#Xm25

The US Army has officially cancelled its XM25 ‘Punisher’ Counter Defilade Target Engagement weapon system after years of development and funding problems. The program first ran into trouble back in 2016, when the Department of Defense Inspector General published a damning report stating that the handle of the program had been mishandled.

Orbital ATK and Heckler & Koch have reached a settlement in their lawsuit which saw ATK sue the German firearms giant for $27 million. The case was filed in early 2017, with ATK demanding compensation for the failure of Heckler & Koch to deliver 20 XM25 prototypes. The two companies had worked together on the US Army’s XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement (CDTE) System. ATK had developed the weapon’s ammunition, optics, and fire control system, while Heckler & Koch designed the weapon. The Army subsequently cancelled the contract with Orbital ATK in April 2017.

It’s almost 3 in the morning, and I’m lying awake in bed thinking about small arms. I’m trying to put everything out of my mind so I can go to sleep and wake up in the morning, go to the range, and bring you some raw ballistic data. So of course what pops into my head is an almost complete article about just why the Army’s latest whizzbang rifle program is doomed to collapse in a heap. All I have to do is write it.

Is the US Army pushing for a new high-powered 6.Xmm caliber with their new NGSAR program? Recently, the listing for the NGSAR industry day in December was updated with a document describing in part the agenda of the second conference. Scheduled for 9:45 in the morning in the document is a 15 minute long presentation on “Ammunition Data – Surrogate Projectile and Specs”, presented by Todd Townsend, David Charowsky, and Mark Minisi. Minisi’s name may not be well-known, but it will be familiar to astute students of recent wound ballistics literature: It was Minisi who developed the finite element analysis-based tissue damage model, which has been refined over the past decade at ARDEC through PM Maneuver Ammunition Systems (PM-MAS). Mr. Townsend is also likely representing PM-MAS, now under the leadership of Colonel Hector Gonzalez. 

At the 2017 Association of the United States Army annual meeting (AUSA 2017), US Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM) presented a concept for the US Army’s future soldier of the 2030 timeframe, which promised everything from powered exoskeletons, to futuristic optics, to individual network capability. I captured the Command’s two future soldier concept demo videos that were running at the conference, embedded below:

In the latest twist of events to do with the 25mm XM25 “Punisher”, it appears the program is coming to a grinding halt after Military.com recently reported that the U.S. Army has completely canceled the program with Orbital ATK after almost two decades of development work. On top of numerous bureaucratic delays and issues that we’ve covered in an earlier post, the program was suffering from the delay of H&K’s delivery of 20 XM25s to ATK, of which the company sued H&K earlier for over 27 million dollars. Because H&K didn’t or couldn’t deliver the product to ATK, the U.S. Government canceled the procurement program completely about a month ago, with the news just surfacing now. Negotiations ensued between the government and ATK but these apparently could not yield an acceptable replacement in time or to satisfy operational requirements.

In a new twist to the ongoing story of the US Army’s XM25 CTDE “Punisher” airburst infantry grenade launcher, Orbital ATK, a technology partner on the program, has sued fellow partner Heckler & Koch for failure to deliver 20 units of the new weapon. Orbital ATK is seeking more than $27 million in damages from H&K, and transfer of some intellectual property to another contractor. Orbital ATK says that Heckler & Koch’s failure to deliver the weapons has jeopardized its contract with the US government, raising the chance of program termination, and at least causing a substantial delay.

How much firepower can you hold in your hands? Quite a lot, according to Kiev-based Precision Systems, who has developed a handheld automatic 30mm grenade launcher capable of dispensing five 30x29mm grenades quickly when used by just a single individual. News of this assault-rifle-sized automatic grenade gun was first published in the Anglosphere by ISH Jane’s:

In May of this year, I got the rare opportunity to travel to Heckler & Koch’s headquarters in Ashburn, VA, to take a look at some of the experimental and prototype firearms they have located there in their famous “Grey Room”. It wouldn’t be worth as much for me to just tell you about it and to snap a few foggy cell phone pictures, though, so I brought along Othais of C&Rsenal to help me take high resolution light box photos of these unique and rare firearms.

The US Army’s “Punisher” XM25 Counter-Defilade Target Engagement (CTDE) weapon program is in danger, says a report released earlier this week by the Department of Defense Inspector General’s office. The program has been riddled with delays and cost spirals, as well as three accidents in 2013, but beyond that the Army has failed to outline a plan for procurement and basic issuance of the weapon, putting the program in jeopardy. From the (heavily redacted) report:

South African defense firm Denel Praetoria Metal Pressings (PMP) have announced a new project for a derivative of their radical 20mm PAW handheld semiautomatic cannon. The new weapon will reportedly be tripod-mounted, fully automatic, and compatible with the same 20x42mmB (belted) explosive ammunition used by the handheld version. Denel PMP is advertising a rate of fire for the new machine cannon of about 200 rounds per minute; via defenceweb.co.za:

A report from Jane’s has stated that the U.S. Army is putting fiscal priority on the Counter Defilade Target Engagement XM25 Grenade Launcher in this upcoming year, thus underlining the degree to which the service is committed to getting this weapon standardized. We’ve been reporting on the 25mm XM25 program for a while now, and throughout previous years the Army has ramped up testing and evaluation of the grenade launcher back in the States. If you recall, the XM25 was used in Afghanistan under a Limited Rate Production and T&E role, to which it performed very well, until one of the units accidentally exploded while in operation, almost killing the soldier behind it. The program was put on a standstill and this is where we are today. Currently the Army is requesting almost 10 million dollars for the upcoming fiscal year, with increasing fiscal requests up until 2021.

The US Army’s XM25 “Punisher” airburst programmable infantry grenade launcher  is being prepared for acceptance testing, but a major component, and a major source of criticism, has received an overhaul from the versions tested in Afghanistan. Military.com’s KitUp! reports on the new optic and fire control system being displayed at the Association of the US Army 2015 conference:

The US Army is soon to conduct qualification and acceptance testing for the radical XM25 Counter-Defilate Target Engagement System, informally dubbed “the Punisher” during operational trials in Afghanistan.  DefenseNews reports:

Despite setbacks, SOFREP.com reports that the XM25 is set to be adopted by the US Army and named the M25 …