Navy needs industry all in on 3D printing parts for subs, or else

WASHINGTON — Leading Navy admirals and officials now see additive manufacturing as a potential savior of the overstretched submarine force and its “exceptionally fragile” industrial base. But they need industry to get on board, ASAP.

3D printers are already churning out an ever-larger array of ever-larger parts, from simple plastic safety covers, to high-end specialty valves, to robust metal structures weighing a ton and a half. And while many companies are embracing the new approach, the service’s program executive officer for attack submarines (PEO-SSN) had stern words for the laggards.

“If you are a supplier, and your lead time is too long, and you refuse to work with us to give us your tech and help us figure out how to reverse-engineer it and how to manufacture it — not that we’re trying to take it from you — [but] we’re going to figure it out,” said Rear Adm. Jonathan Rucker, the PEO-SSN. “[That’s] not a threat — [it’s] a fact of life.

“We’re going to figure out how to get these parts quicker,” he told a ballroom full of contractors at last week’s Naval Submarine League conference. “We need your help. We don’t have a choice. Time is not on our side.”

Rucker reassured industry that “we’re not trying to steal anyone’s IP [intellectual property].” He made a point to praise what he said were a large number of small businesses that were “already … leaning forward [and] helping us in additive manufacturing.”

“All of us can benefit together,” he exhorted the conference. “For all small businesses, I implore you to be part of the team with us.”

Heavy Metal

The military has 3D printed small numbers of small, non-critical plastic parts for years, like safety covers for switches and connectors for LAN cables. But aerospace and defense firms are increasingly able to print large, high-strength metal components.

Up until this year, the Navy had only installed two 3D-printed metal parts on its submarines, said Vice Adm. Robert Gaucher, commander of Naval Submarine Forces. But this year, he told the conference, they quadrupled that to eight — and when USS Michigan comes in for overhaul next year, “we plan to have 33.”

“Delivering these parts will be faster than traditional casting, so we can mitigate our supply chain shortfalls,” Gaucher emphasized. “Where I really want to press forward with metal data manufacturing is at our regional maintenance centers.”

But in the longer term, 3D-printed metal parts can speed up construction of new submarines as well, said Matt Sermon, executive director of PEO-Strategic Submarine.

“Metallic additive manufacturing … it’s our Manhattan Project,” Sermon told the conference. It’s a “national security imperative,” he said, along with increasing use of automation, robotics and other advanced manufacturing technologies to overhaul an ailing industrial base.

The stakes are existential for a submarine force that is struggling to simultaneously maintain an overworked and aging fleet, build the upgunned and upgraded version of the Virginia-class attack sub fast enough to meet both US and Australian demand, and launch the first Columbia-class nuclear ballistic missile boat by 2027.

“We have a huge hole to dig out of,” said Adm. Bill Houston, director of the Navy Nuclear Propulsion program. “We’ve let too much of the shipbuilding industry go away [because] we essentially stopped building submarines for about seven years” after the Soviet Union fell. The Navy is still paying for that decision today, he told the conference, rushing to ramp up production of new boats and improve maintenance of old ones “with an industrial base that’s less than half the size” it was during the Cold War.

“It’s an exceptionally fragile supply base,” Houston said.

That said, in recent years, the service and industry have had some success in reconstructing old-school heavy-metal industrial capabilities, such as the casting of hundred-ton hull sections.

“Castings [were] the bane of our existence when I talked to you two years ago,” Rucker told reporters at the conference. “That chokepoint’s gone.”

A big part of that breakthrough has been the United Kingdom, Rucker said: Whereas the Navy used to have just one vendor it deemed qualified for certain crucial, large-scale castings, “we now have four” — two of them British.

These four companies use conventional casting techniques, not additive manufacturing, which has historically been restricted to much smaller parts. But 3D printing has potential to speed up production of even heavy-metal, high-strength components.

The traditional process “takes years of machining” to smooth out the massive castings and remove the inevitable imperfections left by the traditional process, before they can be installed on a sub or ship, Sermon told Breaking Defense. By contrast, he said, “as additive manufacturing matures … we believe we can print those [parts] with better quality,” saving time and expensive skilled labor.

Sermon’s team has already 3D printed a 3,300-pound (1.65 ton) metal part and is beginning tests to ensure it’s up to standard, he told Breaking Defense. For the future, they are studying additive manufacturing of the kind of massive hull sections that currently can only be produced by casting.

“I see a world, not science fiction … but in the relatively near term, where we’ll be able to print submarine hull and ship modules,” he said.

America’s AUKUS allies, Australia and the United Kingdom, need to be a part of this additive manufacturing revolution, Sermon added. “We want to do it with our partners,” he said. “We absolutely want their industrial base [using] a 2030s model … not a 1970s industrial base.”

An Australian additive manufacturing firm, AML3D, joined the US Navy’s R&D efforts last year, Sermon told reporters at the time. The firm’s work for the US is moving ahead, Rucker told reporters last week: Just before he came to the Submarine League conference, he said, he got an email asking for his formal approval on one of their engineering drawings.