🔷 Saved Rounds 10.8.24

October 08, 2024

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.

together with 1140 Media

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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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