Using 3d Printers to Revolutionize US Military Logistics?

Additive manufacturing, known to the public as 3D printing, may profoundly improve combat readiness and the defense industrial base far more than imagined by most proponents. But the Pentagon must account for the way different organizations measure performance, or it will be doomed to long delays and costly failure.

Additive manufacturing can be used to produce items that are impractical or impossible to make using traditional manufacturing methods because it builds them one layer at a time rather than machining, casting or cutting. Because it is computer controlled, complexity imposes few costs and designs can be quickly and easily altered, promising “mass customization” that is impossible using traditional mass manufacturing methods. Traditional manufacturing requires mass production to justify the costs of buying and building the tools to make an item. 3D printers can make items in much smaller facilities just about anywhere because the power, transportation, and vast floor space for tools and raw materials aren’t needed to make huge batches. Design files can be quickly shared electronically and produced anywhere.

Imagine a company or brigade able to produce repair parts on the battlefield. The Army alone spends billions of dollars buying parts every year. Every Army unit carries large parts stockpiles to keep rolling. This is costly and adds a huge burden to a unit as it deploys and in moving around the battlefield. A unit can’t carry everything, and it’s very difficult to predict what parts will be needed, so the Army uses various methodologies to figure out the most important ones on hand, balancing against cost and bulk. When a unit needs a part it doesn’t have, equipment can sit for weeks until a replacement part is shipped all the way from a depot or the manufacturer. Worse yet, sometimes the part isn’t available at all, triggering a potentially lengthy acquisition process. This problem has increasingly plagued the US military. Fewer manufacturers are interested in producing small batches of specialized military items for the fleets that have dwindled from their Cold War expanse. The explosion of unique, constantly evolving low-density equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan has exacerbated this issue.

This problem has forced the US military to “pure-fleet” designs and make them as multifunctional as possible. Having a single, common platform that shares most of the same repair parts allows maintainers to service their equipment with a smaller selection of parts on hand. But cramming diverse missions into the same platform involves compromises and doesn’t always work well — as exemplified by the F-35, which is slated to replace a diverse array of aircraft. Moreover, systemic flaws are eventually discovered in every design, often leading to usage restrictions or stand-downs until they are corrected.

Additive manufacturing could rescue the US military from the over-reliance on homogenous fleets prone to systemic flaws. Because 3D printers aren’t tied to mass production to meet economies of scale, they could support a diverse equipment fleet using different subsystems and components. Commanders could regain specialized equipment optimized for the job or quickly reconfigure equipment to optimize for the mission or conditions without the logistics and cost penalty. The acquisition system could avoid endless delays pursuing perfect designs for conflicting missions. Designs could start out with achievable, modest goals and continually evolve over their lifetime as conditions change or technology improves.

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