The U.S. Army’s Big Artillery Guns Will Try to Shoot Down Missiles
 

The U.S. Army’s Big Artillery Guns Will Try to Shoot Down Missiles
By Kyle Mizokami - Jan 30, 2018
RE: https://www.popularmechanics.com/mil...navy-missiles/

Faced with a growing number of missile threats, the Pentagon is looking to the U.S. Army’s field artillery to shoot down those incoming threats. An innovative system called the Hyper Velocity Projectile would allow the Army’s heavy howitzers and the Navy’s deck guns to fire projectiles that can down incoming ballistic missiles.

The U.S. military has a two-sided missile problem. America’s potential adversaries field large numbers of ballistic missiles, such as the Chinese DF-21, Russian Iskander-M, and the North Korean Nodong, all of which are a serious threat to both ground and sea-based U.S. forces. Iskander missiles could attack U.S. Army formations in wartime, devastating headquarters and supply units, while the DF-21 is a threat to U.S. aircraft carriers and other large ships.

The Pentagon has defenses to counter these weapons, but they are expensive. The American THAAD, Standard, and Patriot PAC-3 MSE missiles can defend U.S. forces on the ground and at sea, but cost upwards of $2 million each. They're often more expensive than the missiles they are designed to shoot down. Besides, no interceptor has a 100 percent reliability rate, forcing defending U.S. forces to allocate several of them per target. A single missile intercept gets very expensive very fast.

Help is now coming from an unlikely place. The U.S. Army’s M109A6 Paladin and M777 155-millimeter howitzers are designed to lob high explosive, smoke, and other projectiles up to 18 miles. Someone in the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office took a look at those howitzers and decided they would make great vehicles for a Hyper Velocity Projectile (HVP). Traveling at 5,600 miles an hour, the projectiles could intercept incoming ballistic missile warheads at a projected $86,000 per shot.

By itself, each HVP would have a much lower kill probability. However, howitzers can fire several rounds in quick succession, and a typical six-to-eight-gun field artillery battery could fire up to two dozen rounds in 15 seconds. Even better, the U.S. Army already fields hundreds of howitzers. Field artillery typically stations itself a short distance behind the battlefield, a good shortstop position to intercept enemy missiles attacking friendly forces either on the front line or far to the rear.

HVP could become a Navy program as well. Each U.S. Navy cruiser and destroyer has a 5-inch (127-millimeter) gun that could become a HVP platform. The Navy is hunting for a round to replace the canceled long range land attack projectile designed for the Zumwalt-class destroyer’s 155-millimeter Advanced Gun System. Although HVP won’t have the range of the cancelled round, it will be more versatile.

The Strategic Capabilities Office will test the HVP within the year.