Conventional Munitions

Mission — Explosives Safety and Weapons Assessment source

Reduce risk introduced by new weapons systems and technologies that have potential to interfere with ordnance safety and Fleet operations. Emerging radars for all classes of ships introduce a heightened electromagnetic environment (EME) with the likelihood of exceeding the maximum allowable environment (MAE) currently in place. The MAE provides the safety barrier in identifying the electrostatic safety threshold for ordnance items. Exceeding MAE introduces increased risk of inadvertent detonation of electrically primed explosives.

Mission — Insensitive Munitions Adv. Development source

Energetic materials producibility is demonstrated to assure national capability to produce and load munitions systems. The program leverages are being closely coordinated with other military departments, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and allied countries to eliminate redundant efforts and maximize efficiency. A joint service IM requirement has been developed and through the IM strategic planning process, all Program Executive Offices (PEO) are implementing IM in their priority munitions. IM are identified as a Department of Defense (DoD) critical technology requirement and considered as part of a weapon design. The IMAD program matures the technology developed by a variety of Science and Technology (S&T) sources for program management integration into weapons systems to meet the IM technical deficiencies documented in the PEO IM Strategic Plans. IMAD provides the link between S&T programs and the program managers (PM) by optimizing IM technologies to meet Navy requirements. IMAD offers risk mitigation for the PMs in terms of IM technical knowledge, expertise and manpower with the state of the art expertise across IM products. Each technology area is divided into subtasks addressing specific munition and munition class IM deficiencies.

Mission — Conventional Munitions source

Most Navy munitions react violently when exposed to unplanned stimuli such as fire, shock, and bullet or fragment impact, thus presenting a great hazard to ships, aircraft, and personnel. The Insensitive Munitions Advanced Development (IMAD) program will provide, validate, and transition technology to all new weapon developments and priority weapon systems and enable production of munitions insensitive to these stimuli with no reduction in combat performance. Insensitive Munitions (IM) is the Navy's focused effort on propellants, propulsion units, explosives, warheads, fuses, and pyrotechnics to reduce the severity of cook-off and bullet/fragment impact reactions, minimizing the probability for sympathetic detonation, both in normal storage and in use, increasing ship and platform survivability and satisfying performance and readiness requirements.

Accomplishments & Planned Programs (3)