Latest Stories
What Ukraine Stands to Lose
Aid paused (again): After meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at last week’s NATO summit in The Hague, President Donald Trump was pretty gung-ho on Kyiv. When asked about whether the country would receive more desperately-needed Patriots, he said they “want to have the anti-missile missiles, as they call them, and we’re going to see if […]
Castelion Wins Big in Army Budget
Cash-telion: The hype for hypersonics is real. In its FY26 budget, the Army is requesting $25M to develop “Blackbeard” hypersonic missiles made by Castelion—just five months after the California-based missile startup raised $100M in a Series A funding round. Talk about a hot launch. Origin story: Castelion was founded in 2022 by three former SpaceX […]
Two Bills, One Budget, and a Headache
As the saying goes, there are some weeks where decades happen. Between intel leaks at home, the NATO summit in The Hague, and a rather unorthodox ceasefire in Iran, last week was (another) one of those in the defense world. And then came the kicker: On Thursday, the Pentagon unveiled its FY26 budget request. Like, […]
The Tech of the “Twelve Day War”
By this point, we all get the gist of what happened last weekend. Super-early Sunday morning Tehran time, US B-2 stealth bombers flew 37 hours nonstop from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Iran and back, dropping more than a dozen 30,000-pound “bunker buster” GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) on three Iranian nuclear enrichment […]
A Q+A with Pete Newell, CEO of BMNT and Co-founder of Hacking for Defense
Ten years ago, when Pete Newell, Steve Blank, and Joe Felter launched the Hacking for Defense (H4D) course at Stanford, “defense” was still a dirty word in Silicon Valley. Investors were reluctant to put their money into defense tech, engineers were uninterested in the military, and tech companies kept their distance from the DoD. As […]
A Q+A with Anduril’s President and CBO, Matthew Steckman
If you read this newsletter regularly, you’ll know that Anduril has had a hell of a year. In January, the company announced that it’s building a massive, cutting-edge production facility called Arsenal-1, and has since secured major DoD contracts for everything from cUAS, to an Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), to rocket motors. And that’s […]
The Godfather of Defense Innovation: A Q+A with Steve Blank
Chances are, if you’re interested in innovation, you’ve heard of Steve Blank. The entrepreneur, educator, and founding member of the Gordian Knot Center at Stanford University is a legend: he has built company after successful company and helped to develop the “Lean Startup” methodology based on his decades in Silicon Valley. If you’ve ever been […]
Q+A with Raj Shah, Managing Partner at Shield Capital
When Raj Shah was tapped to launch the experimental Defense Innovation Unit (DIUx) in 2016, he could barely secure a budget. Raj was a former F-16 pilot and Wharton graduate. He knew that the kind of innovation that drove Silicon Valley could help close the yawning gaps he saw in US capabilities. But the rest […]
