The cost of each artillery shell of the new Excalibur system is 80 thousand dollars, reports Strategy Page .

These shells will begin arriving in Iraq in the fall of 2006.

The cost of the projectile itself is about 40 thousand dollars. This amount doubled due to the need to recoup the costs of its development. The Excalibur program cost more than a billion dollars.

The projectile was developed by the American corporation Raytheon together with the Swedish company Bofors. The 155mm M982 ER DPICM round is capable of destroying all possible targets that may be encountered on the battlefield.

In fact, it will be able to replace three types of artillery ammunition - fragmentation, high-explosive and armor-piercing. Currently, Excalibur is controlled using GPS. In the future, it is planned to improve it by equipping it with a homing warhead.

The accuracy of this ammunition at maximum flight range exceeds that of similar ammunition. The traditional error for 155-mm projectiles is 370 meters, while for Excalibur it does not exceed 10.

Meanwhile, as Strategy Page notes, the high cost of creating a projectile is due to problems with its accuracy. The developers could not solve this problem for a long time until they were able to install a GPS system on the projectile.

A cheaper system, the Projectile Guidance Kit, is currently being developed in the United States. It is a kind of guidance system for a conventional projectile.

The Projectile Guidance Kit is equipped with small steering planes, with the help of which the system changes the trajectory of the projectile. This head can be installed on any 105 or 155 mm caliber projectile. PGK is capable of providing any projectile with the accuracy of an Excalibur.

The only problem with the Projectile Guidance Kit is that it will not be delivered to the active army until five years later.

A new American projectile costs 80 thousand dollars