Anduril Industries announced its YFQ-44 ‘Fury’ autonomous fighter jet prototype successfully completed its first live flight test, achieving the milestone in just 556 days from clean-sheet design to flight—less than two years. The Fury is Anduril’s entry for the Air Force’s …
Anduril Industries closed an oversubscribed $2.5 billion funding round at a $30.5 billion valuation, more than doubling its previous $14 billion valuation from 2024. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the round with a $1 billion investment—the fund’s largest single check ever—demonstrating …
Pentagon officials initially planned to brief Elon Musk on 29 ultra-classified weapons programs related to potential conflict with China, but canceled the meeting after media reports. Musk ultimately met with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in an unclassified meeting about ‘innovation and …
National Security Advisor Michael Waltz sold his defense contractor Metis Solutions for $92 million, earning between $5-$25 million personally. The company won lucrative Afghanistan contracts while Waltz advocated for prolonged military engagement, raising significant conflict of interest concerns.
OpenAI announced a partnership with Anduril Industries to integrate ChatGPT maker’s AI technology into drone-defense systems sold to the Pentagon, marking OpenAI’s formal entry into military AI applications. The three-year contract embeds OpenAI’s language models and AI …
Anduril Industries selected Columbus, Ohio for Arsenal-1, its first ‘hyperscale manufacturing facility’ designed to produce tens of thousands of autonomous weapons systems annually. The company announced nearly $1 billion in investment to build the 5-million-square-foot facility in …
The U.S. Air Force selected Anduril Industries and General Atomics to develop Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) autonomous fighter jets, beating defense giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing. The CCA program aims to deliver at least 1,000 unmanned combat aircraft equipped with …
Northrop Grumman spent $10.86 million on federal lobbying in 2023, employing 36 lobbyists of whom 29—a staggering 80.6 percent—had previously worked in government positions, exemplifying the revolving door between the Pentagon, Congress, and defense contractors that enables systematic corruption of …
President Joe Biden nominated Frank Kendall for Air Force Secretary in May 2021 despite Kendall having received $702,319 in consulting fees from Northrop Grumman as part of a $300,000 per year consulting contract after serving as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics …
The Department of the Air Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $13.3 billion contract on September 8, 2020, to develop the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missile system, initiating the engineering and manufacturing development phase of a program estimated to cost between …
On April 3, 2020, Raytheon Company and United Technologies Corporation (UTC) completed a $135 billion merger creating Raytheon Technologies, the world’s second-largest aerospace and defense company behind only Boeing. The merger combined Raytheon’s weapons systems—including the Patriot …
Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation agreed to pay $31.65 million to settle civil and criminal charges for systematically defrauding the U.S. Air Force by overbilling labor hours on battlefield communications contracts between January 2011 and October 2013. The settlement included $27.45 million for …
Northrop Grumman received a contract as part of a potential $217 million five-year U.S. military cyber warfare program called Unified Platform, which aims to develop a coordinated cyber weapons infrastructure enabling U.S. Cyber Command to conduct offensive and defensive cyber operations independent …
Northrop Grumman completed its $9.2 billion acquisition of Orbital ATK on June 6, 2018, gaining control of the premier supplier of solid rocket motors essential for missile systems and creating anticompetitive market dominance that the Federal Trade Commission warned would “reduce competition …
Anduril Industries was incorporated on June 16, 2017, by Palmer Luckey (Oculus VR founder), Trae Stephens (Founders Fund partner and former Palantir executive), Matt Grimm, Joe Chen, and Brian Schimpf (CEO). The company was seeded by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and pitched low-cost border …
Retired General Mark Welsh joined Northrop Grumman’s board of directors just five months after retiring as Air Force Chief of Staff and barely one year after the company won the $21.4 billion initial contract to build the B-21 Raider next-generation stealth bomber, exemplifying the revolving …
The U.S. Defense Department awarded Northrop Grumman a development contract for the B-21 Raider Long Range Strike Bomber on October 27, 2015, with an initial value of $21.4 billion that could eventually reach $80 billion over the program’s lifetime, representing one of the largest defense …
General James Mattis joined the General Dynamics board of directors in August 2013, just five months after retiring from the Marine Corps in March 2013 as commander of U.S. Central Command. Mattis would earn over $900,000 in total compensation during his 2013-2017 board tenure, including $594,369 in …
Northrop Grumman’s RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drone program experienced massive cost escalation, with per-unit costs exploding from an initial $60.9 million in 2001 to $222.7 million per aircraft (including development costs) by 2013—a nearly four-fold increase that forced the Air Force to …
The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber’s operating costs reached approximately $150,000 per flight hour according to U.S. Department of Defense estimates, making it the most expensive military aircraft to operate in history and generating massive ongoing revenue for Northrop Grumman …
Northrop Grumman Corporation and its predecessor TRW Inc. agreed to pay $325 million to settle False Claims Act allegations that they provided and billed the National Reconnaissance Office for defective microelectronic parts used in classified spy satellites over a decade-long period from 1992 to …
Halliburton subsidiary KBR was secretly awarded a $7 billion no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure, just days before the invasion began. The contract was awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers without competitive bidding, citing ’emergency circumstances.’ Vice …
President George W. Bush appointed James G. Roche as Secretary of the Air Force in 2001 despite—or perhaps because of—Roche’s 17-year career as a top executive at Northrop Grumman, one of the Air Force’s largest contractors, exemplifying the revolving door that enables defense industry …
The U.S. Air Force’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber program, built by Northrop Grumman, reached a staggering total program cost of $44.389 billion in then-year dollars by 1997, according to Government Accountability Office reports. This represented a dramatic escalation from original estimates and …