🔷 Epic Fury

Epic Fury

We try not to get pulled into the news cycle, but here are some highlights from the ongoing operation in Iran.

• The F-15 104-0 combat record gained an asterisk when 3 F-15s were downed by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 Hornet. The friendly fire incident is under investigation and is not being counted as a combat loss. A Qatari F-15QA downed 2 Iranian Su-24s though, so the updated F-15 record is now 106-0 (with a frat asterisk).

• F-35’s first kill: an Israeli F-35 downed an Iranian Yak-130

• Torpedo: A U.S. submarine sank an Iranian ship, the first torpedo kill since WWII (video)

• Drones: The first U.S. use of one-way attack drones

• PrSM: The combat debut of the ground-launched Precision Strike Missile (PrSM)

• Commercial Space: Satellite imagery services are so good now that commercial firms are delaying imagery so Iran can’t use it for battle damage assessment

• 43 ships have been sunk, including a drone carrier ship (video)

• 3000 Iranian targets have been struck

• 600+ ballistic missiles have been fired by Iran

• 2,000+ Shahed drones have been fired by Iran

• ~97% of incoming missiles and drones have been intercepted

• Interceptor race: The Gulf region’s interceptor magazine depth was strained, and it looked like it turned into a race of attrition—the U.S. and Israel accelerated strikes on the launch sites and drone stockpiles to reduce/manage/eliminate the threats before they ran out of interceptors

• Drone help: The US and Middle East countries have asked Ukraine for drone defense expertise

• Weapons mix: The US employed 1,000+ offensive weapons in the first 36 hours of the war. Half of those were stand-off weapons, but the mix of air/land/sea is worth a look.

• $$$$: the estimated cost of the first 100 hours of the war is $3.7B

• Open Source: Here is an interactive map of all the targets collected via open source data

In That Number

1 of every 3

Ukraine reported that 1 of every 3 Russian aerial threats are now destroyed by interceptor drones, providing a cost-effective alternative to multi-million dollar missile systems. These manual-ramming drones, which cost less than a used car, accounted for over 70% of successful intercepts over Kyiv last month.

TRIVIA

You probably know the idiom "balls to the wall," but where did it come from?

A) Fully arming a WWII bomber’s ball gunner turrets
B) Aerial bombs with ball-shaped fuses that rotate to the bay doors for arming
C) Pushing aircraft throttle levers full forward for max power

On the Radar

Perennial Autonomy’s Merops counter-drone systems are being sent to the Middle East. Merops is a system, but the key ingredient is the Surveyor interceptor drones.

• The Merge’s Take: The company you’ve never heard of has an interceptor system you’ve never heard of, but it’s been schwacking drones in Ukraine for a while—it has 1,000+ Shahed intercepts to date. It’s one of several semi-stealth companies in the portfolio of Project Eagle, Eric Schmitt’s autonomous-drone effort. No press. No website. No CGI videos on LinkedIn. Just quietly kicking ass. OBTW, the U.S. Army began training with them in late 2025 in eastern Poland. And there are many others you haven’t heard of: SkyFall’s P1-SUN interceptor has downed more than 2,500 drones in Ukraine over the past 4 months, including 1,500 Shaheds. Those numbers are standard in Ukraine, but unheard of in Western defense circles.

Drone Dominance. The 25-vendor "Gauntlet 1" competition of the Drone Dominance Program is over, and the Pentagon will be ordering 30,000 drones (~$150M) from the 11 winners in the coming days. But there’s plenty more on the way: this was the first of 4 6-month cycles in the 300,000 drone, $1.1B initiative.

• The Merge’s Take: We love the prize-style competition, and we really love that the project has a public leaderboard with scores and rankings, which is very non-standard in the defense industry. And if you look at the list, you’ll see that the standout winner of the U.S. competition is….a British company called Skycutter. Unlike some of the big drone companies, they have just 866 followers on LinkedIn as of this writing. Follow them. The 99.3 score sent a message, and they are now the drone company to beat.

They Said It

“Our priorities are threefold: 1) high technologies that produce overmatch domination; 2) technologies that substitute machines, fires, or electrons for troops in harm's way; and 3) capabilities that can scale quickly and dramatically reduce our cost-per-kill.” 

— Owen West, Director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), in a "Day 1" memorandum signaling an aggressive shift toward rapid rearmament and lethal commercial-to-combat tech conversion.

Knowledge Bombs

• Nominal raised an $80M Series B extension round at a $1B valuation

• SNC & Specter Aerospace will flight test a supersonic ramjet-powered air-to-air missile later this year

• Smack Technologies raised a $32M Seed+Series A funding to develop military decision-making AI models

• Hermeus completed the first flight of its Quarterhorse Mk 2.1 prototype 

• PBS Aerospace signed a multi-year turbojet engine deal with Zone 5 Technologies

• Anduril is rumored to be raising $4B at a $60B valuation

• The Air Force is looking for more vendors to produce SiAW equivalent missiles

• Elbit America’s SkyStriker loitering munition was evaluated by the Army

• Dominion Dynamics is investing $50M to start building Canada’s first Collaborative Combat Aircraft

• Kongsberg unveiled a north-seeking MEMS for drone and subsea navigation

• Kratos won a $7M production contract for Counter-UAS systems to track threats

• The Pentagon designated Anthropic a national security risk, banning its services

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ANSWER
C) On older aircraft, throttle levers had ball-shaped grips that were pushed forward to the firewall for maximum power. This literal act of pushing the "balls" to “the wall” became a figurative expression for going all-out. Not to be confused with ‘balls out’, which has the same meaning but refers to (get your mind out of the gutter) the mechanical governor of steam locomotives, which has two weighted steel balls that extend to the "balls out" position when at maximum speed.