This is Nicholas Weaver’s second article on the military impact of the spread of technology.
America owes a big chunk of its military superiority to what it can make the tools, facilities, and expertise needed to put together sophisticated planes, ships, and weapons. So what happens when much of the high-precision manufacturing behind Predators and F-22s can belocated anywhere and owned by anyone?
The day isn’t as far off as it might seem. Twenty years ago, if a designer wanted a new, high-precision part, he constructed a design and handed it to a skilled (and expensive) machinist, who would produce a prototype. If more than a handful of handmade parts were needed, an even more expensive set of tooling would be created.
Today, the same designer develops his plan on a computer and then emails the design to the machine shop, which uses an assortment of CNC (Computer Numeric Controlled) machine tools to produce the prototype. CNC lathes can turn effectively arbitrary radially symmetric parts, cutters can create 2D shapes, and CNC mills can cut a 3-dimensional part to extremely tight tolerances. And as long as the designer only needs a few dozen (or even a few hundred) parts, the shop just feeds more material into the CNC machines and out pops more parts.
All it takes is a few shipping containers, a power hookup, and a source of refined metal ingots to produce high precision parts and designs from a high-technology mobile factory. And if that doesn’t seem like it’s got much to do with the military, think again. A major reason why the AK-47 is a “Weapons of Slow Mass Destruction” is it’s easy-to-make design. Any country with a factory base up to the low standards of Russia circa 1947 can stamp them out en masse and wreak havoc. Think of the possibilities when small jet turbines or piston engines for cheap unmanned planes become so simple that anyone can stamp them out and build their own drone air force.
CNC systems have become almost ubiquitous for manufacturing, from $2500 Sherline desktop mills (for a complete system including a linux computer and GPL software) to million dollar high-throughput systems with automatic material feeds.
Anyone watching American Chopper has seen the CNC controlled water-jet used to cut custom wheels, with rims limited almost solely by imagination.
The US Army is starting to exploit these fantastic tools, prototyping and deploying a mobile repair yard, the Mobile Parts Hospital, which, instead of keeping a large inventory of spare parts, is able to produce replacements on demand.
The biggest limitation is one of design. Parts produced by forging, stamping, casting, or extruding can’t necessarily be replaced using pieces made on a CNC mill. Clean-slate designs don’t have this problem. If all the high-precision components were designed to use CNC-produced parts (with a conversion to higher-volume production techniques if necessary), CNC-replacements, and even entire CNC-based manufacturing are now straightforward.
Which brings us back to transportable factories. Write a (large but reasonable) check, place a few CNC machines in a shipping container, add a couple of containers of refined raw material, and now anywhere the containers go a factory resides. Be it critical spare parts for a broken well, a replacement piece for an automobile or the critical components of a rocket motor, the same factory can make all three. A huge revolution for the majority of the globe which remains largely unreachable by FedEx.
In the CNC world, proliferation becomes a matter of design, software, and materials, rather than finished systems. What happens when North Korea or Iran starts selling missiles as digital files rather than on ships which can be intercepted? When private designers and companies create designs which anyone can produce? Two words: Watch out.
– Nicholas Weaver
“When private designers start producing designs anyone can turn out” — that’s the missing piece of the puzzle. As someone who’s worked in companies doing high tech manufacturing, I can say that it’s not as simple as owning a CNC machine, or even knowing how to program it. A lot of engineering expertise is required to create a workable high precision design, and it’s not the sort of expertise you pick up simply by getting a university degree.
Yes, you’re right. Good designers are the bottleneck. And a CNC designer needs to both understand what he’s designing and the limits of the machines themselves. Its heady stuff, but there is a lot of work on making it easier.
But good designers are always rare people anyway. Anything which increases the pool of potential designers (eg, say, in India or China), and which can couple those designers to distant manufacturing, has the potential to change the world.
Three Words: Selective Laser Melting (SLM for short). Also, read Neil Greshenfeld’s book “Fab”.
Good Morning Folks,
This is just another step toward “Desk Top Manufacturing” or comming full circle back to the Blacksmith if you like.
By seperating the process of manufacturing into design, manufacturing, marketing and using information rather then infrastruceure to create, build, and get to market new products are what this is all about.
The Military value of this is that parts for damaged equipment or upgrades from the users can be manufactured at the point of need by CNC machineing off instructions from Grand Rapids out of materials procured from the local economy.
In the quite recent past this would have made the up armoring of HUMVEES a lot faster with units being able to modify existing units already in the field to mfg. recomendations, while production of replacements was proceeding throught it’s bueaucratic process. The same efficancies would come form the Military not having to invantory seldom needed spare parts that could be made on demand.
The only losers here are the bloated Defense Contractors who make money in delays, cost over runs and plain old over charging for there products.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
Byron,
I don’t think CNC machines would’ve done much to speed up-armoring of HMMWVs. CNC machines are expensive, and machining a part from raw stock is time-consuming and expensive as well. That’s OK for a few prototypes, as the author was suggesting, but not a good way of mass-producing upgrades. The problems become even more pronounced if you’re machining hard materials of the sort used for armor. If you’re serious about mass-producing something, you need to invest in castings, forgings, tooling, and perhaps other specialized machinery to speed up your process and reduce the unit cost. It might make sense to use CNC to build certain parts on demand rather than stocking them, but unless logistics were truly horrendous, it’s hard to see how the cost of putting units in the field could beat manufacturing the parts at home and shipping them out quickly.
Good Afternoon George,
The intent of what I said was not a mobile production line in a combat zone, but as a way to speed equipment to those who need it, to speed inovations to equipment that is the result of the lessons learned in combat and to reduce the invantory of seldom needed parts.
As to your concerned regarding CNC machinery and its cost those are droping every year. That million dollar CNC mill of 2000 is now a hundard grand. I remember hearing this same argurment regarding the use of lap top computers by soldiers in the mid 90’s. Some one made the crack to me, “I suspose that you would want one in every Jeep’” I replied, “Well, of course.” Even at its most expensive this equipment would be little more the pocket change and in the case like the war in Iraq it could be left behind for use by a local start up business.
Regarding materials 5/8″ (16mm) cold rolled steel plate is a pretty universal item world wide.
The use of CNC machinery for production is fairly common, I will refer you to the Bretta (HK) plant in Columbia South Carolina. This plant turns out M-16’s, mostly for the Marines and nearly all of the fabrication is done on CNC machinery that for the most part is unmanned during the tooling process.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
Also, george, it is already being used. The Mobile Parts Hospital has been running for a while now, and although it can’t Mad Max a Humvee (big armor plates are not its specialty), it is being used for odd upgrades, like gun mounts and other smaller but more complex pieces.
I suspect its success will grow in the future, as more systems are designed from the start to be built with CNC-based prototypes/parts. Often the limitation is either no computer model (so the part needs to be scanned) or the part wasn’t designed to be CNC-ed, but was something like sand-casting, die-casting, or other technique which can produce a different shape.
No question that the proliferation of cheaper, smaller manufacturing systems will make it easier to make any type of product (including weapon systems) anywhere in the world. But high-precision manufacturing of complex parts still isn’t easy, especially of hard to machine materials which still often require grinding operations. While hard turning is making that unneccesary in some cases — to obtain the precision required for aerospace and other high-precision parts you still need a machine tool with much higher static and dynamic stiffnesses that your typical ‘desktop manufacturing’ system can provide. Certainly the trend is only going to accelerate down that path — but AK-47’s are already easy to manufacture anywhere, as are things like unguided rockets and the like. I think the idea that a terrorist cell could download plans for North Korean or Iranian missiles and run over to their CNC lathe/water-jet/machining center and pop out a bunch of medium or long range missles on short order is a bit alarmist. Rockets are one thing, liquid-fueled guided missles are another. As noted , simply being able to run a machine tool doesn’t mean you have the infrastructure to build and test something on that scale.
I’m with Michael. It’s not CNC as much as it’s additive processes. And I’m thinking it’s not steel, but some new material that’s developed which makes steel obsolete for many applications.
In addition, there’s no reason to think of future weapons systems as being large (in a relative sense). A swarm of wasp-size robots carrying lethal doses of poison could wreak havoc on an enemy… and the military is already working on intelligent swarming UCAV technology. Eventually, I believe we’ll have kirkyan weapon systems ( ref: http://blog.rebang.com/?p=998 ). Not true AI, but self-optimizing systems. Just part of the trend toward mass customization.
Like George said earlier, the proliferation of CNC machinery will fill only a certain niche in the manufacturing of machinery.
The reason sand-casting and die-casting is still around, after many years of CNC-machinery, is because they are much cheaper for mass manufacturing than CNC, and that is not going to change in the short term.
CNC-processing of ballistic steel will continue to be more expensive than current processes, not because of the material cost, but because of the wear on the tools from cold cutting. Moreover, without further heat-processing, you will lose much of the material hardness after you cut the steel.
WRT aerospace applications, there are some parts that you will need to use a forging process because of the material properties required.
A cutting process like CNC will not let you achieve the specific properties.
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The MAGIC (Modification and General Invention Company)UNICAT amphibious trackable vehicle is a prime example of CAD-CAM technology being made available to opposing regimes. Designed to be built as the ‘AK-47′ of vehicles, it will pose a huge problem for forces who are pitted aginst it. It is built as a digital file, able to be built anywhere there is numerically controlled machinery. In terms of capability, it leaves the HMMWV for dead.
I’ve been to the Int’l Manufacturing Technology Show for the last 11 years, and proliferation of CNC is not a problem.
What you will NOT see at an IMTS is all the interstitial stuff. It is what goes on BETWEEN the CNC that hides all the real value. If the Norks sold the “digital” files to build a missile, there would still be enormous gaps that would have to be filled by experience. The customer would still be faced with hundreds of thousands of man-hours dealing with all the hand-off variables between the CNC steps.
Recall that the leading edge tools do not make the weapon (AK-47 or W-31) they make the tools that make the weapon. That indirectness will hold true for a long time to come.
Finally, getting the “Formula 1″ of machine tools to work in an unimproved environment is somewhat optimistic. The stellar costs of these things mean that even a Hollywood terrorist (inifitely crazy & rich) would have a hard time making a go of it.
This isn’t really a story yet. Should be pondered over, not paniced about.
>CNC-processing of ballistic steel will continue >to be more expensive than current processes, not >because of the material cost, but because of the >wear on the tools from cold cutting. Moreover, >without further heat-processing, you will lose >much of the material hardness after you cut the >steel.
Wire EDM, Laser and Water jet, one of these must be possible.