Leonardo DRS, KNDS team up on Caesar bid for Army cannon

Leonardo DRS and KNDS have shaken hands on a strategic teaming agreement to offer the CAESAR Self-Propelled Howitzer to the U.S. Army as a possible Mobile Tactical Cannon as the service continues to evaluate what it wants.

“The team intends to present the U.S. Army with the CAESAR Self-Propelled Howitzer, a combat-proven and reliable system that addresses the U.S. Army’s needs for greater range and improved mobility,” the company announced in a statement at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. “It is a powerful and combat-proven system built for accuracy, adaptability and rapid worldwide deployment.”

Leonardo DRS, with its deep experience in platform integration, will be the prime contractor, and KNDS will provide its mobile artillery systems experience and range of ammunition, the statement notes.

The Army has not been clear about whether it plans to pursue a mobile, long-range artillery capability, but it continues to comb industry worldwide for possible options. It even recently invited companies to submit systems the service could consider providing to soldiers in operational units as a part of ongoing evaluations.

While the service has been slow to move out, the requirement to improve mobile artillery capability in the Army still exists.

“The ability for soldiers to rapidly and reliably put artillery on target is a crucial mission the U.S. Army is addressing, and we are proud to use our deep experience in integrating best-of-breed capabilities to support this future mission,” Aaron Hankins, senior vice president and general manager of the Leonardo DRS Land Systems business unit, said in the statement. “By teaming with KNDS, we are offering the service a mature, accurate, and high-performing solution.”

The CAESAR howitzer is “particularly suited to address the challenges that warfighters will face in the coming decades,” said Olivier Travert, chief sales officer of KNDS France.

The company’s 52-caliber ordnance “has a superb, demonstrated safety record in combat conditions, in all climates, after firing hundreds of thousands of rounds,” Travert added. “The lessons learned in three years of combat in Ukraine — where 120 CAESAR are now deployed, provides us an outstanding position to offer the United States Army a state-of-the-art weapon which can be integrated on a U.S. tactical truck.”

The service has been evaluating options for nearly five years. It held demonstrations for self-propelled howitzers in 2021 at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, but decided to prioritize an investment in the development of its Extended Range Cannon Artillery, or ERCA, system, which it canceled in 2024.

RELATED

The system used a 58-caliber gun tube on an M109 Paladin howitzer chassis, aiming to fire out to 70 kilometers — roughly double current cannon ranges.

When the Army decided to cancel the ERCA program, the Army acknowledged it still had a requirement for a long-range cannon, and so it gave industry the opportunity last fall to show readily available and fielded systems abroad. A team traveled to Germany, South Korea, Sweden and Israel to see those systems in action.

The service planned another Yuma-based demonstration for January 2026, but never pursued it. Instead, the Army recently released a new plan soliciting industry to submit offerings that could be delivered to a Transformation in Contact brigade for experimentation, according to a request for information posted Sept. 30 on Sam.gov, the federal business opportunities website.

“Over the past 8 months, the US Army has been re-evaluating its objectives for modernization and adjusting those objectives to best support the new Army Transformation Initiative strategy,” the RFI states. “Comprehensive analysis has confirmed the importance of 155mm self-propelled artillery systems-of-systems to the Army. Consequently, the US Army is considering opportunities to assist in identifying these opportunities and shape our acquisition strategy.”