"Arsenal of democracy", you say?
Anduril picks Ohio for 5 million square foot autonomous weapon factory
Anduril has found a new home in Middle America with confirmation today that the defense tech maker plans to build its first hyperscale manufacturing facility in Columbus, Ohio. Dubbed Arsenal-1, Anduril claims the planned five million square foot (464,000 square meter) facility is intended to produce tens of thousands of …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 16th January 2025 16:56 GMT cyberdemon
How About A Nice Cup of Liber-TEA
Clearly Mr Luckey has been spending most of his CEO-time playing Helldivers 2...
And now he wants to be the first to build an "Automaton factory".. What could go wrong
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Thursday 16th January 2025 16:56 GMT Eclectic Man
Security
the autonomous systems and weapons that our nation and our allies need to remain secure
Am I the only one concerned that an autonomous system or weapon will make me less not more secure? And I am a Western, Middle-Class, White, Male. What people of colour feel, given the track record of AI systems to fail in all areas concerned with 'minorities', I can only shudder at.
As usual, it all probably depends on how you define "our nation" and "our allies", or, more accurately, how the autonomous weapons define them ...
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Friday 17th January 2025 12:15 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: I wish these...people...would leave Tolkien alone.
"An Orc would never lie about his intention to kill and eat you."
Possibly only about the order of the two. ;)
I find it curious to observe the Flame of the West is be found in land of Mordor where the Shadows lie - at least after the 20th.
I am not sure whether the Dark Lord could handle Andúril but as one of Cohen the Barbarian's former adversaries noted that Dark Lording wasn't what it used to be.†
One might ponder whether the products of this unfortunately named company are the moral equivalent of the orcs that Melkor/Morgoth is accused of blasphemously creating by sourcery and the perversion of elf captives, in which case the company might have been more accurately named Belegur.
† The Last Hero Terry Pratchett.
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Thursday 16th January 2025 21:50 GMT rgjnk
Sounds vaguely plausible
Actually, it sounds like a load of tech bro bullshit.
Any connection to a functional production facility or functional product is purely coincidental. It sounds more like someone has regurgitated a load of games, films & novels to the credulous to make it sound like they're a magically high tech weapons thing when actual reality isn't ever quite like that, not just for weaponry and platforms but for pretty much anything.
Money will flow in, promises will flow out, a few will do well, then it will evaporate leaving nothing behind but a pungent whiff.
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Friday 17th January 2025 05:35 GMT Pascal Monett
Interesting
They didn't decide to build that factory in India, or Mexico.
Oh but of course, we're talking weapons. That means we can sell them for lots more, which means we can pay USA-level salaries for workers to make them.
And we can also pretend that we're making an effort to contribute to the country's economy.
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Friday 17th January 2025 11:59 GMT tojb
Good.
The investment is peanuts compared to vanity space projects, coin mining, and cash-conflagration lossmaking social networks valuable only as a means to control us. The outcome is long overdue, it has been clear for some time that the Ukraine conflict could be ended quickly with less than 1BnUS worth of small one-shot exploding drones, if only someone were set up to do that manufacturing at the required scale.
The Russian semi-autonomous glide bombs are expensive because they have to come further, from "safe" Russian territory to civilian populations such as Kiev that are far from the front. The appropriate countermeasure is a large number of cheap and light UAV launched by Ukrainians against Russian military targets close to the front. A war of invasion exposes the large army of invading soldiers more than the defending small army and widely-spread civilian population, this should be exploited. But it has taken forever to even talk about breaking ground to build this needed drone factory.
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Friday 17th January 2025 23:30 GMT Ashentaine
I expect this will go the same as every other large industry project that gets proposed here in Columbus; they'll see how inadequate the road infrastructure around the city is, realize that winter weather is miserable because the state is basically in a giant valley and can snow paralyze travel, spend a couple years waffling while getting pushback from various self-interest groups seeking to line their own pockets, then eventually just slink off quietly because they managed to squeeze an even more one-sided deal out of another state even more desperate to get any kind of industry to come in.
It's happened before, it'll happen again. Ohio is just a bargaining chip in the great game of corporate greed.
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Saturday 18th January 2025 08:32 GMT the Jim bloke
World class workforce
How are they going to manage that under Trump?
You need either existing industry to poach from, or a functioning education system, or something that makes it actually attractive to skilled migrants...
Either that or the 'harnessing' will involve slave collars - which does resonate with the juntas attitude to workers rights..