For more than two decades, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, has served as a key piece for U.S. deterrence, including in Europe. The launchers, built on the back of trucks and designed to send missiles or rockets over 150 miles to hit targets the size of a trash can using GPS, have also recently seen ample action in Ukraine as forces have worked to repel the Russian invasion.
But the Marine Corps plans to retire its HIMARS over the next several years, instead prioritizing other platforms to pick up the capability a mobile rocket or missile launcher would offer, and heading full-tilt toward its coastal mission.
At the moment, however, they're still a key part of the U.S. arsenal as put on display during the Nordic Response '24 NATO exercise that included Marines earlier this month in Alta, Norway.
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“If Putin decides to get ballsy and go off and do worse things than he's doing right now,” one sergeant, a HIMARS maintainer, told Military.com during the exercise, “I'm going to be back out here fixing these things for us and for other countries, helping them out.”
The system has been a boon on the battlefield for Ukraine. The U.S. sent 39 of the rocket/missile launchers to the country, and according to media reports, Russia hasn't destroyed a single one as of earlier this year — a testament to the…
