CACI's counter-drone award lifted the detection layer 6% while Red Cat cratered 9% on Chinese export controls — the basket split cleanly between the sensing chokepoint and the airframe primes.

CACI International led the basket, up 6.1% to $467.43, after the Department of War moved its SkyValor counter-UAS system into full-rate production with a Southern Border deployment award, and analysts lifted price targets toward a Street high near $569 on the read-through to the roughly $1.9B counter-drone pool in the reconciliation bill. CACI sits on the rf-ew-detection chokepoint — the sensing and electronic-warfare layer that decides which airframes ever reach a target — and it owns that layer regardless of who builds the drone. It ran with the primes: L3Harris +2.7% to $285.16, Elbit (ESLT) +2.3% to $792.69, and AeroVironment +1.0% to $150.35.

Red Cat was the laggard, down 8.8% to $7.83. China added Red Cat to its export-control list, restricting Chinese firms from shipping dual-use components to the drone maker; CEO Jeff Thompson disclosed a 150,000-share sale (~$1.28M); and a for-cause CRO termination spilled into a legal dispute. The stock is now off roughly a quarter on the month. This is the NDAA-compliant-supply chokepoint running in reverse — a "Blue" prime being severed from Chinese inputs is exactly the decoupling the thesis maps, but the near-term cost is a supply scramble. Other small-caps softened alongside it: Draganfly (DPRO) -5.1% to $4.31 and Ambarella (AMBA) -3.2% to $69.01.

The tape concentrated its green in detection and compute. Ondas (ONDS) rose 4.4% to $8.00 on the airspace-security side, Nvidia added 2.3% to $212.06, and Qualcomm firmed 1.2%. The materials tier lagged the primes — MP Materials -1.3% to $45.68 — as the session paid up for the sensing/EW and NDAA-clean links over the airframe and rare-earth names. In short, the day rewarded the layer that finds and defeats drones, not the layer that flies them.

The calendar now turns to earnings: RTX and Iridium report July 28, Enovix July 29, then a wave running through Amprius (Aug 5), Motorola Solutions and MP Materials (Aug 6). The structural date is August 24, when the Pentagon's "Gauntlet II" Drone Dominance competition runs its final production down-select — the event that converts the NDAA-compliant thesis into actual orders. NVIDIA's Q2 (Aug 26) and Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas (Sept 1-3) close the window.