Artillery: U.S. Army Adopts Warship Missile Technology
July 20, 2023: The U.S. Army recently created a novel new type of artillery that is based on U.S. Navy Mk 41 VLS (Vertical Launch System) and a fire control system using tech adapted from the Aegis air defense system. The army calls its version of all this navy tech the TWS (Typhon Weapons System). A TWS battery consists of five or more tractor-trailer vehicles hauling containers containing the equivalent of four VLS cells that are stored in a horizontal position and raised to a vertical position to launch its missiles. The army is currently only using two (Tomahawk and SM-6) of the many missile types that are launched from VLS. There is a fifth tractor-trailer carrying the command post and fire control center. This one battery has sixteen Tomahawk or SM-6 missiles. Additional tractor-trailers are built to transport reload containers with missiles. These trucks have equipment needed to carry out the transfer, which involves removal of the empty missile cell while replacing it with a loaded cell.
Development of the TWS system began in 2021 when the army reactivated its 56th Artillery Command, which had been deactivated in 1991 because the Soviet Union had dissolved and the successor state, Russia, had a much smaller military, only 20 percent the size of the Soviet force. Russia agreed to a new IRNF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) treaty which banned the use of missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 kilometers, which is what the 56th Artillery Command was originally created to operate. In 2019 the U.S. left the IRNF because of Russian violations of the range restrictions.
In 2021 the army was developing three new long-range missiles for use by artillery units. These missiles were to be ready by 2023. The new missiles include the Precision Strike Missile, with a range of 500 kilometers, a Mid-Range Strike Missile with a range of 1,600 kilometers and a Long Range Hypersonic missile with a range of 2,700 kilometers.
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