The Army has officially ended development of its Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) future howitzer system and is pivoting to a new approach that will look to consider industry’s existing capabilities, with plans to assess potential offerings this summer.
Army officials told reporters during the service’s rollout of its fiscal year 2025 budget request that the decision to end ERCA was informed by its “exhaustive” tactical fires study, which also reaffirmed a need to continue pursuing the long-range artillery requirement.
“We placed a lot of bets when we started all of these modernization priorities. And the vast preponderance of them have gone very, very well and exceeded our expectations, but some have not,” Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo said on Monday during a briefing on the budget request. “And so the development of the prototypes for the ERCA capability was one example where we’ve based a number of different technical challenges and engineering issues. So we are now going to pivot and you’ll see that reflected in the FY ’25 submission.”
The ERCA development effort to date had focused around integrating an Army-developed 58-caliber, 30-foot gun tube on BAE Systems’ M109A7 self-propelled howitzer chassis with an aim to develop a system capable of hitting targets out to 70 kilometers at a rate of six to 10 rounds per minute.
Army officials had previously discussed engineering challenges with the ERCA development effort, to include excessive wear on the gun tube, which had delayed the planned timeline for the program.
The Army’s $185.9 billion FY ‘25 budget request includes $55 million in research and development funds for testing and evaluating potential solutions under the new post-ERCA effort (Defense Daily, March 11).
Camarillo told reporters the new effort will look to assess more mature, existing systems from both domestic and international firms, and will begin with an industry day on April 3.
“We’re going to assess what non-developmental capabilities exist out there that might achieve similar amounts of range in terms of our long range fires, and then we’ll conduct some more formal assessments of capabilities and ultimately hope to do a down select of something more non-developmental in the near term,” he said on Monday.
Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, told reporters in a briefing ahead of the budget rollout, that a forthcoming Request for Information to industry will seek to gather feedback on the service’s new approach.
“But we will be asking for systems we can evaluate that are the whole thing. So, platform, weapon, ammunition. So, the whole system is what we would like to evaluate later this summer to do our own evaluation of maturity of the systems, because there’s things people say and then we need to actually do testing to make sure it’s true,” Bush said.