Modern warfare puts forward new requirements for weapon equipments, such as long-distance delivery, precision strike, high-efficiency damage and strong survivability, hence traditional energetic materials face unprecedented challenges. This paper reviewed the main bottlenecks in the development of CHNO energetic materials, energy and sensitivity, stability contradictions, and energy storage-release limit. The research and development trends in cage compounds, nitrogen compounds, and polymeric nitrogen, and metal hydrogen at home and abroad were briefly introduced. Based on these ideas, new strategies were proposed to design energetic materials by multi-scale methods, and further expand the molecular energy storage system according to the explosion features of explosives and the control of reaction rate. Some potential design approchs to energy storage based on atomic combination, molecular combination and micro/nano-structure composites are recommended to carry out extensive and profound researchs in energetic material fields.