The U.S. Army is looking to give its still-in-development anti-armor guided 155mm artillery shells the ability to ‘collaborate’ with each other to help find their targets and otherwise be more effective. The rounds as they are envisioned now are already set to give artillery units a new option for engaging enemy tanks and other armored vehicles, even ones on the move, via indirect fires.
Army Col. Leon Rogers, the service’s Project Manager for Combat Ammunition Systems, provided an update on the Cannon Delivered Area Effects Munition Armor (C-DAEM Armor) 155mm shell, now also designated as the XM1180, at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual conference in Washington, D.C., earlier this week. The C-DAEM Armor round, also known as C-DAEM Increment I, has been in development since 2018. The Army conducted the first live firing of a guided test article just this past March.
“C-DAEM Armor, XM1180, most people don’t really know what that means, but what that gives the artillery community is a way to actually destroy armored targets,” Rogers explained. “As you see in the future, it’s about collaboration. Those rounds will be able to talk to each other.”
Rogers highlighted specifically how this capability could help ensure that rounds don’t double up on the same targets, facilitating a single barrage to engage and destroy more vehicles over a broader area.
Networking the shells together could have other benefits, including helping the rounds fired find targets at all, even if they might be outside the range of their own onboard seekers. Depending on the level of collaboration and coordination between shells, as well as the ability of their seekers to not only spot, but categorize targets, they might also be able to focus their attention on target types that are pre-designated as being higher priority first.
The current XM1180 design leverages the existing GPS-assisted inertial navigation system (INS) guided M982 Excalibur precision-guided 155mm shell, but adds a new and still unspecified all-weather seeker to find targets in the terminal stage of flight. There are future plans to develop a guidance package that is also less reliant on GPS to be more resilient in the face of jamming and spoofing, the importance of which has been underscored by observations from the ongoing war in Ukraine. C-DAEM Armor also features a new unitary shaped-charge armor-piercing warhead. In the past, it has been reported that the round is expected to have a maximum range of around 37 miles (60 kilometers) and the ability to scan up to nearly 11 square miles (28 square kilometers) for target vehicles.
“After the projectile has been fired, the sensors on the projectile will be used to search the area around its reported position, and if found, attack the target,” Peter Burke, Deputy Project Manager for Combat Ammunition Systems, said back in 2019, according to a report from Army Technology.
As already noted, giving XM1180s the ability to collaborate between themselves could help eliminate the “if found” from that equation and also help prevent targets from escaping being struck.
The Army is not the only service to be interested in collaborative capabilities to improve targeting efficiency and effectiveness, as well as just reduce the number of munitions that are expended without hitting targets at all. The U.S. Air Force’s Golden Horde program centered on the development of swarming networked air-launched munitions capabilities is one prime publicly known example.
The baseline C-DAEM shell is already poised to give Army 155mm howitzers a valuable new precision indirect anti-armor capability. The Army’s current Excalibur guided 155mm rounds cannot engage moving targets.
The 1970s-era laser-guided M712 Copperhead 155mm shell, which was largely removed from service years ago, could hit moving vehicles, but also required a third party of some kind relatively close by to designate the target. As a prime example of the M712’s limitations, earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Ukrainian forces had received Copperheads as military aid from the United States, but rarely employed them due to a lack of suitably equipped drones it could use to designate targets from afar.
The Army also has unguided Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM) shells, which are loaded with cluster munitions designed to defeat armored and unarmored targets. Cluster munitions, in general, have been increasingly controversial, in large part due to their potential to scatter unexploded submuntiions that can be threatening to friendly forces and innocent bystanders. You can read more about DPICM and these issues here.
In addition to the XM1180, the Army is also currently developing a second round in the C-DAEM family called the XM1208, which is loaded with nine sensor-fuzed smart submunitions as a DPICM replacement.
All of this now comes as the conflict in Ukraine has further underscored the value of artillery, particularly 155mm howitzers, on the modern battlefield, including for engaging enemy armor formations. On top of the Copperheads, the Ukrainian armed forces have received Excaliburs and DPICM rounds, among others, from the U.S. military.
The U.S. military is working hard now to facilitate a dramatic boost in the production of 155mm shells of all kinds, including through the establishment of an entire new ammunition factory in the United States, to help meet Ukraine’s demands as well as replenish its own stockpiles. At AUSA this week, Army officials said that 155mm shell production is now around 40,000 rounds per month, up from 14,400 shells per month prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The goals now are to get that figure up to 55,000 shells per month by the end of the year and eventually up to 100,000 shells per month in the future.
Beyond more capacity to produce complete rounds, meeting these targets also requires expanded sources for various subcomponents, including shell bodies and explosive fillers.
“We don’t get our TNT from any source in the U.S. right now,” Col. Rogers noted this week. “And, oh, by the way, before the Ukraine war kicked off, just where we were getting our TNT from? Ukraine.”
For the U.S. Army, there is also a growing question about what will fire C-DAEM Armor and any other 155mm shells in the future. The service announced this week that it was launching a new Self-Propelled Howitzer Modernization (SPH-M) effort to succeed its abortive Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) program.
The Army had announced in March that it was canceling work on the next-generation XM1299 155mm self-propelled howitzer it had been developing under ERCA as a successor to the venerable M109 series, due in part to issues with its extremely long cannon. The service has now awarded contracts to American Rheinmetall Vehicles, BAE Bofors, Hanwha Defense USA, General Dynamics Land Systems, and Elbit Systems USA to demonstrate alternative 155mm self-propelled howitzers as part of SPH-M. There have been separate discussions in recent years about options for modernizing or supplanting the Army’s inventory of 155mm M777 and 105mm M109 towed howitzers, as well.
The Army has also said previously that the end of ERCA has put new emphasis on new, advanced 155mm shells, including long-range ramjet-powered types. The new C-DAEM Armor shell is already set to be an important part of that 155mm ammunition ecosystem and networked targeting capabilities could make artillery units even more effective in hunting enemy tanks and other vehicles in the future.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com