The American Center for Manufacturing & Innovation (ACMI) last week said it will establish a campus in Indiana devoted to technologies for munitions as part of a Defense Department program to strengthen the supply chain for munitions.
The Munitions Campus-Indiana will include a research and development (R&D) facility near Indianapolis and other sites, including properties adjacent to Crane Army Ammunition Activity and Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane. The facilities near crane will focus on scaling production.
The R&D center is expected to open in early 2026. The new campus will also include participation by Purdue Univ.’s Energetics Research Center.
The campus is the first for munitions under a public-private partnership with the DoD, which awarded ACMI $75 million last fall for the Munitions Campus. The campus will support companies by providing resources for non-destructive testing, explosives storage and transportation, prototype testing, and munitions manufacturing tools, the Texas-based company said last September following receipt of the award from the DoD’s industrial base resilience office.
Munitions-related technologies include materials sciences, finished goods assembly, energetic materials manufacturing, non-energetic chemicals production and their supply chains.
“This program is an important pathfinder effort to develop a new public-private partnership model, stimulating private investment even in a market such as munitions, where DoD has traditionally shouldered nearly the entire cost burden,” Anthony Di Stasio, director of DoD’s Manufacturing Capability Expansion and Investment Prioritization Directorate, said in a statement. “This approach will stretch the taxpayer dollar much further, enabling us to accelerate growth of the domestic industrial base, maintaining America’s technological and industrial edge.”
In addition to the DoD award last fall, ACMI estimates that $300 million in private capital will be put toward developing infrastructure.
Earlier in February, ADMI said it received a $15 million contract extension from DoD to expand the Critical Chemical Pilot Program, which is leveraging substantial private investment to strengthen the defense industrial base (Defense Daily
, Feb. 8). The pilot effort seeks commercial market solutions for inert chemicals that can be used in energetics for munitions.