In five to seven years, the U.S. Army intends to deploy a new tank ...

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The Army has been trying to improve the accuracy and lethality ofartillery in urban areas.
Officials are test-firing a South African 105mm artillery shellbuilt to kill with tungsten balls. Called Pre-Formed Fragment (PFF)technology, the round is meant for lighter units and infantrybrigade combat teams, said U.S. Army Col. Ole Knudson, projectmanager for combat ammunition systems, artillery, mortar andammunition at Picatinny.
The Army has not yet decided whether to buy the PFF round.
"This would provide lethality. We've been working on qualifyingthis design. We are now faced with some cost-benefit analysis,"Knudson said.
In the past year, the Army has improved the accuracy of 155mmshells with Modular Artillery Charge Systems (MACS), a propellantmade by ATK and General Dynamics Canada. MACS reduces the variationin muzzle velocity from round to round, usually the biggest causeof inaccuracy, Knudson said.
For instance, if the muzzle velocity of artillery rounds leavingthe cannon or howitzer varies by as much as five meters per secondbetween rounds, it can diminish accuracy, he said.
At the same time, the advent of GPS-guided precision artillery hasallowed the Army to fire 155mm shells in urban,counterinsurgency-type missions previously impossible withconventional artillery.
Excalibur, a $100,000-plus per-round GPS-guided artillery shellthat can fly 30 kilometers and land within five meters of itstarget, debuted in Iraq and Afghanis-tan last year.
"Excalibur has a small warhead, so it can be used in even tightersituations, such as between buildings," Knudson said.
The round's success has led the Army to seek an Excalibur 1B rounddesigned to cost less, fly 25 percent farther and be more precise.ATK, BAE-Lockheed and Raytheon have entered the competition.
"Excalibur 1A will be a golden round, meaning they will have to becareful about using them. The primary focus is to make a highlyaffordable Excalibur that has more if not all of the things of thefirst Excalibur," said Mike McCann, vice president of ATK'sadvanced weapon division.
The Army and ATK are also test firing the GPS-guided PrecisionGuidance Kit (PGK), which can turn a standard 155mm round into aprecision weapon.
"The program is tracking an aggressive schedule. We have completedtactical design and started bench testing," McCann said. "It hasGPS guidance such that you are able to take a round that would havea 300-meter CEP [circular error probable] and bring it down to abaseline requirement of 50 to 30 meters."
At roughly $5,000 per round, PGK is cheaper but less precise thanExcalibur.
The PGK rounds are designed with a command safe-and-arm device toprevent the round from exploding if it is not near the intendedtarget.
"The PGK round will decide that it is going to land within the150-meter circle within its planned impact area," McCann said."Then, it will consciously arm the fuze and fire an electricalcharge into a small amount of explosive. That little charge spins arotor which aligns the explosive chain. Only when that last onespins into place will the explosion take place. If for some reasonthere is high wind and the system is not able to counteract it, theround becomes a slug of metal."
The safe-and-arm device helps reduce collateral damage in urban orpopulated areas, McCann said.
Also, PGK can be set to explode at a certain "height of burst" orproximity to the target.
"Ultimately, PGK will have a point-detonate function and a delayfunction. If you want to penetrate a building, you would put it ona delay mode," McCann said.
The Army plans to purchase 3,000 PGK rounds by April 2009 androughly 10,000 a year after that.
ATK is starting to develop a PGK variant for the 105mm weapons usedby faster-moving infantry brigade combat teams. ATK successfullytest-fired a precision-guided 105mm PGK round at Yuma ProvingGround, Ariz., on Aug. 11. The round is 99 percent common with the155mm PGK, according to an ATK press release.
"Simulation and analysis that has been done in some early labtesting shows the PGK round is highly adaptable to the 105mm," saidJack Cronin, president of ATK Mission Systems.
"The 105mm has a shorter fuze so it will require tighter packing,"he said.