UAS Startup Firestorm’s Ambition to Crank Out Combat Drones Fast, Cheap and En Masse Is a Lesson for DoD

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
. 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.

The process could potentially take-place relatively near the front lines of a fight, cutting time-to-user and other logistics challenges. The idea smacks of the same battlefield-proximate production tactics that the Air Force is evaluating for jet fuel and which other services are considering for production at the tactical edge, right down to small Pacific islands.

“We’ve really been focused on modularity with this thing so you can do quick payload swaps,” McCoy adds. “Our IP (intellectual property) is also centered on a Lego-like assembly system for the wings and fuselage. [Parts] essentially get printed in a build-box and you can start putting them together. We think our approach can scale up to a 100-pound [drone] variant.”

At such a scale Tempest may need other non-printed materials for structural purposes but the bulk of the drone could still be additively manufactured. Speaking of scale, Magy opines that Firestorm need not grow to become a large defense aerospace company to fulfill its mission and to supply DoD and international market needs.

That kind of thinking is refreshing in a sector where corporate size and personnel complements are associated with competence or expertise. One need only read defense aerospace headlines from this week or last to see the fallacy of such assumptions. Magy and McCoy agree that disaggregating defense technology development and production is not only strategically and economically relevant but vital to America’s chances of weathering geopolitical competition from peer adversaries.

Firestorm’s principals emphasize that the ability to bring inexpensive, mass produced drones (as well as a variety of other systems) to a conflict is a capability the U.S. sorely needs but presently lacks.

“We haven’t faced the type of competitors that have the kind of technology or output capacity we have in a long time,” Magy observes.

“Ukraine is showing the possibilities of a drone-fight. When you look at how drones are being deployed, how the Iranian [Shahed] drones are playing a role, you can see the fight. They cost [approximately] $20,000 to make and they sell it for $50k. If you want to shoot it down, it can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars per shot. Drones are an easy way to attrit an enemy and bleed them dry of capability and on cost.”

“We believe that [kind of effect] is something we should be able to deploy as a country or let partner nations deploy. The threat of that [capability] we think is super important.”

Mass-produced, multi-use drones with the kind of range Firestorm is proposing (200 miles), available in large numbers at low cost would appear to have broad government and defense market appeal. They could provide a layered, low-cost adjunct to the exquisite solutions the U.S. has baked into all of its various current operational plans.

Tempest’s application flexibility (ISR, EW, strike, ELINT etc.) could also help DoD out of some of the vendor-lock issues it has with current solutions to different missions Firestorm’s principals argue. The company has met with a selection of U.S. SOCOM units but believes its drone and its approach can benefit the larger military services.

“We can see these being as ubiquitous as a small rocket or a mortar,” McCoy says. “But those systems aren’t accurate and they don’t have the [necessary ranges]. We end up firing a lot of munitions to get rounds on target. What would be great is if you could pull something inexpensive out of a backpack, launch it, and hit [a target] with one strike.”

Before they can become ubiquitous, Firestorm’s drones will have to prove themselves in testing. Firestorm is on its fourth Tempest prototype iteration and nearing readiness for a “mass-produce-able beta version” Magy says. The company has flown dozens of hours on its various airframes and has had a selection of special operations experts validate its test work thus far. Plans call for refining Tempest over the early summer and to “be ready for mass production in Q4,” according to Magy.

“The speed at which we’re operating is changing people’s expectations,” McCoy asserts. “This week, I met with some SOF [special operations] units and we kind of laughed at the [slow] speed of changes to existing platforms. Instead of making changes in 12 to 18 months taking millions of dollars, we want to be able to do it days.”

Firestorm’s claims may signal risk to many in the defense acquisition space but Magy and McCoy cite the verifiable risk of continuing to identify, develop and produce new weapons and platforms as DoD has done for the last 40 years.

They argue that rather than handing a single prime contractor a couple billion dollars for a weapons system or a weapons system upgrade, the Pentagon should allocate perhaps two-thirds of the amount to the prime and invest the balance in a dozen small firms to give them the chance to potentially make something cheaper and better.

“If we’re going to be successful in the next fight, DoD is going to have to place some small bets with some small companies that can move really fast because the legacy companies are not going to be able to pull this off.”

The Pentagon is showing small signs of such thinking. The soon to be released National Defense Science and Technology Strategy includes a Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) exercise to test prototype long-range fires systems like Tempest in a real-world sprint format. Championed by Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Heidi Shyu, RDER is the subject of $687 million Pentagon funding request in fiscal 2024.

Whether Ms. Shyu’s office is aware of Firestorm or not, the company has been trying to inform a variety of R&D organizations about its approach and its product. McCoy admits its success has been limited so far whether seeking SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) funding or other support.

I checked with the Silicon Valley-based Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), an organization tasked with championing commercial technology integration within the Defense Department. DIU was recently elevated to report directly to Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and has a new director reporting for work next week.

The organization’s spokesperson did not indicate that Firestorm has been on their radar even though it has links to DIU’s “Blue UAS”, a project to scale capable and secure commercial UAS technology for DoD.

Red Cat Holdings, a defense-facing robotic and software company, announced an investment in Firestorm in March. Red Cat has its own line of quad-copter drones for short range reconnaissance missions, acquired through the purchase of Teal Drones. Teal was one of the first companies Blue UAS-approved as is BlueHalo, the CUAS firm which purchased Magy’s former firm, Citadel Defense.

The apparent lack of awareness of startups like Firestorm is a chronic problem recently recognized by the Atlantic Council’s Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption, a panel of defense experts convened to consider how the Pentagon can better integrate new technology.

In an interim report released earlier this month, the Commission observed that, “In our time serving in the Defense Department, we have found that the United States does not have an innovation problem, but rather an innovation adoption problem.”

Whether Firestorm ultimately succeeds or not, its example is one that DoD can learn from. Be they drones, bombs, missiles or satellites, the U.S. urgently needs plentiful, inexpensive platforms and munitions with which to deter and if necessary, fight its adversaries.