The Australian government has delivered on its commitment to rapidly boost the Australian Defence Force’s (ADF) long-range strike capability with the test firing of a Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) in Australia for the first time. PrSM is a next generation long-range missile with a maximum range beyond 500 kilometres and is central to strengthening Australia’s land and maritime strike capability.
The successful test firing was a tangible demonstration of how Army is realising speed to capability and was also the first time Army has fired a PrSM from a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). The test firing was attended by the Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy and United States Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll at the Mount Bundey Training area in the Northern Territory.
The acquisition of PrSM delivers on the 2024 National Defence Strategy, which directed the Army to optimise for littoral manoeuvre and strengthen its long-range land and maritime strike capability.
The test conducted was two years ahead of schedule and followed the delivery of the first PrSM a year ahead of schedule, as well as the first HIMARS two months ahead of schedule. It comes after Australia and the United States signed a Memorandum of Understanding earlier this year for PrSM production, sustainment and follow-on development.
Negotiations are expected to commence later this year on options for future domestic manufacturing and maintenance of PrSM in Australia. Australia and the United States, as co-development partners, will continue to develop PrSM to maintain its world leading military advantage. Future missile upgrades will expand this capability to include a greater range of over 1000 kilometres, improved sensors and novel warheads.
Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy said: “Today’s PrSM firing is another example of the Albanese Government accelerating long-range strike capabilities for the ADF, alongside the firing of Standard Missile 6, the Tomahawk missile and the Naval Strike Missile last year. From delivering HIMARS ahead of schedule to delivering and testing PrSM ahead of schedule, the Albanese Government is modernising the Australian Army at speed. This successful launch is a significant milestone in the government’s plan to deliver a twenty-five-fold increase to Army’s long-range strike capability.”
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Just a thought, but all this talk of PrSM and Himars being ahead of schedule makes me wonder if this could be the reason for what was considered an inflated price when Govt ordered the second lot of HIMARS. Did they pay a premium to get our buys pushed up and delivered sooner. And maybe an initial buy of PrSM too.
Anything is possible, I suppose, though the US FMS system is heavily regulated. On top of the announced $310 million co-funding of PrSM, Australia made an earlier, mysterious, contribution of about $70 million. I’ve tried repeatedly to find out what that was about, but no one is talking – as usual.
Great to see this happening so soon after the project stood up, given that so many of these things have a tendency to run late.
However, while we fired off a missile on home soil, I’d be keen to understand we actually have many in stock and what’s the timeline of the delivery of a reasonable warstock inventory. If we’re only going to have a very small token training supply in country for the next 2 or so years, then it’s not really a usable capability. Same goes for Tomahawk, NSM and SM-6. They need to be present in reasonable enough quantities to be considered a functioning capability.
As per domestic production and ongoing development and program participation, that’s a good sign. The range in excess of 1000km I think is critical for Australia to have a meaningful longer range capability that is not dependant on the RAAF or the limited Tomahawk capability.
And secondly, domestic production will benefit the whole program as it provides a distributed and hopefully more resilient production capability that will hopefully deliver speedy scalable production.
It’s taking forever to set up local assembly of basic GMLRS rounds for HIMARS, so I won’t be holding my breath for local production of the far more complex PrSM.
It is one thing to test fire the first missile; however, it is another thing to field the weapon in sufficient quantities and declare that we now have this capability. The cynic in me suggests this is nothing more than an opportunistic event that the Government of the Day is using to allay the general public’s perception that they are doing nothing to increase ADF capability.
I share those concerns.