The Navy wants next-generation munitions, so it’s spending millions on innovation hubs

Replenishing munitions stockpiles doesn’t end with simply producing more of them. There are persistent challenges with mixing, manufacturing, integrating and discovering new energetic materials—the chemical compounds that make up explosives, propellants, and munitions. On Thursday, the Navy broke ground on a new facility to help. 

The Maryland Energetics Innovation Hub is meant to furnish lab space where companies can test new tech, such as high-performance computers to run simulations. It is under construction an hour or so from the Pentagon by the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Md., and the American Center for Manufacturing & Innovation, or ACMI. 

“This initiative ensures that NSWC Indian Head Division remains at the forefront of energetics innovation, scale-up, and production,” Capt. Stephen Duba, the warfare center’s commanding officer, said in a statement. “By bringing together government and industry partners in a collaborative environment, we can accelerate the development and fielding of critical capabilities that strengthen the Navy’s arsenal and the larger munitions industrial base.”

The Navy awarded ACMI $50 million to bring companies working in munitions and energetics closer to the service’s technical expertise. The group aims to raise another $150 million for the project.

The MEIH will focus on eight technical areas: developing new energetics materials, high-performance computing; non-destructive test and evaluation; integration with drones or unmanned systems; automating energetic processing and assembly; creating new manufacturing processes for propulsion systems and warheads; analyzing energetics obsolescence, and producing high-precision, high-throughput non-energetic components.

The plan is to finish the first two buildings of the larger facility within nine months, John Burer, ACMI’s founder, told Defense One. 

The White House and Pentagon have made production of munitions—both exquisite and expendable—a clear priority for the near future. Earlier this year, the Pentagon stood up the Congressionally-mandated Joint Energetics Transition Office, which is charged with developing strategies for investment in and implementation of new and legacy materials needed for weapons and propulsion systems.  

Defense tech hubs have already sprouted around the country, in Austin, Texas; Rhode Island’s Unity Park and Quonset Point; and the Louisiana coastline. MxD, a Pentagon manufacturing partner, has a 22,000-square-foot hub in Chicago. 

The Maryland hub is the second facility the Navy and ACMI have embarked on. The first was the National Security Industrial Hub near NSWC’s installation in Crane, Indiana, which is focused on munitions and energetics. The Pentagon is spending $75 million to help erect the Indiana campus, which broke ground earlier this year.

The Maryland and Indiana facilities both are using private capital for “industrial facility build outs,” Burer said. 

“The objective of the Maryland Energetics Innovation Hub is around process development and technology development around energetics, which would be developed there, but then scale and be relevant in many other places across the United States—qualifying new second sources of supply, which is a special thing that they have the ability to do at the nation’s only government-owned, government-operated arsenal for the Navy, at Indian Head,” he said. 

That munitions campus in Indiana is around 1,100 acres, while the Maryland hub would be a fraction of that. 

“What makes this campus special is the ability to facilitate private-public partnerships between the tenants and Indian Head to make use of specialist capabilities that they have behind the fence,” such as mixing energetic materials, Burer said. “To build a solid rocket motor campus, for example, which is one of the specialties behind the gate at Indian Head, you need many, many hundreds of acres…That’s what scaled production needs. But refining the processes at a pilot scale. It’s smart to do that in a smaller footprint campus, in a collaborative way, which is what they’re aiming to do here.”

The southern Maryland-based hub builds on an ecosystem of energetics companies working in the region, but could foster new growth and partnerships for companies designing military technology, said William Durant, CEO and president of the not-for-profit Energetics Technology Center, which will have space at the MEIH and help connect companies looking to work with the Navy. 

“We want to see and help enable the companies that are coming in—that are best suited to meet any of those eight technical capability areas—[be] successful,” Durant said. 

Over the next year, they plan to have a set of companies and a roadmap to execute solutions in those research and development areas. 

“We want to see, in 16 to 18 months, who are the performers, what that’s going to look like to meet the needs of the Navy…and then there are specific products and things that they’re going to want that are needed today in the warfighter,” Durant said.

 While there’s no fixed number, the aim is to have about ten companies join the hub, whether they take up long-term residence or cycle in and out, he said. 

“Whatever is most important in supporting warfighter success. If that means a company comes in for six months, great! If that means that a company now needs to take up residency for five years, great! And now, does that mean we need to build another facility?”