Day 2 after Lockheed Martin's first-quarter print extends the silence. The paper's Friday account of the $7 billion backlog trim noted that the company kept its 2026 guidance — $77.5 to $80 billion in sales, $29.35 to $30.25 in adjusted EPS, $6.5 to $6.8 billion in free cash flow — while burying $125 million in F-16 profit adjustments and $55 million in C-130 supplier-integration writedowns inside the aeronautics segment. [1] What the release did not mention was the B-21. Lockheed is not the prime, but the FY27 budget conversation around airframe capacity, shipbuilding portfolio cuts, and munitions ramp is the conversation in which the silence is loudest.

The AFA Warfare Symposium, held by the Air & Space Forces Association in February at the Gaylord Rockies in Aurora, is no longer the live disclosure event. [2] What is live is AFA national headquarters in Arlington, where on April 21 the association unveiled a Northrop-built B-21 model — the first and largest publicly displayed — at the Doolittle Raiders Memorial Toast. [3] The next AFA symposium-calendar event is the September Air, Space & Cyber Conference. That date is now the next disclosable hook for the airframe-capacity conversation Taiclet's Q1 call kept inside framework-agreement language.

Northrop reports April 28. General Dynamics reports May 1. Lockheed's Q1 is the warm-up. The shape of the next orders book — the FY27 budget that is, per the paper's bank-war-economy thread, the variable that bends 2027 backlogs — is the print the tape is actually reading for.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco