Sustaining the Digital Thread

Additive manufacturing has transitioned from an experimental capability to an operationally fielded technology across all U.S. military services. The Department of Defense committed roughly $797 million to AM in FY2024 — a 166 percent year-over-year increase — and the FY2026 NDAA formally codified AM as critical defense infrastructure. Against that backdrop, the feedstock supply chain sustaining forward-deployed AM has emerged as a strategic vulnerability.

This paper analyzes the challenges of procuring, transporting, storing, and managing AM feedstocks at the point of need, drawing on GAO reports, DoD and DLA policy, the 2021 DoD OIG cybersecurity audit, Army sustainment doctrine, and academic research.

• Physical and chemical degradation of feedstocks under deployed conditions.
• Weight, volume, and transport constraints on forward feedstock stocks.
• No standardized feedstock qualification and classification framework across services.
• Intellectual-property and data-rights restrictions that complicate material sourcing.
• Cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the digital thread linking design repositories to forward printers.
• Foreign dependency in the feedstock industrial base, addressed by NDAA FY2026 Section 849.
• Workforce and training gaps that reduce organic capability at the tactical edge.