Military 3D Printing
Center for Solid State Manufacturing & ASTRO America’s Winning Formula for Turning AM Into US Competitive Advantage
Additive friction stir deposition (AFSD) has a lot of promise, but when it comes to expanding its adoption, AFSD also faces even more challenges than does the broader AM industry….
GKN Will be Pivotal to A NATO-Wide AM Buildup
Last week I wrote about how a return to less strained relations between the US and the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and a related resumption of…
Kratos Buys an AMCM M 8K to Increase Its AM Capacity in Indiana
As is true concerning the growth of any market, increasing AM adoption happens primarily through industrial clusters, hubs of economic activity which harness and accelerate innovation. While Indiana may not…
Aurora Labs Raises A$6M to Scale 3D Printed Turbojet Production
Australian metal 3D printing company Aurora Labs (ASX: A3D) is raising A$6 million ($4.2 million) to expand production of its small turbojet engines for defense and aerospace customers. The financing…
How AM Funding Shifted in China and the US, 2021–2025
Additive manufacturing (AM) funding has shifted in China and the United States over the past five years, but in different ways. In China, metal 3D printing companies accounted for a…
Divergent Is Building a Factory Around 3D Printing
What started with a hypercar is now taking Divergent Technologies into aerospace and defense manufacturing. By combining software, metal 3D printing and robotic assembly, the California-based manufacturer is working to…
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…
Pentagon Turns to Nikon to Ramp Up Tomahawk Production
In a recent post, I argued that solid rocket motors (SRMs) are the first big scaling challenge for 3D printing in a real-world production environment that supports the US military….
The Pentagon’s AM Buildup Has Shifted from Technology to Logistics
It would be very difficult for me to guess how many times I’ve written a post that includes some reference to how the Pentagon‘s scaling challenge with additive manufacturing (AM)…
Mosquito Dreams Part 3: Kelly Johnson & The Starfighters
Chair manufacturer Thonet pioneered bending wood, mass production, and composites. Then a strange wooden airplane takes to the skies and, against all expectations, does well. It takes on many roles and…
Austrian 3D Printed Drone Startup DropForce is Selling Distributed Production
Investors couldn’t stop throwing money at the drone market in 2025, with total investments in the industry setting a record, coming in at just under $4 billion. If anything, though,…
Deals, Dollars and 3D Printing: What’s Moving in AM
There’s been plenty of business activity in additive manufacturing (AM) lately, with new deals, partnerships and investments in production. One of the bigger moves comes from Sweden, where investment firm…
ASTRO America Leads $9M AFRL CRADA to Advance 3D Printed Missile Production
The Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) model for establishing private-public partnerships has started to gain traction in the additive manufacturing (AM) industry over the last couple of years. In…
Mosquito Dreams Part 2: Monocoque and the Battle of Britain
In the first article in this series, we look at how a European chair company invested in the world by pioneering mass manufacturing, modularity, bent wood, tubular steel, catalogs, composites,…
Solid Rocket Motors: the First Big Scaling Test for AM in the US Defense Sector
The additive manufacturing (AM) industry has become obsessed with the opportunity for drones, and there’s certainly good reason for that. But before drones, the big focal point in AM for…
3D Printing News Briefs, October 3, 2026: Hypersonics, Hotends, & More
We’re starting off with defense in this weekend’s 3D Printing News Briefs, as Titomic was awarded a $5 million U.S. defense contract, and VulcanForms announced a partnership with Specter Aerospace…
Zetamix to Make Metal Parts on Board Charles de Gaulle Aircraft Carrier
Zetamix‘s metal 3D printing solution is to be used aboard the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. The $3 billion carrier, built in 2002, has a complement of 1350 and…
3D Printing News Briefs, October 1, 2026: Defense, Enclosures, & More
In today’s 3D Printing News Briefs, we’re starting with defense news, first from Massivit and then from AML3D. Then we’ll move on to U.S. manufacturing of a new large-format LPBF…
How Drone Proliferation Is Forcing a Rethink of Defense Manufacturing
The rapid proliferation of low-cost drones is forcing manufacturers to rethink their approach to design, production, quality, and scale. For defense manufacturing teams, the challenge is both how quickly a…
Alloyed Helps Make UK Made Turbojet Engine
The UK’s Ministry of Defense has worked with Alloyed to develop a 3D printed, UK-made turbojet engine. From idea to testing took seven months. The duo will make a family…
SWISSto12 Partners with Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
SWISSto12 will partner with Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. The duo has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) covering manufacturing payloads, RF products, and expansion in Asia. SWISSto12 will also manufacture phased-array…
Impossible Objects Closes $40M Series B
The Pentagon, along with deep-pocketed collaborators in the private sector, is urgently coordinating the buildup of all the elements necessary for a domestic US drone supply chain. Even so, those…
The 3D Printing Opportunity in UGVs
In 2024, IperionX partnered with fastener firm Vegas Fasteners to jointly make fasteners for the US Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC). That DEVCOM component has been hit by funding…
SPEE3D Appoints New Global CEO to Support Expanded US Focus
A couple of years ago, in the title of an interview I did with the CEO of SPEE3D, Byron Kennedy, I referred to SPEE3D as “the most American 3D printing…
