A company setting out to become Britain’s next sovereign defence prime, built around producing complex weapons faster and more cheaply than the established manufacturers, will announce its first products at Apex Europe this week, according to Cody Aerospace and Defence.
The firm is pitching itself at a problem it describes bluntly, that long development cycles, constrained industrial capacity and extended replenishment timelines are limiting how far Britain and its allies can build and sustain weapons stockpiles. Its answer is a model built around affordability, attainable production volumes and sovereign supply chains.
In practice that means using qualified commercial and military off-the-shelf components inside designs Cody owns, concentrating its own engineering on system integration, packaging, fire control and launcher architecture. The company says that reduces development risk, shortens lead times and makes production scalable, and that it intends to deliver turnkey solutions to end users as well as build partner companies’ products under licence.
Henry Price, the founder and chief executive, has fifteen years in the industry leading work at aerospace primes and tier one suppliers, and the company says its wider leadership brings experience across systems engineering, propulsion, software and defence procurement.
Entering the complex weapons market is not a small undertaking, and the British end of it has been dominated for two decades by MBDA under the Complex Weapons Pipeline, an arrangement that gives the Ministry of Defence a long-term relationship with a single supplier in return for sustained capability. The war in Ukraine exposed what that arrangement cannot do, which is produce weapons quickly and in quantity when a stockpile runs down, and the gap it leaves is what Cody is aiming at.
The strategy of building around off-the-shelf components rather than bespoke design has worked elsewhere. Anduril has taken a similar route with the Barracuda family, claiming a fraction of the tooling and parts of a conventional cruise missile, and Ukrainian manufacturers have gone further still out of necessity.
Apex Europe runs at The Magazine in London on Wednesday and Thursday.
