Preparing the road ahead to be able to produce massive quantities of autonomous systems and weapons by leveraging a new software-defined manufacturing platform that relies heavily on commercial suppliers, Anduril industries plans to build a new facility to “rebuild the arsenal of democracy,” the company said on Thursday.
The build of its five million-plus square foot Arsenal-1 factory that will lean on a manufacturing platform Anduril also calls Arsenal is supported by a $1.5 billion funding round the company raised that was co-led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital and values the venture-backed startup at $14 billion.
The funding will also be put toward “fueling growth” across the company, Chris Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer, said on Aug. 1 during a virtual media roundtable that was embargoed until the official announcement of the Series F round and Arsenal.
About 90 percent of Anduril’s products can be manufactured at hyperscale “under one roof,” Brose said. These products, will be “all classes and sizes,” include autonomous sensor systems and small drones for surveillance, tracking, attacking, and countering small drones, recoverable ground-based air defense interceptors, large autonomous air vehicles that can operate with high-end manned fighters, undersea vessels, and modular electronic warfare (EW) systems, all underpinned by the company’s Lattice artificial intelligence-based open system software used for command and control and supervised mission autonomy, he said.
Anduril also makes solid rocket motors, which will continue to be produced at separate facilities.
The U.S. defense industrial base has been tailored for decades to build exquisite weapons and platforms at high prices and low numbers in the expectation that few would be used and needed in a future conflict, Brose said. The ongoing Russo-Ukraine War has thrown those assumptions out the window as the U.S. scrambles to increase production of munitions and weapons such as Stinger air defense and Javelin anti-tank missiles, he said.
That war is the “baby version of the problem” the U.S. will face in the Indo-Pacific theater “where war games have suggested for years that we would run out of critical munitions in the first week of a conflict,” he said.
“So, when we talk about what we’re actually going to need, I think our view is we need these systems, these autonomous systems of all kinds, and weapons of all kinds in the tens of thousands,” Brose said. “So, we’re off by an order of magnitude the amount of defense systems that, you know, we as America are generating today, and I don’t think that this is controversial to say anymore. I think that most people believe this.”
Queue Arsenal, a factory, a platform, and a philosophy.
Arsenal-1, the gigafactory, will be modeled after commercial companies like Apple [AAPL], SpaceX, and Tesla [TSLA] that manufacture “highly capable pieces of technology” using the latest commercial practices “that have largely passed the defense industrial base by” and do it at far greater scale than the defense industry does, Brose said.
For comparison’s sake, electric vehicle maker Tesla’s gigafactory in Texas has more than 10 million square feet of factory floor. The company’s Nevada site has 5.3 million square feet of space. Boeing [BA] has 2.15 million square feet of manufacturing space in St. Louis, Mo., including the 860,00 square foot Building 101, which supports production of the Air Force F-15 fighter, the future T-7 jet trainer, and other programs.
Brose did not disclose where Arsenal-1 will be built and said a final site has not been determined. Additional factories would be built, with Arsenal-2 sited in the U.S. or an allied or partner nation. Anduril is headquartered in California.
Arsenal, the platform, will have at its heart the Lattice software that enables the design of systems that are far less expensive and exquisite than current systems, and rely on less specialized labor than the defense industry currently does to allow greater workforce participation, Brose said. Simpler designs will also allow the manufacturing platform to take advantage of supply chains that are also less specialized and customized than suppliers to prime contractors currently are but still support high-technology commercial companies with highly capable subsystems and components at large scale, he said.
While “defense unique” components and specialized labor cannot completely be eliminated, they can be minimized, Brose said. For example, Anduril’s Pulsar EW systems feature software-defined radios integrated with commercially available “high performance computing capabilities,” he said.
Brose compared the annual manufacture of 500 or so air-launched Joint Air-to-Surface Stand Off-Extended Range cruise missiles to the weekly manufacture of thousands of Tesla-built autonomous EV cars, adding “you cannot tell me…it is not equally technologically marvelous.”
Arsenal will also have as much commonality as possible, including with the machines and workforce, to allow a “more frictionless” surge capacity between production lines, Brose said.
The manufacturing platform will be flexible so that Anduril can build more or less of what is needed at a given time, and adapt to evolving needs in response to rapidly changing threats, he said.
“What we are building today will be rapidly superseded by new things that we’re going to want to build and need to build in the future to answer threats and requirements that are simply unknown to us right now,” he said. “So, these systems have to be as simple to build, as modular and easy to build as possible because that’s how you get to the scales that are required to produce and field systems in the tens of thousands.”
Arsenal, the philosophy, gets back to how Anduril is approaching the design of its systems and weapons so manufacturing and production can transition from large scale to hyperscale, Brose said. This is an approach the company has already been “proving out” across its product portfolio so that scaling and adaptability are programmed up front, he said.
The design approach and manufacturing platform “is about new thinking as much, if not more, as it is about new technology,” Brose said. Legacy defense contractors have adopted modern design and manufacturing tools but not changing the way they are designing and developing products, and scaling production, limiting their returns, he said.
These companies “are effectively electrifying the horse calvary,” he said. “I want to underscore that what we’re doing with Arsenal is fundamentally changing how we think about the requirements of military systems, so that they include things like simplicity, producibility, adaptability, modularity, and scalability. The ability to produce at the levels that are required, which is only possible if you completely rethink things at the outset.”
Anduril’s Series F raise also includes new investors Fidelity Management & Research Company, Counterpoint Global, and Baillie Gifford, and “major commitments” from existing investors to include Altimeter and Franklin Templeton.