Innovation is about creating something unique and different from scratch, a process that is by nature not necessarily refined or economical, or designed to be done within the limits and constraints of an existing production line. Manufacturing on the other hand is driven by tight margins and costs, with the ability to repeatedly produce the same quality product at high volumes. There is a need for this dynamic tension between innovation and manufacturing to drive the best value possible into a product.

Today’s focus on innovation is driven by a worldwide explosion of knowledge and new technologies. Criticism abounds for weapons procurement not being innovative; but look around our military services and you will find many things that we are doing right – innovation is occurring everywhere. The challenge for us is to find a way to shorten the time to identify and solve problems. And to do so in an iterative manner since the problems often evolve and morph in today’s competitive world of war.

Often quoted as major obstacles for large projects are cost overruns and schedule delays. Commercial industry, however, designs and engineers its manufacturing lines to control costs. A cost benefit approach produces a product that is affordable and justified. Designing for value identifies trades in performance that inform leaders early in the process of emerging capabilities. Our experience in rapid acquisitions, as opposed to major acquisitions, can teach us a great deal in how to solve these schedule delays and cost overruns. Engaging industry to understand cost performance trades can maximize the value of our investments. Prototyping products provides real equipment for initial assessment of performance.

Most often these rapidly innovative problem-solving solutions occur in our operational forces on the front line; in the most daunting environments you could imagine. People solve challenges at the point of the spear. Solutions are often commercial products which never satisfy all the requirements, but “good enough” is far better than nothing at all. If we could negotiate all our projects like this, using the “good enough” measure instead of over specifying the requirements of our projects, we would far reduce the number of cost overruns.

I suggest that this should not be a surprise. The young men and women who choose to serve our nation are bright, hard-working, and selfless. It is in their nature to be willing to take on the challenges they face and solve them without a perfect solution in hand. For them “time to market” is a matter of grave consequence.

On the other extreme of innovation and manufacturing from rapid acquisitions is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Acclaimed for its success, DARPA’s design model is touted as the solution for everything. This organization strives for an order of magnitude increase in performance. It is a model of success. The challenge faced here is to replicate and adopt the success of DARPA to various other programs and areas. They push boundaries and take risks. They fail often and fail quickly. Much like our operational units that endure risks and become stronger for it; DARPA learns from both successes and failures. They drive the far future requirements.

Where DARPA’s resources of time and/or funding are abundant and relatively unrestricted, rapid acquisitions processes are effective in resolving urgent needs when time is critical. Classic major programs have far too many requirements to be able to recreate the DARPA innovative environment or the rapid acquisitions method. The challenge then is how to adapt the acquisition process to be able to better incorporate trades in requirements to produce best value for the service. In my experience, the most innovative asset that a program has is not the process for iteration and prototyping but its people and their capacity for creative thinking.

Engaging our operational units and our defense industry in their projects provides a reliable source of information on the potential capabilities long before they become a reality. DARPA prototypes provide real equipment for initial assessment of performance and concepts of operations.

Empowering our combat forces with the tools and knowledge to identify the cause of the problem and to experiment with solutions that impact the consequences of these challenges is key to quick, innovative solutions. People are the key to any problem-solving challenge. Scientists and engineers can go to the source of the problem and work side by side with the professionals that deal with the issues. First-hand knowledge quickly brings clarity to the problem. Forward deploying capability resolves problems, prototypes solutions, measures the suitability of the solution. The interaction between operators and engineers is vital to create innovative solutions in the field.

The Bottom Line: People innovate when they understand the problem design to best value, and collaborate with others in learning from their successes and failures.

Nick Justice is executive director of PowerAmerica, the public-private power electronics manufacturing institute led by North Carolina State University. A retired major general, Justice Justice capped a 41-year Army career in 2012 as commanding general of the Research, Development and Engineering Command.

Here at Depot 22 ― the Israeli Air Force’s central depot tasked with repairing and maintaining much of the force’s fixed-wing aircraft ― commanders are preparing to transition from 3-D scanning of selected parts to actual 3-D printing of those parts. The transition process, officers say, involves meticulous evaluation and testing, and will focus only on nonstructural parts that can endure stress loads of flight.

But once they master initial printing of flight-worthy parts, depot professionals say they’ll be on their way to an in-house ability to shorten supply chains and bridge strategic gaps that may confound them in times of war.

“In wartime, we can be here around the clock working to return aircraft to their home squadrons,” said Lt. Col. Maxim Orgad, commander of Depot 22’s Engineering Division. “The more we master this technology, the more we’ll be able to use it to save precious time and bridge critical gaps.”

Orgad said Depot 22 has spent nearly three years improving its ability to use 3-D scanners to support the designing and conventional manufacturing of spare parts. What used to take several weeks or months now takes a matter of hours or a few days, he said.

“Before, we had to make a mold of the part, but now we’re using a 3-D scanner, which we can take anywhere and use to scan different parts of the aircraft. The scanner makes the 3-D model, which we then take to our manufacturing center where we manufacturer through traditional methods,” the officer said.

“Granted, this is only the beginning. But eventually we’ll be able to reap even bigger benefits by actually printing our own parts.”

Over the past year, Depot 22 professionals have been flying 3-D-designed plastic parts on Heron and Hermes UAVs to analyze reliability and flight worthiness. The depot is also experimenting with small, noncritical parts associated with the CH-53, F-16 and F-15 aircraft, officers said.

Orgad said the depot’s focus is primarily on UAVs, where it is evaluating future operational needs and determining how they can be met by way of 3-D printing. To that end, Depot 22 is working with the Defense Ministry’s Defense Research and Development Directorate and industry to keep abreast of new technological and procedural developments.

“Our engineers are working in this new field. We’re researching the materials, properties and processes associated with 3-D design and manufacturing. We’re looking at how we can use this technology to fix airplanes and to fly on airplanes. … And as we gain knowledge and experience, we’ll begin to prove some parts in manned aircraft,” Orgad said, before pausing and quickly adding: “But we have a long way ahead of us until then.”

Twitter: @opallrome

At least that’s the philosophy of Arconic, a Pittsburgh-based supplier of aluminum, nickel and titanium parts to the commercial and defense industry. The company is responsible for manufacturing parts of the F-35 and its engine — including some classified components execs refuse to talk about — as well as the armor used on U.S. military ground vehicles like the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

What sets Arconic apart from its competitors is the strength of the alloys it produces — often using patented formulas — and its ability to take many components and manufacture them as a single piece, reducing weight and bulk, said Eric Roegner, president of Arconic Defense.

The company manufactures the F-35’s bulkheads in entirely one piece, using techniques Arconic developed for the inner rear spars on Airbus’ A380 airliner, which first flew in 2005.

“[At] that point, we had been talking to Lockheed, and they were a little skeptical, but when they saw the part flying on the A380, they came to the table,” Roegner said in a Sept. 21 interview.

Arconic forges the bulkheads in one piece out of aluminum or titanium using a 50,000-ton machine at its facility in Cleveland, Ohio. Only one such machine exists anywhere in the world, he said.

To make the 21 foot long, 7 foot tall bulkheads through a more traditional manufacturing process would require machining multiple large pieces of titanium or aluminum, fastening them together, and then putting additional forgings on it, he said. But by using a process called near-net forging — along with some technologies developed and patented by Arconic — the company can make the bulkheads in one piece and dramatically reduce the cost and weight of the component.

“Some of the bulkheads [initially] were composed of upwards of 100 different parts. We could make them in one piece. Just wham, you get your titanium forging or your aluminum forging,” he said. “This one application across six bulkheads took 400 pounds out, and it got the installed cost of the final part down 25 percent.”

Roegner said Arconic is working with Lockheed and Pratt & Whitney, which produces the joint strike fighter’s F135 engine, to find more structures that can be consolidated to a single piece but declined to give further details.

“I unfortunately can’t talk about them,” he said.

The transition of technology from the A380 to the F-35 is just one example of how Arconic’s commercial innovation ends up filtering into defense products. The company is able to sell the majority of its products to defense primes as commercial items, and overwhelmingly manufactures parts for defense applications in the same facilities where commercial products are produced.

That’s helped Arconic retain experienced employees and make investments in new manufacturing technologies or materials, even as defense budgets fluctuate, Roegner said.

“In the world of structures, whether that’s aero structures or ground vehicle structures, and even arguably in jet engines, the commercial world has pushed R&D and development much further and faster than the defense world,” he said.

“The defense world has been putting a lot of its R&D dollars on cyber, networks, stealth, other systems like that and less on the underlying material characteristics of the vehicles, whereas the commercial world has been pushing that very, very aggressively. And what we’ve found is that many technologies we’ve developed commercially we’ve been able to bring in [for] defense applications, and by doing that … save a significant amount of cost while also driving significant performance improvement.”

Like other companies, Arconic is keeping a close eye on innovations in additive manufacturing technologies, better known by the moniker of 3-D printing. This month, the company installed its first 3-D printed part on a production airplane: a titanium bracket for the Airbus A350.

“We’ve been able to communicate about what we’ve done commercially,” Roegner said. “We are in very active work with military OEMs and military applications, we just can’t talk about any of the specifics.”

While the Defense Department is interested in additive manufacturing, particularly downrange in operational scenarios where certain items might be harder to acquire, more work needs to be done by industry to certify 3-D printed parts and prove that they can stand up to the stresses of military use, he said.

Arconic is particularly active in further developing “hybrid” applications, where 3-D printing and traditional manufacturing techniques like forging are both used to make a qualified part. Roegner said this technique is attractive for both the commercial and defense aerospace markets that need qualified parts but want to reap the benefits of 3-D printing.

“We have developed a technology that we call Ampliforge, which uses printing — in this case we used wire-fed, high deposition rate systems — to print a preform that puts exactly the metal you need where you need it. And then you only have to do one final forging hit that locks in all of the properties and dimensions,” he said.

“So you do that in significantly less time, much less cost because you’re not wasting material. … And in terms of qualification, you get the added benefit that you’re not actually qualifying a printed part; you’re qualifying the finished forging.”

As the initiative matures, it is beginning to show tangible feedback for relatively low cost. Tracy Frost, the Pentagon’s director of DoD Manufacturing Institutes and the acting head of the DoD Manufacturing Technologies (ManTech) program, sat down in August with Defense News to explain how it all works and why the defense industry should get involved.

Can you lay out the core idea behind the manufacturing institutes? – All of the technology advancements in the world don’t really mean much to the warfighter unless we can make it, make the product. We usually couch that as, ‘we have to make it when the troops need it, we have to make it in the quantity that they need, and we have to make it at affordable cost.’ The cheaper we can make things, the more we can buy. On a bigger scale, manufacturing kind of underpins all the productivity that we do in the country. That is both an economic and national security issue.

They are public-private partnerships, which is something the department has certainly utilized that authority for in the past but we’re using it in a very new way and revitalizing that authority. So one of the requirements is there was a 1:1 cost match of these awards. The Department of Defense puts [funding out] ranging from $55 million to $110 million of investment over a 5-7 year period. And the proposals had to come in with a 1:1 cost match, which can come from industry, academia and other government organizations.

By DoD standards, that’s not a ton of money. – It really isn’t a large investment considering what the goal was, and is, and what they’ve accomplished so far. And when you look at it as a 1:1 match, industry had to come to the table and match that funding, that’s a lot of skin in the game from day one. And that’s an important point, that from the beginning this is certainly a national effort.

The institutes are investing in what we call industrial commons. It’s a technology challenge that needs to be overcome, in order to get some capability. The applications are super wide. If we can figure out how to transmit information by light, look at the applications — It’s not just defense, its commercial. So all these institutes, we address a space that is going to change the world, not just DoD.

DoD has invested in eight areas. How did you go about selecting those? — We don’t want to bring all manufacturing back to the U.S., right? We want to bring advanced manufacturing back to the U.S. We’re selective, in the technology spaces we want to bring back. We tried to find a technology space that was advanced manufacturing, so not old-school, really moving it forward, where there was a commercial sector, an industry need for the technology as well, and where defense really thought we could use that technology going forward. If there wasn’t a strong commercial pull, it was off the table.

It’s interesting to look at the locations. Detroit makes sense for [the lightweight metals institute]. The fabric and textiles institute is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is located near Natick, which houses our Fabric and Textiles experts with the government. So there were some strategies when they proposed where it was going to be located. Youngstown is an old manufacturing town. It’s very economically depressed so the local government was happy to have them come in. A lot of them got fairly cheap rent spaces they can move into, because local government wants them there. It’s a national resource, but has local impacts.

It’s a public-private partnership, so how does industry funding work? – It’s all different. What was built into the institutes, in the model we have, is the flexibility. Each institute has membership agreements. Some they make public, some they don’t. There’s different tiers of membership. Some institutes say we’re a no-tiers institute. It’s a flat rate to join. Others range from membership fees goes anywhere from a couple hundred dollars for small businesses all the way up to a million dollars. They typically have higher-tier members. It depends, typically, on what kind of organization you are, and then also what you want to get out of it. The higher tier, the more money you give, you might have more seats on councils.

What has feedback been from the defense industry partners involved? – Large companies, some of our big OEM primes, I’ve been in some stakeholder meetings and they say ‘we came to the institutes first because there was money, and if DoD is going to put money somewhere we’ll go see what’s going on. But we’re staying because of the connections.’ The money is not that big. They’re staying because they’re getting access to our supply chain like never before.

For small businesses, they say ‘what an amazing opportunity, I’m sitting at a table with Lockheed and Boeing, and even the medium size companies that will buy my product and integrate into a subsystem Lockheed buys.’ We’re getting access to the rest of our supply chain in a way we couldn’t before. It’s a way to help secure our supply chain. It’s really catalyzed conversations and organizational relationships, and is addressing technology problems like we’ve never seen before.

John McGinn, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for defense, manufacturing and industrial base policy, laid out Wednesday how his team is hoping to prepare the department for an industrial base crisis in a time of conflict.

McGinn compared the new effort to the scenario planning that goes on throughout the Pentagon on a regular basis. But where that planning may focus on options for North Korea or a Russian invasion, this one will look at how various scenarios would impact the Pentagon’s ability to arm itself.

“We’re looking for industrial base risks, and those risks include foreign dependency, sole source, single source, fragile suppliers, suppliers that may not be looking to stay in the market,” McGinn said. He added that there are specific concerns about mining companies that DoD fails to “move the needle on” but which are vital to maintaining a technological edge.

While there have been a few specific studies done, looking at munitions or certain materials, a broad look has not been conducted in many years, McGinn noted. His comments came during an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation.

“To do this, to look at how the industrial base will be stressed, could be stressed under specific operations” will give DoD information it doesn’t currently have much data on, McGinn noted. The findings of the report will be classified, although a non-classified summary may become available in some form, he added.

Bill Greenwalt, a longtime defense acquisition expert who recently completed a two year stint as a key staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Pentagon used to do this kind of scenario planning for the industrial base, but that practice has faltered as staff sizes changed and priorities shifted elsewhere.

As an example of the type of scenario planning the department used to do, Greenwalt held up the question of what would happen if a key manufacturing plant was hit by a tornado. More modern scenarios could include what happens if a factory is disabled by a cyber attack or a specialized company decides to exit the defense market.

To help the study, the Pentagon will shortly release a questionnaire to the defense industry to try and gather information about potential weak spots. The questionnaire, which will be entirely voluntary, will go out with help from trade associations and major industry players.

“We engage with industry all the time and specifically look at industrials spots where we see potential weaknesses and work closely with companions and trade associations- but we don’t have a lot information” on that, McGinn said. “We’re finalizing a very targeted request, and it’s a voluntary request where we give industry an opportunity to provide some information to help us do this analysis.”

The Department of Defense is “leaning more heavily on the expanded notion of the industrial base … drawing from the broader manufacturing industrial strength of the United States and frankly partner countries too,” said Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners.

By the same token, companies are recognizing the potential to get a foot in the door. Right now, about 3-5 percent of aerostructures company Spirit AeroSystem’s total revenue comes from defense, for example. That’s a relatively small slice. But the target is 15-20 percent, according to Spirit executives. The hope is that a couple key programs currently within its portfolio could serve as models for future opportunities, particularly as the Pentagon looks to emulate what’s happening in commercial manufacturing.

In the commercial world, “you just don’t have a lot of time between design and production,” said Duane Hawkins, ‎senior vice president of Boeing programs, business regional jets, and defense programs at Spirit. “You have to be sure what you design will make you competitive. We use that practice on the commercial side on defense programs.”

Proof through prototypes

While not necessarily standard, the Pentagon is more and more often relying on prototypes for proof of concept – replacing at least some of the paper exercise associated with a traditional procurement with the ability to kick the tires, so to speak.

“Are we going to do rapid prototyping on nuclear submarines? No. But UAVs is a classic case in point,” where DoD has been more willing to bring commercial alternatives to bear for the services, Callan said.

The Pentagon notes three areas where prototyping is primarily used in acquisition. First is proof of principle – that is, demonstrating the feasibility of an integrated capability or the ability to overcome specific technical risks, and to develop detailed cost data. Second is fieldability – or the ability to demonstrate performance in the operational environment, for example. And third is pre-engineering and manufacturing development – to demonstrate such things as military utility, fabrication processes and performance, and to define form, fit and function.

That latter scenario drove the rapid prototyping component of the Army’s Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator – which will help inform the service’s requirements for a Future Vertical Lift program. Spirit designed and built the prototype for the fuselage of Bell Helicopter’s V-280 Valor tilt rotor in less than 22 months — a month ahead of schedule.

Bell is competing against a team of Sikorsky and Boeing, which will be offering up the SB-1 Defiant helicopter.

“Prototyping is not done well in defense now. It’s just a different way of thinking,” Hawkins said. “Clearly in [commercial] aerospace we have a lot of quality requirements we need to follow, just like in defense. But we’re able to balance that with speed and low-cost design and manufacturing approaches. In many cases we actually manufacture the prototypes on the production equipment we’d ultimately end up using. We find that more efficient. When we’re ready to go into production, we’re already there, we know what machine we’ll make this on, we’ve done the tooling. You’re starting all over again.”

Dual-hat production

Militarization of commercial systems is not a new tactic for defense services, but it’s increasingly appealing as DoD seeks ways to trim costs and companies try to leverage existing production lines.

“Everybody is looking at all the options at various price points to bring capability forward,” Dave Melcher, CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, told Defense News during the Paris Air Show in June. “Militarizing a particular aircraft that may not have been originally intended for that can be the answer, compared to something much more expensive they can’t afford.”

“Every one of our services have looked at options that were maybe more expedient, some during wartime,” Melcher added. “How do we get capability out there? Maybe it’s a low-cost solution but more plentiful.”

The true advantage of such tactics is of course realized on the production line, both through synergy in processes combined with volume. Spirit AeroSystems delivers about 47 fuselages for the Boeing 737 airliner every month; it utilizes that same production line to produce the fuselages of the P-8A Poseidon for the U.S. Navy, which don’t have any windows and requires modification to the bottom of the aircraft to meet defense requirements.

“We run our production on this six-lane freeway,” Hawkins said. “We run the P-8s in one lane, then we divert them and do what we need to do, then bring it back. For most of the time our P-8 fuselage is running on the commercial line and getting the benefit of building 47 a month, over 600 a year.”

The company does the same for the forward fuselage section of the KC-46, a version of the Boeing 767. The volume is not as high, but the concept is the same.

Callan also pointed to Textron Scorpion as a good case in point of an aircraft with commercial heritage, filling a potential defense hole. “It came out of Cessna, was primarily developed with a commercial mindset, from a business unit that is commercial oriented,” but is now among the aircraft taking part in the U.S. Air Force’s light-attack aircraft experiment, which will help the Air Force decide whether to start an OA-X program of record.

Quite simply, defense is gradually understanding the benefit of adopting the key mantra that drives processes in commercial manufacturing:

“On the commercial side of the business there’s an intense focus on designing for produceability,” Hawkins noted, “It’s a matter of survival.”

The Pentagon on Monday awarded Lockheed $60 million for “cost savings projects to reduce the cost of the F-35 joint strike fighter air system.”

On Tuesday, Joe DellaVedova, spokesman for the F-35 joint program office, confirmed that payment would fund the second phase of Blueprint for Affordability, referred to as BFA, which will begin to reap savings as early as the twelfth low rate initial production lot.

While the first BFA effort resulted mostly in changes made by the three biggest companies involved in the F-35 program — prime contractor Lockheed Martin; Northrop Grumman, which produces the center fuselage; and BAE Systems, which makes the rear aft fuselage — the latest effort will target other businesses further down the supply chain.

“BFA 2 is aimed at driving production savings deeper into the supply chain,” DellaVedova said, adding that at least 25 percent of the $60 million award has been earmarked for companies other than Lockheed, Northrop and BAE.

A Lockheed news release issued in July 2016 noted that more 20 “sub-tier suppliers” had already received funding as part of the effort.

During the Air Force Association’s annual conference last week, Lockheed’s F-35 program head explained that the JPO had opted to try a new funding structure for the second BFA effort.

In the original BFA, Lockheed, Northrop and BAE put forth an initial investment of about $170 million for improvements to processes and infrastructure that would cut the cost of joint strike fighter production, said Jeff Babione, the company’s executive vice president and general manager.

Then, once the companies proved that it had shaved costs during the eight, ninth and tenth batches of production, the Defense Department would pay back that investment plus a fee.

Altogether, Lockheed estimates that the more than 200 projects completed during the first BFA program will save the Pentagon more than $4 billion over the life of the program.

During BFA2, the government will make the upfront investment and also incentivize cost savings, meaning that Lockheed and its suppliers could earn even more money depending on the success of its initiatives.

“It’s a slightly different business model. I would say it doesn’t change things significantly,” Babione said.

“I think we have the first half of dozen projects underway,” he added. “There are hundreds of projects that are in the queue that just need to a have the time and energy put [in]. Remember, we had BFA 1, and we got to a point where we ran out of money, but we didn’t run out of projects. So, we just took all the projects that were left over and we dropped them in the hopper at the beginning.”

Many of Lockheed’s suppliers say they have independently funded new cost-saving technologies and processes, even without Blueprint for Affordability money.

Orbital ATK — which produces 35 percent of the F-35’s composite structures, including the upper and lower wing skins, nacelle components and inlet ducts — has proposed more than 40 projects to Lockheed Martin as part of BFA, said Richard Passmore, Orbital’s director of military structures programs.

Four of those are currently under consideration for the second phase. One project would simply get rid of a second thickness inspection of wing covers that Orbital believes is duplicative and unnecessary, given Lockheed’s ability to apply liquid or hard shims to eliminate any gaps between structures, according to an Orbital ATK spokesman. Another would improve the processes on how finished parts are marked before being shipped off.

Lockheed has not previously funded any of the Orbital ATK’s suggested affordability projects, but the company has put some into place with its own money, Passmore said.

For instance, Orbital ATK was having quality control issues with nacelles, which are made of a “fiber-placed composite” where carbon fibers are layered together, impregnated with resin and then cured.

“Five years ago, 70 percent of the parts Orbital ATK was producing were either too thick, didn’t meet thickness requirements or had this effect of OCW, outer contour wave, in the components,” Passmore said.

The company internally funded a number of projects and changed some of its manufacturing processes, such as when to “debulk” the structure and how to cure it, he said.

“Today, Orbital ATK is producing at a rate of 98 percent zero defect.”

STEICO Industries, an Oceanside, Calif.-based business that makes tubes and ducts for the F-35, has also invested millions of dollars into its manufacturing processes, according to its CEO Matt Sweaney.

Over the past three years, it spent more than $2 million to bring the machining of standard fittings in house. That has reduced lead times and the cost of those fittings, said Sweaney, who declined to comment further about its cost reduction programs.

Taking less than a million dollars from the Pentagon — roughly $750,000 — the Marine Corps Systems Command and Marine Corps Installations and Logistics built a transportable 3-D printing lab prototype for maintenance units and teamed up with machinists from the 2nd Maintenance Battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to evaluate it in field environments over the summer.

The X-FAB — or expeditionary fabrication lab — is a 20-by-20 foot shelter that can be deployed at the battalion-level for maintenance units. It comes equipped with four 3-D printers, a scanner and computer-aided design software system to enable rapid parts manufacturing.

A machinist can scan a part and then run the scan through a software system that recreates the design of the part and then prints the part out in polymer material from a 3-D printer.

The X-FAB is considered a pilot effort to see if additive manufacturing makes sense for Marines and the environment in which they expect to operate in the future, Lt. Col. Howard Marotto, the Next Generation Logistics (NexLog) and NexLog Additive Manufacturing Lead Headquarters deputy director within the Marine Corps Installation and Logistics branch, told Defense News in a recent interview.

“The Marine Corps sees additive manufacturing as a capability that will do a couple of things for the future of the Marines Corps,” Marotto said. “One we see it flattening the supply chain.”

Traditionally the Marine Corps has been reliant on reachback to the United States and the “iron mountain” of spare parts in country, according to Marotto. “We really want to get away from that because it’s inefficient and expensive, but, more importantly, our adversaries in the future will be able to more aggressively attack these realms,” he said.

Long logistics tails are vulnerable, “but if you can distribute that and make it smaller it becomes less vulnerable,” Marotto said.

Additionally, the Marines  are expected to spread out across wider areas of operations and won’t be able to operate with long supply chains. “Additive manufacturing is going to be key and the tool that allows those Marines to support themselves until the next resupply mission or, in some cases, maybe they need less resupply,” Marotto said.

Having fabrication labs downrange will also give Marines the opportunity to innovate in the field to solve specific problems they may encounter where traditional spares and repair parts may not meet the need, he added.

The possibilities for 3-D printing will only grow, Marotto said. For instance, new materials will be introduced for 3-D printing, particularly more rugged materials such as certain metals.

[Drones, 3-D printing and other new tech will transform logistics]

And being able to produce spares in the field quickly could drastically change how the service buys spares, perhaps asking for data in order to print parts rather than having a supplier produce all the spare parts far away from the battlefield.

3-D printing could even solve the parts obsolescence problem plaguing legacy systems. If the service had access to the designs, it could print key parts even if suppliers stopped producing a particular part.

The Marines decided to start with a prototype for a Shop Equipment, Machine Shop — or SEMS — which is a deployable shelter equipped with a milling machine and lathe, among other tools, so machinists in the field can rapidly repair vehicles, weapons or other equipment. The 3-D printing adds a complementary capability to intermediate-level maintenance shops already using SEMS, Ed Howell, the Marine Corps Systems Command Supply and Maintenance Systems program manager, said in the same interview.

Realizing the SEMS would be a good place to start adding 3-D printing capability to test its utility, the command put together a proposal within 24 hours and submitted it to the Defense Department for funding. It was approved to proceed in December, Howell said.

“Right out of the gate we were able to execute,” Howell said, finishing the prototype in late spring and moving into testing in July.

The prototype won’t undergo the full gamut of evaluations as a program-of-record would such as transportability testing including rail impact tests, but it will serve as a proof-of-principle.

“We just want to see, we are mainly looking at the viability of additive manufacturing for [SEMS],” Howell said.

The Marines testing the system are churning out parts, Howell said, but part of the challenge is learning to master relatively complicated 3-D printers. For example, additional training was needed to learn how to use the state-of-the-art printers.

The main questions the command hopes to answer from the evaluation are whether additive manufacturing a capability we should integrate in the SEMS and how the SEMS should look or be designed with 3-D printing capability, according to Howell.

“If we build this out as a program-of-record and build 29 of these to field across the Marine Corps to the SEMS workshop,” Howell said, “I think we will need to be building a reconfigurable tactical workshop. I think the printers change so quickly and become fairly obsolete, almost like lap tops.”

The command will issue a report either this month or in October with tangible results of the printing capability, according to Howell, and then the service will determine what’s next for the X-FAB and 3-D printing as a whole.