Anduril Industries – one of two companies selected by the U.S. Air Force to develop the first stage of Collaborative Combat Aircraft – announced that it will soon build a factory to produce a variety of autonomous weapons, including CCAs, “at scale.”
Anduril has not yet decided on a location for its factory, called “Arsenal,” but it will be in the U.S. and will be a rapidly reconfigurable facility designed to quickly build “autonomous systems and weapons of all classes,” Chris Brose, the company’s chief strategy officer, told reporters. He described the weapons to be built not as “exquisite” all-in-one systems, but as complementary capabilities for other platforms.
The company will “never focus on building exquisite weapon systems. We will focus on building complementary capabilities that we believe we can acquire quickly,” Brose said.
The company’s offering in the CCA competition – the “Fury” – was originally intended as a stealthy, jet-powered sparring partner for the Air Combat Command’s fifth-generation F-22 and F-35. It will be one of the products built at the arsenal, along with munitions for roving aircraft, electronic warfare systems and autonomous submarine vehicles. All of the company’s products will be built “under one roof,” Brose said.
The factory will rely heavily on software to speed up processes and attract workers. It will employ “thousands of people” in “more than 450,000 square meters of production space,” he said.
“Anduril has been on the way to larger-scale production for several years,” said Brose. A second factory should follow shortly, he said; it could be located in an allied country such as Australia.
Brose said the factory – whose name recalls World War II’s “Arsenal of Democracy” – is being built because “America and our allies don’t have enough material, right? We don’t have enough vehicles, we don’t have enough platforms, we don’t have enough weapons. It’s been that way for a long time.” The war in Ukraine showed that the U.S. “struggles with basic things like replacing Stingers and Javelins.” War games focused on a Pacific conflict “have suggested for years that we would run out of critical munitions supplies in the first week of a conflict,” and the weapons used are not easy or quick to replace.
“We built and sized the military around a relatively small number of things,” Brose said. “And over time, we made those things virtually irreplaceable because we so precisely defined the requirements, the manufacturing processes that go into making them, and because they require a highly specialized workforce to make.”
The Arsenal plant aims to reverse this trend.
“Our view is that we need these exquisite platforms in certain numbers, but we simply lack the time, the money, the specialized manpower and all the other things that would be required to scale them to the extent that we actually need to create a deterrent against major power competitors,” Brose said.
The statement closely follows the description of Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks’ “Replicator” initiative, launched last year, which focuses on things the Pentagon already buys.
Brose said the company raised $1.5 billion for Arsenal and related projects.
He pointed out that while there have traditionally been advantages to dividing defense production across multiple congressional districts, “the benefits we can achieve from a manufacturing perspective through consolidation outweigh any political benefits we could achieve through a distributed strategy.”
The company’s goal is to “build not only … shorter-range systems that are so commonplace in Ukraine, but also longer-range, larger-payload autonomous systems and weapons that have a higher chance of survivability and are better suited to INDOPACOM emergencies,” Brose said.
The US military needs “tens of thousands” of them, and that is the scale the company has in mind. It cites commercial companies such as Tesla, SpaceX and Apple as examples.
This “revolution” in production “has bypassed the arms industry,” but Anduril is convinced that it can also work in the military sector, said Brose.
Using the company’s open Lattice software architecture, “we can actually own and control the architecture of everything we build. This is very different from traditional defense manufacturing, where the software is split into many different subcomponents and distributed across the platform,” Brose said.
“Lattice gives us the ability to start with a mature software platform and then build modular, manufacturable weapons on top of it. We can control how all the different subsystems are integrated into the overall platform, be it mission systems, radios or computers.”
The manufacturing process will not focus on additive manufacturing or a specific new process, but rather on automated processes, said Brose.
“One key lesson we learn from the commercial manufacturing revolution is that they’re successful not because they’ve automated everything, or because they’ve used artificial intelligence to get out of it, or because they’ve used modern manufacturing to get out of these traditional problems. Rather, they’ve built production lines to take advantage of making products as easily as possible, with the broadest commercial supply chains available, and using the largest workforce possible,” he said.