At an Association of the US Army event, the Commanding General for the Fires Center of Excellence, Maj. Gen. Winston Brook, unveiled the existence of plans for a 5th Increment of the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM). The main objective connected with Inc 5 is range, which is meant to exceed 1,000 km.

The baseline PrSM Inc 1 has a declared range of 500 Km, possibly already exceeding it by a margin and its mission is to “provide Joint Force Commanders with a 24/7, all-weather capability to attack critical and time sensitive area and point targets including threat air defense, missile launchers, command and control centers, assembly/staging areas and high payoff targets at all depths of the multidomain battlefield”.

Increment 2, already in development, will integrate a Seeker that will enable the missile to pursue mobile and moving targets, increasing its counter-air defence capability and introducing the ability to hit warships at sea as well. Its mission is to “attack critical time sensitive moving maritime or relocatable land targets” and its procurement will begin in FY 2026.

Increment 3 is meant to replace the large unitary warhead with “very reliable, smart submunitions” (sensor-fuzed weapons) that can seek out multiple individual, complex, moving targets within an area - tanks, light-skinned vehicles, air defense systems – for fielding around 2029. Increment 4 is looking at introducing novel propulsion solutions to achieve ranges of up to 1000 km and much increased maneuverability. According to the US Army, this will be possible thanks to the combination of a solid rocket motor booster with a liquid fueled ramjet engine.

Increment 4 should actually field before Inc 3, around 2027.

The new Increment 5 missile wants to achieve ranges beyond the 1,000 km mark and the Army accepts that this will require a longer body, even though this would restrict its use to launchers other than the existing M142 HIMARS and M270. The 1-star Officer specifically mentioned the Autonomous Multi Domain Launcher, a crewless vehicle which is essentially a modified HIMARS without cab and with a modified launch module that can take 2 rather than one rocket pod and which, crucially, could accept longer munitions. Another option would be the palletized artillery launched recently unveiled by Lockheed Martin on a 10x10 container-carrying truck, which offers quite literally twice the “useful” ammunition length as existing GMLRS pods.

These are early days for Increment 5 and much has yet to be determined, but the combination of AMDL launchers and very-long range PrSM would be a powerful, highly mobile capability to employ, especially in the Pacific theatre.

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