Raytheon is restarting production of the Miniature Air-Launched Decoy in Tucson, Arizona. On the surface, this is a routine story about a defense contractor responding to demand from the United States and NATO allies.
Look closer and it becomes something more useful. The restart is a case study in how the defense industrial base preserves capability, why tooling sits at the center of every production decision, and how additive manufacturing is quietly rewriting the economics of making complex hardware.
For anyone who builds precision parts for aerospace and defense, the details matter.
The Warm Line Strategy
Raytheon never fully shut MALD down. Sustainment, assembly, and testing activities continued in Tucson, which means the company can begin delivering new systems within two years of a production contract. In defense terms, that is fast.
Justin Jenia, Raytheon’s VP of Strike Initiatives, put it plainly:
“Every piece of major tooling is in place. We’re not rebuilding a line; we’re re-energizing it.”
That sentence deserves attention. The single hardest thing to recreate in manufacturing is the physical and institutional infrastructure of production. Tooling. Fixtures. Test equipment. The engineers and machinists who know why a process works.
Governments understand this. They sometimes pay extra to keep production lines warm at minimum sustaining rates specifically to preserve the industrial base. When production volume drops, per-unit costs climb sharply because fixed costs get spread across fewer units. Paying to keep a line alive functions as an insurance policy against demand volatility.
The MALD restart shows that policy paying off. Two years to delivery instead of the five-plus years a cold start typically requires.
💡 The lesson extends beyond decoys. Any organization that depends on cast metal parts, printed structures, or specialized fixtures faces the same question: what does it cost to preserve capability, and what does it cost to lose it?
The Tooling Problem Underneath Everything
Jenia’s quote works because tooling is the bottleneck he is celebrating having already solved. For most manufacturers, tooling remains the slowest and most expensive step in producing complex metal components.
Consider investment casting, the process behind turbine blades, rocket engine components, and structural aerospace hardware. Conventional tooling for a complex precision casting can take six to 12 months and cost $500,000. That is a long time to wait for a mold.
Ceramic 3D printing attacks this problem directly. The same analysis found that printing ceramics can eliminate tooling costs for complex castings and reduce lead time for cores and molds by 80 percent. Ceramic tools that once took most of a year now print in a week or less.
This is the technical foundation of what the industry now calls the digital foundry. A CAD file goes in. A ready-to-pour ceramic shell comes out. No wax patterns, no injection dies, no tooling budget consumed before the first part exists.
Companies like Atlanta-based DDM Systems built their entire model on this shift. Their LAMP technology, Large Area Maskless Photopolymerization, prints ceramic molds directly from CAD, eliminating seven of the twelve traditional casting steps. The results show up in real programs. A fighter aircraft servo cover went from CAD to first casting in 39 days, against 100-plus days for the traditional route. An A-10 Thunderbolt II control input arm went from part model to casting in 10 days.
The A-10 example connects directly to the MALD story. Both involve keeping mature Air Force platforms viable when the original supply chains have thinned or disappeared. Tooling-free casting means a part designed decades ago can return to production without anyone rebuilding the original dies.
Additive Manufacturing Moves From Lab to Line
The MALD restart incorporates additive manufacturing for airframes, and Raytheon emphasizes that these printed structures are environmentally qualified. That word choice signals maturity. Qualification means the technology passed the testing regime that governs flight hardware.
The broader numbers confirm the trend. The Pentagon put roughly $800 million into additive manufacturing in fiscal year 2024, a 166 percent increase over the prior year. In FY2026, projects involving 3D printing are tracking toward $3.3 billion. In 2025, the technology had shifted from research programs to urgent, industrial-scale deployment.
The economics driving this shift are concrete:
Speed. Prototypes arrive in weeks instead of years. NASA’s RAMPT program runs dozens of scaled ground tests in the time conventional manufacturing would permit one or two.
Cost. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll held up a Black Hawk external fuel tank fin at AUSA 2025 that the Army reverse-engineered and 3D printed for just over $3,000 — against the vendor’s $14,000 replacement cost. The Army’s version was also 300 percent stronger.
Flexibility. Printed airframes enable rapid mission adaptation. A design change is a file change.
For low-volume, high-complexity defense systems like MALD, these advantages compound. Traditional tooling economics punish small production runs. Additive economics reward them.
What the Modular Design Tells Us
MALD’s architecture reinforces the manufacturing logic. Operators can swap nose sections for mission-specific payloads, including electronic jammers or kinetic warheads. The system integrates onto new aircraft within days and can launch from cargo aircraft as well as fighters.
Modularity and tooling-free manufacturing pull in the same direction. When a platform must accept new payloads and adapt to new missions over decades, the production system behind it needs to change configurations without a six-month tooling cycle for every variant.
This is where digital manufacturing earns its keep. A foundry printing molds directly from CAD builds variant A on Monday and variant B on Tuesday, with no tooling change between them. A 2026 peer-reviewed study from Sungkyunkwan University shows why this design flexibility pays off. Producing 50 designs at 200 parts each forces injection molding into 50 separate molds and around $4 million in tooling, while additive holds cost per part flat across every variant. The same study puts the break-even for identical parts near 10,000 units, so injection molding pulls ahead only on long, unchanging runs. Defense work rarely runs long or unchanging. Low volumes and frequent design changes keep the economics on additive’s side.
The European Line and the Sovereignty Question
Raytheon also plans a potential second MALD manufacturing line in Europe, pending regulatory approval. This reflects growing political pressure among allies for defense industrial sovereignty. Even close partners now want production capacity on their own soil.
Regionalized production raises a practical challenge. Standing up a traditional foundry or tooling shop in a new country takes years. Digital manufacturing compresses that timeline because the capability transfers as equipment and files rather than as decades of accumulated tribal knowledge. DDM Systems’ own pipeline illustrates the model, with Digital Foundry installations planned for Tinker Air Force Base, Robins Air Force Base, and a strategic partnership installation in the UK.
The point-of-need concept extends further. Firestorm Labs’ xCell, an expeditionary mobile factory, 3D prints modular airframes for unmanned systems at the point of need, cutting production timelines, costs, and logistical constraints. Manufacturing capacity is becoming portable.
What This Means for the Industrial Base
Chairman Rogers of the House Armed Services Committee described the state of the defense industrial base bluntly. Companies merged, some atrophied, and skilled talent left the workforce, leaving hundreds of thousands of defense manufacturing jobs unfilled.
The MALD restart offers one answer to that problem: preserve what you have. Warm lines, retained tooling, and experienced workforces let manufacturers surge when demand arrives.
Digital manufacturing offers a complementary answer: reduce what you need to preserve. When molds print from files and airframes print from powder, the barrier to restarting or relocating production drops. The institutional knowledge lives partly in software.
You see the same pattern across the industry. Primes are moving beyond transactional supplier relationships toward deeper industrial partnerships, joint production lines, and coordinated capacity investments. Investment casting itself remains a growth market, estimated at $20.99 billion in 2020 and heading toward $31.07 billion by 2027, and the additive segment within aerospace and defense is growing faster still.
Raytheon’s Tucson restart is one data point. The trend behind it is larger. Defense manufacturing is reorganizing around two principles: keep critical capability warm, and make the rest of it digital. The organizations that do both will deliver in years while their competitors are still cutting tooling.
Continue your research: Explore Aerospace and Defense Casting. Related articles: What MxD’s 2026 Manufacturing Roadmap Reveals About Defense Production and The Navy Just Proved Something Nobody Wanted to Admit About Defense Manufacturing. For production capabilities, see Rapid Precision Castings capability statement. For more detail, read the Solving the Defense Supply Chain Crisis white paper.