FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD
I
f the movie, “Avengers: Infinity Wars” has taught us anything, it’s that—at least for comic book heroes—defeat- ing an apparently superior army requires better technology. While the United States Army may not have the benefit of
an impenetrable energy field that spans the horizon or a magical hammer of the god of thunder, it does have 155 mm cannon artil- lery weapons that rain down destruction like lightning from the sky. Cannon artillery, also known as the “king of battle,” deliv- ers lethal effects to shape the maneuver commander’s fight and to change the enemy’s behavior.
As the battlefield that the Army faces becomes revolutionized with easily accessible electronics applied in new ways, Army modern- ization must rapidly develop new technology for ammunition to enable the Army to expand its area of effects with increased lethal- ity. Te pace of commercial technology forces new ammunition to deliver specialized effects on target, such as armor-piercing or air-burst capabilities. As the Army leans forward to execute multi- domain operations as part of a joint force, acquisition personnel, engineers and software developers must collaborate to deliver better 155 mm ammunition. In the future, the Army’s cannon artillery ammunition must defeat the enemy’s strategic long-range systems and influence the battle from greater distances.
NEXT GENERATION AREA EFFECTS Cannon-Delivered Area Effects Munitions (C-DAEM) is an Acquisition Category II development program designed to replace cannon-delivered cluster munitions with improved effectiveness to defeat current and future threats. C-DAEM will replace cluster munitions, which separate in the air into several bombs. It will enable the maneuver commander to defeat high-priority targets with a high degree of precision at extended ranges, a new capa- bility for 155 mm artillery systems.
Te warfighter needs to immediately change the behavior of high- priority targets by either defeating them or eliminating the threat. Te most effective way to achieve success is to fire less ammu- nition and achieve more direct hits: ammunition that includes precision technology allows artillery weapons to quickly elimi- nate enemy threats from great distances. Tis crucial capability enables the maneuver commander to complete more beneficial missions. Te Product Manager for Precision Attack Cannon Munition (PACM) under the Joint Program Executive Office for Armaments and Ammunition (JPEO A&A) used an original process to competitively select a game changer that will position PACM to rapidly deliver a long-range precision-kill solution to the warfighter.
Te process began at an industry day, where the C-DAEM team clearly identified the program ambitions, emphasizing the desire to expedite the advancement of emerging technologies.
Industry partners recommended that the government speed up the design process by relying on iterative development, or the art of using established engineering best practices to build upon lessons learned in earlier designs. Iterative development leverages model- ing and simulation in place of singular, grand, system-focused test events. Tis allows the more informative component-focused tests to drive design decisions.
In order to tie iterative development into the selection process, the government implemented a creative means of scoring the competition by organizing its program desires into a modeling and simulation tool called the “objectives hierarchy.” Tere are lots of ways to collect and organize technical data for a compre- hensive evaluation, but it took creativity to implement a tool that assigned value to the facts and figures based on operational utility.
BIG BOOM
The battlefield has become revolutionized with accessible electronics applied in new ways, and the Army needs to develop new ammunition technology—fast. (Photo by Maj. Joseph Bush, 41st Field Artillery Brigade)
As the name suggests, the objectives hierarchy is simply a list of program intentions, organized into groups to allow the team to assign ranking and importance. Many of the objectives were tech- nical metrics derived from real-world applications of the desired
16 Army AL&T Magazine Spring 2022
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