WASHINGTON — Anduril Industries, the relatively new defense tech firm started in 2017, announced today it is acquiring autonomous aircraft developer Blue Force Technologies, with its eyes on bringing “affordable mass” to the Pentagon.
“This is a campaign and really kind of a vision of ours [and] has been for years to be able to bring a different kind of mass quickly back to the Department of Defense at a time where the traditional industrial base can’t provide it, and we desperately need it,” Christian Brose, chief strategy officer for Anduril, told Breaking Defense in an interview ahead of the announcement. Specific details of the deal were not publicly disclosed.
Blue Force Technologies, based out of North Carolina, is best known for a developmental autonomous aircraft called “Fury,” which the companies say is a group 5 vehicle with “fighter-like performance.” The Pentagon characterizes aircraft into groups based on size: group 1 represents small hand-held quad-copters while group 5 aircraft are similar to full-scale helicopters.
Brose said part of what attracted Anduril to Blue Force was how Fury fits into the fleet of other autonomous vehicles Anduril is already developing, such as the Ghost small unmanned aerial system and the Dive autonomous undersea vehicle. He added that Anduril plans to make “significant” investments into continuing to mature Fury, which is approaching its first flight.
Anduril’s announcement comes just days after Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks revealed her own plans to initiate a new effort, dubbed “Replicator,” which will aim to produce thousands of autonomous drones within two years.
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“It’s very much a direction that I think Anduril has been headed in for years now, in terms of seeking to deliver the kinds of objectives that Replicator is talking about,” Brose said, adding that he did not personally know anything about Hicks’ new effort beyond what she said publicly.
“That’s very much where we have been focused as a company and the acquisition of Blue Force Technologies, the further maturation and fielding of the Fury aircraft I hope will very much be a part of that initiative,” he continued.
Brose, who himself is a former top congressional staffer for the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he believes the money, technology and industrial capacity are all available to make Replicator “eminently doable.”
The devil, he said, will be in the details, which Hicks has admitted will remain few and far between for the time being.
In a recent interview with Breaking Defense, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey noted the company’s eventual goal remains to become a prime defense contractor that can “fight and win across multiple areas.”
In that interview, conducted before today’s news, Luckey said, “I think we are positioned super well, and I think that is not apparent from the things that we are publicly talking about across our product line.”