The Army Is Dangerously Low on One Key Weapon in the Pacific

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, endangering its ability to increase and arm its Multi-Domain Task Forces (MDTF) – units established for the sole purpose of providing a long-range precision fire capability.

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. Cutting procurement undermines the demand signal, thereby disincentivizing investment in new production capacity. 

That isn’t to say that the Army should buy munitions it does not need, just to boost DIB capacity. But that plainly isn’t the case. PrSMs are an integral part of the Army’s Indo-Pacific plans, and failing to procure them is a misalignment of budget and strategy.

Military leaders believe China’s military has been directed to be ready to invade Taiwan in 2027, which means the Army needs to be buying the munitions it needs to succeed right now, not in the future.

While a higher topline military budget is one way to pay for additional munitions, there is also money within the current topline budget that can be redirected. For example, the Department of Defense gives away more than $1 billion in grants for “basic research,” much of which is university grants to study subjects such as behavioral science not specific to the military. The Army could request less for research and development, and more to build out the systems we need now and in the near future, like PrSM.

Congress should at minimum include an order for all of the PrSMs on the unfunded priorities list, and grant DoD multi-year contract authority for PrSMs to drive down costs by sending a strong and consistent demand signal to industry that aligns budget with strategy.

Consistent procurement of large numbers of precision guided munitions is the only way for the Army to quickly amass a large stockpile for use in the Indo-Pacific and stay relevant for war with a peer adversary. Congress must work with the Army to make sure our warfighters have the capabilities needed to deter and defeat our adversaries – and that means ramping up procurement of the Precision Strike Missile.

Jim Fein is a Research Associate for National Security and Defense Industrial Base at The Heritage Foundation.