ROCK ISLAND ARSENAL, Ill. — In the forge at Rock Island Arsenal, workers in silver heat suits and darkened face shields shovel fire unfazed as flames lick their feet and legs. Their work is older than the nation’s railroads, melting and molding metal the way it’s been done for centuries.
Sparks cascade as they raise a cauldron of molten metal from the flames along the ceiling to a set of empty molds. They pour the orange liquid into molds, judging the flow by sight and instinct. The scene feels half industrial, half elemental, a craft largely unchanged for well over a hundred years. There’s no trade school for this work; the melters learn by doing, part artisan, part tradesman.
A short drive down the road is Rock Island’s advanced manufacturing center built during World War II. The interior is brightly lit, clean and the only sound is the low hum of 3D printers at work. Robotic arms move with deliberate precision, building metal parts layer by layer.
Despite the differences between a 19th century forge and an advanced manufacturing facility, both serve the same mission: to keep the Army supplied and ready now and in the future.
“You see the past, the present and the future all happening at the same time,” Maj. Gen. Beth Behn, the Army’s Tank-automotive and Armaments Command commander, told Defense News on a recent visit to the arsenal in the middle of the Mississippi.
“Every metaphor you’ve ever heard about this, this is how we forge warriors,” Behn said. “It’s through pressure and heat.”
As the Army races to modernize its organic industrial base, Rock Island is showing how legacy infrastructure can evolve at speed; blending craftsmanship, data, and digital manufacturing to meet readiness demands that didn’t exist even five years ago.
For more than 160 years, Rock Island has built the backbone of America’s ground forces, from Civil War-era saddles to spoons to armored vehicle parts sent to modern battlefields.
But what’s happening here now isn’t just about preserving craftsmanship, it’s about reinventing how the Army sustains itself in a new era of competition and conflict.
The arsenal is one of the Army’s oldest industrial sites, but it’s also becoming a proving ground for advanced manufacturing, additive technologies, and small-batch, rapid production. In the same footprint where molten metal once defined readiness, 3D printers now create drone components and precision parts for vehicles and weapons systems in a fraction of the time.
Rock Island is “the Swiss Army knife of the organic industrial base,” Behn said. Keeping its forge hot is a matter of national insurance but building out its 3D-printing capacity is an investment in speed and survivability, according to Behn.
“I’m losing sleep at night over how we need to go faster and what is every possible way that we can do that,” Behn said.
That mindset is now the centerpiece of the Army’s continuous transformation campaign plan, which calls on every depot, plant, and arsenal to “adapt with urgency,” Behn said. That means shifting the industrial base from a slow, linear supply chain to a distributed network capable of producing new systems, and replacing broken ones, at commercial speed.
Rock Island Arsenal has become one of the most visible testbeds for that effort.
Printing with sand
The foundry at Rock Island remains the Army’s only organic capability of its kind, a national asset that conducts hundreds of pours into molds a year.
While the practice of forging is old, modernization is underway. The arsenal has joined a wider forging and foundry community, sharing best practices with commercial and academic partners.
“We’re part of that community,” Col. Eloy Martinez, Rock Island and Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center commander, said. “We’re exchanging good ideas with other members because there are definitely areas ripe for modernization.”
The Arsenal is experimenting with new alloys and more precise mold techniques. The arsenal recently installed a sand 3D printer that can create intricate casting molds in hours rather than months. Getting a wood mold right could take anywhere between two to five months, according Greg Lupton, Rock Island’s deputy commander.
“With a 3D printed mold, typically, we can print a mold in 24 hours … pour into it the next day,” he said. “You can iterate in days or hours versus months.”
The plan is to acquire a second sand printer, according to Martinez.
The flexibility and speed of 3D printing in forging and casting allows the arsenal to operate like it always has with “a high mix and low volume” of product, Martinez added.
The team has also recently achieved its AS9100 certification; a key step in qualifying parts and processes to aerospace-grade standards.
“It’ll open some doors for aviation parts and we can impact Air Force and Army Aviation readiness,” Lupton said.
While keeping the forge is expensive, Behn said, it’s also an insurance policy the nation can’t afford to lose. “Our nation needs to have it,” Behn said. “The question is, what kind of premium are we willing to pay on that insurance plan and how do we make sure it’s functioning, that we have artisans who know how to operate it, and that we’re looking at modernization?”
Printing the next fight
In Rock Island’s advanced manufacturing center, rows of 3D printers and robotic arms are laying the groundwork for how the Army will fight and resupply in the years ahead.
The Army is focused on solving a major problem: how it can scale production of drones in the U.S. to match potential threats proliferating globally.
“We are on the cusp of an accelerated sprint on UAS production,” Behn said. “[Army Materiel Command], writ large, is going to produce 1,000 UAVs by the end of this fiscal year, and we will have a portion of that production, the drone bodies, produced here at Rock Island.”
The Army’s stretch goal is to reach a production rate of 10,000 drones a month, or 120,000 per year, by leveraging composite-based additive manufacturing — known as C-BAM.
The printing system from company Impossible Objects is scheduled to be installed at Rock Island in early 2026. “We have that printer being installed here starting in, I think, the January–February timeframe,” Behn said. “So, you know, operational late spring of ’26 and once it’s operational, its capacity is significant.”
In parallel, the arsenal is also incorporating subtractive manufacturing techniques that originated as a concept developed through the Army Research Laboratory.
“There’s 14 parts that go on an Armored Multipurpose Vehicle that BAE [Systems] produces,” Lupton said. “These 14 parts are multipiece weldments. Anytime you start welding on ballistic aluminum, the weld joint becomes the weak spot,” he said.
“The other challenge with that much weld and the parts that large are they want to twist, they want to warp, which is causing issues with their assembly line, fitment issues when they were trying to install the parts, lack of reliability,” Lupton said.
So instead of welding parts together, the system at Rock Island is able to take large, single blocks of thick aluminum and run them through an automated saw.
“We’ll take it into the roughing cell, which has two robotic heads, that machines it from both side, 500 cubic inches of material removal rate, essentially, just picture aluminum chips flying everywhere,” Lupton described.
The cut piece then moves into a robotic cell to finish up and then is inspected through built-in equipment so it never has to leave the cell.
“It’s very much a lights-out type of machine … it’s pretty rare that you can see an 80-foot-long machining center that’s going to be operated by two individuals,” Lupton said.
The Army plans to be in low-rate production with the equipment in fiscal 2026 and full-rate by FY27.
Sitting in the back corner of another vast building, is “the unicorn” in additive manufacturing, Martinez said. The machine is called the jointless hull – a printer bed that is 20 feet by 30 feet by 12 feet high. It can take on both additive and subtractive manufacturing techniques.
The massive printer began as a research and development effort but the Army is trying to transition it into a production capability, Lupton said.
“We don’t generate a lot of revenue by doing science experiments, so we want to make parts,” he said. The technology is a game changer in parts production because it would allow forge-like capability made in aluminum in the printer and is even more attractive for small quantity production runs.
“It could be a huge time savings,” Lupton added.
Even so, there is a lot to work through in getting it up and running and since it’s a one-of-a-kind system. It’s not easy to maintain, Lupton said.
One recent policy change is also poised to change the game for Rock Island’s modus operandi, which is to produce small quantities of parts that are needed rapidly.
In July, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll delegated parts qualification authority to the AMC commander, giving officials there the ability to approve parts much faster than the traditional process would allow.
“We’re working right now to figure out the implementation of that authorization,” Behn said.
“The idea is to speed the process by which we’re able to produce a part, test it, and say ‘qualified,’ and then have that become a secondary source of supply. We think organically we have the capability to produce OEM-quality parts, and we certainly know there are industry partners who can do that as well,” she said.
“We have to apply a lens of urgency,” Behn said. “Nobody wants to stamp off on a part that isn’t safe, but we also know we can’t be excessively risk averse. This is about producing at scale, at speed, to meet the mission.”
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
