Weapons

Army Building 1,000-Mile Supergun

AUSA: Why is the Army confident it can build a Strategic Long-Range Cannon to shoot with precision more than one thousand miles? Because the superweapon will be essentially supersizing proven technologies found in the existing 155 mm howitzer and rocket-boosted artillery shells from the 1980s.

“I don’t want to oversimplify, (but) it’s a bigger one of those,” Col. John Rafferty told reporters here. “We’re scaling up things that we’re already doing.”

Soon to be a one-star general, Rafferty is the Army’s modernization director for Long-Range Strategic Fires, the service’s top priority, which covers everything from revolutionary hypersonic missiles to longer cannon barrels for the venerable 155mm. While the Strategic Long-Range Cannon — SLRC, pronounced (unfortunately) “Slorc” — will hit targets at ranges comparable to the bleeding-edge hypersonics, Rafferty emphasized the cannon is built on proven principles, just bigger.

How much bigger are we talking about? Will it just look like a scaled-up M109 Paladin howitzer, I asked, or more like a World War II railroad cannon, or even Saddam Hussein’s infamous never-finished “supergun“?