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The power plant that propelled the 27-ton vehicle on its short trip at the BAE Systems assembly plant will also give the NLOS-C one of its hidden assets: the ability to power a small town.

“This system is producing 420 kilowatts of power, enough power to support 4,320 homes for an hour. That is a phenomenal amount of power,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said. “The hybrid-electric technologies of this system, I think, are borderline revolutionary. The engine is on the side of the vehicle. It is about three-quarters the size of a Bradley engine. All it does is generate electrical power.”

For comparison, an Abrams tank can export 18 kilowatts. The NLOS-C could be used to run a hospital, building or expeditionary unit. The hybrid-electric drive also allows the cannon to shut down its combustion engine and move quietly on electrical power.

In coming months, the prototype will be fitted with cameras, radar and other sensors, said Dan Zanini, SAIC senior vice president and deputy program manager for Future Combat Systems. The electro-optical and infrared cameras will allow the cannon’s commander and driver to operate without an open porthole.

“The radar allows you to track incoming rounds and allows you to track the rounds going out,” Zanini said. “You can update the ballistic solution for the next round that is firing. This allows us to take today’s standard ammunition and reduce the circle of probable error on it with these vehicles. Even if they are dumb rounds, if you are smart in watching them, you can update the trajectory in which you are firing them and improve the accuracy of the impact.”

Some of the sensors are being tested at a BAE facility in Santa Clara and by soldiers at Fort Carson, Colo.

“All of the sensors, whether they are embedded on the platform like the short-range EOIR [electro-optical and infrared], the sensor from the machine gun or from the sensors that are on the Class I, the Class IV [unmanned aerial vehicles] and unmanned ground vehicles, they all go through the same fire control architecture so that I no longer have to actually see the target to engage the target,” said Army Col. Bryan McVeigh, program manager for FCS Manned-Ground Vehicles.

Eight cannons are scheduled to be built this year and early 2009, with almost 20 arriving by 2010, FCS spokesman Paul Mehney said.

“These cannons will help advance and define tactics, techniques and procedures,” Mehney said.

Coming years

Over the next several years, the NLOS-C will be rigged to draw in images, video and other data from the Army’s battlefield network. NLOS-C drivers will look at a touchscreen map display that can show live images from robots, UAVs and small ground sensors.

Army and industry engineers are running simulations to make sure the sensors interact as they should.

“With the simulations, we make [interphase control documents]. I have to make sure that my systems can accept data whether it is a physical USB port download or whether it’s software,” McVeigh said.

Some in the Army and in Congress hope to get the NLOS-C and some other Manned Ground Vehicle variants to theater several years ahead of schedule.

“I think it is a little too early to tell, but I am heartened by what I am seeing and what I just saw. It would be my desire as technologies appear that they lend themselves to acceleration,” Casey said.

Casey, who toured BAE’s NLOS-C production facility, said the cannon’s high rate of fire and precision abilities make it ideal for both conventional and irregular warfare.

The 30-kilometer, six-round-per-minute NLOS-C gun is designed to provide suppressive area fire with conventional rounds and precision strikes with Excalibur GPS-guided shells that can hit within 5 meters of the aim point.

“It can hit an armored formation moving across the desert or it can hit a house with limited collateral damage effects on the other side. This is critical in Iraq. What we are seeing in Iraq is the ability to precisely apply fires, particularly in cities, is a critical element of being able to operate in 21st-century warfare. Sixty percent of the population in the world is going to live in cities in 2030, and military operations will take place around cities. We can’t blow up a city to save it,” Casey said.