“Toy Guns” and Rebel Groups: The Proliferation of 3D-Printed Armaments
In December of 2021, a series of images from the ongoing insurgency in Myanmar surfaced on social media. They depicted members of the People’s Defense Force, the armed wing of the National Unity Government which has self-claimed to be the sole legitimate government of Myanmar, carrying a set of bizarre small arms. With the guns’ bulky and brightly colored plastic frames, one might be forgiven for mistaking them for modified imitation firearms in the hands of actors or airsofters. The individuals pictured, however, were real rebels, and the weapons they held, known as the FGC-9, were anything but toys. Rather, the pictures, which saw little circulation outside of a limited number of open-source intelligence pages, marked the first visual evidence of 3D-printed small arms in the hands of a non-state insurgent group.
The use of 3D printing in the manufacturing of light weapons is far from a new development. From crude single-shot handguns that employ nails as firing pins and risk exploding when fired to lower receivers that lack unique identifiers such as serial numbers and require only non-legally controlled parts kit to function, advances in printing technology have allowed for the proliferation of increasingly accessible and sophisticated small arms. The FGC-9, or “F*ck Gun Control – 9mm”, represents the pinnacle achievement in this realm.
A semi-automatic pistol-caliber carbine, the FGC-9 was originally designed by an online-based, decentralized 3D-printed firearms network known as “Deterrence Dispensed.” The group’s leader is known only by their online username: “JSTARK1809”. Though occasionally characterized as a far-right extremist organization or an anarchist political group, Deterrence Dispensed possesses no official ideology other than, in the words of journalist Jake Hanrahan, “unconditional free speech and the absolute freedom for anyone to own a firearm.” The FGC-9 marks the organization’s most ambitious project to date, combining 3D-printed magazines and lower receivers, hand-loaded ammunition, and pieces of hydraulic tubing to form a broadly comparable weapon to commercially available variants in terms of firepower and durability.
The FGC-9 is a logical choice for groups such as the People’s Defense Force. It is reliable, requires ammunition and parts such as triggers and firing pins which are commonly found in the existing small arms arsenal of the People’s Defense Force, and, most importantly, leverages a burgeoning 3D-printing infrastructure within the country. Myanmar has already made extensive use of 3D printers, particularly in its agricultural sector, as a means of overcoming deficiencies in manufacturing brought on as a result of sanctions and isolationism under the military junta. Since 2016, for instance, non-governmental organizations throughout the country have employed 3D printers to produce vital components for farming implements such as sprinklers and solar pumps. Given the accessibility afforded by a design that is widely circulated online, few obstacles exist to simply repurposing this increasingly prevalent technology to produce the FGC-9 in mass quantities and provide groups like the People’s Defense Force a standardized small arm with which to violently engage the military regime.
Improvised armaments have long been a traditional feature of sub-state armed groups. Rebel movements in Southeast Asia, for instance, would craft cannon barrels from wood that was subsequently reinforced with metal or leather bands while the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan grew into a major hub for craft-produced firearms in the late 1800s, manufacturing thousands of British service rifles based on exemplars acquired during ill-fated military expeditions in the British Indian Empire’s North-West Frontier. 21st-century violent non-state actors have moved beyond the purview of hand-crafted light weapons to create makeshift artillery systems that combine homemade rockets with repurposed munitions, armored transports, suicide vehicle-borne explosive devices, and, most recently, improvised aerial strike platforms based on commercial drones. This growing degree of sophistication in improvised weapons has been vital in allowing insurgencies to close the technical gap between them and opposing states, integrating improvised artillery, aerial strikes, and armored vehicles into their schemes of maneuver to create a makeshift form of combined arms combat. In other words, the sub-state armed group of the 21st century is increasingly apt at transitioning from an asymmetric guerilla organization centered on the moral attrition of an adversary to a conventional-esque military force capable of achieving tactical and strategic victories through traditional maneuver warfare.
3D printing has not necessarily been the leading force behind this historic development; however, where this technology has proven its value is in increasing the accessibility of advanced capabilities within the arena of improvised combined arms. Plastic fins, for instance, were commonly found strewn in the fields of Eastern Ukraine, remnants of a 3D-printed assembly that allowed separatist groups to precisely drop widely available munitions such as 40mm grenades from quadcopters serving as platforms for targeted aerial bombardments. In neighboring Syria, an alleged-ISIS attack against the Kafr Hom Internally Displaced Persons Camp made use of a 3D-printed guided munition carrying a grenade-sized warhead. In this sense, the appearance of an entirely 3D-printed firearm such as FGC-9 on the battlefields of Myanmar marks the latest landmark in this evolution, indicative of a future where sub-state armed groups no longer leverage improvised manufacturing or 3D-printing to complement their existing capabilities but, instead, employ this technology to evade safeguards preventing the proliferation of small arms and create arsenals of their own from scratch.
Beyond these technical implications, the use of the FGC-9 by the People’s Defense Force in Myanmar is representative of another trend: the growing nexus between real-world and online sub-state actors through the provision of training, expertise, and advisory support. The exchange of knowledge between violent non-state actors has been commonplace in conflicts throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Al-Qaeda operatives in the early 1990s, for instance, coached Somali militiamen in the use of rocket-propelled grenade launchers to target the tail rotors of low-flying American aircraft, a tactic used to successfully shoot down two Blackhawk helicopters during the infamous 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. Deterrence Dispensed’s FGC-9, however, moves a step beyond this. No longer does this provision of knowledge have to be deliberate; instead, the interconnectedness afforded by encrypted online platforms allows the spread of technical and tactical expertise to transcend traditional boundaries regulating inter-group interactions such as geographic or ideological differences. In this sense, it is possible to envision a future where armed groups as diverse as cartels in Mexico and insurgents in Myanmar are inextricably linked to one another, not by interests or motivations but by information and a shared understanding of how, and with what tools, to fight.
