US Navy Is Fast-Tracking Metal 3D Printing Into Its Submarine Fleet

The U.S. Navy has officially cleared the path for metal 3D printing to move from experimental tool to standard supply chain option across its submarine fleet. The service says it is removing the administrative and engineering barriers that have slowed adoption, putting additive manufacturing into submarine construction, maintenance, and combat-ready repair at what officials describe as unprecedented speed.

Why Submarines Need Additive Manufacturing

The submarine industrial base faces a slow-moving crisis. Many of the parts inside existing Virginia-class submarines were made by manufacturers that no longer exist or have stopped producing those specific components. When a valve, flange, or bracket fails at sea or during maintenance, the traditional supply chain can take months to deliver a replacement. That timeline is incompatible with the Navy's current operational tempo.

Additive manufacturing offers a different model. A digital file of the part can be sent to a metal 3D printer near the shipyard, and the component can be produced in days instead of months. The catch has always been certification. Naval standards for pressure-boundary components are strict, and the process of qualifying a new manufacturing method for those applications moves slowly.

The First Precedent Is Already Set

In March 2026, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard installed a copper-nickel flange produced through metal additive manufacturing aboard the USS Washington, a Virginia-class submarine. The part was welded, inspected, tested, and certified for operational use. That installation established the first instance of a 3D-printed metal component entering a nuclear-powered attack submarine through a public shipyard.

The flange itself is not glamorous. It is a simple connection piece in a piping system, subject to corrosion, pressure, and constant vibration. But its function is critical. Demonstrating that an additively manufactured version could pass the same qualification tests as a traditionally forged or machined part gave the Navy the precedent it needed to expand the program.

Scaling to 100 Systems

The latest announcement points to a much larger rollout. The Navy's Letter of Intent forecasts demand for 100 additive manufacturing systems across the Marine Industrial Base, with a target of producing as many as 1,600 3D-printed metal parts per year by 2030. Those parts would cover submarines and surface shipbuilding alike.

AML3D, an Australian-founded industrial metal 3D printing company, has become one of the primary suppliers into this effort. The company's ARCEMY wire-arc additive manufacturing systems are already installed at Huntington Ingalls Industries, the largest military shipbuilder in the United States, and at the Navy's Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence in Danville, Virginia. AML3D has also received a $2.6 million contract to print five submarine parts that the original manufacturers have stopped making.

Through the BlueForge Alliance, a nonprofit integrator overseeing the submarine industrial base, the Navy has allocated $951 million specifically to rebuild that supply chain. Additive manufacturing is central to that strategy.

What Born-Qualified Means

The next technical challenge is not simply printing the parts. It is proving that every part meets nuclear-grade material requirements from the moment it comes off the printer. Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory are developing sensor-driven monitoring and AI analysis that tracks geometry and material properties during deposition. The goal is to generate enough manufacturing data during printing to reduce or eliminate some of the destructive testing that current certification requires.

That approach, sometimes described as born-qualified manufacturing, would shorten qualification timelines dramatically. If a component can be shown to have been printed within validated parameters layer by layer, regulators may accept process data in place of some post-build testing. Whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and ASME will accept that framework for pressure-boundary components remains unresolved, but the Navy is pushing hard to make it happen.

The Strategic Stakes

The Navy has called metallic additive manufacturing its Manhattan Project. The phrase signals urgency. The submarine fleet is aging, the Columbia-class replacement program is slipping, and the industrial base for large forgings has moved overseas. Domestic forging capacity for components weighing thousands of pounds is nearly gone. Metal 3D printing offers a way to rebuild that capability without waiting for new foundries to come online.

In the near term, the program focuses on non-safety-critical replacement parts. In the longer term, it targets structural components for new construction. The March installation on the USS Washington proved that a 3D-printed metal part can survive certification. The August announcement suggests the Navy now intends to prove it can produce those parts at scale.