TORRANCE, Calif. — A cruise-missile airframe is being 3D-printed before my eyes. The AI-driven system, the size of a shipping container, hums as it stacks layer on layer of aluminum and proprietary advanced metals.
Why it matters: This white-floored factory at Divergent Technologies, just outside L.A., is a window into the American arsenal of the future.
Each of Divergent's printers, engineered and manufactured in the U.S., can produce hundreds of these missile airframes each year. They're part of a new generation of "low-cost" missiles that are roughly one-tenth the cost of a legacy system.
- The finished missiles, including parts from other contractors, run $200,000 to $500,000. Legacy standard missiles range from $2 million to $6 million each.
- Divergent calls its revolutionary capability "one-factory, any-product manufacturing." With no switchover time, the same 3D-printing bay I watched can spit out suspension parts for a McLaren supercar.
Lukas Czinger — Divergent's 31-year-old co-founder, president & CEO — told me: "America has the opportunity today to create the world's leading manufacturing base by adopting leapfrog technology."
- Since the Iran war began three weeks ago, Divergent — like other defense contractors — is enjoying a surge of incoming interest. "Everyone has woken up to what some people knew," Czinger told me. "There's consensus in the [Pentagon] now ... that munitions at scale are required today, not tomorrow. And that is what has accelerated our business here."
The big picture: Divergent is one of the defense-tech companies that the Pentagon has branded the "Arsenal of Freedom" — a Trump administration effort to mobilize the defense industrial base as part of revitalizing America's manufacturing might. The name harks back to President Franklin Roosevelt's "Arsenal of Democracy" mobilization during World War II.
- In January and February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth toured Divergent and other emergent companies in nine states to showcase his drive to reduce "bloat and lethargy" among contractors.
- "Either you succeed right here as patriots in this country, or our warriors will not," a tieless Hegseth told Divergent employees. "Innovation, competition, scale, speed, cost-effective — all the attributes that we need in order to win on the modern battlefield."
A bunch of these frontier defense firms — including Divergent and Epirus, which makes the counter-drone system we showed you last year — are clustered in the South Bay area of L.A., in Torrance, El Segundo and Hawthorne. It's a patriotic, capitalist enclave in the bluest of states: Many of the factory floors have 15-foot American flags hanging high.
- The result: weapons of war at the speed of Silicon Valley. Working with a prime contractor, Divergent recently took a whiteboard design for a missile "from requirements to first flight in 71 days," Czinger told me.
The backstory: Divergent was started in 2014 by Lukas Czinger's dad, Kevin Czinger, as a software-driven race-car manufacturer, and maker of what the company calls "the world's fastest street-legal hypercar," the 21C.
- Kevin Czinger, 66, Divergent's founder and executive chairman, told me his company is part of a breed of startups, "driven by national security needs, that will allow America to lead in the engineering and making of things for the next 100+ years. We can, within a few years, completely reposition America to be the leading maker of things in the world again."
Go deeper: "Electromagnetic weapon zaps drone swarm in seconds."
