🛸 Anduril Buys the Eyes That Watch Everything in Orbit

🔇 Iran's Upgraded Shahed Is Getting Quieter

🇷🇸 A NATO-Adjacent Air Force Just Armed Soviet Jets With Chinese Missiles

📌 Plus 24 more stories across Air, Land, Sea, Space & Cyber

Anduril is acquiring ExoAnalytic Solutions, a company that operates a network of 400 ground-based telescopes to track spacecraft in high Earth orbit and converts that positional data into space domain awareness tools for U.S. national security agencies. The deal, announced Tuesday, will more than double Anduril's space workforce from 120 to over 250 employees, and ExoAnalytic will be folded directly into Anduril rather than run as a separate subsidiary. Terms were not disclosed, though Anduril is simultaneously closing a $4 billion funding round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

The strategic logic is dense and worth unpacking. Anduril received a Pentagon contract in late 2025 to begin developing a space-based missile interceptor, and ExoAnalytic's machine vision algorithms, built to spot and characterize satellites in orbit, translate directly into the targeting geometry an interceptor needs to engage an incoming threat. The acquisition also positions Anduril squarely inside the Golden Dome missile defense architecture, where Congress has appropriated billions toward a constellation capable of tracking and engaging enemy missiles in real time. Maintaining situational awareness across that orbital layer is arguably the hardest unsolved software problem in the whole program, and Anduril just bought the company that has been working on a version of it since 2008. For competing primes and space defense vendors, this is the clearest signal yet that Anduril is building toward a full-stack space defense capability, not just another sensor product.

Anduril has three spacecraft planned for launch this year in partnerships with Apex Space, Impulse Space, and Argo Space, each drawing on ExoAnalytic's orbital data processing. How those missions perform will determine whether the acquisition's technical thesis holds under operational conditions. Separately, INDOPACOM's resources director said this week that CENTCOM is executing roughly 1,000 fires per day in the Iran campaign, and that ground commanders consistently identify the space layer as indispensable to those operations. Anduril just bought one of the few companies genuinely tracking what adversary spacecraft are doing up there.

Images circulated by Middle East security analyst Mohammed al-Basha show a modified Shahed-101 loitering munition with a front-mounted electric propeller, replacing the rear-mounted gasoline engine that gave earlier Shaheds their distinctive buzzing signature. The drone retains the classic fixed-wing, X-tail airframe and adds a detachable rocket booster for initial velocity at launch, leaving a quieter, lower-observable system at cruise altitude. The Shahed-101 already carries an 8-kilogram high-explosive warhead capable of both shaped-charge and fragmentation effects with a stated range of up to 800 kilometers, and U.S. officials have already publicly acknowledged that countering even the current-generation Shahed has been "disappointing." The UAE alone has absorbed over 1,500 incoming Iranian drones and missiles since the conflict's start.

The entire counter-UAS market has been built around detecting small drones partly by their engine noise; a quieter, lower-heat Shahed forces a rethink of sensor baselines across every C-UAS system in theater. Companies that have positioned their systems around acoustic detection, whether fielded or in development, are now facing an adversary that has directly addressed that vulnerability. The technology transfer calculus matters here too: Russia has been building Shaheds under license at scale, which means this electric-propulsion variant could reach Ukraine's battlespace as well. Watch for contract activity around multi-phenomenology counter-UAS approaches, combining radar, infrared, and acoustic sensors, as this new design profile gets incorporated into formal threat assessments.

Photos published this week show Serbian Air Force MiG-29SM+ fighters carrying the Chinese-made CM-400 supersonic standoff missile, making Serbia only the second country in the world, after Pakistan, to operate the weapon. The CM-400 is a fire-and-forget missile reaching Mach 4.5 in its terminal phase, with a claimed range of at least 155 miles and a choice of infrared or passive radar seeker heads for engaging ships or emitting ground targets. Pakistan's air force has claimed the missile was used to attack Indian S-400 air defense systems during the India-Pakistan conflict last year, though those claims remain unverified. What makes Serbia's acquisition notable is not just the missile itself, but the delivery mechanism: China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation's Standalone Weapon Fire Control System (SWFCS) allows integration of Chinese munitions onto non-Chinese airframes using a tablet controller in the cockpit, with no hardware or software changes to the host aircraft.

The SWFCS detail is what defense industry analysts should file away. It means the CM-400 is not locked to Chinese platforms, and that virtually any legacy fighter with available hardpoints is a potential customer. Serbia has been diversifying away from Russian arms suppliers since the Ukraine war made Russian materiel harder to acquire, buying from Airbus, Elbit Systems, and now CASIC in a pattern that reflects a broader dynamic: second-tier military powers are finding that Chinese precision weapons fill capability gaps that Western suppliers either won't address or can't deliver on schedule.

✈️ Air

🛡️ Land

🌊 Sea

🛰️ Space

🧠 C2 & Cyber

🏭 Industry & Policy

That's the brief. If this landed in the right inbox, forward it on.