TOBYHANNA ARMY DEPOT, Pa. — As reporters walked through halls the size of football fields peering at spaces that will soon whir with machines and conveyor belts carrying stacks of minuscule parts, Army officials revealed new details on how they are scaling up drone component production at an unprecedented pace.
These details come ahead of an Army advanced manufacturing strategy expected to be released in the coming weeks.
“How do you take a culture that typically has five to eight years to stand something up and do it in weeks and months? We had to bend a lot of things, had to flex a lot of things, but we had to get a lot of support from both industry and senior leadership to say this can be done, and so every small win mattered,” Jonathan Strzelec, the chief of Tobyhanna’s Transformation Office, told reporters during a tour of the depot Monday.
A large part of the service’s new advanced manufacturing strategy is scaling small drone production in the US, Strzelec, who also supports Army Material Command “for all things UAS,” explained. The strategy falls into the Defense Department’s larger Drone Dominance initiative to scale production in the US so the country doesn’t have to continue to rely on parts made in other countries, namely China.
