Final week, the U.S. Home of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee moved the FY 2026 protection invoice ahead to the Home ground. Included within the laws is a $131 million proposal for what the committee is looking the “Industrial Reserve Manufacturing Community,” which might allow the Division of Protection (DoD) to demand that corporations within the community shift their output from industrial merchandise to protection {hardware} when the Pentagon deems it vital.
References to additive manufacturing (AM) — specifically, the mix of AM and AI — featured closely within the report surrounding the proposed laws:
“Motion is required to right away speed up the Division’s adoption of commercially accessible [AI]-driven [AM] factories to protect America’s army benefit. The Division has an distinctive alternative to scale superior manufacturing applied sciences in a means that bolsters the protection industrial base and the broader American industrial base.”
DefenseNews reporter Courtney Albon, in an article on the proposal, famous that one of many authors of the report, Nathan Diller, previously the director of Air Pressure expertise accelerator AFWERX, gave written testimony to the Senate Armed Companies Committee again in February, which “highlighted [the Commercial Reserve Manufacturing Network] and referred to as the offshoring of protection manufacturing a disaster.”
Divergent’s Blade supercar chassis, an instance of the corporate’s industrial work that enhances its protection manufacturing capabilities. Picture courtesy of Divergent
Diller appeared to allude to Southern California’s Divergent Applied sciences, a closely funded contract manufacturing startup with deep Pentagon ties and an emphasis on AI-backed AM, in his testimony:
”Proper now, we actually are printing hyper automobile frames within the morning and cruise missiles within the afternoon. We’re in agreements with many of the protection primes and plenty of startups, delivering capabilities for air, land, sea, and house throughout all phases of the life cycle.”
As Albon additionally famous in her article, a number of branches of the U.S. army already preserve their very own applications that resemble what’s being proposed with the Industrial Reserve Manufacturing Community. As an illustration, the Air Pressure Civil Reserve Air Fleet allows DoD to faucet into qualifying industrial airline operators for surge airlift capability, and the Division of Transportation maintains round 100 inactive, Authorities-owned vessels that comprise the Nationwide Protection Reserve Fleet, which might assist the Navy when vital.
Nevertheless, apart from the short-term requires elevated manufacturing of sure uncooked supplies and items embodied in Protection Manufacturing Act (DPA) govt orders, this might appear to be one of many first situations since World Struggle Two during which the U.S. authorities is aiming to domesticate an ecosystem of civilian manufacturing enterprises particularly devoted to shifting their manufacturing from industrial to protection items in response to surge demand.
The plan may be very a lot in keeping with the decision for “fungible manufacturing capability” from Seurat’s Chief Product Officer, Michael Kenworthy, who wrote in regards to the idea in a weblog publish printed a couple of months in the past. Relevantly, previous to working for Seurat, Kenworthy was the CTO of Divergent, illustrating how the themes underlying the Industrial Reserve Manufacturing Community have been percolating in sure U.S. deep tech circles for fairly a while.
Seurat’s Space Printing expertise. Picture courtesy of Seurat
Alongside these traces, it’s price mentioning right here that Divergent was lately made part of the U.S. Air Pressure’s $46 billion Enterprise-Huge Agile Acquisition Contract (EWAAC), a ten-year, Indefinite Supply, Indefinite Amount (IDIQ) program that started in 2021, aiming to speed up the acquisition of “progressive weapons methods”. The EWAAC distributors checklist presently contains nearly 300 names.
In a publish I lately wrote about the addition of metallic powders provider Elementum 3D to the EWAAC portal, I famous:
“…as large as it’s, in-and-of-itself, the EWAAC contract ought to have long-term implications far past its personal boundaries. Given how rapidly the DoD’s procurement wants are altering these days, IDIQ may finally develop into the routine means the company does enterprise, and that could be a state-of-affairs that will require a digital acquisition ecosystem to be the muse round which the remainder of the long run protection industrial base is constructed. 3D printed drones and rocket engines are a perfect start line for testing the validity of that idea. Ultimately, the EWAAC can function a mechanism to steadily incorporate the idea into the workings of the DoD at giant.”
Thus, the Industrial Reserve Manufacturing Community may realistically be used as a pilot program for simply such an implementation of sure components from the EWAAC throughout the DoD as an entire. As I’ve additionally been monitoring recently in posts in regards to the U.S. Military’s more and more public declaration of its intentions to ramp up natural DoD drone manufacturing, in addition to different DoD AM funding initiatives, the Pentagon appears to be extra decided than ever to hurry up the usage of AM to create distributed manufacturing capabilities.
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