There is no looming shortage of manufacturing workers in the United States: that’s a misconception. Rather, there’s a shortage that’s already entirely present, one which increasingly threatens to turn into a crisis unless the relevant stakeholders rapidly unify to take drastic, broad-sweeping action.

What the U.S. needs is an Operation Warp Speed (OWS) for manufacturing, and additive manufacturing (AM) and other complementary and alternative digital manufacturing technologies need to be at the center of such an initiative. OWS was a smashing success, which has since led many thinkers to propose using OWS as a model for solving similarly intractable problems on an accelerated timeline.

For those who don’t recall, OWS was the U.S. government-led effort, executed in partnership with private industry, which led to the creation of the COVID-19 vaccine. All in all, it involved eight major pharmaceutical manufacturers and received around $18 billion in public funding.

Image courtesy of Government Accountability Office (GAO)

I’m not interested as much in the specific details as I am in the symbol that the program represents, of what can be accomplished when a problem is clearly defined and a whole-of-society approach is directed towards solving that problem. Revitalizing the U.S. manufacturing labor force requires precisely that same type and level of action.

As of June 2025, according to one estimate, the U.S. has over 400,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs, and other sources paint an even bleaker picture. Meanwhile, U.S. manufacturing activity shrank for the ninth straight month in November. Rejuvenating the American manufacturing landscape is one of the principal stated aims behind the Trump administration’s attempts to impose a new tariff regime on the rest of the planet. Whatever the long-term outcome may turn out to be, tariffs have only made the job more difficult thus far, and the Supreme Court may very well end up squashing the administration’s pursuits in any case.

That’s not to say that certain tariff increases are unwarranted, but even if the courts end up validating what’s happened so far, or if the administration figures out other pathways towards achieving its goals, tariffs can never be enough, on their own. There aren’t many things that governments do better than private industry. But there are certain tasks that governments are uniquely suited to perform, like leading the way on developing frameworks to solve society-wide problems. All the many difficulties that fall under the category of reshoring constitute one such problem.

Governments are also uniquely adept at workforce development. You might not think so, given the extent to which so many individuals with large platforms seem to malign federal workers these days. But even if you leave aside every other area of the government, if we can acknowledge that service members in the U.S. military are, among other things, federal workers, then it would seem quite unreasonable to make the blanket statement that the U.S. federal government is bad at training workers.

Thus, the U.S. federal government is qualified to lead the charge in solving the manufacturing labor shortage, and is even qualified to directly contribute to solving the problem in terms of its workforce training capabilities. Of course, as with OWS, such a program can only succeed if the government brings private corporate partners into the fold.

The EOS Additive Minds Academy North American headquarters. Image courtesy of EOS.

The AM industry is perfectly positioned to deliver to the government what it needs from the private sector. As I’ve documented many times over the last few years, AM companies have repeatedly formed partnerships with government organizations — chief among them, branches and agencies of the armed services — to advance workforce development objectives. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like EOS and Nikon SLM Solutions have created paths to train new workers specifically for Maritime Industrial Base (MIB) suppliers. AM users, such as Ursa Major, have also partnered with state-level agencies, in addition to the federal government, to cultivate new manufacturing jobs.

Rear Admiral Scott Pappano, US Navy PEO Strategic Submarines, meets and greets ATDM students in Danville, VA. Image courtesy of ATDM.

In parallel, the military branches themselves, especially the U.S. Navy, have established centers such as the Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing (ATDM) program in Danville, Virginia. ATDM trained its thousandth worker earlier this year and is in the process of ramping up to a rate of 1,000 new manufacturing workers trained annually. The program focuses on a range of digital manufacturing technologies, including AM.

Staff Sgt. First Class Gregory Mannen instructs students on the components of the RQ-28A Sky Ranger system kit during a Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems course at the 249th Regional Training Institute, Rees Training Center, Oregon, Sept. 4, 2025. Image courtesy of U.S. Army National Guard/Maj. W. Chris Clyne, Oregon National Guard Public Affairs.

Inside the armed forces, the U.S. Army has developed a curriculum for drone training exercises, with 3D printing as a centerpiece. In this context, AM’s ability to serve as a foundation for constructing a reproducible training curriculum is one of the main advantages that gives it an edge over conventional manufacturing processes. Beyond defense, AM has shown great promise as an enabling technology for training first-responder medical workers. An initiative that leverages AM to rapidly accelerate manufacturing workforce development could also address the need to accelerate training in multiple other vocational fields.

I think that a holistic approach along those lines would be required in order for an OWS for manufacturing to succeed. Above all, here, stakeholders would need to take into consideration the nuts and bolts of the overall labor shortage: what are the positions amongst the half-a-million unfilled jobs that are hardest to fill?

A welder shortage, for instance, seems to be one of the primary contributors to the workforce gap: one source claims that the U.S. needs to train 80,000 welders a year by the end of the decade. In addition to all the AM processes, like WAAM, which are explicitly just subcategories within welding, AM has often been described as a form of welding.

In that vein, decision-makers from the public and private sectors need to formulate a consensus estimate regarding how many of the unfilled welding jobs could reasonably be filled by training workers in AM and other relevant technologies. If workers are trained and companies still can’t afford the new equipment, the public sector should provide funding and/or tax incentives to support new hiring. The same approach can be applied to all areas where digital manufacturing can make a meaningful dent in compressing the path that stands between an untrained worker and a skilled manufacturing role.

It says a lot about just how many complexities are layered into this problem that I haven’t even gotten to AI yet. Federal Reserve Chief Jerome Powell is one of the many voices that have confirmed that AI has already changed the landscape for prospective workers and seems to present an obstacle for recently-graduated college-educated applicants, in particular. In an interview I did back in September with Nick Pearce, founder of the recruitment firm Alexander Daniels Global, Pearce emphasized that AI already looks poised to make college seem financially unviable, sooner rather than later, for all but a handful of professions. When structural issues like these arise as a result of new technologies, it is the government’s responsibility to help alleviate the fallout.

In May 2020, OWS set the goal of producing 300 million vaccines by January 2021. It fell well short of that specific goal, but the fact that a vaccine was produced within that timeframe, at all, in tens of millions of doses, is a miracle of human organizing capacity. An OWS for manufacturing should set a similarly simple, ambitious goal: for example, the U.S. could set out to train 100,000 new manufacturing workers within 12 months.

It doesn’t matter if Americans fall well short of the goal — in all likelihood, they will — because even meeting, say, 20 percent of the goal (which seems to be around what OWS achieved) means that Americans will have created a model for training 20,000 manufacturing workers in a year. What’s critical is for that to be treated as a starting point, not as a final result. The original OWS concluded once it had stimulated the mass production of effective vaccines. The mass production of new U.S. manufacturing workers requires a much longer timeline.

Featured image courtesy of Marshall Advanced Manufacturing Center