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The phrase “into the breach,” invokes one of the Army’s most deadly missions: sending combat engineers through enemy obstacles to clear a path so that others may follow. Now, instead of sending soldiers, the Army is experimenting with drones.

Breaching is so dangerous that the Army assumes a deliberate breach could cost half of the forces assigned to it. Hoping to reduce that toll, Oregon Army National Guard combat engineers recently tested using a heavy-lift drone to deliver an explosive-filled tube through simulated enemy defenses, the Army recently announced.

Soldiers assigned to Bravo Company, 741st Brigade Engineer Battalion, 41st Infantry Brigade Combat Team sent a live Bangalore torpedo into the Idaho sky amid 25mph gusts of wind. On a range at Orchard Combat Training Center, they maneuvered the drone and detonated the explosives, taking cover before the munition cleared a path through a wire obstacle.

The successful trial represented months of work put in by the unit’s drone working group, which was established by Lt. Col. Eric Zimmerman, the battalion’s commander, to figure out how to clear a wire obstacle with a commercial drone. Though the U.S. Army is pressing to expand drones on the water and testing turning resupply drones into rocket launchers , the group said they did not find another example of the new tactic in the U.S. Army.

Zimmerman pointed to the war in Ukraine, where drones have drastically changed the nature of war, as inspiration for the experiment. “Watching what was going on in Ukraine, and how innovative they are, it inspires you to get better and think bigger,” he said.

The trial comes as units are increasingly looking to drones to take on some of the most perilous battlefield tasks. Earlier this month, soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division used drones to pull grappling hooks and 3D-printed munitions to blast through concertina wire.

The working group looked into commercially available drones that cost between $2,000 and $40,000 before eventually receiving the Mule 28, a 45-pound heavy-lift drone developed by Lorica Technologies for the project.

The Mule 28 uses eight motors and can hoist 200 pounds into the sky with its 28-inch bi-blade propellers. It also has sensors for targeting and artificial intelligence processing. Lorica had around six weeks to develop the airframe for this project. It presently fields three other Mule 28 models.

“The most casualty-producing thing that Army engineers do is the breach,” said 1st Lt. Andrew Lucas, who co-led the working group. “Expect 50% casualties. If you can deliver something to clear the breach with a $40,000 drone, instead of putting Soldiers in harm’s way, that’s worth experimenting with.”

The engineers first used inert training rounds, practicing until the drone could reliably deliver the dummy charges to the target, before flying live explosives.

Soldiers detonated the charge using shock tube connecting them to the Bangalore instead of relying on a wireless detonator to prevent jamming or early initiation.

The future, Lucas said, may be drone breaching capabilities that require little human input.

“We’re not that far technologically from a drone that has an AI processor on it that could identify where concertina wire is,” he said, adding that in theory, soldiers could provide a rough location before the drone autonomously identifies the obstacle, positions itself, and deploys the Bangalore. Because it would happen internally, he said, the possibility of jamming would be nonexistent.

The next Mule 28 prototype, according to Lorica, will aim to integrate AI obstacle identification with the goal of increasingly autonomous breaching.

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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful atom smasher, has entered a planned four-year shutdown that will upgrade it to its most capable form yet.

The particle accelerator was switched off Monday (June 29) and is scheduled to come back online in 2030 as the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HiLumi LHC), with improvements that will allow it to smash together roughly 10 times more particles than its original design. That data could help spark new discoveries in fundamental physics and shed light on the nature of dark matter , antimatter and the early universe.

"This is a very important moment," HiLumi LHC project chief Markus Zerlauth told Agence France-Presse . "From Monday, we will be entering a new phase."

Since its first successful proton collision in 2009, the LHC has allowed physicists to test theories about particle physics and the Standard Model of the subatomic world. It was essential to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, which helped explain how tiny fundamental particles acquire mass. The collider covers a 17-mile (27 kilometers) loop at the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva.

The current shutdown is the third long-term, planned pause in the collider's operations. The first, a two-year shutdown beginning in 2013, consolidated connections between superconducting magnets and boosted the energy of the colliding proton beams. A second pause, from 2018 to 2022, involved a series of upgrades, replacements and preventive maintenance.

In the current period of dormancy, dubbed Long Shutdown 3 (LS3), specialists will install upgrades to boost the collider's luminosity by a factor of 10. That will increase the number of particle collisions, roughly tripling the number of times particles will smack into each other compared with the existing setup. Once the final version of the particle accelerator is online, it will run until the end of its operational lifespan in the 2040s and will be earmarked for replacement by a new, higher-energy particle accelerator in the years that follow.

"It really is an opportunity to explore the universe in a way we haven't done before," Mark Thomson , director general of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), where the LHC is housed, told New Scientist .

Civil engineers work on upgrades to turn the Large Hadron Collider into the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, significantly increasing the facility’s rate of particle collisions. (Image credit: Samuel Joseph Hertzog, CERN) That jump means that experiments will produce much more data, which will allow scientists to study known phenomena, such as the Higgs boson, in more detail and increase the odds of observing rare events. For example, the HiLumi LHC is expected to produce about 380 million Higgs bosons over its lifetime of a decade or so, compared with the 55 million it's made to date. The data could help scientists solve problems with the Standard Model, which currently doesn't incorporate dark matter or dark energy , the primary forms of mass and energy in the universe.

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"The LS3 represents a huge and complex logistical and engineering undertaking," Jean-Philippe Tock , head of the LS3 coordination team, said in a statement . "In the LHC alone, 1.2 km [0.75 miles] of magnets and components will be removed and replaced with new equipment, and across the whole complex, dozens of projects are planned, involving thousands of engineers, physicists, technicians and support personnel."

While the LHC won't be smashing any particles together during the shutdown period, researchers will continue to analyze data already collected during experiments during the prior operational window.

Though the LHC's primary purpose is fundamental physics research, technologies used to upgrade the collider could find their way into everyday life. For example, some instruments and techniques originally developed at CERN are now being used in medical imaging, sensors and art restoration.

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The Kurds’ fortunes have ebbed and flowed in recent years, but the fall of the Assad regime in Syria in December 2024, the 2025 decision by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to dissolve and engage in talks with the Turkish government, and the 2026 U.S.-Israeli war with Iran had enormous ripple effects on the lives of Kurds in the Middle East and Kurdish hopes for autonomy. We asked four experts to assess how recent regional events are presenting risks and opportunities for the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran.Read more below. Gönül TolSenior Fellow at the Middle East InstituteThe Iran

The post The Shifting Fortunes of the Kurds appeared first on War on the Rocks .

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Two British firms claim they can shrink the sports-car timeline.

Avant Design builds functional cars in virtual reality, not just renders.

Watt’s PACES chassis can take EV, hybrid, or combustion power equally.

Some would argue Lotus has lost its way in recent years, with the all-electric Eletre SUV and the Emeya sedan, both built in China. Thankfully, its next-generation hybrid supercar could help it get some of its mojo back , and an attractive 2+2 model like this one could inject further excitement into the brand.

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The concept has been crafted by Avant Design and the Watt Electric Vehicle Company, a British manufacturer of electric vans and trucks, with the help of virtual reality tools to speed up development of a functional car. Initially commissioned by Autocar for its 2025 Christmas edition, it would perhaps be the perfect addition to the Lotus family.

Review: The 2026 Lotus Emira Turbo SE Feels Like An AMG Experiment, But It’s Not

It is rendered riding on one of Watt’s skateboard platforms, built to support electric, combustion, and hybrid powertrains. Watt calls the architecture PACES, short for Passenger And Commercial EV Skateboard, and according to Car&Driver , it ran a drivable version at this year’s CES. Despite the overall small proportions, it could fit a compact V8, perhaps in a similar way to the 2+2 Gemera from Koenigsegg.

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A Lotus For The Everyman?

Visually, the car looks absolutely stunning . The front end features a blacked-out bumper and narrow LED headlights subtly integrated into the flowing quarter panels. It then sits on a set of fabulous silver-and-black wheels, has digital wing mirrors, and uses tiny suicide doors for the second row, much like a Mazda RX-8. As for the front doors, they are Lamborghini-inspired scissor doors.

The rear end also looks great. Perhaps the most intriguing element is the see-through lip spoiler, which doubles as the LED taillights and light bar. It all looks very coherent and like something that Lotus itself might design.

In addition to sporting a powerful V8, it could include light in-wheel motors for added performance. What’s more, Watt Electric Vehicle Company boss Neil Yates says the car could weigh just 1,984 lbs (900 kg), perfectly fitting for a Lotus.

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Lead image Avant Design