It would be very difficult for me to guess how many times I’ve written a post that includes some reference to how the Pentagon‘s scaling challenge with additive manufacturing (AM) now has more to do with things other than the maturity of the relevant technologies themselves. However many times I’ve done that, it feels like all the AM stories related to the US military over the last few years involve this problem to some extent.
Most frequently, the “thing other than technical maturity” is policy. But that seems to have become somewhat less of an issue, thanks to gradually accumulating advocacy within the government, across multiple presidential administrations, for both AM and the funding procedures required to enable the US military to access its benefits. There’s also the fact that the US is now mobilizing for active combat, which has accelerated adoption of the sorts of practices that make aspects of the supply chain like data-sharing and qualification less burdensome.
In terms of the long-range challenges associated with implementing new production ecosystems within a massive bureaucracy, then, the Pentagon looks like it has now finally moved to addressing AM adoption primarily as a logistical challenge, which is encouraging. I’ll discuss this here in the context of two developments from the past week, but there are a number of other examples that I could cite, and indeed this is a topic I’ve discussed regularly over the course of this year.
The head of the US Army Materiel Support Command — Korea, Colonel Scott Carpenter, recently told reporters that he wants “to be the advanced manufacturing center for INDOPACOM.” Here I will give myself a bit of a pat on the back, as I’ve highlighted in a number of posts over the last couple of months that we should be paying more attention to AM in South Korea precisely because of the relationship between South Korea and the US military. I also think that there has been too little attention paid to the fact that Hanwha Defense USA, a subsidiary of the largest South Korean defense contractor, has made a bid to acquire Austal USA, which, as I’ve pointed out, would essentially mean that Hanwha USA would be acquiring control over the US Navy’s AM ecosystem. That would make a great deal of sense, as South Korea is the world’s second-largest shipbuilder and the US’s shipbuilding capacity has been worn down to a little nub.
Image courtesy of Automation Alley
Additionally, in news that’s thematically related to the South Korea story, the Michigan nonprofit Automation Alley has received a $7.5 million Phase 1 contract through the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) to validate “a ‘streaming manufacturing’ model” that will align a distributed manufacturing network with standards set by the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). (Among other things, this validates the business model for the company DEFEND3D, whose founder and CEO, Barrett Veldsman, I interviewed last year.) Automation Alley will work with both Markforged, now owned by Stratasys, as well as with Fraunhofer USA, to stand up the program.
These examples are useful because they illustrate how the same processes that are driving AM adoption in the US defense sector are taking hold both domestically and internationally. As I documented many times over the summer, transferring AM-related technical know-how to INDOPACOM is of the utmost priority to the US military. Colonel Carpenter did a good job summing up why, telling Defense News that, “…a Guam-based military unit [recently] requested an assembly that would have cost $36,000. The Korea-based team built it through subtractive manufacturing for $82”. Carpenter also noted that AM-enabled distributed manufacturing is now accessible to the joint forces through “the Army’s logistics hub in Daegu, South Korea”.
What’s especially noteworthy about the Automation Alley contract is that it appears to be paving the way for making what’s already available separately to various degrees to each of the branches — a digital manufacturing platform available to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) — to the US military as a whole. The US Navy’s Digital SEA program, managed by Austal USA and now essentially coextensive with the AM CoE in Virginia, is as far as I can tell the most mature example of this so far. A military-wide capability of the sort that Automation Alley may be working on would be a key milestone in the history of the Pentagon’s AM adoption. (I’ve long argued that this is what’s really necessary in order to genuinely optimize the US military’s AM capacity.)
I don’t mean to suggest that the technical maturity of AM is no longer a challenge, for the Pentagon or for anyone else. But there are infinite complexities involved in enacting change management across an organization of any size, let alone one of the world’s largest organizations. Progress can only proceed by prioritizing what makes sense to be prioritized at any given time: if logistics had been the Pentagon’s number-one priority in, say, 2019, then we can assume that the US military would’ve made very little progress on any fronts in the intervening years.
Thus, my point is that there has now been enough progress made on both technology and policy for the Pentagon and its private sector collaborators to feel comfortable demonstrating on a larger and more visible stage what the combination of technical progress and procurement streamlining has been able to achieve over the span of more than a decade. The technological and policy challenges will of course still exist, but they’ll exist in a context where AM is being used in real-world industrial environments rather than in R&D facilities.
Featured image courtesy of Spc. Keli Luangrath/U.S. Army, via Defense News