Future of Defense Innovation

INNOVATION

Air Force Creating New Job Specialty in Base Air Defense

The Air Force is developing a new enlisted job specialty to defend bases against missile and drone attacks. Alarming damage to air bases across the Middle East during Operation Epic Fury focused leaders’ attention on the requirement.

The future of defense innovation

For more than 20 years, Arun Seraphin worked in Congress and at the White House, focusing on how changing legal processes and structures can help national security efforts better leverage science and technology.

AI

Overland AI Snags $20M Marine Corps Contract for AGVs

Looks like the clankers (robots, for the non-internet people among us) are here to stay.

TECHNOLOGY

AWS launches Secret Cloud for industry’s classified workloads

Amazon Web Services on Tuesday announced a new cloud offering designed to run contractor-owned classified workloads, a first for the defense industrial base and select research institutions that historically have had to build and maintain costly on-premesis infrastructure to support classified programs.

Anduril and Amazon’s mobile data center venture aims to bring edge computing to the frontlines

Anduril’s containerized command and data center, Menace-I, can now be outfitted with Amazon Web Services’s Outpost, the two companies announced Tuesday. With two people, the mobile data center “can stand up in under 10 minutes and moves by truck, rail, airlift, or helicopter sling load,” the company said in a press release.

New military tech hub opens at TU Delft to explore military drones, quantum computing

The Dutch military's new Defense White Paper, published this week, envisions drones becoming a cornerstone of future operations. To support that transformation, the Ministry of Defense is relying on close collaboration with universities and industry, with all three sectors working together at a new secure innovation hub at TU Delft, the Delft University of Technology.

US Navy completes major upgrades on two Arleigh Burke destroyers

The destroyers finished Depot Modernization Periods under DDG Modernization 2.0, adding the SLQ-32(V)7 electronic warfare suite.

POLICY

Meet the New Defense Policy Board Advising the Pentagon

The Defense Policy Board was established in 1985 to provide independent strategic advice to the defense secretary, deputy secretary and undersecretary for policy. Its work can involve long-term defense planning, force modernization, regional defense policy and other national security issues referred by Pentagon leadership.

SPACE

Inside the space data race

SpaceX and others have proposed launching tens of thousands of massive satellites for AI processing and other functions in a bid to alleviate some of the woes of terrestrial data centers. But can the technical challenges be overcome? Jonathan O’Callaghan takes a look.

EUROPE

The UK DIP Shows why the tech sector matters

The long-awaited UK Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was announced yesterday morning at a drone manufacturing centre in Swindon. Keir Starmer’s last policy announcement as Prime Minister was made under political duress, following the resignation of John Healey and Al Cairns, and with the newly-elected MP Andy Burnham on the cusp of assuming the role of PM. Despite emphasising innovation, autonomy, and AI, the DIP had zero direct mentions of startups, scale-ups, and venture capital.

The government is putting money behind technologies that are endemic to that ecosystem: drones, AI, quantum, and autonomy, and manufacturing.

STARTUPS

Stratos Ventures launches with $50M and a plan to help make Miami a defense-tech gateway

For decades, Israeli founders have looked to the United States when it came time to scale. Increasingly, they’re choosing Miami as their first stop.

That trend gained another signal this week with the public debut of Stratos Ventures, a defense technology and resilience-focused venture capital fund that operates between Tel Aviv and Miami.