- The U.S. military has been shifting manufacturing targets towards projects with quicker turnarounds. While there are still many pieces of military equipment that take years to produce, lessons are being learned from current conflicts.
- Mach Industries is just one of many companies seeking to make weapon production more streamlined and much faster.
- CEO Ethan Thornton says that there needs to be reform in trade school education and that the country needs to become obsessed with manufacturing.
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For decades, the nature and shape of how America’s military conducted business with civilian contractors remained largely unchanged. Billion-dollar behemoths and years-long procurement efforts were the standard. However, this norm is evolving.
As the U.S. military shifted its focus from the global war on terror to more traditional adversaries like Russia and China, the approach to arming its forces also changed. The military began looking towards newer, smaller, agile outfits that offered innovative ideas with faster turnarounds and budget-friendly solutions. One such outfit is Mach Industries, led by its 21-year-old CEO and founder, Ethan Thornton.
What is Mach Industries?
Thornton’s journey almost sounds like a Hollywood script. An MIT freshman left school to pursue his ambitions in the defense sector, convincing investors and other bright minds to join his mission. Fast forward a couple of years, a few bumps in the road and several lessons learned, Thornton now has Mach Industries pointed in the right direction.
“So think high-altitude balloons,” Thornton said. “Think long-loaded high-altitude aircraft. Again, very bullish there. And that is probably work we are closer to doing as a company. I cannot talk too much about that work, but very passionate there.”
Thornton discussed his ideas on how to improve the American manufacturing process to provide the military with a significant counterpunch to adversaries. He emphasized the need to build small things quickly rather than big things slowly.
“So manufacturing for arming Ukraine or Taiwan looks very different than manufacturing designed specifically for near-peer conflict,” Thornton said. “For the first one, you need very large automated factories producing hundreds to thousands of platforms a month. That is pretty linear thinking and extremely challenging from an electronics perspective. We need to invest heavily in flight controllers, radios, gimbals and sensors to scale to those numbers.”
Can procurement issues be fixed?
Thornton believes the biggest bottleneck is the lack of procurement for mature platforms that can be manufactured at scale. He stressed the need to reform trade school education, become culturally obsessed with manufacturing and vertically integrate the manufacture of rare earths.
Mach Industries is currently manufacturing two primary products at its Huntington, California, factory: a weapon named Glide and a super-light, jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) known as Viper.
Viper is recognized for its ability to take off vertically, eliminating the need for a runway, and Mach claims it costs up to 300 times less to produce compared to conventional UAVs.
Thornton outlined his vision for Mach Industries and the American drone manufacturing industry over the next five years.
“For us, specifically as a company, it is bringing these two platforms to market.” Thornton said. “They are both flying, pushing through TRL levels and bringing them into production. We aim to have five to seven incredibly capable hardware products that we vertically integrated, ready for scaled production.”
Thornton’s goals are ambitious, but if he and his team can deliver on his vision, Hollywood might indeed want to tell their story.
Since Straight Arrow News talked with Thornton, Mach Industries signed a contract with the U.S. Army to build a new cruise missile, and another contract to build UAVs for Heven Drones, a company previously featured on Weapons and Warfare.
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