Defense and space manufacturing company Snowbird Technologies has been confirmed as a participant in the 30th Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC) 2026. The company will take part through the Naval Postgraduate School’s Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing Research and Education (NPS CAMRE) and its distributed advanced manufacturing experiment—one of the exercise’s key technology showcases.
Scheduled to run from June 24 to July 31 in and around the Hawaiian Islands, RIMPAC 2026 is a biennial multinational naval exercise involving 31 participating nations. The exercise will mobilize roughly 40 surface ships, five submarines, 140 aircraft, and over 25,000 military personnel, making it one of the largest maritime exercises in the world.
Karl Wojtkun, Vice President of Business Development at Snowbird Technologies, said, “We’re proud to support the 30th iteration of RIMPAC and look forward to validating our capabilities in new environments to better serve the warfighter at the tactical edge.”
A Networked Manufacturing Ecosystem at Sea
NPS CAMRE’s role in the exercise centers on deploying a distributed network of more than 50 advanced manufacturing nodes, an integrated system designed to produce mission-critical readiness parts in days rather than months. This effort draws on the expertise of NPS researchers and students and is made possible through a Partnership Intermediary Agreement with FLEETWERX, which enables CAMRE to bring industry innovators like Snowbird Technologies into the fold.
Snowbird Technologies will showcase its patented Snowbird Additive Mobile Manufacturing Technology (SAMM Tech) platform, a modular containerized manufacturing unit combining metal additive manufacturing, plastic additive manufacturing, and CNC subtractive machining in a single compact system. The platform integrates technologies from Meltio (wire-laser metal 3D printing), Slice Engineering, and FANUC, and is designed specifically for field-ready, defense-grade manufacturing applications.
Manufacturing at the point of need: advanced production reshapes naval readiness
Snowbird Technologies’ participation in RIMPAC 2026 reflects a broader strategic shift underway across allied navies: moving additive manufacturing (AM) out of the lab and onto the deck. The core challenge is a supply chain that was never designed for the pace of modern operations. Replacement parts for vessels in active service can take months to procure, and obsolete components often have no conventional sourcing path at all.
The answer, increasingly, is to bring manufacturing closer to the point of need, deploying production capability directly into the operational environment rather than waiting on a supply chain built for a different era. SAMM Tech’s containerized, multi-process approach is designed precisely for this, offering field-deployable manufacturing capacity that compresses production timelines to days, whether aboard a vessel at sea, at a forward port, or operating independently of a fixed industrial base.
The momentum behind this shift is well-documented. The U.S. Navy issued a Letter of Intent (LOI) to AML3D in June 2025 outlining plans to install up to 100 large-format metal 3D printers across the Maritime Industrial Base (MIB), with a target of producing around 1,600 additively manufactured components annually by 2030. That same year, James Kilby, Acting Chief of Naval Operations, stated that by leveraging AM naval maintenance strategies, the Navy was “reducing maintenance delays” and moving faster, adding that every 3D printed part replacing a 40 week procurement cycle represented “real, measurable readiness.”
The RIMPAC exercise itself has become a proving ground for these ambitions. During RIMPAC 2024, the U.S. Navy deployed SPEE3D’s XSPEE3D printer alongside other systems to demonstrate the ability to cut parts delivery times from up to 200 days down to mere hours. RIMPAC 2026 raises the stakes further, with NPS CAMRE orchestrating a networked experiment across more than 50 manufacturing nodes, and Snowbird Technologies among the industry partners tasked with proving that the technology is operationally ready, not just conceptually promising.
The window for this transition is narrowing. Defense industrial strategy is no longer debating whether AM belongs in naval operations—it is deciding how fast to scale it.
3D Printing Industry is inviting speakers for its 2026 Additive Manufacturing Applications (AMA) series, covering Energy, Healthcare, Automotive and Mobility, Aerospace, Space and Defense, and Software. Each online event focuses on real production deployments, qualification, and supply chain integration. Practitioners interested in contributing can complete the call for speakers form here.
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Featured image shows Meltio Metal AM Solution During RIMPAC Defense Exercise. Photo via Meltio.
