Extended-range precision artillery hits targets from 36 kilometers

seruriermarshal

ACCESS: Top Secret
Joined
4 May 2008
Messages
1,177
Reaction score
530
Extended-range precision artillery hits targets from 36 kilometers PARIS, June 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Marine Corps successfully fired two Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) Excalibur 155mm precision-guided artillery projectiles from a range of 36 kilometers (22.3 statute miles) in theater. These shots mark the longest distance the Excalibur round has been fired in combat since its fielding in 2007.
"It is incredible to think about how this capability has evolved with its use over time, and these shots are evidence of that," said Lt. Col. Mike Milner, U.S. Army Excalibur product manager. "We are continually improving Excalibur's use in theater."
With more than 500 rounds fired in theater to date, Excalibur is the revolutionary family of precision projectiles for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps artillery. The Marines have significantly increased the operational use of Excalibur in the last year, firing as many as 32 rounds in one week. By integrating Excalibur into close-combat formations, U.S. forces avoid collateral damage even when warfighters are in close proximity to the target.
"Having true precision artillery that can defeat the targets – and from such a great distance – gives our warfighters the ability to engage these targets that would otherwise be out of reach," said Michelle Lohmeier, vice president of Land Combat Systems at Raytheon Missile Systems. "Raytheon developed and fielded the world's first extended-range GPS-guided artillery, and we are proud of the unprecedented precision capability Excalibur gives our warfighters."
About Excalibur
Successfully fielded in 2007, the Excalibur 155mm precision-guided, extended-range projectile is the revolutionary artillery round used in theater today by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Using GPS precision guidance technology, Excalibur provides accurate, first round, fire-for-effect capability in an urban setting. Excalibur is considered a true precision weapon, impacting at a radial miss distance of six meters from the target.


 
Why bother? GMLRS is much better and goes a lot further hence you need to carry less rounds to ensure having a firing unit in range. Of course Raytheon don't make MLRS hence their puffery. Why regurgitate meja spin?
 
Artillery tends to be a better bet when you are in mountains. Behind crest effects are more effective because most rockets use low trajectories to achieve range. Artillery is inherently more accurate and its effects more easily scaleable - both important considerations when engaged in COIN warfare where you want to minimise civilian casualties as much as possible. It is also inherently cheaper than most guided artillery rockets.
 
GMLRS has a vertical impact mode specifically to deal with mountains and urban areas. The earlier versions didn't have this, but it was added as a software mode some years ago after early use in Afghanistan. Its an aeroballistic missile so trajectory is highly variable otherwise. Innate accuracy means very little when comparing two different weapons guided by similar GPS technology, GMLRS has proven very highly accurate in combat, demonstrated in endless videos online. Both seem to be more then accurate enough to attack point targets, maybe even tanks with decent reliability. Though target locating error becomes a factor in this.

GMLRS weighs around 700lb with a 200lb warhead, Excalibur is around 100lb with 24lb of explosive inside, though the whole case is part of the warhead. The large blast of GMLRS simply isn't that purposeful or desirable for many targets. Excalibur has about half the per unit cost, 52,000 dollars vs about 109,000 dollars for the latest production batches. If you want to blow up large buildings or bridges GMLRS will be more cost effective and generally destructive, if you need to hit lots of point targets Excalibur is clearly superior. Plenty of missions exist for both weapons.

GMLRS is better if you don't have a 100% totally precise target location, that target locating error, which is often the case even with laser rangefinders, but cannot allow 155mm unguided shells to impact across a several hundred meter oval. On the other hand even if you can fire unguided 155mm, they cost around a thousand dollars a shell without considering powder or gun tube life or transport costs so that actually can add up pretty quickly.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Still doesn't have the scalability of artillery. You can use 1 tube, 2 tubes, 3 tubes, etc. up and down the scale, depending on the effect you want. GMLRS has a minimum 200lb warhead. Both types of weapons have their uses but rockets will not displace artillery.
 
Surprised nobody posted one of the Excalibur test videos. I wonder if they will ever release a comparable video of the Orbital-ATK PGK alternative. It costs much less and like JDAM is an attachment to standard munitions. It doesn’t have the same precision or the vertical descent profile but might be good enough for most applications and seems to be enjoying continued sales ( http://www.asdnews.com/news-67600/Artillery_Precision_Guidance_Kits_Contract.htm )

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6ukz5jhXdY


PGK
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebzh12PR0-U

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqINp_ydWwU
 
fredymac said:
Came across this video of the OTO Melara guided 76mm shell. Apparently it is a beam rider vs being GPS guided.

That's because it's designed to engage high-speed moving targets, mainly anti-ship missiles. It's not really in the same class as Excalibur or PGK.
 
TomS said:
fredymac said:
Came across this video of the OTO Melara guided 76mm shell. Apparently it is a beam rider vs being GPS guided.

That's because it's designed to engage high-speed moving targets, mainly anti-ship missiles. It's not really in the same class as Excalibur or PGK.

I was thinking there was a single version which used GPS guidance but I guess there are two different types. I can't find any actual test video for the GPS version.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFLortOOhsw
 
Yeah, DART and Vulcano are really different beasts.

Vulcano 76mm is derived from the larger Vulcano 127mm bombardment shell and comes in guided and non-guided versions.

DART is basically the logical conclusion of the Italian Navy using 76mm as a CIWS; it crosses over with missile-based anti-missile systems like RAM.
 
Honestly, without access to a lot of sensitive test data, there's really no way to know.
 
TomS said:
Honestly, without access to a lot of sensitive test data, there's really no way to know.

The concept is better. That is if it can defeat the target (see sensitive test data). Intercepting the incoming missle further away theoritically gives you a chance to re-engage if your intercept is unsuccessful. The further away the interception the more likely the missile or parts of it won't hit your ship and cause damage which could be mission critical. Also using the 76mm as an ASMD capability is more deck space/volume/mass/cost efficient that having seperate systems for multiple roles. The 76MM is also an effective ASuW, AAW and NGS weapon. Those Horizon class DDGs with three OTO guns would be very lethal in a littoral knife fight with FACs and the like. Compared to say a German DDG with one 76mm and two RAM launchers.
 
76/62 course corrected shell
 

Attachments

  • 20161028_150356.jpg
    20161028_150356.jpg
    516.5 KB · Views: 398
jsport said:
Raytheon has an opportunity to market EST as part of the 1000mile gun project as missiles should have a significantly lesser role, primarily against particular missile threats, at these ranges.
There is the little problem of achieving that 1000 mile range however. I don't see it happening anytime soon, especially when you consider the lack of news regarding railguns.
 
jsport said:
Raytheon has an opportunity to market EST as part of the 1000mile gun project as missiles should have a significantly lesser role, primarily against particular missile threats, at these ranges.
There is the little problem of achieving that 1000 mile range however. I don't see it happening anytime soon, especially when you consider the lack of news regarding railguns.
not my falt ur not paying attention.
 
W/o a 1000mile gun no allied victory

https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/h...wer-conflict-play-out-lessons-from-a-wargame/

"Observations and Lessons Learned
The post-conflict after action review was informative and left the students with much to ponder. Before listing just a few of the lessons learned, it is important to note that they are the result of only two days of game play. Moreover, these games were designed to help the students think about future conflicts and operational art, and not for serious analytical work. Still, there were several observations that may point the services and Joint Staff toward areas that require more serious analysis.

The high rate of loss in modern conventional combat challenged student paradigms ingrained by nearly two decades of counter-insurgency operations. In just the first week of the war, U.S. forces and their allies suffered over 150,000 losses (World War I levels of attrition) from the fighting in Poland, Korea, and Taiwan. For students, who have spent their entire military lives viewing the loss of a squad or a platoon as a military catastrophe, this led to a lot of discussion about what it would take to lead and inspire a force that is burning through multiple brigades a day, as well as a lengthy discussion on how long such combat intensity could be sustained.

Because of these huge battlefield losses and how long it would take to get National Guard and Reserves into the fight, the decision was made to strip these forces of most of their trained personnel and use their troops as replacements for battered active units.


To ease the students into the complexity of this wargame, logistics was hugely simplified. (likely logistics would be stifled by the huge missile forces of the eastern powers)Still, much of the post-game discussion focused on the impossibility of the U.S. military’s current infrastructure to support even half the forces in theater or to maintain the intensity of combat implied by the wargame as necessary to achieve victory.
Airpower, the few times it was available, was a decisive advantage on the battlefield. Unfortunately, the planes rarely showed up to assist the ground war, as they prioritized winning dominance of their own domain over any other task. Only when the Air Force had completed a multi-week campaign to take down the enemy’s Integrated Air Defense System( IADS) and win the air-battle, were they willing to assist the ground battle. In the Pacific, the unwillingness to risk carriers within the 900-mile range of Chinese DF-21s and 26s made them close to useless, unless they could operate under a land-based air defense umbrella. (w/o a 1000mile gun, no chance as SEAD eats Air forces and F-35 will never accomplish Close Air Support as it was never intended to by a biased AF)

Neither America nor its allies had any adequate response to the use of chemical weapons by the enemy, short of requesting nuclear release
. It is worth noting that every battle headed rapidly toward total war, as both sides commanders sought to escape restraints on what weapons they could employ within a theater. Every time a theater commander met with a military setback they requested authority to employ nuclear weapons

Neither U.S. forces nor allied forces had an answer to counter the overpowering impact of huge enemy fire complexes, which accounted for most American and allied losses. (w/o massive counter-fire from 1000mile gun no chance of survival of US forces)

Cyber advantages always proved fleeting. Moreover, any cyberattack launched on its own was close to useless. On the other hand, targeted cyber attacks combined with maneuver forces always proved to be a deadly combination.

When NATO is all-in, it can put a huge effective force in the field. But it is important to remember that NATO was only all-in because the students took a huge amount of their investment budget and applied it to directed diplomacy, aimed at rebuilding frayed alliances. Still, the Russian occupation of Ukraine, the Baltics, and Belarus did a lot to focus the attention of NATO allies on the looming threat.

In Korea, the allies must hold for approximately 10 days before the North Korean logistics system collapses. It’s important to note, however, that the fighting remains brutal even after North Korea’s logistics system collapses. Moreover, the restrictive terrain and density of forces leads to particularly intense combat."
 
View: https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1567634188328734720

 
Why bother? GMLRS is much better and goes a lot further hence you need to carry less rounds to ensure having a firing unit in range. Of course Raytheon don't make MLRS hence their puffery. Why regurgitate meja spin?
An artillery round no matter if it is rocket assisted or not will ALWAYS BE CHEAPER AND EASIER TO MASS PRODUCE than any artillery rocket...
 
Why bother? GMLRS is much better and goes a lot further hence you need to carry less rounds to ensure having a firing unit in range. Of course Raytheon don't make MLRS hence their puffery. Why regurgitate meja spin?
An artillery round no matter if it is rocket assisted or not will ALWAYS BE CHEAPER AND EASIER TO MASS PRODUCE than any artillery rocket...
Plus not to mention moving a gun and a load off shells is far easier.

Like 2 chinook can swing a M777 with the 65cal barrel and like 60 shells plus propellent to where ever it can fit.

Compare only 2 himars with a preload pod.


Which will you rather have?

12 shots or 60?
 
Why bother? GMLRS is much better and goes a lot further hence you need to carry less rounds to ensure having a firing unit in range. Of course Raytheon don't make MLRS hence their puffery. Why regurgitate meja spin?
An artillery round no matter if it is rocket assisted or not will ALWAYS BE CHEAPER AND EASIER TO MASS PRODUCE than any artillery rocket...

Building nothing but GMLRS and cassette rockets would be too smart for America anyway.

Excalibur is neither cheap nor mass produced. No 155mm projectile the USA makes is mass produced by historic use rates, a perennial problem with Western democracies is their inability to use peacetime productively to prepare for the next war.

If WW1 required a million shells a day, WW2 required 100,000, and the current modern era ("WW3") requires about 10,000 a day, roughly speaking.

Which means America would probably need to increase production by an order of magnitude, for a decade or so, or two orders of magnitude for maybe a year or two, to seriously cover historic use cases. The last war actually saw something similar happen, where America went into it woefully under-prepared and had to spend a year reorganizing itself, despite starting its rearmament program in the mid-1930's, except America had a tremendous surplus agrarian workers and car factories to convert to ammo plants. This was manageable at the time if not ideal.

It no longer has this, so WYSIWYG and America's ammo industrial base is rather weak.

PGMs like Excalibur have meaningfully managed to reduce the requisite quantity of shells/year from something like 2 million in WW2 to 200,000 these days, I guess but their production rates went from 90,000 to 900? Oof. The Soviets had it right, at least in terms of mass scale peacetime production, but I'm not sure the USSR's relatively prodigious productive capacities were adequate at any point in its history to absorb the ammo consumption for very long in a hypothetical WW3 that was conventional in nature rather than nuclear.

There are truly frightening scales of ammo consumption spoken of in ancient Soviet military studies, with levels greater than even Verdun's mass barrage being considered routine, although granted those were against the Maoist PLA, but still...

America has been mostly bamboozled by the fact that as a superpower and global hegemon it can simply corral the rest of the planet into agreeing to bully a country it's kept under siege for a decade, but even against a civil stricken Eastern European country with equipment two generations out of date at the time (Serbia) it found itself rudely challenged.

Not saying that America is going to get involved in a major ground offensive that needs tons of artillery, but it's going to start requiring things like the political concessions that made Serbia so troublesome, both more often and more aggressively, as regional or local hegemons flex their political muscles against a declining superpower. Having a large standing peacetime defense industry base mitigates requirements of international cooperation and imports.

It's one of those things that got talked about decades ago but side-stepped in Army After Next, as in no one seemed really to know how to address it so they put their heads in the sand and wished America would be bigger in the future I guess. That fell on its butt and now America is, however glacially, realizing this. Whether it will do enough, or even anything at all, is an open question though.

I recently read an article that some magnets or ball bearings or something in the F-35 are being replaced by US sourced alloys of some variety that do the same job because the US doesn't want to rely on imports, which is good, but the macroeconomic factors of America's industrial decline are still apparent which is problematic. It'll be devoting more and more of its increasingly scarce dual-purpose industrial base to choosing between freighters and airliners or frigates and attack bombers, and I don't think it will be expanding its military purpose industrial base much TBH.

The Monroe Doctrine won't be meaningfully affected by America's decline in imperial heights (at least no one will make a grab for it except South America itself, which America can just browbeat into submission), so maybe America can shift some of its military industrial needs onto Mexico by opening ammunition plants or energetics plants down south or something.
 
Last edited:
Why bother? GMLRS is much better and goes a lot further hence you need to carry less rounds to ensure having a firing unit in range. Of course Raytheon don't make MLRS hence their puffery. Why regurgitate meja spin?
An artillery round no matter if it is rocket assisted or not will ALWAYS BE CHEAPER AND EASIER TO MASS PRODUCE than any artillery rocket...

Excalibur is neither cheap nor mass produced though. No 155mm projectile the USA makes is mass produced by historic use rates.

If WW1 required a million shells a day, WW2 required 100,000, and the current modern era (WW3) requires about 10,000 a day, roughly speaking.

Which means America would probably need to increase production by an order of magnitude, for a decade or so, or two orders of magnitude for maybe a year or two, to seriously cover historic use cases. The last war actually saw something similar happen, where America went into it woefully under-prepared and had to spend a year reorganizing itself, despite starting its rearmament program in the mid-1930's, except America had a tremendous surplus agrarian workers and car factories to convert to ammo plants. This was manageable at the time if not ideal.

It no longer has this, so WYSIWYG and America's ammo industrial base is rather weak.

PGMs like Excalibur have meaningfully managed to reduce the requisite quantity of shells/year from something like 2 million in WW2 to 200,000 these days, I guess but their production rates went from 90,000 to 900? Oof. The Soviets had it right, at least in terms of mass scale peacetime production, but I'm not sure the USSR's relatively prodigious productive capacities were adequate at any point in its history to absorb the ammo consumption for very long in a hypothetical WW3 that was conventional in nature rather than nuclear.

There are truly frightening scales of ammo consumption spoken of in ancient Soviet military studies, with levels greater than even Verdun's mass barrage being considered routine, although granted those were against the Maoist PLA, but still...
And how the Soviets fought, and Russias are fighting and failing, is no way NEAR how the US fights.

Look closer to Korea and Nam where air power and precision arty hits carried the day.

Not Mass Barrages.

Heck even in WW2 the US relided more on on precision mass fires then the massive barrage you thinking of. The biggest issue back then was the fact we had 18 different artillery calibers to make compare to todays three, six if you count the mortars. Like the Army didn't do a massive creeping barrage like the Soviets did. Cause we were accurate enough that we didnt need to.

Even during Nam in Tet when US Arty was changing barrels near weekly due to wear out, it was presice hits of a few dozen shells at most before moving on to the next target. And used a fraction of the shells to get the same effect.

Ukraine manage to literally kneecap the Russias so called artillery advantage with a handful of Himars and few Excalibur rounds to allow the current counter attack around Kharkiv. They doing this with less then half, heard quarter, the amount of guns and shells then the Russias have. Russians were the Mass Artillery masters and they are getting beat by someone a fraction their size in arty.

Thats before you add in the mass air support of the USAF tossing cheap JDAMs in the enemy direction among all the other toys like the SDBs and the Apaches hellfires.

Which brings up the exists of the Precision Guided Kit that turns any shell into a gps guided one. Which is cheaply made as well.

You only do mass hundard gun barrages when you cant be accurate that a few guns will do the trick.

And my friend?

The Army trains to put shells in a 20 meter circle at max 40km range with dumb shells as is, we dont need to do the massive barrage to get a similar effect. A 155mm kill raduis is 10 meters, so 4 will kill everyone in that circle.

Which should tell you something since the soviets train to put their shells in a 40 meter circle. Which means they need at least double the amount to do similar.

Throw in the new PGM shells? Those are like a sniper bullet. Used sparingly to do maximum damage with minimum effort, to be used to target command posts, retrans, vehicle maintenance depots, ammo dumps... Basically 1 Excalibur can change the battery by hitting the right place. Be real hard to use all that artillery when their FDC crew suffering from 155 to the face.

Then you get into the special munitions like Bonus... which is another bloody post

Edit: thinking on it.

This is basically the same argument that people had for the Smart bombs in the 80s and early 90s...

And it turned out, precision out does mass every time.
 
Last edited:
Why bother? GMLRS is much better and goes a lot further hence you need to carry less rounds to ensure having a firing unit in range. Of course Raytheon don't make MLRS hence their puffery. Why regurgitate meja spin?
An artillery round no matter if it is rocket assisted or not will ALWAYS BE CHEAPER AND EASIER TO MASS PRODUCE than any artillery rocket...

Excalibur is neither cheap nor mass produced though. No 155mm projectile the USA makes is mass produced by historic use rates.

If WW1 required a million shells a day, WW2 required 100,000, and the current modern era (WW3) requires about 10,000 a day, roughly speaking.

Which means America would probably need to increase production by an order of magnitude, for a decade or so, or two orders of magnitude for maybe a year or two, to seriously cover historic use cases. The last war actually saw something similar happen, where America went into it woefully under-prepared and had to spend a year reorganizing itself, despite starting its rearmament program in the mid-1930's, except America had a tremendous surplus agrarian workers and car factories to convert to ammo plants. This was manageable at the time if not ideal.

It no longer has this, so WYSIWYG and America's ammo industrial base is rather weak.

PGMs like Excalibur have meaningfully managed to reduce the requisite quantity of shells/year from something like 2 million in WW2 to 200,000 these days, I guess but their production rates went from 90,000 to 900? Oof. The Soviets had it right, at least in terms of mass scale peacetime production, but I'm not sure the USSR's relatively prodigious productive capacities were adequate at any point in its history to absorb the ammo consumption for very long in a hypothetical WW3 that was conventional in nature rather than nuclear.

There are truly frightening scales of ammo consumption spoken of in ancient Soviet military studies, with levels greater than even Verdun's mass barrage being considered routine, although granted those were against the Maoist PLA, but still...
And how the Soviets fought, and Russias are fighting and failing, is no way NEAR how the US fights.

Look closer to Korea and Nam where air power and precision arty hits carried the day.

Two wars where America lost show how America can win wars? What?

The USSR won in Hungary and Czechslovakia because it could mass so much considerable firepower immediately that it overawed the enemy into not reacting. The US won in Desert Storm for the same reason, and it won in Iraq in 2003 because it managed to get the world to commit to a 12 year long siege in the aftermath, thus forcing Iraq to fall further than America did relatively speaking and it won even more impressively.

Naturally, it lost the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq pretty hard, for similar reasons to the USSR, in that it couldn't muster enough firepower to breakthrough to the terrorist camps in neighboring countries and sustain a full-front war against the opponent. A similar problem to Vietnam. Unfortunately, America's novel attempt at having its ally undermine its war effort in Afghanistan, whereas the Soviets merely antagonized Pakistan, did not pay out in the end.

Not Mass Barrages.

I don't think anyone considers "~150-300 shells" to be a "mass barrage" except maybe in journalist anecdotes, but that's about how many Copperheads or Excaliburs you're expending to destroy a battalion's defensive strongpoints of dug-in platoons. Once you account for all major combat systems of the battalion (the vehicles, dismounted platoon machine guns, and ATGWs) that's about 1.5:3 which should be able to account for the overkill of the terminally guided submunitions.

It will let the assaulting mechanized company push through the battalion's defense zone with a covering barrage, which is a more traditional creeping-type, and eats more ammo, but that's all it does: it lets you do more with fewer footmen.

Which means the typical American annual ammo production of ~300 rounds of Excalibur over the past 20 years can defeat about 1-3 battalions or so before going to next year's lot, back about the past 20 years.

So the US Army might be able, assuming it never misses a shot or loses any ammo stores, destroy about 20-60 battalions in a major war before running out of ammunition if it had to do so today. That's assuming it never shot any, either. Let's cut them a break and assume it's closer to 10-40 battalions.

While much better than expending the dumb artillery requirement of about 8,000-12,000 rounds against a dug-in battalion, you still need to expend a hundred million a year on ammo production of that one nature of artillery alone. The US Army would be better if it could make approximately 6,000-12,000 shells/year, roughly about as many to twice as many as it has made of Excaliburs ever produced, and sustain that for roughly a decade or two. It would certainly be in fairer waters in terms of ammo consumption, but this won't happen.

Thats before you get into the special munitions like Bonus...

No, actually, I was assuming the US would be using exclusively SADARM and Excalibur-type munitions in my mental napkin math.

Naturally, if it's not, which it won't, and we assume they're firing cassette munitions or conventional HEF rounds, the requisite number of shells jumps up a couple of orders of magnitude. Of its cheapest munitions, the US Army has something like 250,000-300,000 M1122 shells which are converted ICM shells that are used for training, but they have an explosive filler. It has about half as many M795 projectiles.

If we use only "war stockpiles" the US can fire from the, frankly dramatic but perhaps plausible in a more serious ground war, "70,000 shells a day" we see in Ukraine for about...eh maybe a business week if they're careful at husbanding projectiles and don't lose too many ammo points to drones or long range missiles. If we include the M1122 shells it can go for about three weeks tops.

That's all very generous though. If they were firing like the Red Army with discrete norms, or AFATDS is some kind of ultra techno-god-king AI that overrides the guns and crews through Neuralink implants these days, then it will last about a business week total. The M795s will be gone on Monday and the M1122s will last until Thursday evening or so. Then the soft serve ice cream machine is broken.

Looks like the US Marines aren't actually insane? Of course that's maybe their one good idea along with mass issue of silencers.

Even during Nam in Tet when US Arty was changing barrels near weekly due to wear out, it was presice hits of a few dozen shells at most before moving on to the next target. And used a fraction of the shells to get the same effect.

Yes the US was able to sustain a fight in Vietnam, which is comparable in intensity to Ukraine, because it had tons of WW2 surplus to eat through.

Amusing anecdote time, the US ran extremely low on .50 caliber and small arms ammunition during the 2003 invasion, requiring dipping into that Vietnam era production lot. So embarrassing was it asking Israel and Pakistan to produce ammo for it during the occupations that DOD spent the better part of the last 20 years refurbishing and opening a couple new ammunition plants to supply a few billion more rounds of ammo of all calibers from 12.7mm down to 9mm.

But small arms are only a small part of America's generally dismal ammunition production base.

America went from 300-400 Excaliburs to 900 Excaliburs this year, which will probably last about three or four hours in a Ukraine scale war. Maybe next year they can bump that up to like IDK 12 hours? Of course, Ukraine isn't even what the US Army would consider "mid-intensity", going by loss rates of the forces deployed/day and US's own intelligence estimates.

The point I'm making is that the US should be producing Excaliburs at approximately the rate it's producing dumb artillery shells i.e. 10-30,000/year. Otherwise you should be ponying up production about twice or quadruple as much as the M795s are currently, which based on some funny numbers I found is roughly 35,000/year on average, but it's the US Army so it waffles rapidly between like 20,000 shells and 60,000 shells a year. Not good, but depending on how dour you are that either lasts until lunch or it lasts two weeks of combat.

It just isn't, partly because I doubt it can (there aren't enough workers for the factories anymore) and because, this is rather more disturbing, it thinks it doesn't need to.

Now I'm pretty sure the lead time on these kinds of super fancy Excalibur and Durandal and Joyeuse-type shells is longer than two weeks. Maybe two months if America is lucky, but it's probably probably closer to 6-12 months to get geared up for production after you literally scour the Earth for enough people to man your atelier sized production floor, or longer. Javelin is something like a 24 month lead time, but it's a rocket, and rocket motors take a long time to cure (months), so I'm not terribly surprised by that. I'm willing to give Excalibur the benefit of the doubt and assume the US "merely" requires a year's worth of ammunition in storage to chew through before it starts new ammo.

War reserve stockpiles, if you intend to rely on production, should be at a maximum annual rate of "as high as I can get it" with a floor of "consumption of ammo over = lead time". If you don't, and the Soviets didn't because they expected their factories to be radioactive ash and uranium glass, then it should be "however much ammo we ate in the last war, then double it" I guess. Otherwise, you will run afoul of the logistician's wrath, like Erwin Rommel (his entire career lmfao) and Douglas MacArthur (Philippines Campaign) did, and need to high tail it out of there with your tail between your legs.

Somehow, I doubt the US will have the political grit, or even the industrial capacity, to mount a Solomon's Campaign 2, if it gets cheek clapped out of the SCS or something for want of ammo for its ground troops. Of course, that's what peacetime is for! It's the time you use to prepare for the next big war by making lots of stockpiles of ammo and sitting on them for 30 years.

The US has never experienced this itself, but it also isn't stupid and it can read other languages, as everyone knows the U.S. Congress speaks, reads, and can theoretically respond in any living language yet merely chooses to reply in the most boisterous Americanese it can muster. The DOD likewise can understand any military history and conflict in human civilization in mathematical terms, yet chooses to crib its language from soulless corporate Powerpoints and academic Ivory Towers instead. So it should understand this, at a macroeconomic and military sense, and it should be able to look at present wars and say "yeah that's no bueno we need more shells".

Which it's doing, or at least it appears to be make overtures of doing. It's just put-putting around it instead of taking it seriously, as usual.

Perhaps there's some Big Plan to achieve 10,000 Excaliburs/year by 2030 or something, or maybe ramp up production of HEF shells from 300,000 to 900,000/year, and then sustain that for the next 20 years or something, build up a requisite stockpile of munitions to fight the next Big One with, but it doesn't really seem like it. Seems more like a knee-jerk reaction that will get lost in the noise in about 5 years, if it is lucky.

But who can say, history can be rather funny sometimes. It was rather funny that the USSR prepared zillions of shells and tanks and never got a super world war to use them all, after all. So now its successors are sitting on literal mountains of ammunition and clobbering each other with them. Perhaps it will be funny if America finds itself mid-century merely suffering the least from the XXI's macroeconomic maladies and has no apparent muscular military foes left, like it did in the 1990's, but for much, much longer.

That's not exactly the soundest military planning but it's entirely plausible. I'd prefer the production of a few thousand Exaliburs per year myself than wishing the opponents away.

Basically, America is in the same position in 2022 than it was in 1982: not enough ammo against too many opposed battalions. The absolute numbers have changed, but I imagine the relative exchange rates have actually decreased against America, as Desert Storm had a severely detrimental effect on the American war psyche. At least the DOD had a singular opponent in mind in 1982, after all. PGMs, after all, do not seem to actually alter the capital investments needed as significantly as they alter the absolute production time, series assembly lines, and manpower investments needed to destroy a comparable quantity of battalions on the battlefield.

You might be dropping a fat $1bn per year on a specific singular nature of ammunition, but it's the difference between needing a factory that supports the production of 10,000 rounds/year as opposed to 100,000 rounds/year, really. One factory will be cheaper than the other to run and require fewer employees, which is beneficial to the contractor (potentially higher profit margin) and beneficial to the military (less lead time and less absolute production time). So PGMs are beneficial for demographically declining/sub-replacement fertility societies, because they require absolutely fewer workers, making absolutely fewer items to be transported between locations, to achieve similar effects as an order of magnitude greater quantity of conventional munitions.

The relative investment is probably similar though, except you're a demographically declining society with birthrates asymptotically approaching zero, so eventually the dumb munitions will become too much weight to bear and become inefficient. My personal opinion is that America passed this point sometime in the nineties and the defense industrial base just hasn't realized it yet, given it's still producing huge quantities of dumb shells.

The next step from PGMs is tactical nuclear weapons, which continue the trend of "equal investment --> order of magnitude decrease in tangible/real consumption," being an order of magnitude better than PGMs, which are an order of magnitude better than conventional munitions. Of course America gave up tactical nukes a long time ago for field artillery and doesn't seem too keen on giving lieutenants and staff sergeants the ability to call down a couple kilotons on a suspected motor rifle platoon, as was done in the Pentomic Division, but it probably should to gear up for the 2050s demographic squeeze.

I could see the PRC giving its lieutenants nuclear fire authority long before the DOD though, and the PRC won't be much different than the USA in 2050, at least in terms of median age and population pyramid, where it will absolutely be better off than America's closest regional (and some global) allies; but I imagine it will just use robots or something instead.
 
Last edited:
There are truly frightening scales of ammo consumption spoken of in ancient Soviet military studies, with levels greater than even Verdun's mass barrage being considered routine, although granted those were against the Maoist PLA, but still...
Have you got any English-language sources for this? PM if you do (don't want to derail the thread anymore than it already is), it would be an interesting read.
 

ByAnthony Capaccio and Roxana Tiron
September 8, 2022 at 11:01 AM GMT+7Updated onSeptember 8, 2022 at 11:18 PM GMT+7

The Defense Department will spend $92 million in congressionally approved supplemental funds “for procurement of replacement M982 Excalibur munitions transferred to Ukraine in support of the international effort to counter Russian aggression,” according to a budget document last month that wasn’t previously disclosed.

“The $92 million addition to Excalibur more than doubles the program’s budget, adding about 900 projectiles in fiscal 2022,” up from $56.7 million that Congress approved this fiscal year, according to Mark Cancian, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies who’s monitoring Ukraine-related spending. The $56.7 million is to purchase 374 of the sophisticated, GPS-jam-proof rounds, according to Army budget documents.

“This also confirms what had long been suspected, that the United States is providing this advanced weapon to Ukraine,” Cancian said. Each round currently cost from $98,700 to $106,400 in fiscal 2021 and 2022 dollars depending on the quantities purchased, according to Army budget documents.
 
There are truly frightening scales of ammo consumption spoken of in ancient Soviet military studies, with levels greater than even Verdun's mass barrage being considered routine, although granted those were against the Maoist PLA, but still...
Have you got any English-language sources for this? PM if you do (don't want to derail the thread anymore than it already is), it would be an interesting read.

No. I'm not even sure if the documents are still online myself.

I would have to ask the friend who found them on the Runet ages ago to give me the gist again (or go digging through chat archive), but it was something like the six armies in Germany needing a million or two rounds per day, per army, based on extrapolation from a Colonel's writings in the 1970's of the kinds of munitions a Soviet ground force would need, itself based on Congressional minutes of ammo consumption of US ground troops in Korea managing a mere stalemate against the PLA, or Main Intelligence estimates of PLA force size, or something to that effect.

I guess if the USSR had to actually fight and assumed that amount of ammo consumption (it didn't, but it shows how the artillery consumption is calculated) it would be one of those "five days that shook the world," quite literally, even without the Domesday level of conventional ammo consumption.

Now, NATO wasn't the PLA, and it didn't intend to do mass light infantry attacks on mechanized troops, so the extrapolation is a bit of an awkward square peg-triangle hole thing. However, it did come from some actual paper napkin math of a guy looking at the possibility of the Red Army needing to mulch a Chinese attack, and is probably just Disco Age musing of a artillery officer on what would happen if the Border Wars had to be fought without nuclear weapons (they would of course be fought with nuclear weapons, which renders it a bit moot). Kind of like the man-eating supersonic shovel plane that was supposed to mulch entire Chinese divisions just by passing over them.

Not the most amount of shells ever thrown in anger but it was a "dang that's a lot for dudes with T-62s and BMPs," moment. If I can get a copy of the thing I'll send it to you.
 
Last edited:
Why bother? GMLRS is much better and goes a lot further hence you need to carry less rounds to ensure having a firing unit in range. Of course Raytheon don't make MLRS hence their puffery. Why regurgitate meja spin?
An artillery round no matter if it is rocket assisted or not will ALWAYS BE CHEAPER AND EASIER TO MASS PRODUCE than any artillery rocket...
A useful comparison would have to include the relative cost, flexibility and mobility of the launcher/gun and I doubt that the answer is as clear as you contend.
 
A rocket assisted gun round is probably about as costly, at least in time which is the actual limit being discussed, to produce as a normal rocket, for somewhat obvious reasons. I don't think two solid fuel motors of similar diameter are going to cure much faster than each other with conventional manufacturing methods. You are not getting shells, or 6" artillery rockets, much faster than a couple of weeks, clearly.

That said based on current trends in manufacturing it's likely that an artillery rocket will win the race in the short term, though. 3D printing for rocket fuels is a solved problem, with the main issue being scaling, although I think that the USAF is interested in printing motors for AIM-120s or something. This can cut the manufacturing time from "a fortnight" to "hours". 3D printing high explosive might be a tad tougher though it's probably already been done.

The benefits of being able to make far more complex shapes, or even stacked or layered shapes, of 3D printing vice a conventional mandrel will probably be realized more for rockets than for RA shells. Much like how Shrike had half a dozen different radar guidance sections for different radar bands, we might see half a dozen different AMRAAM motors for different engagement profiles and target sets. I suspect the RAP will go inevitably extinct in the coming decades though. The losses in accuracy inherent in the RAP, and inability to compete with fully guided, gliding, or ram-rocket shells, will make them a bit terrible.

Artillery rockets will always be around though because they carry the most mass.
 
Last edited:
I was asked whether GPS jamming spells the end for Excalibur as it seems the Russians are doing it in Ukraine. Found this on youtube but it didn't really give answers.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xfeFicKo94
(sorry about the plug for the sponsors in the middle of it).
No it doesn't, cause the Excalibur and PGK both have UNJAMMABLE INS back ups. Which still does sub 15 meter hits easily. Which will still mission kill a tank.

That and newerpost 2015 models have a Home On Jammer model that depending on the setting automatically switch from its inputted target to the Jammer once that detected.

And even if you go with the highest end cost, the PGK is still cheaper then a Gps jammer.

Then the newest post 2020 Excalibur have Laser seekers.

And they are testing a millimeters wave radar one that just needs a 4 digit grid square and it can seek out find and kill its target like a cheap ass terminator...
 

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom