 |
| M109A7 (Wiki Info - Image: Wiki Commons) |
The M109A7 will be the U.S. Army’s first new artillery piece in twenty years.
This Thursday, the United States Army will receive a new artillery vehicle, the M109A7 PIM or Paladin Integrated Management, a 155mm self-propelled howitzer.
With the previous cancellations of the two bottom-up next generation self-propelled howitzer programs – the XM 2001 Crusader and XM1203 Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon – the M109A7 will be the U.S. Army’s first new artillery piece in twenty years. The M109A7 constitutes a, ”new approach to acquisition, in which expensive, ambitious, all-new designs give way to incremental but still substantial changes to existing platforms,”according to Sydney Freedberg over at Breaking Defense.
From the outside, the M109A7 PIM does not look different from its predecessor the M109A6, or in fact the original M109 self-propelled gun first introduced in the 1960s. However, as Freedberg notes : “In fact, PIM is more like surgically transplanting someone’s head onto a new body: It takes the old gun turret and installs it on an all-new chassis.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat