The U.S. Army is pursuing a new mid-range missile prototype capable of going after moving targets at land and at sea, an Army spokesperson has confirmed to Defense News. The effort is meant to fill a gap in the service’s long-range precision fires portfolio that includes the future Precision Strike Missile and hypersonic weapons capabilities.
The decision to pursue a new mid-range missile was born out of a strategic fires study conducted by Army Futures Command’s Research and Analysis Center based at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.
The Army decided to pursue a mid-range capability to fill a near-term need that will “complement other critical systems” in the service’s LRPF portfolio in support of multidomain operations, Mack said. She could not offer more details on the prototyping effort, as it is still “pre-decisional.”
The service planned to pursue a mobile medium-range missile, or MIRM, in fiscal 2020, but canceled that effort in its fiscal 2021 budget request, saving the Army $90 million.
The Army originally planned over the next five budget cycles in FY20 to spend nearly $1 billion on MIRM, which was meant to be a land-based cruise missile with potential use in the Asia-Pacific region to address the medium-range (1,000-kilometer) gap in capability there. The plan was to move into a technology-maturation and risk-reduction phase in FY21.