Screen: every Q1 2025 federal award action in gov_contract that is DoD-funded and lands on a listed defense, defense-services or defense-communications name under ~$20B market cap, summed by ticker. Ten names come out, in two groups that should not be read on the same scale. The services and IT primes (Parsons, Booz Allen, SAIC, CACI, KBR) post the biggest numbers because task-order ceilings on multi-year IDIQs get booked as obligations — Parsons' $16.6B in a single quarter is more than two years of its revenue, which tells you what that figure is. The five platform and hardware names are the ones where a quarter's obligations track deliveries. Of those, the two worth the deep-dive are HII and VSAT, because in both cases the Q1 flow says something the income statement does not yet.

The two that matter:

• Viasat (VSAT) — defense satcom · Link-16 + tactical-edge networking. $214.7M of Q1 obligations across 42 award actions , and $136.2M of it is one line: DISA's Blue Force Tracking 2 warranties and licenses . The rest is a spread of SOCOM software licenses, ARCLIGHT 2 hardware kits, a CMOSS digital-radio-head award from the Army, KG-255XJ/KGR-42 cryptographic units and Link-16 radio warranties — all tactical-edge networking, none of it consumer broadband. At a ~$5.5B market cap the defense segment is the part of Viasat the market is not paying for; FY2025 (Mar-25) revenue was $4.52B with a net loss, so the Q1 flow is a leading indicator for a segment that is profitable inside a group that is not.

• Huntington Ingalls (HII) — Navy shipbuilding · Newport News. $905.0M of Q1 obligations across 82 actions — the largest of the platform names. The composition is the finding: the two biggest awards ($178.5M and $158.1M) are Mission Technologies engineering, modeling-and-simulation and systems-integration work for the Air Force and GSA, and the long tail is carrier and destroyer maintenance availabilities (USS Sterett, CVN 68/70/72/77/78 planning and execution). New-hull shipbuilding does not show up in a quarterly obligation feed — those contracts were booked years earlier — so this is a read on the services and sustainment side, which is where HII's margin recovery has to come from. FY2025 revenue $12.48B , net margin 4.8% .

The other platform names: Textron's $1.9B (404 actions) and Oshkosh's $685M (1,761 actions) are the largest hardware flows but are spread across hundreds of delivery orders on established programs — steady, not incremental. AeroVironment's $332M is essentially one award, the Army's $288.7M Switchblade 300/600 loitering-munition order — a real datapoint for the loitering-munition thesis, but a single order at a ~$13B market cap is already in the price.

What would change the thesis: Q1 is the seasonally lightest quarter for DoD obligations (fiscal Q2), so the ranking is more useful for composition than for level. A continuing-resolution or a shift in BFT-2 vendor status would remove VSAT's anchor award; for HII, the tell to watch is whether Mission Technologies task orders keep arriving at this cadence in Q2–Q3 2025 data.

Sources: gov_contract (USASPENDING federal award actions), date_signed 2025-01-01 → 2025-03-31, filtered as above; company_snapshot for industry and shares outstanding; price_volume_history for the 2026-02-04 closes; Viasat Form 10-K FY2025 and Huntington Ingalls Form 10-K FY2025 for revenue and margins.