In a small industrial park in downtown Manassas, Virginia, the future of defense is taking shape, quite literally.
That’s where you can find RapidFlight, a young defense tech company, manufacturing autonomous drones for military applications.
“What RapidFlight is doing is really disrupting the way drones are designed and deployed to meet the new type of solutions and customer requirements that are just emerging as we go,” RapidFlight CEO Esina Alic told CBN News.
Fast, modular, and built on demand, their systems line up with the Trump administration’s call for a new era of technological innovation.
“For a future stamped with the American character, the federal government must become an early adopter and avid promoter of American technology,” said Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
RapidFlight leverages 3D printing to go from blueprint to battlefield in a matter of days. Alic says this could give America and its partners a powerful edge.
“We deliver them mission-ready drones and interceptors that allies and United States Defense can afford and rely on, and we have this modular capability and tech that let us really change our design, real-time, based on emerging threats and missions,” she explained.
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Brandon Smith, an engineer and RapidFlight’s VP of Strategy, says recent conflicts highlight the power of affordable and adaptable drones on an ever-changing battlefield.
“We’ve had demonstrations in Ukraine with the MOD over there…We got over there, we performed our first mission. They said, ‘That’s nice, but we need this right now,’ and we changed the design on the fly and supported their need. And then they said, ‘Oh, that’s nice, but we’ve changed again. We need this.’ The modern battlefields are changing so fast that your traditional manufacturing and traditional contracting approach within the DOD just doesn’t keep pace anymore, and RapidFlight really resolves that,” Smith said.
He went on to explain how their drones are designed to be able to do anything the customer requires.
“We do rapid payload integration. So we have a common avionics system that allows us to plug-and-play, or develop new drivers for any new technology, any new payload that our customer wants to go in. So we’re not designed for one specific payload, although individual aircraft have accommodations for different things, like cameras, and cut-outs, and antennas, and things like that. Changing those payload configurations is kind of the thesis of RapidFlight, being able to change on the fly and adapt to user needs,” Smith told CBN News.
Their mobile production system also means drones can be mass-produced, any time, anywhere.
“You take the printers we have in our lab here, you take the manufacturing tables, tools, people, know how, you put all of that into a form factor that’s shippable all over the world, and deposit that in a place where it can run autonomously, depending on how long you supply it, for 30 to 60, 90 days…If they have stuff out in the field, they can come back to us and say, ‘I want to put this radio in this airplane.’ We do a quick design change on our end, send them the files electronically, and all of a sudden, you’re up and printing the tool you need at the moment you need it,” Smith said.
What’s just as important as the tech? Where it’s made. The Manassas facility represents a growing push to re-shore key defense capabilities, ensuring that critical systems are built on U.S. soil.
“By building on American soil, RapidFlight’s helped us lock-in secure supply chains, and we minimize reliance on foreign manufacturing and provide the support to U.S. defense industrial base…We’re building more than drones. We’re building national defense and national readiness and we are ready to project that power when it’s needed,” said Alic.
RapidFlight is one of several emerging defense tech companies drawing serious attention and contracts from the Department of Defense.
As global threats evolve, U.S. defense strategy seems clear: think small, move fast, and invest big in next-generation capabilities made right here at home.
