The U.S. Marine Corps’ plans to sling Tomahawk cruise missiles from remotely operated 4×4 launcher vehicles have come to an end. The service determined that the complete Long Range Fires (LRF) system could not be effectively used in the kinds of austere environments that it expects to be a centerpiece of its future operations. This might have further implications for the U.S. Army, which has been eyeing LRF as a possible smaller and more readily deployable companion to its Typhon system and its large tractor-trailer launchers capable of firing Tomahawks and SM-6 multi-purpose missiles.
The decision to cancel the LRF program is noted in the Marine Corps’ portion of the Department of the Navy’s 2026 Fiscal Year budget request, which started being released last week. The Marines first announced they were looking to field a land-based Tomahawk cruise missile capability in 2020. At that time, ground-launched Tomahawks had not been found anywhere in the U.S. military since 1991, when the U.S. Air Force scrapped its nuclear-tipped BGM-109G Gryphon variants to comply with a now-defunct treaty. The Corps stood up its initial LRF unit – Battery A, 11th Marine Regiment at Camp Pendleton in California – in 2023, something TWZ was first to report.
“The Marine Corps has concluded that the LRF system was not able to be employed in austere, expeditionary, littoral environments and has made the decision to terminate the program,” the 2026 Fiscal Year budget request states bluntly.
No further details are provided about how the Marines reached this conclusion. The underlying vehicle used for the LRF launcher is the Remotely Operated Ground Unit for Expeditionary Fires (ROGUE-Fires), an uncrewed derivative of the 4×4 Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV). The Marines are continuing to field the Navy and Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS), which also uses ROGUE-Fires-based launchers, but to fire the smaller Naval Strike Missile (NSM) anti-ship cruise missiles.
It is worth noting that the LRF launcher vehicle could only carry one Tomahawk at a time before needing to be reloaded, which may have presented complications in an expeditionary environment. The Marines have publicly highlighted in the past potential challenges when it comes to reloading NMESIS launchers, which can accommodate two NSMs at once, in the field.
“Marines are, again, looking at it [NSM] from [sic] different ways than the Navy has been handling it in the past,” Marine Col. Bradley Sams, the service’s program manager for Ground Weapons Systems, said during a presentation at the Modern Day Marine exposition in May. “They [the Navy] take it straight from the OEM [original equipment manufacturer] to the pier, put it on the ship, and it goes out.”
“So we have to look for different methods of handling that weapons system, taking it from point A to point B, and I’d love to hear different ideas on how we could do this using the existing NSM and canister,” Sams added.
Dedicated resupply vehicles with trailers are integral parts of a standard NMESIS battery, per the Marine Corps budget documents. Other factors could well have played a role in the Marine Corps’ decision to terminate LRF, as well.
With NMESIS, the Marines are still set to have ground-based standoff anti-ship missile capability that also offers a secondary ability to strike targets on land. During an exercise in the Philippines earlier this year, the Corps highlighted the immense value of being able to rapidly deploy the system when it sent one of the launchers to an island right in the middle of the highly strategic Luzon Strait. The Strait is some 220 miles across at its narrowest, and on the other end is the island of Taiwan.
Using NMESIS launchers forward deployed on island outposts to help hold enemy naval movements at risk is exactly why the Marines are acquiring this system in the first place.
However, LRF had been expected to provide the Marines with an additional and far longer-ranged layer of strike capability. NSM has a substantially shorter maximum range (around 126 miles in its baseline form) compared to Tomahawk (roughly 1,000 miles).
At present, the Marine Corps does not look to be considering a different ground-based weapon system to hit targets at similar distances to Tomahawk. The service is planning to field the Army’s Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) short-range ballistic missile, including the anti-ship variant now in development, using its existing M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers. PrSM, at least in its current guise, which has a demonstrated maximum range of some 310 miles, still has less reach than Tomahawk. The Army is planning to develop additional versions of PrSM able to hit targets at least 620 miles away, if not more, in the future.
As noted, there may be additional ramifications on the Army side from the Marine Corps’ decision to axe the LRF program.
“There’s some interest from the Army and other services about that single-cell JLTV[-based launcher], as well, because it is a nice complement to the larger four-cell container that’s on a heavy truck,” Edward Dobeck, program director of Launching Systems at Lockheed Martin, told TWZ in April. “There have been some discussions about how to maybe make it [Typhon] lighter.”
Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the LRF launcher and the Army’s Typhon system. Typhon, which the Army has also deployed to the Philippines on a semi-permanent basis, is sometimes referred to as the Mid-Range Capability (MRC) and as the Strategic Mid-Range Fires (SMRF) system.
“From an MRC standpoint, you can see what that is going on in the Philippines,” Dobeck added in April. “MRC provides a very strategic asset for [use from] the Philippines to be able to provide that capability in the region.”
Still, it is the Army’s experiences with Typhon in the Philippines that have been driving the service to look at alternatives.
“So, the Mid-Range Capability, we fielded it, we have put it into the theater, but we’re learning lessons on how we can improve the next evolutions of that,” Army Col. Michael Rose, commander of the service’s 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) headquartered at Fort Shafter in Hawaii, said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual conference last year. “How do we make it more mobile? How do we make it smaller? How do we make it more agile? How do we employ it most effectively and how do we sustain it? A lot of those lessons are feeding back into our RDT&E [research, development, test, and evaluation] and acquisitions professionals to improve and enhance that new operational capability.”
The Marine Corps’ conclusion that the LRF system is not suitable for its expeditionary concepts of operations may now prompt additional questions about the ability to deploy and operate the larger Typhon system at forward locations. At the same time, the Army’s concept for employing Typhon does not involve distributing the launchers to very remote locales as the Marines intended to do with LRF.
In a contracting notice put out last month, the Army did express additional interest in a potential new uncrewed launcher vehicle capable of firing Tomahawks, as well as Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (PAC-3 MSE) surface-to-air missiles, based on the 10×10 M1075 Palletized Loading System (PLS) truck.
In the meantime, the Army’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget shows the service is still pressing ahead with Typhon in its current form, but is only planning to order a very small number of missiles for those systems – just seven Tomahawks and six SM-6s – in the upcoming fiscal cycle. Interestingly, the budget documents also say the Army is shifting to purchase only anti-ship optimized Marine Strike Tomahawk (MST) variants for Typhon going forward. MST, which retains a land-attack capability, is one of three versions of the latest Block V Tomahawk, the others being the baseline type and one with an advanced warhead design. Whether the service expects to purchase additional Tomahawks and/or SM-6s through other funding streams is not immediately clear.
Whatever might happen going forward on the Army side, the Marine Corps’ future is no longer set to include ground-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com