The U.S. Army’s first unit to receive hypersonic weapons will get a battery’s worth of rounds by the end of the year, Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano, the service’s program executive officer for missiles and space, told Defense News in a recent interview.
In 2021 the 1st Multidomain Task Force, 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade at Joint Base Lewis-McChord received all equipment — except for the actual live rounds — for the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon capability it calls Dark Eagle.
The Washington state-based unit was supposed to get the missiles in fall 2023 but several aborted test events forced the Army to push back its fielding plans.
The first three missiles were distributed to the unit earlier this year, with the last of the munitions arriving in July. The fourth round is currently going through acceptance checkouts at Lockheed Martin’s facility in Cortland, Alabama, Lozano said. The final eight are expected to be delivered “by the end of December,” Lozano said.
The Army is also aiming to conduct a hypersonic missile test around the same time.
“That will complete the basic load for battery one, up at JBLM,” he added. “Then … we’ll start working on Battery Two.”
The fielding of the munitions follows a lengthy delay in the testing process. Several tests of the round were aborted in 2023 due to challenges at the range and the hiccups in the process of firing up the missile for launch.
Testing the all-up round was considered critical to ensure the system was safe, effective and ready for fielding.
The U.S. is presently in a race to field the capability and develop systems to defend against hypersonic weapons, which China and Russia are actively developing and testing.
The Army conducted an end-to-end successful flight test of its hypersonic missile at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii in May 2024, which put the initial fielding to the first unit closer on the horizon.
While the process of equipping the Army with the weapon has taken nearly two years longer than planned, service officials have been quick to point out that missile development programs typically take about 10 years. The LRHW program, meanwhile, is only just beyond the five-year mark.
The Army has worked with Leidos’ Dynetics for years to build the industrial base for the Common-Hypersonic Glide Body that will be used by both the ground service and the Navy, as the domestic private sector has never built a hypersonic weapon.
The service also separately produced launchers, trucks, trailers and the battle operations center necessary to put together the first weapon battery.
Lockheed Martin is the weapon system integrator for the Army’s hypersonic capability that will be launched from a mobile truck.
In preparation for receiving the all-up rounds, the Army completed its delivery of the first hypersonic weapon capability — minus the rounds — to the Multi-Domain Task Force unit at JBLM two days ahead of its end-of-fiscal 2021 fielding deadline. The unit has been training on the system since the delivery.
The next phase of production will ramp up quickly once delivery to the first battery is complete.
“The second tranche of production is both Battery Two and the Battery One reload,” Lozano said. “That’s a very complex missile system. Although we’ve gotten through the testing of the system and we’re confident that it works, we’re still working through how to take a prototype system that’s complex and transition it into production, where you have a very repeatable process that drives out quality defects.
“We’re in the middle of that process right now,” Lozano added. “Things that we’re wrestling with every day is we’ll build up part of the missile and we’ll take the boost phase rocket motor and mate it to the missile midsection and then the inspector will come by and we’ll find some defects that we will have to work and address. … We’re learning as we build these missiles.”
Speed, of course, brings added challenges, Lozano acknowledged.
“Just the nature of having gone so fast — if you were doing a typical 10- or 15-year missile program, you drive all this risk out of the program and you’d be delivering on time. You’d just be delivering 10 years from now.”
Yet, “the good news is that we’re making progress now,” he said. “We just have to keep our foot on the gas pedal and continue to push forward and make more progress.”
Battlefield Tech
C4ISRNet
[crypto-donation-box type=”tabular” show-coin=”all”]
