Army Selects Five Firms for PrSM Increment 4 Development; 621-Mile Range Prototypes Head to FY2027 Competitive Fly-Off
The five-way split exposes a constraint Lockheed's Increment 2 win obscured: the jump from land-strike to maritime-strike requires guidance architectures the incumbent may not own. Anduril's drone-sensor ecosystem and RTX's naval-targeting heritage give them a structural advantage on the sensor-fusion piece that a pure missile house cannot match. If either firm wins the maritime down-select, the Army signals it is willing to fragment the PrSM production base across multiple integrators to avoid single-source dependency on Lockheed—a move that raises sustainment costs but hedges against supply-chain disruption in a Taiwan contingency.
The Army is widening the PrSM aperture from land-strike precision to maritime-strike precision at ranges that cover the entire Taiwan Strait and most of the South China Sea, and it is doing so through a five-way competitive prototype race rather than a Lockheed sole-source continuation.
Lockheed won the Increment 2 production contract ($1.2B) a week before this announcement, but Increment 4 is a different calculus: the maritime-targeting requirement forces new sensor fusion and midcourse-correction architectures that smaller primes—Anduril, Castelion, Mach—have never integrated at this range. Watch the FY2027 fly-off results in late 2027; if Lockheed does not dominate the maritime track, RTX or Anduril will inherit the Increment 4 production line, which shifts the sustainment burden and supply-chain dependency away from the incumbent.
What sensor package does the Army expect each competitor to integrate for maritime target acquisition and midcourse correction at 621+ miles—organic to HIMARS or dependent on external targeting networks?
Fault Lines
Strategic intelligence, synthesized daily — with a public track record. Every call graded against what actually happened.