Tucked away in the converted storage room of a former movie theater, a handful of soldiers are producing drones by the dozen as part of the division’s Lightning Lab, a 13-person unit borrowed from other parts of the division and rapidly trained to build drones, training aids and ad hoc solutions to problems encountered on the battlefield. 

The Lightning Lab troops also take their 3D printers on the road. When the division was deploying to the Philippines last summer, the unit was tasked with producing drones to use during the training, said Chief Warrant Officer 2 John Crutcher. They decided to produce a 3D-printed unibody frame they called the kestrel, so they “went out to the Philippines, made 125 of them out there in the field, and took a lot of good feedback from the field,” including that soldiers needed to be able to fly the drones indoors, for training and room-clearing, Crutcher said.

So, a week after they returned to Hawaii, they made a new model, dubbed the Falconette.

The rapid—some might even say “lightning-fast”—speed at which the lab can gather feedback and adapt is a key component of the U.S. Army’s Transformation in Contact initiative, and a radical departure from the traditional yearslong defense acquisition process.

Lt. Col. Eugene Miranda, spokesman for the 25th Infantry Division, said much of what the lab does is “soldier-driven innovation from the point of need.”

“A lot of that innovation is being powered down to the soldiers who are actually the users of the things. So we get that real-time feedback, versus these age-old systems where it’s optimized only for the process of the planning, programming, budgeting and execution time horizon.”

In addition to the Kestrel and Falconette, the lab also makes one-way attack drones that cost just $12 in components to make, and is working with a company that won an Army innovation competition on swarm tech. The company brought its winning tech here and “in 24 hours, we had redesigned our Kestrel frame to be able to fit their components to be able to get up and fly a swarm,” Crutcher said.

It’s not just drones. During the Philippines trip, Crutcher said, they printed 110 new buttstocks for rifles, because the scopes were sitting too high to easily and comfortably use them with the original buttstocks. They also print training aids. 

So how much training do the soldiers need before they can build drones? Crutcher said his expertise came from “YouTube University, Google University, Reddit University.” 

One soldier who showed up on a Tuesday morning had built his first drone by the afternoon, and was building drones unsupervised by Thursday, he said.

The lab also teaches other units how to use the printers and build drones, because “we don’t want to be the single point of failure for the 25th ID,” Crutcher said. “You can’t rely on a 13-person shop to mass-manufacture at scale, right? Anybody who knows how to do math is going to be able to figure that out pretty quickly.”