The Army on March 28 awarded Lockheed Martin [LMT] a nearly $5 billion production contract for Precision Strike Missiles Inc. 1.
Work on the new deal is expected to be completed by the end of March 2030, according to the Pentagon.
PrSM is the Army’s program to replace its legacy ATACMS missiles, also built by Lockheed Martin, with the base weapon capable of reaching ranges up to 500 kilometers.
Scott Prochniak, Lockheed Martin’s manager of business development for tactical strike missiles, told Defense Daily this week that production qualification testing for PrSM Inc. 1 was nearing completion as the Army plans to move into the initial operational test and evaluation phase in early summer.
Lockheed Martin has been building initial batches of PrSM under Early Operational Capability (EOC) contracts, with Prochniak noting the company is currently in the process of delivering missiles under the EOC 2 award.
Paula Hartley, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of tactical missiles, told reporters in October the company will have delivered an initial 26 missiles for EOC 1 by the end of 2024 and that EOC 2 will cover 50 PrSM missiles.
Prochniak, in an interview at the the Association of the United States Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, said the PrSM production rate is “going to ramp up” with the next contract and that Lockheed Martin expected that award “could be soon.”
The Army completed its latest PrSM Inc. 1 production qualification test on March 19 at Vandenberg Space Force in California which was an extended range demonstration.
“The flight test assessed the PrSM missile’s ability to launch and execute stable flight characteristics throughout the predicted trajectory and range. Missile performance was nominal for all parameters and demonstrated PrSM’s contribution to the enhancement of Army long range precision fires capabilities,” the Army said in a statement.
In March 2023, the Army tapped Lockheed Martin and a team of RTX [RTX] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] for the Long Range Maneuverable Fires (LRMF) program to work on developing long-range missile concepts to inform the design of a future PrSM Inc. 4 capable of ranges up to 1,000 kilometers (Defense Daily, March 27 2023).
An Army official in December confirmed the service is exploring development of a future fifth increment of PrSM that would be fired from a larger pod to reach ranges beyond 1,000 kilometers and achieve potential hypersonic speeds (Defense Daily, Dec. 3 2024).