US lawmakers have given the green-light to the army’s effort to develop a ‘mid-range’ missile and have provided the service with USD88.1 million to do so in fiscal year 2021.
In late December, President Donald Trump signed a comprehensive spending bill for FY 2021 that includes Pentagon funding and dollars for the army to move ahead with designing a mid-range capability (MRC) prototype. The service had not initially requested MRC money but later unveiled plans for a new weapon after abandoning the cross-domain upgrade to the Army Tactical Missile System (CD-ATACMS). The latter was to field an anti-ship capability.
“It was a hard problem to take an existing seeker and not build for the type of launch environment and put it in ATACMS,” Brigadier General John Rafferty, head of the US Army’s Long-Range Precision Fires Cross-Functional Team, told Janes in October. He noted that the service envisioned the CD-ATACMS as a “bridge” until it could field its Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) spiral 1 capability. However, the army now plans to field a PrSM baseline capability in 2023 before the spiral 1 capability with a multi-mode seeker in 2025.
“Now I don’t think we need that [CD-ATACMS] bridge,” the one-star general added.
Accordingly, lawmakers zeroed out the army’s USD62.4 million CD-ATACMS request in the appropriations bill citing the programme’s termination.
The US Army’s MRC programme will exploit a variant of the US Navy’s BGM-109 Tomahawk, and the SM-6 anti-air warfare/ballistic missile defence/anti-surface warfare missile (shown here). (US Navy)
As for MRC prototype development, in November the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) announced it was awarding Lockheed Martin a USD339.3 million contract to design, build, integrate, test, and deliver such a weapon by FY 2023.
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