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DARPA program manager outlines tunable energetics, on-site nitric acid and expeditionary power
Summary
In a DARPA podcast, DSO program manager Dr. Keith Whitener described SIRENE, a program to make existing munitions safer to transport yet tunable in yield; HNO3, which aims to make nitric acid from air and water at the point of need; and Excursion/Expeditions, efforts to generate fuel-like energy on the battlefield.
Dr. Keith Whitener, a program manager in the Defense Sciences Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), described several projects that aim to shift how the U.S. military sources and uses energetic materials and power in contested environments.
Whitener said SIRENE (Switchable Reactives and Energetics) is not designed to create new explosives but to give existing munitions a new capability: remain highly desensitized for most of their lifecycle, then be switched to higher yield when required. "We don't wanna make new explosives," he said. "We wanna take the explosives we have and imbue a new capability in them." He credited a Los Alamos National Laboratory performer with an advance in structuring materials so shock waves can be dissipated or sustained depending on material fill and geometry.
The program explores whether structuring materials with air gaps or filling them with liquids can change how shock waves propagate, potentially enabling a tunable response: "You can kind of half fill it and you'll get half the explosion, quarter fill it, and quarter the explosion," Whitener said, describing early experimental indications.
Whitener also described HNO3, the High Efficiency Nitrogen Oxygenation program, which explores producing nitric acid from air and water at the point of need. He emphasized the chemical's dual importance: "About 80% of the nitric acid that we use right now goes into making fertilizer," he said, and "about 50% of the global food supply uses some sort of nitrate fertilizer." He added that nitric acid is also "a really good oxidizer" used in propellants and energetics, and said existing nitric acid production relies on large, centralized facilities that depend on ammonia feedstocks.
On logistics and battlefield sustainment, Whitener framed point-of-need production as a way to reduce risk to supply lines. "The U.S. military consumes a tremendous amount of energy, roughly 10,000,000 gallons of fuel per day," he said, noting that convoys are frequent targets in recent conflicts and that producing energy or key chemicals nearer the front could reduce those vulnerabilities.
To address that problem, Whitener described Excursion (Expeditionary Carbon Utilization for Energy Resilience and Stabilization) and a follow-on portfolio called Expeditions that aims to create deployable systems with fuel-like energy density and battery-like flexibility. "Let's make a battery with the energy density of fuel, but with all the sort of operational flexibility of batteries," he said, explaining the programs' goals to balance energy capacity and power output for different operational needs.
Whitener framed these efforts as tackling hard scientific and engineering trade-offs: breaking strong atmospheric nitrogen bonds for HNO3, controlling shock propagation for tunable energetics, and compressing energy density and rechargeability in a single platform. He also briefly linked the creative skills behind acronym-making and problem solving to a personal anecdote about appearing on Jeopardy!, noting that wordplay helped in naming programs.
The episode does not report policy actions, procurement decisions, budgets or timelines; Whitener discussed technical goals, early experimental findings and program objectives. For more detail about these programs and related research, the podcast episode directs listeners to DARPA's show notes and the agency website.
