A newly produced Battle Damaged Repair & Fabrication part produced at the Advanced Manufacturing Center of Excellence inside the Rock Island Arsenal-Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center. The BDR&F program allows 3D printing technology to produce replacement parts quickly and get military vehicles back into the field faster. Rock Island Arsenal-Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center develops, manufactures and delivers readiness solutions through conventional and advanced manufacturing processes for the U.S. Army and Department of Defense systems globally. (IMAGE: U.S. Army, Kendall Swank)

There’s no question that the two biggest industries for additive manufacturing (AM) are medical devices and aerospace. At this point, the reasons for this are well understood: you can basically sum them up as the platitude that AM works best in high-mix, low-volume applications.

Setting these industries aside, the next most fecund ground for 3D printing technology is found in defense—not just as a subset of aerospace, but as its own sector. Defense applications for AM include naval ships, armored fighting vehicles (AFVs), and small arms, as well as the usual aerospace lot (e.g., drones).

What’s interesting (at least to me) is that many of the above examples are not quite as high-mix, low-volume as one might expect from a typical AM use case. Sure, we’re not building hundreds or even dozens of naval vessels—at least, not yet—but, compared to your average medical or aerospace AM part, the variety is considerably lower. Then there are the applications involving AFVs or firearms, where volumes are significantly higher than in AM’s two primary sectors.

What is it about defense that makes it such a seemingly ripe market for AM growth? 3D Systems recently announced that its aerospace and defense (A&D) business grew over 15% in 2025 and forecasts that this growth will accelerate to over 20% this year.

“Recent U.S. policy developments, including NDAA provisions, provide an additional tailwind that aligns closely with our ongoing domestic investments,” said Jeffrey Graves, president and CEO of 3D Systems, in the press release. That’s at the end of a rather long quote, and it almost sounds like an afterthought, but I suspect that it’s actually the most important part.

2026 NDAA blocks AM machine procurement from select countriesIn case you hadn’t heard: Section 880 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for this year prohibits the Department of Defense from operating, procuring, or contracting with companies using “foreign-made additive manufacturing machines.” This prohibition includes software and post-processing equipment, and the countries identified as “foreign” for the purposes of this prohibition are China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

Now, to my own (admittedly limited) knowledge, three of those four countries are not home to any major players in the AM industry. That suggests it’s reasonable to conclude that the real target of this provision is China, which has seen prolific growth in 3D printing (technology) and additive manufacturing (industry) in recent years. While the biggest Chinese AM success stories come from desktop makers, such as Bambu Lab and Creality, companies focusing on industrial markets, such as BLT and Farsoon, have also been making considerable headway.

It’s worth noting that there are caveats that allow for the operation and procurement for “foreign” (i.e., Chinese) AM machines, such as “testing, analysis, and training related to intelligence, electronic warfare, and information warfare” as well as the option for the Secretary of Defense to waive the prohibitions on a case-by-case basis when such operations or procurement are “required in the national interest of the United States.”

Nevertheless, the 2026 NDAA decisively sides against the Chinese AM industry when it comes to the biggest defense sector spender in the world. This would appear to vindicate a hypothesis I’ve been entertaining since last year: the growth in additive manufacturing for defense isn’t because additive is good for the defense sector, but rather because the defense sector is good for the (Western) AM industry.

To put it another way, if you’re an AM supplier based in Europe or North America (or Israel), you might naturally be concerned with how quickly your Chinese competitors are gaining on you, both in terms of market share and technological capabilities.

What better place to concentrate your efforts than in a sector that those competitors are legally barred from entering?

Defense for additive manufacturingAs much enthusiasm as I have for technology, I also tend toward cynicism when it comes to the business side of things. With that in mind, I wanted to get a sanity check on this idea that the growth of AM in defense has more to do with business prospects than technological fit. I sat down with Steve McKee, technical fellow for advanced manufacturing and repair for defense at Wohlers Associates and former director of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

I asked whether he believes AM adoption in defense is being driven by the technology’s capabilities domestically or competition with China, and he said, “I really believe that it’s a combination of both. I think what we’ll continue to see is an acceleration of the evolution of those capabilities in terms of throughput, speed, and material properties across different types of 3D printers and other advanced manufacturing techniques.”

McKee’s mention of other advanced manufacturing techniques reminded me of a point Tali Rosman made in her webinar on additive manufacturing for defense last year about the loss of domestic casting and forging capacity since the turn of the century. That’s obviously had a significant impact on the defense industrial base, but the question is whether AM can fill that void.

“Maybe we need to reimagine the platform and not be so beholden to casting and forging,” McKee said in response. “There may be an alternative approach, and if you look at the current events and conflicts out there, the opportunity that additive manufacturing offers is the idea of reimagining some of our weapon systems.”

More specifically, there’s the question of how a technology as nuanced as 3D printing—especially metal 3D printing—can integrate into military supply chains, particularly when it comes to the necessary technical skills to utilize AM effectively in field deployments.

“You can’t just train somebody by saying, ‘Okay, I want you to hit the green button and print,’ on a 3D printer downrange,” McKee noted. “It’s a lot more complicated than that, and it requires a lot of change management: What are the policies? What’s the doctrine? Where do I position these assets?”

Despite enthusiasm within the industry and its growth within the defense sector, 3D printing as a technology is not a panacea for the manufacturing and supply chain challenges the sector is currently facing. By a similar token, defense ought not to be taken as the easiest or best path forward for the AM industry’s growth. When I asked McKee about the biggest challenges for AM in defense, he cited the importance of cross-border collaboration, something that seems increasingly difficult to achieve these days.

“The timelines and the linear nature by which we’ve set many of these processes up can absolutely be collapsed or flipped on their heads with additive solutions,” he said. “So, we are seeing an acceleration, but the biggest challenge is we’re going to have to become much more imaginative as we look at employing these platforms.

“How can we understand the qualification of some of these parts, as all of the starting materials and equipment and everything else changes? There will be a continued acceleration, and figuring out how to orchestrate that across national boundaries is critically important, because no one’s cornered the market, nor will they on all of that knowledge.”

Whether AM is good for defense or vice versa, it seems likely that the majority of the Western industry’s growth will continue to come from that sector, at least in the near term. What interests me now is whether that means that Western AM suppliers will double down on their efforts to grow in this sector—potentially at the expense of focus on other areas, such as energy or automotive—and whether we’ll see the major Chinese players shift their emphasis to those more open areas, as well as defense applications outside the United States, in response.

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