Threat Status Drones Unleased: Inside the Army's mission to 3D print drones in huge numbers

Video

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

From the floor of the Association of the United States Army convention in Washington, Army Lt. Gen. Chris Mohan, the deputy commanding general and acting commander of Army Materiel Command, explains how the Army plans to use 3D printing to manufacture drone bodies and print drone replacement components near the battlefield.

[WOLFGANG] Walk us through what you all are doing right now in the drone space. Because as you look out of this convention floor, it’s drones, drones, drones, drones, drones everywhere. What’s AMC doing in that?

[MOHAN] About six months ago, the chief staff in the Army looked at me and said, “hey Chris, I need you to get involved in this space.” Because what we were seeing is the proliferation of UAS everywhere, not only in our own society, but particularly on the battlefield. We make stuff every day. That’s what we do. We’re a blue-collar “making” organization. And so we took some of our existing processes and started down this journey towards not making onesies and twosies, but mass production of UAS.

[WOLFGANG] How many are we talking about? You’ve got thousands, tens of thousands?

[MOHAN] Our goal, the target I gave our team, is, by this time next year, to be able to produce from mostly our own manufactured parts, and that’s important, about 10,000 a month.

[WOLFGANG] Is that just where we’re headed now in the drone space? This is mass quantities. Is that what the battles of tomorrow could look like?

[MOHAN] Yeah, first contact by a machine is the direction we’re headed. And just because we don’t want to do it doesn’t mean that the enemy doesn’t want to do it to us. And so we have to have that capability. But there’s a huge upside for us. Because one, we’re using a lot of our existing machinery to do the manufacturing of stuff like this out back there, like batteries, wiring harnesses, the bodies, we’re already doing that. And doing it at speed and scale will allow us to do other things at speed and scale as well.

[WOLFGANG] Let’s talk about why it’s important for you to do a lot of this work yourself, manufacturing them. Because I know on the podcast a few months ago, we talked about the logistical challenges of moving materiel into a theater like the Pacific, for example, or even the Middle East. Just the vast distances you’re talking about.

[MOHAN] Everything’s hard.

[WOLFGANG] Everything’s hard. So moving tens of thousands of drones out of a space that large may not be feasible in a conflict situation. So the alternative is to what? Try to make a lot of it?

[MOHAN] That’s right. There’s a couple pieces to it. One, being able to manufacture it organically will solve the challenge of about 90% of that supply chain is offshore in the United States. So we’ve got to bring it on. And then owning the tech data and networking our machinery and our operators. And I’m talking about a global network where we have files that are uploaded on a digital repository where people down at the tactical level can download those files on our tactical systems and then print not only replacement systems, but replacement parts forward, off a tech data that we already own.

That’s the direction we’re headed. Now, are they going to build motors, motors up front or down at the tactile edge? No, because that’s really hard. But the ability for us to ship mass quantities of those and then print the bodies or the housings, etc., that’s what we’re headed for.

[WOLFGANG] So owning the tech data. Can you walk me through a little bit of what that means? Are you basically building and coming up with this from scratch?

[MOHAN] We’re working with several commercial partners. We’re working with units. We’re printing a version of one that’s the 2CR has, the 101st. And there’s all kinds of good ideas. But again, we take it and something that has like 15 different pieces. Hey, we’ll take it and re-engineer it for mass production. And we’ll take it down to five or six pieces. And so that’s the direction we’re headed. But it’s hard work.

[WOLFGANG] How big of a team do you have working on this?

[MOHAN] We’ve got two production facilities right now, the Joint Manufacturing Technology Center at Rock Island, Illinois, and then Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania. They’re doing the electronics piece. We already manufacture 3D print circuit cards up there already. And so this is a natural evolution of their capability. And so there’s a team, and I have a small team in my headquarters just doing the program management. So there’s a couple hundred folks that are working this. In the future, as we go to mass production, there’ll be hundreds working it.

[WOLFGANG] We’re not just talking necessarily either just about building up from scratch. We’re talking about replacement parts fixing.

[MOHAN] That’s right. That’s why we need to own the tech data.

[WOLFGANG] So that if it’s broken and get fixed quickly.

[MOHAN] As long as they have the capability to print it or manufacture whatever they need to manufacture.

[WOLFGANG] Are we headed for a world — or maybe we’re kind of already there because we’ve seen this in Ukraine — where soldiers need to be proficient with how to do a lot of this stuff at the individual level?

[MOHAN] Absolutely. And so then it drives us to be more intuitive for operations, too. As we look at software, for example, not UAS, but software, if we design an app and we can’t give it to a soldier with 5 minutes or 10 minutes of training orientation and they go run with it, shame on us. Because we have to do this. And UAS, it’s going to be ubiquitous to the battlefield. And so our current sprint right now, we’re sending systems right now to the National Training Center. We’re going to send them to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk. And then we’re going to send a next batch to First Corps out at Fort Lewis. And some of those will go into the hands of people like me, sustainers, so they can learn how to use and be exposed to it.

[WOLFGANG] I would imagine, and correct me if I’m wrong, but all the soldiers that I talk to are excited about this stuff.

[MOHAN] Oh, yeah. Because they’re doing it and they’re doing it on their own. And that’s why we connect them with us. And that’s when we really see the ingenuity of the American soldier. One more story, I was down at Third Infantry Division. And this young specialist said, “Hey, general, check this out.” We were in their innovation lab. And when a specialist says, “Hey, general, check this out,” it’s either really good or really bad, right? He said, “Hey I designed this fixture where we can fly a grenade under a drone and drop it, and it works.” That’s what we need to supercharge, supercharge that.

[WOLFGANG] It seems like the weight of the Army and the Department is behind that.

[MOHAN] And Congress. Everybody knows this is critical. This is a critical capability that we have to have — not want to have — we have to have it because the battlefield is headed that direction right now.