Posted on 07/25/2019 3:14:30 PM PDT by PROCON
U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground conducts developmental testing of multiple facets of the Extended Range Cannon Artillery project, from artillery shells to the longer cannon tube and larger firing chamber the improved howitzer will need to accommodate them on November 18, 2018 (U.S. Army photo)
The future of Army long-range precision officially has a name.
The Army confirmed on Monday that it plan on designating the Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) program's brand new 155mm self-propelled howitzer as the M1299, Army Recognition reports.
Developed in response to increasing concerns of near-peer adversaries like Russia and China, the ERCA gun nailed targets with pinpoint accuracy at a range of 62 kilometers during testing at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona in March, far outstripping the range of both the M109A7 Paladin (30km) and M777 (40km with the M982 Excalibur guided artillery shell) howitzers.
Compared to those systems, the M1299 will receive two "leading-edge technologies," as Army Recognition reports: the experimental new XM1113 rocket-assisted artillery shell, and a longer 58 caliber tube designed to boost the conventional howitzer range from 38km to 70km and, eventually, an eye-popping 100 km "within the forthcoming four years."
Extended Range Cannon Artillery, or ERCA, will be an improvement to the latest version of the Paladin self-propelled howitzer that provides indirect fires for the brigade combat team and division-level fight (U.S. Army photo)
"We know we need the range in order to maintain overmatch," Col. John Rafferty, head of the long-range precision fire cross-functional team, told Defense News. "We need 70 to 80 kilometers because that's the start, and then we will be able to get farther. Right now we are on a path to 70 kilometers with ERCA."
Extended range is only one element of the Army's never-ending pursuit of lethality. The M1299 will incorporate a fully automated ammo loading system to boost the howitzer's rate of fire from 3 rpm to 10rpm, although Defense News reported in March that the Army doesn't plan on fully incorporating the system "beyond the first iteration" until 2024.
Soldier may not need to wait that long to get their hands on the ERCA program's new tech, though: the official M1299 designation comes just weeks after the Army awarded a $45 million contract to BAE Systems to integrate various elements of the ERCA system into the service's existing and future Paladin howitzers.
Anyway, congrats to the M1299 on its induction into the world of alpha-numeric military designations. We hope your upcoming baptism is a baptism by fire.
Make that northwest from Stud. Mental image and direction got muddled. Just south of the Rockpile.
“Meet the M1299, the new Army howitzer with twice the range of the Paladin”
I hear that’s a pocket pistol in Texas.
You keep pushing on me there and you’re going to learn why my name is Pooh!
Rule of thumb for a M109A5/6 shooting lo angle:
1000 feet of altitude for every 1 kilometer of range, i.e an 18 km shot goes ~18,000 feet above ground.
He probably got the idea from Obama, who made remarks along that line when declaring that we would never again need tanks because we (and likely most other countries) would never again fight a war requiring them and that acquiring more would be foolish... then a few years later the Ukraine and Syria brew up and demonstrate just how wrong he was.
Artillery is still in use by US forces in Afghanistan: https://www.army.mil/article/212751/dropping_steel_rain_artillerymen_deter_enemy_rockets_in_afghanistan
When I went to OCS at Sill in 1967, the family included the M107, M108, M109 and the M110. And the sex symbol of the group was the M107.
I see alot of the M108/M109 in the M1299.
February 2018. The Russians/Syrians used them. We didn’t. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/world/middleeast/american-commandos-russian-mercenaries-syria.html
Firing rates from 3 RPM to ?? RPM must mean some humongous “clips” are used by these things... /s
Pooh2 might be in better keeping with the theme of the thread!
lol
We slaughtered a bunch of Russians in Syria with arty in the last year or so.
L
In this case, caliber refers to how many times the barrel is longer than the diameter of the projectile.
The projectile has a diameter of 155 mm (6.1 inches), so a 58 caliber barrel would be 8.99 meters long, or 29.4 feet long.
All your ‘clips’ are belong to us! :-)
https://youtu.be/SAQQ7kdqmlU
Yuma Proving Ground is *the* place to test artillery in the U.S.A. (and much of the world!)
Lots of advantages of precision artillery over air support or drones.
That’s not a storage yard. It’s a rebuild and reclamation facility. Many of the tanks and other vehicles there are either in need of a complete rebuild (as another poster pointed out) or are simply old and verging on obsolete. A lot of what fighting vehicles I could see on screen was so old it isn’t even stuff Guard units would deploy - for example, none of the M1s pictured had the TUSK kit or the CROWS turret on top, and there are other bits of kit missing indicating that the tanks are mostly M1s (no longer in service with the US Army in any capacity other than “target”) and M1A1s (the last of which is set to leave service with reserve and Guard units in 2021), mostly from Guard units by the markings and equipment. The ones I could see up close don’t even have the brackets or signs of the brackets ever having been installed for the various M1A1 SEP or TUSK upgrades, so they’re ***old***.
Remember, the M1 has been made for ***40 years*** now - in fact the thing has been in service long enough for earlier models to start appearing in museums - so the oldest ones in the inventory are going to be worn out and obsolete.
No few of the tanks in that video are M60A3s - a tank type that was last made in 1983, was removed from active formations in the 1990s and whose very last US Army use was as training aids in 2005. It’s been ***15 years since then*** and they’re being scrapped or waiting to be sold to foreign nations - they are *not* sitting there stored against future need as the logistics train to support them no longer exists in the US Army. An M60A3 is hopelessly outmatched in modern peer combat or against peer weapons unless upgraded; said upgrades are a significant fraction of the cost of a new M1.
What you are seeing there is stuff back for a rebuild, awaiting sale to an allied foreign military power and stuff awaiting reclamation prior to scrapping. It’s not a storage yard (in fact, they say that at the start of the video!) and at least in the case of the vehicles they will not be used again by US military forces. Of the visible vehicles, most appeared to have last been front line capable back in the 90s.
Take the Humvees that they mentioned were being demilled and sold off - those things first entered service in ***1984*** and a great many of them are no longer suitable for military service, just as an unrestored, unrebuilt 1984 Mustang with 300,000 miles on it is not a good choice as a daily driver. A lot of the rolling stock in that video is ***old*** to the point where it is financially smarter to buy a new one instead of constantly repairing it or spending the money to overhaul a tired chassis.
Let’s take another example - those tracked vehicles on the flatbed rail cars in the video. Those are either M577 command vehicles or M1063 command vehicles - replaced in service by the M4 C2V starting in the 1990s, which in turn was replaced by a version of the Stryker. Some few are left in service today but the vehicles are definitely on the way out. A few are being given to museums as they’re that old - the design dates to the 1960s.
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