UAS Startup Firestorm’s Ambition to Crank Out Combat Drones Fast, Cheap and En Masse Is a Lesson for DoD https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericte...en-masse-is-a-lesson-for-dod/?sh=53ab45781409 America’s inability to produce weapons systems and munitions quickly, cheaply and in mass quantities may lead to its downfall. A small San Diego-based UAV startup is signaling that there is a way forward. The company is called Firestorm Labs and as the name implies, its mission is creating battlefield-changing tactical mass. The startup claims its small “Tempest 25” 25-pound modular drone can take on ISR, electronic warfare, strike and other missions while changing the defense manufacturing paradigm. Firestorm CEO, Dan Magy, says his company can print the entire drone body in nine-hours. Its goal is to be able to install all requisite hardware and software for a particular application and do production flight testing within 24 hours. Within 48 to 72 hours the UAV could be taken out of a box and an operator could “push go”. The company envisions producing 500 to 1,000 drones a month in short order. In a place like Ukraine, such capability in quantity could prove highly impactful. As things presently stand within the U.S. defense industry and the Pentagon, such potential impact is blunted by time-to-fielding and cost. Traditional defense primes don’t manufacture quickly, cheaply or in quantity. DoD acquisition decisions lack urgency, clarity and simple capability requirements. In such a depressing environment Magy’s observation/contention that - “SpaceX was able to bring down the cost of rocket launch by a factor of ten in a decade. We believe we can do the same thing for precision guided UAVs in a matter of months.” - is attention-getting. So too is the genesis of Firestorm’s overarching idea which looks to the example of the terrorist foes America has spent the last two decades fighting. “The thesis of this idea,” Magy says, “was, how could you take a technological approach similar to what ISIS used against [multinational forces] in Syria and give that technology to Ukraine to stop Russia.” Additive manufacturing is a key enabler in producing the Tempest 25 quickly and cheaply. Among the small Firestorm team is the former head of aerospace and defense for 3D printing giant, Stratasys SSYS +2.9%. His experience in additive manufacturing is helping the startup produce a new iterative design for the Tempest every 30 days according to Magy. Firestorm is not its CEO’s first rodeo. Dan Magy has launched four previous hardware/AI venture-capital backed companies including Citadel Defense in 2015. Citadel was a counter-UAS company whose anti-drone system was adopted by U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command in 2016 and used in Syria during the anti-ISIS campaign. In 2021, the company was purchased by BlueHalo, another counter-UAS firm which recently won an award from the U.S. Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) to develop the Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) system for integration on small ground vehicles. Magy is joined in Firestorm by Chad McCoy, a 20-plus year USAF Special Forces veteran who most recently served as the director of the Air Force Research Laboratory-affiliated Doolittle Institute which develops and commercializes munitions technologies. While serving as director, McCoy says he learned a lot, “but I learned that we could also go a lot faster than the government is going.” His emphasis has been on ensuring that Tempest is a completely modular, open architecture UAV, both for the purpose of future-proofing it and quickly adapting it to new missions/roles. Scalability is another benefit of this approach and Magy indicates that the commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) modular component-mix which Firestorm has chosen for Tempest is the company’s secret sauce. Tempest’s digitized design simplifies manufacturing and assembly with attendant time and cost advantages. Both Magy and McCoy stress that de-centralized production is key to Firestorm’s low-cost, large-quantity strategy. “We can scale elastically using a network of additive manufacturing printers that are available around the country and around the world,” Magy explains, “turning them on or off depending on demand as opposed to just having our own production line.” While in its infancy (the startup is about a year-old) Firestorm has yet to stand up its own production line but Magy says it has “100 printers in the American southwest” which it can call on within “a couple days’ notice” to start printing its airframes. The company essentially intends to be able to share the Tempest’s digitized design with additive printer subcontractors/assemblers who can slot in electronics and payloads. (Much more at above url)