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WASHINGTON: Army wargames against Russia and China found a major gap in the service’s planned arsenal of long-range precision weapons, a gap it now plans to fill with a new intermediate-range missile that could fly as far as 2,000 miles. To speed development, the weapon will probably be derived from a missile already used by another service, such as the famous Tomahawk.
“[Navy] SM-6s and Tomahawks, that’s a capability I can see us as having in the future,” the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. James McConville, told a DefenseOne webcast this morning. “We are working that, [and] the Marine Corps is doing the same thing. If you don’t have to develop your own system, if you already have something that already works… it’s in all of our interest to go ahead and pursue those.”
Now, McConville didn’t address the intermediate-range missile specifically, whose existence was first reported by our Defense News colleague Jen Judson just last week. But in an exclusive interview about the new weapon, the artillery modernization director at Army Futures Command told me the service is looking at “existing missiles capable of flying at various speeds and altitudes.”
That way, Brig. Gen. John Rafferty told me, prototypes of the new mid-range weapon can be operational in 2023, alongside several other new weapons – revolutionizing the Army’s long-neglected artillery branch to hit targets once reachable only by airstrikes.
“2023’s a big year,” said Rafferty. If all the programs in his portfolio stay on schedule, which of course is never guaranteed, that year will see
“What we want to do is provide arrows in the quiver… options to our combatant commanders that present multiple dilemmas to our competitors,” he said. “That’s how we deter.”
The New Arsenal
The new PrSM missile, in and of itself, will extend the range of Army artillery far beyond anything they have today – yet in the context of the future force, it’s relatively short-ranged. “It’s ironic,” Rafferty told me.
That said, PrSM will be the mainstay of the Army’s future missile arsenal, Rafferty said. Why? First, it can fire from a large number of existing launchers, both the tracked MLRS and the wheeled HIMARS. Second, it should be cheaper than the longer-ranged and faster-flying hypersonic missiles.
In fact, Rafferty once described the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon as an “exquisite” high-performance systemthat will likely be reserved for the most critical and difficult targets, such as hardened command bunkers. A big part of the attraction of the Strategic Long-Range Cannon is that it could fire larger numbers of cheaper projectiles at similar ranges – but its novel technology remains highly experimental.
So as the Army studied future conflict – with extensive input from the other services and the joint Combatant Commanders around the world – it found a whole category of targets too distant to hit with PrSM but too numerous to handle with hypersonics.
“The strategic fires study was done with combatant commands’ input, as well as others from the operational force,” Rafferty told me. “[It] showed that if we could address some of the high payoff targets in the mid-range space that we would really begin to change the calculus in the Pacific and in Europe – in really different ways.”
In the vast expanses of the Pacific, Rafferty said, the primary target for the intermediate-range weapon would be Chinese warships – which means it must be able to track and home in on moving targets. PrSM will eventually have an anti-ship seeker as well, but its 500-plus km range doesn’t get you that far across the Pacific; hence the value of an intermediate-range weapon.
“If you can mix and match short-, mid- and long-range capabilities in a variety of different locations, you can really create a dilemma” for the adversary, Rafferty told me. “He may not know what’s on what island” – which means he must treat any US outpost as a long-range threat until intelligence proves otherwise.
By contrast, Europe is a smaller warzone, mostly on land, where the intermediate-range weapon could strike targets deep in Russian territory. In the 1980s, the ability of Army Pershing missiles to threaten Moscow from bases in Western Europe helped lead to the now-defunct INF Treaty, which banned such weapons and got the Army out of the long-range missile business for a generation.
By recreating an intermediate-range capability in Europe, Raffety said, “you begin to put all of the adversary assets at risk in depth. Now there is not sanctuary for him to hide.”
https://breakingdefense.com/2020/09/army-seeks-new-mid-range-missile-prototype-by-2023/
“[Navy] SM-6s and Tomahawks, that’s a capability I can see us as having in the future,” the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. James McConville, told a DefenseOne webcast this morning. “We are working that, [and] the Marine Corps is doing the same thing. If you don’t have to develop your own system, if you already have something that already works… it’s in all of our interest to go ahead and pursue those.”
Now, McConville didn’t address the intermediate-range missile specifically, whose existence was first reported by our Defense News colleague Jen Judson just last week. But in an exclusive interview about the new weapon, the artillery modernization director at Army Futures Command told me the service is looking at “existing missiles capable of flying at various speeds and altitudes.”
That way, Brig. Gen. John Rafferty told me, prototypes of the new mid-range weapon can be operational in 2023, alongside several other new weapons – revolutionizing the Army’s long-neglected artillery branch to hit targets once reachable only by airstrikes.
“2023’s a big year,” said Rafferty. If all the programs in his portfolio stay on schedule, which of course is never guaranteed, that year will see
- the first battalion of the Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) upgrade to the venerable M109 Paladin armored howitzer, doubling its range to over 65 kilometers (40+ miles).
- the first prototype battery of the Precision Strike Missile(PrSM), which will replace the Cold War-era ATACMS, upping the range of the Army’s MLRS and HIMARS missile launchers from 300 km to over 500, with a future upgrade aiming for 700-800 km.
- the first prototype battery of the new intermediate-range missile, to be developed by the Rapid Capabilities & Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) also working on hypersonics and laser weapons. The Army doesn’t want to lock down rigid technical requirements too early, Rafferty told me, but he said the weapon’s range could be up to 1,500 or even 2,000 km. (Of the Navy missiles McConville mentioned, the SM-6 couldn’t reach this range, though it might have other missions; the Tomahawk definitely could).
- the first full-range test shots for the experimental Strategic Long-Range Cannon (SLRC), which aims to use gunpowder and rocket-boosted shells to reach 1,500 km-plus ranges previously reachable only by missiles;
- the first prototype battery of the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), whose range, Rafferty said, will be “thousands of kilometers.”
“What we want to do is provide arrows in the quiver… options to our combatant commanders that present multiple dilemmas to our competitors,” he said. “That’s how we deter.”
The New Arsenal
The new PrSM missile, in and of itself, will extend the range of Army artillery far beyond anything they have today – yet in the context of the future force, it’s relatively short-ranged. “It’s ironic,” Rafferty told me.
That said, PrSM will be the mainstay of the Army’s future missile arsenal, Rafferty said. Why? First, it can fire from a large number of existing launchers, both the tracked MLRS and the wheeled HIMARS. Second, it should be cheaper than the longer-ranged and faster-flying hypersonic missiles.
In fact, Rafferty once described the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon as an “exquisite” high-performance systemthat will likely be reserved for the most critical and difficult targets, such as hardened command bunkers. A big part of the attraction of the Strategic Long-Range Cannon is that it could fire larger numbers of cheaper projectiles at similar ranges – but its novel technology remains highly experimental.
So as the Army studied future conflict – with extensive input from the other services and the joint Combatant Commanders around the world – it found a whole category of targets too distant to hit with PrSM but too numerous to handle with hypersonics.
“The strategic fires study was done with combatant commands’ input, as well as others from the operational force,” Rafferty told me. “[It] showed that if we could address some of the high payoff targets in the mid-range space that we would really begin to change the calculus in the Pacific and in Europe – in really different ways.”
In the vast expanses of the Pacific, Rafferty said, the primary target for the intermediate-range weapon would be Chinese warships – which means it must be able to track and home in on moving targets. PrSM will eventually have an anti-ship seeker as well, but its 500-plus km range doesn’t get you that far across the Pacific; hence the value of an intermediate-range weapon.
“If you can mix and match short-, mid- and long-range capabilities in a variety of different locations, you can really create a dilemma” for the adversary, Rafferty told me. “He may not know what’s on what island” – which means he must treat any US outpost as a long-range threat until intelligence proves otherwise.
By contrast, Europe is a smaller warzone, mostly on land, where the intermediate-range weapon could strike targets deep in Russian territory. In the 1980s, the ability of Army Pershing missiles to threaten Moscow from bases in Western Europe helped lead to the now-defunct INF Treaty, which banned such weapons and got the Army out of the long-range missile business for a generation.
By recreating an intermediate-range capability in Europe, Raffety said, “you begin to put all of the adversary assets at risk in depth. Now there is not sanctuary for him to hide.”
https://breakingdefense.com/2020/09/army-seeks-new-mid-range-missile-prototype-by-2023/
