American M982 Excalibur Shells
A senior Ukrainian official has raised doubts about the effectiveness of the American-made M982 Excalibur artillery shell. Yegor Chernev, deputy chairman of Ukraine’s security committee, said the shell struggles against Russian electronic warfare systems.
The Excalibur relies on GPS for guidance, making it vulnerable to jamming from advanced Russian electronic countermeasures. Each shell costs tens of thousands of dollars, yet it may miss targets when facing strong electronic interference.
This criticism reflects a wider concern about the reliability of high-tech weapons in today’s contested electronic battlefield. Once praised for pinpoint accuracy, the Excalibur now highlights the risks of over-relying on GPS-dependent systems.
Electronic jamming is increasingly shaping modern warfare, compelling militaries to reconsider their precision weapon strategies. The M982 Excalibur was developed jointly by Raytheon Missiles & Defense and BAE Systems Bofors.
It’s a 155 mm guided artillery round designed to deliver precise strikes in complex combat environments. Introduced in 2007, the shell aimed to help U.S. forces hit high-value targets without endangering nearby civilians.
High-Value Targets
Excalibur uses both GPS and inertial navigation to land within 13 feet of its intended target. This precision is vital in urban operations or near friendly troops, reducing the chance of collateral damage.
It can destroy enemy bunkers, vehicles, or fortified positions with one accurate hit. When fired from standard howitzers like the M777, it reaches targets up to 25 miles away.
Tests show it can strike from up to 43 miles using more advanced artillery systems. The shell’s long range gives field commanders firepower without needing close air support.
However, Russia’s jamming capabilities have exposed a major flaw in Excalibur’s GPS-dependent guidance. Ukraine’s battlefield experience shows that even top-tier weapons can falter under real combat conditions.
Chernev’s comments underline a growing global arms race between precision systems and electronic warfare. The future of artillery may depend more on how well systems resist interference—not just how far or accurately they shoot.
The U.S. hailed Excalibur
Foldable glide fins increase Excalibur’s range, while its 22-kilogram warhead supports height-of-burst, delay, or point detonation. This flexibility lets it strike a wide variety of targets with different detonation settings for maximum effect.
Each shell reportedly costs between $70,000 and $100,000, reflecting both its complex engineering and high operational stakes. The U.S. hailed Excalibur shells as a revolutionary battlefield solution when it sent them to Ukraine in 2022.
Videos released by Ukrainian forces showed Excalibur hitting Russian artillery, tanks, and bunkers with incredible precision. General Valeriy Zaluzhny praised the system’s accuracy during Dnipro River operations targeting Russian positions firing on Mykolaiv.
Unlike unguided shells, which scatter widely, early reports showed Excalibur achieving a 70% hit rate. Because it required only one round per target, Ukrainian gunners saved ammunition and reduced their exposure to counterfire.
That efficiency mattered against Russia’s larger military, helping Ukraine make smarter use of limited resources. But as the war dragged on, Excalibur’s performance started to suffer significantly under electronic warfare attacks.
Russian systems like Zhitel and Krasukha-4 emit strong radio waves that disrupt satellite navigation, such as GPS. When GPS is jammed, Excalibur can lose its target lock and miss by dozens of meters or more.
In some cases, the shell might not detonate at the right point or fail to detonate altogether. By mid-2023, Ukraine reported a massive drop in Excalibur’s success rate—down to just 6% in some instances.
Washington Post
This prompted Kyiv to scale back its use, and the U.S. eventually stopped supplying the shell. A May 2024 Washington Post article confirmed Ukraine formally notified Washington about these battlefield failures.
Excalibur’s dependence on GPS, once an innovation, has proven to be a critical vulnerability in modern warfare. GPS signals travel thousands of miles from orbit and are inherently weak by the time they reach Earth.
Russian jammers overwhelm these signals by broadcasting disruptive noise on the same frequencies used for guidance. Excalibur has a backup: inertial navigation, which uses internal sensors to estimate location through speed and direction.
However, inertial navigation is less accurate, especially across long distances or in shifting battlefield conditions. Over the past decade, Russia has improved its jamming arsenal with tools like Pole-21, which can block GPS over wide areas.
Other Western weapons using similar guidance—like JDAM-ER bombs and HIMARS rockets—have also struggled against these systems. Russia’s electronic warfare edge is forcing the West to rethink how it designs and deploys precision-guided munitions.
This is not the first time that countermeasures have rendered a cutting-edge weapon ineffective. Pilots had to change tactics when Yugoslav forces disrupted American cruise missiles during the 1999 NATO campaign in Kosovo using crude jamming techniques.
Radio Jammers
The United States developed frequency-hopping systems in the early 2000s after insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan used simple radio jammers to disable remote-controlled explosives.
More recently, Hezbollah has limited Israeli drones’ surveillance capabilities by using jammers supplied by Iran to interfere with them.
These instances highlight a recurring pattern in warfare: a new technology gains traction until an opponent discovers a way to counter it, which leads to yet another innovation cycle.
This pattern was evident in the Excalibur’s struggles in Ukraine, which served as a reminder that no weapon is impervious to modification.
The Excalibur’s deteriorating dependability has frustrated Ukrainian artillery crews. To guarantee hits, gunners accustomed to expecting near-perfect strikes have been forced to switch to older, less accurate techniques, firing volleys of unguided shells.
Because crews must stay in position longer to adjust fire, this shift increases ammunition consumption and puts them at greater risk.
To confirm targets before firing, some units have adapted by combining artillery with drones. However, this method relies on the availability of drones and unobstructed communication lines.
GPS-Dependent Weapons
There is also a considerable psychological cost. Soldiers, who previously relied on the accuracy of the Excalibur, now confront uncertainty due to the possibility of a costly round missing its target, leaving their position vulnerable.
This problem has ramifications that go well beyond Ukraine’s borders. With countries like the US, China, and others closely examining its lessons, the conflict has turned into a testbed for contemporary warfare.
The Pentagon is debating the future of GPS-dependent weapons because of the Excalibur’s susceptibility to jamming.
Engineers are looking into options like autonomous munitions that use artificial intelligence to find and strike targets on their own or laser-guided systems that aim at targets lit up by a designator.
The U.S. Army is already funding programs such as the Precision Strike Missile, which integrates multiple guidance modes to prevent jamming. Meanwhile, enemies are paying attention.
Similar to Russia, China is probably improving its electronic warfare systems to counter Western munitions, as evidenced by the BP-12A and other GPS-guided artillery rounds it fields.
Russia’s Krasnopol
Comparing the Excalibur to the artillery of other countries reveals both its advantages and disadvantages. Although Russia’s Krasnopol, a laser-guided 152 mm shell, is as precise as the Excalibur, its versatility in contested environments is limited because it needs a spotter to illuminate the target.
Although it has a comparable range, China’s GP155A, which is another GPS-guided round, lacks the demonstrated combat record of the Excalibur. Western systems that try to address jamming vulnerabilities, such as Germany’s Vulcano, which combines GPS and laser guidance, are still not widely used.
These options draw attention to a trade-off: although laser guidance can get around GPS jamming, it relies on human operators and line-of-sight, which isn’t always possible.
Although Excalibur’s design, which combines precision, autonomy, and range, is still unrivalled in theory, its actual performance now depends on defeating electronic defences.
The Excalibur has demonstrated its value in past battles. It made it possible for American forces to attack urban insurgent positions in Iraq and Afghanistan with few civilian casualties.
Canada, Australia, and India
92% of Excalibur rounds fired in Iraq struck within four metres of their targets, a statistic that unguided artillery could not match, according to a 2008 U.S. Army report.
Due to its success, allies including Canada, Australia, and India widely adopted it and incorporated it into their M777 howitzers. However, those theatres lacked the electronic warfare capabilities observed in Ukraine.
U.S. air superiority ensured clear satellite signals, while insurgents did not have the capability to jam GPS. With its extensive jammer network and disputed airspace, Ukraine’s battlefield offers a much more complicated setting, revealing flaws that previous conflicts were unaware of.
How militaries will adjust to this new reality remains a more general question. The United States fields systems such as the AN/ALQ-249 to disrupt enemy navigation and communications, demonstrating that electronic warfare is not exclusive to Russia. However, Russia’s rapid and widespread jamming efforts in Ukraine caught Western planners off guard.
Excalibur shells started to fail in large quantities in early 2023, with weeks going by without a successful hit, according to a 2023 article in The Economist.
Ukraine pushed for software updates to restore the shell’s accuracy, which sparked urgent talks between Kyiv and Washington.
Pentagon Documents
Despite applying some patches to other systems, such as the JDAM bombs, the fate of the Excalibur shells remains unknown. The United States’ decision to suspend deliveries points to a potential change in focus toward creating next-generation weapons that are less dependent on susceptible technologies.
This story may seem distant to the typical American reader, but it is relevant at home. Every Excalibur round is a representation of taxpayer dollars—hundreds of millions spent on a weapon that an adversary’s inventiveness has rendered obsolete.
According to Pentagon documents from 2022, the United States has provided Ukraine with billions of dollars in aid, which includes more than 3,000 Excalibur shells. Poor performance of these munitions fuels debates concerning military priorities and defense budgets.
However, the issue extends beyond financial constraints. In future conflicts, soldiers—whether Ukrainian or American—who fire these rounds rely on their dependability. A missed shot represents a crucial moment where lives are at stake, a tank continues to advance, or a bunker maintains its integrity.
Conclusion
The issues with the Excalibur foreshadow a significant shift in the future. As the era of uncontested GPS dominance draws to a close, engineers may need to reconsider how they achieve precision.
The next ten years of warfare will be shaped by the Pentagon’s response, whether it takes the form of multi-mode guidance, hardened GPS receivers, or entirely new systems.
Other countries will follow suit with their own innovations. For instance, China’s evolving electronic warfare capabilities could pose similar challenges in a future Pacific war. Additionally, the human cost is constant.
As they adjust to these setbacks, Ukrainian gunners demonstrate the tenacity of individuals engaged in a technological tug-of-war, with their inventiveness being just as important as the weapons they use.
Right now, it feels like a pivotal moment. The reality of adaptation is as significant as the promise of precision offered by the Excalibur.
Warfare evolves swiftly, often outpacing the speed at which headlines are reported. The question remains: will the battlefield require a new level of accuracy that we haven’t yet thought of, or can the United States and its allies outperform the jammers?
References
- The Washington Post—Russian Jamming Renders U.S. Weapons Ineffective
- The Economist—Excalibur’s Decline in Ukraine
- U.S. Army—Excalibur Program Details
- Raytheon—Excalibur Precision Artillery
- Defense News—JDAM and GPS Vulnerabilities
- BAE Systems—Artillery Innovations
- Defense One—Electronic Warfare in Ukraine
- Forbes—Excalibur Usage and GPS Jamming
- U.S. Department of Defense – Ukraine Military Aid Fact Sheet
- Facebook—Pakistan Defense Forum
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