Happy Hegseth Lecture Day to all who celebrate! Everyone’s favorite new monthly tradition—SecDef Pete Hegseth gathering a bunch of super important people for a stern talking-to—is back for its November rendition, but with a bit of a twist this time. Instead of calling his audience fat, Hegseth is set to deliver an “Arsenal of Freedom” […]
When President Trump said, “If [NATO members] don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them,” earlier this year, his mind was clearly on Europe. That message got through and ignited a speedy and spendy military buildup on the Old Continent, sure, but one much bigger—and closer—NATO ally has stayed out of the defense spending spotlight […]
Neros is turning things up a notch. Earlier this week, the California-based drone startup announced that it has scored a multi-million-dollar delivery order contract from the US Marine Corps for thousands of its Archer drones. Plus, most of the FPVs will have a mini-warhead attached to make them lethal. Big buzz: Neros’ Archer FPV quadcopter […]
The DoD, sorry, DoW, has really gotten a taste for critical minerals. On Monday, rare-earth magnet maker Vulcan Elements announced a whopping $1.4B partnership with the Pentagon, Department of Commerce, and ReElement Technologies to scale their vertically integrated rare-earth magnet supply chain. Sounds like the meeting with Xi wasn’t that good. Rare air: Drones have […]
Everything’s bigger in Texas, especially the explosions. On Monday, Aeon, an Austin-based smart missile startup, announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it has successfully completed all-up live-fire tests of its Zeus missile platform for the US Army Transformation and Training Command (T2COM) and the Army Applications Lab (AAL) ahead of schedule. Talk about […]
Well, it’s been quite the week for the German defense tech scene. Yesterday, the Financial Times reported that the country plans to award a whopping €900M contract for kamikaze drones to three homegrown producers: STARK, Helsing, and Rheinmetall. Under the contract, according to the FT, each producer would supply the German military with about 12,000 […]
The era of France’s main exports being wine and cheese may be coming to an end, at least if Alta Ares has anything to do with it. On Thursday, the French counter-drone software company, in partnership with an undisclosed Ukrainian startup, announced it had kicked off mass production of its X-Wing interceptor drones for Ukrainian […]
In the near-future battlefield, and today in Ukraine, swarms of friendly drones will be deployed as fast as enemy ones come in. For counter-drone tech, knowing which ones to shoot down can be hard. On Wednesday, Allen Control Systems unveiled a solution to this conundrum: A cryptographically secure, radio-silent identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system that tells […]
There’s a lot of hype around both drones and space-based tech, and Radical Aero wants to capitalize on both. The Seattle-based stratospheric aircraft startup emerged from stealth after a $4.5M seed round last April and is making autonomous solar-powered drones that fly at high altitudes for months at a time. And on Wednesday, the company […]
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Germany has done a pretty sharp U-turn on the whole “we’re pacifists” thing it’s had going since the end of WWII. In the past few months, the country has placed some big-time defense orders, passed a bill introducing voluntary military service and potentially conscription, exempted defense spending […]
