According to the Pentagon, “We will not defeat our adversaries with compliance checklists; we will defeat them by rapidly fielding superior capabilities produced by an expanded, resilient American industrial base.” This was in a memo issued on July 13, notifying US military higher-ups that the government is suspending the planned deadline for Phase 2 of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) compliance program, which was originally supposed to go into effect in November.
I mentioned this briefly in a recent post on Lincsolution, a South Korean AM firm that just announced it’s building capacity to prioritize aerospace and defense customers, which at this point is more or less a prerequisite for participating in the AM industry. The quote from the Pentagon memo almost makes me want to ask whether it might not be possible for “compliance checklists” and “rapidly fielding superior capabilities” to coexist, if not for fear of appearing to have fallen prey to a loser’s mentality.
According to the memo, the deadline suspension is for the benefit of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), who the Pentagon claims were experiencing a disproportionately negative impact from the push for Phase 2 compliance. The department has been reviewing the policy since the memo was issued, a sixty-day process that should be coming to an end in a couple of weeks, so perhaps we’ll have more clarity by then.
At any rate, it seems clear that the Pentagon is attempting to make it easier for the US military and its suppliers to leverage the new digital manufacturing technologies that it has been adopting at an increasingly accelerated pace in the 2020s. This is also evident from the Navy’s announcement earlier in August of Project Peculiar Document, a bizarrely-named initiative that aims to make it easier for the Navy and relevant contractors to bypass impediments standing in the way of using 3D printing for certain categories of parts. Level 1 control and SUBSAFE parts will still require “rigorous tracking and non-destructive inspection”.
Ribbon-cutting ceremony for the CAMRE Advanced Manufacturing Center that was opened in early 2024. Image courtesy of DVIDS
The US Navy has been implementing variations of this policy for years, but this is the most formally comprehensive streamlining of 3D printed part procurement that it has undertaken. It comes after a series of qualification database milestones that I’ve written about in posts including this one on The Barnes Global Advisors (TBGA) and Bechtel Plant Machinery Inc. (BPMI). It’s also pretty relevant here that, right before the Navy announced Project Peculiar Document, Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Keyport became the first NAVSEA facility to receive approval for a metal 3D printing process, not just because of the timing but also because the general streamlining process seems like it will work in much the same way.
Meanwhile, I put both of those developments in the context of Austal USA’s Digital SEA platform (which the Navy suggests you consult if you’re curious about the changed rules related to 3D printed parts approval). I wonder if this is also part of the context behind the CMMC Phase 2 suspension, since it’s possible that with microsegmentation, vendors can tap into secure defense platforms without third-party certification being required to ensure compliance.
All of this also follows a summer in which the US is projecting its expeditionary manufacturing capabilities all over the Indo-Pacific, with every drone that’s 3D printed on a US vessel representing a new bee in China’s bonnet. And, most recently, the Pentagon and the Small Business Administration (SBA) have announced a new entity called the Smaller War Plants Commission, which they say is inspired by World War II’s Smaller War Plants Corporation, created to accelerate onboarding of SMEs into the US defense procurement environment. It turns out it was also a predecessor to the SBA.
According to the Trump administration, the Smaller War Plants Commission is deliberately meant to coordinate the establishment of the Civil Reserve Manufacturing Network (CRMN), which I wrote about last year when it was first discussed in Congress. Taken altogether — against the backdrop of the VC-funded boom in defense tech over the last several years — all of these actions suggest that the US expects the war economy to be here for a while.
The Iran war may not quite be “a world war” yet, although on the other hand it’s hard to see how that’s the case when there are more and more overlaps between it and the Ukraine war, and indeed more and more observers seem to be pointing this out. I think more people find this idea appealing than you’d hope would be the case, as it would allow them to imagine themselves as part of a very important historical moment. I’ve certainly been at AM events before where I’ve looked around the room and thought to myself, “I bet most of these people really want there to be another world war.”
Now, if that is truly the direction the world is heading, the fate of the AM industry is surely far from the top of the list of matters of significance for humanity. Nevertheless, this is what I’m paid to write about, and if the Iran and Ukraine wars combine and expand, it’s hard to see how companies in the AM industry will be able to escape getting roped into it without going bankrupt, so aside from the people it will affect directly, it’s a useful microcosm for considering the choices that many other sorts of businesses would be forced to make in the same circumstances. Along those lines, any potential world war may simply be “nested” within the US-China trade war that has already been going on for a long time, in which case you may find this post to be helpful for anticipating the near-term future.
Featured image courtesy of General Dynamics Electric Boat
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