Quick Summary
• When a warship cannot leave port because a decades-old part no longer exists anywhere in the supply chain, the daily cost to the taxpayer is in millions. The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) has spent £6.25M on Project Tampa (including up to £5M with industry), a four-spiral defense additive manufacturing program designed to address obsolescence…
Additional Context
When a warship cannot leave port because a decades-old part no longer exists anywhere in the supply chain, the daily cost to the taxpayer is in millions.
The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) has spent £6.25M on Project Tampa (including up to £5M with industry), a four-spiral defense additive manufacturing program designed to address obsolescence and parts shortages across ageing defense platforms, some of which will remain in service for more than a decade. The program has now produced safety-critical components across land and air domains, and the MOD published its first Defence Advanced Manufacturing Strategy early last year.
Speaking at our AMA: Aerospace, Space and Defense 2025 event before retirement, Richard Hamber, laid out the scale of that problem and his opening example set the ton