Outgunned, Outranged US Army Hurries to Forge Long-Range Weapons

Longer-reaching artillery, missiles are a key to Army’s 6-point game plan for the era of ‘great power competition’

A Russian Grad multiple rocket launcher system fires in Kubinka Patriot Park outside Moscow on Aug. 22, 2017. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)

For decades, U.S. aircraft carriers—effectively mobile airfields—and forward air bases have been the foreign policy muscle of then-President Theodore Roosevelt’s adage “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

But that big stick has lost its clout in recent years, challenged by new Russian and Chinese missile systems that are amassed over hundreds, even thousands, of miles on the horizon.

With the various branches of the U.S. military scrambling to reinvent themselves for a renewed “great power competition,” the Army’s No. 1 priority is the development of its own long-reaching ground-launched missiles and artillery, known as “fires.”