🔷 Saved Rounds 10.8.24

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
“There’s a lot of lip-flapping about national security resilience manufacturing. But there is no money for us to do this.”

— Scott Colosimo, founder & CEO of LAND, an electric mobility startup with some defense backing, explaining the dynamics of on-shoring battery tech and other manufacturing.

Word of the Week

Joint Concept Technology Demonstration: A JCTD is a method to examine and assess the military utility of new technology. Managed by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), JCTD is a quick-response tool to field capabilities by truncating paper-work elements of a requirements process and replacing them with a hands-on Military Utility Assessment (MUA).

Why it matters: Skydweller’s solar-powered drone completed JCTD flight testing as part of an Autonomous Maritime Patrol Aircraft (AMPA) initiative, where it logged a 22.5-hour sortie.

In that Number

4 million

Ukraine is now capable of manufacturing up to four million drones annually. Despite that number, it may not be enough—Lithuania is donating 5,000 FPV drones to Ukraine.

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They Said It
“There's a heck of a lot you can do networking phones together as one big distributed antenna.”

— Sean Gorman, co-founder & CEO of Zephr, on how they’re using software on cellphones strapped to drones to sniff out and avoid GPS jammers on the battlefield in Ukraine

Saved Rounds

• In Orbit Aerospace won a $1.8m AFWERX contract to employ AI to detect and manage anomalies in hypersonic flight during re-entry

• SRC unveiled an electronic warfare (EW) payload designed for Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA)

• Boeing was tapped for $600m for another lot of JDAM kits

• Airbus showed off its A350-1000 airliner testbed doing autonomous taxi, takeoff, and landing

• STM (Turkish) announced a new model of its KARGU drone equipped with an armor-piercing warhead

• The UK is looking for a ground-launched, long-range strike weapon

• The UK government bought a US-owned semiconductor factory in England to secure its military computer chip supply chain (the plant was closing)

• Russia is planning a whopping 30% increase in defense spending for 2025

• Ireland announced a record $1.5B defense budget for 2025

• The NGA launched a 7-year $700m data-labeling RFP to train its AI-powered computer vision models, its largest data-label effort to date

• The Pentagon announced its first direct lending tool for US defense tech companies, offering $10-150m loans from a $1B fund

• Boeing received an Air Force contract valued up to $6.9B to deliver Small Diameter Bombs (SDB) for the US, Japan, Bulgaria, and Ukraine

• Sierra Space disclosed the Air Force is studying a scaled-up version of its “Ghost” space-based cargo delivery vehicle—designed to stay in orbit for 5 years and deliver that cargo anywhere on Earth within 90 minutes

• AEVEX Aerospace acquired Veth Research to enhance its drone product’s GPS-denied navigation capabilities (Veth specializes in Vision-Based Nav)

• Impulse Space raised $150m to advance its orbital transfer vehicles

• Distributed Spectrum won the US portion of the inaugural AUKUS Electronic Warfare Challenge  

• Brazil’s Air Force received its 7th C-390 Millennium

• Saab and KAI partnered to strengthen its GlobalEye bid for South Korea’s new Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) aircraft

• Saab is establishing an arms factory in Michigan

• Ultra I&C won the Marine Corps program for CAC2S (Common Aviation Command and Control System)

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