A Tomahawk Land Attack Missile fired from a newly fielded Typhon launcher on Sept. 28, 2026, at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, California, gave an Army battery its first live shot with the cruise missile. The launch followed five weeks of training with Navy personnel and Lockheed Martin field service representatives. The battery, from 3rd Battalion, 12th Field Artillery Regiment, is assigned to Multi-Domain Command Europe.
It was also the third firing of a Typhon system within the continental United States, according to the Army. The battalion’s commander said the weeks at China Lake left him ready to send the crews forward.
Defence Industry Europe reported the launch in an Oct. 15, 2026 article by Hannah Miller, which reports the battery’s training and quotes its battalion leaders. It says the 3-12 battery “was activated in November 2025, with the China Lake firing marking its first Tomahawk launch.”
What Typhon is
The Army calls the system the Mid-Range Capability, or MRC. The Congressional Research Service, in its In Focus report on the system updated April 20, 2026, says “The MRC system is also known as the ‘Typhon’ missile system,” and that it “leverages existing Raytheon-produced SM-6 missiles and Raytheon-produced Tomahawk cruise missiles.”
CRS says the system is intended to hit targets at ranges between the Army’s Precision Strike Missile and its Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon. Defence Industry Europe’s report describes the same gap, calling Typhon “a mobile, ground-launched system designed to operate at ranges between the Army’s shorter-range missiles and long-range hypersonic weapons.”
Each MRC battery is planned to consist of four launchers and a battery operations center, along with prime movers, trailers, generators and support vehicles, per CRS. “The tractor trailer-mounted Typhon has four launch cells,” the report says, and it notes the Army’s own description of the system as “rather large [and] long, because it has to go to a vertical setup to fire the missile system.”
From one battery to a third shot
The Army accepted its first MRC battery in December 2022 and activated it in January 2024 as D Battery, 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, part of the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., according to CRS. The same report says the Army stated in June 2023 that its Mid-Range Capability Project Office had demonstrated a Tomahawk launch from the prototype system, following an SM-6 launch earlier that year.
CRS also recorded that a second Typhon battery had been activated at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and that the Army planned to field a battery to the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force in Europe in fiscal 2026. More broadly, CRS says the Army plans one MRC battery in the Long-Range Fires Battalion of each Multi-Domain Task Force and is working to field another three batteries to the remaining task forces between fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2028.
The battalion’s view
Lt. Col. Derek Bartlett, the battalion commander, described the capability in terms of what it offers a combatant commander. “We get that range for that combatant commander to give them options and capabilities where they really haven’t had it before from the land force,” Bartlett said, adding that “the Army now has that capability.”
He was direct about the crews after the training period. “They’re incredibly good at what they do now,” he said. “I’m very comfortable deploying them forward after these five weeks.”
Command Sgt. Maj. John Hespe, the battalion’s senior enlisted advisor, pointed to the coordination a launch requires. “It requires all domains to work in unison for a kinetic strike to happen,” he said. “Rockets in the field artillery community are going to continue to evolve.”
For the 3-12 battery, activated in November 2025, the China Lake shot stands as its first Tomahawk launch and, according to the Army, the third time any Typhon system has fired within the continental United States.
Top image: A Typhon launcher of the 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force fires a Standard Missile-6 in Australia in July 2025. The 3-12 battery’s Tomahawk launch is not shown. Image Credit: Sgt. Perla Alfaro / U.S. Army — Public domain / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.