Source Breaking Defense

WASHINGTON, US: The US Army has taken two new steps forward in its quest for long-range strike capabilities that will be able to hold threats in the Pacific at range.

On Thursday evening, the Army put out two announcements: The service tested a conventional hypersonic missile, built in partnership with the Navy, and that it also successfully launched a pair of Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) Increment 1 weapons from a HIMARS launcher.

Both systems fit into the Army’s focus on increasing long-range fires, which is seen as vital for any conflict with China, given the much-ballyhooed “tyranny of distance” any Pacific conflict would entail.

The hypersonic test occurred at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. Per an announcement from the Pentagon, this “is the second successful end-to-end flight test of the All Up Round (AUR) this year and was the first live-fire event for the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon system using a Battery Operations Center and a Transporter Erector Launcher.”

The Army and Navy are collaborating on the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, which is designed to be launched from land or sea. Militaries around the world are in a race to develop hypersonic weapons, which, at least on paper, combine high speeds with maneuverability that should allow weapons to avoid air defenses.

Meanwhile, the PrSM launch, which took place on Wednesday at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, was deemed a success, with the Army saying the munition engaged “four simulated rotary wing targets within a helicopter staging area.”

PrSM Increment 1, produced by Lockheed Martin, is slated to replace the Army’s legacy ATACMS tactical ballistic missile, increasing range out to 500 kilometers. As part of the service’s efforts to increase its weapon portfolio range, it plans to use that first PrSM increment to strike targets closer in, and the hypersonic weapon for ones further out. Then the new Typhon Mid-Range Capability, deployed to the Philippines this year, will be used for targets at distances in the middle of the two.

But the Army is also hoping to develop multiple versions of PrSM going forward. Increment 2 is under development with a multimode seeker, known as the Land-Based Anti-Ship Missile (LBASM) seeker, and a PrSM Increment 3 seeks to add in enhanced lethality payloads.

The Army has also tapped a Lockheed Martin team and a Raytheon Technologies-Northrop Grumman team to work on competing PrSM Increment 4 designs that can fly more than 1,000 kilometers, possibly double the range of the current version. A few weeks ago the service said it was looking at an Increment 5 for an autonomous launcher to hit targets beyond 1,000 kilometers.