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The US Army announced that the first PrSM batch has been delivered in December 2023.

Operational testing is expected in 2024, with low-rate initial production, full-rate production, and initial capability testing expected in 2025, according to the Government Accountability Office’s 2023 Weapons Systems Annual Assessment.

A total of 110 PrSMs are expected to be procured in fiscal 2024 and 190 in fiscal 2025

It's fairly ridiculous to claim that ATACMS M57(?) last produced a few years to decade ago which are still our best-in-class available for operational use until ~2025+ are "30 years" old tech. The number of PrSMs we'll have by end of next year would last us about 24 hours in a great power war.

https://www.thedefensepost.com/2024/03/07/lockheed-precision...

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It’s really quite reasonable. The basic capabilities of the ATACMS are not hugely changed and have been available for decades. Russia does not have an equivalent that is demonstrably deployed effectively. They’re also not the focal point of US military development.

The quality of Russian equipment being deployed right now is really bad. The limiting factor here is not “science”.

Fun bonus if you want to watch some people die:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1dv3086/north_kore...

Russia does not have an equivalent that is demonstrably deployed effectively.

Ukraine is being hit with Iskander-M all the time, e.g. just days ago at Myrhorod taking out SU-27s.

The quality of Russian equipment being deployed right now is really bad.

And yet Ukraine is still losing territory, countless men, and the war. This blasé attitude is just bizarre, as if NATO has a secret stock of wunderwaffen about to be arrive and deliver the coup de grâce any day. NATO has spent a quarter trillion dollars+ on this proxy war, staked its credibility on it, and is losing.

Fun bonus if you want to watch some people die:

Things people who have lost their humanity say.

It is Russian propaganda narrative to claim, that Russia is fighting NATO. There might not be some Wunderwaffe somewhere, but nato is also not providing everything it has and all the quantities. The conflict cannot be compared to fighting nato. The co flict is some nato countries drip sending equipment to another country, and also far from sending all quantity they have.

> And yet Ukraine is still losing territory, countless men, and the war.

Ukraine is losing territory at a glacial pace. Meanwhile Russia is giving away (selling) territory to China.

Russia is also losing men att a rate of 5-to-1 or thereabout.

Losing the war? Pfft. Russia is throwing away all their equipment, countless of lives and ruining their economy in the ground... For nothing.

Ok buddy! We’re coming up on day 900 of the 3 day invasion. I’m sure you’ll get it soon.

If they breathlessly announced they were dismantling one of our howitzers, we'd joke about them being 60 years behind. It doesn't mean those howitzers aren't useful weapons, but...

Probably because you can't GPS jam a dumb artillery shell. otoh:

US-made weapons augmented by Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites for position updates in Ukraine are now susceptible to Russian electronic warfare (EW) jamming ... The weapons affected may include the 155mm Excalibur artillery projectiles, Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB), Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) and weapons rounds used with the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), among others, depending on how they are employed by the weapons operators.

An unnamed source reportedly familiar with the classified report told the NYT that in the worst-case scenario, only one in 19 Excalibur rounds was hitting its target, where the report said the cost per successful strike skyrocketed from $300,000 to $1.9 million between January and August 2023.

Being able to test GPS jamming techniques against intact munitions isn't some hypothetical academic problem.

https://www.kyivpost.com/analysis/33448

> Being able to test GPS jamming techniques against intact munitions isn't some hypothetical academic problem.

The US military-industrial complex is probably extremely grateful for the chance to do the same, here. Very useful if there's ever a direct conflict.

Excalibur, GLSDB, JDAM, and ATACMS all have GPS-aided inertial guidance and can be set to fall back to just inertial; the US has long been aware of the likelihood of GPS jamming in a hot war, and certainly plans to employ the same sort of jamming themselves against potential enemies.

I fully expect there's a lot of work being done on cheap anti-jammer drones that home in on a jammer's signal; it's like a big "come get me!" signal. We already have HARM missiles for radar for a similar purpose.

For example here [0] - Russian Glonass Kometa antennas with 4 elements to reduce effects of EW warfare. Great samples for Western military complex of bleeding edge Russian EW countermeasures.

Or when Russians appears to have lost a jamming pod above Ukraine [1] Again bleeding edge EW tech which Russia just lost.

[0] https://mil.in.ua/en/news/russians-use-bombs-equipped-with-e...

[1] https://www.twz.com/ukraine-just-captured-one-of-russias-mos...

A successor to the HARM missile (I think?) for the F-35 is in the works that would have the option of targeting a GPS jammer platform. [0]

There are definitely many ways to make those jammers disappear. Ukraine will inevitably find a way to do it on the cheap.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-in_Attack_Weapon

> Being able to test GPS jamming techniques against intact munitions isn't some hypothetical academic problem.

If Ukraine is just leaving the GPS guidance turned off entirely and relying on inertial guidance, then whatever secrets Russia has discovered in ATACMS really are academic.

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