Ukraine has become well-known for its innovations in drone warfare, particularly its ability to design, develop, test and produce new models in a few months. This means Ukraine can counter Russian innovation very quickly, forcing Russia to keep on developing replacements. The old weapons cycle of replacing equipment every year or two is now - in some cases quite literally - replacing them every month or two.
It looks like American manufacturers are beginning to get the message. Case in point: a prototype of a new lightweight assault drone that was developed and built from scratch in 71 days.
U.S. Defense technology firms Divergent Technologies and Mach Industries unveiled a new autonomous strike aircraft prototype in Los Angeles on February 17.
The aircraft, called Venom, moved from concept to flight readiness in just 71 days, or about 10 weeks. The companies say the rapid timeline shows how digital manufacturing and modular engineering can shrink development cycles that traditionally take years.
The prototype was built as a flight demonstration platform. It is designed to prove that defense hardware can go from initial design to operational prototype much faster using software-driven engineering and advanced production systems.
. . .
Instead of building wings, fuselage sections, skins, and control surfaces as separate multi-part assemblies, it produced large monolithic structures. That reduced overall part counts and simplified production workflows. Fewer parts mean fewer fasteners, fewer failure points, and faster assembly.
According to the companies, this process compresses production timelines while maintaining structural integrity. The goal is to create aerospace-grade hardware at a pace closer to software development cycles.
There's more at the link.
This gets even more interesting when we recall that over the past few years, the US military has developed containerized additive manufacturing (so-called "3D printing") facilities that can be deployed along with military units, including infantry or armor brigades, naval ships, etc. Furthermore, with modern high-bandwidth satellite communications facilities, detailed design and manufacturing blueprints and instructions can be distributed from the manufacturer to those field units, built and tested under operational conditions, and feedback and suggested improvements sent back to the manufacturer, in literally hours or days. The advent of modern AI systems means that the process can be sped up by an unknown, but undoubtedly significant factor, meaning that the "loop" of design-build-test-evaluate-redesign can be drastically shortened. Given an adequate basic design, the ten-week process described above might be reduced to no more than two or three weeks. One side can have a counter to a new enemy technique or weapon almost before the latter has been fully deployed.
We're only at the start of this revolutionizing of at least some military development and manufacturing processes. It's going to become much more widespread, very quickly - and in the process it will solve a number of problems that have plagued armed forces for literally centuries. Want an example? Try the under-development Red Wolf cruise missile, small enough to be fired from Marine Corps helicopters and modified agricultural aircraft, enabling those platforms to reach out several hundred miles with pinpoint accuracy. Variations on that theme are being developed right now using similar technology, and should cost considerably less than currently-deployed equivalents.
Who knows where this will end up?
Peter
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