Well, the Pentagon is certainly pushing up against the Christmas deadline. Yesterday, the DoD, sorry, DoW, announced over $400M in APFIT contracts using FY26 funds—the first of the year—bringing total contracts awarded by the nearly four-year-old program to over $1.4B.
While the DoD didn’t release names of the companies in this batch of projects—as per—a quick look at the tech (we’re journalists, guys) points to Fuse Integration and Sea Machines/Leidos as a few of the lucky winners.
“Crossing the billion-dollar threshold underscores APFIT’s commitment to America’s small business innovators, and we are proud to accelerate the delivery of these critical capabilities to our warfighters,” Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said in a statement.
Wouldn’t call Leidos a small business, but who are we to judge?
Race to accelerate: First, a bit about APFIT. The program—full name “Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies”—was introduced way, way back in the prehistoric year of 2022, designed to help small businesses building military tech bridge the infamous “valley of death” and speed up development. APFIT:
- Was first funded by the FY22 NDAA
- Has awarded—in total—over $1.4B in contracts to over 75 different companies
- Received roughly $1.4B in funding between the appropriations act and BBB this year
- Awards contracts between $10M and $50M to small businesses and non-traditional defense contractors
This fresh FY26 batch saw the highest-ever APFIT contract award—$49.7M for “Real-Time Command and Control at the Tactical Edge” with the Army. The other contracts include (strap in):
- $20M for autonomous UGVs for ground-based air defense (GBAD) with the Marine Corps
- $22.15M for deployable, attritable optical systems for the Space Force
- $28M for domestic high-performance UAS batteries for the Navy
- $35M for Gremlin low-cost munitions for the Marine Corps (this is a spin-out of a DARPA program contracted to Dynetics in 2018)
- $21.66M for High Frequency Intercept Direction Finding and Exploitation (HIDES) for the Army
- $33M for Kraken 18 communications pods for the Navy (that’s likely Fuse Integration)
- $20M for miniaturized gyroscopes for resilient navigation for the Marine Corps
- $25M for mobile smart manufacturing for airframe spares for the Air Force
- $48.5M for augmented maneuver vehicles for satellites for the Space Force
- $49.7M for real-time command and control at the tactical edge for the Army
- $24M for small uncrewed maritime vessels for the Navy and Marine Corps
- $10M for tactical high-bandwidth, low-latency, high-capacity data networks for the Marine Corps
- $35M for Trolling Uncrewed Navigation Assistant (TUNA) seekers for the Marine Corps
- $29.49M for Whaleshark autonomous low-profile vessels (ALPV) for the Marine Corps (that’s likely Sea Machines/Leidos)
And the Pentagon is just getting started. In the announcement, the DoD said it plans to use all of that sweet, sweet NDAA money to award more contracts to vendors and projects throughout the year “as they are selected.”
Look out, small defense businesses. It may be the holidays, but it sounds like it’s time to kick it into gear.