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Ukraine’s DART Missile Rides a Balloon 11 Miles Up — Then Deliberately Goes Blind Before Russia Can Jam It.
A $200 latex envelope, a graphite warhead, and one design decision that makes a guided missile impossible to jam: switch the receiver off.
The Machine That Wins by Switching Itself Off
Over the Ukrainian steppe, a latex envelope the size of a small house drifts east, at the mercy of a wind that has been blowing the same way for eleven thousand years. There’s no engine. There is no pilot. Underneath it, on a release cradle, is a six-foot cylinder of Ukrainian steel and Chinese-adjacent electronics, built to do something almost theologically strange for a guided weapon: built to stop knowing where it is.
That’s all there is to it. That is the whole thesis of the DART missile, and it is the reason why a country fighting a bigger, richer, more industrially deep adversary has spent 2026 quietly building one of the war’s most elegant asymmetric strike systems. The DART, developed by Ukraine’s Center of Innovative Technologies Program, was first shown to the public on 16 June 2026 in the trade press and at the Eurosatory exhibition in Paris. It is 1.84 meters long, ten centimeters in diameter and…
