Video shot and edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)
Shooting things you can see is hard enough. Shooting things you can’t see based on directions someone being shot at is giving you over a staticky radio is even harder. But a digital addition to the Army’s most nimble of artillery pieces is making the job of delivering explosive packages accurately and on time a lot easier.
Over the past two years, the US Army has been applying technology that was once the province of submarines and strategic bombers to a piece of weaponry with a somewhat more humble history: light field artillery. The M119 howitzer, the modern descendant of the towed cannons that have been used to lob shells at enemies since the Middle Ages, has been upgraded with a digital inertial navigation system that makes it possible for a gun crew to set it up within minutes and start firing in support of soldiers in the field.
The M119, technically speaking, is a “gun-howitzer”—a cannon that can be used both for direct fire (aimed at the target with an optical sight or radar) and indirect fire aimed based on positions provided by a spotter. Howitzers were originally guns with shorter barrels relative to their shell caliber that were used to lob shells in a high arc, at greater distances than the even shorter-barreled mortar.
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