Hub in Indiana Seeks to Broaden the Pentagon’s Industrial Base-OxBig News Network

(Bloomberg) — A new hub for defense companies focused on key items like munitions and solid rocket motors is under development in the Midwest, as the Pentagon looks to broaden the US defense industrial base.

The American Center for Manufacturing and Innovation, or ACMI, an investment firm that concentrates on critical sectors of the domestic industrial base, says it has agreements with 16 companies to occupy its new Munitions Campus, to be constructed on the grounds of the company’s National Security Industrial Hub in Bloomfield, Indiana. Design and construction work is set to begin in the second quarter of 2025, with the campus opening in phases from 2027.

Expected private investment in the project will be about $600 million, John Burer, the center’s founder and chief executive officer, told Bloomberg News in an interview.

The campus is adjacent to two US military sites, the Naval Surface Warfare Center — Crane Division and Crane Army Ammunition Activity, and is backed by $75 million in US Defense Production Act funding over five years.

The federal funds are divided between $50 million for ACMI Federal to provide “equipment that would help lower the operating costs of the companies that were based on the campus and $25 million of prototyping funding that gets administered to the tenants of the campus to help them head-start some of these programs that then they would aim to scale on the campus,” Burer said.

At a time when the Pentagon is working to replenish US stockpiles and prepare for a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific, Burer said the Munitions Campus and others like it could help to boost domestic production and provide surge capacity when needed.

ACMI won the Pentagon funding in 2023 as part of a pilot program intended to support US startups and ease their path to working with the government.

According to the developer, tenants will include Alaris Defense, Athena AI, Canopy Aerospace, Deterrence, Elementum 3D, Exos Aerospace, Freemelt, Hybron, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions Inc., Prometheus Energetics (a joint venture of Kratos and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd.), Raven Space Systems, Rocky Mountain Scientific Laboratory, Spinner, Supernova, Sustainment and Voyager Technologies. Prometheus will construct its headquarters and a solid rocket motor production facility on a 550-acre (2.2 square kilometer) parcel on the site.

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