Quick Summary
Additional Context
It would be very difficult for me to guess how many times I’ve written a post that includes some reference to how the Pentagon‘s scaling challenge with additive manufacturing (AM) now has more to do with things other than the maturity of the relevant technologies themselves. However many times I’ve done that, it feels like all the AM stories related to the US military over the last few years involve this problem to some extent.
Most frequently, the “thing other than technical maturity” is policy. But that seems to have become somewhat less of an issue, thanks to gradually accumulating advocacy within the government, across multiple presidential administrations, for both AM and the funding procedures required to enable the US military to access its benefits. There’s also the fact that the