US Army - Lockheed Martin Long Range Precision Fires (LRPF)

I can't read the article, but it's equally absurd & hilarious that we've spent so many years & oodles of money to build a YUGE fleet of stealth aircraft only to turn around & give the job of dismantling air defenses to stuff like ATACMS, The PRSM, & other long-range surface-to-surface missiles while The F-35 essentially just stands around & watches the action unfold after passing along the coordinates of the target.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eay2yotwFD0


Not sure as to how The PRSM will be able to hit the radars of, say, a SAM site in a GPS-denied environment unless they opt to turn it into an air launched ballistic HARM like Israel's ROCKS.
 
Having multiple weapons able to cover down for each other is a good thing.

Cause if you do it right, and this is right here, you enemy now has to you come up with plans against each and combonation of each other.

Throw in that Stealth is useful in other ways as well...

The US now ahs a very scary set up able to tear the guts out of multiple things in as many ways. And that is a nightmare for enemy commanders to deal with.
 
Having multiple weapons able to cover down for each other is a good thing.

Cause if you do it right, and this is right here, you enemy now has to you come up with plans against each and combonation of each other.

Throw in that Stealth is useful in other ways as well...

The US now ahs a very scary set up able to tear the guts out of multiple things in as many ways. And that is a nightmare for enemy commanders to deal with.
Plus there are also circumstances where an ally is in need of help but providing F-35s may be a bit on the nose depending on the circumstances. Ground-launched missiles on the otherhand, less of a problem.
 
Having multiple weapons able to cover down for each other is a good thing.

Cause if you do it right, and this is right here, you enemy now has to you come up with plans against each and combonation of each other.

Throw in that Stealth is useful in other ways as well...

The US now ahs a very scary set up able to tear the guts out of multiple things in as many ways. And that is a nightmare for enemy commanders to deal with.
And that an F-35 can act as a director of the LRPF from the Army, meaning it can still contribute to the battle without having to go back to base and re-arm.
 
Sounds about right.
 
I can't read the article, but it's equally absurd & hilarious that we've spent so many years & oodles of money to build a YUGE fleet of stealth aircraft only to turn around & give the job of dismantling air defenses to stuff like ATACMS, The PRSM, & other long-range surface-to-surface missiles while The F-35 essentially just stands around & watches the action unfold after passing along the coordinates of the target.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eay2yotwFD0


Not sure as to how The PRSM will be able to hit the radars of, say, a SAM site in a GPS-denied environment unless they opt to turn it into an air launched ballistic HARM like Israel's ROCKS.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and a lot of anti aircraft systems to choose from if the U.S. is engaging Russia or China.

Incr2 PrSM is to have a terminal seeker for ships and mobile land targets, and I suspect the MCode sufficiently accurate even in a GPS denied environment that you would not want to be out in the open near a target.

ETA: it’s not like Russian SAMs seem completely safe from ATACMs.
 
Having multiple weapons able to cover down for each other is a good thing.

Cause if you do it right, and this is right here, you enemy now has to you come up with plans against each and combonation of each other.

Throw in that Stealth is useful in other ways as well...

The US now ahs a very scary set up able to tear the guts out of multiple things in as many ways. And that is a nightmare for enemy commanders to deal with.
Oh of course. This should only ever be witnessed on something like DCS (that I don't even play, lol), but in a real world NATO/Russia conflict, I would expect nothing less than to see us make instant & overwhelming use of everything including the kitchen sink in terms of conventional weaponry. The air campaigns & the tactics used therein are actually very predictable, but knowing what's coming is one thing - stopping it is quite another.

That said, I also think that it would be really interesting to see as to how NATO would attempt to deal with being on the receiving end of its own playbook.
 
There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and a lot of anti aircraft systems to choose from if the U.S. is engaging Russia or China.

Incr2 PrSM is to have a terminal seeker for ships and mobile land targets, and I suspect the MCode sufficiently accurate even in a GPS denied environment that you would not want to be out in the open near a target.

ETA: it’s not like Russian SAMs seem completely safe from ATACMs.
No, but if you've noticed, we've only sent the less accurate version of ATACMS that uses ins & whatever complex software for guidance, as these things are simply too expensive to waste. Shooting them down isn't particularly difficult, though, provided that they are detected in time & that you have the right missiles, which, believe it or not, are not those on The S-300/S-300V/S-350/S-400.
 
Since the PrSM has been in production for over a year does anyone know what its' tri-services designation is?
 
No, but if you've noticed, we've only sent the less accurate version of ATACMS that uses ins & whatever complex software for guidance, as these things are simply too expensive to waste. Shooting them down isn't particularly difficult, though, provided that they are detected in time & that you have the right missiles, which, believe it or not, are not those on The S-300/S-300V/S-350/S-400.

I suspect the INS on PrSM is somewhat more advanced.
 
I suspect the INS on PrSM is somewhat more advanced.

The INS on the ATACMS is mature (Re: Old) tech with it being developed in the 1980s and going into service about a year before its first combat use in operation Desert Storm.
 
The PrSM has been in the LRIP for over a year so I wonder how many of them have been delivered so far?
 
Last edited:
The Army intends to have a net inventory of about 1,000 PrSM AUR's by 2030. They might look to increase that though there are pressures to field follow on increments which are more suitable for the Indo-Pacific needs.
 
Last edited:
Army has other budgetary pressures and will likely see the least budget growth if not scaling back of funding to make way for increases in the Space/Air Force and Navy. Even if that doesn't happen it has a lot of other modernization priorities that will limit how much it can spend on increasing a single program. It could obviously prioritize internally like scaling back investments in MRC and/or Dark Eagle and buying more PrSM missiles instead but that is unlikely to happen..
 
Last edited:
ATACMS suffered from a decline in need due to the collapse of USSR. PrSM comes online when the 'true' inventory objective should probably be three to five times what the currently stated goal (and what they've facilitized for) for the weapon is given the change in the threat and what's needed. But that's the story across most of the munitions and platform portfolio and there is little political support to do much about it across both parties.
 
ATACMS suffered from a decline in need due to the collapse of USSR. PrSM comes online when the 'true' inventory objective should probably be three to five times what the currently stated goal (and what they've facilitized for) for the weapon is given the change in the threat and what's needed. But that's the story across most of the munitions and platform portfolio and there is little political support to do much about it across both parties.
I wonder how they'll feel once China controls Taiwan.

c48321cbe38db6b3a840849acf1dff31.jpg
 

There would be no shortage of static targets in a landing scenario. A blockade or other naval fight sans landing probably make Incr1 less useful.
Why wait for them to land?
 


Why wait for them to land?

With the troop ships you want to sink as many of them as possible while they're in the middle of the Taiwan strait where the water is relatively deep.
 
I can't read the article, but it's equally absurd & hilarious that we've spent so many years & oodles of money to build a YUGE fleet of stealth aircraft only to turn around & give the job of dismantling air defenses to stuff like ATACMS, The PRSM, & other long-range surface-to-surface missiles while The F-35 essentially just stands around & watches the action unfold after passing along the coordinates of the target.
I think Ukraine war has shown that ballistic missiles (especially the one with cluster warhead) is very very good at killing SAM.
F-35 disadvantage is that it carry so few missiles inside and the only internal supersonic missile it can carry is AARGM-ER. Who know, maybe someone will invest in Mako eventually

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eay2yotwFD0


Not sure as to how The PRSM will be able to hit the radars of, say, a SAM site in a GPS-denied environment unless they opt to turn it into an air launched ballistic HARM like Israel's ROCKS.
They can easily put an anti radar seeker on PRSM
 
It apparently combines passive RF and mm wave radar.

According to this article it uses a seeker with passive RF (I won't be surprised if the RF seeker is broadband to give it an anti-radiation mode) and IIR modes, given the events of the last three years in Ukraine I have no doubt the US Army has accelerated its production schedule now that it has been successfully tested.

On another note does anyone know what the DoD's tri-services designation for the PrSM is?
 
I think Ukraine war has shown that ballistic missiles (especially the one with cluster warhead) is very very good at killing SAM.
Honestly, those happenings were probably the results of poor tactical deployment (like, who leaves an S-400 completely exposed in the middle of a field?) & subpar crew performance more than anything else, but either way, it's nothing that cannot be fixed, as it's not a technological issue, imo, as opposed to the choice of missiles for the defense of The S-300s/S-400s, if that makes any sense.
 
Or it could be a technology issue that cannot be easily fixed by addressing HF's. Unless you have deep insight into actual functioning of the systems, or have read after action reports, there's literally no way to tell
 
Human factors...
Ah, okay - sorry. One of the main problems, as I see it, comes via the use of the standard S-300/S-400 missiles that simply don't have the best burn times & are primarily designed to be lofted above, before ultimately falling on, their targets (aircraft), & as a result, they simply lose too much energy & cannot curve downwards fast enough to intercept something like ATACMS.

In general, it looks like what has happened, here, is that The Soviets starting fielding air defense systems like The S-300V that, at least in theory, would be able to deal with the traditional ballistic missiles of the time like The Pershing & Scud that aren't exactly known for their maneuverability, so in response, we developed ATACMS that can snake all over the place with its long burn time before ultimately falling on, say, a SAM site, thereby making it very difficult for The S-300/S-300V interceptors to be able to take them down, as The Soviet missiles would have long since stopped burning & would have lost too much kinetic energy to be able to move in time, etc.

Ironically, this makes their older missiles, like The S-75 (even though almost no one uses them, anymore) & The S-125 ideally suited for the task, as just like The Buk that has proven to be their most effective system at dealing with ATACMS, those upgraded older missiles have excellent burn times, good-to-great speed, excellent maneuverability, & perhaps most importantly, start by shooting on the way up via an adjustable launcher, as is the case with The Buk, & calculating the point of interception is just basic math, not to mention the fact that even the improved legacy missiles are cheap as hell & are much more accurate than their predecessors.

Sure, hit-to-kill is great & everything, but it's also extremely expensive, & the real key to shooting down ATACMS, etc., is to use a missile that is still under power at the moment of interception, as that gives you a much larger margin of error. Russia might not see it, but we've actually made their job much easier for them, imo, plus it's the ultimate troll move, lol.

For perspective, we could have done the very same with The Hawk, as like The S-125 it has excellent speed, maneuverability, & a great burn time, but nooo...we just decided to give them all away.
 

Similar threads

Please donate to support the forum.

Back
Top Bottom