According to Breaking Defense, the program was launched after the Army halted internal development of the Extended Range Cannon Artillery system and shifted toward evaluating existing self-propelled howitzers in 2024. The report noted that an official list of competitors has not yet been released.
However, several companies are known to be pursuing the program. These include South Korea’s Hanwha, Germany’s Rheinmetall, U.S.-based Elbit America, and a joint offering from Leonardo DRS and European land systems group KNDS.
Russia’s army has always been artillery centric.
These things are just big fat targets if the enemy has enough drones like Iran.
Then why does Ukraine produce ~40 155mm bohdanas a month?
Why are you so confident in being wrong? Do you actually know anything about war or are you just spitballing because you have read some scifi books with drone swarms in them?
This is actually pretty serious and this armchair opinion that people repeat thoughtlessly influences actual policy by muddying the water of public understanding and it puts actual human beings in danger.
I know the army keeps telling congress they don’t need howitzers, but the defense contractors keep buying congressmen to push them.
Sure smells like corruption.
No what smells like corruption is buying into delusional thinking about drones made by a bunch of techbro ai companies juicing the whole market so that the common narratives are utterly unconnected to reality and portray drones as a “cheaper” silver bullet to all of war rather than a transformative but complimentary new element of Close Air Support… when age-old dependable mature technology already exists that is no less relevant than ever…
This is marketing bullshit, artillery is here to stay drones just enhance artillery they don’t make it irrelevant not in the least.
The army may not want more howitzers under certain conditions, that doesn’t mean the army does not want howitzers full stop. The army has piles and piles and piles of howitzers for a reason.