Soldiers Prove Army’s Oldest Missiles Still Ready for Battle

Soldiers Prove Army’s Oldest Missiles Still Ready for Battle
White Sands – Soldiers from the 3rd battalion 321st field artillery regiment out of fort bragg joined test officers and engineers at white sands missile range to test some of the army’s oldest missiles.
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The army tactical missile system or atacums is a long-range artillery missile built in the 90s. Many of these missiles have been sitting on the shelf a long time; so long in fact , that the missiles are older than the soldiers operating the launcher system so testing is needed to ensure they are still ready for battle.

They already pass their prime for safe [use] so we need to make sure they’re still reliable, and they still work, and they they reach the pattern the distances, and that we can still use them to conduct the test. The two missiles were launched at two different target areas on white sands missile range allowing the test to include different distances and flight types.

The missiles were also temperature conditioned heated and cooled prior to the shot to simulate different storage and firing conditions. The result did great; both of them did very good. They actually reached the pattern that they supposed to.

They have bumblets inside so they were able to accomplish the pattern in the distance required.

While not all tests require active duty soldiers to conduct them, there’s always a benefit to getting the end user involved giving the soldier experience firing the weapon and seeing how it can perform first hand. “I’ve never been able to shoot an atax before right now,so just the experience alone definitely has its value. It’s real. I guess you could say because training you go through every day, you know same old same old and to do some real army stuff it’s great by identifying weapons that are still good and able to be deployed.”

The army can save money on disposal and replacement of the older missiles while improving readiness by certifying that the weapons could still be used in a future operation, so we know the ammunition is good and we could use it in the future., you know in battle and combat . White sands missile range regularly conducts reliability tests of this type, testing various weapons from different stockpiles and ensuring that the army is ready to fight whenever it needs to.