Monday, October 12, 2026
The Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital has issued a conditional commitment for up to $1.5 billion in long-term financing to Wolfspeed, a silicon carbide and gallium nitride chipmaker that emerged from bankruptcy a year ago. Nothing has been signed.
The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin are discussing a deal for the F-35 that could run for up to ten years and cover both building the jet and keeping it flying, Breaking Defense reports. Production would stay at about 156 a year. The prize, and the problem, is spare parts.
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded Raytheon a five-year contract for Standard Missile-3 Block IB interceptors with a base value of $4.4 billion, rising to $6.3 billion with two option years. It follows multi-year deals for the SM-6, the Tomahawk and AMRAAM.
General Dynamics' board has elected Danny Deep, the company's president and a 25-year insider, to succeed Phebe Novakovic as chief executive on 1 January 2027. She becomes executive chairman. He inherits a backlog worth about 2.6 years of revenue and a company that says its task is to produce faster.
Anduril plans a shipyard at Sparrows Point in Baltimore County to make components and large assemblies for Virginia-class attack submarines, backed by a Navy contract worth up to $2.9 billion. It will not build whole submarines, and the yard is not expected to start work until 2030.
Hanwha Philly Shipyard said on Wednesday it has a contract to build the Missile Defense Agency's new Missile Range Instrumentation Vessel, for up to three ships with one firm. In July, the White House budget director announced two of them for $2 billion. This week's announcements gave no price.
Gloucestershire police were called to three suspicious vehicles near Whelford at about 12.45am on Sunday. Five men were arrested, first on suspicion of offences under the Explosives Act and then on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act. A major incident was declared, about 85 homes were evacuated, and an Army ordnance disposal team worked inside a cordon reported at 440 yards. Nothing detonated. Nobody has been charged.
Riyadh is the world's eighth-largest military spender and carries the heaviest defence burden of any major spender outside an active warzone. Its East-West pipeline has been struck, the Houthis hold the Bab al-Mandab, and it has said it will hold off on retaliation. The paperwork behind the spending explains the pause better than the spending does.
Contracts obtained through litigation describe four frontier labs each holding Defense Department agreements worth up to $200m, with bidirectional data exchange including model benchmarks and engineers embedded with the military. Procurement usually buys a product. This buys a relationship in both directions.
More than 400 pages of Defense Department contracts with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI were obtained through freedom-of-information litigation. The documents were disclosable when they were signed. What separated them from the public was not classification but the cost of asking twice.
The US Army's acquisition chief spent a day in August on a howitzer production line in Changwon. The more consequential arrangement is in Arkansas, where a Korean firm has a preliminary lease at a US arsenal to build a $1.3bn plant making nitrocellulose and nitroguanidine — the chemistry every artillery shell is built on, and the part America stopped making.
The Pentagon has signed seven-year framework agreements to triple Patriot interceptor output and quadruple THAAD. The dollar figure is not the interesting clause. The guaranteed minimum annual quantity is.