The US Army is exploring the rapid development of a long-range strategic cannon that can reach out and destroy a target at a range of up to 1,000 nautical miles
While militarys are competing in the field of hyper-sonic missiles that can travel in excess of 1,000 miles, the US Army is also looking at supersizing existing technology to reach comparable distances.
That’s what Colonel John Rafferty told reporters at an annual US military conference in Washington this week, saying that a new long-range cannon in development will be able to shoot at precision more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres), a range comparable to Pentagon’s existing arsenal of Tomahawk cruise missiles.
According to Rafferty, whose comments were reported by Breaking Defence, the new weapon is in essence based on 155mm howitzer and rocket-boosted artillery shells from the 1980s.
“I don’t want to oversimplify, [but] it’s a bigger one of those,” he said. “We’re scaling up things that we’re already doing.”
The strategic long-range cannon (SLRC), or “slorc,” is a priority because US field artillery is “out-ranged and outgunned,” as former US national security adviser H R McMaster put it to lawmakers in 2016.
Development of long-range precision fires technology is the Army's number one modernisation priority. In October, the service unveiled LRPF, along with its five other modernisation priorities -- the next-generation combat vehicle, future vertical lift, a mobile network, air and missile defence, and soldier lethality -- as part of a plan to overhaul modernisation and build a future force.
The Paladin M109A7 next-generation artillery system being manufactured by BAE Systems is a significant upgrade to the combat-proven M109A6 Paladin cannon artillery system.
"From a tactical fires perspective, we are going through basically a two-step upgrade to our current Paladin, going to the M109A7, which is a new chassis," Murray said. "The next step is coming very quickly. We call it the extended-range cannon artillery. ... We have already shot a ... round out of that tube and more than doubled the range of our current artillery. And the goal is to get that out even further."
Rafferty is the director of the army’s Long Range Precision Fires team, which is separate from a multi-service program still in the process of being created that would tackle the development of hypersonic missiles. The completion date for the SLRC has not yet been announced.