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In That Number
$74M per base
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that outfitting a typical military installation with layered counter-drone defenses costs $74M per base upfront, plus $5M a year in upkeep. The total funding projection is $7.4B (100 bases)).
Together with Firehawk
Firehawk
America’s solid rocket motor industry consolidated from six manufacturers to two. Firehawk wants to be number three.
Mike sits down with Will Edwards, Co-Founder and CEO of Firehawk, to talk about breaking a thirty-year propulsion duopoly.
Founded in 2019, Firehawk replaced the traditional cast-and-cure process with a continuous thermoplastic platform, cutting propellant production from 60 days to 6 hours. The company just closed a $150M+ Series D to scale two major facilities in Oklahoma and Mississippi.
Check it out!
On the Radar
Grid Aero
Oshkosh to build cargo drones. Oshkosh Defense partnered with Grid Aero to mass-produce the Lifter, an autonomous, twin-prop modular payload drone. Initial work covers production engineering, design for manufacturing, and customer demonstrations at Oshkosh's Wisconsin plants.
The Merge's Take: The trend of tapping the automotive industry to help drone production started in Europe: VDL switched from BMW MINIs to drones (Netherlands), the Schaeffler/Helsing partnership (Germany), and Renault partnerships with Turgis Gaillard and Thales (France). The trade is simple: one side has a product but lacks means to rapidly scale production; the other has production expertise and excess capacity. In this case, Grid Aero has a promising design and prototype; Oshkosh has 19,000 employees and the means to get it into mass production. Elon Musk says production is 1000% harder than making a few prototypes. With the pivot in demand signal from drone prototypes to drone production, the ones that can find ways to produce quickly are likely to win.
CDAO
Swarm Forge prizes. The Pentagon's CDAO awarded $8M in prizes ($2M each) to the top 4 demonstrator teams from Swarm Forge Crucible 3: Anduril, Lockheed Martin, Shield AI / Skyeton (split prize) and SwarmInt. Swarm Forge is a project to accelerate the discovery, validation, and fielding of software for groups of autonomous systems.
The Merge's Take: Some familiar names—and a dark horse. SwarmInt, a Virginia startup founded in 2023, earned a spot in the Top 4. That said, the prize money is a rounding error, and the real challenge is finding a funded buyer. Swarm Forge tees up a transition within 90 days, but it doesn't do procurement or acquisition, and it’s unclear where it goes. Service budgets are in FY27 execution mode (pending Congress passing them), and the FY28 budget is about to get locked. Our bet: temporary funding through the Pentagon’s unmanned systems portfolio office, DRPM-UxS, but it too faces a funding challenge—of the $54.6B requested in FY27, $53.6B was via the reconciliation process…which is likely dead.
SNC
Navy jet trainer race down to 1. Sierra Nevada Corp. pulled out of the Navy’s T-45 replacement program. SNC’s reason: the Navy wants fixed production prices before the design is mature, with limited visibility into long-term funding. For those keeping score at home: Lockheed Martin (TF-50N) and Boeing (T-7) both pulled out of the competition, Northrop left SNC’s team, and now SNC has walked. Textron is now the only known major contender.
The Merge’s Take: SNC’s proposed clean-sheet aircraft had a high-risk profile, would have had hard-to-predict costs, and would have faced tough competition in a global market full of jet trainers; Textron’s M-346N is using Leonardo’s proven M-346 baseline. The Navy now faces an uncomfortable trade: proceed with little competitive price pressure, or revise the terms to attract bidders and risk another delay. The service’s 193 T-45 fleet is limping along with life extensions to get them to 2036, yet this replacement program—which has not selected a vendor yet—is already 4 years behind schedule, with initial deliveries starting in 2032. It should not be this hard to run a jet trainer program.
TRIVIA
On November 4, 1965, a U.S. Navy pilot flying an A-1 Skyraider dropped what unusual item on a mission during the Vietnam War?
A) a toilet
B) a sink
C) a beer keg
They Said It
“NASA is getting back in the business of flying high and fast again.”
— Jared Isaacman, NASA Administrator, on NASA's new X-70 Fractal. It’s designed to carry 2,000 pounds of payload at 45,000 ft
Knowledge Bombs
Shield AI is acquiring Echodyne in a $5.3B deal
Shield AI unveiled X-BAT 001, its first full-scale VTOL fighter drone prototype
Hypersonica raised a $112M Series B to build European hypersonic strike
The Marine Corps wants cargo drones that carry 100 pounds 40 nautical miles and back
Saildrone won a court order for the Navy to reevaluate its MUSV proposal
Neros secured an up to $450M OSC loan commitment
Gallium Defense raised a $7.9M seed round for counter-FPV radar
Aeon was awarded a $13.8M SOCOM contract shoulder-fired Zeus missiles
Dronamics is going public via SPAC at a $500M enterprise value
Axon is investing $1.2B more in Skydio, raising its stake to about 37%
Harbinger raised a $240M Series D and eyes expansion into defense
Corridian emerged with a $38M seed to build undersea logistics AUVs
Red Cat partnered with Sine Engineering on GPS-denied comms
CODE380 built a 10-oz receiver that intercepts Russian drone video out to 10 km
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ANSWER
A) A toilet. During the Vietnam War, Commander Clarence Stoddard Jr. of VA-25 dropped a toilet to commemorate the 6-millionth pound of ordnance dropped. The unique "bomb" was modified with fins, stickers, and a nose fuse.
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