"As long as you have a ground that can hold the system, they can be shipped to it, they open up, you connect them to power, and within the same day, they self-calibrate and start manufacturing," Machina Labs CEO Edward Mehr said — a plain description of a manufacturing model that aims to compress factory lead times and blur the line between factory and field.
Machina Labs' RoboCraftsman and the third facility
Machina Labs, a Los Angeles–based firm that uses AI and robotics to build large metal structures such as airframes and drone bodies, plans to break ground on a third manufacturing facility this year. The new site—yet to be named or located—could reach as much as 250,000 square feet, more than double the size of the company’s two existing facilities, Edward Mehr said at the Space and Missile Defense Conference.
The company raised $124 million in a Series C round last year, and Mehr said much of those proceeds will go toward the new plant. Machina Labs sells a manufacturing system called RoboCraftsman; today the company produces five of those systems a year and intends to ramp that output. Several of the systems are slated to outfit the upcoming facility, which Mehr said will produce cruise missile products. Mehr also described the firm’s flexibility claim: the same RoboCraftsman factory that makes Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) fuel tanks, he said, can switch to make UAV airframes.
House field hearing and Rep. Ken Calvert on skilled trades
The manufacturing story comes against a broader background of concern about skilled trades across the defense industrial base. At a Sept. 4 field hearing chaired by Rep. Ken Calvert of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, lawmakers and officials warned that a generation of messaging favoring four-year degrees contributed to a shortage of skilled craft workers.
Rep. Calvert cited the American Welding Society’s estimates that roughly 20 percent of the welding force are approaching retirement and that, in 2025, the society estimated a need for 320,000 new welders by 2029. Those estimates, he noted, predate the data center boom, which also relies heavily on welders and fabrication.
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See what we buildPentagon industrial base policy and the BuildFreedom.us grant
The Pentagon’s head of industrial base policy, Michael Cadenazzi, told the hearing in written testimony that decades of policy and societal pressure have pushed many young Americans toward degrees that “haven’t delivered the benefits they were promised,” leaving defense manufacturers short of skilled workers. Cadenazzi said there are as many as 400,000 unfilled skilled trades jobs in the defense industrial base today and that number could grow to 2.5 million by 2030.
As a response, the Pentagon awarded a $10 million grant to BuildFreedom.us. Cadenazzi described the effort as linking jobseekers with scholarships, apprenticeship programs, and so-called “AI-proof jobs.” The grant, he said, will pay for more than 9,000 scholarships. BuildFreedom was launched in partnership with the National Labor Exchange and Mike Rowe’s mikeroweWORKS Foundation; Cadenazzi said the program has rolled out in three states with plans to expand nationwide and will use a new Buildfreedom.US website as a hub to convert interest into scholarships, training, credentials, and job opportunities.
GAO designates State Department oversight of mishandled defense articles as high priority
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) publicly released a letter on Sept. 8 elevating concerns from a 2025 report into a “high priority” issue for the State Department. The GAO said the department’s investigations, documentation, and reporting on incidents where U.S. allies or partners failed to properly secure or transfer defense articles were inconsistent.
The watchdog recommended that the State Department document the status and findings of its investigations and develop guidance for determining when to report an incident to Congress, saying that such steps could inform congressional oversight of future assistance.
Other procurement, corporate moves, and demonstrations
- The Army selected Boeing and Anduril for its Integrated Fires Protection Capability (IFPC) Increment 2 Second Interceptor.
- Allen Control Systems is expanding manufacturing capacity with a new 191,000 square-foot facility in Austin, Texas, to produce the company’s robotic turret.
- Kongsberg chose Echodyne to supply radars for its counter-UAS system.
- Former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Director Frank Whitworth is now president of Satellogic, responsible for operations and defense and intelligence product strategy.
- The Navy and MARTAC demonstrated refueling of autonomous vessels at sea.
- Former Pentagon weapons buyer Ellen Lord joined Chariot Defense’s advisory board, alongside two former Army generals, James Rainey and Samuel Peterson, and defense investor Stephen Rodriguez.
How technologists, policymakers, and defense manufacturers are responding
Technologists and manufacturers are scaling flexible automation: Machina Labs is increasing RoboCraftsman production and planning a much larger facility that it says can pivot between different metal-structure products with minimal retooling. Policymakers are reinforcing the workforce angle: Rep. Calvert’s hearing and the Pentagon’s testimony foregrounded shortages and retirement trends, and the Defense Department is funding BuildFreedom.us to create training pipelines and scholarships. Oversight bodies are pushing for clearer accountability: the GAO’s high-priority designation for State Department reporting aims to tighten how mishandled defense articles are investigated and reported to Congress.
These threads—automation that promises rapid, flexible production; a skilled-trades shortfall measured in hundreds of thousands of positions; and stepped-up scrutiny of how defense articles are tracked abroad—are converging as the Pentagon and its suppliers plan for new capacity and new systems. The immediate, concrete next steps are already laid out in the record: Machina Labs’ ground-breaking this year, BuildFreedom’s national expansion and website rollout, and GAO’s call for improved State Department guidance and documentation.
