Drone fever is hitting new heights, and if the Senate’s latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act becomes law, the Pentagon will have a brand-new combatant command dedicated to autonomous systems. Last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted 18-9 to advance the FY 2027 NDAA, authorizing $1.14T in spending and setting the stage […]
Unlike in the UK, it’s Christmas in June for the US defense world. Yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee released its $1T FY2027 defense spending bill—in line with the Pentagon’s request—and there’s a lot to get excited about for our friends in the startup world (and of course, the primes, too). That eye-watering number doesn’t include […]
Well, guys. The moment you’ve all been waiting for is here. This morning, the Silicon Valley Defense Group released its fourth annual NatSec100 report, looking at the state of things in our cute lil’ defense tech world and the companies dominating the game. And lucky for you, we here at Tectonic got an exclusive first […]
Well, the $1.5T defense budget is here, friends. In case you missed it—on Friday, the Trump administration unveiled its FY2027 budget request. As promised, it included a chunk for defense ($1.15T discretionary and $350B mandatory, reconciliation style), larger than the GDP of Turkey. Yes, that is a real statistic. On the menu? Big bucks for […]
Pour one out for MASC. Yesterday, less than a year after announcing it, the US Navy canceled the Modular Attack Surface Craft (MASC) program—originally designed as a prototyping competition to field medium unmanned surface vessels (MUSVs)—in favor of a “regular and recurring marketplace” for mid-sized drone boats. Reactions to the shift in the USV world […]
Looks like the White House just can’t quench its thirst for the minerally good stuff. This morning, Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration is set to launch a critical mineral stockpile, called Project Vault, backed by $12B in seed money split between $1.67B in private capital and a $10B loan from the US Export-Import Bank. […]
Well, it’s certainly been a busy start to the week for the Pentagon press office. Yesterday, between a rabble-rousing speech by Pete Hegseth at Lockheed’s factory in Fort Worth, the release of a plan to fully overhaul the DoD’s innovation ecosystem, another plan to accelerate AI development for the military, and the official announcement of […]
We can all breathe a sigh of relief. On Sunday night, Congress finally released a compromise draft of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a breezy 3,000-page bill that authorizes a record $901B in defense spending, $8B more than the White House initially requested. The must-pass bill is headed for a vote in the coming […]
If you’ve been tracking some numbers coming out of the Pentagon recently, you’ll have seen a whole lot of zeroes. Earlier this week, the Department of Defense/War (take your pick, we don’t judge) dropped a whopping $150B solicitation for the Missile Defense Agency’s Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) program, tapping over 1,000 “qualifying […]
Well, the whole defense spending kick is showing no signs of abating. Yesterday, Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te announced in an op-ed in the Washington Post that his country plans to spend an extra $40B (about NT$1.25T) on defense to counter the growing threat from China. A massive portion of the supplementary defense package—which would be […]
