U.S. Army and Lockheed Martin Retarget HIMARS-Fired GMLRS Rocket in Flight to Destroy Moving Target

Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Army retargeted a Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) round in flight and destroyed a moving target during a recent test at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, the company announced on October 28, 2026. Fired from an M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), the rocket received its new target through Lockheed Martin’s Strigo datalink and the Remote Interceptor Guidance-360 (RIG-360) uplink, integrated with company funds. Lockheed Martin calls it a program first.

The demonstration addresses a structural limit of the Army’s standard precision rocket. GMLRS flies to coordinates loaded before launch, which makes it accurate against fixed targets but blind to anything that relocates after the fire mission is sent. That gap matters more as Army long-range fires shift toward mobile launchers, air defenses, and vessels. The test comes nine days after Lockheed Martin announced Army Milestone C approval for Extended Range GMLRS (ER GMLRS).

How Strigo and RIG-360 Enabled GMLRS Retargeting in Flight

Publicly available specifications describe GMLRS as a 227 mm rocket produced in Unitary (M31A1/A2) and Alternative Warhead (M30A1/A2) variants, each delivering a 200-pound-class warhead to roughly 70 kilometers. An inertial measurement unit aided by GPS steers four nose canards. A HIMARS carries one six-round pod; the tracked M270A1 and M270A2 carry two.

RIG-360 forms the ground end of the retargeting link. Lockheed Martin built it as a software-defined X-band communications unit providing 360-degree in-flight coverage, originally so the Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS) could pass in-flight updates to Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) interceptors with less reliance on the Patriot radar for that link. The Army’s Integrated Fires and Mission Command project office awarded a $114 million definitized engineering and manufacturing development contract on May 9, 2025, and the company reported the first developmental flight test with a PAC-3 missile in October 2026. A RIG-360 prototype had already relayed target updates to a datalink flown inside a surrogate GMLRS during captive-carry testing in October 2023.

Strigo supplies the datalink. Unveiled on August 10, 2026, the Strigo line brings radio-frequency sensors, missile datalinks, and seekers onto shared modular hardware, matured in a dedicated product center that has absorbed $250 million in company investment. Randy Crites, vice president of Lockheed Martin Advanced Programs, said the integration of GMLRS, RIG-360, and Strigo gives warfighters “the confidence and capability to succeed in the most complex, real-world scenarios.”

Lockheed Martin did not disclose the test date, the engagement range, when the update was sent, which sensor generated the target track, or the type and speed of the target. The company says the capability required no fundamental change to the missile.

Extending the Datalink to ER GMLRS and the Precision Strike Missile

The retargeting link matters because GMLRS carries no terminal seeker. Against a moving target, accuracy depends entirely on how current the aimpoint is when the rocket arrives, so every mobile-target engagement needs an external sensor track and a path to push fresh coordinates during flight. Without that link, a crew facing a target that relocates has to compute and fire a new mission.

Lockheed Martin states that the same datalink package applies directly to ER GMLRS and the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM). ER GMLRS uses a new motor and fins moved from the nose to the tail to reach up to 150 kilometers, about twice the baseline round, from the same HIMARS and M270 launchers. Soldier-led operational tests in September and October 2026 fired Alternative Warhead and Unitary rounds in succession from an M270A2 at White Sands before the Milestone C decision. Longer range means longer time of flight, and therefore more distance a mobile target can cover between launch and impact. An in-flight update turns that interval into a correction window, provided the sensor network holds a usable track.

PrSM presents a different case. Increment 1 is the Army’s deep-strike successor to the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), while Increment 2 adds a seeker intended for moving land and maritime targets. Lockheed Martin has said Strigo technologies informed aspects of that seeker package, which first flew in March 2026 on a 350-kilometer test. For a seeker-equipped missile, a datalink narrows the area the seeker must search; for seekerless GMLRS, the datalink is the entire moving-target solution.

Analysis: The test points to a moving-target strike option built on a rocket already in large-scale production rather than on a new seeker-equipped munition. Lockheed Martin reported delivering its 75,000th GMLRS in 2024, so an upgrade that leaves the airframe largely unchanged could scale through existing lines. The trade-off is dependency: a seekerless rocket on a datalink is only as good as the external track and the uplink, both priority targets for electronic attack in a contested theater. RIG-360 was built for IBCS, so reusing it on GMLRS suggests sensors fielded for air and missile defense could eventually cue surface-to-surface strikes.

Lockheed Martin funded the RIG-360 integration internally, and neither the company nor the Army has announced a requirement, funding line, or schedule for in-flight retargeting on GMLRS. Open questions include the unit cost of adding the datalink to production rounds, whether the Army will seek the capability for ER GMLRS as that rocket enters production, and how the link performs under jamming. RIG-360’s progress through engineering and manufacturing development for PAC-3 is the nearest indicator of when an offensive fires version could mature.