AUSA 2024 — As the US Army moves out on its quest to revamp its self-propelled howitzer plans, today it announced the five companies picked to demo their existing platforms on a roadshow of sorts.
That handful of companies includes Rheinmetall, BAE Systems, Hanwha, General Dynamics and Elbit Systems, with the service divvying up $4 million among the bunch to cover other transaction agreements. The plan now is to visit those companies to see what platform capabilities they have today that can potentially fill the gap created when the Army halted Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) platform work. That prototype added a 30-foot, 58-caliber gun tube to BAE Systems’ Paladin M109A7 self-propelled howitzer to launch 155-mm rounds out to 70km, an increase from the current max range of up to 30km.
“We want industry to tell us what the optimal ways of achieving something like this,” Brig. Gen. Rory Crooks, the director of the Army’s long-range precision fires cross functional team, told reporters today. While the service is open to seeing a mix of platforms and munitions, it ultimately wants a platform that can fire a mix of new munitions still under development and will need a resupply vehicle for the weapon.
Following that market research phase, the service will decide if there are viable options on the market today or if it will need to embark on a new development effort, Army acquisition head Doug Bush recently told Breaking Defense.
“Hopefully some time next year [the Army will know] whether we can go straight to procuring those things, or if we need to do development,” Bush added.
“We’ve accounted for options in the 2026 [budget plans] and then this information would all be able to feed into [the program objective memorandum for] 2027 because if we were to go into procurement … you’d have to fund it,” he later added.
And if the decision is made to go into procurement, the service will open up the competition to any vendor interested in competing, said Col. Freeman Bonnette, a program manager with the Program Executive Office for Ground Combat Systems.
News of the deals came during this week’s Association of the US Army conference in Washington, DC, with many of the selected vendors on the show floor talking artillery.
South Korea’s Hanwha, for example, is showcasing its K9A2 Thunder with plans to demo the K9A1 variant for the Army, while BAE Systems told Breaking Defense it will show off Archer — a Swedish self-propelled howitzer system. Jim Miller, BAE’s vice president of business development for combat mission systems, said the company also plans to show the service an upgunned Paladin as part of a separate line of effort to upgrade the artillery platform.
PHOTOS: AUSA 2024
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