🔷 Small Biz, Big Fury

Exclusive!

This is the untold origin story of the Fury Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), as told by those who lived it.

Scott Blesoe and Joe Murray join Mike to talk about Fury’s very beginning—way back to 2016.

Now known as Anduril’s YFQ-44, Fury originated as an SBIR project from Blue Force Technologies and may go on to become a poster child for SBIR success stories.

But it’s not all good news.

The experience—and the decision to sell to Anduril—motivated Scott and Joe to launch a new type of investment fund, the DoD Accelerator.

DoD Accelerator bridges the gap between venture capital and private equity, addressing the ‘funding valley of death’ they faced and the factors that led to the decision to sell their company.

This is packed with never-before-revealed details and serves as a great backdrop for a broader conversation about the realities of operating a business in the defense industry.

Check it out!

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In That Number

more than 80%

Ukraine reported that more than 80% of enemy targets are now destroyed by drones, with over 800,000 video-confirmed hits recorded in 2025.

This technological evolution relies on locally manufactured systems and a unique "gamified" bonus program to incentivize and verify battlefield success.

TRIVIA

On February 1, 2003, which NASA space shuttle tragically disintegrated over Texas during re-entry, killing all seven crew members?

A) Challenger
B) Columbia
C) Discovery

On the Radar

Faster B-21s. Northrop Grumman is close to a deal with the Air Force that will accelerate B-21 Raider production. Congress approved $4.5 billion for the “expansion of production capacity” for the B-21 as part of last year’s reconciliation funding (aka BBB), and Northrop has stated it plans to spend $2-3B over the coming years to support increased production.

• The Merge’s Take: Yes, build more bombers. The current plan’s production details are classified, but public estimates peg it at 7 bombers per year. That’s because the program was shaped in the 2010s as a limited production rate program to field 100 bombers in the 2040 timeframe, but now, almost no one believes 100 is the right number. We’ve previously covered the 180-225-300-bomber estimates, but most narratives now align on a 145-bomber fleet, assuming the B-21 mission does not expand into a multi-role platform. Regardless of the number, the ‘more bomber narrative’ is important to get the $$$$ required to build additional production capacity.

Navy’s Hedge. The Navy unveiled a Hedge Strategy to prevent the fleet from becoming a “brittle, single-purpose force.” The goal is to balance readiness for high-end conflict (high consequence but low probability) with the enduring commitments of low-intensity conflict and gray-zone operations (low consequence yet high probability). Unmanned systems are envisioned to complement “tailored forces” to tackle “situations that are too consequential to ignore but too unlikely to drive our overall fleet design.”

• The Merge’s Take: The idea is to use drone boats and low-cost systems to stabilize the shipbuilding plan and the over-committed Navy. That said, as of this writing, the Pentagon has taken down the Golden Fleet website, and Congress zeroed out the Navy CCA program’s budget, which sure sounds like a lot more instability. Keep an eye on how the black-shoe and brown-shoe navy narratives come together—or not.

Stepping up drone defense. The Pentagon had some notable Counter-UAS news this week to address the counter-drone policy confusion. First, JIATF-401 released sweeping new guidance for homeland C-UAS operations, removing the ‘fence-line limitation’ on defensive actions. Second, the Air Force launched the Point Defense Battle Lab to adopt and integrate drone-defense equipment and develop employment tactics.

• The Merge’s Take: It appears the era of ‘sit and watch’ is over, and base commanders now have the authority and means to protect their installations. They now have 60 days to implement site-specific procedures, but expect some growing pains as they define how far beyond the fence line they act. We sense some PR headaches on the horizon when the military shoots down a kid’s birthday present, but you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

They Said It

“I know these things are expensive, and I know the defense industrial base is compressed, but we have got to figure out how to walk and chew gum here with aircraft.” 

— Adm. Daryl Caudle, Chief of Naval Operations, arguing for the acceleration of the F/A-XX program

The program remains in limbo due to Pentagon concerns that it could compete for industry resources with the F-47, and it’s now a battle inside the Beltway. While the Pentagon requested just $74M to keep the program on life support, Congress put its thumb on the scale with an additional $897M F/A-XX appropriation.

Knowledge Bombs

• Grid Aero raised a $20M Series A round for autonomous cargo drones

• Castelion broke ground on a 1,000-acre hypersonic manufacturing campus in New Mexico

• Anduril is opening a new 1.2 million sq ft facility in Long Beach, CA

• Voyager broke ground on a major facility expansion in Pueblo, Colorado

• ANELLO Photonics won a $20M APFIT award for GPS-denied inertial navigation tech

• Boeing’s first operational MQ-25A Stingray started taxi tests (video)

• SpaceX launched Stargaze, a free space tracking system using Starlink satellites

• Leidos is acquiring ENTRUST for $2.4B to expand its energy infrastructure portfolio

• Northwood Space closed a $100M Series B round and won a $50M Space Force contract

• The NRO declassified JUMPSEAT, its first-generation elliptical orbit signals-intelligence satellite

• The Air Force & Stanford partnered to test an AI copilot to help pilots

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ANSWER
B) Space Shuttle Columbia. The Space Shuttle Columbia (OV-102), on its 28th mission (STS-107), suffered a catastrophic structural failure and disintegrated during re-entry on February 1, 2003. The failure was traced to a piece of insulating foam that broke off the external tank during launch and struck the leading edge of the left wing, creating a hole that allowed superheated air into the wing during re-entry.