America Makes launches two defense project calls totaling $25.6M for metal AM qualification and in-process QA

America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) have opened two project calls worth a combined $25.6 million, both targeting additive manufacturing capabilities for the US defense industrial base. The Maturation Initiative for Additive Metals Interchangeability (MIAMI) carries $12.4 million from the Office of the Under Secretary of War, Acquisition and Sustainment, Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) Program, seeking to validate that metallic AM materials can reliably substitute traditional alloys in Department of War weapon system components. The INtegrated System for In-situ Testing & Evaluation (INSITE) is valued at $13.2 million, co-funded by IBAS and the Office of the Under Secretary of War, Manufacturing Technology Office (OSW ManTech), aiming to build a unified AM quality-assurance system combining real-time in-process monitoring with post-build nondestructive evaluation (NDE). Three awards are anticipated for MIAMI and one for INSITE, with both programs structured in phased approaches from preliminary qualification through comprehensive testing.

These project calls represent a direct application of the defense acceleration wave that has reshaped US AM policy since 2025, driven by NDAA §849 and the broader push to reduce supply-chain vulnerability. The MIAMI initiative tackles the core bottleneck in aerospace and defense AM adoption: the qualification grind. By funding shared, validated data that demonstrates material interchangeability, America Makes is attempting to compress the decade-long certification cycle that has historically kept metal AM parts out of critical weapon systems. The INSITE program addresses a parallel gap — the lack of trusted in-process quality assurance for large, dense, or complex geometries that evade conventional NDE. Both efforts sit squarely within the metal-pbf-lb and metal-ded process segments, and they signal that the US Department of War is moving beyond isolated part demonstrations toward systematic qualification infrastructure. This is not a single-company win; it is a structural market redefinition that lowers qualification cost across the entire defense supplier base.

For the AM industry, these calls confirm that defense funding is now the primary driver of metal AM qualification research in the United States, displacing the slower, program-duration-locked aerospace commercial model. The practical outcome will be a set of publicly available material property data and inspection protocols that any qualified supplier can reference — effectively creating a shared qualification substrate that reduces the cost of entry for smaller AM service bureaus and material producers. America Makes and its project teams must now execute on delivering statistically robust data that meets DoW certification standards, not just academic publication benchmarks. The real test will be whether the Phase 0 results translate into actual part substitutions in fielded systems within 24 months, not whether the project calls generate press releases.