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Naval
Forces News - France |
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French
Navy Looking to Deploy Army MLRS from LHDs for Coastal Fire Support
Missions |
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The
French Navy (Marine Nationale) is looking at ways to improve its coastal
fire support and land attack capabilities. The information was first
revealed by French defense news website OPEX360:
The French procurement agency (DGA) awarded a contract to Airbus Defence
& Space to study the integration of Multiple Launch Rocket System
(MLRS) with the French Navy Mistral
class LHDs. |
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 Artist impression: An MLRS launching a rocket from a Mistral class LHD's deck. Airbus Defence & Space picture via www.opex360.com |
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The
contract award is public
record and first surfaced in September 2015 but it was awarded
one year ago (December 23rd 2014). The value of the contract awarded
to Airbus Defence & Space is 333,330 euros ($363,356 USD). The official
aim of the contract is "Adapting the LRU system fire control for
use on BPC" (Adaptation de la conduite de tir du système
lru à une utilisation sur bpc). BPC is an acronym for command and projection vessel (Mistral class) while LRU is an acronym standing for unitary rocket launcher. In September 2011, a contract for the LRU upgrade was awarded by the French Procurement Agency to a Franco-German consortium including Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, alongside Airbus Defence and Space, Sagem, and Thales to modernize the LRM (M270) MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) with new firing system and rockets. In the past, French army had a fleet of 55 M270s, only 13 units are receiving the upgrade to the LRU configuration, with the rest having been withdrawn from service. The LRU uses the new rocket M31 also called GUMLRS (Guided Unitary MLRS). In France, the M31 rocket is manufactured by the U.S. company Lockheed Martin with an engine supplied by the French Company Roxel. Compared with the earlier French MLRS rockets, which were armed with submunitions, the M31 features a single 90 kg HE warhead; includes GPS and inertial navigation system guidance to provide a circular error of probability of less than 10 m; and doubles the missile's range to 70 km. |
 The LRU (Lance Roquette Unitaire) is based on U.S. made M270 MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) |
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Contacted
by Navy Recognition, a DGA spokesperson confirmed existence of the study
but said there was nothing he could add compared to what OPEX360 already
reported. Comment It appears that the French Navy is more than ever on the lookout for coastal/land attack systems. We received information last week that the French Navy found its current 76mm and 100mm guns to be insufficient in both range and lethality following operations in Libya (during which it conducted coastal fire support missions). The U.S. Navy expressed a similar need for smart naval ammunitions relatively recently and as a consequence the U.S. defense industry is currently working on several solutions such as the Excalibur N5 by Raytheon, the Standard Guided Projectile (SGP) and Hyper Velocity Projectile (HVP) by BAE Systems or the LRLAP by BAE/Lockheed Martin and Navy 5 Inch. Some of the Russian Navy Buyan-class corvettes are fitted at the stern with a A-215 Grad-M launcher for 40x 122mm rockets. |
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