🔷 Saved Rounds 10.1.24

Welcome to Tuesday's Saved Rounds, where we send out all the goodies we couldn't squeeze into our Sunday newsletter.

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They Said It
“If you survey 2,000 fighter pilots, 1,999 would tell you that the adversary forces in the sim are terrible.”

— Shield AI’s Mike Benitez, on the current state of live virtual constructive (LVC) training in the US military

Word of the Week

POSTMAN: An acronym for a DIA program called Primary Open Source Tasking Management Aggregation Network

So What: POSTMAN is a tool for OSINT—open source intelligence—and will be used by industry partners to help the military collect intel via public sources

Fighter Pilot Wade Hunter "Thunder" Nunnelley & Family
are in the fight of their lives.

What started as severe back pain quickly became a life-altering diagnosis—brain cancer with tumors down Thunder’s spine.

Please spend a minute to
 read their story.

In that Number

20

The Space Rapid Capabilities Office selected 20 technology companies to participate in the first phase of a project aimed at developing a cloud-based satellite operations infrastructure.

Saved Rounds

• Japan committed $288m to develop an electronic warfare aircraft based on the Kawasaki P-1

• The Air Force wants to add an AESA radar to its X-62A test jet

• The Army picked American Rheinmetall Vehicles and HDT Expeditionary Systems to build equipment-carrying robot prototypes

• Lockheed Martin received a $3.2B Air Force order for JASSM/LRASM stealth cruise missiles

• Epirus unveiled a new expeditionary High-Power Microwave (HPM) weapon for the Marine Corps

• Viasat is developing a phased array antenna for the Air Force to enable multi-band, multi-orbit, multi-vendor SATCOM

• The FBI raided defense contractor Carahsoft

• The Air Force opened a facility in Arkansas to train international F-35 pilots

• Northrop Grumman was selected over RTX to develop a hypersonic Glide Phase Interceptor for the Missile Defense Agency

• HavocAI raised a $11m seed round to advance its low-cost autonomous boat swarm tech

• Anduril is teaming up with Microsoft to improve the troubled Army Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) goggles program

• Raytheon delivered Saudi Arabia’s 1st AN/TPY-2 air defense radar (part of $2.3B deal)

• Electra demoed its Ultra Short STOL aircraft prototype for the Air Force

• Russia debuted bazooka drones in Ukraine

• South Korea is buying 200 kamikaze drones from Poland’s WB Electronics

• France claimed the worlds-first space-to-Earth laser communication

• Radian Aerospace started flight testing its reusable orbital spaceplane prototype

• Saab delivered its 5th and final GlobalEye early warning aircraft to the UAE

• The US pledged another $8B in aid for Ukraine, including stand-off weapons for F-16s

• D-Orbit raised $169m to develop space-based cloud computing and in-orbit servicing systems

• Israel secured $8.7B in US military aid

• The Air Force ended its EC-130 Commando Solo mission (here’s a pic of these unique-looking C-130s)

• Granta Autonomy (Lithuania company) was awarded a contract for 7,000 FPV drones—5,000 are going to Ukraine

• Anduril won a $25m Space Force contract to upgrade a space surveillance network

• NOAA ordered 2 next-gen C-130J hurricane hunter aircraft

• Romania received a $920m FMF loan to buy US-made Abrams tanks and ammunition

• Leidos replaced Lockheed Martin on Lunar Outpost’s moon rover team being developed for NASA’s Artemis program

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