Except for enabling uniquely advanced geometries, I believe that the 2 actually differentiating benefits of additive manufacturing (AM) are the potential for deployability and the potential for simplifying the method of coaching new manufacturing employees. For those who’re an business stakeholder pitching policymakers on making AM a crucial aspect in a nationwide manufacturing mobilization effort, these are the strengths I believe you must lean into.
On the similar time, I believe it’s vital to understand that these benefits are nonetheless very a lot of their “potential” section: manufacturing on the point-of-need and coaching new industrial 3D printing operators are removed from being plug-and-play options. Nonetheless, the variety of case research the place each of these benefits are being accentuated are steadily accumulating, and one firm that’s a standout on this context is SPEE3D.
Again in November, Vanesa Listek wrote about how nearly a dozen AM corporations participated within the U.S. Navy’s annual Trident Warrior workout routines, SPEE3D amongst them. Now, in opposition to the backdrop of this week’s Navy AM Summit 2026 (February 3-5), the corporate has revealed the way it labored with a frequent collaborator, the Consortium for Superior Manufacturing Analysis and Training on the Naval Postgraduate Faculty (CAMRE NPS), to exhibit how the corporate’s expertise allows front-line manufacturing of crucial elements.
At Trident Warrior ‘25, CAMRE educated service members from throughout the U.S. armed forces on the XSPEE3D, the containerized chilly spray AM (CSAM) system that SPEE3D launched within the fall of 2022. Particularly, the service members examined the XSPEE3D’s capability to assist the restore of U.S. Navy aviation elements in fight eventualities.
Based on the corporate, the trials validated that the XSPEE3D is an more and more viable possibility for executing upkeep, restore, and overhaul (MRO) duties in contested logistics environments. SPEE3D’s mixture of an Australian headquarters and a heavy U.S. presence provides the corporate an edge in a world the place the U.S.’s counterparts within the Australia-UK-U.S. (AUKUS) partnership are signaling a shared curiosity in enhanced front-line MRO.
In a press launch about SPEE3D’s demonstration of coaching non-specialists to restore aviation elements at Trident Warrior ‘25, SPEE3D’s US VP of Protection, Mark Menninger, mentioned, “Navy readiness is critically vital to all branches, they usually want applied sciences that present them the flexibility to get belongings again into service. The Trident Warrior workout routines demonstrated how SPEE3D supplied the warfighters and maintainers the quickest and best resolution to get their programs again up and working, giving them the very best likelihood to finish their missions shortly and successfully.”
Chris Curran, Lt.Col., USMC (Ret.), the Program Supervisor at CAMRE, mentioned, “I believe maybe the largest win for SPEE3D throughout the occasion was displaying how you should utilize the machine to exactly add materials to a broken half and never need to manufacture a brand new half, saving materials labor whereas enhancing readiness.”
Whereas this kind of exercise is actually nothing new for SPEE3D, the angle about “coaching non-specialist operators” illustrates the importance of the operational trials. That’s not a peripheral element: it’s the foreshadowing of a quantum leap.
There isn’t any actuality wherein the West addresses its long-term scarcity of producing employees with out non-specialists being quickly educated on new gear. Because of this until AM OEMs make sure that non-specialists can learn to use their {hardware} in unprecedentedly compressed timelines, then the AM business has nothing to supply the broader manufacturing sector when it comes to AM’s usefulness as a workforce improvement software.
The synergy between speedy workforce improvement and frontline manufacturing capability is exactly what makes the protection sector so integral to accelerating the speed of 3D printing adoption. This is the reason I believe that the U.S. army must be serving to different crucial industries standardize a system for the event of a brand new technology of superior manufacturing employees.
Steven Camilleri, the CTO of SPEE3D, as soon as instructed me in an interview about how he subscribes to Clayton Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation, particularly the idea that, “The issue of any disruptive expertise shouldn’t be a technological one, however a advertising and marketing one.” If corporations like SPEE3D can proceed to decrease the barrier-to-entry for coaching new employees on their {hardware}, the AM business will go a good distance in the direction of fixing its advertising and marketing issues.
Photos courtesy of SPEE3D
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