🔷 Saved Rounds 5.13.25

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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In that Number

$892.6 Billion

The Trump administration will request $892.6 Billion for the defense budget.

It was initially teased as a $1T defense budget, but that doesn’t look like it will happen.

In real terms, it’s a budget cut, not a boost, and has drawn bipartisan meh in Congress.

Tweet of the Week

The wind-up: The Chief of Staff of the US Air Force gave a state-of-the-force update.

The pitch:

Thanks for Following!

We asked and you delivered: this week we passed 9k followers on LinkedIn.

Next stop: 100k!

They Said It

“The second prototype will look slightly different from the outside – particularly around the air inlets – but the overall size remains the same,”

— Mustafa Demiroğlu, Turkish Aerospace Industries CEO, on the progress of its Kaan 5th-gen fighter program

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 ICYMI

Our friend Jell-O from the Fighter Pilot Podcast debuted his memoir last months, and it’s worth the click.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn how to land on an aircraft carrier (or, in Jell-O’s case, how not to), and you won’t believe the life-threatening medical condition he overcame to climb back into the cockpit of a high-performance jet fighter.

Grab Through the Yellow Visor in print or digital on Amazon — or get the audio book from Audible.

Check it out!

Zoom in

Remember that short-lived Gaza pier thing last year? It’s a mission called JLOT—Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore—and if it sounds like rapidly creating an expeditionary floating pier is hard...you’re right.

Zoom in here for a new declassified report on how good (and not-good) the Pentagon’s JLOT efforts have been over the past decade.

Saved Rounds

• Stratolaunch achieved a major milestone with its 2nd Talon-A2 hypersonic flight test

• The MDA’s Glide Phase Interceptor (hypersonic defense program) won’t field until 2035 due to a lack of funding, despite a Congressional mandate to be fielded by 2032

• Quantum Systems raised a $160M Series C round to accelerate production of its autonomous drones and associated software

• Israel is reportedly in talks to procure JASSM stealth cruise missiles from Lockheed Martin

• The Air Force’s T-7A completed sled-testing a new ejection system

• Tekever announced a $533M investment into UK defense research, infrastructure, and technology as part of the Overmatch program, coinciding with the StormShroud drone unveiling

• DZYNE unveiled its Grasshopper air-launched cargo drone glider

• Pratt & Whitney had 3,000 workers go on strike

• The Navy conducted the first flight test of the sea-based Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missile

• Saudi Arabia was approved to buy $3.5B in AIM-120C-8 missiles

• Space Force remains skeptical about the benefits of satellite refueling

• Boeing’s KC-46 boom-vision upgrade slipped to 2027

• Northrop Grumman was selected by the Space Force for relay stations supporting the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next-Gen OPIR) program

• Delian Alliance unveiled a new one-way attack drone for coastal defense

• Palantir announced that Anduril's Menace was its preferred vendor for Edge software

• Anduril is acquiring Klas, a key hardware vendor for the company’s Menace edge-computing product

• Navy stealthy special ops speedboats are getting kamikaze drone launchers

• The Space RCO sees a possible product line for orbital warfare satellites

• IonQ plans to acquire Capella Space to create the world’s first space-based quantum key distribution (QKD) network

• Boeing proposed a 2027 delivery for the new Air Force One with requirement trade-offs

• Saab started deliveries of its Arexis jamming systems to Airbus for integration on German Typhoons

• SNC received the 4th Boeing 747-8 airliner for conversion to the Air Force’s E-4C ‘Doomsday’ Survivable Airborne Operations Center

• Sierra Space completed a ground demo of a new nav satellite for the Space Force’s Resilient Global Positioning System (R-GPS) initiative

• The Space Force advanced 3 companies—CACI, General Atomics, and Viasat—to the next phase of its $100M laser comm terminal program (Blue Origin not selected)

• The UK certified the Royal Air Force’s Protector RG Mk1 (aka MQ-9B) to operate without geographic restrictions, the first-of-its-kind milestone for a large, unmanned aircraft

• Rocket Lab's Neutron rocket was selected for an experimental rocket cargo delivery mission

• The Army added special operations-specific requirements into the design of its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) tiltrotor, leading to an unspecified increase in weight

• Rheinmetall and Iceye established a joint venture to build synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites

• The Air Force’s B-52 Radar Modernization Program cost estimate increase triggered Congressional notification (>15% above program estimate)

• The Pentagon rolled out a 2-year plan to streamline software adoption (enterprise cloud, software factories, reduced red tape, etc.)

• SciTec won a $259M Space Force contract to develop a ground system for military missile-warning satellites

• L3Harris partnered with Thales to develop a short-range air defense (SHORAD) command system for the UK

• The Pentagon is implementing an ‘Anything-as-a-Service’ pilot program

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