America Makes Dishes Out $16.5 Million to Qualify Defense AM Suppliers and Advance Refractory Alloys

America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining announced two major project call winners this week that together funnel $16.5 million into defense additive manufacturing. The money is not going toward flashy new machines. It is going toward the unglamorous work of qualifying suppliers, developing training standards, and pushing refractory metal alloys from lab curiosity to production reality.

JAQS-SQ Groups 2 and 3: Building a Qualified Supplier Base

The first tranche, $10.5 million, expands the Joint Additive Qualification for Sustainment Supplier Qualification program. The original JAQS-SQ project laid groundwork for qualifying laser powder bed fusion and directed energy deposition suppliers. Groups 2 and 3 scale that work with unified training for production and engineering operations managers.

Wichita State University's National Institute for Aviation Research is developing the curriculum. Once suppliers complete it, they will be audited to confirm they can operate as qualified AM manufacturers for the Department of Defense. The goal is practical: stop every defense program from reinventing its own qualification playbook every time it switches powder bed fusion platforms.

PADAM 2.0: Refractory Alloys for High-Temperature Defense Applications

The second tranche, $6 million, goes to the Powder Alloy Development for Additive Manufacturing 2.0 project. Funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory, it targets high-temperature refractory alloys. These materials can withstand extreme heat, which matters for rocket nozzles, turbine blades, and hypersonic components. The program's stated aim is to move these alloys from promise to practice, with work on manufacturability, performance, and supply chain resilience.

Aerospace OEM Adopts In-Situ Quality Monitoring

On the quality control side, Additive Assurance reports that a major household-name aerospace OEM has adopted its AMiRIS in-process quality assurance solution. The system provides machine-agnostic, in-situ monitoring that moves beyond simple defect detection. Instead, it looks for process anomalies that could lead to defects, then ties thermal signals to CT scans and other non-destructive evaluation data.

As build volumes grow, traditional inspection becomes a bottleneck, especially for complex geometries that are expensive and inspect once off the printer. An OEM spokesperson put it plainly: the attraction is a common analysis layer across the supply chain, rather than forcing every partner to live inside each machine OEM's proprietary software.

Why This Matters

Defense AM has long struggled with a qualification gap. Each program office wrote its own rules, and suppliers jumped through different hoops for every contract. Standardizing supplier training and audit criteria removes one of the biggest friction points in scaling metal AM for defense.

The refractory alloy work is more forward-looking. If high-temperature materials can be printed reliably, it opens doors for engine components and hypersonic structures that are difficult or impossible to forge conventionally. Combining that with better in-process quality data means the industry is slowly tightening the loop between design intent and as-built reality.

The winners of both calls will spend the next several years delivering results that most end users will never see. That is the nature of qualification work. But without it, defense AM stays stuck in pilot programs. With it, the pathway to serial production gets clearer.