On September 25th, the US Navy's Naval Sea Systems Command issued an important notice inviting industry to a briefing day on the emerging Navy Modular Missile (NMM) program. The project aims for a new modular family of missiles to replace multiple types of short, medium, and long-range weapons currently in use, improving both performance and the number of munitions carried on ships with dual and quad-pack solutions in vertical launch cells.

The Industry Day will be held October 21-22 at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. On this occasion, the US Navy will present the program and the planned acquisition strategy. The invitation is also extended to "non-traditional" firms, as the modular nature of the new missiles is specifically intended to expand options in terms of components, propulsion solutions, etc.

One of the first priorities seems to be defining a successor to the SEA SPARROW. The US Navy has been talking about NMM since at least 2024: It was, along with the at-sea, underway reloading of VLS cells, one of the new projects presented by Navy Secretary Carlos del Toro. Again, the NMM was also mentioned at a later conference on operations against the Houthis in the Red Sea, where Rear Admiral Fred Pyle mentioned the intention to create a new family of missiles with a common "front end" (certainly the seeker and guidance systems, perhaps even the warhead) but offering a wide range of choices of rocket motors to ensure different performance and ranges.

Research into new rocket engines and boosters was initiated as early as 2021. The notice specifies that the program will be carried out in collaboration with the USAF to define a “reference open architecture” that will allow for the integration and variation of components within a "known" system, seeking the best solution from industry each time.

The NMM family will need to include "a long-range hypersonic variant and several 'scalable' variants to replace existing short, medium, and long-range weapons." The US Navy plans to release "several" Requests for Proposals as early as Fiscal Year 2026.

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