The counter-drone “duopoly” I flagged last issue lasted about five weeks. In the past ten days, CACI took a $500 million counter-drone IDIQ, DHS handed 12 companies seats on a $1.5 billion vehicle of its own, and the Marines bought a microwave weapon. Plus: Hadrian’s $1.37 billion bet that the factory is the product, the Navy builds its own drone czar while the Pentagon’s chair stays empty, and Lockheed opens a missile storefront.

Third issue. Last time I told you counter-UAS had become its own procurement category with an emerging two-vendor base. That framing is already obsolete, which in this market counts as a good week for the thesis and a bad week for the wording.

Top Signal: the counter-drone market just tripled its customer base, and the duopoly framing died in five weeks

Three awards in ten days, each answering a different part of the same question.

First, CACI. On July 28, Army Contracting Command awarded CACI a three-year, $500 million IDIQ to move its SkyValor counter-drone system into full-rate production for Joint Interagency Task Force 401, following operational evaluations at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma (CACI, Breaking Defense). The first task order deploys SkyValor under the Pentagon’s Domestic Shield program, defending US installations and critical infrastructure. Fifty bids came in for this one (The Defense News). Confirmed: that makes three $500 million-class counter-drone IDIQs from JIATF-401’s orbit since May, after Perennial Autonomy and AeroVironment.

Second, and bigger structurally: DHS. On August 1, the Department of Homeland Security opened ordering on a five-year, $1.5 billion counter-UAS IDIQ, spread across 12 companies in two tracks, hardware and services (Washington Technology, ExecutiveBiz). The hardware track alone carries a $1.01 billion ceiling and drew 57 offers. Fortem Technologies was the only small business to prime the hardware track, with Lockheed Martin and Microsoft as its subcontractors (Fortem). Read that cap-table-shaped sentence again: a Utah small business is the prime, and Lockheed is the sub. Also worth savoring: each awardee received a guaranteed minimum of $250 at award. Not million. Dollars. The IDIQ structure in one number.

Third, the defeat layer diversified. The Marine Corps awarded Epirus an $11 million contract for HAVOC, a vehicle-mounted high-power microwave system built on its Leonidas platform, with a universal sled mount so it can ride on different vehicles and work alongside the MADIS air defense system (DefenseScoop, Marine Corps Times). Small dollars, but it puts directed energy on a fielding path with a delivery target rather than a demo schedule.

My read: the story is no longer which vendors win. It’s how many distinct customers now exist. In June this looked like one buyer, JIATF-401, standing up a deliberate two-supplier base. Today there are at least three buyer classes: JIATF-401 for the joint force, DHS for borders and federal facilities, and the services buying their own defeat systems on the side. Each runs its own vehicle, its own task-order cadence, its own vendor pool. For companies, that’s three separate pipelines to feed and three separate BD teams to fund. For investors, it means counter-UAS revenue quality now varies enormously by which customer sits behind it: a JIATF-401 task order, a DHS ceiling seat, and an $11 million Marine prototype contract are three very different assets wearing the same category label. The loser in this structure is the single-sensor point solution with no integration partner. Every one of these vehicles rewards companies that show up as a layered stack, which is exactly why Fortem arrived holding hands with Lockheed and Microsoft.

Deal Flow

Hadrian (US) raised $1.37 billion in a Series D at a $7.87 billion valuation, announced August 6, co-led by WCM Investment Management, Washington Harbour Partners, Valor Equity Partners, 137 Ventures and Baillie Gifford, with JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group as anchor co-lead (Hadrian). Reported: the valuation is roughly five times the $1.6 billion mark from its January round (Dealroom). So what: this is the largest US defense round since Anduril’s Series H, and it went to a company that doesn’t make a weapon. Hadrian sells manufacturing capacity, factories-as-a-service for munitions, shipbuilding and autonomous systems. The market has moved one layer down the stack, from funding the product to funding the ability to produce anything at all. Note who anchored: JPMorgan through a dedicated security initiative. When bank strategic capital co-leads a defense manufacturing round, the “is this a VC fad” question gets harder to sustain.

Context: capital keeps concentrating rather than spreading. Crunchbase counts 107 defense-tech venture rounds so far in 2026 against a funding total that already cleared 2025’s full-year record months ago (Crunchbase). Fewer, larger checks into proven names, same pattern all year. Hadrian fits it exactly.

Contract Watch

The Navy built its own drone czar while the Pentagon's remains an empty chair. On August 5, Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao established a Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Robotic and Autonomous Systems, DRPM RAS, and put Christopher Miller in the seat on an acting basis (US Navy). In the same move, the Navy removed Rebecca Gassler, who had run its robotic and autonomous systems acquisition portfolio for fewer than eight months (USNI News). The service says the new office will "operate in concert" with the Pentagon-wide DRPM-UxS. So what: six weeks after the June 29 memo, the Pentagon's own unmanned czar still has no name attached, and the first service just stood up a parallel structure with an actual human in it. You can read that as coordination. I read it as the Navy protecting its lane before the joint office gets a director with the authority to take it. The org chart is the battlefield here, and the services move faster on org charts than on anything else.

RTX drew $271 million for AEGIS Weapon System MK 99 fire control modernization, and General Dynamics Mission Systems took a $230 million modification for Hammerhead mine units (Govly, from DoD announcements). So what: unglamorous sustainment and modernization line items, which is where prime revenue actually lives while the headlines chase drones.

Voyager Technologies keeps stacking defense work. The Space Force tapped Voyager for in-orbit satellite communications, weeks after Raytheon selected it for propulsion on the SM-3 interceptor family and DARPA funded phase two of its adjustable solid-rocket-motor program (The Defense Post). So what: three different customers, three different mechanisms, one quarter. Component suppliers that sit under multiple programs are the quiet compounders of this cycle, the Karman pattern repeating.

Tech Radar

Lockheed Martin just launched a product line the way a startup would, and that’s the story. On August 10, Lockheed announced Strigo, a set of modular RF sensors, missile datalinks and seeker technologies built on a common baseline architecture, sold through a dedicated product center the company describes as a storefront of “ready-now and near-ready” hardware (Lockheed Martin, Defense News). The company says it has put $250 million into the center to date and that Strigo work already informed the seeker package on Precision Strike Missile Increment 2 (reported, company figures).

What it actually is: productization. The traditional prime model builds hardware against a formal requirement, one program at a time, on the government’s schedule. Strigo inverts that: build the modules first, on internal money, before a requirement exists, then reconfigure them across air defense, missile defense and strike missions. That’s the operating model Anduril has marketed since 2017 and the reason challengers claim they move faster. What it’s not: a new weapon. No contracts, customers or delivery timelines were named beyond the PrSM reference, and Defense News noted the release was thin on the center’s size and structure. Put it next to March’s Rapid Fielding Center and July’s half-price PAC-3 ACE interceptor and the pattern is unmistakable: the largest prime is systematically adopting the challenger playbook, product-first, internally funded, priced to compete. The “primes are dinosaurs” thesis has always been lazy. This is what the counterattack looks like.

Reading List

1. Washingtonian: Meet DC’s 2026 leading defense-tech innovators. A who’s-who of the boom, and the most readable treatment yet of the conflict-of-interest question as investors, former officials and family members converge on the same contracts. Long, worth it.

2. USNI News: Navy removes head of drone programs after 8 months. The cleanest account of the reshuffle, and the eight-month tenure is the detail to sit with. Acquisition reform eats its own org charts.

3. Inside Unmanned Systems: DHS awards $1.5 billion counter-UAS contract to 12 companies. Read it for the timeline: the awards slipped eight months past DHS’s own projections. Even urgent procurement runs on procurement time.

4. Breaking Defense: JIATF-401 awards CACI $500M for non-kinetic cUAS. Short, and the “non-kinetic” framing matters: the task force is deliberately buying across defeat mechanisms, not picking a winner.

5. Defense News: Lockheed launches modular missile tech with dedicated storefront. Appropriately skeptical on the missing details. The best coverage of Strigo asked what wasn’t announced.

What to Watch

Swarmer reports Q2 tomorrow, August 13, after the close, a day later than I projected last issue (Swarmer). The test stands as written: whether the $33.1 million backlog is converting into recognized revenue. One number to anchor on: Q1 revenue was $20,325. Not million, not thousand, twenty thousand three hundred twenty-five dollars (Quartr). The company is guiding to $19.9 million for the full year, which means essentially the entire income statement has to materialize in the next two quarters. Thursday tells us if it started.

The DRPM-UxS chair enters week seven empty. My bet from Issue 1, a DIU or commercial pick over a career acquisition official, still stands. But the Navy’s move this week raises the stakes: every additional week without a name gives the services more time to build parallel structures the eventual czar will have to negotiate with rather than direct.

DHS task-order pace. Ordering on the $1.5 billion vehicle opened August 1. Same rule as always with IDIQs: ignore the ceiling, count the draws. The first few task orders will show whether DHS components actually buy through the shared vehicle or keep going around it.

That’s the issue. This week’s ask: if the counter-drone map in the Top Signal was useful, forward this to one person who tracks that market. They’ll want the DHS vendor list before their competitors read it.

Corrections policy: errors get fixed publicly at the top of the next issue and in the comments here. Spotted one? Reply with a reputable source link.

This newsletter analyzes publicly available information about the defense industry. It does not cover operational military matters and takes no political positions.

Swarmer popped 950% in March, gave most of it back, and still can’t be valued on its revenue. Plus: NATO’s $50 billion Ankara list decoded for the American primes, the drone czar’s empty chair, and Helsing’s $1.8 billion American-funded round.

Second issue. Last week I said we’d cover who won NATO’s Ankara summit and who got named to run the Pentagon’s new drone office. One of those happened. The other is still an empty chair, and that turns out to be the more interesting story.

Top Signal: the year's best-performing IPO is a defense-software company with $310,000 in revenue, and everyone stopped watching right when it got interesting

Back in March, Swarmer (Nasdaq: SWMR) had the loudest debut in defense tech. The Austin-based, Ukraine-rooted drone-autonomy software company priced at $5, closed its first day up roughly 520% near $31, and ran into the $60s within the week (Crunchbase, DroneXL). Every outlet wrote the 950%-pop story. Almost none of them wrote the next one.

Here it is. Four months on, SWMR trades around $42, a market cap near $450 million (Yahoo Finance, StockTitan). Against trailing-twelve-month revenue of about $310,000 and a net loss of $8.5 million, that is roughly 900 times sales. The company is guiding to $19.9 million in 2026 revenue off a reported $33.1 million backlog (Seeking Alpha). Confirmed: this is the first venture-backed, next-generation defense-software company from the current funding cycle to trade in public. Karman (KRMN) beat it to the tape in early 2025, but Karman sells missile and space components. Swarmer is the autonomy-software thesis itself, listed and priced.

My read: the pop was never the signal. The settle is. The market gave back the frothy peak and still holds Swarmer at a multiple no revenue can justify, which tells you public investors will pay enormous premiums for the specific story of combat-proven autonomy software and will not wait for the income statement to catch up. That is the same thesis funding Anduril's Lattice and Shield AI's Hivemind in private markets, now getting its first daily mark-to-market.

The catch, and it is a large one: Swarmer sold 3 million shares and raised $15 million. On a float that thin, price discovery is close to fiction. So the honest lesson for the four-dozen defense names Crunchbase tags as likely IPO candidates is not "the window is open at any price." It is that a micro-float can manufacture a headline valuation, and a real, Anduril-scale offering with actual share supply will get a completely different reception. Swarmer answered whether the public wants the story. It did not answer whether the public will fund the sector's exits at scale. That question is still open, and it is the one that matters.

Deal Flow

Helsing (Germany) raised $1.8 billion in a Series E at an $18 billion valuation, announced July 13, with Dragoneer leading and Lightspeed, General Catalyst, Accel and the prime Saab all participating (Defense News). It is Europe’s largest defense-tech round on record. So what: read the cap table, not the flag. This is American growth capital, General Catalyst and Lightspeed both wrote checks, setting the price on Europe’s flagship defense-AI company, with a European prime buying a strategic seat. When the incumbent invests instead of trying to outbuild you, you already know who blinked. Same pattern I flagged with Airbus and Quantum Systems last week.

Context on the US side: it is quiet this week, and that quiet is the signal. The big American rounds already cleared earlier in 2026. Anduril took roughly $5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation (Crunchbase), Shield AI $2 billion, Saronic $1.75 billion. The mega-round action has rotated to Europe because the top US names are, for the moment, done raising and busy spending. If you track base rates, the pattern holds: fewer deals, bigger checks, capital concentrating hard into the proven names.

Contract Watch

NATO announced more than $50 billion in new procurements at the Ankara summit on July 7 and 8 (NATO, Ankara Summit Declaration). Last issue I said we’d cover who won and, more usefully, who was expected to and didn’t. The US read: the marquee American win is Northrop Grumman, tapped to supply Triton uncrewed maritime surveillance aircraft to the alliance, alongside Saab GlobalEye early-warning aircraft and a tenth Airbus A330 tanker (NATO). The hardware is not the real story. The declaration’s language on eliminating defense-trade barriers among allies is worth more to US industry than any single award, because the structural tax on transatlantic defense sales has always been paperwork, not tariffs. What I did not see: any headline US prime capturing the munitions and air-defense production money, which is where the bulk of the 5%-of-GDP wave will actually flow. The primes that win Ankara’s follow-through will be the ones with European production footprints, not just European sales offices.

AeroVironment drew the first task order against its $500 million counter-drone IDIQ: roughly $80 million to defend Air Force Global Strike Command bases with the Titan system, posted July 6 (DefenseScoop). Last week I said the IDIQ ceiling was a number to ignore and the task-order pace was the number to watch. Here is task order one, three weeks in. That is a fast draw, and it says the base-defense requirement is real and funded, not aspirational.

Step back and the counter-UAS category now has a deliberate two-supplier base. Perennial Autonomy took a $500 million C-UAS IDIQ in May; AeroVironment took its matching $500 million in July (Defense News, DefenseScoop). The Army has committed a billion dollars to this one problem in under two months, split across two vendors it clearly does not want to depend on singly. Confirmed, and worth saying plainly: counter-drone is no longer a line item inside air defense. It is its own procurement category, with its own budget and its own emerging duopoly.

Tech Radar

The autonomy layer is the product now, and Swarmer’s own catalog is a clean illustration of the category the whole sector is converging on. Its three pieces are a command-and-control interface (STYX), a coordination engine that runs across drones from different manufacturers (MINAS), and an embedded operating system that abstracts the hardware away (TRIDENT) (Yahoo Finance). Strip the branding and that is the same architecture as Anduril’s Lattice and Shield AI’s Hivemind: a software layer that treats the airframe as interchangeable and keeps the value in the code.

This is how to read the CCA autonomy downselect. The Air Force settled the airframes in June, with Anduril and General Atomics winning Increment 1 production. The airframe was always the truck. The competition that decides who actually owns collaborative autonomy is the software downselect still running between Anduril, Shield AI and RTX’s Collins Aerospace. What Swarmer’s listing does is put a price, however distorted by float, on a pure-play version of exactly that layer with no airframe attached. If you want to know what the market thinks autonomy software is worth on its own, you now have a ticker. And it clears the one bar that matters in this category: by the company’s account, the software has run more than 100,000 real missions (reported, company figures), which no lab-grown competitor can claim, and which is precisely why investors keep looking past the income statement.

Reading List

1. Crunchbase News: After Swarmer’s debut, 12 other defense tech IPO candidates. The useful part is the list. Treat it as a watchlist, not a forecast, and count how many are software-layer plays.

2. Seeking Alpha: Swarmer, eye-popping IPO but the rally can’t be justified. A Strong Sell note with a $28 target. You don’t have to agree with the call to want the bear case in front of you before the August print.

3. USNI News: New Pentagon unmanned czar will oversee most drone programs. The cleanest read on the DRPM-UxS memo. Watch the carve-outs. CCA, MQ-25, Triton and the Navy’s medium USV stayed with the services. The primes protected their big programs.

4. NATO: The Ankara Summit Declaration. Primary source. Skim the procurement and defense-industrial paragraphs, ignore the rest. This is the document every “NATO spends billions” headline is paraphrasing, usually badly.

5. Defense News: Helsing raises $1.8 billion. Short and accurate on the number. Read it next to the cap table and ask who is really pricing European defense.

What to Watch

The drone czar’s chair is still empty. More than two weeks after the June 29 memo, no one has been named to run DRPM-UxS, the office that can override the services and steer a portfolio outlets put anywhere from $53 billion to $75 billion (USNI News, Defense One). Last issue, my bet was that the pick would come from a DIU or commercial background rather than the career acquisition workforce, and that the appointment would confirm or contradict the “speed to delivery” intent within a day. That bet stands, and the delay is starting to say something on its own: consolidating this much authority into one seat is easy to announce and hard to fill, because the right person has to be acceptable to four services that just lost control of their drone budgets.

Swarmer reports Q2 around August 12. First real test of whether the $33.1 million backlog is converting into recognized revenue or just press releases. Watch the revenue line against the string of small contracts announced since the IPO (SkyKnight, Meta Bureau, a Japan entry via Rakuten).

Drone Dominance phase two opens in August, and the Gauntlet structure narrows the field from roughly 25 vendors toward twelve for the first tranche of prototype delivery orders (FedBiz Access). This is the round I said would separate production lines from pitch decks. It will.

Prime earnings land late July. I’m not reading the top lines. I’m reading backlog mix: whether the drones-and-munitions surge is landing on Lockheed, RTX, Northrop and GD’s books or bleeding to the challengers. Ankara’s production money makes European footprint the tell.

That’s the issue. One ask this week, and it’s a different one from last time: reply and tell me what I missed. Who won at Ankara that I should have flagged, which round I underweighted, where the read is wrong. I would rather be corrected in the inbox than in public.

Corrections policy: errors get fixed publicly at the top of the next issue and in the comments here. Spotted one? Reply with a reputable source link.

This newsletter analyzes publicly available information about the defense industry. It does not cover operational military matters and takes no political positions.

Welcome to the first issue. The format stays the same every week: Top Signal, Deal Flow, Contract Watch, Tech Radar, Reading List, What to Watch. The beat is the defense technology industry itself: companies, capital, contracts, procurement. No operational military coverage, no politics. Everything is sourced and linked, because that’s how this should be done.

Top Signal: Ukraine opened defense tech exports, and the first shipment already crossed the border

For four years, the most battle-tested defense industrial base in the world was legally barred from selling abroad. That ended on July 1, when Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers approved the country’s first formal export mechanism for domestically produced weapons and defense technologies (Janes).

The mechanics matter more than the headline, as they usually do. Partner countries with government-to-government “Drone Deal” agreements (currently the Netherlands, Lithuania and Latvia, with Denmark, Germany, Canada and the US preparing their own) can buy directly from Ukrainian manufacturers. Export applications clear within 30 days, with a minimum contract value around $335,000 (FlightGlobal, Janes). The IP stays Ukrainian: re-export requires Kyiv’s written consent, and products built abroad on Ukrainian technology owe 20% of product value back to Ukraine’s state budget. A “critical products” list stays off the market entirely, and domestic military requirements legally come first (The Defense Post).

Here’s the math driving all of it. Ukraine’s defense production capacity has grown roughly 35-fold since 2022, from about $1 billion to $35 billion, while domestic contracts reportedly absorbed only around a third of that capacity last year. Output is projected to hit $55 billion in 2026 (The Defense Post). That overhang of combat-proven, low-cost capacity now has a legal route to Western buyers, and it moved immediately: on July 1, Ukraine issued its first-ever permit to export finished combat drones, a batch of F10 strike drones from F-Drones, shipped to the US military under the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program. F-Drones’ US arm is building an $18.4 million plant in Ohio (Euromaidan Press, FlightGlobal).

My read: every Western drone and counter-drone company just gained a competitor class that iterates faster, prices lower, and carries a combat record the marketing departments here can only gesture at. The smart money won’t compete head-on; it will form Ukrainian joint ventures, and the 20% revenue-share rule is precisely what makes that a clean transaction. For the first time, “license Ukrainian tech” is a priced, legal product. The one thing that could slow this down is the thing that always slows these frameworks down: export bureaucracy in practice rarely matches export policy on paper. Watch the actual permit volume, not the announcements.

Deal Flow

Quantum Systems (Germany) raised $1.2B at an $8B valuation, with backers including Airbus, Blackstone and Advent (Tech Startups, citing WSJ). The drone maker’s systems have flown thousands of missions in Ukraine, and this now ranks among the largest private defense tech rounds outside the US. The tell here is Airbus on the cap table. When a prime buys into a startup rather than trying to outbuild it, you know exactly who blinked.

Dominion Dynamics (Canada) raised a $100M Series A, reportedly the largest defense tech round in Canadian history, to build its AuraNet command-and-control platform and Scout robotic wingman (Tech Startups, citing Axios). The Anduril playbook is being franchised into allied markets, and Ottawa’s push for sovereign Arctic capability gives this one a committed anchor customer from day one. That’s the part that matters; the round size is secondary.

Context for both: defense tech VC passed $14.6B in the first five months of 2026, already clearing 2025’s full-year record of $9.6B, with capital concentrating into fewer, larger rounds (Crunchbase News). The market has stopped paying for concepts. It pays for contracts and manufacturing scale, and both of this week’s rounds fit that pattern exactly.

Subscribe now

Contract Watch

The Pentagon awarded AeroVironment a $500M, three-year IDIQ for commercial counter-drone technology, announced Wednesday under the Army section of the DoD’s contract updates (DefenseScoop). Standard reminder on reading IDIQ awards: that $500M is a ceiling, not booked revenue. The government draws against it through task orders, and the pace of those orders is the number that actually matters. AV’s shares had already jumped nearly 19% on record fourth-quarter revenue earlier in the week, and the contract added another leg. This is the second $500M-class counter-drone award in six weeks, after Perennial Autonomy’s in May. Counter-UAS is now a full procurement category, not a line item, and the budget trajectory says it stays that way.

The bigger procurement story got a fraction of the coverage, which tells you most people missed it. A June 29 memo, made public July 2, creates a Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems (DRPM-UxS): one office consolidating nearly all drone, ground robot, unmanned surface vessel and counter-drone programs, reporting straight to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. It can override the services on drone acquisition, move money between programs, and sits on a $53.6B budget request for autonomous platforms (Defense News). Anyone who has sold into this market knows what four services with four processes costs a small company. That friction just collapsed into a single buyer for the attritable-systems segment. The yet-unnamed director of this office is about to become the most important customer in the industry, full stop. Note the carve-outs, though: the major defense acquisition programs, including CCA and the Navy’s large unmanned platforms, stay with the services. The primes kept their lanes.

Tech Radar

The laser truck problem. The US military has largely settled on truck-mounted high-energy lasers for counter-drone work. AeroVironment’s 20 kW LOCUST has been tested on light tactical vehicles, and Oshkosh Defense showed a hybrid-electric vehicle at Eurosatory capable of 115 kW of exportable power with bursts up to 250 kW, built explicitly for future directed-energy weapons (Military Times).

The cost-per-shot argument for lasers is real: single-digit dollars versus millions for an interceptor missile. But the constraint has never been the beam. It’s generating and managing that much electrical power on a moving vehicle, plus the thermal load that comes with it. The value in directed energy accrues to the unglamorous layer: power generation, thermal management, vehicle integration. If you’re allocating attention in this segment, look at who makes the truck, not who makes the laser. The laser is becoming the commodity.

Reading List

1. Crunchbase: Defense startup funding hits an all-time record as VCs begin to eye exits. The best single overview of the 2026 funding surge. The exit-pipeline section, with nearly four dozen potential IPO candidates, is the part worth your time.

2. Defense News: Hegseth creates powerful new drone office. Read it for the carve-outs. What the office doesn’t control tells you which programs the primes protected.

3. FlightGlobal: Ukraine creates export framework for military technology sales. Concise on the mechanics. Bookmark the eligible-country list; it will grow.

4. Military Times: The US military wants a fleet of laser trucks. Long, and one of very few pieces that treats the power problem as the story it is.

5. Technical.ly: How defense tech startups can survive the funding boom. A necessary counterweight to the record-funding euphoria, from founders and investors themselves.

What to Watch

NATO’s Ankara summit runs July 7 and 8, and Secretary General Mark Rutte has said tens of billions in new defense contracts will be unveiled (Quwa). Next issue breaks down who actually won what, and, more usefully, who was expected to win and didn’t.

Drone Dominance phase two opens in August, with 48 companies reportedly competing for orders of 60,000 drones (Euromaidan Press). This round will separate the companies with production lines from the companies with pitch decks.

And watch who gets named to run DRPM-UxS. My bet: someone with a DIU or commercial background rather than a career acquisition official. The office was built to move fast, and the appointment will confirm or contradict that intent within a day of the announcement.

If one thing in this issue was useful, forward it to one colleague who’s been asking you about defense tech. That’s the whole ask this week.

Corrections policy: errors get fixed publicly in the comment section. Spotted one? Reply in the comments with a reputable source link.