# Modular factories can restore munitions production quickly

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/modular-factories-can-restore-munitions-production-quickly/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Trae Stephens](https://realalpha.app/people/trae-stephens/) · Anduril
- Host: [David Friedberg](https://realalpha.app/people/david-friedberg/) · CEO, Ohalo · Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.
- Show: All-In
- Episode: [The State of Modern War: Palantir & Anduril Execs on Drones, AI, and the End of Traditional Warfare](https://realalpha.app/v/mjNP5IOzCbA/), Apr 6, 2026
- Moment: 12:20 to 15:19 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/modular-factories-can-restore-munitions-production-quickly/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/mjNP5IOzCbA/?t=740

## Quote

> “The problem is that once we burned through our inventory in the warehouses of stingers and javelins, the **assembly line to build stingers** and javelins didn't exist.”
> — [Trae Stephens](https://realalpha.app/people/trae-stephens/) at [14:13](https://realalpha.app/v/mjNP5IOzCbA/?t=853) · All-In

## Takeaways

1. Build factory capacity that can pivot between products.
2. Shared skills and suppliers can lower costs at scale.
3. Old production lines may be hard to restart once workers retire.

## About this segment

Trae Stephens explains how Anduril’s Arsenal campus is designed to switch production between weapons as demand changes. The approach aims to avoid supply gaps when stored munitions run out.

From “The State of Modern War: Palantir & Anduril Execs on Drones, AI, and the End of Traditional Warfare”, Apr 6, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/mjNP5IOzCbA/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[12:29](https://realalpha.app/v/mjNP5IOzCbA/?t=749) manufacturing behind it. And then I want to just understand a little bit about is this product led or production capacity led? Do we need to make selections and have capital committed to bringing product to market before we start to build out the base? Or is there an alternative way to get ready? Arsenal One is the factory campus that we're building in Columbus. The operating system for that, the Arsenal platform, is really intended to reduce the the cost, the overhead that's required to automate and, you know, handle these processes in the most efficient way possible. So there's like kind of the software layer that sits behind that. We're actually working with Palantir, the Foundry platform on some of these programs as well. And the idea behind this is that you want it to be as modular as possible. If we build out

[13:15](https://realalpha.app/v/mjNP5IOzCbA/?t=795) the factory campus, and when we said, we're just going to build Furies here, or we're just going to build Roadrunners here, we're just going to build Barracudas here, that provides a tremendous limitation in the moment of a conflict, to be able to be responsive to the demand for specific things that are relevant to that conflict. And so we're kind of thinking about this more like contract manufacturers think about building assembly capacity, where they say, yeah, we make, you know, this VR headset for Facebook, we make this VR headset for Samsung, we make this VR headset for Apple, we build a skill set around building optic systems, but we're going to build a bunch of them. And we're going to be much more effective at doing that by hitting the network of scale, get lower costs on all the individual parts. You're going to build out a supply chain

[14:02](https://realalpha.app/v/mjNP5IOzCbA/?t=842) to work through that. That's roughly what we're doing in this case, is we're saying, like a contract manufacturer, we want to be able to pivot on a dime into ramping up production of roadrunners if we need roadrunners, or ramping up production of barracudas if we need barracudas. The counterexample to this, of course, is what we saw in the early days of Ukraine, where what they really wanted was more stingers and javelins. The problem is that once we burned through our inventory in the warehouses of stingers and javelins, the assembly line to build stingers and javelins didn't exist. All the people that worked on those assembly lines were retired.

[14:34](https://realalpha.app/v/mjNP5IOzCbA/?t=874) And so the primes were literally calling people out of retirement to come back and teach them how to build stingers and javelins again. And so these are problems that we're trying to avoid by the design of the factory as an initial concept. Who funds it? So, is there a government contract that supports the production of these facilities? And are multiple companies going to be able afford to stand these up to make these investments? Or is this just going to end up being an anduril because you've got most of the capital and you guys are going to roll these facilities out? How do we make this kind of a national interest? Well, our business model is definitely very different from the primes, who are basically responding to things as requirements