The promise of speedy delivery is the centerpiece of the manufacturer’s pitch to Germany. Lockheed’s “hot production” line in Moorestown, New Jersey, could pump out launchers in time for Berlin’s envisioned fielding time a year from now, Edward Dobeck, program director of launching systems, told Defense News in an interview.

That is, if the two governments succeed in moving quickly through the foreign military sales process that governs such transactions, Dobeck added.

In Germany, the proposed purchase will also have to pass parliamentary consideration after the summer break, which could turn controversial given the weapon’s intended purpose.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius announced July 16 Germany’s interest in the system as a means to bolster the country’s deterrence posture vis-à-vis Russia. He said Typhon would serve only as a counterstrike capability, threatening punishment if Moscow were to attack first.

The Typhon, a containerized, land-based version of the Mk-41 vertical launch system installed on many Western warships, can fire missiles up to 2,000 kilometers, including Tomahawks and SM-6.

The U.S. Army commissioned the weapon’s naval-to-land repurposing, and Biden administration officials had planned to field the launcher, named Mid-Range Capability in the ground service’s lingo, to combatant commands across the globe, including Europe.

In the Army’s nomenclature, one MRC battery includes four Typhon launchers with four cells each, for a total of 16 missiles to be loaded at once; a command-and-control shelter; a reloader; and a support vehicle.

When the U.S. Army embarked on the MRC program in 2020, it was intended to fill an urgent capability gap to hit moving targets at land and at sea, which was left open in the wake of the service’s failed cross-domain upgrade to the Army Tactical Missile System. That effort experienced a variety of technical problems and delays.

The Army fielded the new capability in three years.

According to Dobeck, Lockheed has delivered two batteries to the service and completed production of the third last month. The company is now beginning production for the fourth and final battery currently under contract.

German officials consider the potential Typhon buy as a gap-filler for an eventual European program, dubbed ELSA, that would fulfill the continent’s mid- and long-range strike needs.

As such, Berlin defense leaders have stressed that the utility for the Bundeswehr, the armed forces here, would be fleeting.

The German government’s vision of buying, owning and operating Typhons independently comes as Pistorius has portrayed the acquisition as linked to a German-U.S. pact from a year ago aimed at temporarily stationing mid-range weapons in Germany by 2026 on a bilateral basis.

That announcement on the sidelines of the 2024 NATO summit in Washington came at a time when U.S. plans to field mid-range strike capabilities — presumably Typhon — to key worldwide commands anyway were still alive and well.

Since Donald Trump took office as president in January, those machinations are no longer set in stone. Results of a Pentagon global force posture review, which could upend capability deployment plans for Europe, are expected in the fall.

Dobeck, the Lockheed executive, said the company has been in touch with Germany’s Diehl Defence and Rheinmetall about local partnering on Typhon.

European missiles for purposes other than strike, including Diehl’s Iris-T and the Franco-Italian Aster anti-air missiles, could eventually be fired from the U.S. launcher, he said.

Jen Judson in Washington contributed this report.

As part of a newly announced Eastern Flank Deterrence Line, a regional plan focused on the Baltic states, the U.S. Army and its allies and partners plan to pursue key ground-based capabilities.

“Everyone loves to talk about long-range fires and air defense,” Gen. Christopher Donahue, U.S. Army Europe and Africa’s commander, said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s inaugural LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany.

“So specifically, what we want to develop is a common launcher … that is both offensive and defensive capable. We want a common fire control system so that any nation can use that fire control system,” he said. “Then obviously, we want everything to be optionally manned. If we look out for an air defense system or a long-range fire system, we want it to be one system, optionally manned, where we’ll be able to take munitions from any country and shoot through them.”

Donahue acknowledged the existence of the bureaucracy that has bogged down previous weapons development and the foreign military sales process.

Even so, he said, “The United States has taken on reform of foreign military sales, and you’re already seeing the changes that are coming. We already know that we’re now having actual things that will be allowed to move at a higher rate of speed and getting them to move faster.”

In the past, the Army has struggled to develop a multi-mission launcher that can take on a wide variety of missiles; particularly ones that focused on something that could fire interceptors that can defeat anything from drones, cruise missiles and rockets, artillery and mortars.

The service canceled a MML program in 2019 and has yet to select and qualify a second interceptor for its Indirect Fires Protection Capability system designed to provide fixed or semi-fixed site protection against RAM, drone and cruise missile threats. The first IFPC prototypes are headed to South Korea this summer.

Donahue said the operational environment in Ukraine and the Middle East has accelerated the development of capabilities that can rapidly configure systems to fire different munitions.

“You look at where technology is, we are at the point where we can actually do it now in all of these conflicts,” Donahue stated. “We look at what’s at play out there and what we’re learning from it and then, because we are watching in Ukraine, you know, with the Middle East, this is forcing technology to mature to the point where we can do that.”

Donahue described the common launcher as something like a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS — that is used in Ukraine and either owned or on tap to be purchased by nearly 20 countries worldwide — but could be adapted by countries to suit their own industrial investment and operational needs.

“HIMARS is a great long-range system,” Donahue said, “so I’m confident most nations would want that, but they may want to put it on something common with their military.

“You would be able to take that common launcher and if Norway wants to put it onto a wheeled vehicle, they can put that common launcher on the wheeled vehicle,” he continued. We want to make sure that no matter who buys what type of variant of HIMARS rockets or missiles, just using that example, it can be fired through any fire system. Right now, there is not that interoperability so we have to make sure that happens.”

To address the dire need to deepen the magazine depth for global deterrence, Donahue added, “we want to get to the point where you can fire other people’s rockets through these common platforms.”

Here comes CAML

The Army released a “request for solutions” to industry late last month through its Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, for a Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher (CAML).

“CAML is an autonomous/optionally crewed, highly mobile, air transportable, cross-domain fires launcher with the potential to augment or replace existing Army launchers. CAML will be capable of worldwide deployment and operations,” Sam.gov states.

The solicitation, which limits responses to U.S. companies capable of processing and storing secret information and hardware, asks for two separate solutions: A CAML Heavy on an M1075 Palletized Loading System tactical vehicle or similar 15-ton chassis tactical vehicle and a CAML Medium that could fit on Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles.

For CAML-H, the Army is looking for something that could integrate a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) used in the recently fielded ground-launched Typhon Mid-Range capability missile system or the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptors used in Patriot air and missile defense systems.

The CAML-M would be able to fire Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MRLS) family of munitions used in HIMARS or AIM-9X interceptors used in the IFPC system.

Both systems would be supported by an Autonomous Resupply Vehicle “capable of autonomously reloading pods/canisters of missiles,” the request states, “with minimal to no human intervention.”

RCCTO plans to rapidly prototype 1 CAML-M with MLRS family of munitions within 18 months and another with IFPC-capable missiles within 24 months and an ARV within 36 months from date of the contract award, the solicitation lays out.

Within 24 months, the Army will produce four TLAM-capable CAML-H prototypes within 18 months and one MSE-capable prototype within 24 months.

The tech is there

Lockheed has ownership over a variety of systems that could be involved in the CAML effort — from MLRS to Typhon to PAC-3 MSE.

HIMARS would be tuned to fire not just offensive weapons but defensive ones as well, Jason Reynolds, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for integrated air and missile defense in its missiles and fire control sector, told Defense News in an interview at LandEuro. The systems would also all be mobile as opposed to the current configuration of defensive systems, which are typically trailer-based like Patriots are today.

“What we’re learning in the real world is, if you’re mobile, you’re more survivable,” Reynolds stated.

Technologically, the prototypes could be done relatively quickly if investment from the government puts the program in the HOV lane, he noted.

“I don’t think there’s anything technically that would prohibit that because these are existing systems today,” Reynolds said. “You might have to combine some of the electronics, you might have to redesign some of the circuit cards, you might have to repackage some of these items to put it onto that vehicle, whatever the new vehicle is, but it’s not like you’re inventing something, you’re just repackaging.”

For Lockheed, its ship-based Mark 41 launcher, which was adapted for the ground-launched Typhon system for the U.S. Army, already has missile load-out flexibility.

“It really provides the ability to bring and load out any mix of defensive- and strike-based capability missiles that anybody that’s a Mark 41 user wants to employ,” Edward Dobeck, company program director for launching systems within its rotary and mission systems division, told Defense News in an interview this week.

Typhon successfully sank a ship off the coast of Australia last week during U.S.-Australia-led exercise Talisman Sabre.

HIMARS have also demonstrated autonomous capability during the most recent capstone event as part of the Army’s experimentation campaign known as Project Convergence.

“Those are some of the technologies we’ve demonstrated that we think are the sorts of things that could be leveraged on CAML,” Paula Hartley, Lockheed’s vice president of tactical missile within the MFC business, told Defense News in the same interview.

“It’s not a new missile system or munitions, it’s just putting it all together and the government moved pretty briskly in this and I think that we have responded extremely well in helping them do that,” she said.

“We can tell industry exactly what it is that we need for all the leaders that are out there. It’s our job, I think, to hold industry accountable to deliver quickly and to hold ourselves accountable for giving industry the ability to deliver quickly through our acquisition processes,” U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich said July 17 during his first public speech since taking command at the Association of the U.S. Army’s inaugural LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany.

“We’ve got to do this fast. We need real capabilities and we need them delivered as soon as possible. We can’t afford to wait, future pledges are no longer enough,” he said. “To do this, the defense industrial base on both sides of the Atlantic is going to have to become fully activated.”

Grynkewich stressed there’s plenty of work to go around, it’s not a matter of investing in one or the other. “It needs to be one seamless industrial base that can deliver capability and capacity for the alliance,” he said.

Moving quicker is easier said than done. Every country will have to contend with their own budget approval process and work through red tape across borders. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made a pledge earlier this year on a trip to NATO headquarters that the U.S. would conduct major foreign military sales reform.

Even so, the U.S. military and NATO have developed solid regional plans beginning with a clear one focused on the Baltic States that will help guide government and industry in getting capabilities to units there.

The U.S. Army Europe and Africa commander, speaking a day earlier at the conference, said the “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line” plan aims to enhance ground-based capabilities and drive military-industrial interoperability across the alliance.

As part of the plan to counter Russian threats and enable scalable, global deterrence, the Army and its NATO allies are urgently developing standardized, data-driven systems, common launchers and cloud-based coordination.

The plan includes a system to share data. NATO has already procured that system – Palantir’s Maven Smart System – an artificial intelligence platform that takes a vast amount of data and rapidly analyzes information to help military commanders make decisions.

U.S. Army Europe and Africa officials have also adopted Maven at headquarters, using it for mission command and visibility across the theater. The system has completely replaced PowerPoint briefings and offers information to commanders in real-time.

On NATO’s wish list, according to Grynkewich, are capabilities that mirror a Ukrainian brigade. “How do we get our brigades to have the same level of capability where we can match what they’re able to do today?”

Additionally, Grynkewich said he wants to focus on air defense. “There’s never enough air defense. You always want more, but it’s an acute requirement, whether it’s counter-[unmanned aircraft systems] or counter-ballistic missiles,” he said.

And there will also be a continued focus on long-range fires, Grynkewich noted. “We need the capability to hold things at risk.”

Industry now has real incentives in place, Grynkewich said, with the new commitment made by NATO nations at the last summit to spend 5% of their gross domestic product on defense by 2035.

“I would ask industry folks who are here and elsewhere to realize that sustained commitment should be a powerful signal to do the things you need to do, to expand production lines, to increase [research and development] spending, etc., so that we can get where we need to go,” he said.

Leadership is now moving to deliver new and emerging technology to the battlefield along with legacy technology that is still relevant and will work to make things interoperable.

“I challenge each of the chiefs of defense, land forces commanders and every leader in here to hold themselves to account for that. There’s no time to waste,” Grynkewich said.

The July 17 statement by the Swiss, which said the notification from the United States arrived the prior day, illuminates some of the hasty mechanics behind Washington’s newfound emphasis on helping Ukraine repel near-constant Russian attacks with missiles and drones.

Switzerland ordered five Patriot systems, made by Ratheon, in 2022. Deliveries were set begin in 2026 and go through 2028.

The U.S. foreign military process, which governs the sale, makes the diversion of defense goods possible, the Swiss announcement notes. No information was available about how many systems would be affected and what the new timing for future deliveries would be.

Switzerland’s Patriot pick was part of a lengthy air-defense and air-policing review by the government that also led to an order of 36 U.S. F-35 fighter aircraft.

Last year, the United States told Switzerland that a batch of ordered PAC-3 MSE interceptors, the most advanced interceptors fireable with Patriot, would similarly be diverted to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Germany this week offered to buy two Patriot systems from the U.S. and give them to Ukraine. One Patriot setup costs roughly $1 billion, depending on the number of interceptors, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said during a visit to Washington on July 14.

Details for the purchase are now under discussion with the U.S. administration, Pistorius said following talks with U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Outstanding questions surrounding the transaction are all “solvable,” he added.

Speaking at the LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, on July 17, top NATO commander U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich signaled a new dynamic in supplying Kyiv with the defensive weapons.

Grynkewich said he would bring European nations together to work on delivering Patriot and other capabilities to Ukraine. The idea is to “look at what’s the art of the possible” in orchestrating the flow of new production equipment to Ukraine’s defense, he said.

“I won’t go into a ton of details on any of that, I’m not going to tell the Russians or anyone else the exact numbers of weapons that we’re transferring or when those will happen,” U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s inaugural LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, July 17.

“We’re also looking at other capabilities and what those needs are and working on proposals for our political leadership,” Grynkewich said.

President Trump said publicly earlier this week that he intends to ship more Patriot systems to Ukraine.

The commander will soon bring European nations together to work on delivering Patriot and other capabilities, he said, to “look at what’s the art of the possible. This will be tied to being able to sequence what flows into Ukraine now … capabilities that are in Europe can be moved more quickly than something off the production line. The production line can then be used to back-fill the capabilities.”

The United States, which has been using Patriot since the Cold War era, sent systems to Ukraine for the first time in April 2023. Its interceptors went to work immediately, batting off even complex threats like hypersonic weapons.

A total of 19 countries have purchased the Raytheon-made weapon, and there are more than 250 Patriot fire units around the world.

Tom Laliberty, Raytheon’s president of land and air defense systems, told Defense News in an interview in 2024 that the U.S. owns 85-90 of those, with the rest distributed among the other 18 customer countries.

The U.S. Army is slated to build a new Patriot battery to replace the one sent to Ukraine and to secure one more battalion’s worth of systems.

International customers are on the rise, and countries like Germany that also have sent Patriot to Ukraine have ordered new ones to replenish those sent and to bolster their own defenses.

Raytheon’s production lines have the capacity to make 12 fire units a year, which the company views as sufficient capacity to support current and future contracts as they materialize.

At the same time Lockheed Martin is racing to increase its production of the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement, or PAC-3 MSE, interceptor.

The company is contractually working toward delivering 650 PAC-3 MSE missiles per year by 2027. It is currently producing roughly 550 a year.

Lockheed is looking at how it might possibly ramp up to 650 missiles a year earlier, Jason Reynolds, company vice president of integrated air and missile defense within its missiles and fire control business, told Defense News at LandEuro here.

“What we’re endeavoring to do in partnership with the U.S. government, is to pull that left as much as we can,” he said.

The company is also looking at “the efficiencies and streamlining and doing everything we can to stretch those dollars actually to take that to a higher capacity, upwards of around 750 per year by 2027,” Reynolds said.

The government has not yet officially released the number for a top production level, “if you take that trajectory and you project it forward into the future years, you will see as well north of 1,000 and then even much higher after that,” he said.

While he doesn’t have a good sense of what the numbers will be, Grynkewich said, “I know that my guidance is to get the Ukrainians what they need to defend themselves. So there’ll be more to follow. We’re going to move as quickly as we can on this. A ton of coordination in making it work, but, as I mentioned, we’re already doing the preparation phase for the first tranche of capability to start moving with respect to Patriots.”

As part of the plan to counter Russian threats and enable scalable, global deterrence, the Army and its NATO allies are urgently developing standardized, data-driven systems, common launchers and cloud-based coordination, according to Gen. Christopher Donahue.

Regional plans have been coming together for some time, but the Army, along with NATO, is first focusing on the Baltic states “to try to get to how do you actually make it so that industry and the nations know exactly what the requirements are — ultimately that is now known as the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line,” Donahue said.

“We know what we have to develop and the use case that we’re using is you have to [deter] from the ground,” he said. “The land domain is not becoming less important, it’s becoming more important. You can now take down [anti-access, aerial-denial] A2AD bubbles from the ground. You can now take over sea from the ground. All of those things we are watching happen in Ukraine.”

For example, Donahue noted, Kaliningrad, Russia, is roughly 47 miles wide and surrounded by NATO on all sides and the Army and its allies now have the capability to “take that down from the ground in a timeframe that is unheard of and faster than we’ve ever been able to do.”

“We’ve already planned that and we’ve already developed it. The mass and momentum problem that Russia poses to us … we’ve developed the capability to make sure that we can stop that mass and momentum problem,” Donahue said.

The plan includes a system to share data. NATO has already procured that system, Donahue said, referencing its choice of Palantir’s Maven Smart System, an artificial intelligence platform from Palantir that takes a vast amount of data and rapidly analyzes information to help military commanders make decisions.

“We already know exactly what we have to do with cloud and we know exactly the type of actual unmanned systems, brigades, everything else that we need for that,” Donahue said.

Specifically, the Army wants these capabilities to be interoperable with NATO partners.

The Army also wants a common launcher that serves in both an offensive and defensive capacity, along with a fire control system that any nation can use.

And, Donahue said, “We want everything to be optionally manned,” whether that is an air defense or a long-range fires system.

“We want it to be one system, optionally manned, where we’ll be able to take munitions from any country and shoot through them,” he said.

And the Army wants to lower the cost of systems.

“As a general rule, whatever you’re shooting at, whatever your weapon system or munition you shoot at, another adversary’s capability, it should be cheaper than what you’re shooting,” Donahue stressed.

Donahue acknowledged the obvious existence of bureaucracy but said that on the U.S. side, reform in things like foreign military sales is coming and the Army will be able to move at a much faster rate.

Directly addressing industry, Donahue said, “We have sent a clear demand signal to you of exactly what we need. … If you sell us something, it has to be interoperable. You have to share the [Application Programming Interface]. The cost has to go down.”

Interest in the Lockheed Martin-made launcher comes as defense officials in Berlin await a final call by the Trump administration to honor a Biden-era agreement under which American missiles are to bolster Germany’s deterrence posture starting in 2026.

Those long-range fires capabilities, launched via Typhon, are to include SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles, plus “developmental hypersonic weapons,” said a July 2024 German-U.S. statement, released on the sidelines of NATO’s 75-year anniversary summit in Washington.

Boris Pistorius, speaking to reporters in Washington on July 14, said missile-stationing plan’s fate was still iffy, as U.S. defense leaders re-assess the American military footprint in Europe.

“I’m very confident that the announcement will remain in place,” he said following a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “But a final decision is still outstanding.”

In that context, Berlin’s interest in Typhon could be seen as a gesture to keep the long-range strike plan, devised as a conventional counterstrike option in the event of a Russian attack, on track in the first place.

Either way, European nations currently lack the weapons range that Typhon would bring to the continent, according to Pistorius.

Countries have banded together to develop such weapons under the European Long-range Strike Approach, or ELSA, but those capabilities will take seven to 10 years to field, he said.

The program requirements are part of the UK’s wider Land Mobility Program that intends to replace three different types of aging vehicles and consolidate the British Army’s fleet.

The two companies have teamed up to offer GM’s flagship Infantry Squad Vehicle and its utility variant for the LMV segment, both based on the rugged Chevrolet Colorado ZR2.

In an interview with Defense News, Bradley Watters, vice-president of international government solutions and strategy at GM Defense, said the company views the competition as a strategic race.

“It’s all about getting that first win, with a major military force, and having these vehicles back in Europe – GM is getting back into Europe, if you have not heard of it, in multiple areas including sales, maintenance, distribution centers and more,” he said.

The Request for Information published by the UK Ministry of Defense in January highlighted that an important aspect that would be considered in the selection process would be the potential for off-the-shelf solutions.

According to the manufacturer, its ISV uses approximately 90% commercial-off-the-shelf parts, which could play in its favor.

For example, the vehicle features dynamic suspension spool valve dampers sourced from Multimatic, a Canadian company. When asked whether the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on a variety of goods have affected the procurement of components, Watters said that no negative impact has been felt.

“The bottom line is that the environment is changing all the time, everyday – we’ve worked with different administrations and changes for more than 100 years and we’re doing the same now,” a GM Defense spokeswoman said.

The company is also currently exploring the potential that second-source suppliers based in Europe could offer in certain areas to meet the localization requirements that many countries are now after.

GM Defense plans to incorporate in its bid the facilities NP Aerospace already has in Coventry, U.K., and London, Ontario, to gain access to localized and tailored design and contents. The two firms also announced that they would be going after the Canadian Armed Forces’ Light Utility Vehicle and Light Forces Enhancement programs.

British authorities have not confirmed whether they are considering integrating a remote weapon station on the vehicle to be chosen as part of the LMV tender.