Rheinmetall gets deal for 72 new British Army howitzers

Rheinmetall announced it secured a supply contract to deliver 72 weapon systems, along with associated equipment and services, for the British Army’s RCH 155 wheeled howitzer program, with the deal valued in the low three-digit million-euro range.

The contract covers the L/52 remote-controlled weapon system, the 155mm gun and turret assembly that sits atop the vehicle, along with 72 elevating masses, the mechanical structure that raises and lowers the gun barrel, plus onboard tools and additional non-recurring services including support preparing training materials and technical documentation. Deliveries are scheduled to run from May 2028 through June 2031, with manufacturing taking place at Rheinmetall’s newly built gun production facility in Telford, England, a plant the company is bringing into operation in stages.

The RCH 155 itself represents a genuinely unusual approach to artillery, mounting a fully automated turret derived from the combat-proven Panzerhaubitze 2000 tracked howitzer onto the drive module of the Boxer 8×8 wheeled armored vehicle, a platform already in service with the British Army and several other NATO militaries. That combination lets the RCH 155 fire while actually moving, a capability traditional towed or even tracked self-propelled artillery generally cannot match, and the system can unleash up to eight rounds per minute before repositioning within roughly 30 seconds, well before enemy counter-battery radar can typically calculate a return strike. The turret can also perform what the industry calls Multiple Round Simultaneous Impact, a technique where the gun varies its barrel elevation and propellant charge across several shots so that rounds fired seconds apart along different trajectories all land on the same target at exactly the same moment, a tactic designed to maximize the shock of a single engagement.

The RCH 155 is a joint product of ARTEC GmbH, a partnership between Rheinmetall and KNDS Deutschland, with both companies’ shareholders acting as subcontractors on the program. Germany and the United Kingdom are currently both procuring the system and jointly qualifying the 155mm L/52 RC weapon platform, meaning the two nations are working through the technical verification process together even as they place separate national orders, a structure that lets both militaries share development costs and lessons learned rather than running entirely independent qualification programs for what is functionally the same gun.

Britain’s broader RCH 155 commitment traces directly back to a decision made in the opening years of the full-scale war in Ukraine. The British Army sent its entire inventory of 68 AS90 155mm tracked self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine to support Kyiv’s defense against Russia’s invasion, a donation that left the Army’s own artillery arm relying on just 14 Archer self-propelled guns acquired secondhand from Sweden as a stopgap. The UK Ministry of Defence formally announced its order for 72 RCH 155 systems on May 13, 2026, placing the contract through the Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation, the European procurement body known by its French acronym OCCAR that manages multinational defense programs on behalf of member states, at a total value close to £1 billion, or approximately $1.35 billion.

UK Defence Secretary John Healey framed the broader RCH 155 acquisition as serving purposes well beyond simply replacing lost artillery, tying the investment to both military readiness and domestic economic benefit.

“This major investment is defence delivering for the battlefield and for Britain’s economy,” Healey said, according to Overt Defense.

The manufacturing arrangement behind the program spreads work across multiple British and German facilities. Rheinmetall’s Telford plant will produce the gun barrel, breech, recoil system, and trunnions, the pivot points that let the barrel elevate, while KNDS UK’s facility in Stockport will build the Boxer drive module itself, including the chassis, engine, and drivetrain, a division of labor that The Defense Post reported supports roughly 100 skilled manufacturing jobs at the Stockport site alone. Sheffield Forgemasters will also contribute gun barrels and related components to the broader program.

Florian Hohenwarter, CEO of KNDS Deutschland, described the UK’s role in the program as central to the company’s broader European manufacturing strategy when the original 72-unit order was announced.

“The United Kingdom is definitely one of our most important BOXER customers and is also a significant location for manufacturing the systems. Scaling up KNDS’s production capacity in the UK plays a crucial role in equipping all our BOXER customers and thus Europe’s defence capabilities,” Hohenwarter said.

The RCH 155’s effective range extends beyond 40 kilometers (24.9 miles) using standard ammunition and past 54 kilometers (33.5 miles) with extended-range munitions, giving the British Army a substantially longer reach than the AS90 it replaces while requiring a crew of just two soldiers to operate, thanks to the turret’s high degree of automation. First deliveries under the broader UK program are expected in 2028, with officials targeting what the Ministry of Defence calls minimum deployable capability before the end of the decade, meaning enough operational systems fielded and crews trained to genuinely field the capability rather than simply taking delivery of hardware.