For years, the Pentagon has been asking the wrong question about 3D printing.
The debate has swung between extravagant predictions that additive manufacturing would put factories on the battlefield and replace warehouses with digital files, and skepticism that dismissed the technology as expensive, slow, and ill-suited to mass production. Neither vision captures what is happening now.
In 2025, a 992-pound, five-foot-long additively manufactured metal valve manifold was installed aboard a nuclear-powered US Navy aircraft carrier. Another 3D printed metal component went aboard a Virginia-class submarine. The Navy has now approved 101 additively manufactured components installed aboard ships and submarines, while the Defense Logistics Agency had placed its first order for additively manufactured air diffusers for Ohio-class submarines.
That set of examples is tiny compared with the millions of components moving through the Navy’s supply system. But that misses their significance. A component approved for a submarine, ordered through the Defense Logistics Agency, or installed aboard an aircraft carrier has entered the military’s systems of engineering approval, certification, procurement, configuration control, and sustainment.
That—not the number of printers the Pentagon owns—is the real measure of whether additive manufacturing is becoming a military capability. And its most consequential application may be remarkably mundane: keeping old equipment operating.
The US military operates equipment often designed decades ago. Suppliers disappear. Tooling is discarded. Production lines close. A manufacturer may have little incentive to restart production to make three inexpensive components for a fifty-year-old aircraft.
A relatively trivial part can sideline equipment worth millions of dollars simply because nobody makes it anymore. Additive manufacturing changes that equation.
At Robins Air Force Base, the Air Force is using reverse engineering and additive manufacturing to address low-volume sustainment requirements across aircraft including the C-130, C-5, C-17, B-1, B-52, KC-135, and F-15. The Army’s Battle Damage Repair and Fabrication effort similarly uses digital models and additive manufacturing to produce temporary replacements for obsolete or long-lead-time vehicle components.
Sometimes the payoff is even simpler. In 2025, a two-person Navy team produced approximately two thousand F-35 O-ring installation tools in less than two weeks. Procuring them conventionally was expected to take roughly six months.
That example should reshape how defense leaders think about this technology. The military value of 3D printing does not depend on printing an aircraft. If a locally manufactured $50 tool helps return a $100 million aircraft to service weeks or months earlier, the operational return can dwarf the value of the object being printed.
That logic becomes more important in war. In a Western Pacific conflict, US forces will operate across enormous distances while an adversary attacks across the length of US supply chains—ports, airfields, warehouses, ships, and transportation networks. Additive manufacturing will not eliminate those supply chains. But every suitable component manufactured closer to where it is needed is one less component that must move through a contested battlespace.
The services are already experimenting with this model. Sailors aboard the USS Somerset manufactured a replacement component for the ship’s reverse-osmosis system. Marines have produced additively manufactured components for tactical vehicles, communications equipment, and unmanned aircraft. The Army has experimented with extending additive manufacturing from arsenals and depots toward operational forces.
Unmanned systems could make this capability still more consequential. An F-35 or nuclear submarine is expected to serve for decades and demands extraordinarily rigorous configuration control. Many small drones present a fundamentally different manufacturing problem. They may be inexpensive, expendable, rapidly modified, and short-lived. As adversaries introduce new jammers, sensors, defenses, and tactics, designs may have to change continuously.
Under those conditions, the critical manufacturing metric will not be the lowest unit cost after producing one hundred thousand identical items. It will be how quickly five hundred units of version seven can reach the battlefield after combat experience reveals version six is vulnerable.
Soldiers with the 4th Infantry Division are already combining small drone experimentation with 3D printing of components. Digital design and flexible manufacturing could eventually compress the cycle between battlefield observation, redesign, production, and renewed employment.
None of this means 3D printing is about to replace American factories. Conventional manufacturing will remain faster and cheaper for stable, high-volume production. Additive systems require power, feedstock, trained personnel, maintenance, inspection, and often machining or heat treatment. Certification remains difficult. Intellectual-property restrictions can prevent DoD from reproducing components it is technically capable of manufacturing. Digital manufacturing files also create cybersecurity vulnerabilities: A corrupted design may produce a component that looks correct but fails under stress.
Indeed, certification—not 3D printing technology—may be the real frontier. Producing a metal object is one thing. Demonstrating that it will perform predictably after thousands of hours of vibration, corrosion, thermal cycling, fatigue, pressure, or shock is another. That is why Navy material specifications, flight-certified aircraft components, Defense Logistics Agency procurement, and submarine qualification matter more than another printing demonstration. They represent the institutional machinery that converts a promising technology into a dependable supply source.
The Pentagon should therefore stop asking how many objects it can print and start asking harder questions. Does additive manufacturing reduce aircraft downtime? Shorten ship maintenance? Return battle-damaged vehicles to service faster? Reduce procurement lead times? Allow deployed forces to carry fewer rarely needed parts? Accelerate adaptation of unmanned systems?
And above all, can it do these things reliably and economically under wartime conditions?
Sometimes the answer will be no. That is not evidence that additive manufacturing has failed. It is evidence that the technology is maturing.
The future is not 3D printers versus factories. It is arsenals, shipyards, depots, ships, and forward maintenance organizations combining additive manufacturing with machining, casting, forging, welding, robotics, and other processes as needed.
That is considerably less revolutionary than the early promises surrounding military 3D printing. It is very likely far more important.
A military’s ability to fight is inseparable from its ability to repair, replace, modify, and manufacture. In a prolonged war against a capable adversary, the cumulative ability to reproduce an obsolete part, turn a six-month procurement problem into a two-week manufacturing problem, repair a damaged vehicle closer to the battlefield, or rapidly modify a drone design could become strategically consequential.
That is what it means to turn additive manufacturing from a promising technology into an operational capability. Fortunately, that transition appears to have begun.
Burgess Laird is a senior defense analyst with the Institute for Defense Analyses.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Senior Airman Renee Blundon, US Air Force
