* Investor Carl Icahn made an offer on the Oshkosh shares he does not already own for $2.7B, valuing the overall firm at $3B. With his current stake of about 9.5%, Icahn is the largest shareholder, but his proxy battle back in January failed. This follows a consistent takeover MO that Icahn applied across industries, with varying degrees of success. Earlier this week Navistar, where Icahn also ramped up a significant stake, appointed 3 board directors at his request. According to the Financial Times he is no longer interested in merging the two truck manufacturers.
* The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) estimates [redacted PDF] that “a large number of culvert denial systems [link added by DID] might have been falsely reported by Afghan contractors as complete when, in fact, the denial systems were not installed or were installed in a defective manner, rendering them ineffective and susceptible to compromise by insurgents seeking to emplace IEDs.”
* South Korea’s KAI will bid in a light utility helicopter competition in Turkey.
* Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology received a $900K grant from the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research to develop a robot that can accomplish a variety of tasks by using random objects available in its environment, like, say, picking an object in a room on fire to apply sufficient force to a stuck door.
* A conscript from the Russian Army has been charged for having blown 4,000 tons of ammunition with a cigarette butt, in the latest of a series of recent incidents in depots and disposal sites. That’s the same Russia that is dropping from the Nunn-Lugar agreement.
* Boiky, Russia’s third Project 20380 large corvette (or small frigate, given its 2,200-ton displacement) is going through sea trials. Stereguschiy, the lead ship in the class, was commissioned 5 years ago.
* The Stimson Center is trying to get to the bottom of what the announced 60/40 US naval split between the Pacific and the Atlantic will translate into, in homeporting terms.
* Rise of the multi-hull designs? China is working on trimaran rescue ships while France’s CMN is floating an asymmetrical design with an outrigger for VTUAVs and helicopters.
* This post on the US Naval Institute’s blog about the timing of NATO’s planned departure from Afghanistan in 2014 is well worth reading.
* That would be a depressing, if realistic, way to close a Friday round-up. Here is something lighter: Pentagon Announces Sequestration Scenario for Navy.