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- 🔷 Saved Rounds 3.3.26
🔷 Saved Rounds 3.3.26
Welcome to Tuesday's Saved Rounds, where we send out all the goodies we couldn't squeeze into our Sunday newsletter.
In that Number
3 for $316M
Germany is going all-in on domestic loitering munition production, allocating money for contracting 3 companies for $316M each. Startups Stark Defence, Helsing, and (soon) Rheinmetall.
Zoom in
The Arctic is cold….duh. But is U.S. Arctic strategy plagued by "environmental detachment" of the brutal realities of operating in the High North?
Zoom in here to explore the pain of sub-zero operations and some ways to make it work. Hint: move from persistence to rotational.
They Said It
“The biggest question I hear about why people don’t want small- and medium-capability is because they’re concerned about who commands and controls it, and in my mind, that’s the point. You don’t have to command and control it. This is like a distributed maneuver pool, like a Jeep used to be in the Army. It’s inexpensive, it’s easy to operate, and we give it to maneuvering commanders in the field.”
— Gen. (Ret.) Michael Minihan, former AMC Commander, advocating for a shift from high-end centralized airlift to a "Jeep-like" distributed logistics model
On the Pod
We have the untold origin story about the Fury unmanned fighter jet!
We chat with the people who created it, what led them to sell their company to Anduril, and how that experience led them to create an investment fund called the DoD Accelerator to help other companies with what they went through.
Check it out!
Feed the beast: like, comment, and share
to make the algorithm happy!
Shahed 136 passing a LUCAS drone over Iran last weekend
Saved Rounds
Castelion won a $50M Navy contract to produce its Blackbeard hypersonic weapon
FlyFocus raised €4.5M in funding to build European UAVs
TYTAN Technologies raised a €30M Series A round for AI-powered air defense
AV won a $186M Army contract for next-generation Switchblade loitering munitions
Rheinmetall & Rocket Lab are in a bidding war for Mynaric (laser comm firm)
The Navy is looking for a new long-range anti-radar missile
The Army designated Yuma Proving Ground as its primary counter-UAS test hub
Northrop Grumman named their YFQ-48A fighter drone Talon Blue
The Space Force is looking for industry-provided on-orbit satellite refueling by 2030
Picogrid & Guardian RF partner to defend Vandenberg from drones
L3Harris cut hypersonic component production time by 10X
Sophia Space raised a $10M Seed round for data centers in space
Frankenburg Technologies raised a €30M Series A for affordable missiles
23 firms launched the Alliance of Canadian Defense Companies
The Army is seeking industry’s best electromagnetic spectrum solutions
Green Flag Ventures invested in MaXon Systems to develop autonomous anti-drone platforms
Boeing moved their defense and space headquarters back to St. Louis
xAI's Grok was cleared to operate on classified military networks
Vantor won a $217M Army contract to support the One World Terrain program
Textron Systems won an Army LASSO contract for loitering munitions
Phantom Space acquired Vector Launch IP to accelerate rocket development
JIATF 401 launched a counter-UAS marketplace for quickly procuring tech
Mach Industries opened a new San Francisco hub to scale unmanned systems
The Navy plans to award a $100M contract to support MQ-25 production (each MQ-25 costs more than that)
The Navy is looking for expendable EW decoys for its fighter fleet
Pratt & Whitney announced a $200M investment to expand its Georgia facility
BBN Technologies won a DARPA contract to X-ray things 1km+ away
South 8 & 3ME intend to develop lithium-ion military batteries for Arctic use cases
IAI delivered an autonomous submarine to the German Navy
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