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- 🔷 Saved Rounds 2.17.25
🔷 Saved Rounds 2.17.25
Welcome to Tuesday's Saved Rounds, where we send out all the goodies we couldn't squeeze into our Sunday newsletter.
In that Number
70%
Ukrainian forces have reached a point where robots handle 70% of frontline logistics. This shift reduces infantry exposure in high-intensity areas, despite the high attrition rates and costs associated with maintaining these robotic fleets.
Zoom in
The U.S. Drone Dominance program is building hundreds of thousands of drones, but dominance isn’t just about building more drones, and the initiative may have a significant blind spot in developing a scalable sense-and-strike system.
Zoom in here to learn more about the hunter-killer dynamic.
They Said It
“The biggest risk is that when almost a million people are fighting, and we don’t understand how they fight – which ways work, which don’t work, which are effective, which are ineffective.”
— Lt. Col. Yuriy Myronenko, Ukraine's Deputy Defense Minister, on the nation’s new unified drone mission data platform.
Word of the Week
MQ-22 Swift: The MQ-22 Swift is an ultra-long-endurance drone that can fly for up to 8 days and carry up to 150 pounds of payload.
So What: This drone isn’t new—it’s Platform Aerospace’s Vanilla. The company quietly released the military designation on social media last month, and as of this writing, it’s still the only online reference.
On the Pod
The untold origin story about the Fury unmanned fighter jet!
Check it out!
Saved Rounds
SOCOM is looking for vendors for small cruise missile production
Rafael was selected for the Army's second IFPC Inc 2 interceptor competition (joining the race with Lockheed Martin and Anduril-Boeing)
Lockheed Martin unveiled Lamprey, a mini-submarine that attaches to other vessels
Natilus unveiled design enhancements for its blended-wing-body (BWB) aircraft
L3Harris integrated its Red Wolf cruise missile onto the OA-1K Skyraider II to garner SOCOM interest
The Pentagon selected 6 vendors for hypersonics R&D
HEO, SatVu, & Sierra Nevada won commercial imagery contracts from the NRO
Red Cat revealed the V7, an uncrewed vessel for long-range kinetic strikes
Stoke Space added $350M to its Series D funding for its Nova rocket launch
Hypersonica successfully tested a Mach 6 missile prototype at a range of 180+ miles
Boeing showcased its long-range anti-ship & mining munition for strategic bombers
Davie Defense won a Coast Guard contract for 5 Arctic security cutters
Elbit Systems revealed a C-390 variant specialized for ISR and SIGINT
Taiwan scrapped its $308M C-130H upgrade to buy 10 new C-130Js
Axiom Space secured $350M in funding to support its commercial space station
The ISR market is projected to reach $76.5B by 2035
The Joint Fires Network is moving from prototype to an integrated program office
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