U.S. Needs to Refocus on Energetic Materials.

• Author: Fischer, John
• Position: Emerging Technology Horizons

The list of top defense modernization priorities that were cited in the 2018 National Defense Strategy forms the basis of our work at the National Defense Industrial Association's Emerging Technologies Institute.

An updated list of technology priorities, recently released by the office of the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, reasserted the importance of those original emerging technologies and even added a few more topics.

And yet we also know that there are many technical areas that are not explicitly covered in the emerging technology list, but are nonetheless critical to national defense and which will benefit from developments in other emerging fields. One of these is the ongoing research and development of advanced energetic materials.

Energetic materials refer to the broad category of explosives, propellants and pyrotechnics, all essential to the performance of weapon systems. There is an urgent need for more advanced energetic materials to enhance the performance and lethality of modern weapon systems. Despite their importance to much of what the military does, there has been little in the way of practical advancement since the end of World War II. For example, RDX, one of the mainstays of our explosive inventory, was patented in 1898, and entered manufacturing in 1940; another common explosive, HMX, is only slightly more recent, having entered service only a few years later.

As with a number of emerging technologies, peer competitors are moving ahead of the United States in the deployment of advanced energetic materials, often using U.S. technology originally developed here.

For example, China since 2011 has been building weapons with CL-20, an energetic material invented in the United States 35 years ago that produces less visible exhaust, but that we ourselves have not used operationally because of production and environmental challenges.

Even worse, the current U.S. industrial base in energetics manufacturing is outdated and vulnerable, in some cases relying upon hostile foreign sources for critical ingredients. There are fears that the industrial base might not be able to provide the volume of energetic materials needed to replenish weapons in a large-scale conflict.

There is hope on the horizon. Several of the Defense Department's emerging technologies could play a role in developing more effective energetics. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms have shown promise in the pharmaceutical...