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Army Budget Aimed at Maintaining Modernization Momentum

Investments include hypersonic weapons and digital transformation.

The Army's 2024 budget request seeks $584 million for the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) system among other modernization efforts. Credit: Lockheed Martin photo

The U.S. Army’s 2024 base budget request of $185 million is meant to maintain modernization momentum, according to Gabe Camarillo, undersecretary of the Army.

Camarillo briefed reporters on the budget priorities March 13 alongside Maj. Gen. Mark Bennett, the Army’s budget director in the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Financial Management and Comptroller.

The budget request represents roughly an $8 billion increase of the 2023 request and reflects an increase in research, development, testing and evaluation (RDT&E) funds necessary for the service’s significant modernization efforts.

“Addressing the increases you see within the RDT&E increase, I will note that 82% of the Army's science and technology budget is aligned to our top modernization priorities,” Camarillo said, citing the approximate $1 billion request for long-range hypersonic weaponry that will “support the further development and demonstration of the prototype battery that will provide the Army a strategic attack weapon system to defeat anti-access area denial capabilities.” He also pointed to the $197 million request for the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle to “support the maturation of detailed design and prototyping phases with competition.”

Increased procurement includes critical munitions for combatant commanders such as the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), $584 million, and the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement, $1.2 billion. Other modernization priority efforts include the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle, $555 million, Mobile Protected Firepower, $395 million, and the Next-Generation Squad weapon $290 million. The Army continues investments to upgrade industrial base facilities with more than $1.5 billion aimed at meeting requirements for next-generation ammunition and equipment.

The two officials highlighted a number of other investments, such as:

Two-deep sensing systems, Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN), $142 million, and High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, $191 million.
Mobile Short Range Air Defense (M-SHORAD) system, $590 million
13,701 Handheld, Manpack and Small Form Fit (HMS) radios, including 5,465 Leader and 8,236 Manpack variants.
34,221 Low-cost Tactical Radios Replacements to replace the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System.
33 low-rate production Mobile Firepower Protected vehicles
$439 million for zero-trust cybersecurity
$639 million for cryptography modernization

The investments in zero trust and cryptography modernization will help the Army “unlock data” for multidomain operations, according to Camarillo.

“There's no secret that if we're going to be able to fight to perform multidomain operations and to execute the national defense strategy, we have to be able to unlock data, ensure that we have the right skills in place and to develop the right tools at this at the pace that we need them moving forward,” Camarillo said. “There has been a concerted effort over this last year to relook our entire network spend across the Army through a series of capability portfolio reviews. And what that did was allow us to align our FY24 investments in a way that will help us to achieve foundational gains to enable us to accelerate our digital transformation.”