Anduril Industries on Wednesday said it has hired Keith Flynn as its first corporate manufacturing executive to help the company as it transitions to quickly scale production from tens and hundreds of items across its portfolio to thousands of products to meet customer demands.
Flynn is senior vice president of manufacturing, joining Anduril from Glydways where he spent nearly four years as the head of product engineering for the autonomous public transportation company. Prior to Glydways, Flynn led manufacturing for the now defunct autonomous truck company Starsky Robotics and before that was director of West Coast operations at the industrial automation company
Comau.
Flynn also worked at Elon Musk’s electric vehicle automotive manufacturing company Tesla [TSLA] for more than six years, the last three as senior manager of manufacturing engineering and then as director of manufacturing engineering. He led “the introduction of new products, equipment and technology into the casting, stamping, body and general assembly operations at the Tesla factory,” according to his profile on LinkedIn. He also worked for more than eight years in manufacturing and engineering roles at automaker Toyota [TM].
At Tesla, Flynn helped with the company’s Model S, the 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year, and at Toyota he helped launch the 2003 Lexus RX300, the first Lexus built outside Japan, Anduril said.
Anduril has already delivered thousands of products, including small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), drones and electronic warfare systems that counter small UAS, sensor towers for border security and force protection, loitering munitions, and subsea vehicles. Now the company wants to produce thousands of systems on demand.
Matt Grimm, Anduril co-founder and chief operating officer, said in a statement that Flynn’s “experience in implementing digital technologies that enable production operations to efficiently scale will be instrumental in delivering disruptive, autonomous defense capabilities at the magnitude needed by the United States and our allies.”
The need to be able to quickly go from producing tens and hundreds of systems to thousands is being driven by the need for low-cost, attritable, autonomous unmanned systems that can help overwhelm an adversary’s defenses. The Pentagon recently made this clear through its new Replicator Initiative, which seeks to begin fielding, within two years, thousands of low-cost all-domain attritable autonomous systems to counter China in the Indo-Pacific region.
Flynn will oversee more than 200 engineers and technicians and investments in manufacturing operations in Sydney, Australia, and seven factories in the U.S. In Australia, the company develops and manufactures the Dive extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle. In the U.S., Anduril manufactures its Ghost small UAS, Sentry Tower, and Anvil counter-drone system at two factories in Orange County, Calif., the ALTIUS multi-mission loitering munition in Georgia, solid rocket motors in Mississippi, and the Dive-LD autonomous undersea vehicle in Massachusetts.
In the short-term, Anduril said its goals are to increase production of the ALTIUS-600M, the new Fury Group 5 multi-mission autonomous UAS, and solid rocket motors (SRMs).
Anduril this summer acquired the solid rocket motor company Adranos, opening a new product line for the company. Anduril said that is currently “making significant investments in our Rocket Motors Business line to shift production capability from the hundreds to the thousands.”
Anduril touts its software first approach to manufacturing, the design of its products with manufacturing in mind, digital tooling that leverages common standards, and collocating “research, development, and production engineers in the same physical space which enables us to move quickly.”