Built by Lockheed Martin Corp, the Typhon system had been flown 8,000 miles from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State to Luzon in the Philippines as part of a military exercise called Salaknib and there it has remained as a strategic asset.
The Army has practiced moving it around the rough, hot terrain but had stopped short of firing it in previous exercises.
Typhon is “highly requested by a number of our partners and allies and it’s at their request that we deploy,” General Ronald Clark, the US Army Pacific commander, told Bloomberg in an interview on Monday. “It’s a pretty strategic deterrent capability.”
The American and Filipino militaries have continued to build on a long-enduring relationship with the annual exercise known as Balikatan, which has continued to develop in size, scale and complexity in recent years.
The system can launch both the Navy’s Standard Missile-6 and Tomahawk missiles from a land-based vertical launch system and can strike targets in the 500- to 2,000-kilometer range, with the ability to reach Chinese territory from the Philippines.
China has opposed the Typhon deployment, claiming it has destabilised security in the region and urged the Philippines to remove the weaponry and “correct the wrongdoing as soon as possible.”
The Philippines and China have overlapping claims in the South China Sea, leading to confrontations on the water and heated diplomatic disputes.
The Army decided to pursue the mid-range missile capability to fill a gap after the cancellation of an upgrade to its Tactical Missile System.
The service raced to field the Typhon in order to have a capability that could sink ships at strategic distances short of what longer-range systems are capable of reaching.
Since the first Typhon was sent to the Philippines, the Army also deployed an additional system to the Talisman Saber exercise in Australia where it fired an SM-6 missile for the first time last summer. The Army then shipped it to Japan in September.
The Army had planned to send a Typhon system to Europe this year with a new unit focused on long-range, precision missiles that would also include hypersonic weapons and the Precision Strike Munition, or PrSM, recently used in operations in the Iran war.
But that operation has been called into question after president Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of 5,000 American troops from Germany and indicated he could scrap other commitments, including missile deployments in Europe.