During this year’s Rim of the Pacific, the biennial naval fighting exercise that brings ships and troops from across the world to Hawaii, 3D printers, drones and AI are taking center stage.
Over the last few iterations of RIMPAC, the Naval Postgraduate School’s Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing Research and Education participated in the exercise and experimented with these systems. But this year, military leaders have made a point of massively scaling up their use across the Hawaiian islands and beyond.
“Now we’re looking to operationalize those capabilities that they’ve been learning and experimenting with, with real capabilities that we’re looking at putting forward in the first and second island chain over the next few years,” said Rear Adm. Mike Mattis. “This is the largest advanced manufacturing event across the Department of War ever held. More machines, more locations, and really for the first time, orchestration at a theater-wide level of what that looks like.”
Mattis was appointed by U.S. Pacific Command chief Adm. Samuel Paparo to oversee “The Forge,” a facility at Schofield Barracks that commanders in Hawaii hope will bolster 3D printing and other manufacturing capabilities in the Pacific. Army troops at the base have also been using these tools to develop and build their own drones on site and on deployments across the region,
including the recent Exercise Balikatan in the Philippines.
“We currently have over 2,000 requests for parts and supply of broken items across the joint force that we are trying to source through our various advanced manufacturing capabilities across the Hawaiian Island and at ships at sea,” said Mattis. “We also have other ships participating that are even out of this theater, and we have previously been working with exercises in Okinawa and the Philippines to understand what advanced manufacturing looks like in austere, expeditionary conditions, particularly with high humidity and high temperature where these machines don’t operate optimally.”
On July 7, a small, self-driving boat delivered parts for a 3D printer aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Essex as it participates in the exercise.
“From what we can tell, is the world’s first underway replenishment of any warship using a fully autonomous USV (unmanned surface vessel) or drone boat,” said Ivan Avanesov, the CEO of Los Angeles-based Splash Industries, the company that developed the 10-foot vessel, which it calls the Typhoon.
He said that while Splash, in partnership with the U.S. military, monitored the boat from Oahu telling it where to go, no one told it how to get there. It has relied entirely on its onboard software to navigate rough seas and
darkness as it traversed the ocean to make deliveries.
Paparo first began pushing for more manufacturing of parts for military systems in Hawaii and across the region when he was the Pacific Fleet’s commander, and has expanded that push as the top commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific at Camp Smith.
U.S. military commanders in Hawaii are eyeing China amid tensions in the region as Beijing spars with neighboring countries over maritime territorial and navigation rights, and increases military maneuvers around Taiwan. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has reportedly instructed his military to be capable of seizing Taiwan by 2027.
In February 2025, Paparo told an audience of international military leaders and arms manufacturers at the Honolulu Defense Forum in Waikiki that “we need the capability to produce parts, from propellers to circuit boards, on demand. It isn’t future tech; it’s current capability … the technology exists. I’ve seen it, it’s here in Hawaii, and we have to scale it.”
In August of that year, the military officially unveiled The Forge and Honolulu Community College unveiled its new Advanced Manufacturing Program Facility, a Pentagon-funded training center that leaders say aims to train a work force that can support both military and civil manufacturing needs in Hawaii.
Ann Wright, a retired
diplomat and Army officer in Hawaii that is now an activist and vocal critic of American foreign policy said that “with the never ending wars the U.S. keeps getting into, 3D weapons of war, including aerial drones and boats of which were manufactured to be used in RIMPAC, will be a godsend to the military by reducing the cost of weapons dramatically, making war cheaper.”
“With the U.S. having bombed a minimum of 25,000 targets in Iran, the Trump administration is no doubt looking for cheaper ways to bomb,” said Wright. “But God may not take so kindly to the increase in civilian casualties, as the cheaper the weapons the military has, the more they will be used. For every weapon made by 3D printing, (the Department of Defense) should have to make 3D hospital equipment to replace the equipment their 3D weapons will destroy and 3D prosthetics for the arms and legs that will be blown off by the 3D weapons.”
From an improvised headquarters at Schofield Barracks, Marine Lt. Col. Michael Radigan is running the RIMPAC Joint Advanced Manufacturing Center, which is coordinating the production and delivery
of parts and drones for the exercise.
“It helps accelerate the iteration for weapon systems as we come up with these new hot ideas,” Radigan said. “We can quickly test them, put them in place, and then we feed that information back to our commercial side, and they help us scale up more quickly.”
Dozens of companies from around the world have come to Hawaii for RIMPAC to show off and pitch their products to international forces that have come to participate.
Inside a shipping container at Schofield Barracks full of 3D printing equipment, Duane Blank said “the type of printing that we do here is the ability to iterate and give the warfighter the ability to get what they need at the point of need” as he showed off spare parts and fully functioning drones produced by the printers.
Blank is the field operations manager for San
Diego-based contractor Firestorm, and came to Hawaii aboard the USS Essex.
“We were aboard the USS Essex with this exact container,” he explained. “We produced over a thousand parts underway. One part of the things that we tested was how well this printer works under (rough seas) … the printer worked phenomenal with zero anomalies at all during that time, proving that this is a viable asset.”
Outside, Veronique
Zijlstra, the business development manager of Norway-based Fieldmade showed off a much smaller machine that can be parachuted out of a plane with troops. . She said “we can set it up in 10 minutes, and we are printing within one hour.”
She showed a damaged piston cylinder head from the Philippine Coast Guard’s vessel BRP Gabriela Silang that its crew had fixed with duct-tape, and explained “we told them (to) come back in a week or whenever you’re back in Pearl Harbor, come back and visit us because you’ll get a new one.”
