I recently wrote about the US Navy’s development of the Advanced Integrated Mobile Machine Shop (AIMMS), a containerized unit built around the Phillips Additive Hybrid system, which combines DED and CNC milling in a deployable platform.I noted that the story was especially relevant given the delivery of the AIMMS unit to the Pacific, and Phillips’ upcoming participation in the biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) event, the world’s largest maritime combat exercise.Now, AM software provider 3YOURMIND, a US and German company that frequently collaborates with Phillips, will be partnering with Phillips once again at this year’s RIMPAC, July 24-31 in the Hawaiian Islands.
3YOURMIND and Phillips will be participating in the distributed manufacturing experiment run by Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), one of the US military’s primary breeding grounds for advanced manufacturing R&D.Phillips Additive Hybrid system at MILAM 2026.Image courtesy of 3DPrint.com.
3YOURMIND’s involvement will enable NPS to gauge the effectiveness of executing distributed production on an operational vessel, with the USS Essex serving as the ‘laboratory’ in this case.The USS Essex is an ideal site for the purpose, having been the first US Navy vessel where the US military tested metal 3D printing on an in-service ship.3YOURMIND and Phillips have been working together for years on US military contracts, including projects like reverse engineering tank parts to create a digital inventory for the US Army, and the integration of 3YOURMIND’s Rapid Part Identifier (RPI) with the US Marines’ Digital Manufacturing Data Vault (DMDV).
This is the third US military exercise that 3YOURMIND and Phillips have partnered on in as many months, previously working together at the Joint Inter-agency Field Experimentation (JIFX) at California’s Camp Roberts in May, and Valiant Shield in Okinawa in June.In a press release about the collaboration between 3YOURMIND and Phillips at the upcoming RIMPAC exercise in July, the president of 3YOURMIND’s North American operations, William Cuervo, said, “Establishing a digitized manufacturing network is fundamentally an enterprise problem concerning fragmented people and assets.The strategy involves addressing this enterprise problem and tailoring the solution for military requirements.” Chris Curran, program manager at the NPS’s CAMRE program, said, “We’re moving advanced manufacturing out of the lab and into the fleet.
But to operationalize that during a massive exercise like RIMPAC, we needed absolute command and control over the digital supply chain.It’s about ensuring the right unit gets the right file at the exact right time, so they can print what they need to stay in the fight.” The capability to create distributed manufacturing networks is what I consider the most intriguing long-term value proposition for the AM industry.But for now, I generally think of it in terms of scenarios like, “Research Lab A creates a prototype, and then its partner, Research Lab B — thousands of miles away — accesses the same network, prints the prototype file, modifies it, and uploads the new file to see what Research Lab A thinks of the modification.” On the other hand, what the US military is exploring in war-game exercises with distributed manufacturing — expeditionary manufacturing — can be thought of as the basic concept taken to its logical extreme.
In that sense, it’s pretty exciting from a technological perspective that the DoD keeps doubling down on the idea, because if you can produce parts on an operational naval vessel, you could presumably produce them from anywhere.In any definition of distributed manufacturing, the combination of a parts identifier function and digital inventory that 3YOURMIND delivers is an indispensable component for leveraging the full potential.It’s clear why that would be the case for military organizations, who need to be able to reverse engineer files on the ground to leverage expeditionary manufacturing as a lead-time reducer.
But it’s just as important for any organization that’s being held up by lack of access to a critical part which is difficult to procure because it’s no longer in mass production, or because it’s in particularly high demand, or because one or a few of the materials it’s made from are scarce, etc.Another factor suggesting that 3YOURMIND is well-suited to capture this market is its partnerships, not just with Phillips but also with companies like EOS, a sister company of AM Ventures, whose portfolio 3YOURMIND is a part of.If AM enables and encourages Western militaries to collaborate more closely on new weapons systems development, that won’t be able to happen without a shared software network.
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