Commentary
The United States is falling behind China and Russia in a critical element of military technology: bang for the buck in high explosives. The kinetic punch that U.S. explosives deliver per pound is only about 70 percent of what China and Russia get from their “energetics.”
The even more astonishing failure is that the powerful conventional explosive used by our adversaries was invented in the United States with taxpayer money, but then neglected by our military and allowed to be acquired by our adversaries.
A naval scientist in China Lake, California, invented the CL-20 explosive in 1987. CL-20’s power is 1.4 times that of HMX, invented in 1941. The other commonly-used explosive in U.S. ordnance is RDX, invented in 1898….