Testing Military-Grade Adhesive in Extreme Loading Conditions

Military performance requirements for adhesives have been traditionally derived to fulfill niche defense needs in harsh operational environments with little consideration for dual-use commercial potential.

U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen, MD

The term “military-grade” can have a variety of meanings that are perspective dependent. In 2014, Ford Motor Company emphasized the term heavily in advertising campaigns to garner consumer acceptance for the transition from steel to aluminum in the body of their flagship F150 model. As cited by Ford, “Engineers selected these high-strength, military-grade aluminum alloys because of the metals' unique ability to withstand tough customer demands.” From this point-of-view, military-grade implies superior performance. However, the bureaucratic and logistical barriers required for certification to military-grade acceptance levels per DoD performance requirements can also be perceived as impediments to innovation and the transition of fundamental science into tangible product. This is in-part due to the legacy age of many DoD performance standards dating to the 1950s and 1960s when the US military peaked in technology market share and was responsible for approximately two-thirds of domestic research and development (R&D) and one-third of global R&D.

In 2023 the commercial private sector provides the overriding funding stream for technology development for primarily non-military applications. Since the “golden age” of DoD-derived performance specifications the interactive roles between requirements and innovation are now understood to be dependent on their timings to product life cycle, which is typically ignored universally across the materials domain. Traditional DoD adhesive specifications are measures of late life cycle quality assurance for low-risk bonding applications with long-term historical usage and well-understood design allowables.