States procure more conventional ammunition than they use. To avoid depot congestion with obsolete ammunition and to reduce storage costs, they dispose of part of their stockpiles via foreign military sales and increase the use of ammunition for training purposes. Despite these disposal initiatives, a large part of a nation's surplus ammunition stockpile will ultimately require demilitarization—a process by which ammunition is safely dismantled or destroyed while, ideally, its valuable materials are recovered.

In many countries, excess stockpiles of obsolete or unserviceable munitions have reached a level requiring demilitarization on an industrial scale, often in a race against time as the ammunition tends to become unsafe with age. Since states rarely have the capacity to demilitarize the surplus ammunition stockpiles of their collective security forces, they often turn to the demilitarization industry.

Policy-makers and programmers tend to be poorly informed about the demilitarization industry's markets, challenges, and techniques, for several reasons. Data pertaining to ammunition demilitarization is just as sensitive as ammunition design and procurement information. Hence, policy-relevant information is rarely distributed publicly and resides predominantly within individual ministries of defence (MoDs), their contractors, and some international bodies such as NATO ammunition working groups. Furthermore, contractors fear that discussing their activities and capacities publicly may put them at a commercial disadvantage. Finally, academia has not traditionally covered this activity.