Army sees 3D printing taking off ‘very, very soon’

GVSETS 2025 — The US Army intends to accelerate and scale the use of 3D printing, several officials said at a ground vehicles conference this week, as they’ve become increasingly aware of the advantages 3D printing capacities can provide to logistics and sustainment.

“Just like everything else with technology, it is kind of a crawl, walk, run. I would say [with additive manufacturing] we are in the walking stage, but we are going to be running very, very soon,” Randl Besse, commodity manager at the Rock Island Arsenal (RAI) Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center (JMTC), said during a session at the GVSETS Conference.

Already at least 1,500 different individual components for multiple Army in-service platforms and systems have been printed at RIA, Besse said.

Also speaking on the panel, Jason Duncan, maintenance integration division chief at the Integrated Logistics Support Center (ILSC) of the Tank-Automotive & Armaments Command (TACOM), said that another goal is moving 3D printing from battle damage repair fabrication to a fully qualified approach.

“We have been coordinating to be able to move faster and make sure we have a good process. That cutting-edge technology allows us to kind of move at the pace of change,” Duncan said.

The Army is not just looking to additive manufacturing in support of land vehicles. As militaries the world over race to stock up on attritable unmanned aerial systems, Besse said the Army is using 3D printing to join in the race.

“We started looking at new, higher volume types of equipment that would get us to be able to produce at much larger scales, talking in the scale of 10,000 drone bodies per month,” he said.

According to Besse, although the Army has “nearly every type of additive manufacturing that you could think of,” it plans to procure additional new capabilities.

As such, Brandon Pender, associate director of the Ground Vehicle Materials Engineering at the Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC), told the audience that the Army is keen to involve the industry in this process.

“We are open to doing our cooperative R&D agreements with any of you in the room, and happy to discuss what you could print for us. Additionally, we have our laboratories available. We have our machines available,” Pender said.

As part of this collaboration, suppliers can have a prototype printed and/or tested by the Army. As Pender said, the parts and components can be produced even in “giant shapes and forms, out of aluminum and more alloys”.

In terms of certifying printed parts and components, the Army has been working on establishing guidelines and validating their designs.

Pender said that creating a “digital ID” for each one of them can increase supply chain availability and end “an obsolescence problem for the Army forever”. “If we have a digital recipe, we don’t have to worry about tooling, if there is a vendor to qualify. We should be thinking about how to digitally validate parts,” Pender said.