Army’s big drone ambition runs into the hard part: scaling up

ROCK ISLAND ARSENAL, Ill. — The U.S. Army is racing to turn its aging organic industrial base into a modern drone factory network — and learning just how hard it is to move from prototypes to mass production.

“We know how to manufacture things. There’s not a problem with that, but UAS, they are different,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Mohan, acting commander of Materiel Command, told Defense News in a recent interview. “We can do the wiring harnesses. We could do some of the microelectronics, but either we don’t have the capability, such as the brushless motors, and we have to buy the machinery to do that.”

The Army’s push comes amid lessons from the war in Ukraine, where inexpensive drones and loitering munitions have reshaped the battlefield and overwhelmed conventional forces.

Ukraine and Russia are churning them out.

Catching up

The United States, by contrast, has struggled to scale production, relying on commercial suppliers and small pilot runs. Officials say that gap underscores the need for a domestic, high-volume industrial network capable of rapidly fielding thousands of drones.

This is a challenge the Army’s SkyFoundry is designed to tackle, even as the service confronts technical, bureaucratic and funding hurdles. The effort is turning depots and arsenals that once built tank parts and artillery shells into a distributed network of drone factories.

The goal is to mass-produce small, expendable, unmanned aircraft — the kind flooding battlefields in Ukraine — at a rate of 10,000 systems per month.

The industrial base has struggled to build capability to mass produce drones. Unlike in Ukraine, “We don’t have that existential crisis,” Col. Eloy Martinez, the commander of Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, told Defense News on a recent visit.

“We have a lot of laws that we have to abide by … it’s the bureaucratic stuff that’s always downhill,” he said. “How do we break these barriers? How do we reduce that time?”

What’s imperative is that the Army figure out how to move as fast as possible now, according to Brig. Gen. Beth Behn, commander of Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, told Defense News at Rock Island.

The general had spent six months with Security Assistance Group-Ukraine in the summer and fall of 2023.

“So I had a front row seat to the conflict, and I came back with my hair on fire,” she said. “We have got to adapt.”

Behn returned from the experience to realize how little the dramatically evolving drone threat had penetrated the thinking within the Army.

“We’re almost two years later, and so now we’ve got drone operator courses and we are doing production, and we’ve fielded capabilities to our [Transformation in Contact] formations, so we are moving with speed,” Behn said. “I do think we’re on the cusp.”

SkyFoundry takes shape

Rock Island is primed to 3D print drones, having invested significantly in building a high-tech advanced manufacturing facility on post. One building is filled with various printers capable of producing a wide array of parts and components in various materials, such as metals and composites.

The arsenal is already producing drone bodies and frames using additive manufacturing, and a variety of different 3D-printed options sat on a display table just outside of a massive room dedicated to printing parts.

Rock Island is eagerly awaiting the arrival of a 3D-printing capability from Impossible Objects that will allow it to print 120,000 drone bodies per year.

“We should be installing that or closing the deal on the contract,” Martinez said. “We’ll have that early part of the spring, late winter time frame.”

Once operational, the printer could produce up to 60 small drones per hour at costs falling below $100 a drone, allowing the Army to create systems that can be expendable in combat.

Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania is focusing on wiring harnesses, microelectronics and brushless motors, while Red River Army Depot in Texas will handle battery production and final assembly.

“Rock Island will continue to print bodies. They will continue to print propellers and frames,” Mohan said. “Tobyhanna will do the brushless motors. They will do the wiring harnesses and the microelectronics. Those systems will be shipped to Red River … for final assembly, testing, as well as manufacturing the batteries.”

Mohan emphasized that Skyfoundry is “not a specific location. It’s more of a concept.”

The networked approach is designed to allow each site to specialize in a segment of the manufacturing process while sharing data, digital designs and software updates through a centralized repository.

“We’ve got to have this digital repository,” Mohan said, “so that we can trade not only the electronic files for printing parts, but we have to own the tech data.”

Bluegrass Army Depot in Richmond, Kentucky, is going to serve as the UAS innovation center, he said.

“We already have, we do a lot of really neat stuff with UAS at Bluegrass already, and artificial intelligence enabled security, as well as some stuff for the Special Operations community, and we are gonna merge all of that there,” Mohan added.

The Army is still refining its requirements, Martinez said.

“They want a noun, which is the drone, but they can’t tell us what drone, what type, what their capabilities are,” he said. “So we’re trying to flesh that out.”

The Rock Island team expects to produce drone bodies for the Army’s goal of 1,000 UAS by the end of this fiscal year, with production scaling sharply by 2026, according to Greg Lupton, Rock Island deputy commander.

The initial push to reach production of 10,000 drones per month carries a price tag of roughly $197 million, Mohan said, with $75 million of that going toward brushless motors and wiring capabilities.

“As soon as we get a budget, we will order that machinery,” he said. “It’s about an eight-month lead time.”

Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois is capable of producing a wide array of drone parts and components in various materials. (Kendall Swank/Army)

The Army plans to spend another $150 million per year over the next three years to sustain and expand the effort.

The modernization push also ties into broader initiatives to reduce reliance on overseas suppliers.

“Ninety percent of UAS parts are coming out of China and Taiwan,” Mohan said. “The systems we’re building, we don’t have Chinese parts in them.”

The drone initiative fits into a broader effort to become less dependent on materials coming from China. AMC is trying to identify where it can set up rare earth mineral processing and lithium production within Army installations and bring manufacturers and mining companies onto those installations.

Red River Army Depot, Mohan noted, sits on top of a large lithium deposit.

“There’s a synergy that we’re trying to aim at there,” he said.

The Army will also need to figure out how to issue and account for the drones, Mohan said.

“The focus right now is to get them at scale to our training centers, so we’ll ship to the National Training Center, JRTC, Joint Readiness Training Center, as well as to those units who have not had the ability to use UAS because they haven’t had the money,” he said.

The first 50 systems will go to I Corps at Joint Base Lewis McChord, Mohan said.

“We are on the cusp of an accelerated sprint on UAS production,” Lupton said. “Once it’s operational, its capacity is significant.”

Army’s big drone ambition runs into the hard part: scaling up

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