IMTS 2026 Will Show How 3D Printing Is Quietly Rebuilding the U.S. Defense Industrial Base

The International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) has always been a place for big machines and bigger promises. This year, the Emerging Technology Center at McCormick Place is taking a sharper angle: showing how additive manufacturing can make the U.S. industrial base faster, more flexible, and less dependent on fragile overseas supply chains.

Aires Tide: from concept to test flight in months

The centerpiece is Aires Tide, an 11-foot tall test flight vehicle developed by Sandia National Laboratories as part of the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission. What makes it stand out is not just its size, but how quickly it came together. The team moved from concept in October to a test flight in May, a pace that would be impossible with conventional tooling.

According to Lonnie Love, a fellow at Sandia, the project used AI-driven design combined with metal 3D printing on a Velo3D Sapphire XC system in Inconel 718. That combination reportedly cut development time by about seven times and reduced cost by a factor of fifteen. A half-scale version was dropped from 32,000 feet at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground in Utah on May 19, 2026, giving the team real flight data to feed back into the design loop.

"Traditionally, changing vehicle designs to accommodate different payloads or flight forces would take engineering teams months," Love said. "AI enables us to get the design to about 95% of the way there in days and hours; then we can add in design constraints with respect to additive manufacturing." That matters when national security projects need to iterate fast.

Drones built live, then flown inside the hall

Elsewhere in the ETC, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is running a live manufacturing cell that prints quadcopter airframes during the show. Visitors will see the frames produced in real time, then watch the 3D-printed drones take off in a netted flight area.

The cell mixes additive and subtractive processes and can switch between 3.5, 5, and 10-inch rotor sizes. Thomas Feldhausen, an R&D staff member at ORNL, says the demonstration is meant to show manufacturers how flexible production systems can move from design to production while adapting to changing requirements. In plain terms: one cell, many variants, no retooling.

Other exhibitors at IMTS 2026 will also show drone-related manufacturing tech, including Mazak, FANUC, Kennametal, Open Mind, Edgewater Automation, MTConnect, and Schunk. The message is consistent. Defense needs high-mix, low-volume production today and the option to scale up tomorrow. 3D printing is being positioned as the bridge between those two modes.

Why this matters beyond the show floor

These are not lab demos for their own sake. The U.S. Navy has already been fast-tracking 3D-printed submarine parts, and the Air Force continues to fund large-format metal printing programs. IMTS is now the public-facing window for a strategy that has been building behind closed doors: use advanced manufacturing to create surge capacity when supply chains break.

Douglas K. Woods, president of AMT, which owns IMTS, put it directly: "What makes the ETC so powerful is that the technologies we need for national defense are the same ones that can make domestic manufacturing more efficient and competitive."

IMTS 2026 runs September 14-19 at McCormick Place in Chicago. If the show delivers on its preview, the defense industrial base will be less abstract and a lot more physical.