🔷 Saved Rounds 3.4.25

Welcome to Tuesday's Saved Rounds, where we send out all the goodies we couldn't squeeze into our Sunday newsletter.

Today is Fat Tuesday—and TIL that ‘Mardi Gras’ is French for ‘Fat Tuesday’ and I don’t know how I got this far in life without knowing it.

 PODCAST

Joe “Grip” Beissner, Director of Requirements and Capabilities for Radio Frequency Solutions at ⁠Raytheon⁠, a business of RTX, joined us to discuss the cutting-edge AESA radars Raytheon delivers for our warfighters.

You can find it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast content.

They Said It

“So an all-long-range force…it sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? You sit in Topeka, Kansas, you press a red button, the war gets fought. Nobody gets hurt. It’s all done at long range, but it doesn’t win because it just can’t sustain the tempo of the fight.”

— Air Force Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, on the pressing need underpinning the service’s Next Gen Air Dominance fighter program.

Zoom in

What is C3BM, where did it come from, and why does it matter?

It stands for Command, Control, Communications, and Battle Management, but the rest is complicated for those who don’t live in this realm.

Fortunately, the Air Force put out a great overview—zoom in here to get up to speed.

In that Number

$6.9B

The Pentagon is requesting $6.9B for hypersonic projects this year, which DepSecDef nominee Stephen Feinberg testified is not enough.

 Together with Raytheon

Saved Rounds

• General Atomics tested the MQ-9B SeaGuardian anti-submarine warfare capabilities

• Denmark is increasing defense spending above 3% of GDP for the next 2 years ($7B ) for rapid investments in fighting capabilities

• The UK plans to increase defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 % of GDP on defense by 2027

• BlackSky won a multi-million DIU contract for its next-gen ISR satellite

• Teledyne FLIR Defense won a $15m Germany contract for Black Hornet nano-drones

• Skydio won a $19m Spanish contract for X10D drones

• Norway allocated $312M to purchase military equipment from Ukrainian companies to support the war

• Lockheed Martin delivered the 18th C-130J to the Coast Guard for conversion to the HC-130J Combat King II aircraft

• Poland signed a $300m contract to lease 8 Boeing AH-64D Apache helicopters until the AH-64E orders arrive in 2028

• France is accelerated its rearmament plan, including more Rafale fighters, frigates, and unmanned systems

• Xona Space was awarded a $4.7m Air Force contract to demo Pulsar, the company’s constellation of LEO satellites that provides a GPS-alternative

• Baykar tested a TB2 drone variant with a turbo engine and AI (computer vision, autonomy etc.)

• The US & India are launching a new alliance for autonomous systems

• Sweden is buying Taurus KEPD-350 cruise missiles for its Gripen C/D fighter fleet

• Lockheed Martin unveiled a scalable, layered counter-drone system designed to detect, track, and neutralize threats

• Kongsberg delivered its unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV, aka drone sub) prototype to the US Navy for testing

• Boeing announced the end of Little Bird helicopter production

• India tested a helicopter-launched anti-ship missile

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