Reinventing Reindustrialization: Why NAVWAR Project Manager Spencer Koroly Invented a Made-in-America 3D Printer

It has become virtually impossible to regularly follow additive manufacturing (AM) industry news and not stumble across the term “defense industrial base” (DIB), a concept encompassing all the many diverse organizational and technological elements associated with the final outcome of producing military hardware. Still somewhat underrepresented in this discourse, though, is the term “organic industrial base” (OIB): the totality of U.S. government-owned facilities responsible for maintaining and repairing fleets, manufacturing weapons systems and ammunition, and generally contributing to the sustainment of all branches within the U.S. military.

An easy way to think of the relationship between the DIB and the OIB is that it’s similar to the relationship between squares and rectangles. Just like all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares, the OIB is part of the DIB, but the reverse isn’t necessarily true.

There is also a third category of institutions that seems to sit somewhere between these two already overlapping spheres: the research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) organizations. Such organizations, like the U.S. Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), are responsible for conducting research into emerging technologies considered priorities for U.S. national security, often early phase research, towards the objective of developing those technologies to the point where they can be transitioned to commercialization by the DIB and OIB.

The seemingly countless RDT&E organizations within the Department of Defense (DoD) have arguably been the U.S. military’s most critical asset in the decade-plus buildup of its AM capabilities. The Naval Information Warfare Center (NAVWAR) Systems Command is a perfect example of that. Spread across five different sites around the U.S., NAVWAR’s specifically defined task is to focus “on capable and secure communications and networks that span platforms and facilities”. In recent years, as DoD has become more and more explicitly focused on accelerating U.S. military advanced manufacturing capacity — which requires increased attention to the cybersecurity of DoD-relevant production processes — NAVWAR has become an indispensable link in the U.S. military AM value chain.

In May 2025, for instance, a little-known startup founded in 2024, Chicago Additive, announced that the company was launching the AMOS 3D printer, a ruggedized desktop FDM printer that will be made in America at two Chicago Additive facilities in Indiana. ‘AMOS’ stands for ‘Advanced Manufacturing Operation System’, a technology developed at Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific under the leadership of Project Manager Spencer Koroly. Chicago Additive was enabled to produce the AMOS in March 2025, when the Department of the Navy leased to the company a co-exclusive patent license, “Advanced Manufacturing Operational Apparatus, System, and Method”.

Although the AMOS is optimized for use by the OIB — including by service members on the frontlines — Koroly, in an interview, pointed out to me that the real rationale behind the printer was to create a machine that could work in as many different environments as possible:

“It’s designed to work for just about any user, right across DoD, right across industry, across academia,” Koroly said. “It wasn’t designed exclusively to be a military 3D printer, but rather a genuinely dual-use product.

DoD is obviously very interested these days in developing more dual-use systems, i.e., technologies equally relevant to both commercial and defense applications. By moving away from these specialized systems where the government is the only customer, it increases the accessibility  for the general marketplace and, hopefully, drives the production cost down. So in addition to making a machine that can withstand harsh conditions, we’re trying to make a machine that can drive up the AM adoption rate.”

In thinking about the DoD’s internal use of the AMOS, specifically, Koroly and his collaborators also wanted to make a 3D printer that could ultimately be integrated into any conceivable context where the U.S. military has a physical presence. Part of the problem with the DoD’s attempts to truly leverage AM as an enabler for distributed supply chains — and this is a technological problem with 3D printers, generally, not a challenge unique to DoD — is that an enterprise might be using any number of different machines in all of its different, geographically-dispersed units.

By creating a machine optimized for virtually any group within DoD, the AMOS could lay the groundwork for genuinely decentralized defense supply chains:

“Most companies trying to enter the U.S. defense market don’t take into consideration how the DoD budget is cut into so many different small pies,” explained Koroly. “So you’ll go to one battalion that sources its own 3D printer, and another that sources a different brand, etc. We wanted to make sure that we designed a printer that could be realistically affordable for every different battalion, every different innovation unit, within DoD, with just a little bit of funding — something attainable for the average military user.

The AMOS may not be the least expensive machine, then, but the price point isn’t outrageously high, either. Another thing we kept in mind was using standardized parts, which could be sourced from a variety of different locations.

We also had to be mindful of factors like the corrosiveness of saltwater for users in the Navy and the Marines. That’s why the AMOS uses all stainless steel hardware. The quality of the parts we use might increase the upfront cost, but I think that the durability of the machine over its whole life-cycle will significantly narrow the gap against the alternatives on the market.”

Koroly envisioned scenarios in which the AMOS could be used to achieve distributed manufacturing:

“You could design a part in one lab in the continental U.S., and then if you have a machine at a military base in, say, Hawaii, the part quality would be guaranteed in advance, and the 3MF or whatever file format you use would enable the identical part to be reproduced. I’ve actually seen as many as three different brands of FDM printer on a single Navy ship before. If we can standardize everything onto one machine, at least regarding one particular AM technology, we can guarantee that we can enable that cross-pollination of parts without duplicating capabilities.

That’s the more important angle to the AMOS, beyond ruggedization — the purpose of ruggedization is really to contribute to distributed supply chains. The more widely that a single machine is adopted, the more you’re able to truly create a digital warehouse of parts.

That would also minimize the amount of pre-planning of inventory levels that’s necessary for any part that the AMOS can make. If you can store the part in the digital warehouse, and you know you have the physical infrastructure that enables reproducibility, now you don’t need to make all of these thousands of parts in advance, and store them in a brick-and-mortar location for however many months or years on end.”

This could also make it easier to train new service members and make those service members more productive over the course of their careers. By leveraging a machine that can produce as many different parts as possible, in as many locations as possible, the military can reduce the number of different specializations that each of its various branches depends on for operational effectiveness. That would be especially useful for anyone who needs to source parts in a contested environment:

“Every time you add a new specialized machine, that’s a new process that an operator has to learn and be trained on,” Koroly continued. “And then, typically, sailors and marines, for instance, rotate out, so you can’t ensure how long the worker you’ve trained will stay in that role.

Every new machine adds a new layer of complexity. Then, when you think about trying to manage that in remote locations, you’re not going to be able to get a maintenance worker into a contested environment on an island somewhere just to fix one specific component. You’d have to be able to rely on the users, the war-fighters and sailors and soldiers that are already there on the ground, or at sea, to be able to fix their own equipment in the field.

So I think that the idea should be to create the most generalized machines possible that limits the amount of equipment that users in active combat have to take with them. And, by setting up that sort of distributed manufacturing capability, you also ensure that if you lose one warehouse, or one manufacturing operation, you don’t lose all the parts that you’re storing or making. Now you can just source those parts from other areas within the supply chain.”

Finally, while the AMOS is designed to produce parts for as many different applications as possible, drone components are perhaps the most in-demand application category driving DoD interest in frontline 3D printing right now. Developments from real-world battlefields over the past several years demonstrate the significance of tools enabling the creation of parts that haven’t even been designed yet:

“One of the key lessons learned in contemporary conflict is that you have to be able to iterate,” Koroly told me. “Having a high-speed printer that can reliably iterate parts, whether a drone or a medical cast or anything else you can make from polymer, is something we were deeply focused on. Before this project, I was working in autonomous technologies, and we were using 3D printers day-in, day-out.

I think the famous Marine Corps saying is adapt and overcome. Whatever gives the warfighter the highest level of adaptability and flexibility is what they’re naturally going to gravitate towards. I don’t like being stuck in one set of solutions and one way to solve a problem. I want to be able to iterate very quickly and then scale up quickly from there.

Not knowing everything that the AMOS is going to be used for is one of the most rewarding aspects of all this to me: putting the machine into the hands of Marine Innovation Units, and other advanced manufacturing groups, and seeing the things they come up with. Because that’s what we were thinking about in the years that it took to make the AMOS — what’s the best, most reliable tool we can produce, that can handle the widest range of materials? And how can we design it so that the end-users who are trained on it can maximize the tool’s capability?”

Images courtesy of Chicago Additive and NIWC Pacific.