Raytheon’s 155mm M982 Excalibur extended-range guided artillery shell is a modern marvel:
It can be hurtled out of a howitzer barrel under immense G loads, then once it reaches the top of its trajectory, it begins its guided glide path via pop-out canard control fins, which greatly enhances the shell’s range over a standard 155mm round. Because it is guided, it can also hit nearly any target at near vertical angles, allowing it to strike the enemy in the shadow of steep mountains or in urban environments that traditional ballistic artillery could not engage safely.
Introduced onto the battlefield in Iraq in 2007, the rounds gave Howitzer units so much added flexibility due to the Excalibur’s increased range, non-ballistic trajectory and almost perfect accuracy that the Army immediately upped the round’s production from 18 units a month to 150. Since then, thousands more M982 shells have been built and nearly a thousand of them have been fired in combat.
Now they’re shrinking it down for the Navy’s five-inch Mk45 deck guns.
Is the tube artillery that fires such a round a smooth bore? If not, how could the round possibly de-spin so it could deploy the wings?
As far as I know, Excalibur is fired from standard howitzers, Dan.
Various smart bombs are cheaper and have displaced Excalibur in Afghanistan.
Some years ago, the Army and Navy were working on similar technology for the Navy’s 16-inch guns. Those tubes would have been capable of truly accurate fire out to 100 km. The retirement of the Iowa class ended that. Too bad the Montana class was never built.
A proper price comparison needs to take into account shipping and handling:
The howitzer’s rifled, and the Navy gun’s smoothbore, it would appear:
Price catalog for quite a few shells. No Excalibur.
An Excalibur shot better be worth it, as I can buy some 120 conventional shells for the same price.
Smart bombs are cheaper if you don’t count the cost of the plane that has to fly them out there. And while the Montanas were truly awesome battlewagons, they would have been obnoxiously slow for modern fleets built around 32kt carriers.
To my mind it seems that guided rockets would be more straightforward. There’s GMLRS already, but they’re pretty big. I’m thinking guided katyusha.
A precision-guided shell that hits within four meters at far greater range could easily be worth a hundred conventional shells. We know most shells hit nothing of value, and we know friendly artillery often isn’t. When we add in the extra range and ability to plunge down past cover, yeah, an Excalibur shell could easily be worth it.
Rockets are increasingly easy to shoot down, as the Israelis are proving. Admittedly, artillery shells aren’t too far behind in that department.
Military technology is going some very interesting places in the near future. The current technological landscape is giving me a rather 1910ish feel. Lots of new, meaningful toys, but no one’s figured out how they all fit together.
We’re probably ignoring the modern Bloch without even realizing it.
Scipio Americanus says, “Rockets are increasingly easy to shoot down.”
If that’s the case then all those shiny new missile frigates built by the navies of China, Pakistan, Russia, and others will need to be re-fitted with different weapon systems.
Perhaps new navies will comprise old-fashioned battleships alongside aircraft carriers full of low-cost drones; maybe even airbourne aircraft carriers.
Boeing has a project to put a Small Diameter Bomb (version II with wings and moving target capability) on an MLRS rocket.
“Inefficiency” was a strong point of traditional artillery bombardment. Bombardment is sometimes as much about mentally disrupting its human targets by getting them to put their heads down as it is about physically destroying them. Bonus points if you achieve both, which Excalibur by itself is unlikely to do.
While rockets are increasingly easy to shoot down, I do think we need to recognize that a relatively slow, ballistic Qassam rocket and Mach-3, guided missile aren’t equally easy to shoot down. I do wonder if we’re going to see Robotech-style missiles, with erratic arcs, as point defenses improve.
I wouldn’t say that inefficiency was a strong point of traditional artillery; it was simply unavoidable. Targeting information wasn’t accurate, and delivery wasn’t precise, so one shot, one kill was never on the table. As with small arms, near misses have a suppressive effect, but not all unaimed fire is equally suppressive; near misses are still much better than wild misses, and timing matters, too.