When a warship cannot leave port because a decades-old part no longer exists anywhere in the supply chain, the daily cost to the taxpayer is in millions.
The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) has spent £6.25M on Project Tampa (including up to £5M with industry), a four-spiral defense additive manufacturing program designed to address obsolescence and parts shortages across ageing defense platforms, some of which will remain in service for more than a decade. The program has now produced safety-critical components across land and air domains, and the MOD published its first Defence Advanced Manufacturing Strategy early last year.
Speaking at our AMA: Aerospace, Space and Defense 2025 event before retirement, Richard Hamber, laid out the scale of that problem and his opening example set the tone for everything that followed.
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The “Achilles Heel” of Defense Logistics
The Challenger 2 tank was designed in 1980, entered service in 1998, and its current out-of-service date is 2040. “It counts as a vintage car, effectively,” Hamber said, “and that is reflective of quite a few of the key platforms that [the] Ministry of Defence is operating. And that sets us all sorts of challenges and effectively provides the compulsion for us to get after additive manufacturing as the most recent manufacturing technology that will deliver benefit.”
Those challenges compound in ways that go beyond simple age. Lead times are extensive because the MOD is not a large enough customer to command priority from suppliers. Supply chains have collapsed because the firms that originally designed and manufactured many of these parts have gone out of business over six decades.
And most critically, the parts themselves are documented only in 2D file drawings rather than digital CAD models. “The digital thread is our current Achilles heel,” Hamber said. “We’ve got to get better at exploiting digital engineering information if we are going to exploit additive manufacturing. The two go hand in glove. And whilst there would seem to be an awful lot to worry about this, our current experimentation and innovation activity called Project Tampa has proven that the ideas contained within the strategy are valid.”
These documentation gaps have a direct cost attached to them. A Challenger 2 sitting in a workshop costs the MOD £1,400 a day, but “that pales into insignificance when you compare it to the cost of a QE-class aircraft carrier or a nuclear-powered submarine,” Hamber said, “which you are talking about a million pounds a day if we can’t get them to sea. So you can see there is a financial imperative as well as an operational imperative to improve the availability of these platforms as old as they are.”
The experience in Ukraine has demonstrated that speed of repair in the field matters as much as the ability to manufacture. That strengthens the case for production capability positioned closer to the point of operation.
Project Tampa was commissioned in 2021 around four incremental spirals, each raising the technical bar. Spiral 1, now complete, produced 11 non-safety-critical parts across five companies and fitted them to in-service platforms. Spiral 2 targeted safety-critical components and introduces the air domain, where certification requirements are far more demanding than those governing land systems.
“Everybody was fighting for ships and land systems, i.e. tanks and trucks, because their certification bar is not as high as it could be,” Hamber explained. “But put safety critical and air together, and suddenly you get a far more interesting challenge with a range of authorities and regulators involved that you can’t imagine.”
Two parts from Spiral 2 illustrate the scope: NP Aerospace in Coventry is using Caracol’s Vipra AM wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) to produce a critical component for the Mastiff vehicle exceeding 100 kgs, with six fitted per vehicle across its axles. Thales has moved to laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) for chaff and flare dispenser magazines that had become difficult to source through dip brazing, 3D printing four at a time in a thin-wall structure that has proven highly successful.
Shifting From Retrofit to Initial Design
The structure of Tampa also reflects a deliberate institutional choice about liability. Having disaggregated its own manufacturing capability years ago, the MOD cannot inherit responsibility for parts it produces directly. Working through OEMs allowed Tampa to sidestep both the intellectual property (IP) and certification questions while the evidence base was being built.
That changes with Spiral 4, which remains in development but would open competitive bids to manufacture unobtainable parts beyond the original OEM group, making it the first genuine threshold for broader industry participation. Whether a company needs to be UK-owned to participate is less important than whether it has a UK footprint. As Hamber noted, Thales is French-owned and Boeing has a UK presence, and what matters is being subject to UK law at the point where design information originates.
The certification question, historically cited as the hardest barrier, has proven more tractable than the sceptics predicted. “If I had a pound for every person that told me that we would never solve those two problems,” Hamber said, referring to IP rights and certification, “I’d be a very rich person. But in actual fact, the evidence we’ve gleaned from Project Tampa working with industry means that we can address those points, and I would have to hand all their money back.”
The approach was to return the evidential burden to OEMs, requiring the same fatigue testing, Charpy testing, and qualification process demanded of traditionally manufactured parts. Parts have tended to outperform what they replace. The MOD’s own process, however, remains a bottleneck.
“The real challenge for the Ministry of Defence is that we still insist on three face-to-face meetings, typically using PowerPoint slides, to convince ourselves that the information being presented is valid. We are not consumers of digital engineering information yet.”
That institutional gap matters because of where Hamber believes the real value lies. Of the 1.6 million items across the total defense inventory, the current additively manufactured fraction is, by his estimate, “three or six persons’, fingers and toes.”
Changing that ratio requires additive manufacturing to enter at the design stage, not as a retrofit. “What we’ve discovered in Project Tampa is [that] the most expensive way of doing additive manufacturing is reverse engineering parts that have been produced traditionally,” he said.
Britain’s ageing fleet problem is, it turns out, everybody’s ageing fleet problem. NATO allies, the US DoD, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are all working through the same calculus, and the Tampa Spiral 3 arrangement with the DoD, which is designed to have each country test interoperability of their AM industrial bases, is the most structurally advanced of those collaborations.
The MOD’s estimate of £118 million in savings over 15 years is, by Hamber’s own description, “a very, very, very, very conservative estimate,” because it excludes the operational costs of unavailability that dominate the actual calculation.
His message to industry was direct, and pointed squarely at what comes next, highlighting that attendees should “start investing more heavily if you’re engaged in the defence supply chain, in additive manufacturing, because we want you to. And you will see policy direction that pushes you in that direction.”
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