Washington ? The Pentagon killed the $11 billion Crusader artillery program Wednesday, a major step in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s effort to weed out Cold War-era weapons projects in favor of more-futuristic arms technologies.

“This decision is not about any one weapon system, but merely about a strategy of warfare, a strategy that drives the choices that we must make about how best to prepare our total forces for the future,” Rumsfeld said.

Some members of Congress said they would fight to revive the program, but Rumsfeld predicted his decision would prevail.

“When the dust settles, we’ll find that Crusader has been ended,” he told a Pentagon news conference.

It is the first major weapons program Rumsfeld has decided to kill, although others may be in jeopardy. They include the Army’s Comanche helicopter and the Marine Corps’ V-22 Osprey aircraft.

The Army fiercely opposed killing Crusader, a 40-ton artillery cannon designed to close what the Army calls a capabilities gap between its heavy artillery and that of China and North Korea. It is not yet in production, and the first Crusader systems would not be in the field until 2008.

Army Secretary Thomas White, the service’s top civilian official, has called Crusader critical to the Army’s future. His job appeared in jeopardy early this week when it was revealed that someone at Army headquarters had lobbied Congress to save the program after Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told White that Rumsfeld intended to drop it from the budget for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1.

Rumsfeld exonerated White on Tuesday, and the Army secretary appeared at Rumsfeld’s news conference to say he would support the Crusader decision.

The debate over Crusader is emblematic of tensions between the military and its civilian overseers on the difficult question of how, and in what form, the nation’s armed forces should adapt to meet post-Cold War challenges. The military is wary of giving up too much in near-term modernization for the sake of investing in technologies that may not become available for a decade or more.

“This is a good choice,” Rumsfeld said. “We will see it through to the end.”