Desert drills help fine-tune army's light artillery system.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

The Army and Marine Corps new lightweight artillery platform--scheduled to enter low-rate production in early 2003--could be ready for deployment within a few years. But despite an overall successful testing of the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, soldiers are still concerned about some software bugs.

Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, the contractor for HIMARS, is expecting an order of 34 launchers from the Army and two from the Marine Corps, said Becky Withrow, business development director.

The company is currently working under a $102 million engineering and manufacturing development contract for eight launchers--six for the Army and two for the Marine Corps. The company recently delivered the two Marine launchers.

During a war-fighting experiment this summer called Millennium Challenge, the Army employed in live combat exercises at Fort Irwin, Calif., three HIMARS prototypes that have been undergoing testing at Fort Bragg, N.C. for the past two and a half years. Future production systems will include improvements, based on feedback from soldiers who tested the prototypes, Withrow said.

HIMARS is a C-130 transportable, early-entry, artillery platform that can launch the entire family of Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) and Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) munitions with a range of eight to 300 km. The HIMARS is designed to engage and defeat tube and rock-et artillery, air defense concentrations, trucks, light-armor and personnel carriers.

"The role of the HIMARS is to give us the capability to actually deploy with the initial entry forces," said Capt. Hurley Shields, the commander of battery 327. "It gives the commander on the ground a deep strike capability, which wasn't there before with forward MLRS, because it took a long time to actually get follow-on forces back in country.

Hurley's unit was making last minute preparations for a mission rehearsal late at night when they had to suppress the enemy's air defense artillery systems so that friendly attack helicopters would have the freedom to maneuver in the air space.

The HIMARS is built on a 5-ton truck chassis and the cab is a modified version of the basic truck steel cab used in the Army's family of medium tactical vehicles (FMTV). The cab was customized, to protect HIMARS crews from shrapnel, fumes and other hazards that come with launch operations.

The HIMARS consists of a carrier, a fire control system that computes all fire mission data and a...