Overview
America Makes, the national additive manufacturing institute, and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) have jointly announced two new project calls representing a combined total of $25.6 million in funding directed at solving two of the most persistent challenges in military additive manufacturing: material interchangeability and integrated quality assurance. The announcements signal a significant escalation in the US federal government’s commitment to making 3D-printed components a fully qualified and reliable element of national defence readiness.
MIAMI: Proving Additive Materials Can Replace Traditional Alloys
The first of the two project calls, valued at $12.4 million and known as the Maturation Initiative for Additive Metals Interchangeability (MIAMI), is funded through the Office of the Under Secretary of War, Acquisition and Sustainment, Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment Programme. Its core objective is to validate definitively that metallic additive manufacturing materials can serve as qualified replacements for traditional alloys in existing weapon system components.
This is a question that has significant practical consequences for military supply chains. A large proportion of the US defence industrial base still relies on conventional forging, casting, and machining to produce replacement parts for active weapons systems. When those parts become unavailable — due to supplier failure, geopolitical disruption, or obsolescence — additive manufacturing represents a potential backup pathway. But that pathway is only useful if the military can trust that AM-produced parts are functionally equivalent to the originals.
MIAMI is designed to generate that proof systematically, establishing the test protocols, certification frameworks, and material datasets that will allow defence contractors and military logistics teams to treat AM materials as qualified substitutes with confidence.
INSITE: Closing the Quality Loop with Integrated Inspection
The second project call, valued at $13.2 million and known as the INtegrated System for In-Situ Testing and Evaluation (INSITE), addresses the quality control challenge from a different angle. Rather than focusing on material equivalence, INSITE aims to build a complete integrated quality assurance system that combines real-time monitoring during the printing process with post-build inspection using non-destructive evaluation methods.
The goal is to create a single, certifiable framework that can track quality throughout an additive build and verify it after completion — eliminating the current gap between in-process monitoring and post-build inspection that leaves uncertainty in the middle of many AM workflows. INSITE will be particularly focused on parts that are challenging for existing inspection methods: dense materials, complex geometries, and large components where defect detection is most difficult.
Why This Matters
Together, MIAMI and INSITE represent a coordinated effort to address the two biggest gaps preventing additive manufacturing from fully entering the defence production mainstream: trust in the materials and trust in the process. As the US military works to strengthen domestic manufacturing resilience, the ability to produce certified, qualified 3D-printed parts on demand is becoming a national security priority, not just an engineering aspiration.
