Russia’s 3D Printed Missiles & Can NATO Get Its Act Together?

For most of US history, however much the two major parties differed on domestic policy (in some cases a lot, overall less than you’d think), there was always essentially a consensus that shaped how the US operated in the sphere of international relations. Depending on your perspective, this either represented everything that was right or everything that was wrong with the American system of electoral politics. Since 2016, the position taken by one of the party’s leaders with regard to Russia has served as a rare but persistent example of a fissure splitting opinion within the Washington political duopoly.

Thankfully, there are very few instances in which it is at all relevant to discuss politics in the context of manufacturing. However! Defense production in Ukraine is so central an issue to additive manufacturing (AM) in general, as well as to how the AM industry fits into joint preparation between the NATO partners, that it’s difficult to avoid in light of some news about Russia’s deployment of a new class of 3D printed cruise missiles.

Here’s what Ukrainian drone experts noted about the “Filin, an 11-foot Russian winged cruise missile”, according to reporting from Business Insider:

Serhii Sterenko, who runs one of the nonprofits that organizes crowdfunding efforts in support of the Ukrainian war effort, said in a post on Telegram, “The mass use of this type of aerial attack weapon is what awaits us very soon. Then we will remember the jet Shaheds only as a small problem compared to this.”

This kind of rhetoric in the context of defense production always leaves me with a more or less ambiguous impression, because it would be hard for me to believe that, in this case, Ukraine isn’t thrilled to share this news, which acts as an advertisement in favor of their military being given more foreign aid. From NATO’s perspective, though, if it is to survive as a coherent entity, doing nothing about this is clearly unacceptable.

And when I say “doing nothing about this”, I don’t just mean the Filin: I’m talking about how NATO partners are going to approach aiding Ukraine going forward. But the Filin is an excellent focal point, not only insofar as it’s such a recent development, but also because we’ve been given an unusual amount of detail related to it. The United24 site, a news platform funded by the Ukrainian government, reported that “Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR) has published a detailed breakdown and interactive 3D model” which was “designed to show how the missile is assembled and which foreign technologies continue to appear inside Russian weapons”.

Obviously, only some components of the missile are 3D printed, but as we know from the US military’s AM buildup, every component becomes critical if you need to source it in order for the entire system to function effectively. In addition to the use of AM in the Filin’s production, United24 notes that,

“Investigators identified 35 US-made components and 22 Chinese-made components, alongside increased reuse of common solutions across multiple circuit boards and systems. That trend suggests Russia is continuing to simplify supply chains and standardize electronics across different missile and drone programs while increasing its dependence on Chinese technology.”

That point about “simplify[ing] supply chains” and “standardiz[ing] electronics” is the most important angle because it illustrates how much life appears to be left in Russia’s defense production capacity. Now, the reason this whole set of issues is unavoidably political beyond being simply geopolitical (they’re different things) is because we’ve never seen what a Trump presidency is like when he’s a lame duck (here is a Wikipedia link in case you’re unfamiliar with the term and think I’m being disrespectful).

But with the US midterm elections approaching, we’re about to find out exactly how much anyone actually cares about deferring to Donald Trump on the war in Ukraine, which means there are two very different possibilities on the horizon in terms of NATO’s ability to use AM in support of Ukraine. And here, it’s worth pointing out that very few Republicans have ever publicly demonstrated sharing Trump’s opinions on Russia, despite their fear of expressing disagreement with him when it comes to everything else; and that more and more Republican officials have been breaking with the president on issues where Trump is bucking a broader consensus among the electorate. While there are differences in opinion between US voters when it comes to supporting Ukraine, the gap seems to be narrowing, and it has historically been less of a gap than what exists between Democrats and Republicans on most subjects.

So, while it’s certainly possible that Republican politicians will continue to follow Trump’s lead in his historically anomalous public signs of support for the nation that the rest of NATO views as their greatest threat, I would imagine that there will be a gradual return to the traditional arrangement where America isn’t acting in complete defiance of the military alliance that it’s ostensibly the leader of. If the disunity in NATO does start to subside, one highly likely outcome of that would be greater incorporation of AM into an expanded effort to support Ukraine.

No one likes the idea of giving a foreign nation money, especially for war, but it’s important to point out that the US military would almost certainly have more to gain than Ukraine would if the US starts embracing more interaction between the two militaries. At this point, I can’t imagine that there’s anywhere in the world outside Ukraine where there’s a higher concentration of expertise concerning what it means to mobilize for contemporary warfare (thanks to the US and Israel, Iran could be catching up).

This isn’t even to mention the EU nations, which, with Ukraine’s help, could feasibly use AM to create a new defense industrial base more or less from scratch that would be much more agile and hence much more relevant to fighting wars in the 2020s than whatever we’ve got going on in the US (one wonders if herein lies much of the explanation as to why the US has been intent on keeping the EU and Ukraine separated).

Meanwhile, there couldn’t be a more opportune time for the NATO nations to ramp up cooperation on AM activities. Aside from all the success the US has had in recent years, over the summer, NATO participated in the European Defence Agency’s AM village workshop for the first time, which included very promising demonstrations of distributed production capacity. Also, in September, GKN Aerospace unveiled a UAV demonstrator that included no parts subject to ITAR regulations, which, if it can be produced at scale, would represent an ideal opportunity for the various NATO nations to collaborate on distributed supply chains. And, to go back to a post I wrote about last year, Ukraine is already using AM as part of its strategy to produce substitutes for weapons made elsewhere (in that case, a bomb made by a Turkish defense contractor).

All of this is still hypothetical. In a matter of days, it may not be.

Featured image courtesy of HUR