WASHINGTON — The Army has selected five companies to develop prototypes for the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) Increment 4 program, restarting the competition for the service’s next long-range strike weapon.
Anduril, Castelion, Lockheed Martin, RTX and Mach Industries each received Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreements to build prototype missiles, the service announced Tuesday. The Increment 4 missile is intended to hit moving maritime and land targets at ranges of at least 1,000 km (621 miles) — roughly double the range of the Army’s PrSM baseline.
The announcement did not disclose the value of the OTAs and a spokesperson from Program Acquisition Executive (PAE) Fires did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Per the announcement, each company will be tasked with developing prototype missiles capable of launching from the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). According to an April solicitation from PAE Fires, the system must also have an open systems architecture — meaning operators can plug new hardware and software into the platform — and be able to operate in the Indo-Pacific “consistent with the supplied operational scenario.”
The five vendors will participate in a competitive fly-off in fiscal 2027, after which the Army will conduct the program’s first down select, the service said. In fiscal 2028, the companies will hold a final fly-off, and the final down select could occur in fiscal 2030, according to the solicitation.
Tuesday’s announcement comes after the service reopened the PrSM Increment 4 competition when it posted the new solicitation in April. The Army had previously awarded contracts to Lockheed Martin and an RTX-Northrop Grumman team in 2023 to begin developing the missile.
Neither Lockheed nor RTX responded to requests for comment by the time of publication regarding whether the previous awards carried over to the new OTAs. Anduril, Castelion and Mach Industries also did not respond to a request for comment on their proposed solutions.
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In June, Lockheed touted its PrSM Increment 4 solution after a testing event at one of L3Harris’ propulsion facilities. The missile “demonstrated a flawless booster‑to‑ramjet handoff,” marking a “pivotal advanced propulsion milestone,” Lockheed said in a press release. The companies were set to begin conducting full flight tests this fall.
Tuesday’s announcement comes two weeks after the Army awarded Lockheed a $1.2 billion contract for the company’s “early operational capability” PrSM Increment 2 system, a missile with a multimode seeker capable of hitting maritime targets on the move. The PrSM Increment 2 capability — also referred to as the Land-Based Anti-Ship Missile seeker — is designed to travel up to 500 km (310.7 miles) in combat, as Breaking Defense previously reported.
Further, the Army used its PrSM Increment 1 capabilities for the first time in combat in March during the on-and-off again conflict in Iran. Since then, reports have surfaced that the US has used “virtually all” of its PrSM systems.