Twenty miles south of Columbus, Ohio, surrounded by cornfields and horse farms, Anduril Industries is doing something the traditional defence industry has not managed to do in decades: building cutting-edge combat aircraft quickly and cheaply enough to matter.
The company’s Arsenal-1 facility has begun production of the Fury, a high-speed autonomous drone designed to fly alongside crewed fighter jets and act as a force multiplier in contested airspace. It is not a prototype. It is not a test article. Production has started, and the timing is not accidental.
The US military’s appetite for uncrewed combat aircraft has surged in the past two years, driven by hard lessons from Ukraine, where cheap FPV drones and loitering munitions have redefined what an army can do without putting a soldier in the crosshairs. The Pentagon is paying attention, and Anduril is the bet it is placing on the future.
What Is the Fury, and Why Does It Matter?
The Fury is Anduril’s entry into the US Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, known as CCA. The concept is straightforward, even if the engineering is not: pair a crewed fighter with one or more autonomous wingmen that can carry weapons, gather intelligence, take electronic warfare roles, or absorb enemy fire in place of the human pilot.
It is sometimes called a “loyal wingman” drone, a term that has circulated in defence circles for years but only now has hardware behind it. Anduril’s Fury began flight testing in late 2025 and has since progressed quickly enough that full production at Arsenal-1 is now underway.
The Fury is a jet-powered aircraft, not a quadcopter or a fixed-wing recreational drone. It is fast, it is designed for contested environments, and it is built to be expendable enough that losing one in combat is an acceptable trade-off rather than a catastrophic loss.
Inside Arsenal-1
The facility itself is worth examining, because it represents a fundamentally different way of thinking about weapons manufacturing.
Arsenal-1 is a $1 billion investment. Over the next decade, Anduril expects it to employ more than 4,000 people, with roughly 250 on staff by the end of 2026. That sounds modest, but the factory’s output per employee is the point. The goal is not to recreate the sprawling, slow-moving contractor campuses that have defined US defence manufacturing since the Cold War. It is to build a plant that can actually scale production when demand spikes.
Matt Grimm, Anduril’s co-founder and chief operating officer, described the approach in terms that traditional primes would find uncomfortable. Rather than designing a product first and figuring out how to build it later, Anduril bakes manufacturability into the design from day one.
That means choosing aluminum over titanium where performance allows, borrowing composite techniques from the recreational boat industry, and selecting a commercial business jet engine for the Fury specifically because of its established supply chain and maintenance network. When you need to produce hundreds of these aircraft, a supply chain that already exists is worth more than a marginally better engine that needs to be built from scratch.
This is a direct challenge to Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, all of which have grown comfortable delivering expensive platforms on decade-long timelines. Anduril is explicitly designed to not do that.
Not Just the Fury
The Fury is the flagship program at Arsenal-1, but it is not the only thing being built there.
By the end of 2026, Anduril expects to be producing three additional programs at the facility: the Roadrunner interceptor, the Barracuda cruise missile family, and at least one classified program that the company has not publicly identified.
The Roadrunner is an autonomous air vehicle designed to intercept drones and missiles. It can take off vertically, intercept a threat, and return to base, making it a reusable counter-drone system rather than a one-shot solution. Given the explosion in drone threats across military theatres globally, the market for something like the Roadrunner is obvious.
The Barracuda is a cruise missile variant, a long-range precision strike weapon designed to operate autonomously or in coordination with other systems. Details remain sparse, but it fits the same template: autonomous, scalable, cheaper than legacy alternatives.
Anduril already operates production facilities in Mississippi, Australia, Rhode Island, Colorado, Atlanta, North Carolina, and Southern California. Arsenal-1 is the centrepiece of what the company is calling a distributed manufacturing strategy, spreading production capacity so that no single facility is a single point of failure.
The Army Is Already Using Drones This Way
While the Air Force focuses on high-end loyal wingmen, the Army has been integrating drones into ground combat in ways that are more immediate and perhaps more telling about where warfare is heading.
At Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the 101st Airborne Division recently conducted a live-fire exercise that put drones front and centre, not as support tools, but as the first line of contact. Before soldiers moved toward any objective, drones went first, scanning terrain, identifying threats, and in some cases establishing initial contact before human troops arrived.
Brigadier General Travis McIntosh put it plainly: “Drones are reshaping the geometry of the battlefield in real time.” What that means in practice is that traditional cover and concealment no longer works the way it did. Distance no longer offers the same protection. An enemy can see further, react faster, and strike more precisely than a decade ago, and so can the US military.
Army Specialist Basil Holland, who operates small reconnaissance drones in the 101st, described their core value simply: “They can spot targets at short and medium range and give you eyes on anything you need.” Getting eyes on a target before exposing troops is not a revolutionary concept. Doing it cheaply, quickly, and at scale is.
One of the most pointed observations from that exercise came from a US Army Reserve planner: “In the past, troops were trained to look down for roadside bombs. Now, we have to look up in the air.” That shift captures how much the threat environment has changed, and how quickly.
What Ukraine Taught the Pentagon
None of this is happening in isolation. The US military’s urgency around autonomous systems is directly shaped by what has played out in Ukraine since 2022.
Ukraine has used FPV drones and loitering munitions to destroy armour, disrupt supply lines, and conduct reconnaissance at a scale and cost that no conventional approach could match. Russia has responded with its own drone campaigns, targeting infrastructure and deploying Shahed-series kamikaze drones in large numbers. The lesson for anyone watching is that drones are not supplemental. They are central.
The Fury, the Roadrunner, Arsenal-1 itself: all of it is a response to that lesson. The US military does not want to find itself in a peer conflict relying on platforms that cost $100 million each when the enemy is fielding autonomous systems for a fraction of that. The CCA program is the Air Force’s formal acknowledgement of that reality.
Autonomous wingmen that can absorb risk, carry weapons, and operate as part of a networked force give crewed aircraft a fundamentally different set of options. The Fury is the first serious attempt to deliver that capability at production scale inside the United States.
What Comes Next
Anduril is not the only company competing for the CCA contract. General Atomics and other firms are also in the running, and the Air Force will eventually select a primary contractor for large-scale procurement. But Anduril’s decision to begin production before the contract is finalised is a calculated bet: that manufacturing readiness will matter as much as the aircraft’s specifications when the Pentagon makes its call.
For the wider drone industry, Arsenal-1 signals something important. The line between defence tech and commercial aerospace is blurring faster than most expected. Companies built on software-first thinking, with manufacturing borrowed from adjacent industries, are now producing weapons of war. The traditional defence industrial base is being challenged from outside, and the Pentagon is actively encouraging the competition.
Whether the Fury wins the CCA contract or not, the approach it represents is already changing the industry. Fast iteration, commercial supply chains, and manufacturing as a design constraint rather than an afterthought: these ideas are not going away. They are spreading.
The cornfields around Arsenal-1 are probably going to look different in five years.