For Army advanced manufacturing, 3D printing was just a start

Terry Gerton You guys are doing exciting work over in Army Materiel Command, specifically focused on advanced manufacturing. Carolyn, maybe I can ask you first to give us a little overview of what’s going on.

Carolyn Farmer Yes, absolutely. We’re having a lot of fun in this exciting space, no doubt. It’s an exciting time to be a part of the Army. In terms of advanced manufacturing, we have turned the tides, I’ll say. We’re embarking on a complete new journey. So most recently, over the last five months, the Army Materiel Command, the acting commanding general, is the lead integrator and lifecycle manager for all things advanced manufacturing for the Army. This does not mean at all that we’re shouldering that burden on our own. We are synchronizing and integrating the entire Army for priorities across advanced manufacturing. And that also, in terms of lifecycle management, will relate to the front end of a lifecycle. So the research, the development, the acquisition side of the lifecycle, to include also from an Army Materiel Command perspective, our focus area in sustainment. And so from a lifecycle perspective, where do we invest and prioritize advanced manufacturing from an Army perspective? But then also, ma’am, how do we tie that into department-level investments and weapon systems as we move forward for the future? This again is an exciting, fast-moving area in terms of advanced manufacturing. It is not solely focused on 3D printing though. That is something that is a misnomer worldwide really, right. Advanced manufacturing, it takes into account so many other different facets. Today we’re advanced manufacturing, you know, in terms of construction as well, and so that’s an exciting space. We’re ribbon-cutting new barracks at Fort Bliss and many other locations. But advanced manufacturing spans the entire spectrum of yes, advanced manufacturing additive printing, but we’re also in terms of subtractive and then applications in construction and many other areas. But it’s an exciting time to be a part of AMC embarking upon this journey.

Terry Gerton Wow, you just laid down so many different things I want to follow up on. So, Jon, let me just pick one for you. Carolyn talked about the lead integrator for lifecycle management across the Army. I mean, that’s a huge scope. What does lifecycle management mean for AMC at this point?

Jon Strzelec  I’ll bring it down a level, right? So Carolyn’s leading the advanced manufacturing efforts for Army Materiel Command. Underneath of that, I’m leading the advanced manufacturing efforts for small UAS systems. So our Group 1 attritable drones, right? And we think about lifecycle management of our older Army systems where we have a radio that’s going to be used for 10 years, and we set up a supply chain to buy replacement speakers and knobs and buttons. And we know in six years, we’re going to replace this many of them. That’s what lifecycle management meant before advanced manufacturing. Now, we’re lifecycle managing through replacement. We’re making things that are meant to go out and not come back. So how do you create a demand signal, or how do you build things to where each time it goes out, you’re going to get a feedback loop that now tells you it needs to be built slightly different because the adversary can take it out now and it needs to be able to handle this just denied environment or that type of radio frequencies? And so lifecycle management switches from this holistic, long-term thing the Army knew how to do to where the advanced manufacturing concepts go beyond how you’re making it, but to the actual policies and culture and how you’re actually driving it to where, least in the UAS space, lifecycle management is how do we make sure we have the supply chain to make more, not how do maintain what went out the door. And so it’s drastically different than that holistic perspective of lifecycle management we’re all used to.

Terry Gerton That’s right. When you’re thinking about a major end item, you’re thinking about replacing, I don’t know, washers and sprockets and those kinds of things. And now you’re thinking about replacing the whole end item, a drone. How is that changing culture and structure?

Jon Strzelec Slowly, right? I would say for the Army senior leaders that know the mission and understand what’s happening, and you’re hearing this across the highest of levels, is that this is an imperative. We have to be able to do this. It’s changing very fast and they’re giving us direction. They’re giving us the bandwidth and they are giving us the autonomy — great word for drones today, right — to actually be able go and do this. But when we talk about America as a whole and the manufacturing base that’s not all in the country, and things like that, it’s a lot of education. It’s a lot a collaboration with industry. We can’t do it without them. We’re not trying to say we’re the smartest. We are just saying that we have a pretty powerful workhorse of an industrial base that we can help do it together. And so we are seeing significant changes. Drone dominance is helping us with that. Advanced manufacturing is helping us with that. But it’s probably slower than I’d like it to go.

Carolyn Farmer Yes, so I was going to just follow on that. From the defense industrial base, which includes the organic industrial base, all the way to the tactical edge — where do we apply the right resources and the right priorities for advanced manufacturing? So we’re taking a look at that and partnering with, of course, our Army stakeholders and then our industry stakeholders, our academic stakeholders who are bringing so much to the table in that regard, to help us go faster. I know the federal government is always not known for our speed and agility. But I’ll say that that message is changing, right? We are making strides in that arena and we are making some incredible investments across the portfolio to be able to do that, especially with our soldiers at the tactical edge. As we start looking at the capability for advanced manufacturing to get parts and weapon systems back up online, we know that they possess that capability at the edge. What kind of investments do we need to make in upskilling that soldier at the tactical edge to be able do that and get a weapon system back online, either in a small UAS space or a tactical weapon system? We can do that for low-risk parts, if you will. We’ll send the things back home if we need to for higher-risk items. But for those low-risk things to get our readiness numbers back up online, we know our soldiers possess that capability and they’re willing and ready to do that at the edge.

Jon Strzelec I think that’s the point of advanced manufacturing. We talk about, like, advanced, right? But they could very well be making the same part the same exact way, but they’re making one on location where they need it instead of thousands back in the actual assembly line. That falls underneath the umbrella of advanced manufacturing because you’re making something in a different way, different space, different mentality, different culture than what it was designed to do in the first place in the factory. It’s a great point.

Terry Gerton A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I commanded a direct support maintenance company in the Army. So we had those soldiers forward. And I’m just imagining the vans full of spare parts that maybe I don’t need anymore. There’s a van that’s got a machine in it that we could make different pieces like that. How is that changing what you want soldiers to do?

Carolyn Farmer So we’ve got to decide as an Army and really as a department what we need them to do and also where we need then to do it. Everything doesn’t have to have a mobile capability where they’re at the very front edge of the tactical space. They can be further back in the theater, and that also provides an added capability not to just the U.S. Army, but looking at all the joint force — look at the theme of AUSA, right? Bringing it to the joint force. The Army is the foundation of that joint force. How do we apply that across our stakeholders, across the services, and then branch out even to our allied partners in that region, right? We don’t have to do it ourselves. And from the digital, you know, engineering domain, from the digital, I’ll say, challenge that we’re embarking upon, how do we do that securely, swiftly and then safely as well? So our OSW partners are helping us lead that domain, and the Army is falling right in line so that we can really harness that potential as a department, but also again, what we can bring as an Army to that is impactful.

Terry Gerton Let me take us back to the conversation where we started about lifecycle management. A big part of lifecycle management is managing the supply chain. Supply chains are long, distributed and complicated these days, let’s just say that. How does advanced manufacturing change your supply chain calculations, computations, demand signals, response time?

Jon Strzelec From a holistic standpoint, the long term, “we know we’re going to need 15 of these every week for the next seven years. Let’s go ahead and set those lines up.” What we’re finding is that the volatility of everything that’s out there now is changing so fast that by the time you get through that acquisition cycle, it’s not possible to keep up with what we need. Four years ago nobody knew we needed drones; three years ago we didn’t need millions; two years ago we found out it might be a thing; and a year ago we were told, go do it. And so we would have had been above this bell curve five years ago to now be where we want to be when it comes to some of these types of things. So, when advanced manufacturing comes into play at the levels at which Ms. Farmer’s talking about with OSW and these echelons of enterprise leaders, we’re literally talking about an ecosystem to where — and I’ll just give it as an example, it just makes more sense to me — you’ve got that soldier forward who’s got a pocketful of the parts they know they need often. But not everything breaks the way that we think it’s going to break, so even those long-term, supply chain-type acquisition projects that we do have out there, the first time something breaks that we never thought was going to break, they still need that part. Well, OK, that vendor hasn’t made that part in five years, because it wasn’t expected to break. The industry partners that we’re starting to work with and the incredible technology that’s out there from some of these folks that are in this space, they have the ability to re-engineer, right? So we talk reverse-engineer, that can get a little bit political because you’re stealing somebody’s IP is kind of the way it goes. But when we talk about re-engineering, it’s why am I going to make a part that’s 10 years old that was technology that was advanced then, when there’s a better way to make it now that has the same fit, form, function that AMC can now serve to qualify in that enterprise-wide strategic plan that we have now to own the type of qualification processes and help with that. Now you’re talking about, I can take one of those parts off the shelf and in rear echelon, right, handed to one of these industry partners. They can make a better widget with today’s parts that can be easily made cheaper, and then we just digitally distribute that information out to the field and they can a one-off with a temporary qualification to get them back in the fight while we work on the qualifications and the longer-term plan in the background. So I hate to quote, like, an Amazon or something like that, but when you’re at home on a Sunday and don’t feel like leaving your house and you need paper plates for a picnic in the following weekend, you go to Amazon and just order it. I look at advanced manufacturing as being that type of ecosystem to solve these problems in different ways than the traditional way of just managing the lifecycle. You have more ways to get after them. And so I just see it as a game changer that people are starting to see.

Terry Gerton What about the raw materials that are required in advanced manufacturing? How do you get those out to the field?

Jon Strzelec It changes, right?

Carolyn Farmer Absolutely. So obviously, we would not ask our soldiers at the very forward tactical edge to do certain, I’ll say, materials that require safety and other facets.

Jon Strzelec Circuit cards, clean rooms, so many things.

Carolyn Farmer So it just sort of depends, and I know that’s not a wonderful answer. But in terms of what we need at the tactical edge, what we need them to do very quickly in an agile manner, versus at a theater sustainment level, versus at division level. And then what do we need to invest upon, from a digital thread and a digital network, to make sure that our other joint service partners can also help us bear this burden. Because we’re all in this together. It’s a joint force kind of initiative, if you will. So we’re working with our OSW counterparts in materiel readiness, actually. They’re embarking upon deploying the Digital Manufacturing Exchange. It’s the DMX, and they’ve already been affiliated with several different official exercises, I’ll say, that have brought in the joint services, also allied partner nations, as well as, I will say, industry partners in foreign entities. And how do we then distribute a digital file to be able to make said part, you name it, from a distributed effort? And so again, we’ve distributed this and exercised this in many official exercises, but we need to do more of it, to exercise this particular community and to showcase to industry that we can protect your IP, that we have a capability to do this. And if we need a pay for IP as a service, we’re calling it, whether that be in a right-to-repair scenario — we don’t need your IP forever, right? We don’t want to pay that level of effort for it, to begin with from day one for that particular effort. But we want to possibly do it as IP as a service. We’ve just got to get our weapons systems back online and get us out of a state of negative readiness, if you will, and move it forward. And so how do we do that and secure your information? OSW is working to help us crack that code.

Jon Strzelec I think it’s also really important to recognize that not every readiness driver we have is some rare earth material that we don’t mine or we don’t have. It might be the hot button when we’re talking about drones with magnets, or circuit card chips, or some of the cameras that go on there for their IR-type cameras. But there’s a whole lot of parts that the Army is currently struggling with on their readiness drivers that are just made out of aluminum, right? But the drawing originally had a “only this OEM can make it,” and we paid for contracts with them to give them the sole rights to do it. Because at the time, that was the most strategic thing we could do for our bang for the buck for what we needed for the soldier. And so there’s a lot of components out there that the rare materials that we need, that people keep saying are rare, they’re readily available at these places that are already out there. I mean, we’ve got 23 different arsenals and depots across the United States. We’ve got forward locations that have machine shops. And so the forward edge, depending on what echelon of things you’re talking about making, might be 50 miles away, but it’s a full-blown facility that has all this stuff already They just don’t have that digitally enabled connection back to, “this is safe to make, we’ve qualified it, make it to this spec and that vehicle can get back on the road.”

Terry Gerton That’s really cool. And you guys are at the forward edge of this advanced manufacturing — pilots, exercises. What do you think the Army needs to have to scale it so that it’s really the way that the Army does business?

Carolyn Farmer If you mind, I’ll tee it up and then I know you can add a tremendous amount of detail to this. From a perspective of what does our nation need? Really, it’s not just what the Army needs. We’ve got to have the partnerships in place with academia and with industry. We’re here to make sure that it’s just a government-only situation, right? We are standing up tremendous public-private partnerships, P3s, in a lot of our organic industrial base sites. We’re looking to grow that and scale that. We know that those investments have to be made upfront for us to be able to harness the technology that’s out there, the innovation of our many industry partners and bring that inside the walls of the OIB where we have a dedicated workforce, where we had the safety, the security, if you will, and that we can work together and partner with our industry and academic partners to be to move a lot of this forward. And Jon has a tremendous amount of examples that we’ve already done this applying. So I’ll tee it up to you, Jon, to help us kind of relay that.

Jon Strzelec I’m fully aware — and I hate to say this, because it just sounds like I’m talking bad about the Army, but I’m not — we’re really good at what we do that we’ve done often enough to do it well. We’re not that great at, “I need a solution tomorrow and we’ve got the right people to do it.” Because we’re not set up for that. But I fully acknowledge there are industry partners out there, in these venture capitalist startup companies and these large primes and whatnot, that have some of the most innovative people that are just paid nonstop to be innovative, to figure out what’s next. We’re looking for those ideas. We’re holistically saying, that’s a great idea. Partner with us. Let’s co-invest into these areas inside of our depots and arsenals where we put your technology on the floor, and we’re going to take our workforce and our backbone and our solvency that no matter what happens in the United States, this military facility is going to be here and keep doing this, and let us bring that wealth of dependency and other things when it comes to keeping it moving and keeping it growing, and allow those vendors and those commercial partners to offload some of that risk space that they would normally have to go invest $25 million into a state-of-the-art facility that they don’t know what the next requirement is. What we’re saying is, let us help take on some of the burden. Come join our depots and arsenals where we’ve got floor space that’s literally sitting there not being used. Let’s sign a use agreement. Let’s sign a lease. Let’s sign a cooperative arrangement. And guess what? We might use it from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, but why don’t you use it for excess capacity in the off hours to meet your demands? And now you don’t have to buy a machine shop. You don’t to upgrade the circuit card line. You don’t have to do these things. So scalability to this is, I think, it really comes down to spreading the word, getting the knowledge out there and letting people know this is not your industrial base or your organic industrial base of the past where it’s you’ve got 20-year contracts that you’re locked into. No, we are trying to take the steps that industry is doing, our commercial partners, and do the same thing and get as close as we can to contractor-operated facilities, while we can still maintain that long-term strategic edge in the government and the military itself. If they move on to the next technology, hey, you helped us get stood up, we’ll keep running it. We will still come to you for help. But go ahead and go chase the next big thing. And when it’s ready, come help us set it up again. And so trying to share that with our industry partners…I’ll give you an instance, right? I’m bouncing all over the place, but it’s exciting. One of the examples is, our industry partners hear things from us like, hey, you do know that you can partner with the OIB and we’re underneath the same NDA and legal requirements to protect your data from the government. We don’t own it. It’s yours. If we get out of line, you can sue us. Like, we operate the same exact way as a business in those public-private partnerships to where if you hand us a piece of IP to make it to yours and another government entity comes to me and says, hey Jon, I want to see that IP? Sorry, you’re not behind the NDA. This is a contract with them. I’m not allowed to give it to them. And so I think the efforts that Ms. Farmer’s team’s doing and what Army Materiel Command’s doing with our ASAALT partners and our OSW partners and everybody across the world, it’s a “how do we educate to let people know what really is fluid and capable” instead of “I did this 20 years ago,” and the OIB is slow, right, and so for me, scalability is informing, educating and doing it together. It’s not just dictating how it’s going to be done.

Carolyn Farmer And one last plug to follow on, I would say also, we can’t offer the capability to do this without the right contracting mechanisms in place. So, of course, a subordinate command of AMC is Army Contracting Command. And we’ve worked exceptionally well with them across the board to stand up Commercial Solutions Opening. And I’ll just talk about one of them, our AMC advanced manufacturing Commercial Solutions Opening, CSO. We awarded our first contract on September 28th. And we did that in a matter of, I believe it was 38 days, which is unheard of, right? This is something that normally would take six months to do, but I won’t say it’s just on the government because the contractor also had to have a very solid plan in place. They had to be ready to propose, right. We had to had a very transparent relationship to understand what are the requirements, what do we need you to do, and for them to be able to propose effectively and for us to be to secure and award that contract again in 38 days. That’s unheard. So, we’re really excited. We’ve set the standard pretty high. Not saying we’re going to do it all at that kind of space and that kind of agility. But the standard is there and we’re ready to move out in partnering with these academic and really industry partners.

Jon Strzelec I’m going to plug it one more time, right? Because you heard requirements in there and things like that. But the CSO, right, the advanced manufacturing CSO with AMC, it’s a completely different contract vehicle than most people have ever heard of. It’s literally saying, you’re a company who has a great idea, that you see a problem in the Army or you see problem in government, put your proposal in. And then we evaluate them like you would in a business setting where we do a tech evaluation. And what’s really interesting and innovative about the contract piece of this one is, is that you’re not going up against everybody else that put in. The CSO allows us to do it on your own technical merit, right? And so if you’re company A, and you submit something we haven’t even thought about, but all of a sudden it’s like, holy cow, this can solve problems — we can award just to you, even though nobody else had the idea, because you’re evaluated on your technical merit. And so the speed at which these contracts go, it’s an open, continuous solicitation. It’s not something where you’ve got to wait for that Sam.gov and your employee saw it just the right day, and then you call somebody to find out, hey, do they really know what this contract is, to make sense of it — because contracts are written in purely understandable language, we all know that. So it’s an open enrollment contract that if somebody is out there in industry, has a proposal that they think is the next thing that government needs and we’re not knowing it yet, they can just drop into it. It gets evaluated by Ms. Farmer’s team. Then they go back, they get a pitch and it works almost like a Shark Tank event in the government. So that is making it grow at scale as well, because it’s giving those industry partners opportunities that didn’t exist before.