🔷 Pulsed

Presence

Projecting military power is about control and exploitation across domains—land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace.

The level of said control is directly related to being present.

Power → Control → Presence

So, the nature of presence matters a great deal.

The Air Up There

Captain Obvious: What goes up must come down.

Ignoring balloons, lift for flight requires velocity (Bernoulli's principle). This requires power, and aircraft power is finite.

Unlike a tank on the ground or a ship at sea, when an aircraft runs out of power, it leaves its domain….quite abruptly.

This power-limited dynamic is seen literally every time an aircraft flies—flight planning, fuel planning, fuel reserves, weather consideration for fuel reserves—and has been an obvious airpower consideration dating back to the Wright Brothers.

Translation: Operating in the air domain is inherently transitory and ephemeral, meaning control of it is, too. You might say airpower operates like a pulse…

Presence

Power requires control, control requires presence, and presence in the air is generally bounded in 2 ways:

• Spatial: location, size, and shape

• Temporal: time, duration, and sequencing

So, control of the air spans everything from a pocket of localized air superiority for 24 hours a day to regional air superiority for 30 minutes at a time.

But rarely does it mean air supremacy across an entire theater for the duration of a campaign when someone tries to fight for control—it’s not how air operations work.

[For those who grew up in the GWOT era, Afghanistan enjoyed mostly uncontested skies for nearly 20 years, mainly because no force existed to attempt to wrestle control from the US-led force.]

Pulse

In 2023, the Pentagon embraced ‘pulsed operations’ as a new Joint Warfighting Concept, recognizing that operations in highly contested environments require airpower…and that control of the air is temporary because…physics.

At the same time, the Air Force unveiled ‘pulsed airpower’ as its future operating concept,

‘Pulsed airpower’ is sort of like declaring breathing a future human capability since it's essentially baked into the recipe for airpower, though the authors get a pass. A causal factor is that none of this is captured or articulated in Air Force doctrine or strategy.

One Force Design

A year after unveiling ‘pulsed airpower,’ the Air Force introduced ‘One Force Design’ in late 2024, outlining three mission areas:

• Mission Area 1: capabilities that can be postured within, and generate combat power from, a dense threat area under constant attack.   

• Mission Area 2: capabilities that have the range to operate from a defendable area beyond an adversary’s line of fire and can project force into highly contested environments.   

• Mission Area 3: capabilities that have the flexibility to span a range of potential future crises; they can cover most of the world from positions resilient to limited adversary attacks. 

While the term ‘pulse’ isn’t anywhere to be found, it’s definitely a theme—if not the DNA—of the design.

When you cut through all the fluff, the 3 Mission Areas are essentially 3 different types of pulses—varying intensities and frequencies that provide levers for commanders to pull on and overlay to create synergistic or enduring pulses of presence.

Presence → Control → Power

We know this because we recently had a chance to spend time with senior Air Force leadership and a bar napkin to break it all down. Hmm, that sounds like the makings of a future pod episode. 😎

Fight’s On

Part 1 covered control & denial

Part 2 covered presence

Part 3 is in work, but there are a few directions we may take it. To be continued.

In That Number

350

On the heels of launching an aerostructures joint venture, Leonardo revealed it expects GCAP partners to order 350 next-gen fighters in 2035.

GCAP—for Global Combat Air Program—is a UK-Italy-Japanese fighter program.

TRIVIA

Kevlar, a material widely used in military body armor, was originally developed for which application?

A) Firefighter suits
B) Brake pads
C) Parachute cords
D) Reinforce vehicle tires

On the Radar

Applied Intuition is reportedly raising another round, this time at a $15B valuation. The autonomous driving software company raised $250M 12 months ago at a $6B valuation.

• The Merge’s Take: Applied Intuition cut its teeth in the commercial automotive market (Audi, VW, Nissan, Toyota, GM, Porsche, and more) but is rapidly entering the defense market. They recently acquired Episci and have ambitions to apply autonomy across land, air, sea, and space domains. Expect to see big things once they get organized.

Germany’s leading defense group wants the nation to embrace the pivot from cars to defense equipment as a major growth driver. The idea was pitched by the German Security and Defense Industry (BDSV) group as a way to 1) meet the demand of rising defense spending and 2) address the country’s automotive industry crisis.

• The Merge’s Take: Most of Germany’s automotive companies have defense production in their lineage or were originally defense companies, so it’s not too wild of an idea. One example is BMW, which was a re-branding of aircraft engine manufacturer Rapp Motorenwerke. People often associate BMW’s logo with a rotating propeller—but that’s a myth perpetrated by a misunderstood marketing campaign in 1929. It doesn’t help that this myth was in this scene in the 2000 movie Finding Forrester. Who thought you’d get automotive history and a reference to a 25-year-old movie mistake in your email today?

DIU picked 4 companies to develop one-way drone prototypes. The companies selected are AeroVironment, Dragoon, Auterion, and Swan—the latter 2 are software companies that are partnered with Ukrainian drone producers.

• The Merge’s Take: 2 of the drone designs have a 69-mile range, which is on par with the hundreds (or thousands?) of other offerings that already exist and are being used in Ukraine. The other 2: 690-mile one-way-attack designs. Now we’re talking! While DIU didn’t say which companies are building which types, we can confidently say one of the long-range drone providers is Dragoon, which advertises a hybrid powerplant.

They Said It
“We’re seeing in our adversary developmental capabilities that they’re pursuing all of those…[but] we’re not pursuing all of those yet.”

— Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman, on the 6 categories of killer satellites China is developing or has developed

Knowledge Bombs

• Taiwan is buying a drone family of systems comprised of 4 types of kamikaze drones, including 200 drones with a 600+ mile range for cross-strait warfare

• The Air Force seemingly paused plans to develop the NGAS stealth tanker

• Portugal dropped plans to buy F-35s

• Canada is reconsidering its $13.2B F-35 purchase

• The Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon office responsible for high-level long-term strategic analysis, is being disestablished

• General Atomics partnered with Radian Aerospace to share UAS technologies to advance their space plane—the world’s first fully reusable horizontal takeoff and landing, single-stage to orbit spaceplane

• Sikorsky is flight-testing a Rotor Blown Wing VTOL drone

• Denmark awarded Kongsberg $306M for Naval Strike Missiles (NSM)

• Northrop Grumman completed static fire test qualification of the Sentinel ICBM rocket motor

• The Army tapped Boeing to advance to the next phase of cruise missile interceptor programs (Indirect Fires Protection Capability (IFPC) Increment 2)

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ANSWER
D) Reinforce vehicle tires. Kevlar was accidentally discovered in 1965 while searching for a lightweight alternative to steel in car tires. Soon after, its impressive ballistic properties were recognized, paving the way for its use in protective gear.

Yes, this is the second automotive reference in this week’s newsletter.