The six-foot jet-powered Roadrunner interceptor/attack drone is an important Anduril product
In August, disruptive defense technology company Anduril announced it had raised $1.5 billion specifically to build a ‘high-scale manufacturing facility’ that would produce ‘orders of magnitude’ more drones than current processes. Their grand plan was to “rebuild the arsenal of democracy”.
Now that vision is becoming a concrete reality, with the announcement today of a giant new high-tech development in Ohio, a five-million-square-foot facility called Arsenal 1 that will create more than 4,000 new jobs.
Anduril’s high-tech arsenal
The new facility, announced by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, Lt. Governor Jon Husted and JobsOhio, and represents the largest new project ever in Ohio history by number of employees.
The facility will be located on 500 acres in Pickaway County near Rickenbacker International Airport. Anduril plans to invest over $900 million, having chosen the area based on the available workforce and supportive business climate.
Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, in one of his trademark t-shirts.
It may not look much like a traditional aerospace manufacturing plant. Anduril emphasizes the need for ‘software-defined manufacturing’. This will take current manufacturing methods, which are already highly data-centric, to a new level and use digital twins to perform analysis, design, modeling, simulation and manufacturing – as well as manage and order materials and components – on a new level.
Flexibility is the key. When a new requirement is identified, software-defined manufacturing must be able to incorporate it seamlessly into the existing manufacturing process. Instead of months and years of definition and testing, changes should happen almost instantly. One of the main lessons of the conflict in Ukraine is the speed of development – many talk of a cycle of weeks between generations – and the US will need to keep up with this in future conflicts.
Anduril are big on AI. Their Lattice platform allows multiple types of drones, sensors and other systems to be networked to respond and react at the speed of the car. AI is likely to infuse and enable the entire process.
Expect to see a lot of additive manufacturing and robotics at work at Arsenal from Day 1. The factory is designed to produce tens of thousands of drones per year. Initially these are likely to be Anduril’s current product range, the Fury an autonomous combat aircraft that works alongside manned platforms, the Roadrunner, a one-way interceptor and attack drone, and the Barracuda, a family of long-range attack drones or range cruise missile. of 100-500 miles.
Anduril’s Barracuda-500, essentially a low-cost cruise missile
However, there are unlikely to be assembly lines in the conventional sense. Software-defined production must enable the factory to switch from producing one type of system to another rapidly.
Significantly, Anduril won’t be selling the Pentagon a host of small drones that Elon Musk believes will replace manned aircraft. These may be the future, but they are too big a step for the current culture of the Department of Defense. Instead, Anduril offers unmanned alternatives that are similar in capabilities to what the military uses now, but promise to get the job done at much lower cost and provide much greater mass.
So a handful of Air Force F-22 fighters (they only have 165 in active service) can be escorted by squadrons of Furys to literally take on the flames and absorb casualties. The sparse magazines of the Tomahawk missiles can be saved for the highest value targets, while the masses of Barracudas can handle everything else, and so on.
Registering the replicator
Anduril’s bold new investment comes just as we’re looking at the report card for the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative, which, inspired by developments in Ukraine, aimed to provide the military with large numbers of low-cost, high-speed drones , aiming to deliver them in 18-24 months.
However, as an article in DefenseNews points out this week, the future of the Replicator is in doubt. Kathleen Hicks, the Deputy Secretary of Defense who has championed the Replicator and fought repeatedly to gain funding and recognition for it, is scheduled to leave on December 20.th.
The Pentagon has announced several systems purchased through the Replicator, a mix of underwater vehicles and small drones, specifically one-way attack drones. But of the roughly 3,000 systems ordered, more than half will be Switchblade 600 attack drones made by AeroVironment Inc of California.
The SwitchBlade 600 appears to be a very effective design and has been successfully used in Ukraine. We covered its launch in 2020: this is more of a legacy system from a traditional supplier — US forces have used the earlier SwitchBlade 300 since 2012 — than the kind of 3D-printed, AI-powered drones that are Anduril promotes.
The Switchblade 600’s high cost, something like $200,000 per drone, is one reason why only a few thousand are being purchased. And it shows why new technologies and economies of scale are needed.
The drone arsenals of other nations
Hundreds of Russian FPV drones are being sent to the front
Replicator’s modest purchase is under contract with the European Drone Coalition, which, on a similar time scale, is sending 30,000 FPV attack drones to Ukraine for $55 million – roughly ten times as many drones for roughly a tenth as much. FPVs may not be individually as good as SwitchBlades, but mass is also important and they can address many more targets.
Meanwhile, China is said to have placed an order for nearly a million attack drones. Whether these are small FPVs, larger Shahed-type attack drones or a mix is unknown. Ukrainian journalist Dylan Malyasov, writing on DefenceBlog, says he discovered the order in a conversation with the Chinese company Poly Technologies.
“We already have an order for nearly a million drones for our government and are being forced to turn away other customers to meet the demand,” the representative said. according to Malyasov.
Ukraine and Russia also each made more than a million small drones last year, although these are still mostly assembled by hand in small workshops. Ukrainian production in particular is decentralized; drones are said to be manufactured in every basement in Kiev.
The numbers for Arsenal 1
The US produces high-quality drones, but is currently far behind in terms of mass production capability. Arsenal 1, which combines volume with the ability to adapt and produce new designs at high speed, looks like a step in the right direction. If only Anduril’s government customers could be persuaded to order.
