With the United States rushing to refill its stocks of critical munitions, expand its munitions industrial base, and field large volumes of new weapons, the energetic materials contained within these munitions are an increasingly crucial part of alleviating one of the nation’s most serious defense shortfalls. By providing greater explosive effects or powering weapons that fly farther or faster, novel explosives and propellants promise to increase the lethality of U.S. munitions and, potentially, reduce the number of weapons required to conduct offensive and defensive military operations. Constructing additional facilities to produce these new compounds would also expand a critical bottleneck within the U.S. munitions industrial base.
Despite these potential gains, most American weapons remain reliant on energetics developed decades ago. Newer formulas with improved performance characteristics, such as CL-20, were created by American researchers during the Cold War, but failed to make their way into large-scale production for the warheads and motors of U.S. munitions. By contrast, the U.S. military’s precision-guided munitions feature cutting-edge sensor, networking, and signature-reduction technologies to deliver extreme accuracy against the world’s most challenging targets.
Why has there been comparatively little improvement in the realm of explosives, and how could advances in this area provide the U.S. military tactical, operational, or even strategic advantages in future conflict? Most importantly, what must be done to turn the promises of new energetic materials like CL-20 into military reality?
This report explores these questions in four parts. First, it recounts the history of RDX during World War II to draw several enduring lessons for overcoming barriers that, as early as the 1920s, inhibited the adoption of novel energetics by the U.S. military. RDX played a vital role in maximizing U.S. and allied combat power during the war, and the story of its fielding shows that not only has the U.S. military resisted new energetics in the past, but that persistent advocacy, new manufacturing methods, and the compound’s operational use in special-purpose munitions were all key to encouraging its eventual widespread use.