U.S. Army battalion fires final Paladin rounds after 43 years

A U.S. Army artillery battalion at Fort Carson, Colorado fired its last rounds as a Paladin unit on May 7, closing out 43 years of service with the self-propelled howitzer while simultaneously becoming the first Paladin formation in the Army to fire using the new Artillery Execution Suite, the Army reported.

The 3rd Battalion, 29th Field Artillery Regiment, part of the 4th Infantry Division, marked the transition during a division-wide exercise called Ivy Mass, threading its final certification as a Paladin formation together with a live demonstration of the Army’s next-generation command and control architecture.

The M109A6 Paladin has been the backbone of American armored artillery since the early 1990s. Weighing roughly 32 tons and carrying a 155mm howitzer with a range of up to 30 kilometers using standard ammunition and further with rocket-assisted rounds, the Paladin gave division commanders the ability to deliver precision indirect fire from a platform that could keep pace with advancing armor. Over more than three decades, it served in Panama, the Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and became the reference point against which other Western self-propelled howitzers are measured. For the crews of 3-29 FA, it was the weapon system that defined their professional lives across multiple combat deployments.

Maj. Andrew Patterson, the battalion’s operations officer, described what the final exercise actually demonstrated: “3-29 FA successfully conducted the first sensor (Army Edge) to shooter (Artillery Execution Suite to M109A6 Paladin) live fire mission.”

Army Edge is the Army’s tactical edge computing platform, designed to process sensor data at the point of collection rather than routing it back to a distant server. The Artillery Execution Suite is a fire control software system. Linking them in a live fire chain means a sensor detecting a target can pass that data through a networked architecture and generate a fire mission on a Paladin with minimal human latency in the loop. Doing it for the first time on the same day a battalion fired its final rounds as a Paladin formation gave the exercise a symbolic weight that unit leadership did not let pass unacknowledged.

Lt. Col. Jeffery Wollenman, the battalion commander, put the moment in direct terms: “It is fitting the battalion’s last field training at Fort Carson was a merger of the past and future. The battalion participated in the division’s Ivy Mass where we incorporated Next-Generation Command and Control and became the first Paladin battalion to shoot the new Artillery Exchange Suite.”

Next-Generation Command and Control, known as NGC2, is the Army’s initiative to replace the collection of older, often incompatible digital systems that currently link sensors, commanders, and weapon systems across the force. The goal is a unified data environment where information from any sensor, whether a drone, a ground radar, or a satellite feed, flows automatically to the right shooter without requiring manual re-entry at each step. The Army has described it as enabling decision-making at machine speed, a phrase that captures both the ambition and the operational logic: in a high-intensity conflict against a peer adversary with comparable electronic capabilities, the side that closes the sensor-to-shooter loop faster will win more engagements.

The 3-29 FA’s transition away from the Paladin is part of a broader Army restructuring that converts single-caliber field artillery battalions into composite formations combining 105mm and 155mm guns in a single unit. A composite field artillery battalion carries genuine tactical advantages. The lighter 105mm howitzer, more easily air-transported and positioned in terrain that heavier equipment cannot reach, supports rapid air assault operations and light infantry forces. The heavier 155mm guns provide the range and explosive payload needed to neutralize hardened targets and provide deep fires against high-value threats. A commander with both in one battalion can tailor fires to the mission without waiting for a separate unit to be attached, which reduces coordination overhead and speeds response time in fluid engagements.

The battalion’s history with the Paladin across Iraq and Afghanistan gave its crews a depth of operational experience that cold performance metrics cannot fully capture. Paladins answered calls for fire in both conventional and counterinsurgency environments, supporting ground units in contact, providing illumination for night operations, and training allied forces including the Afghan National Army. The regiment also worked alongside German and Romanian allies, building interoperability that has become more relevant as NATO has expanded its eastern posture in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. That institutional knowledge of how to coordinate fires across coalition partners does not disappear when the platform changes; it transfers into whatever system comes next.

Wollenman closed the ceremony with a statement that doubled as a summary of the battalion’s self-understanding: “The battalion showed what every artillery platform of the future holds. The Pacesetter battalion motto rings true: We set the pace!”

The transition of 3-29 FA encapsulates a tension the Army is navigating across most of its combat arms: how to modernize rapidly without losing the operational culture that makes experienced units effective. The Paladin’s retirement from this particular formation is not a story about obsolescence. It is a story about an institution trying to move fast enough to stay relevant in a threat environment that has changed more in the past five years than in the previous thirty, and using the soldiers who know the old system best to prove out the new one before anyone else. Fort Carson’s mountains absorbed the last Paladin rounds from the Pacesetters on May 7. What comes next will be built on what those crews already know.