The Army has plans to modify its long-range artillery missile to hit moving targets at sea, giving the service its first truly “multi-domain” strike capability and its first claim to participation in the Third Offset Strategy.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley promised in a speech earlier this month that “we are going to sink ships” as part of the service’s contribution to the multi-domain battle concept it will employ under the Pentagon’s future concept of operations.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter made good on that promise Friday during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies about defense innovation and the department’s future strategy. Carter said his new Strategic Capabilities Office will spearhead an effort to give the Army’s Lockheed Martin-built [LMT] MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) a shore-to-ship strike capability.
“A prominent theme of SCO’s work is spearheading creative and unexpected new ways to use our existing missiles and advanced munitions, and across varied domains,” Carter said. “One example of this that I want to highlight – something I haven’t talked about publically before today – is SCO’s project to develop a cross-domain capability for the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS. By integrating an existing seeker onto the front of the missile, they’re enabling it to hit moving targets, both at sea as well as on land. With this capability, what was previously an Army surface-to-surface missile system can project power from coastal locations up to 300 kilometers into the maritime domain.”
Multi-domain battle envisions a battlefield where the Army will perform “cross-domain fires” that can attack enemy ships at sea and establish air superiority with land-based capabilities.
Implementing the concept and turning it into a doctrine falls to Training and Doctrine Command Chief Gen. David Perkins. While multi-domain battle sounds like it comes with an extensive shopping list for new vehicles and weapons, Perkins said cross-domain effects likely can be achieved with existing systems, though he mentioned the High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) as an example.
“If we have HIMARS or some type of missile system that goes from land to land, which is what we focus on now as an Army … we probably ought to think about can we use land-based missile systems to not only do that but then put an adversarial navy at risk so now you have land-to-ship missile systems,” Perkins said earlier in October at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting, where Milley also made his promise to attack ships from shore. “Quite honestly, the physics are not that much different.”
HIMARS can technically be modified from land-to-land targeting to land-to-sea targeting with little engineering and at slight cost compared to buying a brand-new land-based anti-ship missile, he said.
William Roper, who heads the SCO, said ATACMS likely could be modified with existing technologies and systems at relatively low cost. His office is tasked with pioneering innovative uses for existing technologies that will give the military services relatively affordable access to new combat capabilities in the near-term.
“Given the number of seekers that we have under development, we believe we’ll be able to take an existing one, retrofit it on that Army missile, (and) hit moving targets on land (and) moving targets at sea,” Roper said.
“Multi-domain ATACMS was one of the first examples – that we’re now discussing publicly – where we’ve been working on it with the Army for a couple of years,” Roper said. “When we first started it was very much a program that would have great support and also great antipathy sometimes within the same organization. … They have all rallied around this idea that land power can enable other domains. It’s an obvious conclusion. We cannot relegate powers to individual sections of the globe anymore.”
“What we’re trying to do in SCO is create as many different options for them, to enable it, to be the ways that they start doing it.”