The US Army has prioritised the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement (CDTE) weapon as its "number one materiel solution to mitigate a critical capability gap" for dismounted soldiers in combat, and is officially kicking off the programme in its fiscal year (FY) 2017 budget request.
Defeating defilade targets at 35-500 m is a crucial requirement for dismounted troops, as squad-sized elements have found firefights too often become stalemates once each side hides behind structures. The XM25 is designed to be a lightweight, squad-carried means of attacking defilade personnel without air support or fires support.
Accordingly, the army has requested USD9.764 million in FY 2017 for the programme and hopes for USD14.852 million in FY 2018, USD24.930 million in FY 2019, USD32.158 million in FY 2020, and USD25.798 million in FY 2021.
The maker of a new grenade launcher that can fire rounds that explode when they pass walls or barriers is "finalizing development" of a weapon it believes will give soldiers a serious edge.
XM-25 carries a magazine of five 25mm grenade rounds and a fire-control system that lets the soldier instantly program how far the grenade will travel before it explodes. That means a soldier can engage an enemy hiding behind a target — only he doesn't need to hit something to ruin the enemy's hiding place and his day.
According to XM-25 maker Orbital ATK spokesman Jarrod Krull, in spring the Army will conduct qualification testing and contract validation. If the weapon fulfills the Army's requirements, the Army could see fielding in early 2017, Krull said — assuming budget decisions also line up in the weapon system's favor.
The XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement weapon system is now in development. But by this time next year, the system may have moved into low-rate initial production and if so, will lose the experimental “X” prefix.
Lt. Col. Shawn Lucas, the PEO Soldier program manager for individual weapons at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., said the XM25 is currently in the “engineering and manufacturing development phase,” not yet ready for fielding.
“That’s where we are developing the subsystems, which would be the weapon, the fire control, and the programmable ammunition,” he said. “[We are] integrating it all to work together at the system level so we can meet the requirements the user has asked for. If we do that, we would look to go into production.”
It’ll be about August of next year, he said, when the Army would ask decision makers to move to a “milestone C” decision with the system. That will allow them to start low-rate initial production, or LRIP, and manufacture a little more than 1,100 of the weapons, along with the needed ammunition. The LRIP decision will help prove out manufacturing processes for the weapon, the fire control and the ammunition. Additionally, those systems would then be used to do operational and live-fire testing.
Additionally, he said when that happens they would do “type-classification” on the system.
“We’d take the X off,” he said. “It’s no longer experimental; it’d be the M25.”
Read more: http://www.defencetalk.com/xm25-counter-defilade-target-engagement-system-may-lose-x-by-next-august-48712/#ixzz2br3hanKR
