The following article appeared in print in National Defense Magazine and online:
The Navy is investing in a new 3D printing facility on the remote island of Guam that could save the service time and money when making critical repairs.
The project — called the Guam Additive Materials and Manufacturing Accelerator, or GAMMA — is working to open the facility by April 2026. Managed by Maryland-based nonprofit Applied Science and Technology Research Organization of America, or ASTRO America, it will house advanced additive manufacturing technology such as 3D printing systems, said the project’s director Alex Benham.
GAMMA will provide the Navy the ability “to deploy parts or components as needed, where needed,” Benham said in an interview. By using additive manufacturing, the service can make anything from large metal components to small plastic radio dials all in the same facility, he added.
The Navy awarded a $5 million initial contract in fiscal year 2024 to launch the project. In the coming months, ASTRO America anticipates receiving $12 million more, alongside other funds from nonprofit BlueForge Alliance and the Navy’s Maritime Industrial Base Program Office.
Guam’s location in the Western Pacific makes it an asset for military staging and rapid mobilization in the region, but its remoteness comes with drawbacks, Benham said. Namely, crucial elements required for repairs on Guam’s naval installations often include frustrating wait times as parts are shipped to the island from mainland United States.
As a result, minor mishaps, such as a submarine’s valve breaking, can be surprisingly demanding to resolve.
“Castings for that could take six months to two years, just to get one produced,” Benham said. But by using additive manufacturing, “we can turn around and make it in two weeks.”
ASTRO America has been working closely with the Navy’s only two submarine tenders, both of which are currently homeported in Guam, to ensure they can “actually respond to the needs of the submarine industrial base,” said Neal Orringer, the organization’s president and CEO. Tenders — essentially floating machine shops that provide critical maintenance and repair for submarines — often bear the brunt of managing maintenance due to Guam’s lack of local repair infrastructure, he added.
The capability to make what’s needed on demand will save the Navy more than just headaches, Benham said. When it comes to generating parts on-island rather than shipping them in, “the time savings are enormous,” he said. “The cost savings with not having a boat operational during that time are astronomical.”
When completed, the projected 8,000-square-foot GAMMA facility will house advanced manufacturing capabilities ranging from plastic printing for smaller pieces, to directed energy deposition for large-scale printing of bulky metal components, to laser powder bed fusion, which accurately produces smaller, more detailed metal parts, Benham said.
These wide-ranging capabilities will also benefit the facility itself, allowing tools and replacement parts to be built “quickly and cheaply in a completely remote environment,” Benham added.
But the project isn’t just about submarines and machinery. In addition to establishing the facility and providing inspection and validation capabilities for end-users, it’s also about fostering a talent pipeline on Guam for the defense industry by working with local universities, government and supply chains, Orringer said.
By establishing a satellite campus of a mainland U.S. institution and laying the groundwork to build a local workforce on the island — where it is currently not possible to obtain a degree in mechanical engineering — the hope is that Guam will be prepared for when there is “an increasingly larger body of possible part families and part categories, in addition to all that tooling and indirect support, that we’ll be able to lead,” Orringer said.
For the time being, GAMMA is still in the early stages of an ongoing, phased approach. Typically, that process is called crawl, walk, run, Benham said.
“We’ve been using a slightly different one,” he said. “Tread, splash, swim.”