Why Standardized Defense Production Is an Automation Problem

The Department of Defense has said publicly that it wants to field commercial vehicle and battery technology on military ground vehicles, and it wants that technology standardized and produced at scale. The Jumpstart for Advanced Battery Standardization (JABS) effort, run with the Army's DEVCOM Ground Vehicle Systems Center in Warren, Michigan, is built around a simple architectural idea: rather than a bespoke battery per platform, develop common, standardized modules based on commercially proven technology and scale them across the fleet.

Most of the commentary about that decision focuses on the chemistry and the vendors. The most consequential word in it is "standardized." Standardization is not a technology decision. It is a production decision. It declares that the DoD intends to buy hardware the way industry builds it: in volume, from repeatable processes, across multiple suppliers. And that quietly creates a production engineering problem, because a standardized design is only as good as the production system that can hold it identical, unit after unit, across variants, rates, and years.

Before making that argument, it is worth stating clearly what SMT is not claiming. SMT Automation holds no DoD contracts and no prime program awards. We are not part of JABS or any defense program. What we have done, for nearly a decade, is design and build the automated production systems that hold standardized commercial products to specification at automotive volumes. This article is about what that experience says standardization will demand from the defense industrial base.

Standardization changes the shape of the problem

When every platform carries its own bespoke design, production volume per design stays small, and hand-built fabrication is economically defensible. Standardize the design, and the economics invert: now there is one design family at real volume, and the winning production approach looks like automotive manufacturing. Automated handling. Repeatable process control. In-process verification. Takt-time discipline.

But defense demand has a shape that pure automotive tooling handles badly. Automotive programs justify hard automation, meaning dedicated, single-product lines, with volumes in the hundreds of thousands. Defense demand arrives as something messier:

• Low-rate initial quantities for prototyping and operational evaluation, in the tens to hundreds.
• Multiple integration variants around the common design, because a standardized module still meets a different vehicle at every platform boundary.
• Rate uncertainty, with volumes that step up or pause with budget cycles and fielding decisions.
• Long sustainment tails, where the same assembly must be producible years after the initial run.

Hard automation cannot follow that profile. Manual builds cannot hold quality across it. The tool that fits is the flexible automation cell.

What a flexible automation cell actually is

A flexible cell is a robotic workcell, whether for assembly, material handling, dispensing, machine tending, or inspection, engineered so the product-specific content is concentrated in interchangeable elements while the capital content stays general purpose. In practice:

Standardization is where automation earns its keep.

• The robot, controls, and safety system are product-agnostic. The same cell that runs variant A runs variant B after a program and tooling change, not a capital project.
• Product-specific knowledge lives in fixtures and programs. Modular fixture plates, quick-change tooling interfaces, and offline-programmed paths mean a new variant is an engineering exercise measured in days or weeks, not a new line.
• Changeover is designed, not improvised. Locating schemes, tool changers, and parameter recipes keyed to part serial numbers let one cell run mixed models without quality drift. Changeover discipline is precisely what separates a cell that can serve low-rate defense work economically from one that cannot.
• Verification is built in. Vision inspection, process-parameter logging, and torque or dispense monitoring are captured per unit, so quality evidence scales automatically with volume.

This is the standard toolkit of automotive automation integrators, refined over decades of model changeovers and mixed-model lines. It maps one to one onto the defense problem of producing a standardized design family across variants and uncertain rates.

The three failure modes that decide it

In our automation work for GM and Magna, spanning production-line integration, major retooling, robotic and cobot integration, vision systems, end-of-arm tooling, controls, commissioning, and launch support, the projects that struggled almost always failed in one of three ways. Each applies directly to standardized defense production.

Process control that lives in people instead of systems. If the process runs correctly because a specific operator knows the trick, the process is not standardized, whatever the drawing says. Standardization at volume means parameters that are locked, revision-controlled, and executed identically on every shift.

Verification that happens after the fact. End-of-line inspection finds defects after the value is already spent. Cells built with in-process verification, from vision checks to parameter monitoring, catch drift while it is still cheap. On a defense program, that evidence trail is not a nice-to-have; it is what a quality clause is actually asking for.

Changeover as an afterthought. The line that runs one variant beautifully and takes three weeks to run the second is not a production system for defense demand. Changeover has to be engineered in on day one, because every requalification costs a program schedule and review cycles.

None of these are exotic. All of them are habits, and habits are what a decade of automotive launches builds.

The labor math makes this urgent

There is a second reason standardized defense production runs through automation, and it is arithmetic. Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute project that U.S. manufacturing could need as many as 3.8 million additional workers between 2024 and 2033, with roughly 1.9 million skilled openings potentially going unfilled. Defense manufacturing competes for those same machinists, controls engineers, and technicians against every other industrial sector, often in the same labor markets.

A production strategy that assumes hiring its way to rate is building on sand. A flexible automated cell multiplies scarce skilled people instead of consuming them: one skilled technician supervising an automated cell produces a multiple of manual output, while the cell absorbs the repetitive work and the human handles setup, programming, and judgment. In a constrained labor market, that is not a cost story. It is the only credible scale story.

Where this leaves the industrial base

The DoD has chosen a manufacturing strategy: commercial technology, standardized designs, produced at scale. The binding constraint on that strategy is not chemistry and it is not money. It is production systems that can hold a standardized design to specification across low rates, many variants, and uncertain volumes, with a workforce that is genuinely available.

That is an automation problem. It is the problem the automotive automation base around Detroit, the same region that hosts the DoD's own ground-vehicle engineering center, has spent decades solving for the most demanding industrial customers in the country. The opportunity in front of that base, and in front of shops like ours, is to bring the discipline across honestly: no shortcuts, no borrowed credentials, just production engineering that holds up.

Standardization is where automation earns its keep.