Rebuilding the Arsenal 2026

As spades went into the ground to signal the start of construction of the new Building 47 at Lockheed Martin’s Munitions Production Center in Troy, Alabama, it marked a significant development in accelerating production of the company’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptor, better known as THAAD. The expansion of factory space in Troy is a key element of the company’s $8-9-billion commitment to expand its munitions production footprint across the United States.

The Department of War’s Acquisition Transformation Strategy is part of a long-term plan that signals clear demand for critical munitions and it enables industry to confidently invest in facilities and workforce development, along with supply chain expansion and advanced manufacturing capabilities. In addition to enlarging the facility in Troy, Lockheed Martin is also growing its plant in Camden, Arkansas, which is another site that’s vital for building more munitions at a faster pace.

“My job is to interface and collaborate with the Department of War in achieving the call to action to produce these critical munitions, not only at speed but also at scale, multiplying the current production rates by two, three, or even four times the current rates,” Dan Nimblett, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for Munitions Acceleration Integration told TWZ on the ground in Troy during the groundbreaking event.

“Fundamentally what’s occurred changes how acquisition works [with] long term demand agreements. These long term procurement agreements enable Lockheed Martin and our supply base to make the necessary investments with confidence of the future demand. This allows us to make the investments not only in our people and our facilities, but in the technology necessary to build [these munitions] at a scale and a speed that’s relevant to the threat today,” explained Nimblett.

Lockheed Martin was the first company in the U.S. defense industry to announce a framework agreement with the DoW for munitions acceleration of high-demand missiles – initially tripling production capacity of the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptor, followed by a second agreement to quadruple the production capacity of advanced THAAD interceptors. These two defensive missiles are cornerstones of a layered air and missile defense system, and both have been integrated together via Joint All-Domain Operations, including with the U.S. Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS).

In response to the DoW’s call to action, the company has already invested more than $2 billion in its production facilities and in the related tooling, its key suppliers, and its workforce in order to accelerate production rates.

Lockheed Martin plans to effectively double the factory footprint in Troy and dramatically increase the workforce. “We’re going to increase that [workforce] by drawing in college students, high school students, veterans, everybody’s welcome,” explains Jason Reynolds, vice president and general manager for integrated air and missile defense. “When they come to Lockheed Martin, they receive training, they get opportunity, and because these programs are on a ramp and in production in such high demand, this is where you come to start your career and you [can] work here for a long time.”

Lockheed Martin currently employs around 1,100 workers at its Camden site, but this is also growing. The Camden training center is seen as being critical in providing the swift increase in skilled operators needed to support this acceleration. “We work closely with the state of Arkansas as well on looking at what else we can do in the community and the infrastructure in that community to support people moving, hopefully into Camden as we ramp up,” says Reynolds.

“People here [in Troy] really know their work matters. It’s meaningful for both the community as well as for our national defense. So, we’re really proud of our employees and we’re on a growth trajectory. We’re hiring and we want as many qualified people to come join our team as possible.”

The Camden site is also accelerating its work on the long-range Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), which is also set to quadruple production over the next few years. Reynolds added that building missiles faster using automation and advanced manufacturing technologies, plus increasing the production line capacity, are some of the vital means for success.

“PAC-3 MSE and THAAD are the most capable air defense interceptors on the planet. They’re in extreme demand [and] we’re doing everything possible,” says Reynolds. “With PAC-3, we have been doubling that production over the last four years and now, like I said, we’re going to triple it. We’re working very carefully with our suppliers, with the U.S. government and with our partners and allies all around the world to get all the parts in and get them into factories like you see behind us today to assemble them and get them out to the warfighter as quickly as possible.”

Another way Lockheed Martin is accelerating the delivery of advanced air defense capabilities is the through the introduction this summer of the PAC-3 Adapted Capability Effector, or PAC-3 ACE. This new missile leverages the PAC-3 fire-control system and provides for full integration with the Patriot weapon suite.

The main differentiator of PAC-3 ACE is that it would be produced at less than half the unit cost of MSE and first flight could occur within 18 months. A core part of the rapid fielding strategy is an international, joint-development model. Lockheed Martin is partnering with both American and European industry, sharing production lines, supply chains and expertise.

Lockheed Martin says PAC-3  ACE provides a “cost-effective, multi-threat solution.” The interceptor is engineered to engage a broad spectrum of air-breathing threats, cruise missiles, and both short and medium-range ballistic missiles. By offering a low-cost “kill” per-engagement, it is designed to address the current climate that demands deeper ammunition reserves without compromising on performance.

Inside A Growing Lockheed Martin Site That Is Key To Its Munitions Production Ramp

The keys to munitions acceleration

This year, Lockheed Martin has made significant progress in a series of production acceleration projects for munitions programs under its Missiles and Fire Control division. “I was supposed to retire last year. I’m here because this is the most exciting time in the 30 years I’ve been in this industry,” says Dan Nimblett. “These long-term agreements provide us the certainty to enable us to make these investments.”

“What recent conflicts have demonstrated is that Lockheed Martin and the American defense industrial base never lost the technological edge. The technology and the capability has always been there – we have the best systems in the world. We’ve proven that through real world performance.”

Nimblett explained that Lockheed Martin’s supply chain is following suit, and that they are all now investing in similar ways to ensure they meet the demand signals. “We’re evaluating how we produce and increase additive manufacturing and robotics. We’re also looking at how we develop, which I think is a fundamental part of getting capability into the warfighters’ hands at a speed and scale that’s relevant to the threat.”

Having received Milestone C approval from the U.S. Army in July 2025, PrSM manufacturing has relied on a high level of automation. PrSM was engineered from the start for automated, robot-driven production – automating tasks once done by hand – and that early-stage streamlining is paying dividends as Lockheed Martin seeks to accelerate output.

“We have a lot of robotics built into our munitions production,” explains Gaylia Campbell, vice president, Tactical Missiles. “A lot of times we use robotics to help increase the safety of the assembly, like an explosive charge that has to be integrated into a munition, and we have a robotic arm that places that and tests the placement. We also robotically paint and coat [PrSM]. So, we have a lot of robotics already in Camden and that’s really going to help us with this ramp-up in production – the fact that so much of it is [already] automated.”

Campbell emphasizes that PrSM entered production with a mindset of acceleration. “We got PrSM through preliminary and critical design reviews, and into first flight in times roughly half of what it would normally have taken us. We’ve been amazingly successful on all these flights. Those early [test] flights went off one after the other during the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when there were a lot of challenges for all of us in our daily lives, and yet we were able to continue to fly and prove the operational performance.”

Lockheed Martin is reshaping the munitions supply chain with an unprecedented slate of manufacturing initiatives that pull together new facilities, strategic partnerships, and workforce development. The company is also expanding a number of its other production facilities, such as a $60-million investment in its complex in Archbald, Pennsylvania, that will add 700 jobs in support of high‑priority programs including PrSM, THAAD, PAC‑3, and Apache sensors. In Orlando, Florida, three legacy paint bays have been merged into a high‑performance shop that can retool a work cell in hours rather than weeks, while Ocala’s new Progressive Work Smart Assembly Line has cut seeker and mission control unit build times by roughly 50 percent.

A partnership with General Motors will bring high‑rate commercial manufacturing expertise into Lockheed Martin’s production processes, and the new Rapid Fielding Center in Grand Prairie, Texas, is tasked to reduce traditional manufacturing development timelines. What once took years of design, testing and tooling is aimed to be prototyped, fabricated and validated in a matter of months.

Echoing endorsement of the DoW’s initiative, Campbell underscores that knowing what the demand signal will be is a critical differentiator when it comes to production ramp-up. “We can plan for some of those really critical rare earth minerals that we need, the batteries for example in our munitions, we need certain rare earth minerals for that. We need to know the total demand signal and that means we can negotiate with the suppliers and guarantee that we have access. That can really help us accelerate.”

To support the wider munitions efforts Lockheed Martin is also investing in solid rocket motor development and production, as well as lower-tier parts that go into solid rocket motors. “We’re working with different suppliers to develop new sources of supply for solid rocket motors,” says Campbell. “We’re investigating heavily right now in designing and prototyping several motors that we plan to test and take to production, and that really will develop a whole new supply chain and will really be critical for all munitions production.”

Having a five-year contract instead of annual contracts allows the manufacturer to have far more buying power to secure sub-components for a far better price point. “I can go and invest. Invest in more capacity, invest in my supplier’s capacity,” explains Campbell.

“Production is all about velocity. Keeping the line moving and not having to stop because we don’t have a part. Being able to order bigger quantities of things up front is really huge when it comes to acceleration.”

Contact the author: Jamie.Hunter@teamrecurrent.io

Castelion, a startup begun by former SpaceX employees, has provided the first view of its Blackbeard hypersonic weapon. The first look at what has been billed as a lower-cost missile comes as the company announces that it has secured $1 billion in new financing, which it says will help get its first hypersonic weapon into production as part of its ambitious manufacturing strategy. While hypersonic weapons have very attractive qualities, they are extremely expensive and that cost will likely keep them from being bought in large quantities or used against wider target sets. Castelion is focused on trying to shift that, building hypersonic capabilies that can be bought in large quantities and used more freely, even if they have reduced performance.

A profile photo at the company’s headquarters reveals a weapon with a ballistic missile-like booster, on top of which is mounted an unpowered hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV). The booster brings the HGV to the desired velocity and altitude before releasing it toward its target. The concept is in contrast to air-breathing cruise missiles capable of traveling at hypersonic speeds. Hypersonic speed is generally defined as anything above Mach 5, which larger ballistic missiles also reach in the course of their flights. More precise performance figures for Blackbeard are lacking, but Castelion has previously hinted it could hit targets out to just under 500 miles.

Both stages of the weapon have cruciform fins, while the HGV features a prominent ‘chine’ line along the length of its body, and a slightly beaklike nose. The trolley on which the weapon is mounted provides some idea of its overall size. The blue stripes seen on each stage normally signify that a munition is an inert, non-explosive round utilized for training or tracking purposes. This would indicate a real (unarmed) missile rather than a dummy or mockup.

The company has previously said that it was aiming to have a more finalized Blackbeard design by 2027, so there is still potential for more design changes to come. We have reached out to Castelion for more information.

Castelion has previously released images of various missiles with very different, far more simple designs, which it has said “are representative of the low-cost internally developed test vehicles we use to enable rapid subsystem design iteration and to ground our performance models in real-world test data.”

OCTOBER 5, 2025

Two more development flights completed Sunday.

Each test validates vertically integrated subsystems and components from new suppliers nationwide – tightening the link between engineering and manufacturing to deliver capability faster. pic.twitter.com/t4tKM2cPx9

— Castelion (@Castelion) October 7, 2025

Some of these earlier experimental configurations also look to feature tail sections that are at least heavily inspired by, if not lifted directly from Standard-series surface-to-air missiles as used by the U.S. Navy and other navies globally.

Castelion yesterday also announced it had received Series C financing, comprising $800 million in equity financing and $250 million in committed financing. The equity round values Castelion at approximately $13 billion.

The company says it will use the funds as it transitions from development and flight testing toward producing Blackbeard in significant quantities.

Castelion claims the weapon is the first hypersonic strike system to be designed from the outset to be substantially less expensive and easier to manufacture at scale than traditional high-end missile systems.

“Deterrence depends on unapologetic American strength; highly capable weapon systems that adversaries fear produced in quantities they can’t imagine at a price taxpayers can afford,” Castelion CEO and co-founder Bryon Hargis said.

Another flight test in the books – this time @Spaceport_NM. Our second flight in the past 30 days.

The best way to stay ahead of your adversary in a prolonged competition is to have faster learning cycles than they do. pic.twitter.com/9n776j8XWr

— Castelion (@Castelion) February 19, 2025

The company says Blackbeard has gone from a clean-sheet design to a program of record in less than four years, with fielding targeted for 2027. Castelion has also secured more than $500 million in U.S. military contracts over the past 18 months.

A major part of the company’s strategy is its Project Ranger campus in Sandoval County, New Mexico. Castelion describes the roughly 1,000-acre facility as the largest dedicated hypersonic missile manufacturing site in the United States. The company previously committed more than $250 million of its own capital to infrastructure at the site and says it will now invest hundreds of millions of dollars more to expand production capacity.

That emphasis on manufacturing is central to how Castelion distinguishes Blackbeard from many existing hypersonic programs. The company has designed the weapon and its production processes around the expectation that large numbers will eventually be required.

“There’s a manufacturing renaissance underway and this round turbocharges American production of Blackbeard,” Hargis said. “Designed in California, built in New Mexico, supplied from small and large businesses across the United States; Blackbeard is an example of what America can do when private capital and Government work together.”

In May of this year, the Pentagon outlined plans to acquire at least 10,000 Blackbeard missiles, as well as a similar number of lower-cost cruise missiles, over the next three years.

These framework agreements are part of a larger effort to rapidly expand U.S. reserves of long-range, standoff weapons and, at the same time, strengthen the defense-industrial base so manufacturers can keep producing those weapons at a high rate over the long term.

The U.S. Army has made clear it is interested in employing Blackbeard in a ground-launched mode, as you can read more about here. Army budget documents confirm it is pursuing Blackbeard aggressively, but through a phased approach that offers multiple off-ramps. The service has previously talked of firing Blackbeard from new uncrewed launcher vehicles, as well as from existing M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers. How many Blackbeard missiles are compatible with each of these launch systems is unclear.

“The mission of Blackbeard Ground Launch (GL) is to attack/neutralize/suppress/destroy using hypersonic missile delivered precision fires (seeker based) against time sensitive moving targets and hardened targets at a much-reduced cost per missile than currently exists in the Army inventory,” the Army stated in its proposed budget for the 2026 Fiscal Year. “Blackbeard Ground Launch (GL) is an affordable, mass-produced hypersonic weapon designed for mid-range precision. The Army will leverage advancements in technology, materials, and cost-effective production methods to provide superior capabilities through fast, iterative design cycles, flexible hardware development, and modern manufacturing practices.”

Meanwhile, earlier this year, Castelion announced receipt of a contract from the Navy to integrate Blackbeard onto the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet carrier strike fighter and transition the system to an early operational capability in 2027. This will involve extensive system safety and certification testing, flight testing, and other integration activities related to carrier-based operations. This development may well be connected with halting plans for an air-launched, air-breathing hypersonic anti-ship cruise missile. A version of Blackbeard could also find its way onto Navy ships and submarines, as well as ground-based launchers, as we have discussed in the past.

In fact, the Army has also said that the ground-launched version of the weapon that it expects to receive will leverage an “existing air-launched, extended-range Blackbeard design,” without providing more information.

The U.S. Air Force has also awarded Castelion contracts in the past in relation to long-range strike weapon concepts, and TWZ has previously reached out to that service for more information.

Regardless, Castelion’s ambitions extend beyond Blackbeard. The company says it has been developing a much longer-range precision strike weapon for several years and will now accelerate its development and testing. That system is intended to reuse technologies, components, and manufacturing techniques developed for Blackbeard.

With a huge demand signal from the Pentagon, Castelion is also working on defensive systems based on the same development and manufacturing philosophy. The company says those efforts are focused on lowering costs, increasing production rates, and providing greater magazine depth for air and missile defense.

The strategy responds to the fact that the U.S. military’s growing interest in hypersonic weapons has been accompanied by persistent questions about production capacity and cost. Hypersonic systems are technically demanding, but the ability to manufacture them in meaningful numbers is ultimately just as important as demonstrating that an individual weapon can fly.

Castelion is betting that a different approach to development and manufacturing can change that equation.

“Castelion is at the forefront of defense manufacturing in the nation,” said Tom Ochinero, chairman and founding partner of Interlagos Capital, which provided some of the equity financing. “They’re building the capabilities to produce thousands of hypersonic weapons a year, something the U.S. has never seen before.”

This reflects a steadily growing U.S. military-wide push toward lower-cost precision munitions that are relatively simple to manufacture, while also drawing on non-traditional defense contractors to develop and produce them. Such efforts are widely viewed as essential to building up stockpiles in an economically sustainable manner ahead of a major contingency, such as a large-scale conflict in the Pacific with China, and ensuring a steady supply of weapons throughout a prolonged war.

The next test of this model will be whether Castelion can translate its relatively rapid development timeline into sustained production at the scale it is promising. With Blackbeard targeted for fielding in 2027 and a new generation of longer-range and defensive systems already in development, the company is positioning itself as much as a defense manufacturer as a missile developer, but this remains very much an unproven concept in this notoriously tricky area.

The new view of Blackbeard at Castelion’s headquarters offers a glimpse of the hardware at the center of that effort.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

General Atomics (GA) has unveiled plans for what it calls the Wildfire Unmanned Aerial System, a next generation medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) drone. The move comes as the Pentagon is seeking an updated, modular, cheaper successor for the MQ-9 Reaper – one that is easier to produce and can be more freely sent into higher-risk environments where losses are likely to occur. 

The Reaper, a workhorse for U.S. uncrewed strike and ISR missions for decades, suffered heavy losses during the war with Iran and against the Houthis in Yemen. This has added a new level to already existing concerns about how they would perform against a peer threat like China. It also has decreased the MQ-9 fleet so dramatically that there are real concerns above operational impacts and the force size going forward overall. The MQ-9 is now out of production and cannot be directly replaced.

Aviation Week was the first to report about the Wildfire.

GA spokesman C. Mark Brinkley offered limited details about the Wildfire system, which he claimed is a leap beyond what the Pentagon is currently seeking in a new MALE combat drone. The company, he added, is not yet providing any images.

“General Atomics is looking at it and asking ourselves, ‘What can we really do? No kidding, no BS, actually do,’” Brinkley told us. “Let’s be honest with ourselves first. How do we come out of the box, day one, with a 10,000-nautical-mile ferry range? Can we carry four LRASMs [AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles]? Can we swarm 100 aircraft under semi-autonomous control? Can we fuse all of that data into a highly effective common operating picture? Can we do that at scalable, affordable mass?”

“So that was the assignment, and our engineers sharpened their pencils and got to work,” he added. “What came out the other side was our new Wildfire UAS. That thing is a beast, and no one who actually does this for a living and is honestly concerned about America’s warfighting edge can look at it and not want 100 of them as fast as we can make them.”

Last month, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) announced its plans for what it has dubbed the Massed Modular Aircraft (MMA) program to replace the Reaper. The objective is to bring several companies together to help determine the way forward.

“The math of modern warfare is changing, and our force design must change with it,” DIU stated. “For decades, the Joint Force has relied on low-density, high-value, ‘exquisite’ (>$30M) manned and unmanned aircraft. In a high-end fight, this model is simply unsustainable. To win, we must design for, and accept, inevitable attrition while retaining the advantage.”

“The Joint Force seeks a cost-effective, theater-range, massed, and modular Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) to provide a flexible, operationally-responsive, risk-tolerant option in the air domain,” the DIU explained. “The ability to employ many aircraft at once ensures a persistent overwhelming credible threat despite inevitable attrition.”

Massed Modular Aircraft “are envisioned as in-theater reconfigurable platforms capable of long-range payload delivery,” DIU added. “Crucially, MMA must retain the ability to be outfitted with a variety of payloads, including Full Motion Video (FMV) sensors, to execute missions that the MQ-9A performs today.”

Primarily, DIU wants an aircraft with a munition and sensor payload capacity of at least 2,800 pounds, an unrefueled combat radius of at least 2,300 nautical miles with payload, and able to self-deploy one-way at least 8,000 nautical miles. It must also have a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) to rapidly swap in different payloads and system upgrades.

As for secondary attributes, DIU wants autonomy for control, allowing one pilot to operate several aircraft. In addition, it is seeking “resilient and integrated communications – hybrid SATCOM/mesh network connection” and to be able to conduct “local airfield operations under highly degraded or denied primary C2/SATCOM conditions.”

In addition, the aircraft would have “at least 200 knots true airspeed” and operate from runways with a maximum length of 6,000 feet.

The MQ-9A Reaper has a 3,850-pound payload capacity and can fly for more than 20 hours unarmed, or more than 12 hours with weapons. In the case of the latest MQ-9B version, with an extended wingspan, flight endurance can be increased to more than 40 hours.”

The deadline for submissions on this program ended July 23, but it is unclear when contracts will be awarded. However, proposed solutions “must be capable of full-scale prototype flight testing within 21 months of award, with a targeted Initial Operating Capability in FY2031 (20 mission-ready aircraft delivered to an operational unit, able to be deployed),” DIU noted.

To put the DIU goal into perspective, official budget documents say the Air Force had 165 Reapers in inventory as of the start of Fiscal Year 2026, which began on October 1 of last year. This had already marked a significant year-over-year decrease, down from 231 MQ-9As at the beginning of Fiscal Year 2025. These figures don’t include the Marine Corps and Central Intelligence Agency, which also fly Reapers.

General Atomics is turning the MQ-9 Reaper family of drones into cruise missile ‘trucks’

As noted earlier in this story, the DIU announcement of the MMA program came as Reaper losses in the war against Iran were mounting.

By May, the Air Force’s total MQ-9A fleet had shrunk to 135 aircraft, Air Force Lt. Gen. David Tabor, Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs, told members of Congress at a hearing.

There was enough concern that the service has scrambled to replace some of those airframes.

“So there’s a bit of a short-term effort to buy back things immediately, in this fiscal year,” Tabor testified.

The picture has only grown bleaker since then.

“The U.S. military has lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones during the war with Iran, or roughly 25 percent of its fleet,” The Washington Post reported last week, citing three U.S. officials familiar with the matter. The newspaper, citing the Air Force, stated that Reapers can cost between $30 million and $50 million each, depending on the type of sensors and weapons they carry.

“The potential taxpayer cost of recent losses is over $1.3 billion for that weapon system alone,” the publication added.

TWZ cannot independently verify those figures.

The MQ-9 Reaper Keeps Getting Shot Down – And Still Gets Used

The MMA program is not the first effort to replace the MQ-9. The Air Force has tried multiple times to develop a Reaper replacement without success. While GA had long held essentially had a monopoly on the MALE combat drone market in the U.S., the DIU competition has a host of other companies competing. 

As we highlighted in a past report on this subject:

“…the U.S. drone landscape has changed considerably in terms of manufacturers. A few years ago, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Atomics would have been seen as the front-runners for the MQ-9 replacement. Now, there are more contenders, often with a founding focus on rapidly scaling up production at low cost. Still, these firms have much to prove, especially considering the risk in replacing an aircraft as important as the MQ-9. At the same time, in the more advanced drone space, the legacy defense “prime” contractors are also making major progress in leveraging new technologies to reduce production costs and migrating away from exquisite, very expensive drones as their default offerings.”

As for General Atomics, Brinkley pushed back against the notion that the MMA program is actually a Reaper replacement.

“I think it’s really unfortunate that MMA has been branded as a ‘Reaper replacement’ because it misrepresents what America needs now and what we need later,” he suggested. “We need an immediate backfill solution to a critical shortage of unmanned MALE ISR/Strike. We need to get going on that now. MMA isn’t a backfill solution, or even a bridge to a backfill solution. This isn’t that.”

“Some say we need cheaper, disposable aircraft, so that we can use them and throw them away, or lose them and not feel bad about it. No one is talking about actual capability, ready today,” Brinkley told us previously. “No one is talking about all of the hard lessons, already learned, about icing and weather and weapons integration. No one is talking about the multiple survivability upgrades available for the existing platforms and the lack of investment in those.”

“These make-believe weapons that don’t exist have the luxury of being anything you imagine them to be,” Brinkely added. “Unscratched lottery tickets, promising all of the win and none of the lose [sic].

Still, the company did submit a proposal for MMA, Brinkley told us on Wednesday, “but the aircraft [Wildfire] is not dependent on that program.”

“We can deliver Wildfires years earlier than the current schedule, and absolutely no one on Earth wants to see them coming over their horizon,” he stated.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has plans for a new radar to succeed the AN/TPY-2. The AN/TPY-2 is most commonly associated with the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile defense system, but it can also be used as a stand-alone sensor in a larger integrated air defense network. MDA’s main desire now is to find a more mobile radar system to make them less susceptible to enemy missile and drone attacks. Iran’s successful targeting of largely static missile defense radars this year, including the reported destruction of at least one AN/TPY-2, has been a wake-up call to just how vulnerable these prized assets have become already. TWZ explored this reality and its implications in a detailed feature earlier this year.

MDA put out a call yesterday for “innovative prototype concepts” for what it is currently calling the Forward-Based Mode (FBM) Radar Next. This notably came just ahead of the annual Space & Missile Defense (SMD) Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, that opened today and at which TWZ is in attendance.

The contracting notice stresses that the agency is currently in the pre-solication phase of this effort, but that it does have plans to eventually pursue these prototypes through an Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreement. OTA is a mechanism typically used to support rapid prototyping and other research and development work outside of a typical and often drawn-out contracting process. In its budget request for the 2027 Fiscal Year, which was released earlier this year, MDA also explicitly asked for funding for a pair of “next generation radar prototypes to prove out and mature emerging technologies for the future FBM Radar fleet.”

For some additional context, MDA uses the term FBM here to refer to a radar used to detect threats, traditionally ballistic missiles, after launch. Deployable radars like the AN/TPY-2 employed in this role are typically emplaced at semi-permanent sites. The U.S. military also has higher-end static strategic radar sites around the globe, along with space-based assets, to help provide additional layers of early warning detection.

FBM is one of two typical modes of operation for the X-band AN/TPY-2. The other is a terminal mode where the radar is used to cue interceptors to incoming threats. As mentioned, AN/TPY-2 is most commonly used in the terminal mode as part of the THAAD system, but it also has a demonstrated ability to feed data to Patriot surface-to-air missile systems.

At the time of writing, the U.S. military is publicly known to have two AN/TPY-2s deployed in the FBM mode in Japan, as well as three more at sites in Israel, Qatar, and Turkey. Additional AN/TPY-2 are also currently forward-deployed elsewhere globally as a component of the THAAD system.

AN/TYP-2s, as well as the generators needed to power them, are trailer-mounted and technically road mobile. However, they are not designed to be very rapidly relocated from one site to another. This brings us back to the FBM Radar Next.

“As adversarial missile capabilities become increasingly sophisticated, the need for agile, survivable, and highly precise forward-based sensors has never been greater. Current static or semi-mobile radars are vulnerable to counterattacks and lack the rapid relocation capabilities necessary for modern distributed operations,” the pre-solication notice explains. “FBM Radar Next will close this gap by providing a system that can be quickly transported, set up, and operated in austere forward locations while maintaining interoperability with existing Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications (C2BMC) networks.”

In terms of transportability and deployability requirements, “the system must be capable of rapid deployment and transport via C-17 military airlift and tactical ground vehicles,” the notice says. “The radar must demonstrate rapid setup and teardown times (e.g., operational within specified hours of arrival, and tear down within minutes to maximize survivability).”

The next-generation radar must also be capable of “high-sensitivity detection, persistent tracking, and precise discrimination of advanced threats in high-clutter and contested electromagnetic environments,” the notice continues. MDA also wants “engineered physical, thermal, and electromagnetic signatures to
ensure platform survivability in contested environments.”

Furthermore, “the design must support remote operations, command and control integration, and automated system health monitoring,” the notice adds. Minimizing the onsite operator footprint is critical to improving personnel safety and increasing overall tactical flexibility.”

MDA wants the FBM Radar Next to be able to slot into more “versatile deployment architectures, with the capability to operate either as a highly integrated single aperture or as multiple distributed arrays to optimize geographical coverage, sensitivity, survivability, or electronic protection.” In line with this demand, there are additional requirements for a modular design with open architecture systems, as well as seamless integration with the existing Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications (C2BMC) architecture.

The MDA video below highlights the general capabilities of the C2BMC architecture in the context of a notional engagement of a hypersonic threat utilizing the still-in-development Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI).

GPI Scenario Animation

A highly networked and distributed concept of operations could open the door to more novel radar configurations, including ones involving larger groups of smaller types, to succeed the AN/TPY-2. Smaller individual radars could also have reduced signatures, be easier to conceal, and be more readily relocatable, all helping to reduce vulnerability. This could also make the entire system more resilient in the event that nodes are lost or otherwise rendered inoperable for any reason.

There could be benefits in terms of unit cost and scalability of production from such an approach, too. Prime contractor Raytheon is understood to have only produced 16 AN/TPY-2s to date, in total, for all customers, not just the U.S. military. The unit cost of a single one of those radars is generally pegged at around $250 to $300 million, and these are long-lead-time items that take years to deliver.

“The system design must prioritize manufacturing ease, design-for-manufacturing-and-assembly (DFMA) principles, and cost-efficiency. It is critical that the prototype demonstrates a viable pathway to rapid, high-volume production at an affordable unit cost,” MDA’s FBM Radar Next notice makes clear. “This ensures the capability to quickly scale production and cost-effectively replace radar units in highly active forward-deployed environments.”

Regardless of the approach MDA ultimately decides to pursue, the threat ecosystem that is driving the FBM Radar Next plans is real now, and is not just limited to enemy missile attacks. Weaponized drones, especially long-range one-way attack types, present real dangers to high-value targets. This fact had already been driven firmly into the public consciousness by the ongoing war in Ukraine. It has now been further demonstrated by Iran’s aforementioned targeting of prized air and missile defense radars around the Middle East during fighting earlier this year. The ramifications of all of this go well beyond these particular conflict zones, too.

As we wrote back in March after Iran’s very deliberate targeting of U.S. and allied radars became clear:

“Strategic air and missile architectures, in general, exist in a world now where the threats they face are not limited to very-long-range standoff capabilities possessed only by peer or near-peer adversaries.“

“It used to be, generally, that you had to fire a ballistic missile or high-end cruise missile in an attempt to strike one of these systems. Now, long-range one-way-attack drones, as well as increasingly capable cruise and ballistic missiles, continue to proliferate steadily, including to smaller nation-state armed forces and even non-state actors. An attack could even come from a small drone with a C4 charge launched from a fishing trawler 10 miles away from one of these critical radar installations. The threat of these kinds of near-field attacks has largely been overlooked for years, even as the low-end drone threat has exploded and ‘democratized’ precision-guided weaponry, as they did not fit the established aerial threat matrix and the countermeasures used to repel those threats.”

…

“The scale and scope of Iran’s retaliatory attacks so far, while clearly threatening, pale in comparison to what one would expect to see in a major high-end fight between the United States and China in the Pacific. The overall ramifications would also be more severe.“

“Beyond the more immediate impacts of losing this kind of strategic radar coverage, there are far larger implications. In some cases, these radars are designed to provide critical early warning and verification of incoming nuclear strikes, or other large-scale attacks by a major adversary, targeting a nation’s home soil. They are critical parts of the nuclear deterrent. As such, losing these sensors can have major downstream impacts on strategic decision-making cycles based on concerns about what suddenly is not being seen. Fewer radars also means fewer ways to double-check that a track is not a false positive in a scenario where the total available decision-making time could be seriously truncated, to begin with. These are concerns TWZ explicitly highlighted after Ukraine’s attack on the Armavir Radar Station in Russia in 2024.”

During a panel discussion at the SMD Symposium today, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Richard Zellmann, Deputy Commander of U.S Space Command, further underscored the reality of the current threat ecosystem, including one-way attack drones layered in with traditional missile barrages. The general also highlighted the impact of more readily available space-enabled targeting and navigation capabilities.

“We see, I think, the low end on Epic Fury [the official nickname for U.S. operations against Iran earlier this year]. Sure, the missiles are more high-end, but we’ve seen our adversary employ a number of one-way attack systems that are coupled with these ballistic missile volleys,” Zellman explained. “We are really at this point in the history of warfare because of the democratization of space. Space isn’t a sanctuary. It’s no longer just the playground of nations with a lot of money.”

“The commercialization of space has created what many call essentially a transparent battlefield. And because I can see everything all the time with commercial ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; in this case primarily satellite imagery], it’s given our adversaries capabilities that they haven’t had in the past,” he continued. “That ISR, if you couple it with a platform that has access to GPS or some other PNT [Position, Navigation, and Timing] system, and then you add in another layer of over-the-horizon comms, like say from an Iridium or a Starlink [satellite communications terminal], and you have a pretty lethal asymmetric weapon system that our adversaries can get a hold of.”

Munitions that use GPS, or a similar form of navigation, alone for guidance are only employable against static targets. This, in turn, only drives home even more the importance of the transportability and deployability requirements that are at the heart of the FBM Radar Next plan.

It’s also important to note that, like AN/TPY-2 now, FBM Radar Next will still be just one part of a larger air and missile defense architecture. In our analysis earlier this year, we noted that Iranian attacks on radars in the Middle East had reinforced arguments for new layered defenses to protect those and other prized assets and for migrating more early warning and missile tracking capabilities into space. There is still a question of how much of that functionality will be shared and eventually ported over into orbital sensing capabilities. As Lt. Gen. Zellmann pointed out today, threats to space-based capabilities continue to grow, and that domain can no longer be considered a sanctuary, either. Having a layered, redundant, and flexible mix of terrestrial and orbital sensing for ballistic missile tracking will remain highly important for the foreseeable future.

What exactly a successor to the AN/TPY-2 looks like in the end remains to be seen. What is clear now is that very real missile and drone threats have prompted a major rethinking on the part of MDA about how future missile defense radars will need to be employed to ensure they can survive going forward.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

During the two most recent major Middle East conflicts it has been involved in, the U.S. Army swatted down more than 1,400 Iranian missiles and drones, according to the officer in charge of the Army’s air and missile defense. The figures provided by Lt. Gen. John Rafferty, commander of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense, and Joint Task Force-Gold, offer new context about the number of Army interceptions during these fights. His comments also come amid concerns about the tremendous expenditure of U.S. interceptors that has exacerbated the stress on America’s magazine depth of these high-end defensive weapons, an issue that TWZ has raised frequently for years. 

“For the last 14 months,” the 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command (AAMDC), based at Fort Bliss, Texas, “has been in the largest air and missile defense fight in U.S. history,” Rafferty said during a panel at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium (SMD) in Huntsville, Alabama, attended by TWZ. “Over the 12-day war [between Iran and Israel], they successfully engaged 125 ballistic missiles, and during Operation Epic Fury, over 1,200 ballistic, cruise and UAS threats have been neutralized.”

The 32nd AAMDC, which is responsible for all U.S. Army air and missile defense in the region, “adapted and innovated to overcome advanced threats,” Rafferty added. “The THAAD [Terminal High Altitude Area Defense], the Patriot, and our counter-UAS systems are the envy of the world, and that’s due in no small part to some of the efforts of the organizations that are represented by the leaders in the front row here, but also by the contributions of many of our industry partners and industry teammates here.”

Though he didn’t mention how many interceptions were performed by the U.S. Navy’s ship-launched SM-3 and SM-6 missiles, or Air Force air-to-air missiles and rockets, Rafferty’s comments added insight into the extent of the U.S. military’s defense of the region during numerous Iranian missile and drone barrages. It represented just a part of a much larger regional effort involving several nations that came under Iranian attack.

In May, Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), testified before Congress that Epic Fury “validated, at full scale and in actual combat, a combined Middle East Air Defense (MEAD) network – a concept the region had exercised for years but never fully operationalized.”

“During OEF, for the first time in history, U.S. air defenders stood shoulder to shoulder with partner air defenders across national systems… Over the course of the operation, this integrated architecture intercepted over 6,000 one-way attack drones and more than 1,500 ballistic missiles aimed at U.S. forces, Israel, and our Arab partners.”

Cooper did not break down how many interceptions were carried out by each country, but the figures provided by Rafferty suggest that the Army was responsible for about 16% of all of them. CENTCOM declined our request for the numbers of interceptions carried out by the Navy and Air Force.

As a result of this intense air and missile defense activity, partner nations, minus Israel which uses its own systems, have had their missile stocks backfilled by the U.S. due to the massive consumption of interceptors. It’s also worth noting that it is common to use multiple interceptors against each target to increase kill probability, so one target often doesn’t mean one missile was used to shoot it down.

LIVE: Head of Central Command testifies before Senate committee on Iran war

As for the 12-Day War, Iran fired about 550 ballistic missiles and around 1,000 drones at Israel, according to the IDF. About 90% were intercepted by the U.S. and Israel, the Jerusalem Post reported at the time. While the Army engaged 125 Iranian missiles, the U.S. Navy played a large role in swatting down these threats as well. It is unclear just how many interceptions the Navy performed during that conflict, but former acting Chief of Naval Operations Adm. James Kilby told the Senate Appropriations Committee in June 2025 that the service fired interceptors at incoming Iranian threats “at an alarming rate.”

As we noted earlier in this story, we have been sounding the alarm about magazine depth for years, especially in regard to America’s air and missile defenses. In fact, we laid out in detail these exact concerns and how they would be a major issue in war with Iran just prior to the conflict starting in a feature you can read in full here.

The U.S. has burned through hundreds of THAAD and Patriot interceptors since a shaky ceasefire went into effect on April 8, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) latest assessment. CSIS was updating a previous analysis of munitions expenditures during Epic Fury that you can read more about here.

According to CSIS, the U.S. had about 2,300 Patriot interceptors in its inventories before Epic Fury, 1,030 by the time the ceasefire was agreed to, and between 759 and 827 as of July 27.

As for THAADs, there were 452 interceptors in the U.S. inventory before Epic Fury, between 232 and 262 on the date of the ceasefire, and between 234 and 278 as of July 27.

During the SMD panel, Rafferty addressed magazine depth concerns but did not provide any granularity about the number of interceptors used. The bottom line, he said, is that THAAD and Patriot munitions are just one part of an overall defense.

“I cannot add anything to the emphasis on magazine depth… or for the need for cheaper and wide-ranging mix of interceptors,” he explained. “I mean that couldn’t be made more loud and clear from the highest levels of our government. But I do want to highlight the need that interceptors alone won’t do it, right? We need more of a comprehensive missile defeat strategy that focuses on interceptors, equally so on non-kinetic effects, both electronic warfare and directed energy.”

“And the type of targeting C2 enabled by a data strategy, and a cross-domain solution that works that helps us take data from TS [top secret], move it down to secret, and even down to CUI [controlled unclassified information], that’ll enable us to use that data to make decisions to engage targets faster,” he continued. “That’s the kind of comprehensive missile defeat strategy that isn’t just about more interceptors. It’s about integrating other capabilities, non-kinetics, and also decision-making into that.”

For the moment, things have calmed between the U.S. and Iran, with no major attacks against each other for several weeks. Media reports have suggested that President Trump has shifted to economic, rather than military pressure against Iran in large measure over concerns about the ability to sustain a conflict with greatly diminished magazine depth.

Still, Trump has been unable to compel Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, pare its ballistic missile stocks or stop supporting proxies like the Houthis and Hezbollah. Given that, it remains possible the notoriously impatient president could resume hostilities at any time. So too could the Iranians, who have done it before.

Meanwhile, the heavy use of these expensive, hard-to-build, long-lead-time weapons raises additional questions about how the U.S. can defend itself from another major threat, and especially should a war break out with China. 

Rafferty didn’t bring up concerns about whether the supply of air defense munitions and general capacity was sufficient for a China fight, nor was he asked about it in the ensuing question and answer session. Still, he did imply that the U.S. Army’s air defenders were under significant stress battling Iran.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

The U.S. Army is on the hunt for a new lower-cost strike missile capable of hitting targets more than 621 miles (1,000 kilometers) away. The Affordable High Speed Strike (AHSS) missile could be more of a traditional ballistic missile-like weapon or feature an air-breathing propulsion system. AHSSs could be fired from new uncrewed launcher vehicles that the Army is pursuing separately, as well as certain existing crewed types like the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). The service sees these future weapons as offering a particularly important new way to strike enemy air bases, air defense nodes, missile launchers, and other high-value targets within a particular theater of operations.

AHSS was among the many programs the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Aviation & Missile Center (DEVCOM AvMC) highlighted at its booth at the annual Space & Missile Defense (SMD) Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. TWZ was in attendance at this conference, which wrapped up yesterday. Aviation Week was first to report on AHSS from this event.

“AHSS is an entirely new missile,” a DEVCOM spokesperson said, according to Aviation Week. At the same time, the Army is also clearly in the very early stages of defining what it wants from this new weapon beyond general affordability and reach.

A graphic on display at DEVCOM’s booth at the SMD symposium showed renderings of two distinctly different notional missiles under the AHSS heading, as seen at the top of this story and below. One has a traditional ballistic missile-type design with a cruciform fin arrangement at the tail end. The other notional missile has a more novel design with an air-breathing propulsion system feeding from an intake in the nose. In broad terms, the intake has a style commonly associated with high-speed jet engines such as ramjets and scramjets. It also has a completely different tail configuration, as well as what appears to be a long, slender stabilizing strake visible along the right side of the body.

Aviation Week‘s story also highlights the Army’s current separate development of an entire new family of Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher (CAML) vehicles. However, the current AHSS concept also includes “an option to be launched from a crewed HIMARS,” the DEVCOM spokesperson said, according to that outlet.

HIMARS, which uses a 6×6 tactical truck as its base, fires munitions via standardized ammunition ‘pods.’ As such, it seems likely that any other launcher that makes use of these same pods, such as the tracked M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), would also be able to fire the future AHSS missile.

“This project directly supports Precision Fires capabilities by developing, maturing, and demonstrating affordable high speed strike missile technologies for responsive, mobile, deployable, survivable, and sustainable Army conventional theater strike weapons,” the Army said about AHSS in its 2027 Fiscal year budget proposal, which was released earlier this year. The program will “provide hardware and software technologies demonstrated, including affordable advanced propulsion, complementary warhead, guidance, navigation and control technologies, and integration onto Army mobile launch platforms.”

“The Army needs affordable, responsive high speed strike capability to attack theater level targets, provide offensive counter-air capability, and be launched from Army mobile, deployable, and survivable platforms,” the Army budget documents add.

The specific mention of the offensive counter-air (OCA) mission set is interesting as it is far more commonly associated with air assets. However, it is simply defined as “offensive operations to destroy or neutralize enemy aircraft, missiles, launch platforms, and their supporting structures and systems both before and after launch, and as close to their source as possible,” according to the January 2020 edition of the U.S. military’s official Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Long-range surface-to-surface missiles are very applicable for pursuing these objectives, something we will come back to later on.

It is also worth noting that DEVCOM’s graphic at the SMD Symposium used the exact same air-breathing missile render to represent the planned Increment 4 version of the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM). The baseline version of PrSM, or Increment 1, is a traditional short-range ballistic missile with ability to hit targets at least around 310 miles (500 kilometers) away, if not further. The Army’s current stated plan for Increment 4 is to acquire a new variant or derivative of PrSM with a range of at least 621 miles/1,000 kilometers. For further context, the Increment 2 PrSM, which is in active development now, is an anti-ship-focused variant with a new seeker system, allowing it to engage moving targets. The Increment 3 plan is centered on new unspecified “enhanced” payloads, which could include swarms of loitering munitions.

The Army has also talked in the past about an Increment 5 variation of PrSM with even greater range. This would put it in the same general category, at least in terms of reach, as AHSS. As noted, DEVCOM has stressed that AHSS is distinct from other existing efforts.

Furthermore, AHSS and PrSM are just two parts of a larger array of new longer-range strike capabilities the Army is working to acquire. The service has already fielded a small number of Typhon systems, which are currently capable of firing Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles and Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) multi-purpose missiles. Tomahawks can hit targets roughly 1,000 miles away. The Army is now pushing to field the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), also known as Dark Eagle, as well. Last year, new details emerged that put the maximum range of this weapon at around 2,175 miles.

On top of this, defense startup Castelion is developing a ground-launched version of its Blackbeard missile for the Army. Blackbeard is a lower-cost design said to be capable of traveling at hypersonic speeds. The exact maximum range of this missile is unclear, but the Army has said in the past that it is targeting “80% of the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) Increment 4 capability.”

A key underlying factor in all of this was the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019. Under the INF, the United States and Russia were both prohibited from developing and fielding nuclear or conventionally-armed ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles with maximum ranges between 310 and 3,420 miles (500 and 5,500 kilometers). The AHSS section in the Army’s 2027 Fiscal Year budget request specifically mentions that such developments are now “unconstrained by previous treaties.”

Depending on what kind of capability is ultimately pursued under AHSS, as well as PrSM Increment 5, the Army could be on track to field its first new medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) since the INF went into force in 1988. MRBMs are categorized as ballistic missiles with maximum ranges between 620 and 1,860 miles (1,000 and 3,000 kilometers). Members of Congress have notably been openly supportive of the Army acquiring exactly this kind of long-range capability in the past.

Pairing this capability with new and improved crewed and uncrewed launchers could offer more flexibility for employing these weapons, while also helping to reduce vulnerability to enemy attacks. TWZ has highlighted now on several occasions how uncrewed mobile launch systems would offer even greater advantages for future expeditionary and distributed operations. Uncrewed platforms could be pushed further forward without necessarily exposing human operators to greater risks. This would also allow a smaller force of human personnel to operate a larger number of total launchers, in general.

The broader value of Army ground-based long-range strike capabilities has been demonstrated this year in the course of operations against Iran. PrSM, as well as older Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) short-range ballistic missiles, have been so heavily employed against Iranian targets that there are now serious concerns about the adequacy of the remaining stockpiles of those weapons. There are reports that stocks of PrSMs, which the Army only received in quantity in 2023 and that made their combat debut in strikes on Iran, have run especially low.