Army’s Prized Excalibur Munition May Not Survive Budget Drills

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7/18/2010

The latest chapter of the Army’s smart-artillery projectile reads like the perennial story of so many other military hardware programs.

The XM982 Excalibur was conceived as a revolutionary weapon that would guarantee to kill enemies, with no friendly casualties. The Army spent more than a decade developing Excalibur and in recent years had started to field small quantities of projectiles to units in the field.

In June 2008, Excalibur was named one the Army's 10 Greatest Inventions for 2007. But it now appears to have fallen into that undesirable category of “exquisite weapons” that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is trying to banish from the military’s budgets.

The program so far continues on path toward full production later this year, but it could soon face the chopping block as the Army undergoes a series of program scrubbing exercises — dubbed “capability portfolio reviews” — that Gates directed for all branches of the military.

Excalibur is a particularly juicy target for the budgeteers both for its $100,000 per-round price tag and for the fact that there are other weapons in the Army’s arsenal that can achieve comparable “precision effects,” said Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli.

When first hearing about the capabilities of Excalibur, “It sounds fantastic … [until] you see the cost,” Chiarelli said in a speech last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C.

Even if the price could be slashed to $47,000 per round, as the program office estimated with a larger production run in mind, it still is questionable whether the Army can justify buying such a pricey weapon, Chiarelli said.

To be sure, Excalibur is the most accurate artillery projectile in the Army's inventory, but it is not clear why the service really needs it, he noted. It can hit targets to within 10 meters from ranges of about 40 kilometers. By comparison, the accuracy of conventional artillery shells is about 50 meters.

Chiarelli said the Army has not yet made a convincing case for why it needs such high precision when other weapons — owned by the Army, Navy and Air Force — are available, and cost less.

A possible alterative to Excalibur is a GPS precision guidance kit that can be strapped on a $600 dumb projectile, Chiarelli said. “PGK doesn’t quite have the same accuracy. But quite frankly, it’s cheaper.”

Now comes word that the Excalibur program also is under high-level Pentagon scrutiny because it is expected to incur the dreaded “Nunn-McCurdy breach” that is triggered when a system ends up costing significantly more than originally estimated.

The Nunn-McCurdy legislation that Congress passed in 1982 was designed to put the kibosh on wasteful defense programs. It required that any program whose costs exceeded 15 percent of its original estimate had to be “certified” by the defense secretary, or else be terminated.

According to the industry publication, “Inside the Army,” a May 12 memorandum by Army Undersecretary Joseph Westphal ordered the Excalibur program officer to draft a report in preparation for a Nunn-McCurdy breach and for the subsequent reviews that would be required to certify the program and save it from termination.

The memo indicated that procurement would be slashed from 30,000 to 6,264 projectiles, and that the decision to buy fewer rounds would drive the unit cost from $47,000 to $99,000 per projectile.

The program already had been scheduled for an August review so it could begin full-rate production in the coming months.

Westphal’s memo also explained that reductions in Excalibur orders were the result of a senior-level Army study that concluded that the weapons were not in high demand in combat today. It noted that only 142 projectiles had been fired since 2007 in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the “Inside the Army” report.

Then-program manager for combat ammunition systems Army Col. Nathaniel Sledge Jr. told National Defense in 2004 that Excalibur was an important program for the Army because the future of field artillery depended on its ability to incorporate smart weapons into the arsenal.

“Artillery and mortars are more useful to the ground troops than close-air support,” said Sledge in 2004. Excalibur would give the Army accuracy comparable to the smart bombs used by the Air Force and the Navy. The original plans called for the Army to acquire 61,483 projectiles. Officials said in 2004 that they had projected the Excalibur would cost $29,000 each, once in production.

Sledge, who is now retired, said the current situation is not surprising considering several issues that have undermined the program.

“Excalibur is a seminal achievement for fires weaponry, but it has experienced challenges competing with better marketed, more expensive, and sexier weapons,” he said. One problem has been the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command’s “failure to develop and disseminate (market) credible doctrine for use of the weapon,” Sledge said in an interview. “If the user's representative doesn't sell a new weapon and its capabilities to the combatant commands, they are not likely to use it."

Another hurdle for Excalibur has been the inability of the program office to manage costs, Sledge said. “The PM office could never get [prime contractor] Raytheon to lower the unit price. With past conflicts unresolved, the PM office appears more interested in the artillery version of JDAM, the precision guidance kit (PGK), which is much cheaper for nearly similar accuracy and precision.”

Even if Excalibur had been “marketed properly,” he said, it could be that “users didn't use the weapon more because of its late introduction into the wars, local operational restrictions on its use, and/or the availability and proximity of Excalibur-trained field artillery units.”

Contractor overhead expenses were a major contributor to rising Excalibur costs, said Sledge. “The economics don't help. The quantities and margins just aren't there with Excalibur. Now that there is a unit cost impasse, contractors may be moving on to similar but more profitable opportunities such as the Navy's 5-inch and 155mm projectiles.”

In September 2008, the Army decided to bring in another contractor, Alliant Techsystems, to design another version of Excalibur. A Raytheon spokesman referred all questions related to Excalibur to the Army.

The current troubles also speak to a larger dilemma about what weapons the Defense Department should be buying for today’s and future wars.

“Excalibur cannot compete with better marketed weapons,” said Sledge. “Some in the Army have never been comfortable with Picatinny Arsenal successfully developing a missile-like artillery shell.”

The thinking is that “if it comes out of a gun it is not as modern and not as safe as alternatives,” Sledge said. Weapons such as JDAMs and Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems have “always been more popular with commanders, and with defense contractors because of the higher profit margins,” he said.

As to the Nunn-McCurdy breach, it may not turn out as badly as it looks. Hardly any programs that have reached such status are ever canceled, said David Berteau, a defense acquisitions expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There was this idea that somehow if you had to certify a program that is in deep trouble, that it was going to produce more kills,” Berteau said. “It hasn’t done so. Getting a certification is much easier than killing a program.”

Posted at 8:14 AM by Sandra Erwin | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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7/18/2010

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