Why you should tick not off the Navy

The Navy's HDRM material makes this a double whammy.

News: Revolutionary Material Dramatically Increases Explosive Force of Weapons - Office of Naval Research

The Navy has developed a material with the strength of aluminum and the density of mild steel. That means that the Navy can use this material, called High-Density Reactive Material (HDRM), instead of steel to encase high explosive for cannon-launched projectiles or missiles.

So what, you say? Well, HDRM is itself explosive. That means that an HDRM-encased warhead of an anti-aircraft missile will not only shred an enemy aircraft with HDRM fragments, penetrating the airframe just as steel fragments would, the HDRM fragments will blow up once they've penetrated into the plane.

This capability begs the question:  - could you make an entire warhead out of HDRM? Say you want to penetrate the earth deeply to strike an Taliban cave in Afghanistan. Right now we have to use a specially-designed penetrating case to plummet through the earth to reach the cave, where the explosive within then explodes.

The problem is that the casing, to stay intact during the penetration, consumes a huge percentage of the bomb's or missile's weight. That means the explosive charge is relatively small. But what if you don't need to stuff the casing with TNT because the casing is TNT, that is, TNT equivalent?

HDRM won't displace high explosive fillings in large numbers because TNT or Composition B, two of the most common explosive fillers, are so cheap to make and are very powerful. I doubt HDRM is very cheap! But it seems that there would be special uses where the whole warhead could be HDRM that would be superior to conventional explosives.