Nov 11, 2024
The Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the Freedom Forge 2.0 workshop on the concept of rapid deployment of military production, the relevance of which has become especially evident against the backdrop of hostilities in Ukraine and the need to quickly establish mass production of products.
Currently, it can take months or years to create a new enterprise of the military-industrial complex in the United States and other NATO countries, but DARPA is looking for ways to reduce this period to a few days. According to the plan, the facilities should not be huge factories, but a network of decentralized flexible production facilities with the ability to be located anywhere.
It is proposed to implement this with the help of advanced scientific achievements: instead of the usual machines and conveyor belts, the authors of the concept consider it necessary to use robots that will “shape” the necessary part of the workpiece. It is planned to manufacture all the necessary equipment on site using 3D printers.
That is, DARPA seeks to create a system in which a single factory, built in a short time, can produce almost any military product, from a drone body and artillery ammunition to a tank turret. Within the framework of this concept, it is enough to simply load a new technical process to make changes to the design or even change the type of product being produced.
The authors were clearly inspired by the example of the revolution in the creation of UAVs, where thousands of FPV drones are produced in relatively small workshops, and developers quickly make the necessary changes to the design. However, simply scaling this experience to all other sectors of the military industry still seems unlikely. At the same time, the DARPA initiative shows that the United States does not neglect the “industrial” component of combat experience and seeks to get ahead of the curve, approaching the next military conflict better prepared than any potential adversary.
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