When working with the rare and expensive top-grade materials that the military demands in high-performance aircraft and precision weapons, the waste is all the dearer. The traditional production technique, subtractive manufacturing, starts with a “billet” of fill and whittles it down to the desired product, wasting up to 90 percent of the material. 2Īdditive manufacturing’s second cost savings come from the materials used in the process. As explained in the The Economist, Boeing already uses “a number of printed parts such as air ducts” in the F/A-18. This is, quite literally, not a pipe dream. It also means internal systems such as ducting and piping can be designed to maximize fluid-flow efficiency from more rounded shapes, simultaneously eliminating unnecessary system volume and making it lighter still. This means it can go without the brackets, flanges, and surfaces required for handling, bolting, or welding pieces of the component together-thereby saving material and weight. Senior mechanical engineer Peter Schmehl of MakerBot, a leading producer of desktop 3D printers, says he believes this process has the potential to “radically change ship construction, making designs that might not be possible using conventional techniques.” 1 If the “build volume” is large enough, a manufacturer can print a component as a whole, forgoing the need for further assembly. The initial cost savings of 3D printing come from the designs allowed by the layer-by-layer process.

This is due largely to the economic benefits derived from the technology. One of the most immediate ways 3D printing will impact the Navy is through the design and construction of ships, submarines, aircraft, and everything carried on board.

As a result, 3D printing holds the possibility of upending both how and where a whole host of items are produced, with effects on the Navy ranging from ship and aircraft design and construction to logistics to the attendant new challenges that will be generated. But as their capabilities have advanced in the past decade, they have increasingly created finished products. Former surface-warfare officer (nuclear) Brian Jaffe, an MIT student and developer of a 3D printing start-up, estimates that these still account for the vast majority of the machines’ usage. Additionally, unlike a traditional assembly line, it can switch from producing wrenches one minute to gaskets the next.Ĭompanies first put 3D printers to use generating rapid prototypes to test designs. The latter might deliver a faithful recreation of a wrench’s one-dimensional image, but a 3D printer can create a metal replica, or even a new wrench. Where the printing press facilitated the diffusion of new ideas, 3D printing combines the Internet’s fast access to information with what The Economist calls the “Third Industrial Revolution.” While the precise method varies by printer, in general 3D printers build up from nothing to a finalized product, typically by spraying a fill material, layer by layer, from nozzle jets not too unlike those in an inkjet printer.

Three-dimensional (3D) printing, also known as additive manufacturing, is not just a singular new technology. More than five and a half centuries later, a new type of printing promises to have similarly far-reaching effects on the world’s militaries-specifically, for our purposes here, navies. The press advanced the professionalization of militaries through the use of written doctrine, while at the same time spreading new ideas that helped to spur the wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It was around 1440 that Johannes Gutenberg unleashed the printing press, an invention that brought exciting new opportunities along with daunting challenges.

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