Inside a standard shipping container, a “factory-in-a-box” hums to life. It is not waiting for a supply drop from across the ocean; it is manufacturing drones for the air force on-site using 3D printers from HP.
This is the “xCell,” an expeditionary mobile factory from Firestorm Labs, designed to 3D print the modular airframe of the “Tempest” unmanned aerial system (UAS) at the point of need. As Firestorm CEO Dan Magy explains, this ability to “3D print modular airframes on-site dramatically reduces production timelines, costs, and logistical constraints.” It boosts military readiness and on-the-fly innovation.
Firestorm, which recently raised $47 million to scale this technology, is just one example of a massive shift sweeping the defense sector. For decades, the promise of 3D printing, or additive manufacturing (AM), was a futuristic vision. In 2025, that vision shifted from research and development to urgent, industrial-scale deployment.
The 3D printing industry is uniquely positioned to help U.S. defense manufacturing rapidly modernize, scale, and innovate, say industry leaders, who point to changes in how the U.S. military acquires and certifies equipment and systems, along with boosted funding and directives to rapidly modernize, that’s creating major opportunities for the 3D printing industry.
According to executives from some of the world’s largest makers of industrial 3D printers, such as EOS, Stratasys, Nikon Advanced Manufacturing, the U.S. defense industrial base is undergoing a critical transformation. Driven by geopolitical tensions, supply chain fragility, and the swift pace of adversary innovation, the military is turning to AM to shore up its manufacturing backbone, enable faster product development, and shift production on-shore.
“Industrial 3D printing is just being brought to the tactical edge for the U.S military for the first time,” Firestorm’s Magy said recently on his podcast. “I think you’re going to see dramatic changes in both system availability and then the availability to build and deploy new technologies like drones in mass.”
The Shift: From “We Will Need This” to “We Need This Now”
With defense spending hitting record highs, including funding for additive manufacturing programs, there’s an increased adoption of 3D printing by veteran and start-up defense-focused companies, like Firestorm and Beehive Technologies, which just completed hot-fire testing of a 3D-printed Frenzy engine designed to power swarm class UAVs.
But for the companies manufacturing industrial 3D printers, this focus on defense is not a sudden pivot. Rather, it is an acceleration of infrastructure built over the past several years.
“We did not make a strategic pivot recently,” says Greg Hayes, senior VP at EOS, one of Germany’s largest 3D printer makers with a plant in Texas. “We’ve made decisions over the course of the last several years to position ourselves to ride this wave of 3D printing in the defence industry, which we could see coming.”
However, the timeline for adoption has compressed drastically in the past eight months. Alessio Lorusso, CEO of Roboze, an Italian company that develops industrial-scale 3D printers used at several American defense industry contractors, notes that the conversations he is having with Ministries of Defense (MODs) have fundamentally changed.
“We’ve gone from discussions about an ability that is ‘going to be required’, to hey, ‘this must happen now,'” Lorusso says. “We need to create the capability for drones now. We need to have the capability to produce the spare parts for tanks and land vehicles right here, right now.”
Yet, urgency coupled with funding isn’t enough. The military has notoriously complex regulations and drawn-out processes. Some of these, though, may be changing under the current administration, accelerating the adoption of AM.
“Advanced manufacturing often dies in qualification and testing,” says Hamid Zarringhalam, CEO of Nikon Advanced Manufacturing, which produces some of the world’s largest and most advanced metal 3D printers, one of which was just purchased by Newport News Shipbuilding to support the U.S. Navy. “It’s not because we can’t qualify the parts, but because the military’s requirements have often been overly rigorous.”
The DoD, however, has been loosening internal requirements recently for small, expendable UAVs, including reduced documentation burden, acceptance of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) components, and greater tolerance for 3D-printed airframes and non-traditional manufacturing, plus relaxing some supply-chain and procurement restrictions.
“An 85% solution in the hands of our armed forces today is infinitely better than an unachievable 100% solution … endlessly undergoing testing or awaiting additional technological development,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in November speaking to military leaders and defense contractors in Washington.
Rapid Innovation, Iteration & Production
Companies turning to 3D printing to fuel the rapid development of next-generation military hardware include Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and countless startups, such as Divergent Technologies.
Stratasys technology, for example, is used to manufacture complex drone frames, lightweight canopies, propellers, camera and antenna mounts, electronic component housings, and flight-certified parts for companies, such as General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, makers of the MQ-9B SkyGuardian.
While Drone technology is in the spotlight, 3D printing is used to manufacture everything from rocket engines to tank door latches domestically or at the point of need.
Companies like Spain-based Meltio are proving that metal 3D printing is ready for the field. During recent naval exercises, a Meltio system aboard the USS Somerset printed and installed a critical pump part within 34 hours, restoring mission capability to the vessel at sea that would have otherwise taken weeks at a repair harbor.
“One of the most persistent pain points is the inability to quickly repair or reproduce critical parts for legacy platforms and systems in the field,” explains Lukas Hoppe, R&D director at Meltio. One metal 3D printer aboard a vessel can mean the difference between readiness or repair.
Industrial Scale 3D Printing
Although 3D printing single critical and obsolete repair parts quickly has long been a major selling point for additive manufacturing, a new focus is mass production.
A recurring theme among these executives is the industry’s evolution from producing single prototypes and parts to achieving industrial scale and reliability.
“When defense departments buy one 3D printer here, one 3D printer there, this is not going to scale for them, for us, for anybody,” argues Lorusso. Instead, Roboze is developing “autonomous factories” capable of producing thousands of parts per year. “Our solutions are not designed for prototyping. They are engineered for full-scale production, even in extreme operational environments and using high-performance materials for land, air, and naval applications.”
In fact, advocacy for a centralized “foundry” model for 3D printing is growing.
“If we want to scale additive manufacturing for defense, what we need is an AM farm on U.S. shores,” Nikon Advanced Manufacturing’s Zarringhalam says. “Such a farm with massive scale and state of the art manufacturing technology will serve a similar function as semiconductor foundries do for the chip industry.”
Nikon Advanced Manufacturing opened its 90,000-square-foot Technology Center in Long Beach, Calif., in 2024 to serve its aviation, aerospace, and defense clients.
The consensus among these leaders is clear: The question is no longer if the military will use 3D printing, but how fast they can deploy it at scale.
The industry envisions a future that is a hybrid of massive, centralized “foundries” producing thousands of standardized parts, and decentralized, autonomous units—like Firestorm’s xCell—printing airframes on the front lines. As supply chains tighten and threats evolve, additive manufacturing is stepping out of the lab and into the line of fire.
“The topic of ‘does the technology work’ has been solved,” says Hayes at EOS. “Now it’s all about how do you implement the technology and scale production,” and who will achieve industrial-scale deployment first.
