Army Halts Paladin Buys: Moving to Lighter Guns

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]to working with you on that. Thank you.

[00:00:01]>> follow up, ma'am. Thank you, Ranking Member. Thank you, full committee chairman, Mr. Cole. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

[00:00:07]Mr. Secretary and General, I invite you to comment on this as well after the Secretary's remarks, if appropriate and you choose to.

[00:00:15]Last few years, the Army's requested the less than the minimum production rate of 36 platforms or sets for the Paladin program.

[00:00:25]Kind of risking production the production line stoppages, workforce layoff. The fiscal year 2027 requested zero out of Paladin procurement, despite having only awarded 518 of the original acquisition objectives of 689 sets. I guess what I'm trying to figure out, and perhaps you can enlighten me on, is number one, is this because of budget constraints, or are we moving on from the platform?

[00:00:54]Is the decision to make a change there?

[00:00:57]Or, you know, again, we don't know what might or might not be in the $350 down the road. Is it Is that something that would be put in there? I'm just trying to figure out where we're headed on the program and whether what do you the objective is to get rid of it or deploy it or do it in some different way?

[00:01:23]Sure.

[00:01:25]I'll go first real fast. So, sir, I was a private on on a Paladin a long time ago. So, the system's a great system, but we need to move to a lighter system. I When you when you look at what it takes to get a Paladin someplace, and you get what it takes to get HIMARS, and how the capabilities of that weapon system compared to the Paladin, there's there's no comparison. So, if we we're looking forward to our pacing threat, we need to move to systems that weigh a lot less, so we can get it where it needs to be in a time of need.

[00:02:02]Okay. And to specifically answer your question, Chairman, we are looking at a mobile tactical cannon, which in it can emplace, I think it's 40 seconds versus 15 minutes, which matters a lot with the drone threat. If you look at the fighting in Ukraine on either side, it's just really hard to move out and get fires ready to go, and then you I mean, you have to do it incredibly quickly. The Paladin's just incapable of it at speed, and so, while we think the Paladin will be in our lives for a while, because we want to be good custodians of the assets the American taxpayer has given us, we think that new purchases to balance that platform out should be something different.

[00:02:38]>> Believe me, your secretary, we've been looking for a new gun for a long, long time. And we've had gone through multiple iterations. So, I'm just trying to get a feel for what the the plan is and what we're looking towards. So, that's a helpful response.

[00:02:54]Um Given that, I mean, how does this hold in procurement