Meet the M1299, the new Army howitzer with twice the range of the Paladin

taskandpurpose.com ^ | July 24, 2019 | Jared Keller

[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.

[Spktyr]

No, really, the M1A1 is now a museum piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aladW_D4nKU

Above is an Abrams armor officer visiting and climbing over an M1A1 (the type he used to serve in) in a museum and reminiscing.

[fieldmarshaldj]

*possible ping of interest*

[NFHale]

OhYeahbaby... I want one...

But it won’t fit in my shoulder holster... and it would be HELL for “Mexican Carry”...

:^)

[IndispensableDestiny]

That video supports my point.

[whistleduck]

Considering Bull was launching stuff into near orbit, and likely designed advanced arty 30 plus years ago (S Africa), I would not think it would be that impressive.

Was it Mossad or natural causes? Or the Russkies?

[archy]

Of course with nuke rounds, (which we never did fire during the Cold War, thankfully), impacting in one grid square was close enough.

The Soviets didn't think so. Their artillery planning included protocols for an entire corps to deliver their airtillery payload time-on-target into a single grid square, everything from company-level mortars to 200mm+ field arty' plus barrage rockets. No idea if they included their 152mm- nuclear rounds in that deliver, but I'd not be surprised if one or two was in the mix, just to be sure,

No wonder Ivan calls his artillery *God of Battle*....

А что такое современная война - интересный вопрос, чего она требует? Она требует массовой артиллерии. В современной войне артиллерия это бог... артиллерия решает судьбу войны, массовая артиллерия.

[And what is the modern war, it's an interesting question, what it requires? It requires massive artillery. In modern warfare, artillery is a god... Artillery, massive artillery decides the fate of the war.] --Josef Stalin (1940)

[archy]

Now all we have to do is get enough capable people to man them.

And teach it how to swim rivers. We got a helo big enough to airlift it?

[archy]

That’s just an insane “reach out and touch someone.”

Well, maybe to an infantryman with a rifle. Some guys with 16-inchers throw a projectile the size of a Volkswagon something like 52 miles:

I wonder what accuracy is at that range with so many variables on that length/arc of a flight

We once worked out a 15-mile firing exercise for the U.S.S. New Jersey at 15 miles at right around a minute of angle. Of course their FDC [thankfully , not the ANGLICO guy calling for fire] has to take into account the Coriolis effect, as well as the Eötvös effect caused by the rotation of the Earth on it's axis, the projectile's leaving the denser atmosphere, the Earth continuing to rotate [hopefully!] and the projectile reentering *normal* artillery conditions. Winds, of course, can be blowing in any direction, or not at all, at different altitudes of the projectile's journey.

Even a relatively dumb ol' tank gunner knows that main gun rounds fired to the east always fly a little higher, and those fired to the west always impact just a tad low. On the Way! [Y'all call it *Shot, out!*]

[archy]

Any suggestions on a name for this new gun?

*Big Noisy II*

Been told that the M65 *Atomic Annie,* AKA *The Atomic Cannon* of the 1950s-'60s was sometimes so called. As well as a lot of unprintable names by its crews who had to wrassle the 240mm thing through the narrow streets of picturesque German burgs and towns, leaving a trail of knocked-down mailboxes, utility poles and extending building corners and walls behind them.

[archy]

I remember when a 175 was quietly positioned behind our small HQ at Tam Ky in I Corps, Viet Nam. When it fired off everyone hit the floor. After checks to see if arms and legs were in place the CO, who thought the world had come to an end, took a couple of knuckle draggers and convinced the self-propelled unit to find another location to terrorize.

We used to refer to the M107 SP 175mm as the Snipers Rifle. When the Israelis came within 175 range of Damascus during the 1967 Six-Day War, the Russians ordered one of their sub commanders [K-172] that if Damascus was shelled or entered by Israeli troops, he was to launch 3 of his P-100 Oniks *Sunburn* cruise missiles with nuclear warheads and take out Tel Aviv, Haifa, and the Israeli nuclear production site of Dimona in the Negev desert.

Glad it never came to that.Your CO might have had a fit.

[archy]

I have read that during WWII, more casualties were inflicted by artillery than anything else.

I do not have to tell you who won the war. You know, the artillery did.

– Gen George S. Patton

[archy]

When is the last time we ever used artillary and tanks? We keep building them and then send them off to remote, dry, desert storage locations.

I attended a tank familiarization course for National Guard troops about two months ago, which included live main gun fire and driving. As a former enlisted Armor MOS graduate, class of 1966, I was offered [but declined] to man the gunner's seat for an entire Table 8 gunnery qualification, but was honored.

We've got some really good young tankers and some pretty decent equipment; there are shortcomings. And having prepositioned vehicles makes more sense than losing them in air delivery, and lets their fighter escort augment that of the crew transport. Lose a tank [or arty] crewman with 5 years experience, and it takes 5 years to replace him. I hate thinking about losing a battalion's worth in one plane.

[archy]

The Germans, characteristically, were rabid about accurate stat keeping and the numbers of German troops that got sliced, diced and pureed by Ivan’s artillery were pretty well documented. Do NOT f**k with Ivan when his artillery is properly set up and ranges on you.

Concur, historically and tactically. As a young tank crewdawg looking at the potential for a visit to the Federal Republic by the Eighth Guards Tank Army in the mid-1960's, I was not overly impressed with the 17-1 tank versus tank odds we'd be facing the first day, nor did we overly sweat Soviet air support. Artillery was our second-largest fear; artillery during rearm/refuel was our biggest.

[Who is John Galt?]

We once worked out a 15-mile firing exercise for the U.S.S. New Jersey at 15 miles at right around a minute of angle...

IIRC, HMS Warspite managed to hit the Italian battleship Julius Caesar at a range of 28,500 yards (~15 miles?), which might still be a record, for naval artillery "fired in anger" at a moving target. The British 15" 42 caliber guns were an older design than the American 16"/50s used in the Iowa class, but the Brits apparently knew how to use them (or got lucky ;^)...

[yarddog]

I have no military experience tho through a weird couple of events I was actually sworn in to the Army before being told I could “follow the yellow arrows” to go home from Maxwell Air Force Base after being drafted. My hearing was damaged by a lot of shooting while still very young without protection.

I am sure someone famous said something like “Artillery is the King of the Battlefield”, tho I don’t remember who.

I have loved history since I was a small child and still it seems like I don’t know much. I do know all kinds of things which turn out to not be true.

[archy]

The computer does it, or it doesn’t get done. To include weather drones/balloons to measure wind along the way.

Not entirely. The Korean War-era book of Firing Tables for the Iowa class Battleship 16" guns was calculated at the University of Illinois using the best electronic vacuum-tube Von Neumann IAS machine *calculator* then in existance, the facility thence known as ILLIAC I and having about the computing power of a current $3.00 pocket calculator. ILLIAC evolved, brought forth later generations, to ILLIAC 4, the first massively parallel computer. Daniel Slotnick was working as a programmer on the IAS machine in 1952 when the idea of building a computer using an array of processors came to him. Relocated to the NASA Ames Research Center in California, a few flaws corrected, 3 years later ILLIAC IV was connected to the ARPA Net for distributed use in November 1975, becoming the first network-available supercomputer.

You could say that the Internet became available because artillerymen needed better ballistic data, as did theit follow-on, NASA. Thank you Mr Slotnick, and thank you, [Admiral] Grace Hopper.

[Chode]

if i had to guess, i’d say either Mossad or the US

but he might be amused to see it took us this long to get only this far...

[schurmann]

“You’re referencing WW1, he’s referencing WW2. Pretty sure that latter one’s not in doubt...” [Spktyr, post 87]

Still in doubt. Historians cannot agree over numbers from the Second World War.

Soviet figures merit the least confidence, due to the propensity of the Soviet government to come clean about anything, until driven to the wall - if they do so then. Recall that they concealed a population undercount of over 20 million, until the 1970s or so.

Third Reich German records are suspect for similar reasons, despite the incorporation of BRD into NATO in the 1950s. A fair amount of destruction and chaos was injected into the mix by the Allied Combined Bomber Offensive, introducing new layers of uncertainty.

And national governments have always been reluctant to divulge particulars on combat losses and weapon effectiveness. Applies to information released into the public domain, and to what they share with each other. No less true among the Western Allies.

The main limitation is that actual combat is the worst place to collect data on system effectiveness.