Army tests next-gen long-range fires capability in Pacific

“Everything went fantastic” when the U.S. Army fired its new long-range missiles from its prototype uncrewed missile launcher at a target off the coast of Palau, the first such launch outside the continental United States, a U.S. Army Pacific leader said.

“Couldn’t have asked for better results” in the June 16 launch of two Precision Strike Missiles from the Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher, Brig. Gen. Jeffrey VanAntwerp, head of operations for U.S. Army Pacific, said in a phone interview.

Soldiers from the 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force and the 1-181 Artillery Regiment of the Tennessee National Guard used the weapon to help sink a moving ship as part of a Navy-led training exercise called Valiant Shield. The AML and PrSM—which can hit targets 250 miles away—are part of a larger Army effort to deliver long-range precision fires and other support to the joint force in the Pacific as it prepares for a potential war with China. 

“It’s difficult to find and fix elements that are operating in on the land, particularly when they are they are…mobile and networked, and in the case of this AML, potentially don't even have to be manned by a human being, and can be controlled in multiple ways,” VanAntwerp said. “They have autonomous features, where they can just operate by pre-programmed waypoints autonomously. You can obviously teleoperate them, so operate them remotely, and can be paired with other systems as well. So just a ton of opportunity and capabilities” and “it's filling what we believe to be a gap in our capability and a vulnerability in the adversary’s capability to target it.”

China is focused on building capability “to defeat air and maritime threats,” so the U.S. Army wants to deliver “purpose-built land forces,” VanAntwerp said. And it’s not enough to just “be able to shoot from land to sea, you’ve also got to be able to collect [intelligence], and so we’re also looking to support those needs. … You’ve got to enable those kill chains.” 

To that end, U.S. Army Pacific, working with the research and experimentation branch of the office of the undersecretary of defense as well as Aerostar Industries, launched high-altitude balloons and the Vanilla Ultra-Long Endurance Unmanned Aircraft System from Guam during Valiant Shield for sensing; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; and communications. The exercise was Vanilla’s “graduation event,” according to an Army press release, and it operated for a 27-hour flight that included a “violent storm.”

The exercise was also an opportunity to better understand joint requirements, particularly those of the Air Force as it continues to develop its agile combat employment concept, and to validate communications architecture, VanAntwerp said. 

“Now the goal is to achieve greater persistence in that, so that we’re always collaborating as a joint force, and it becomes routine,” he said, adding that for the Army’s multi-domain task forces, “if they’re not forward in the theater, operating alongside our joint partners and our combined partners, our foreign partners, then you’re not being effective. The days of like, you go out to the back 40 at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, or even Hawaii—if it’s not with partners, and it’s not with a joint force, it’s really not real.”