Tactical Additive Manufacturing in Europe: Distributed Logistics and Defence Readiness

The relevant question is not whether additive manufacturing is technologically mature, but whether it is being structurally embedded into NATO and EU defence logistics architectures. Recent institutional acts – including the NATO 2022 Strategic Concept, the European Commission’s Readiness 2030 White Paper, the SAFE Regulation and the European Defence Industry Programme – frame distributed manufacturing as a resilience instrument addressing supply-chain vulnerability, munitions shortfalls and mobility bottlenecks. Tactical additive manufacturing emerges within this context not as a peripheral innovation, but as a legally codified component of industrial sovereignty, digital inventory substitution and expeditionary sustainment. By examining regulatory thresholds, funding instruments, design-authority constraints and SME eligibility criteria, this analysis situates tactical AM within the broader NATO–EU transition toward distributed, EU-controlled production and logistics architectures. Modern high-intensity conflict environments expose the weakness of long, centralized supply chains. EU and NATO documents emphasize that Europe must address strategic vulnerabilities in defence logistics. NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept explicitly calls for identifying and mitigating dependencies in critical infrastructure and supply chains [1] .