The U.S. Army Has A New Weapon to Fight the Next Big Land War (Think Russia or China)
The last time the Army qualified a new ground, direct-fire weapons system was when the M256 cannon was integrated on the M1 Abrams tank in the 1980s, service officials said.
Army weapons developers tell Warrior that collaboration with industry and cost-conscious acquisition practices wound up saving more than $20 million in the Stryker 30mm lethality program.
This cost savings, Army officials said, allowed the service to start a second upgrade program for remote weapon station improvements that give greater flexibility to employ currently assigned weapons. Specifically, the second upgrade phase includes the integration of a Raytheon-built Javelin, with upgraded optics, onto the current Remote Weapons System.
The Javelin upgrade included the integration of under-armor Javelin missile launch systems, giving commanders another option to deploy the anti-tank missile or even more of them at the same time.
Overall, Army weapons developers are looking to harvest key insights from the current effort and are already looking far beyond equipping Stryker units in Europe toward a larger-scale fleet-wide upgrade.
This first appeared in Scout Warrior here.