‘Silicon Valley innovation meets Midwest scale’ in new Oshkosh-Grid Aero partnership

A Midwest-based automotive manufacturing company is partnering with a Silicon Valley-based drone aircraft company to mass produce the latter’s unmanned aircraft to meet future military needs.Headquartered in Wisconsin, the Oshkosh Corporation has made specialty trucks, military vehicles, and more for over a hundred years. The company announced on Monday its new partnership with Grid Aero to mass produce their Lifter drone, marking the first time the company will expand into aircraft.“We’re being responsive to the department’s ask of us from December of last year, when they said, ‘Look, we don’t have an innovation problem. We have a scale problem. We would prefer to see early stage companies come with an idea and a partner who can de-risk the path to massive scale,’” Logan Jones, Chief Growth Officer of Oshkosh Defense, told the Washington Examiner, adding that the partnership represents the “combination of Silicon Valley innovation meets Midwest scale.” The Lifter drone is the size of a small aircraft and is characterized as a Group 5 drone. It’s designed to carry out long-range missions where it can deliver critical payloads while avoiding the dangers of having a more expensive and piloted aircraft do the same mission.Jones said Oshkosh’s traditional production of tactical vehicles makes large drones a logical partnership due to the specialty materials that can be used for both.“We’re very firmly in the camp of let’s go find some metal aircraft that that resemble the way that you build and fabricate trucks, military vehicles, and obviously weight matters. But metal is inherently scalable with the current processes and workforce that we have at Oshkosh, and so then you get to know these companies and Grid aero. They designed it and made choices early on, so that it is manufacturable and can scale, not so that it you know it looks like a composite, sexy, futuristic aircraft,” he said.Jones said Oshkosh’s traditional production of tactical vehicles makes large drones a logical partnership due to the specialty materials that can be used for both.Oshkosh will now experiment with adding the Lifter aircraft to its current production lines and they will put together a “pilot factory layout that would allow for much greater surge potential because you have a dedicated line,” and it would “allow us to build many hundreds of these a month,” Jones added.Arthur Dubois, CEO of Grid Aero, said, “We designed our Lifter aircraft platform to bend the cost curve for long-range airpower. It is simple, rugged, piston-powered, and built from ubiquitous materials, borrowing as much from military trucks as from traditional aircraft.” During Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s tenure, the department has revamped its procurement process with the goal of decentralizing the industrial base away from a few main companies. They have also sought to include non-traditional military companies, including technology and robotic-focused businesses.Hegseth visited the Oshkosh Defense headquarters in August during his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour. He toured the manufacturing facility, test drove a tactical vehicle, and gave a speech to workers.THE MILITARY’S $1 BILLION DRON PLAN TO TAKE ON CHINA — AND HOW IT HOPES IT NEVER HAS TO USE THEM“The point of what we wanted to talk about today here in Oshkosh is emphasizing two things: that we’re a very different department that’s open for business across the country, it’s not just the defense industrial base, it’s major manufacturers around the country that we want to get in the defense game. When you can do commercial and you can do scale and you can do it well, we need you at the Department of War,” the secretary told reporters traveling with him.Jones said the Pentagon is aware of its new partnership with Aero Grid, but acknowledged the “wild-card” is congressional funding.The Pentagon is looking to significantly expand the defense industrial base’s capacity particularly for autonomous and robotic systems as they look to capitalize on new and emerging technologies. The department is trying to field hundreds of thousands of various autonomous systems, including air, ground, surface-level and sub-surface level drones with different mission sets, Defense Innovation Unit acting Director Travis Metz told the Washington Examiner.