The Precision Strike Missile was supposed to be the Army’s long-reach wonder weapon — a 500-kilometre knife that could punch through anything ATACMS couldn’t reach. On April 1, 2023, Lockheed Martin delivered the first production rounds. Three years later, every one of them is gone.

Aviation Week reported this week that the entire U.S. inventory of PrSM Increment 1 was expended during Operation Epic Fury. Not rationed. Not reserved. Expended. The Army fired its newest long-range missile faster than Lockheed Martin can build replacements, and the Pentagon is now doing the math nobody wants to do out loud: what happens in the next war, the big one, if the first one emptied the shelf?

The Weapon That Was Supposed to Win the Next War

PrSM is not a household name. It should be. The Precision Strike Missile was designed to do exactly one thing: put a warhead on a target hundreds of kilometres away, fired from a truck, with GPS-grade accuracy. It replaces the ATACMS — the Gulf War-era tactical ballistic missile — and does it with twice the range in a package small enough that a HIMARS launcher can carry two of them instead of one.

It was built for the Pacific. The Army’s whole long-range-fires doctrine pivoted around PrSM. Multi-Domain Task Forces in Japan, the Philippines, Guam. Sink Chinese ships at 500 kilometres. Kill airfields on the first islands of the first chain. That was the plan.

Then Iran happened, and the Pacific plan got spent hitting targets in the Gulf.

How Fast a Stockpile Disappears

Here is the ugly arithmetic. Lockheed Martin’s Camden, Arkansas facility was producing roughly 110 PrSMs per year at the start of Epic Fury. That is a missile about every three and a half days. A single HIMARS battery, firing at sustained combat rates, can chew through that annual production in under a week.

The U.S. Army had not publicly disclosed the size of its PrSM inventory going into the war. Independent estimates put the number somewhere between 200 and 400 missiles. Whatever the real figure was, it wasn’t enough. Aviation Week’s sources say every operational round was fired in the opening phase of Epic Fury, most of them against Iranian coastal radar sites, IRGC naval bases, and air-defence clusters ringing the Strait of Hormuz.

The Army is now waiting on the production line. There is no emergency reserve. There is no second shelf.

The Industrial Base Problem Nobody Can Solve Overnight

Lockheed has been asked — repeatedly — to accelerate. The company has promised output rising to around 400 rounds per year by late 2027. Even that wouldn’t replenish the expended stockpile until 2028 at the earliest. And 400 per year is still a peacetime number. Against a peer adversary, 400 per year is a drop into an ocean of targets.

The problem is not engineering. The problem is supply chain. PrSM needs solid rocket motors, and the U.S. has a grand total of two companies making them in volume. Aerojet Rocketdyne (now L3Harris) and Northrop Grumman between them supply every major long-range missile programme: PrSM, Tomahawk, JASSM, SM-6, Standard Missile family. When you fire 850 Tomahawks in a month — as the Navy just did — that same motor supply chain has to feed everyone.

Epic Fury drained more than one shelf. It drained the shelf the other shelves depend on.

What the Pentagon Is Actually Worried About

It is not Iran. Iran is the bill that just came due. What keeps senior Army planners awake is the next line item on the shopping list — a conflict in the western Pacific where ranges are longer, targets are harder, and the enemy gets a vote on how long the war lasts.

War-game after war-game at the Rand Corporation and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has modelled a Taiwan Strait scenario. Every serious model ends the same way: the United States runs out of long-range precision munitions within the first three weeks. PrSM was supposed to plug exactly that gap. Epic Fury just proved the gap is bigger than anyone wanted to admit.

And the fix — accelerating production, second-sourcing rocket motors, stockpiling rounds at forward bases — costs billions and takes years. Congress is already fighting about whether to do it.

The Silver Lining, Such as It Is

The missiles worked. That part of the story has gotten lost in the spreadsheet panic. PrSM’s combat debut was, by every account, successful. Iranian coastal defences were systematically gutted. Radar sites fell silent. The air superiority that made the rest of Epic Fury possible owes a lot to a weapon that had never been fired in anger before March.

Increment 2 — a seeker-equipped version that can hunt moving ships — is in testing. Increment 4, the 1,000-kilometre variant that can reach mainland China from the Philippines, is funded through 2027. The weapon is real, the concept is validated, and the industrial base is finally getting the emergency funding it needed five years ago.

The only problem is timing. The next war won’t wait for the factory.

Sources: Aviation Week, The War Zone, Congressional Research Service, Lockheed Martin press materials.