🌊 Saildrone gets $16.3M to keep patrolling the Caribbean

Saildrone received a $16.3 million Navy task order to keep its Voyager unmanned surface vessels operating in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific into 2027.

The fleet supports Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S), which detects and monitors narco-traffickers under 4th Fleet's Operation Southern Spear.

Nearly three years of continuous presence moves uncrewed surface vessels out of experimentation and into sustained, routine fleet operations.

Joint Interagency Task Force 401 awarded four-year-old software firm Kaizen a $15 million contract to build a digital marketplace for counter-drone systems.

Vetted military, law enforcement and allied buyers can compare and purchase from Anduril, DroneShield, SMARTSHOOTER and AeroVironment through a tiered access catalogue.

Marketplace purchases now total $21 million, up from $13 million in April, with Australia, Poland, South Korea, the UK and Romania onboarded.

Northrop Grumman signed $3 billion in seven-year framework agreements covering Patriot solid rocket motors at $2 billion and THAAD structural components at $1 billion.

The deals make Northrop a second rocket motor source, targeting a known supply bottleneck as officials aim to triple PAC-3 and quadruple THAAD output.

CSIS estimates the US has spent roughly a third of its Patriot interceptors and half its THAAD stock; analysts caution these are agreements pending appropriations.

Orbital Sentry closed a pre-seed round led by Ridgeline with participation from Superorganism and Hustle Fund; the amount was not disclosed.

The company is building commercial overhead persistent infrared (OPIR) sensing from geosynchronous orbit for missile launch warning and battlespace awareness.

Its first platform, Fire Sentry, targets wildfire detection within seconds of ignition, pairing a commercial revenue path with national security applications.

The Defense Department is soliciting AI to monitor inmate calls and messages at the Military Correctional Complex at Fort Leavenworth, with proposals due August 13.

Officials want semantic and agentic AI that flags emerging slang for drugs or criminal activity and translates between Spanish and English in near real time.

The tools must run on Amazon Web Services government cloud and interface with the facility's existing ViaPath phone system serving more than 650 inmates.

Senate appropriators unveiled a bipartisan continuing resolution funding the government through December 11 and rejected a $1 billion advance procurement request for the Trump-class battleship.

The bill also denied authority to obligate funds for five munitions lines, including PAC-3, Tomahawk, AMRAAM and two Standard Missile-3 variants.

Without that language the Pentagon says it risks cancellation liabilities on multiyear procurement contracts, though the bill does carry a shipbuilding exemption.

GM Defense's Expeditionary Power Integrated Kit powered two 4th Infantry Division command nodes at Project Convergence Capstone 6, carrying 9 and 30 kilowatt loads.

The system ran those nodes for three to eight hours without a generator, cutting the acoustic and thermal signatures that give away command post locations.

Integrated Dynamics Engineering's Tactical Hybrid Generator was evaluated alongside it, pointing to a crowded vendor field for Next Generation Command and Control power.

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