U.S. Army tests artillery shell that hunts moving tanks

The U.S. Army fired three prototype tank-killing artillery shells at a tank target in the Arizona desert at Yuma Proving Ground. The Army used the tests to check a new seeker that builds an image of the target area and steers the 155 mm round into an armored vehicle, including one that has moved since the shell was fired. The rounds belong to the XM1180 Cannon-Delivered Area Effects Munition (C-DAEM) Armor program. They were launched from a 39-caliber cannon in different configurations, so the team could evaluate the seeker’s performance on each shot. Yuma Test Center personnel ran the firings together with Project Manager Combat Ammunition Systems, the U.S. Army’s DEVCOM Armaments Center at Picatinny Arsenal and Raytheon, which builds the GPS-guided M982 Excalibur shell that the XM1180 is based on. Col. Alicia Johnson, who heads the ammunition program office, traveled to Yuma with her leadership team to watch the tests. They were the second phase of a series of guided test vehicle firings meant to prove the shell can find targets on its own. Lovjoat Singh, a test and evaluation engineer at DEVCOM Armaments Center who planned and ran the firings, explained the two steps of the test. “It will be an open loop test then following a closed loop test. Open-loop test means the seeker is going to be seeking a target but not actually acting upon it. Then closed loop is actually using the seeker to guide to a target,” said Singh. The seeker gives the XM1180 a different job from the Excalibur, which flies to a fixed GPS coordinate and was never designed to hit a vehicle on the move. The new shell keeps much of the Excalibur’s design but swaps the payload for an armor-piercing warhead and adds the terminal seeker. As a result, an artillery battery tens of kilometers from the front can attack tanks and armored vehicles that a forward observer can no longer pin to a single grid point. “It’s a cool new technology that basically creates (an) image of the target area and it’s able to find the target in that area. It should be able to use the image to guide to target,” said Casey Scharenbroich, an evaluator with the U.S. Army Operational Evaluation Command who was on site to judge how mature the technology has become. “It would be a huge advantage on the battlefield for commanders, allowing them to engage targets that have moved or are on the move with this munition,” Scharenbroich said. The Army also expects the seeker to reduce collateral damage, because the shell guides onto a specific vehicle instead of saturating an area. That is the main difference from cluster rounds such as the Cold War-era DPICM, which scatter dozens of bomblets and leave unexploded ordnance across the battlefield. The XM1180 program dates to 2018. The Army fired its first guided test vehicle at Yuma in February 2024, when the shell identified a target and handed guidance over to its seeker, and the program reached Technology Readiness Level 6 ahead of schedule. Army officials have since said they want future rounds to share data with one another, so that several shells fired at a column of vehicles do not all strike the same tank. The seeker is now headed for a second, newer program. Yuma test officer Ashley Lochetto said the next steps are testing the seeker without satellite navigation and fitting it to the XM1230 Extended Range Artillery Projectile. “Our intent is to conduct GPS denied testing of the (seeker) along with integrating it into the XM1230 Extended Range Artillery Projectile,” said Lochetto. The Extended Range Artillery Projectile effort is the U.S. Army’s push for a maneuvering 155 mm shell with deployable wings that can strike moving targets such as self-propelled howitzers, rocket launchers, infantry fighting vehicles and tanks beyond 65 km (40 miles) without a rocket motor. General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems joined General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems and BAE Systems on the program in June. The Army is aiming for low-rate production in fiscal 2029 and initial operational capability in fiscal 2030. Separately, the service is pursuing a new rocket-assisted 155 mm projectile for the M109 and M777 howitzers. The C-DAEM Armor guided test vehicle series will continue through fiscal 2027. The first XM1230 firings with the new seeker are scheduled at Yuma Test Center within the next few months.