3YOURMIND and Phillips Corporation Join NPS Distributed Manufacturing Experiment at RIMPAC 2026

3YOURMIND, the Berlin-based additive manufacturing software developer, and Phillips Corporation Federal Division are participating in a distributed manufacturing experiment organized by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) as part of the biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) military exercise, running from June 24 to July 31 around the Hawaiian Islands. The experiment, conducted through the NPS Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing Research and Education (CAMRE) and its Partnership Intermediary FLEETWERX, is designed to test a command-and-control system for coordinating production requests across a distributed joint-force additive manufacturing network. 3YOURMIND is supplying its commercial off-the-shelf platform for part identification, order management, and production planning to manage the digital thread across participating units, while Phillips Corporation will provide containerized hybrid AM technology-including milling and 3D printing capabilities-aboard the USS Essex. The setup pairs a part assessment tool with a common operational picture to coordinate production decisions at sea, with the broader objective of demonstrating the feasibility of delivering parts at the point of need in operational environments. Before RIMPAC, both companies took part in two preliminary technical exchanges: Joint Inter-agency Field Experimentation (JIFX) at Camp Roberts in Monterey, California, and Valiant Shield in Okinawa, Japan, in May and June, respectively, to validate technical compatibility and operational feasibility ahead of the larger exercise.

This experiment matters because it moves additive manufacturing from isolated machine demonstrations into a networked, command-controlled sustainment architecture-a shift that directly addresses the military's persistent challenge of getting the right part to the right place at the right time. The NPS CAMRE consortium and FLEETWERX are effectively building the operational playbook for distributed AM in contested logistics environments, and 3YOURMIND's role as the software orchestrator positions it at the value-chain node that captures the most recurring value: the digital thread that routes production decisions across fragmented assets. This is not a hardware play; it is a software-and-workflow integration that, if validated at RIMPAC scale, could inform future investment decisions across the Department of Defense's distributed manufacturing roadmap. The crawl-walk-run approach-starting with JIFX and Valiant Shield before the main RIMPAC event-reflects the deliberate qualification pace typical of defense adoption, where technical compatibility must be proven before operational deployment. For the broader AM industry, this experiment tests whether software platforms can serve as the nervous system for a distributed manufacturing network, a capability that has direct commercial parallels in industrial supply chains and service bureau networks.

From an expert standpoint, the practical takeaway is that 3YOURMIND is executing a well-structured defense market entry strategy: partner with established federal integrators like Phillips Corporation, validate through incremental field exercises, and target the software layer rather than competing on hardware. The company's success will depend on whether the RIMPAC experiment produces measurable improvements in part delivery time, production routing accuracy, and digital thread integrity-metrics that will determine whether this approach scales beyond the experiment. For buyers in defense logistics, the key question is whether the command-and-control system can handle the complexity of real-world operational constraints, including bandwidth limitations, part criticality prioritization, and heterogeneous printer fleets. The results from RIMPAC will likely inform the next phase of the DoD's distributed AM investment, making this a concrete milestone rather than a speculative signal.