🔷 Saved Rounds 11.5.24

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 were to ask me three or four years ago, I would have said, ‘You know what? It’s about price, and the satellites are disposable. The rockets are disposable. Who cares? You know, if we get 90% reliability, everybody will be happy.’ I was wrong about that…We realized that in order to have scale, you needed reliability.”

— Chris Kemp, CEO of Astra, the California rocket maker that endured a tumultuous financial journey from private to public to private

Zoom in

There is a new Space Force effort focused on integrating command and control to close kill chains of 4 classified weapons.

Zoom in here to learn more about the Joint Enterprise Integrated Federated C2 For Space.

[Note to Space Force: this is the most generic-sounding program we’ve ever heard of. It doesn’t even make sense trying to say it out loud, and it's impossible to truncate or use it as an acronym (JEIFC2fS?). We expect this from the Army, not you. Come up with a better name]

In that Number

7,943%

An investigation found that Boeing charged the Air Force for some of the parts on a C-17 sustainment contract, including a 7,943% markup for soap dispensers.

Before everyone breaks out the pitchforks, the report does not go into details about air-certified vs commercial or the inherent bloat that comes with compliance with government cost accounting systems.

Not convinced? Listen to defense industry legend Norm Augustine explaining a $600 roll of tape came to be when the Pentagon wanted to buy it.

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Saved Rounds

• Northrop Grumman’s LITENING pod completed Navy F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet flight testing

• Poland was approved for a F-16 Viper Midlife Upgrade as part of a $7.3B package

• Silent Arrow’s air-launched 300-mile range cargo drone is set to begin Air Force testing

• BAE flew a Link-16-controllable EW payload on General Atomics’ MQ-20 Avenger, testing the viability of autonomous payload control

• The UK plans to increase defense spending by $3.8B next year, a 5.3% bump

• Finland is buying 150 AARGM-ER anti-radiation missiles for their forthcoming F-35A fleet (2026)

• Saronic unveiled a new autonomous surface vessel with plans to produce 100s starting next year

• The European Union approved a $38B loan to Ukraine, backed by profits from frozen Russian assets

• Australia committed to buying $4.7B in SM-2 and SM-6 missiles

• Special Aerospace Services acquired Concordia Technologies, a missile and hypersonic weapons defense company

• Air Force F-16s are now flight testing the new Integrated Viper Electronic Warfare Suite (IVEWS)

• Kraus Hamdani Aerospace was awarded a $20m Army contract for its ultra-long endurance Group 2 ISR drone

• QinetiQ received an Army contract for MQM-185B (Banshee Jet 80+) target drones

• Reaction Engines closed down (UK hypersonic engine builder)

• CACI completed its $1.2B acquisition of Azure Summit Technology, improving its position in the RF payload market

• Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 drones can now launch smaller Croatian FPV drones

• Leidos is restarting production of GBU-69 small glide munitions for SOCOM (they’ve sold 4,000+ to date)

• L3Harris is set to deliver an upgraded ground-based enemy satellite jammer early next year

• Germany’s Bombardier 6000 biz-jet-based spy plane completed its first test flight…in Kansas

• Israel earmarked $530m to accelerate its Iron Beam laser air defense system (sounds logical given all the events of 2024)

• Lockheed Martin finalized its acquisition of Terran Orbital

• Taiwan was approved to buy $2B in air defense systems (AIM-120-based NASAMS and radars)

• Tawain signed a deal to buy 1,000 attack drones (Switchblade 300 and ALTIUS 600 variants)

• LIFT Aircraft and Near Earth Autonomy received an Army contract to design a drone payload for battlefield blood resupply and casualty evacuation (CASEVAC)

And finally…

• India became an official German-French-Italian-Spanish Eurodrone program (we’re not saying it’s ugly, but…it looks like an MQ-9 and a CRJ had a baby, and now you can never unsee it)

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