Army invests in dial-a-bullet tech

The Army is looking for new technology to allow cannons to rapidly select between different types of ammunition, according to a small business innovative research proposal request for ""Smart-Feed" Selective Ammunition Feed System for Machine Guns and Auto Cannons".

It's certainly a neat idea, and the Army is looking to demonstrate it in the 30mm M230 cannon from the Apache, which is currently a 600-round-per-minute single-feed system, as compared to the 200 round-per-minute dual-feed 25mm M242 cannon on the Bradley or LAV-25, or the dual-feed 200 rpm 30mm Mk44 cannon on the LPD-17 series of ships.

There's one problem.  What ammo is the M230 going to select between?  There are two production rounds for the M230: the M788 training round (a slug) and the M789 high-explosive dual-purpose round, which is the combat round (yes, there is an older HE-incendiary M799 round, but without some optimization it isn't any more effective than the M789 when used against troops due to the way it is designed and fuzed).  So the M230 has one combat round to choose from -- what good does this ammo selection system do?  For ground vehicles, there are typically two types of ammo, and given that those cannon are dual-feed ...

Perhaps this technology would make more sense if it were tied to a development of a new ammunition type or a caliber/configuration that would allow more choices.  For example, in 40mm, you might use a mix of HEDP, HE, non-lethal, and marking rounds, which might benefit from a multi-select feed system.

I'll observe that this SBIR proposal comes out of the Aviation and Missile RDE Center, not the Armaments RDE Center, which might explain the lack of complete analysis of the implementation of the solution.