In the U.S. military’s now decade-plus buildup of additive manufacturing (AM) capabilities, the Department of Defense (DoD) has gradually increased its attention on enabling its personnel to print parts at the tactical edge. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines the tactical edge as “The platforms, sites, and personnel (U.S. military, allied, coalition partners, first responders) operating at lethal risk in a battle space or crisis environment.”

As we’ve seen since the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, that once-gradual buildup is now giving way to a more accelerated effort, as the real-time evolution of military 3D printing proceeds at a pace faster than DoD’s traditional program-of-record (POR) cycles can keep up with. A recent story in Defense News, for instance, describes how a team at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JTRC) at Fort Johnson (Louisiana) sent a digital spare to soldiers operating at the tactical edge.

According to Defense News, the Army Materiel Command (AMC) now has a repository of around 1,000 part files, a catalog the AMC is urgently trying to expand. For those who have closely followed the DoD’s most recent AM ramp-up, the kinds of parts targeted won’t come as a surprise: components that are either no longer under contract or aren’t even in production.

Image courtesy of DoD

Recently, at Fort Drum’s 10th Mountain Division, members of the 10th Brigade Support Battalion recounted how they’ve saved $500,000 by printing parts like equipment container vent replacements. While the battalion is serving stateside, not at the tactical edge, the vent replacements are a solid example of the sort of parts that could be added to the Army’s digital repository for tactical edge production.

Defense News notes how this endeavor responds to the vision set forth by the Army Chief of Staff, General Randy George, which General George refers to as “transforming in contact”. In another article that just came out, published on the Association of the US Army website, General George specifically highlighted advances in 3D printing as one example of how the Army is successfully implementing that vision:

“We’ve made gains … as far as 3D printing and doing it locally and also having the ability to actually order 3D-printed parts and do that quicker, which is improving our overall readiness on parts, especially when it’s long lead-time parts,” George said. Regarding specific use-cases for advanced manufacturing, George pointed to unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) — drones — explaining, “Especially for systems like UAS and counter-UAS, the days where we have these programs of record where we buy something and then we’re going to try to field them for 20 years, we just know that we’re not going to do that.”

“In terms of how that approach might work in practical terms, AMC deputy and acting commander Lt. Gen. Christopher Mohan shed some light to Defense News, stating, “The long-term vision is that we have this centralized hub of data and then we map both the [organic industrial base] and other capabilities all the way down to the tactical level and say, ‘Okay, we can see what type of machinery we have at each one of our depots and arsenals and then all the way down to the tactical level.’ And the units at the tactical level will be able to access the data based upon the capability that they have.”

Image courtesy of DoD

As I wrote in an article published in 2023, the idea is for innovation to be able to happen anywhere that DoD personnel happen to be, including in the heart of active combat: “Military R&D is no longer being relegated solely to academic and nonprofit institutions, but is taking place at the ground level, on the fly, and in the next decade, is poised to move at an exponential rate to the frontlines. Although there are many different technological fields involved in this transformation, 3D printing and robotics are the central ones, with the overlap between the two seeming to be of especially high priority in the [DoD’s] latest R&D funding efforts.”

In a panel discussion in August, DoD officials made much the same argument, with Margaret Palmieri, DoD deputy chief digital AI officer, arguing, “The answers are not going to all come from the Pentagon. The good ones are going to come from the people that are closest to the problem, and you have to give them the tools and the data and the capabilities and the understanding to be able to pull that together in real time.”

It can’t be stressed strongly enough, that this is a change in the DoD’s approach to procurement, as much as it’s an evolution in technology. For those who think that the difficulties represented by the military procurement process are a problem too entrenched to address, the DoD’s highest officials are now essentially telling us that technology is now progressing too rapidly for them to avoid addressing that problem.

Moreover, as the military is always at the forefront of industrial change, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the manufacturing sector has to start thinking similarly about this same set of issues. The tactical edge isn’t purely a military issue, as the era of grey warfare means geopolitical tensions inevitably seep into all other areas of society.

Additionally, as the increasingly severe effects wrought by natural disasters turn climate flashpoints into virtual war zones, the “resilience baseline” is rising for industrial ecosystems across the planet. In other words, the DoD likely views the tactical edge as being just as relevant domestically as it is in the theaters of international combat.

Featured image of General Randy George is courtesy of US Army/ Spc. Salvador Castro