US Army looks for its conventional artillery to reach 70 km by 2023

The US Army is looking to achieve its target goal of a 70 km range for conventional artillery by 2023, Colonel Anthony Gibbs from the US Joint Program Executive Office for Armaments and Ammunition confirmed at the online IQPC Future Artillery Conference on 25 May.

Delivered under the army's Long Range Precision Fires (LRPF) modernisation effort, the capability will use a new suite of ammunition currently under development that will include a baseline 155 mm canister projectile that will be a modular system providing fragmentation, sensor-fuzed or cargo munitions. The prototype of this modular round is currently being developed and will be test-fired this summer. The new design is intended to be more flexible and resilient to manufacture than traditional rounds, with certain inspections and tests replaced by modelling, analysis, and process control.

The XM1135ER ammunition will have a multi-component charge system derived from tank ammunition to enable it to cope with the far higher barrel pressures created in the US Army's new Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) system. It will use a modular supercharge propellant system that will also have adapted packaging and stowage to be compatible with auto-loaders. The design will also include a variant of the XM1171/XM1172 Long Range Precision Guidance Kit (PGK-LR): a development of the existing M1156 PGK that has been adapted to the different size fuze well in the new round and which is intended to function in a GPS-denied environment.