FPV and at least one friendly Vampire drone flew overhead and an additional drone watched from a short distance away.

The vehicles repeatedly came under attack from Russian FPVs and heavier loitering munitions. An escorting Ukrainian FPV moved to intercept, with unclear results. A couple of Russian drones managed to score hits on the vehicles, but their hedgehog armor held—and both vehicles appear to have survived the there-and-back daytime trip into battle.

A way forward for vehicles

It's at least the second time the 475th Assault Regiment has deployed vehicle-drone teams. The Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps used a related approach in its months-long counteroffensive in northern Donetsk Oblast, which began this spring: it sent in ground robots first, suppressing Russian strongpoints, fraying Russian supply lines, and clearing routes for manned vehicles to follow.

The unmanned aerial escorts lend the 475th Assault Regiment's hedgehog vehicles situational awareness they might not have on their own. It's well known that hedgehog armor can obscure a vehicle crew's view of the surrounding terrain. But friendly drones flying directly overhead can act as eyes in the sky for the crews on the ground.

The drones also help the vehicle crews compensate for a lack of mobility. The metal cages that support the metal spines that make up hedgehog armor tend to prevent a vehicle's turret from fully rotating. In order to aim its gun, a hedgehog vehicle has to meticulously point its whole self—turret and hull—at the enemy.

That takes trial and error, and time. The longer it takes, the more vulnerable a vehicle is to enemy drones. Friendly drones, running interference for the vehicles, can reduce that exposure long enough for the vehicle to fire a few shots.

The 475th Assault Regiment and 3rd Army Corps, among other units in Russia's wider war on Ukraine, are pointing the way forward for traditional armored vehicles in this new drone age. Yes, vehicles are more vulnerable to aerial attack than they were just a few years ago.

But no, armored vehicles aren't obsolete or useless. They just need a little help—or a lot of it—from the same kinds of drones that also make their existence so perilous.

Un resumen deportivo en 30 minutos conducido por José “Pepe” Lacayo, con la participación de Jorge "Yoyo" Morejón, Dagoberto “Daguito” Valdés y José “Chamby” Campos. De lunes a viernes a las 6 pm.