Armaments consortium to help speed, standardize drone fuze production

The National Armaments Consortium is expanding its collaboration with academia, industry and the military in an effort to quickly standardize drone fuzing technology, which its leaders say is a critical component to the Pentagon’s push to pump out lethal unmanned aerial systems.

Fuzing technology generally refers to systems that control how and when a munition, in this case attached to a drone, explodes. Fuze development is particularly important to lethal UAS, which are intended to move quickly to a target and need to detonate reliably.

There are currently countless drone designs, including home-made systems using 3D printing, and several types of munitions they use to detonate targets, resulting in a need for the U.S. military to unify certain components that can be adapted to different platforms.

The NAC is intensifying its effort to do so by bringing together more than 1,200 organizations — many of which might be able to provide some part of the fuzing system — to come up with standard, safe solutions for American service members.

“Almost every single weapons system, rifle, in the free world has a Picatinny rail on it, and that rail is how you can mount anything onto a rifle,” said NAC executive director Ben Harris in an interview with DefenseScoop Friday, referencing a common weapon platform that can hold a variety of accessories like scopes and lasers. 

In the spirit of the concept for unifying munition technology for UAS, Harris said “we need some type of common standard so that it’s safe for the soldiers to be able to mount munitions onto these platforms.”

Especially over the last year, the military has been aggressively trying to make drones ubiquitous throughout the force. Training, reorganizations, and urgent requests for UAS made in the hundreds of thousands have all been parts of the Pentagon’s recent drone crusade. 

But fuzing technology for drones can quickly become complex for several reasons, including the vast number of air systems that have been developed, safety requirements and the need for UAS to move quickly and accurately to their targets.

“The government is going to jealously focus on safety, I think,” said Harris when asked about how the NAC balances safety with fast production. “Producibility at scale is where industry can really come in.”

“Don’t get me wrong, everything the industry does, they want to do safe, but the industry is going to tell you that’s too hard, and that’s going to slow down our production rates,” he added. “They’re going to meet where it’s safe, but they’re going to narrow it down to the few concepts that the government and industry knows it’s safe, and industry is saying we could rapidly produce this.” 

NAC members include universities, non-profits and defense companies. The fuze expansion falls under a Master Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, or CRADA — a mechanism that allows government and industry to jointly research a specific topic — that began in 2022.

This CRADA is unique, hence the “master” description, because it can build upon pre-negotiated agreements to create additional “annexes” focused on specific technical research issues in a rapidly developing field like UAS. 

Harris said that under this agreement, the government can share sensitive information to achieve the aim of standardizing fuzes. Industry “will hold on to its intellectual property” to protect their information, but can decide to share data in later agreements. 

“But there’s a lot of open sharing, and that’s what the NAC sponsors,” Harris said of the consortium, which has a database of all 1,200-plus organizations and understands their ability to know sensitive government information. “The NAC members are trusted and vetted that they’re going to take care of that appropriately, and all of that language is all laid out in the CRADA so that there’s no stray information leaking out of this community.”

Harris said the benefit of entering into a partnership with the NAC comes with the collaboration. More than three-quarters of the NACs membership are considered “small, non-traditional companies,” according to Harris, and may not be able to produce an entire solution the government is looking for, but maybe a portion of it.

“All of these different companies have skin in the game, but they aren’t the ones who do the entire build of a system of systems,” he said. “It takes a community to do this, which is what the NAC brings.”

The Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM), which brings “in-house” engineering and technology expertise to the fuze effort, is also involved in the CRADA.

When asked about how quickly units might see the fruits of this collaboration, Harris said it depends. 

If “you’re taking systems that are already out there, systems that are already vetted, that are already safe, and you’re tweaking or modifying them, then I think you could see something turned around in 12 months,” he said. “But in a lot of cases, when you start talking about some of the larger munitions, if they’re talking about having to develop a new type of fuze, well, now that gets a little bit more complicated.”