As the threat of weaponized drone swarms continues to escalate for U.S. forces, defense planners are considering high-energy laser and high-power microwave countermeasures to combat the threat of these groups of unmanned aerial systems (UASs).

PALO ALTO, Calif. Industrial security company Xage Security has won a contract with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to digitize and secure flightline maintenance operations.

HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. The U.S. Air Force's Theater Battle Control Division, headquartered at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts, awarded an $8.4 million integration contract to Lockheed Martin March 26 as part of the Air Force's Three Dimensional Expeditionary Long-Range Radar Rapid Prototyping program.

Program officials said the main intent of the integration effort is to develop, test and field interfaces allowing the radar system to transmit data to other command and control nodes.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska. Tyonek Native Corp. has been tapped by the U.S. Air Force Mobility and Training Aircraft Directorate to install avionics modifications -- worth as much as $92.8 million -- on the Air Force's C-5 Galaxy aircraft fleet, under an Alternate Modification Installation (AMI) contract. 

U.S. ARMY YUMA PROVING GOUND -- YUMA, Ariz. The U.S. Air Force reported that during a late-March 2021 test, the Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie unmanned aircraft system (UAS) platform successfully launched an even smaller unmanned aircraft from inside its the Valkyrie's internal weapons bay.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. Researchers at University of Massachusetts Amherst, with funding from the Army Research Office (ARO) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), announced they have identified a way to protect quantum information from a common error source in superconducting systems. The research, published in Nature, realized a novel way for quantum errors to be spontaneously corrected.

Albuquerque, N. M. Verus Research has won a contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate, the center for space technology research and development, as part of the AFRL's $9.7 million, five-year Research Options for Space Enterprise Technologies (ROSET) project, which focuses on future space communications.