While the Army and Marines are both using the Excalibur 155mm precision guided extended range artillery shell in Afghanistan and, Raytheon [RTN] is working on qualifying the 1b variant in the United States.
“We’re in the middle of qualification of the 1b,” said David Brockway, business development manager for Excalibur at Raytheon. “We’re increasing reliability and reducing costs.”
Qualifying the round for safety and performance is mostly done at Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz. The first testing series involves safety, and the 1b has passed that, he said.
“It’s performing very well with miss distances averaging two-to-two-and-a-half meters at extended range,” Brockway said.
Now the 1b is doing performance testing which should conclude toward the end of the month, where testers accelerate the life of the round. “You shake it, drop it, heat it up” and emulate different environments, he said.
It’s essentially highly accelerated life testing, putting the round into environments it would find over the expected 20 years of its life. The round is fired at short range, long range and off-axis.
Brockway said once qualifications are complete, the 1b is scheduled for a November Milestone C acquisition decision, followed potentially in December by a first 1b production contract.
While the Excalibur 1b variant is moving forward, the Raytheon and government team is considering the future.
“There’s an opportunity to take Excalibur and put a digital (semi-active laser) SAL in,” Brockway said. The advantage here is if the battlefield is moving, it would be possible to adjust the aimpoint of the round in the terminal part of the trajectory, or using SAL, to reduce the miss-distance by less than a foot rather than four meters.
Raytheon is investing in a digital SAL, leveraging its work with 2.75 laser guided rockets and Paveway laser guided bomb, for example, he said.
“We hope to demonstrate by this time next year, an Excalibur SAL flight,” Brockway said. There is no requirement in the United States, but there are some international customers interested in the capability.
Additionally, as GPS weapons proliferate, potential adversaries are investing in technologies to jam those GPS signals. Excalibur has one of the best anti-jam GPS systems, he said.
“There’s an emerging requirement to do home-on-jam,” he said. “By the end of the year, Raytheon expects to have lab demonstrations of performance” that would show Excalibur can autonomously engage and take jammers off the battlefield. “Excalibur has a lot of maneuverability, and ability to attack a moving target,” he said.