Advanced Munitions

Executive summary

Europe cannot build its way out of the ammunition shortage on tonnage alone. Keep building, buy every hour of spare qualified capacity that exists now - and take the routes that break the feedstock bottleneck seriously, because they are the only ones that change the ceiling rather than the rate.

The charge is the narrowest stage in the chain. Europe has forty-two sites that can fill a 155 mm shell and is adding more. It does not have the propellant to load them or, on the current chemistry, a secure way to get it. The finding is arithmetic, not opinion.

The tonnage answer will not arrive in time. The companies best able to deliver it are holding spending flat while their order books grow - an industry that will not build ahead of a signed order, which is a different problem needing a different answer.

Insensitive munitions take market share as new lines qualify - not by replacing the depot. On present behaviour that puts the changeover in the early 2030s, but the timetable is administrative, not physical: a government that wanted it sooner could have it.

A composite charge is the only published way out of Europe’s cotton dependency. European propellant runs on nitrocellulose, and nitrocellulose runs on cotton linters a strategic competitor controls. A nitramine-in-polymer charge removes that link entirely - swapping it for an exposure Europe can actually do something about.

Companion volume - Annexes & Source Register

Annexes A to G and the full numbered source register, so every superscript in the paper resolves to an entry: the insensitive-munitions instruments clause by clause, the range ladder data, the chemistry and cost arithmetic, the charge-module installed base, and the assumption register.