Defense Secretary Ash Carter this week disclosed new details about a secret project to tweak the Army’s main, long-range surface-to-surface missile by giving it a new seeker and the ability to hit moving targets — a capability that could allow ground forces operating near coastlines to target ships up to 186 miles away.

Carter, during an Oct. 28 address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, revealed the full scope of a project, part of the “Strike-Ex” program run by the Strategic Capabilities Office, begun in fiscal year 2016 with $4 million as a concept and which the Pentagon plans to convert into a prototype with $121 million in FY-17. In a parallel development, Army forces in the Pacific are looking to acquire an off-the-shelf capability to demonstrate an anti-ship capability in 2017.

“A prominent theme of SCO’s work is spearheading creative and unexpected new ways to use our existing missiles and advanced munitions, and across varied domains,” Carter said. “One example of this that I want to highlight — something I haven’t talked about publicly before today — is SCO’s project to develop a cross-domain capability for the Army Tactical Missile System.”

Built by Lockheed Martin, ATACMS is the Army’s premier long-range, guided missile launched from the service’s Multiple Launch Rocket System.

“By integrating an existing seeker onto the front of the missile, they’re enabling it to hit moving targets, both on land and at sea,” Carter said. “With this capability, what was previously an Army surface-to-surface missile system can project power from coastal locations up to 300 kilometers into the maritime domain.”

In written testimony prepared for a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in April, William Roper, the SCO director, revealed ATACMS to be part of the Strike-Ex program. “Options to upgrade the Army’s ATACMS missile are also part of our Strike-Ex program,” Roper said. “Because the modifications are higher risk than Maritime Tomahawk’s, we will team with the Army to build and demonstrate an operational prototype, giving the Army multiple options for next-generation fires.”

The SCO’s FY-16 budget included $4 million to conduct preliminary design and system engineering “in support of system architecture, hardware design and platform integration requirements,” according to the Pentagon’s FY-17 budget request. Another plan for FY-16 funding calls for the SCO to “develop operationally relevant proof-of-principle demonstration to anchor modeling and simulation performance results.”

The FY-17 plan — which requires enacted defense authorization and appropriations bills, not expected until after the Nov. 8 election at the soonest — calls for the SCO to work with the Army to “conduct platform integration test exercises to collect performance data to validate CONOPS and identify risks” and to acquire “test article hardware to support component level testing and integration.” In addition, FY-17 project funding, $121 million, would finance “fabrication of Strike-Ex test articles to facilitate platform integration evaluations.”

The SCO is working with the Army Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center, headquartered at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, AL, on giving ATACMS an anti-ship capability.

In addition to the Strike-Ex ATACMS project, the Army has launched a tandem project to demonstrate as soon as 2017 a land-based, anti-ship capability in the Pacific.

The SCO has an office in Hawaii that works closely with U.S. Pacific Command. On Oct. 4, Adm. Harry Harris, head of U.S. Pacific Command, called for the Army to consider new ways to operate beyond its traditional domains.

“Before I leave PACOM, I’d like to see the Army’s land forces conduct exercises to sink a ship, shoot down a missile, and the aircraft that fired that missile — near simultaneously — in a complex environment where our joint and combined forces are operating in other domains,” Harris said in an address delivered via Skype to the Association of the United States Army.

Army Gen. Robert Brown, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, said during a brief interview on Oct. 4 that the service was actively working on the capability to demonstrate an anti-ship capability.

“We are already working toward that,” he told Inside Defense at the AUSA conference. “We volunteered to put it in as a JEON — a Joint Emergent Operational Need — and we volunteered to test it in the Pacific.”

A JEON — like a Joint Urgent Operational Need process — allows for the rapid acquisition of a capability outside the traditional procurement system. Both a JEON and a JUON can be considered “urgent.” While a JUON is focused on a capability that can be fielded in two years or less, a JEON is a project that can be delivered in five years or less.

Which munitions is the Army looking at for this 2017 demonstration?

“You have ATACMS,” Brown said, adding the self-propelled Paladin artillery system and High Mobility Artillery Rocket System which can launch ATACMS. “There are other systems that exist: A Norwegian missile, land to sea; there is a Japanese system, land to sea. We’re looking at those,” the Army four-star general said