This CEO told the Navy he would automate his way out of American workers

I drove out to East Pecos Road in Mesa to film Hadrian's Factory 3, the building that opened in January with the governor, a congressman, and the mayor standing out front while the company's release promised more than 350 new jobs in early 2026. What you can see from the street is a warehouse with loading docks, and the street is all I got, because when I asked to film inside, the answer was no.

Less than two months after the ribbon, CEO Chris Power explained the business to Defense One while talking about a Navy manufacturing partnership. The Navy's number one problem, he said, is that it cannot find enough skilled workers, "so we have to automate our way out of this problem." The machines let Hadrian keep capacity "idle in capital equipment and robotics, and not have to, say, hire or fire people."

So in January the pitch to Arizona was jobs, and by March the pitch to the Navy was that the machines mean Hadrian never has to make a hiring decision it doesn't want to make. Both pitches are true at the same time, which is the part that took me a while to sit with. There is a mechanism that makes them compatible, and I have been calling it the Deskilling Subsidy. The government pays for a system that pulls the craft out of skilled work and stores it in software the company owns, and the launch event keeps selling the worker as the reason the whole thing exists.

The salesman

Before Hadrian, Chris Power worked in e-commerce partnerships and workforce software. TechCrunch's profile has him moving to the United States in 2019 with about $6,000, cold-calling Texas hotels, and founding Hadrian in 2020. Nowhere in that path, at least the version the profiles document, is there a machining job.

He opened his written testimony to the House with "As you can hear from my accent, I was born in Australia," then argued that automated factories are the only way to win, and that a New American Workforce could be recruited out of restaurant drive-thrus and warehouses.

I know some of you want the passport to be the story, and I'm asking you not to go there, partly because it's ugly and partly because it's the less interesting fact. The interesting fact is that a growth operator with no documented time on a shop floor is now explaining to Congress what American industrial labor should turn into. The people who do have that time noticed. A Practical Machinist thread from 2024 called the thirty-day training pitch smoke and mirrors and said it showed little understanding of the trade. A forum thread is not a study and I'm not treating it like one, but it is what working machinists said out loud the first time they saw the pitch.

The superpower pitch

The model, as Power describes it, is clever. I'll give him that. The bottleneck in a traditional machine shop, he told TechCrunch, is Bob or Jeff, the veteran who is literally the only person who knows how to make a particular part. Hadrian's answer is to write that process into software, automate around 80 to 90 percent of the operation, and have one person run four to six machines. He compares it to Chick-fil-A and Amazon logistics. Standardize the process, copy the site, and stop depending on the guy.

The TBPN Digest transcript of a March 2025 interview has him saying "100% of our workforce of people have never set foot inside a factory before," and that those workers are ten times more productive because software and robotics give them superpowers. Hadrian's website advertises a factory workforce trained in thirty days or less. To Congress the number was forty days, from no machining experience to precision parts bound for space, and he told the committee, "Everyone has equity. Everyone has purpose." When the $260 million round was covered in 2025, the framing was that Hadrian supercharges workers rather than replacing them, and on Fox Business it became an Iron Man suit of productivity.

I want to take the Iron Man suit seriously, because I think output really does go up when you do this and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But look at where Bob's thirty years went. The reason this alloy chatters at that feed rate used to live in Bob's hands. Now it lives in the company's software, and the person standing at the machine was working a drive-thru a few weeks ago. The knowledge moved, and control and bargaining power moved with it, out of the person doing the work and into a system the company owns. The reason Hadrian keeps bragging about how little experience its workforce needs is that the low requirement is the product.

The factory franchise

The Mesa building is not something Hadrian raised from dirt. AZBEX reported that Hadrian leased an existing Class A building at The Cubes at Mesa Gateway, finished in late 2023, and did tenant improvements inside it. The square footage drifts across the public descriptions, 265,500 in one place, roughly 270,000 in another, 290,000 in the ribbon release, and I don't think the drift means much. The building type means a lot. If you can take a logistics cube, fill it with standardized machines and software, and get aerospace parts out the other end, then production is something you can copy, and copying is the whole business.

The machines, Power said in the same TBPN interview, come from Germany, South Korea, and Japan. America invented CNC and no longer builds the tools he runs. That doesn't make the parts un-American and I'm not going to pretend it does. It does tell you what "reindustrialization" means in this version. The imported spindle is the durable asset, and the American at the console is the thirty-day variable.

And then the model leaves the warehouse. In December, Lockheed Martin announced an agreement to put a Hadrian production cell inside one of its Missiles and Fire Control sites, with PAC-3 MSE, THAAD, PrSM, and GMLRS among the named programs. Hadrian calls this factories as a service, which in plain English means the standardized production system gets installed inside the defense prime itself.

I need to be careful here. There is no evidence Hadrian emptied out a Mesa machine shop or caused a documented layoff anywhere, and I looked. The displacement argument is about the supplier model, not a specific victim. The Bob-and-Jeff shops that used to hold that knowledge are exactly what a production cell inside Lockheed is built to make unnecessary, and once the cell is in place, the trade they practiced is a setting in somebody else's software.

Follow the public money

This is the part that gets misquoted, so slow down with me. Defense One described a Navy public-private manufacturing effort with about $900 million in government money and more than $1.5 billion in private investment, over $2.4 billion across three maritime facilities. Nobody wrote Hadrian a $900 million check. That figure is the government share of a broader effort Hadrian is part of. The facility described in the article targeted about 80 percent automation and training in as little as thirty days, and it was in explaining that facility that Power said "we have to automate our way out of this problem" and that the machines let Hadrian "not have to, say, hire or fire people." He was describing what the public money buys.

The Army is in too. Red River Army Depot awarded Hadrian a contract with about $39.2 million obligated on a firm-fixed-price basis and a cumulative face value up to $80 million. Hadrian was the only bidder.

The jobs math

Now put the Mesa promise next to the Mesa contract, because they are different documents making different promises. The ribbon-cutting release said more than 350 new jobs in early 2026. The city agreement requires at least 300 full-time jobs averaging $71,000, within five years, and in exchange Mesa reimburses Hadrian $750 for each qualifying Mesa resident it hires, paid after the employee completes a full year and at least five hours of training, capped at $75,000, which works out to roughly 100 hires. The public heard 350 jobs this year. The city signed for 300 jobs within five years.

In August 2026 Hadrian was still posting entry-level Mesa technician roles that prioritized curiosity and willingness to learn over industry experience. I could not find independent confirmation that 350 Mesa positions were filled. Maybe they were. What I can say is that the only source for the Mesa headcount is the company that told the Navy it doesn't have to hire.

Hadrian has missed a dated promise before. Its Series C post in July 2025 said a 400,000-square-foot corporate and research headquarters would be fully operational by January 2026. In August 2026, Axios reported that the Los Angeles headquarters and the San Francisco engineering hub were still being planned.

Before somebody puts it in the comments, Hadrian says it plans to grow from about 700 employees to 2,000, per Manufacturing Dive, and that is a big hiring claim that belongs in this story. It also doesn't contradict anything above. A company can hire thousands of people while designing every unit of output to need less experience and less commitment to any particular one of them. Hiring a lot of people and needing none of them in particular is the plan.

The charge under the ribbon

On May 21, 2026, an individual filed NLRB case 28-CA-387462 against Hadrian. The listed location is Mesa, Arizona, 85212. The allegation is Section 8(a)(1), concerted activities, with retaliation, discharge, and discipline listed. As of this writing the case is open, and open is all it is. It's an allegation. Nobody at the Board has found anything.

I'm being exact because this is where people get sloppy. The charge document is not public on that page, so the merits are unknown, and nobody should say Hadrian fired a whistleblower or that the Board ruled against the company. The docket supports neither. What it does establish is that the ribbon was cut on January 29 and, less than four months later, someone in Mesa told the federal government that Hadrian punished them for acting together with coworkers. I think the public should know that exists, and I think it belongs on the same page as "Everyone has equity. Everyone has purpose."

There is also a pattern in who gets to look inside, and I'm part of it. Sourcery got an exclusive. John Coogan produced a factory film while working at Founders Fund, which invests in Hadrian. Not Boring disclosed both an investment and a sponsorship in its profile. My request to film at Mesa was declined. The friendlies get the tour and I get the wall, which proves nothing about the labor charge but does explain why the public documents are the only way into this company.

Their strongest case

Hadrian's best argument is not weak, so here it is. The skilled-trades shortage is real. The defense industrial base needs more capacity, and the Navy is not making up its submarine backlog. Hadrian says it is hiring toward 2,000 people, paying equity to factory technicians, and making each of them far more productive than a traditional shop could, and Power's stated intent, every time he's asked, is to supercharge workers rather than replace them.

Then hold that intent up against what he says when the audience is the Navy. About 80 percent automated, training in as little as thirty days, capacity parked in machines so the company doesn't have to hire or fire. I found no verified Mesa layoffs, no specific displaced shop, and no independent Mesa headcount, and I'm saying so plainly because the argument doesn't need me to hide it. A hiring plan doesn't cancel a labor-optional operating model. It just makes the contradiction easier to see.

Capacity without craft

America needs more ships, more missiles, more parts, and more people who can make them, and automation belongs in that effort. I'd be lying if I said I wanted the repetitive work done by hand. Build the robots.

But a thirty-day checklist is not industrial memory. A country that wants to make its own weapons needs machinists and apprentices and small shops and engineers who understand the work beyond the interface, because the interface is owned by a company, and companies get bought, pivot, and fail. When the Navy pays for a system that absorbs the craft, and the ribbon-cutting still sells the worker as the centerpiece, the public is paying for both halves of the same trick. That's the Deskilling Subsidy. Spend the money in a way that leaves the American worker harder to replace, because capacity without the craft underneath it is a dependency with a hard hat on.

If you know someone still posting the ribbon-cutting photo, send them this.

• Dr. J