David Albritton: GM Defense Wants to Apply Commercial R&D Work to Aerospace, Defense

General Motors' defense business plans to leverage the parent company’s commercial research-and-development efforts to support its work in defense and aerospace areas, National Defense reported Thursday.

“Every year GM invests upwards of $7 billion to $9 billion in R&D,” said David Albritton, president of GM Defense. “That's a huge wealth of resources that we can leverage.”

Albritton said those efforts include development work on electric motors, lithium-ion batteries, cybersecurity systems and hydrogen fuel cell technology.

He cited GM Defense’s involvement in the U.S. Army’s infantry squad vehicle program, interest in the service’s robotic combat vehicle initiative and plans to team up with other companies to advance certain capabilities.

“We're also thinking about this across domains, not just with ground vehicles, but … air [and] sea applications,” Albritton said. “Some of the things that we're doing are focusing on capability trends that the services have talked about as it relates to network systems, autonomy and AI, directed energy … [and] increased energy demands.”