🔷 Saved Rounds 9.17.24

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

💎 GIVEAWAY! We’re giving away a laser-etched A-10 30mm shell from @30mmshells. Here’s the SPINS:

1. Locate your super special referral link at the bottom of this email

2. Share the Merge using that link

3. Repeat #2 to increase your odds of winning (1 referral = 1 entry)

4. Winner will be drawn next week

Motherhood complete!

They Said It
“We have a lot of legacy applications within the department — I mean a lot. We still have applications that run on mainframes that are critical to day-to-day operations, and the people who wrote those are dead.”

— John Hale, chief of cloud services at the Defense Information Systems Agency, describing the state of the Pentagon’s IT and how they are using AI to modern legacy code of these ancient systems

Fighter Pilot Wade "Stab" Holmes is & Family
are in the fight of their lives.

His fighter squadron has started a way to provide mutual support with just $1, but we were so moved that we donated The Merge’s entire monthly income to the cause.

Please spend a minute to
 read their story.

Zoom in

A new paper outlines how the US needs to work better with allies and partner nations on defense tech acquisition.

Zoom in here to learn how to “Buy the Way We Fight.”

In that Number

$1.3B

Taiwan committed $1.3B to buy L3Harris ‘Viper Shield’ EW systems for its fleet of 66 F-16V fighters.

Check our latest episode with Dan Magy, co-founder and CEO of Firestorm.

They’re on a mission to democratize the air by re-imaging how drones are built by making them radically affordable and mission-adaptable.

They developed a method to 3D-print drones at the point of need, using a combination of shipping-container-based factories and localized supply chains.

Best of all, the drones are modular—from props to jets, AI to sensors, etc.

Check it out!

YouTube 

Apple 

Spotify

They Said It
“Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware.”

— SpaceX throwing shade at the FAA and EPA (and probably some other agencies) over the fumbled approvals for Starship’s next test flight

Saved Rounds

• Piasecki’s massive VTOL tilt-ducted transport drone started flight testing

• Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornets are getting JASSM stealth cruise missiles

• NATO’s DIANA picked 10 companies for Phase II of the defense tech accelerator

• BAE is using 3D printing to produce primary structural components for the Tempest fighter

• Sev1Tech won a $188m Air Force production agreement to expand the meshONE-Terrestrial network used by the service’s Battle Network

• OneWeb launched a GPS-alternative receiver that uses alternative broadcast services (Iridium, etc.)

• Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 plane flew for the third time

• Hermeus is building a hypersonic engine test facility in Florida

• Vantage Robotics introduces nano drones for operations in contested environments

• Northrop Grumman might jump back into the Air Force’s NGAD 6th-gen fighter competition (pending what changes the paused program makes)

• A Marine Corps AH-1Z Viper sank a moving vessel with an AGM-179 JAGM for the first time (Hellfire missile replacement)

• Anduril and Oracle are partnering to bring Lattice to Oracle's OCI (air-gapped cloud for classified use)

• Anduril plans to launch a space-based testbed next year

• Orbital Composites won an AFWERX TACFI award to build a fleet of Starfighter X drones

• Merlin kicked off a flight test campaign to certify its autonomous Cessna Caravan

• Merlin’s planned acquisition of EpiSci fell through

• NATO ordered $133m in Paveway bomb guidance kits from RTX

• Canopy Aerospace was tapped by the Air Force to develop a hypersonic thermal protection system based on transpiration-cooling (sweating metal)

• L3Harris was reaffirmed as the winner of the Navy’s EA-18G Growler Next-Gen Jammer-Low Band (NGJ-LB) program and awarded a $587m contract

• The US released $1.3B in military aid to Egypt

• Egypt is replacing US F-16s with Chinese J-10C fighter jets

• The Air Force selected Whiteman for the second B-21 bomber base, alluding that the B-2 will be retired before the B-1

• BAE was awarded a $4m contract as a performer on DARPA’s AIR program (autonomy on VENOM F-16s doing a counter-air mission)

• Bell is trying to sell the V-280 Valor tiltrotor to Australia

• DIU awarded 3 contracts to prototype a database for unmanned systems to operate in disconnected environments (Ditto, Syntiant and HarperDB)

• Turkey finalized plans for its Steel Dome layered air defense system

• Norway ordered 3 more TPY-4 Radars from Lockheed Martin

• The Air Force selected 7 companies for its $5.4B contract air support services program (contract air for CAS)

• General Dynamics is acquiring Iron EagleX, a provider of AI, cybersecurity, and software to special forces

• Hungary welcomed its first KC-390 Millenium aircraft

• Japan was approved to buy KC-46 tankers

• Romania was approved to buy 32 F-35A fighters

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