Teledyne Technologies will buy smaller rival FLIR Systems under a proposed $8 billion stock-and-cash deal unveiled Jan. 4, bringing together two complementary providers of digital imaging, aerospace and defense electronics to form a growing midtier specialist.

The remaining core of defense electronics specialist Sparton finally has a new strategic owner, with the U.S. subsidiary of Israel’s Elbit Systems agreeing to buy it for $380 million, the companies announced Dec. 23.

The authorization for the possible Foreign Military Sale (FMS) valued at $128.1 million came after the State Department accepted a letter of request from the Kazakhstan government. 

The U.S. Navy awarded L3Harris a $496 million contract to launch the four-year engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase of the NGJ-LB program.

Epirus, a startup building high-power microwave (HPM) applications for UAV deployment, closed a $70 million funding round that included an investment by L3Harris Technologies.

A small team at Hanscom AFB developed a new way to transmit video from the Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS) to a ground-based terminal. 

The U.S. Air Force for the first time flew a Lockheed Martin U-2 Dragon Lady with the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm on Dec. 15.

Northrop Grumman helped lead a seed-round venture capital investment in Philadelphia-based Deepwave Digital, and the companies are looking to integrate Deepwave’s edge-compute, artificial intelligence (AI) technology into an “array” of sensor systems to improve capabilities and longevity.