USS Essex Prints Its Own Parts at Sea: RIMPAC 2026

At sea, a broken component can’t simply be reordered and delivered the next morning. Some items take weeks to reach a deployed ship, and others are no longer produced at all. To ease that strain, the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Essex (LHD 2), working alongside Combat Logistics Battalion 13 of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, has turned to onboard 3D printers that give the crew both additive and subtractive manufacturing tools.

The effort is one of roughly 40 experimentation projects featured at RIMPAC 2026, each backed by a sponsor from the US Department of War or the Department of the Navy under the Fleet Experimentation Program (FLEX). These initiatives run through every stage of the exercise, pierside, underway, and aboard both U.S. and partner-nation vessels, letting the