Continuous Composites (CCI) has secured a multi-year contract with the U.S. Army DEVCOM Aviation and Missile Center (AvMC) to apply its proprietary CF3D technology to the development of components for current and future missile platforms.
The effort is being executed in collaboration with the U.S. Army’s Manufacturing Technology (ManTech) program and coordinated through America Makes, as part of broader Department of Defense initiatives to test leaner, faster production pathways for advanced precision strike platforms.
Addressing the Limits of Conventional Aerospace Manufacturing
The contract centres on the Precision Strike Missile architecture, where CCI will assess how CF3D, combined with advanced materials and fiber-steered design, can be applied to components that existing production methods struggle to deliver at scale. Traditional manufacturing approaches for high-performance aerospace structures introduce variability and throughput constraints that affect production predictability and repeatability, challenges the Army is actively working to address across its missile programmes.
CCI’s mandate under this effort is to establish a scalable production pathway for structures including nose cones, fins, leading edges, and bulkheads, parts that demand both high mechanical performance and reliable, cost-efficient delivery. Improving yield, reducing variability, and reinforcing supply-chain resilience are stated priorities.
“We believe our technology provides game-changing capabilities to the U.S. industrial base, and we are focused on solving some of the toughest challenges related to high-performance and high-temperature materials,” said Steve Starner, CEO of Continuous Composites. “Our goal is to lower program risk, improve system capability, and position our customers for confident, scalable production in the future in alignment with Department of Defense priorities.”
Scaling Composite AM for Defense: The Gap This Contract Addresses
The CCI-Army contract sits within a broader and accelerating effort to qualify advanced manufacturing technologies for missile and aerospace production, moving them from capability demonstration toward repeatable, production-ready deployment.
America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining have already launched the AACAMS initiative, a dedicated programme to develop roadmaps for scaling continuous fiber additive manufacturing for DoD use, recognising that CFAM’s ability to produce strong, lightweight components combining plastics with long fibers such as carbon or fiberglass makes it a priority technology for defence applications.
The pattern of industry-Army collaboration through DEVCOM AvMC is well established for metal AM. Velo3D joined a DEVCOM AvMC initiative alongside Raytheon Technologies to develop scalable, repeatable laser powder bed fusion processes for Aluminum CP1, with the explicit aim of supporting the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense modernisation goals.
What connects these efforts is a shared recognition that the bottleneck in defence manufacturing is no longer access to capable technology, but the ability to qualify and scale it within programmes that cannot afford variability.
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Featured image shows Continuous Composites’ CF3D printing technology. Photo via Continuous Composites.
