AM Demand Signals: Unusual Machines’ CEO Allan Evans Explains the White House Executive Order on Drones

In terms of all the many factors out there with the potential to impact demand outlook for the additive manufacturing (AM) industry, an executive order issued by the White House in June is among the biggest developments so far this year.

The order, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance”, doesn’t specifically reference AM. However, AM is nonetheless relevant to a number of the themes covered throughout the document, such as accelerating R&D, ensuring supply chain security, and prioritizing domestic manufacturing. Moreover, the general significance of 3D printing to the global drone industry suggests that any effort to expand U.S. drone manufacturing should similarly represent a boon for U.S. 3D printing activity.

President Trump’s executive order was followed up about a month later by the related memorandum from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance”, which, like the executive order, focuses on what are commonly considered ‘small drones’ — those that weigh 55 pounds or less. The Hegseth memo didn’t explicitly mention 3D printing, either, but again, like the White House document, it also made allusions to some directly relevant themes:

For instance, according to the Secretary of Defense, one part of the “threefold” mission for speeding up the U.S. drone industry will entail a Department of Defense (DoD) push for “…a technological leapfrog, arming our combat units with a variety of low-cost drones made by America’s world-leading engineers and AI experts. Drone dominance is a process race as much as a technological race. Modern battlefield innovation demands a new procurement strategy that fuses manufacturers with our frontline troops.”

That sentiment brings to mind many of the actions that U.S. military branches, especially the U.S. Army, have been taking regarding 3D printed drones throughout 2025. It also puts into perspective the growing interest in 3D printed drones demonstrated by investors, including Firestorm Labs’ $47 million Series A that the company announced less than a week after the Hegseth memo.

At this point, it’s still very much anyone’s guess, how big the drone opportunity will be for the AM industry, especially concerning the AM industry of the U.S. and its allies: but a useful way to start to gauge the size of that opportunity is to get a handle on how big that opportunity seems for the small drone industry, as a whole.

Allan Evans, the CEO of drone component supplier/e-commerce retailer Unusual Machines (NYSEAmerican: UMAC), based in Orlando, Florida, naturally thinks the opportunity has the potential to be massive, and not just for defense applications:

“People have the perception that the military is almost the sole driver for increased drone use, and that probably makes sense since, in the Ukrainian conflict, they’re going through something like 4 million drones a year,” said Evans. “But the consumer and enterprise segment has just sort of invisibly been there, as well, and it’s huge.

Allan Evans.

“For insurance purposes like roof inspections, agricultural industry asset monitoring, wedding photography, and food delivery — not to mention cases that are routine at this point like inspection of cell phone towers and oil & gas pipelines — small drone applications have opened up an enormous market, people just haven’t necessarily noticed it. I think it’s one of those things where you don’t see it, you don’t see it, you don’t see it…and then suddenly you see it everywhere. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t already there before you noticed it, though.

“So that’s what’s happening with the small drone industry, and the number of people who are noticing it now is just really starting to grow all at once because of the conflicts in the Ukraine and the Middle East. And the DoD is going to be the big injector of capital into U.S. producers over the next couple of years, but long-term, I think the commercial market is going to be much bigger, even, than the defense market.”

Obviously, a lot of changes have to take place in the U.S. and similarly highly-regulated economies before what Evans is describing can become a reality, and the White House and DoD policies take crucial steps in that direction. Trump’s executive order, for example, orders the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to speed up the process of granting Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) exemptions, which are required in the U.S. for drone operators who fly the machines farther than their own range of vision.

As I’ve already mentioned, both policies also call for the advancement of the U.S. industrial base’s capacity for increasing domestic drone output. In multiple ways, Unusual Machines exemplifies the role that AM can play in furthering that agenda. For one thing, the direct use of 3D printing for designing and prototyping drones and producing components should enable faster reshoring of drone supply chains than would be the case if the U.S. were relying solely on legacy manufacturing techniques. This is especially viable in cases where 3D printing can be used to implement bridge production strategies:

“We’ve worked with HP, using their Multi Jet Fusion technology for a lot of parts that don’t make sense to get tooled, like GoPro camera mounts,” Evans explained. “3D printing gives us a great framework to hit what I’d call these middle volumes, where you don’t need 25,000-50,000 of a part. If we only need, say, 1,000, we can create high quality prints, quite economically, that match the mechanical properties that we need, while also allowing us to identify the specifics of how that part needs to be designed if we ultimately need to go to tooling.”

Additionally, the existence of a company like Firestorm Labs, which is dedicated to creating deployable micro-factories that leverage HP 3D printers, means that a company like Unusual Machines can focus on producing kits with all the drone components that can’t be 3D printed — at least not easily, or not yet at scale:

“You’re not going to build your own drone motor at the edge,” said Evans. “That would be ridiculous. What would make sense would be for us to supply a kit with parts like motors, lithium batteries, etc., which users — including DoD — can have on-hand, and then they can print drone frames and fixed wings and assemble the parts on the frontlines, or the edge, in order to create  distributed supply chains.”

This is one of the reasons why Unusual Machines is opening a drone motor factory on U.S. shores, with a planned start date of September 2025. Again, while those motors won’t be 3D printed, the existence of a domestically-located U.S. drone motor factory will give the U.S. AM industry a much more realistic chance to contribute to the production of genuinely “Made in USA” drones, which should considerably strengthen the demand for drone parts 3D printed in the U.S.

But do the U.S. and its allies really have any shot at catching up to China’s drone production capacity in any meaningful way? According to Evans, the idea isn’t as far-fetched as it initially might sound:

“The U.S. government, through the American Security Drone Act, which kicks out [Chinese drone manufacturer] DJI, creates a big enough marketplace for capitalism to work. And then the White House executive order and the Hegseth memo will lead to government contracts, which will start to drive cash into the U.S. drone ecosystem.

“The combination of those two things is going to lead to intense competition in a classic capitalistic sense, and in my opinion, the market is going to act as a brutal filter that will very quickly pick winners. There’s way too many companies right now, but as the customers start to decide, the winners and losers will start to become clear, which should, in turn, attract more investors owing to the increasing certainty.

“We’re already at the beginning of that process with the demand signals coming from the White House and DoD. A few companies will be big winners, and a whole bunch of companies are going to lose, and that’s going to lead to consolidation. My guess is that within three to five years, the companies that emerge as winners are going to be very competitive on a global scale.”

An exciting prospect for AM users looking to enter the small drone market: right now, everything is up for grabs.

Images courtesy of Unusual Machines