Jim Fein
The U.S. Army has a major role to play in the Pacific—and it needs the right tools to do it. So why is the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), one of the Army’s newest and most relevant capabilities, underfunded in this year’s defense budget request, despite the clear and present strategic need for it? The Indo-Pacific is primarily a maritime theater dominated by air and naval operations, but PrSMs would help the Army support the Air Force and Navy with long-range precision strike capabilities, holding Chinese assets at risk with mobile ground-based platforms that are hard to target.
Unfortunately, the Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request (FY-26 PDB) reduces PrSM procurement relative to the Army’s 2025 request.. While in FY-25 it requested funding for 230 missiles, the FY-26 PDB request only requested funding for 45 PrSMs, both lower than the FY-25 request and the FY-26 projection of 268 missiles. The remainder appear to be on the Army’s unfunded priorities list, which lists $324 million for PrSMs. This is not in line with the Army’s own stated priorities and makes it less relevant in the Indo-Pacific.
MDTFs are already a proven success. While originally designated for a temporary deployment to the Philippines, the first deployed MDTF is now scheduled to stay in the Philippines indefinitely. Admiral Paparo, head of INDOPACOM, stated that “fundamentally alters the strategic calculus in the contested environment,” a glowing endorsement from a leader outside of the service. The Army should be standing up and expanding more MDTFs, not pulling back.
MDTFs are vital but only work if they are armed. Decreasing PrSM procurement doesn’t just make the Army less relevant in the highest priority theater, it also contributes to a longstanding problem that harms the defense industrial base (DIB): inconsistent procurement. Industry investment needs a strong business case to spend capital on increasing production capacity. That business case in turn relies on a strong and consistent demand signal, to provide certainty that the investment will pay off.
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