America Makes Picks 25 Suppliers for $10.5M Metal AM Defense Qualification Program

America Makes, the Department of Defense's manufacturing innovation institute for additive manufacturing, has selected 25 organizations for a $10.5 million supplier qualification program. The goal is to standardize how metal AM suppliers are trained, audited, and accepted into the defense supply chain, replacing the current slow, part-by-part qualification process with a unified framework.

Who Got the Awards

The list spans the full metal AM ecosystem. Machine makers like FormAlloy Technologies and Seurat Technologies are joined by production service providers such as ADDiTEC, AML3D USA, and Cumberland Additive. Aerospace and defense primes including Collins Aerospace, GKN Aerospace, Baker Hughes Energy Transition, and Eaton Corporation made the cut. Materials and process specialists such as Elementum 3D, Materials Sciences, and Norsk Titanium US round out the group.

Wichita State University's National Institute for Aviation Research will develop the training curriculum, which will cover process control documents and additive manufacturing qualification principles. Each supplier will integrate that guidance into its operations, then face an audit to prove it can consistently produce qualified components using LPBF or DED.

Why This Program Exists

Defense acquisition rules have always treated every new AM part as a unique qualification event. That works fine for prototypes. It does not work when the Pentagon wants to buy thousands of flight-critical parts from dozens of suppliers. The current system is slow, expensive, and discourages small companies from entering the defense market.

The JAQS-SQ program, now expanded to 25 suppliers after an initial cohort of six LPBF specialists, aims to fix that by focusing on whether a supplier can run a controlled, documented process, not on whether it can qualify one specific geometry. If a company passes the audit, it should be able to quote on a broader range of government work without restarting the qualification clock from zero.

What Comes Next

Awardees will report progress at America Makes Technical Review and Exchange events over the life of the project. The initial group covers machine developers, production shops, aerospace manufacturers, materials suppliers, and companies specializing in LPBF or DED. Several already supply components to aerospace, energy, and defense customers. Others are smaller, non-traditional suppliers that the program is explicitly designed to lift into qualified production.

If the framework works, it should accelerate the timeline for getting AM parts onto aircraft, ships, and vehicles while giving the Pentagon a larger, more resilient supplier base. That is a meaningful step toward making metal additive manufacturing a standard part of defense procurement, not a niche exception.

Source

• 3D Printing Industry - America Makes Selects 25 Suppliers for $10.5M Metal AM Qualification Program