Quick Summary
• At this year’s Balikatan event, an annual joint exercise hosted by the Philippines military with participation from Western allies, the US military trained Filipino troops in expeditionary manufacturing enabled by...
Additional Context
At this year’s Balikatan event, an annual joint exercise hosted by the Philippines military with participation from Western allies, the US military trained Filipino troops in expeditionary manufacturing enabled by 3D printing and other digital production processes. A group of advanced manufacturing specialists known as ‘The Forge’, representing the US Army’s Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division, taught their partners in the Pacific how to manufacture in a warehouse in the jungle, a skill that the US service members themselves had only begun acquiring the previous year.
As I noted in my story about that event, the geography of that instance of tech transfer is anything but accidental, with Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) prioritizing a buildup of deployable additive manufacturing (AM) capa