Navy 3D-Printed 12 Drones Aboard Ship During RIMPAC Exercise

The U.S. Navy is treating shipboard logistics as a bottleneck worth solving with on-demand manufacturing. During RIMPAC 2026, a defense technology company called Firestorm Labs ran a containerized 3D printing setup aboard the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Essex as it transited toward the exercise in Hawaii. The result: more than 1,000 parts and 12 complete first-person-view drones printed and assembled on deck, with waves running as high as 12 feet.

The system, called xCell, is what Firestorm Labs describes as Expeditionary Manufacturing: a self-contained industrial 3D printing unit that fits inside a standard shipping container. Sailors operated it while the ship was underway, printing drone airframes and mechanical test components. The company also fabricated repair parts the crew needed for shipboard equipment, cutting what would normally be days or weeks of waiting on a resupply run down to hours.

Every part printed on deck is one that does not need to be flown or shipped across contested waters. That is the core pitch. In a wartime logistics scenario, ships operating far from friendly ports could replenish drone stocks and repair broken hardware without returning to base. The Navy has been trying to reduce its dependency on long supply chains for years. Additive manufacturing at sea directly addresses that problem.

The 12 Squall drones printed during the trial were later flown as adversary aircraft in a counter-drone exercise, so they were not just showpieces. Service members helped assemble them on a moving deck in Pacific swell, which is a genuinely useful stress test. The test also included mechanical test parts to validate the printer itself and real repair components for the Essex crew.

Firestorm Labs is not the only group exploring shipboard additive manufacturing, but actually pulling it off at sea during a major multinational exercise puts them ahead of most lab demonstrations. The Navy has been investing in distributed manufacturing for several years now. What this trial adds is a working proof of concept with real hardware in a real operational environment.

The catch, as always, is raw materials. Filament or resin still takes up space and weight on board, and those supplies can run out. But the tradeoff shifts meaningfully when you consider that a few kilograms of polymer can replace dozens of pre-assembled drone airframes, spare parts, and repair components. On a long deployment, that math works in favor of carrying material rather than finished inventory.

If this program scales, the next logical step is ships carrying a small library of printable designs rather than warehouses of spare parts. A hull breach patch, a sensor bracket, a drone frame: all can be produced on demand if the design files and raw material are on board. That is a fundamentally different logistics model, and RIMPAC 2026 gave the Navy its first real look at how it works in practice.