Arsenal-1 Will Produce AI-Piloted Drones, Interceptor Missiles, and Cruise Missiles on the Same Production Line — a Model the Pentagon Is Betting $1 Billion On

Ohio's Biggest Job-Creation Project Ever

On January 16, 2025, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, Lt. Governor Jon Husted, and JobsOhio announced that Anduril Industries (a Costa Mesa, California-based defense technology company) will build Arsenal-1, a five-million-square-foot advanced manufacturing facility on 500 acres in Pickaway County near Rickenbacker International Airport. The project represents the largest single job-creation and new-payroll project in Ohio history, bringing more than 4,000 direct production and service jobs to the state by 2035. Anduril plans to invest over $900 million in capital into the surrounding area.

The economic projections are significant. Ohio's governor's office said the project is expected to add nearly $1 billion to the state's GDP, generate over $1 billion in in-state labor income, and produce roughly $800 million in tax revenue. When indirect and induced jobs are counted, the total employment impact reaches an estimated 4,500 additional positions over the next decade, with more than $2 billion in annual economic output.

Ohio's existing aerospace and defense sector already employs the seventh-largest workforce of its kind in the United States. The state is the top supplier to both Boeing and Airbus, hosts GE Aerospace's headquarters, and is home to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and NASA's Glenn Research Center. Anduril's decision to place its first hyperscale manufacturing facility here signals that the company sees something in Ohio's workforce and infrastructure that matches its production ambitions.

Construction is expected to begin immediately after state and local approvals, with the first products targeted for July 2026. Anduril recently closed a $1.5 billion funding round to "hyperscale" defense manufacturing, and Arsenal-1 is the first facility purpose-built to produce tens of thousands of autonomous weapons systems at volume.

What Arsenal-1 Actually Builds

Arsenal-1 is designed to manufacture Anduril's autonomous defense systems at scale, including the YFQ-44A Fury collaborative combat aircraft, the Roadrunner interceptor drone, and the Barracuda family of missiles. The facility uses reconfigurable production lines and a common set of commercial manufacturing tooling, machinery, and processes across every autonomous vehicle Anduril produces, a design philosophy built around flexibility and rapid scaling.

The Fury is the anchor program. Anduril announced in March 2026 that the YFQ-44A had entered serial production at Arsenal-1, three months ahead of schedule. The aircraft went from clean-sheet design to first flight in 556 days. In June 2026, the Air Force awarded Anduril a production contract for the FQ-44 (the "Y" prefix drops when a prototype transitions to production), alongside a parallel contract to General Atomics for the FQ-42. The Air Force has not disclosed the cost or size of either order, though budget documents show the Pentagon is seeking nearly $1 billion to buy CCAs in 2027, and Secretary Troy Meink has said the service plans to procure over 150 combat-capable CCAs by the end of the decade.

The CCA concept pairs semi-autonomous drones with crewed fighters to extend reach and survivability in contested airspace. The first increment prioritizes mass over stealth. The Fury has no internal weapons bay; it has already flown with an AIM-120 AMRAAM mounted externally, and its airframe is designed for affordable rapid scaling.

The Air Force is pursuing a "software sold separately" approach, decoupling the purchase of the CCA's mission autonomy software from its airframe. The service awarded mission autonomy production options to six vendors: Anduril, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Collins, and Shield AI. Anduril, Shield AI, and Collins received initial production contracts, with a final selection expected by summer 2027. The Air Force tested the government-owned Autonomy Government Reference Architecture by running Collins software on General Atomics' YFQ-42 and Shield AI's Hivemind on Anduril's YFQ-44, enabling a mix-and-match approach across vendors.

The Hiring Signals: Where AI Meets the Factory Floor

Anduril's careers page and job boards show the company actively recruiting for roles tied to its Ohio operations. A LinkedIn search for Anduril jobs in Ohio returns numerous results. Specific Anduril postings in the Ashville, Ohio area (adjacent to the Pickaway County site) include the following roles:

The Senior Manufacturing Tooling Engineer role, posted on Anduril's Greenhouse board, sits inside Manufacturing Engineering and calls for someone who can develop tooling solutions so Anduril's defense products are "produced efficiently, reliably, and at scale." This is a floor-level engineering role, designing the jigs, fixtures, and production aids that enable high-volume output.

These roles point to a workforce that bridges software-defined autonomy and physical production. A technical program manager for production at Anduril connects the team writing autonomy algorithms with the team building airframes on a line. An S&OP planning analyst at a defense-tech factory is forecasting demand for systems whose capabilities are still being updated over-the-air.

Anduril's career page frames the work directly: "This is hard work, on hard problems, in hard mode." It adds: "If you value working in the office or in the field" (a signal that the company expects production staff to operate where systems are tested and deployed, not just where they're assembled).

The full scale of Arsenal-1-specific hiring is difficult to pin down. Anduril's site doesn't break out how many open roles are tied to the Ohio facility versus its sites in California, Colorado, or Australia. Third-party job boards should be treated cautiously, as they scrape, duplicate, and miscount. The Greenhouse and LinkedIn postings confirm the roles exist; the exact headcount committed to Arsenal-1 at this stage hasn't been made public.

Why Ohio Won — and What It Means for Defense-Tech Talent

Anduril evaluated sites across the country and landed on Pickaway County for reasons that go beyond incentives, though the state did offer a Job Creation Tax Credit and $70 million from the All Ohio Future Fund. What made Ohio the answer was a specific convergence of workforce density, military infrastructure, and logistics access.

Ohio has the third-largest manufacturing workforce in the United States, and within a 45- to 60-minute drive of the Arsenal-1 site, roughly a million workers live in the Columbus region and across south and southwest Ohio. That radius matters because Anduril is targeting a July 2026 start for initial production lines, an aggressive timeline that rules out locations where the company would need to import most of its labor. "There was space available, a strong partner to work with, and a skilled workforce in the Columbus region," said Zack Mears, Anduril's Senior Vice President of Strategy, in an interview with Pickaway Progress. He added that within about a 45-minute to one-hour drive, there's a population of nearly a million people Anduril can draw from.

The state produces around 6,200 tech graduates per year from more than 200 higher-education institutions, including five R1 research universities and over 70 programs tied to aerospace occupations. Ohio has invested nearly $500 million in workforce development, including career technical education expansion and industry sector partnerships, and committed $300 million to innovation districts projected to generate 47,500 STEM graduates over the next decade.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base sits nearby, along with the Air Force Research Laboratory, Defense Supply Center Columbus, NASA's Glenn Research Center, the Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility, and the National Space Intelligence Center of the U.S. Space Force. Anduril's physical proximity to its primary customer — the U.S. Air Force — was a decisive factor. The company also gains direct runway access at Rickenbacker International Airport, a civil-military facility that supports the world's largest aircraft and handles air freight, commercial, and military traffic.

The site sits on 500 acres, giving Anduril room to grow the campus beyond the initial five million square feet. That headroom matters because the company designed Arsenal-1 to be reconfigurable — the same tooling and processes can shift between different autonomous vehicle types as demand changes.

Pickaway County Commissioner Jay Wippel said the county spent nearly two decades preparing for a project like this, laying groundwork through infrastructure investment and partnerships with One Columbus and JobsOhio.

For defense-tech workers, the implication is that defense-tech manufacturing jobs are concentrating in the Midwest, not just on the coasts. JobsOhio's Talent Acquisition Services will work directly with Anduril to recruit, develop, and retain the workforce, and the state's Find Your Ohio program connects veterans and transitioning military members to these roles. The companies already in Ohio — GE Aerospace, Honeywell, Sierra Nevada Corp., L3Harris, General Dynamics — give new defense employers a running start on supply chains and talent pools.

Rebuilding the Arsenal in the AI Era

Arsenal-1 is not just a factory. It represents a different model for how defense hardware gets made — one built around software-defined manufacturing, reconfigurable production lines, and the ability to scale output rapidly across multiple product types.

The old defense manufacturing model was built for bespoke production lines, years-long design cycles, and rigid tooling dedicated to a single platform. Anduril's approach uses Arsenal OS, a software-defined manufacturing platform that integrates design, development, and mass production stages across all Anduril products. CEO Brian Schimpf said when the project was announced that Arsenal-1 will "set the standard for how we respond to the challenges of the future fight."

Anduril is not alone in this push. Across the country, defense manufacturers are pouring billions into new capacity. GE Aerospace plans to invest $1 billion to scale engine and parts production, with more than $275 million directed at defense-specific sites. L3Harris is building a solid rocket motor campus in Camden, Arkansas, expected to deliver a six-fold increase in manufacturing capacity. Avio USA is investing $500 million in an 860,000-square-foot solid rocket motor facility in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, expected to create more than 1,000 jobs. Hadrian opened a facility in Cherokee, Alabama, focused on submarine components, part of a public-private partnership exceeding $2.4 billion in combined investment.

The common thread is speed and scale. Autonomous systems are no longer a future concept — they are a present-day production problem.

That shift changes what defense employers need from workers. The job categories emerging at Arsenal-1 and similar facilities are not traditional manufacturing roles with a software veneer. They are hybrid positions that require fluency in both physical production and the software platforms that increasingly govern it. Anduril's senior systems engineers and program managers command salaries from $129,000 to $220,000, a signal of how much the sector values people who can operate at the intersection of autonomy software and hardware production.

Zachary Mears told Site Selection that the company evaluated locations across the continental US against aggressive timelines, weighing workforce density, two-to-four-year education pipelines for engineers and technicians, and infrastructure access. "We are building and investing in a manufacturing design for the future," Mears said. "You will see continued growth for us, including factory growth."

The talent pipeline question is the one that will determine whether this rebuilding effort actually works. The defense industrial base does not just need more workers. It needs workers who can move between the digital and physical layers of production — people who understand autonomy software well enough to troubleshoot a manufacturing line that is itself software-defined. That is a different hiring brief than anything the sector has written before, and it is the brief that will define the next decade of defense manufacturing.

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