The Pentagon plans to buy 30,000 one-way attack drones this month, but the military’s ability to repair or even build drones on the battlefield could make or break operations in modern conflicts.
So when Dan Magy, the CEO of Firestorm, first told me in December about a mobile industrial-grade 3D printing shop inside a shipping container, I needed to see it for myself. And I did, a couple months later on a rare rainy day in San Diego.
The entire setup felt like walking into a field lab—white floors, ceilings, and walls draped in vinyl sheets—and smelled like brand new toys just ripped out of the package. There’s a giant computer that shows renderings of what’s to be printed. A table displayed a smorgasbord of what was made—neck braces, satellite antenna, splints, drone arms, and what could only be described as a giant wrench.
“You hit print and then you come back in six to 12 hours and you’re done,” Magy said. “When you want to move it, this processing station will roll and then these two sides roll up, and then you can just ship it. And then it takes about two hours to redeploy. So you just pull it up, and away you go. Put it on a boat, a plane.”
The HP printers are massive, like two coffins stacked on top of one another, and set up in a climate-controlled container, called XCell, which can be broken down and assembled in a few hours. This particular mini factory is two 20-foot units connected, measuring just shy of 1,200 square feet, and includes a chamber to clean and remove particle dust from the 3D prints.
“It’s an advanced manufacturing line,” Magy said. “We were using [the HP printers] already to make our drones. Then we were asked by the end user to figure out how to put this in a box so we could build stuff where we need it, as opposed to waiting 18 months for resupply on drones.”
Firestorm is building a library of the most in-demand items for battlefield and humanitarian use, while also working with the government to create an easily searchable database for computer aided designs the military might need.
“A lot of these are parts that the end users have either designed or asked us to build because the supply chain can’t sustain them. Remember, there’s no Pep Boys or AutoZone in defense. You can’t go to the store. So we’re building things like engine coolant pans,” Magy said. “Now, you don’t need to ship all these components. We’ll just have libraries full of things we can print” at a much cheaper rate.
It’s a growing field gearing up to match the military’s need to deploy drones by the thousands.
“The military has looked at expanding the use of 3D-printed parts in everything from Humvees to rocket motors and hypersonics. There’s also a big upside for organic maintenance depots…if the military can print its own 3D parts in the field, that cuts down on maintenance costs, reduces equipment downtime, and increases overall capacity at the depot,” said Shaun McDougall, a lead defense analyst for Forecast International.
Magy said the next year is about expansion, including printing with other materials beyond the current nylon composite and designing their own medical products, such as knee braces.
“What you’re going to see over the next year is a dramatic expansion in advanced manufacturing capabilities we’re going to be containerizing. We think this covers a part of the pie. We want to expand,” he said.
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Drones in the USA. The Pentagon wants to buy more than $1 billion in small drones in less than two years—while simultaneously making sure those drones are free from China-made parts and subcomponents. And the first big test starts this summer.
- Travis Metz, the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program manager, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that while all drones it delivers to troops are compliant with current legal bans on certain foreign-made small UAS, the plan is to be “more prescriptive than the NDAAs in terms of not allowing various components to be included in the systems that we procure, with the long term goal of building a drone supply chain that is American.”
- “We’ll be placing orders in August for Phase Two. We will not be allowing any Chinese batteries and motors in Phase Two, in addition to other restrictions that we’ll be imposing that are above and beyond the current statutory restrictions,” Metz said.
- The Pentagon wants to order 30,000 drones in the coming days, after a recent tech competition at Fort Benning, and at least another 50,000 in August after the next competition phase, Metz said. The goal is to deliver 300,000 by 2027 and keep that pace for a few years.
AI “copilots” on submarines. Despite the age of the Navy’s fleet of attack submarines, the service is focused on inserting the latest tech when it can, said Vice Adm. Richard Seif, commander, Naval Submarine Forces.
- “So, today we have 48 attack submarines,” which are a mix of newer Virginia-class submarines, and older Seawolf and Los Angeles-class submarines, some of which are “over 30 years old,” Seif told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
- “Today, we have over a dozen submarines that have, really, state-of-the-art algorithms. We call it a copilot for AI/ML. Anywhere you have a lot of data and not a lot of analysts to look at the data just it screams for AI/ML, as an example,” Seif said.
- That ability to update submarines with new technology “underpins” deterrence, he said: “And so going forward, whether it’s quantum, whether it’s artificial intelligence, machine learning, or the new capability, or even unmanned systems, as we integrate those payloads, we’ll be fully ready to do that.”
One last thing: Check out this very cool image of the Civil War-era USS Monitor on the seafloor.
