Fire away: army in a rush to produce new cannon.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: IN FOCUS: DEFENSE AND TECHNOLOGY NEWS

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- The Future Combat Systems program wants to give the Army a gift on its 233rd birthday this year: a working prototype for its nonline-of-sight cannon.

The often maligned FCS program plans to unveil the first functioning 155 mm howitzer wedded onto a common chassis June 14 at the service's birthday ball in Washington, D.C.

Four additional vehicles will be delivered by the end of this year, said Mark Signorelli, NLOS-C program manager at lead contractor BAE Systems.

BAE announced last year it will build a 150,000 square-foot production facility for the NLOS-C in Elgin, Okla., which is scheduled to open in early 2009.

The cannon is the vanguard in a series of eight vehicles that will be placed on a common FCS chassis. Program managers have said that the cannon will provide lessons on how to meld the other systems with the vehicles, which include a nonline-of-sight mortar, a mounted combat system, and platforms designed to carry infantry, perform reconnaissance and surveillance, maintenance, medical missions, and command and control operations.

"We're going to be way out in front of the rest of the FCS program in terms of production," Signorelli told National Defense. Plans call for 18 cannons to be produced from 2010 to 2012. FCS officials said the goal is to roll out other technologies in the next several years, but most of the larger vehicles will probably not be fielded until the middle of the next decade.

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Part of the reason for the cannon's relatively fast production schedule is its unique status in the program.

The cannon is seen as the follow-on to the Crusader mobile artillery program, which was cancelled in 2002 after the Army sunk $2 billion into the project. The service still needed a modem version of the 1960s-era Paladin self-propelled howitzer, which is still in use today. Congress has a separate funding line for the cannon portion of the NLOS-C system, but the common chassis comes out of the FCS budget.

While the cannon enjoys solid backing from its congressional sponsors--particularly the Oklahoma delegation--the Army has been forced to play defense for the rest of FCS on Capitol Hill during every budget cycle dating back to 2004. About $1 billion has been slashed from its budget through the 2008 cycle. Four of its unmanned systems have been eliminated altogether due to budget constraints.

Some members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office have pointed to several...