The Army won’t field its first operational Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) battery with live rounds until fiscal year 2025 due to delays, the Government Accountability Office said in a new report.
The projection is “based on current test and missile production plans,” GAO said, noting the Army has faced “integration challenges” with LRHW that led it to miss its initial goal for fielding by the end of FY ‘23.
“According to the Army, the LRHW program is committed to delivering this critical capability in coordination with the Navy. It stated that following the integration challenges discovered in flight test, the military departments and industry partners established an independent review of the entire system and embarked on a rigorous risk reduction test campaign. The Army added that the program is on track to implement required corrective actions and successfully demonstrate system performance by the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024,” GAO writes in the report.
The update on the plan to conduct LRHW testing by late FY ‘24 follows previous comments from the Army that it was looking to resume testing in the summer after a series of canceled tests last year (Defense Daily, March 13).
“There’s a cadence of testing that has to happen before you can send it operationally into the field and that’s ongoing right now,” Jarret Lafleur, DoD’s senior adviser to the principal director for hypersonics for strike systems strategy and policy, said at the Defense One Tech Summit on Tuesday. “Our job is to move fast, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. So we’re going to go as fast as we can on that.”
The Army’s LRHW, which has been in development for over four years, will share the same all-up missile round and canister, and Common Hypersonic Glide Body (C-HGB) with the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike program.
In 2019, the Army chose Lockheed Martin [LMT] to serve as the weapon systems integrator for the LRHW, which will be fired from a truck, while Dynetics [LDOS] is tasked with producing the C-HGB.
Following a series of three canceled live fire tests last year, the Army confirmed it would not meet its goal to field the first operational system with live rounds by the end of 2023 (Defense Daily, Nov. 8 2023).
The two most recent planned flight tests in 2023 were aborted due to “launcher and launch sequence issues,” according to the GAO report, which notes the Army is still conducting an independent technical review of the launcher challenges and will “test the launch sequence separately from the missile before it resumes flight testing.”
“The LRHW integration issues discovered during testing also affect missile production. The Army cannot complete the missiles for the first battery until a successful test demonstrates that the current design works,” GAO writes in its report.
The Army completed fielding of the ground equipment for its first prototype hypersonic weapon battery, minus the live rounds, in the fall of 2021 to the soldiers from the I Corps’ 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington, who have been testing on the equipment since then.
“LRHW officials stated that once a successful flight test is achieved, the first production missile will be delivered within approximately 6 weeks and the first battery of eight missiles will be delivered within approximately 11 months,” GAO writes in the report.
The Army’s $185.9 billion FY ‘25 budget request includes over $1.2 billion in LRHW funding, split between $744 million in procurement and $538 million for further research and development and testing.
The service’s budget documents note the requested funding continues the development of the C-HGB and covers a planned procurement of further ground support equipment and a basic load of eight All-Up Rounds.