For nearly a decade, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) has identified, prototyped and scaled commercial technologies that deliver advantages to warfighters. To meet current and future threats, the Department of Defense must rethink the current state of manufacturing, which is fragmented and often dependent on a traditional supply chain with limited capacity and – in many cases – a reliance on adversaries for key components.
The manufacturing base of the future needs to be trusted, resilient and deliver next-generation technologies at speed and scale. This is an area that commercial technology can help solve for the Department, and that the Department can help catalyze for the rest of U.S. manufacturing.
DIU has long had interaction with a variety of advanced manufacturing firms in support of efforts in autonomy, space, and other areas. DIU has announced its first formal effort in this space, Blue Manufacturing, which aims to qualify advanced commercial manufacturers and enable them to rapidly connect with cutting-edge technology companies. Through these relationships, Blue Manufacturing seeks to develop and integrate commercial technology with a trusted manufacturing innovation base in advanced areas like 3D printing, automation, and high-rate production to scale production quickly, securely, and globally.
“At DIU, we have the opportunity to work with a number of commercially derived tech companies who are incredibly advanced in their hardware and software in support of defense needs, many of whom will need to scale dramatically to help meet expanding threats and reestablishing deterrence. At the same time, there are incredible companies in advanced manufacturing – right here in the United States – doing everything from digital engineering to 3D printing and everything in between, that are looking for a lot more places to deploy their capabilities so that they can grow, and who want to contribute to national security,” said DIU Director, Doug Beck. “The Blue Manufacturing Initiative will focus on pairing the very best hardware and software manufacturers in defense technology with the very best advanced manufacturing providers to help both strategically critical industries to scale.”
The first step in this initiative is to create the Blue Manufacturing Marketplace to establish a pre-vetted catalog of trusted advanced manufacturing companies capable of scaling defense technology production.
Vendors seeking to be accepted into the Blue Manufacturing marketplace will have the opportunity to submit their solutions through an assessment process and leveraging DIU’s newmulti-stakeholder partnership authority (10 U.S.C. § 4127(e)). The initial Blue Manufacturing Marketplace cohort assessment will identify trusted manufacturing partners in six categories for Department needs, including:
- Parts Production: Large-format metal additive
- Parts Production: Small-format metal additive
- Parts Production: Composite or ceramic additive
- Parts Production: Automated metal machining and forming
- Automated and advanced post-processing
- 3D-printed tooling
A team of subject matter experts will evaluate submissions and select finalists screening for key things like cyber, adversarial capital, supply chain risk, etc. In the short term, a successful Marketplace will enable technology companies to seamlessly identify and work with trusted manufacturing entities. Longer term success will enable the DoD and USG to have a stronger U.S. and partner based supply chain for scaling needed technologies.
In addition, DIU has plans to conduct AOIs to continue building out a variety of other areas in advanced manufacturing in the coming year.
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