The fiscal 2024 defense authorization conference report establishes a Joint Energetics Transition Center under DoD acquisition chief William LaPlante.
The center is to develop “an energetic materials strategic plan and investment strategy to guide investments in both new and legacy energetic materials and technologies across the entire supply chain for the total life cycle of energetic materials, including raw materials, ingredients, propellants, pyrotechnics, and explosives for munitions, weapons, and propulsion systems,” according to Section 241 of the conference report.
The latter also provides that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ensure that munitions’ analyses of alternatives consider lethality before the issuance of capability development documents for buying new munitions or modifying existing ones.
“The U.S. military has long ignored the essential role of energetic materials in the lethality of its weapons systems and has instead focused on greater precision to achieve desired effects against targets in low-intensity forward environments,” said an Energetics Technology Center (ETC) study from June 2021. “Propellants and explosives developed nearly a century ago continue to serve as the mainstays of U.S. systems, and were sufficient as long as U.S. forces enjoyed significant advantages in precision and delivery from forward-deployed platforms. But the strategic context has changed. Competitors operate systems capable of denying U.S. forces the access necessary for their current weapons. U.S. forces require the additional margin in range and destructive effect that improved energetics can provide.”
Nearly all energetics used by U.S. military forces date back at least 80 years, according to ETC. They include the octogen (HMX) explosive invented in 1941 and the hexogen/cyclonite explosive (RDX) invented in 1898 and used by Britain to destroy thick-hulled German U-boats in World War II.
The Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Kingsport, Tenn., synthesizes the RDX, HMX, and IMX explosives used in many DoD munitions.
This week, the U.S. Army awarded BAE Systems a competitive $8.8 billion contract to continue managing operations of the Holston Army Ammunition Plant for the next decade (Defense Daily, Dec. 13).
Section 243 of the fiscal 2024 defense authorization report establishes a pilot project to evaluate the cost, schedule, and lethality of the CL-20 compound as the main warhead or propellant fill for three weapons.
ETC has said that CL-20 has a 40 percent increase over U.S. HMX-based explosives in penetration depth.
While Northrop Grumman [NOC] has annually produced 10,000 to 20,000 pounds of CL-20 in Promontory, Utah, the company may be able to scale up production significantly, especially if costs dropped, including through economic order quantities.
With funding from an Office of Naval Research effort to find new energetics to improve explosive and propellant performance, a Navy research chemist, the late Arnold T. Nielsen, first synthesized CL-20–China Lake compound number 20–at Naval Air Weapons Center (NAWC) China Lake, Calif., in 1987.
ETC has said that China is using CL-20 in its weapons and has far surpassed the U.S. in advanced energetics.
More explosive power per pound also means CL-20 lends greater range to munitions, but creating CL-20 is more challenging than synthesizing HMX, and thus industry would need an order stream of hundreds of thousands of pounds or several million pounds of CL-20-based propellants in order to ramp up/accelerate CL=20 production, ETC said.
ETC in Indian Head, Md., has been examining which of a half dozen munitions, among them the Lockheed Martin [LMT] AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) and AGM-158B Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range (JASSM-ER), would be the best candidates to test and possibly outfit with the CL-20 explosive (Defense Daily, June 13).
The military has thus far used CL-20 in limited instances, including in the AeroVironment Switchblade 300 “kamikaze” drone, which DoD has supplied to Ukraine, and in initiator devices to trigger energetic materials—explosives, propellants and pyrotechnics.