US Army Considers 3D Printing for Mass UAS Production

According to Breaking Defense, the head of US Army Futures Command, General James Rainey, told an audience at the US Army’s Global Force Symposium and Exhibition (March 25-27 in Huntsville, Alabama) that the branch is currently assessing its capabilities for 3D printed drone production, towards the objective of a potential scale-up in the very near future. Rainey noted that, thus far, the endeavor has taken the form of 3D printing drone swarms that mimic enemy forces’ unmanned aircraft system (UAS) programs.

“What we need right now is the ability to replicate the UAS threat during training at home station,” Rainey reportedly told the crowd at Global Force. “So Bradley platoon, tank platoon, shooting, gunnery, we got to be able to swarm UAVs on a platoon. …We got to be able to replicate that threat. And we need to do it at a price point that is ridiculously low: We don’t need the Gucci cameras and everything else.”

Breaking Defense also referenced work being done by the 101st Airborne Division at Kentucky’s Fort Campbell that was reported in early March, involving the 101st Airborne’s work with Army Materiel Command (AMC) on a “drone production sprint.” Defense Scoop reported that, in response to government-wide budget constraints for FY 2025, the commander of the 101st Airborne, Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, used existing unit funds to initiate a 3D printed drone program.

Defense Scoop quoted Sylvia as saying that the 101st “spent a bunch of money” on 20 UAS systems in 2024, whereas, as of the beginning of March 2025, the division had used additive manufacturing (AM) to produce over 100 drones “at a much lower cost.”

The acting commanding general of the AMC, Lt. Gen. Christopher Mohan, told Breaking Defense, “It’s gonna take a couple of months before we get to a decision,” about whether or not the branch will take mass drone production into its own hands. “We’ve proven that we can do it with this low-level system and we can print this one and produce this then we can produce much larger.”

If the US Army does decide to ramp up its drone production, Mohan stated that the branch would likely move towards injection molding, which he said could allow the branch to ultimately produce “10,000 drones per month”.

In that context, this would be a textbook case of AM-enabled bridge production, a manufacturing strategy in which AM “primes the pump” at the beginning of a product’s life cycle, often in anticipation of a more conventional production process taking over once the production rate hits an economy of scale. On the other hand, the more that the US military experiments with 3D printed drones, the likelier it will become that 3D printing will remain the preferred technique for some significant percentage of the final product.

That’s a particularly realistic scenario when it comes to drones. Major military conflicts in the 2020s have already sparked a revolution in drone production, with 3D printing at its center.

The US military has diligently studied that landscape to incorporate the same methods into its procurement processes. In June 2024, for instance, it was reported that Task Force 99, a small US Air Force group based in Qatar, had designed and printed a drone using AI in less than 48 hours. And in February, Firestorm Labs tested its xCell containerized AM factory to print drones at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) exercise at California’s Camp Roberts.

Thus, given the unusually rapid evolution of drone production, it may ultimately make sense for AM to play a larger role in the output of end-use parts than is currently being assumed, even if the US military ramps up to those higher scales now being considered. In any case, drones are poised to remain at the forefront of the US military’s advanced manufacturing strategy for the foreseeable future.