Lethal Touch

Atul Chandra

It is now more than three decades since the US army first used laser-guided artillery munitions in combat. This was during the 1991 Gulf War, when the US army used Copperhead artillery rounds, which were the first cannon-fired smart munitions of their kind. These rounds were used to destroy observation towers being used to direct the planting of land mines around allied positions.

The use of such smart munitions brought about the first major change in how artillery was used in over 500 years. Until then the cannon was largely pointed towards the target and in the centuries that followed, such weapons offered more power and longer range but rarely greater accuracy.

It was the erstwhile American defence firm, Martin Marietta which developed the world’s first cannon-launched guided projectile, nicknamed the Copperhead in 1975. Developing such laser-guided artillery munitions was challenging to say the least, the Copperhead artillery shell featured sensitive electronics that had to be hardened to withstand the force of being blasted out of a cannon, a jolt approximately 8,000 times the force of gravity.

Smart Shell

Over the preceding decades, more advanced versions of precision artillery shells have been inducted into every modern military. But they are an expensive addition to the military inventory, both in terms of procurement and storage and maintenance.

Such munitions can quickly become unaffordable as evidenced by the Lockheed Martin-developed 155mm precision round, dubbed the Long-Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP), which was designed for the US Marine Corps and would have revolutionised naval firepower. The LRLAP would have the ability to hit land targets from up to 74 nm away. The LRLAP system featured munitions guided by a Global Positioning System (GPS) and Inertial Navigation System (INS) and at that time it was the most accurate and longest-range guided projectile in US naval history.

The LRLAP was to be fired from the US Navy’s Zumwalt Class warship’s 155mm Advanced Gun Systems. But when the number of warships to be procured was cut to only three, the cost of an individual LRLAP round shot up to nearly a million dollars per round. In comparison, a Tomahawk land attack missile with a range of 1,000 nautical miles also cost approximately USD 1 million (as per 2016 data). The LRLAP programme was cancelled in 2016.

Despite programme failures such as the US LRLAP, the US has proceeded with other Terminally Guided Munition (TGM) programmes such as the Excalibur, which is the US Army’s next-generation cannon artillery precision munition and manufactured by