Anduril Goes Big In Ohio With Arsenal 1 ‘Hyperscale’ Drone Plant

Back in August, disruptive defense tech outfit Anduril announced they had raised $1.5 billion specifically to build a ‘hyperscale manufacturing facility’ which would produce ‘orders of magnitude’ more drones than current processes. Their grand plan was to ‘rebuild the arsenal of democracy.’

Now this vision is taking on concrete reality, with the announcement today of a giant new development in Ohio, a five-million-square-foot facility named Arsenal 1 which 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 biggest new project ever in Ohio’s 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 selected the area on the basis of the available workforce and the supportive business climate.

It may not look much like a traditional aerospace manufacturing plant. Anduril stress the need for ‘software-defined production.’ This will take current production methods, which are already highly data-centric and used digital twins to carry out analysis, design, modeling, simulation and production – as well as management and ordering of materials and components – to a new level.

Flexibility is key. When a new requirement is identified, software-defined production should be able to incorporate it seamlessly into the existing production process. Rather than months and years of definition and testing, changes should take place almost at once. One of the key lessons of the conflict in Ukraine is the speed of development – many talk about a cycle of weeks between generations – and the U.S. 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 together to respond and react at machine speed. AI is likely to suffuse and enable the entire process.

Expect to see a lot of additive manufacturing and robotics at work in the Arsenal from Day 1. The plant 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 jet fighter which work alongside crewed platforms, the Roadrunner, a one-way interceptor and attack drone and Barracuda, a family of long-range attack drones or cruise missiles with ranges of 100-500 miles.

However, there are unlikely to be assembly lines in the conventional sense. Software-defined production should enable the plant to switch from production of one type of system to another at speed.

Significantly, Anduril are not going all-out to sell the Pentagon swarms of tiny drones that Elon Musk believes will replace manned jet. Those may be the future, but they are too big a leap for the current Department of Defense culture. Instead, Anduril offer uncrewed alternatives which are similar in terms of capability what the military uses now, but promising to do the job as much lower cost and provide far greater mass.

So the Air Force’s handful of F-22 fighters (they only have 165 in active service) can be accompanied by squadrons of Furys to literally take the flak and absorb casualties. Scarce magazines of Tomahawk missiles can be conserved for the highest-value targets while masses of Barracudas can tackle everything else, and so on.

The Record Of Replicator

Anduril’s bold new investment comes just as we are seeing 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 drones at high speed, aiming to deliver in ’18-24 months’.

However, as a piece in DefenseNews this week notes, the future of Replicator is in some doubt. Kathleen Hicks, the Deputy Secretary of Defense who has championed Replicator and battled constantly to win funding and recognition for it, is scheduled to leave on December 20^th.

The Pentagon has announced several systems acquired via Replicator, a mix of underwater vehicles and small drones, in particular one-way attack drones. But of the 3,000 or so systems on order, more than half will be Switchblade 600 attack drones made by AeroVironment Inc of California.

The SwitchBlade 600 seems to be a highly effective design and has been used successfully in Ukraine. We covered its launch back in 2020 : this is more of a legacy system from a traditional supplier – U.S. forces have used the earlier SwitchBlade 300 since 2012 – than the sort of 3D-printed, AI-enabled drones that Anduril is promoting.

The high cost of Switchblade 600, something like $200k per drone, is one reason why only a couple of thousand are being acquired. And points to why new technologies and economies of scale are needed.

Other Nations' Drone Arsenals

Replicator’s modest purchase is in contract to the European Drone Coalition which, on a similar timescale, is sending 30,000 FPV attack drones to Ukraine for $55 million – roughly ten times as many drones for roughly a tenth as much. The FPVs may not be individually as good as SwitchBlades, but mass is also important and they can address a lot more targets.

Meanwhile China has reportedly placed an order for almost a million attack drones. It is not known whether these are small FPVs, larger Shahed-type attack drones or a mixture. Ukrainian reporter Dylan Malyasov, writing in DefenseBlog, says he discovered the order in a conversation with Chinese company Poly Technologies.

“We already have an order for almost a million drones for our government, and we’re forced to turn down other clients to meet the demand,” the representative stated according to Malyasov.

Ukraine and Russia each also made more than a million small drones last year, although these are still largely assembled manually in small workshops. Ukrainian production particular is decentralized; it is said that drones are made in every basement in Kyiv.

The U.S. makes high quality drones, but at present is 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 can be persuaded to place orders.