Once per quarter, the Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) team at the US Naval Postgraduate School holds weeklong exercises dedicated to demonstrating emerging technologies viewed by the Department of Defense (DoD) as critical to national security. Held at California’s Camp Roberts, JIFX week provides an opportunity for collaboration across the military branches, and between the military and the private sector.
The most recent JIFX week, held in February, featured amongst its participants Firestorm Labs, the company behind the xCell containerized additive manufacturing (AM) system, designed for tactically deployed drone production. In January, Firestorm landed a five-year, $100 million Air Force contract to develop 3D printed drones.
At February’s JIFX week, an xCell unit powered by startup Chariot Defense’s mobile high-voltage battery-powered generator churned out parts for Firestorm’s Tempest drones. The printed parts included nosecones with camera ports, fuselage segments for carrying payloads between 10 and 20 pounds over ranges of 100-675 miles, and assorted wing and tail segments.
Image courtesy of Firestorm Labs via LinkedIn
In a DVIDS article about the exercises, the director of JIFX, retired US Army Special Forces Colonel Michael Richardson, said, “This February event was the most engaging experimentation week since before the pandemic. Part of that was the weather. The periodic heavy rain and strong winds gave our participating firms the same challenging conditions their technologies will be expected to perform in if part of the fleet or force. …Several firms accomplished firsts with their systems and nearly everyone collaborated in an ad-hoc experiment or two that demonstrated their capacity to address operational challenges more effectively together.”
The VP of hardware at Firestorm Labs, Bill Buel, said, “The idea for xCell came to fruition so that we could manufacture our drone at the edge in a contested logistics environment. But during development, we realized there’s also a much broader need for xCell as producer for spare parts and other drones. It doesn’t even have to be our drones. So, we really embrace that. We have taken an operator first approach, and we want to empower the operator to make this truly modular.”
Image courtesy of Daniel Linehan, NPS, via DVIDS
Over the course of almost a decade, the US military — and the US Navy, in particular — has shown growing interest in using AM to enable expeditionary manufacturing units, with containerized systems driving the success of companies like SPEE3D. Now, that foundation appears to be hitting an inflection point as frontline drone production becomes an evermore crucial capability in the wake of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
In that vein, expeditionary units may take over from rocket motors as “the big thing” for AM in the defense contract world, which would give Firestorm Labs a decent shot at becoming the next Ursa Major. Interestingly, in an interview from last year with Ursa Major co-founder (and then-CEO) Joe Laurienti, Laurienti told me that drones are one of the areas the company is looking to explore down the road, suggesting the potential for collaboration between Firestorm and Ursa.
It is also worth mentioning that, at the February JIFX week, a laser weapon system (LWS) was used for the first time, which succeeded at destroying Group 1 UAS systems (different from those produced by Firestorm). Alongside the use of lasers to produce the Firestorm drones, this is only the latest development to highlight how critical fiber lasers are to US supply chains, an issue I wrote about at the beginning of 2024, and which seems poised to only become more relevant in the current trade war environment.
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