What if the biggest bottleneck in defense technology is not designing better systems, but actually figuring out how to manufacture them at the speed, cost, quality, and scale modern warfare demands?
Eric Hostetler, CEO and co-founder of Volund Manufacturing, joins Greg to unpack why America’s defense industrial base needs more than individual manufacturing breakthroughs. Drawing on a career that spans Vans, Oakley, Fox Racing, Apple, Anduril, and high-end defense manufacturing, Eric brings a consumer goods mindset to one of the country’s most urgent industrial challenges: producing reliable defense hardware at scale.
At Volund, that philosophy is being applied to air-breathing propulsion systems for low-cost, attritable drones and other unmanned systems. Rather than treating the engine as the only innovation, Eric and his team are building a vertically integrated factory where manufacturing, quality control, software, automation, and production planning are designed as one system from the beginning.
In this conversation, Greg and Eric explore:
- Eric’s unconventional path from BMX bikes and learning to weld to nearly 100 trips to China while building consumer products for companies including Vans, Oakley, Fox Racing, and Apple
- How working on rifles for U.S. special operations helped push Eric from consumer products into defense, eventually leading him to join Anduril as one of its earliest employees
- Why consumer goods taught him that cost, quality, production volume, and speed cannot be treated as problems to solve after a product has already been designed
- The problem with designing defense hardware for the demo first and planning to “optimize for manufacturing” later
- Why Eric believes manufacturers need to optimize the whole cost and complexity equation instead of focusing too heavily on individual technologies like AI, robotics, or automation
- How Volund is building vertically integrated propulsion manufacturing for low-cost, medium-to-long-range unmanned systems
- Why the factory itself is part of the product, with CNC machining, sheet metal processing, welding, heat treatment, balancing, quality systems, and other capabilities brought under one roof
- How self-contained manufacturing cells can handle production tracking, metrology, quality control, and scrap decisions without creating downstream bottlenecks
- Why factory software, IoT, MES integration, and automated quality systems may deliver greater gains than simply replacing human labor with robots
- The propulsion supply chain challenges hiding behind bearings, investment castings, rare earth materials, chemical precursors, and other critical components
- Why Eric believes parts of the existing defense industrial base may need to be replaced rather than simply funded to produce more
- How aging machine shops, fragmented suppliers, cybersecurity requirements, and limited scaling expertise make rapid expansion especially difficult
- Why vertically integrated, product-focused factories could become a stronger model for rebuilding domestic manufacturing capacity
- What Volund’s $12 million seed round unlocks as the company works toward low-rate initial production of its first two engine sizes
- Why COVID exposed the fragility of global supply chains and helped reignite investor interest in factories and domestic industrial capacity
- Volund ’s approach to hiring experienced operators and engineers who understand legacy systems but are motivated to build faster, less bureaucratic alternatives
- The Apple principle of “brief by exception,” and what defense companies can learn from eliminating meetings about things that are already going according to plan
- Why investment casting deserves far more attention as a critical, skilled-labor-intensive foundation for propulsion and turbomachinery
For anyone building in defense tech, hard tech, robotics, or advanced manufacturing, this conversation offers a systems-level look at what it will actually take to rebuild American production capacity. The future of defense manufacturing may depend less on finding a single breakthrough technology and more on redesigning the entire factory around speed, scale, reliability, and manufacturability from day one.
Learn more about Volund Manufacturing: https://www.volundmfg.com/
Connect with Eric Hostetler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-hostetler-4421964/
Connect with Greg Toroosian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregtoroosian/
