The Army wants missiles that can be fired remotely by unmanned launchers:
The U.S. Army is working to convert Navy missiles into land-based mid-range weapons that complement its short-range rockets and long-range hypersonic missiles. If experiments prove out, the new missiles and their launchers will be added to the Army’s connect-everything network so that soldiers can fire them remotely or in concert with other batteries. ...That would allow an operator to hit a target with fire from a constellation of launchers under a single point of control, bringing a variety of weapons to bear.
I advocated something like that 17 years ago in Military Review as an aside to discussing new armored vehicles, thinking the vehicle could direct external firepower to supplement the vehicle's own organic weapons (p. 29):
For long-range or beyond-line-of-sight firing, missiles should be part of the force. The power of today’s precision weapons is already breathtaking. In the future, separating missiles from the FCS makes the most sense for a networked force. Missile modules, each containing two or more missiles, could be dropped off in the wake of the advancing FCS unit or even scattered by aircraft along the axis of advance in the enemy’s rear areas. The FCS crew could control firing.
Later I discovered that I had imagined a project already under discussion--Netfires.
But this Army project is getting close to what I wanted if the vehicle crew requests fires from a unit that calls in the remotely fired missiles.
Next stop, the black box of effects support:
In my ideal world, fire support is a black box where a call to destroy or suppress a target automatically calls in the appropriate weapon capable of taking out the target in a timely manner without the soldier making the support request even knowing what asset provided the support.
It could be a plane or space system out of sight, an attack helicopter, a ship or submarine offshore, a distant ground force missile or artillery asset, or even an 81mm mortar back at the company level.
Or non-kinetic effects, of course.
The new Army missiles will be an important part of this effort.
