The newest aerospace and defense manufacturers in America are not rebuilding legacy arsenals. They are doing something harder: creating production systems from scratch, under investor pressure, with no institutional playbook. Anduril, Saronic, and a growing cohort of VC-backed defense hardware companies face unprecedented tension. But how do you build a factory for a product that is still evolving?
The emerging answer is to build manually first. It’s not a cost-saving measure, not a temporary stopgap, but a deliberate production strategy. The fastest-scaling defense programs of the last two years validate production sequences manually before committing to automation. They then build scalable, modular systems around what they learned.
Why Manual Production Is Strategic
When a new defense platform enters production, the engineering is rarely final. Parts are being revised. Assembly sequences are being discovered. And investing in hard automation before the design stabilizes is expensive. Fixed jigs, custom welded tooling, and rigid cells become technical debt the moment a design changes.
Starting manually lets manufacturing engineers observe the real assembly process, identify genuine bottlenecks, and capture cycle times that reflect actual complexity. Those first builds produce the empirical data that defines where automation earns its investment. It mirrors the logic aerospace engineers apply when testing prototypes: prove the concept before industrializing it.
Building for the Next Version
Fast-moving entrants also design production infrastructure with change in mind from the start. Traditional defense manufacturing relies heavily on welded steel fixtures and purpose-built tooling optimized for a specific configuration. When that product evolves, that infrastructure requires full retooling.
Modular infrastructure built on aluminum extrusion systems, reconfigurable jigs, and standardized workcell components absorbs design changes at a fraction of the cost. A fixture supporting one assembly operation can be reconfigured in hours. Each build cycle generates information, and when the factory can evolve as quickly as the product, that information compounds into production improvement rather than organizational debt.
Software-First From the Start
Physical modularity is necessary but not sufficient on its own. The production systems scaling fastest also share software-defined operations from the earliest stages. Production data should be captured and structured from day one, work instructions digital and version-controlled, and robot programs stored as reusable templates rather than rebuilt per production run.
The goal is to compress the distance between a design change approval and a production line update. That compression matters in programs where requirements evolve with field conditions. For manufacturing engineering leaders at new entrants, software infrastructure deserves the same investment as mechanical equipment from the outset.
The Factory as a Competitive Capability
Legacy defense programs treated the factory as a fixed asset. It was expensive to build, expensive to change, and amortized over a single platform lifecycle. The new cohort trend treats it as a capability that must evolve alongside the platform it produces. The companies winning today did so by reserving automation investment for the production sequences they had already proven, then building infrastructure flexible enough to absorb what came next.
Read more about automation for Aerospace and Defense.
