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MUNITIONS
June 2007
Skeptics Watch Cannon Progress Closely
By Stew Magnuson
 The Defense Department civilian leadership cancelled the mobile artillery Crusader platform five years, ago, but the concept lives on in the Future Combat Systems non-line-of-sight cannon.
The cannon, currently weighing 27 tons, will be the first large piece of FCS equipment to be delivered to a brigade for evaluation.
The program will require the integration of the turret, cannon, and the hands-free loading system onto the common chassis by May 2008. The preliminary design review for the FCS program comes about a year later. The Army characterizes that evaluation as a make-or-break milestone.
For the time being, the cannon, and the similar non-line-of-sight mortar, are on schedule, program managers insist. Both have recently undergone a series of test firings.
Mark Signorelli, NLOS-C program manager at lead contractor BAE Systems, said bits and pieces of Navy weapon systems the contractor has worked on and the cancelled Crusader artillery system have been integrated into the cannon.
“What we’ve been able to do is take some very basic concepts and really mature them by making them lighter weight, and more reliable,” he told National Defense. “It’s really an evolution of technology we already had.”
The Army sunk $2 billion into the Crusader until its cancellation in 2002. Defense Department leadership at the time, including the since departed secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, said the Army would still require a mobile, all-weather, precise weapon capable of striking multiple targets.
While never dubbed Crusader II, the NLOS-cannon was the next mobile artillery piece in the pipeline.
“It’s 24/7, day-night, all weather,” Signorelli said. “The kind of things you really can’t replace with an aircraft … Whether the Air Force likes to admit it or not, weather impacts their ability to fly.”
The cannon and the mortar will need to move as rapidly as tanks and armored personnel carriers. That requires improved speed, less weight and better survivability.
In the Crusader, the ammunition handling equipment weighed as much as the ammunition, Signorelli said.
Improvements in carbon fiber materials, and the smaller, lighter power and electrical systems helped to cut the weight of the ammo loader in half.
The cannon will have a two-man crew, a marked improvement from the five-man crew on the Paladin, the 1960s era mobile artillery platform still in use today.
“Artillery men today are primarily associated with picking up bullets, moving them around, putting them in the breach. These men are fighting from the vehicle,” Signorelli said.
The driver can execute the mission with two button pushes. “Once you load the ammunition in the vehicle, it’s not touched again.”
The cannon can carry 24 rounds and fire six per minute as opposed to the one round per minute in the Paladin.
The increased rate of fire and computerized synchronization will allow the crew to place four rounds on the same spot simultaneously, he said.
Armoring and weight remain a concern, though. Initial concepts for the cannon called for it to weigh 20 to 24 tons fully loaded for combat. Army officials acknowledge that they will not reach that goal. The cannon’s weight currently stands at 27 tons.
The cannon, mortar and six other FCS manned vehicles sit atop a common chassis.
Since the manned vehicles are intended to serve on the front lines, they will require all the same armor protection of a Bradley fighting vehicle or an Abrams tank.
One of the leading FCS skeptics, the Government Accountability Office, reported in an overview of the program that the vehicles are overweight by seven to nine tons. It cited armor as the main culprit. Current designs can’t guarantee complete protection against certain anti-tank mines, GAO noted. Requirements also called for the vehicles to shut down engines and maintain a “silent watch” for “several hours.” To date, the batteries allow for less than one hour, GAO said.
An engineer for one of the lead system integrators said another complicated problem has been the commutator ring, which serves as the transmission path for the signals between the main chassis and the turret.
“It’s one of the most complicated commutator rings that we’ve ever seen,” said the engineer, who asked not to be named.
The 140-channel commutator ring “is a pretty big leap from anything we’ve done on this size,” the engineer said. “But we are seeing progress.”
Daniel Zanini, senior vice president of systems integrator SAIC, and deputy program manager of FCS, said the cannon is the first of the eight vehicles to be placed on the common chassis, so it will be the platform where all the bugs will be worked out.
“We’re taking the most challenging areas and we’re funneling those through NLOS cannon,” he said.
The NLOS-mortar has also struggled with weight issues, but has reduced the weight of the gun, said Joe Lannon, director of the armament research, development and engineering center, which is serving as a subcontractor to BAE.
During the initial designs, there was a good deal of debate on whether the mortar should be 105 mm or 120 mm. The 120 mm guns were considered too heavy, but the 105 mm wouldn’t provide the lethality required. Also, choosing 105 mm would require the development of a new suite of ammunition, which would prove costly, Lannon said at the National Defense Industrial Association science and technology conference in Charleston, S.C.
This was particularly challenging, Lannon said, because the mortar rounds currently in use are loaded through the muzzle, while the NLOS-mortar would require them to be loaded through the breach.
ARDEC had concepts on the drawing board to create a light, but lethal 120 mm mortar, so BAE took the unusual step of selecting a military laboratory as a subcontractor.
The mortar was test fired in March from a platform at Camp Ripley, Minn. It will undergo further tests at the Yuma Proving Grounds, Ariz. It can currently fire 12 rounds per minute, which is short of the desired rate of 16 rounds per minute, he said.
ARDEC was able to lighten the gun with composite materials, Lannon said. A foreign manufacturer also had a lighter steel the center wanted to use. ARDEC was able to facilitate the transfer of the technology to a U.S.-based manufacturer so it could comply with U.S. regulations.
The result is a gun that weighs 40 percent, or 2,600 pounds less, than the weapon found on an Abrams tank.
“All the performance of the 120 mm gun on the M-1 tank is available in this gun system that can be put on a 20-ton vehicle, which is a considerable advance,” Lannon said.
Please email your comments to SMagnuson@ndia.org
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