Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

4. Department of Defense · Notable · Needs Congress

Increase USMC HIMARS rocket artillery batteries

Partially done

116 4. Department of Defense

“Increase the number of rocket artillery batteries (HIMARS).”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The Commandant's own record says the launchers are fielded. The October 2025 Force Design Update, read in full, states: "We have fielded the remaining HIMARS launchers, bringing the Marine Corps to **ten HIMARS batteries** in the Active and Reserve Components and enhancing the HIMARS batteries communications architecture." That is an increase in the number of rocket artillery batteries, reported as complete, by the service that owns the decision and inside the window. It is `partial` and not `done` for two reasons. Ten batteries is well short of the 300 percent increase in rocket artillery capacity that Force Design 2030 set as the objective in March 2020 and that CRS, a month after this update, still described as a proposed future capability rather than a completed change. And no allowlisted source states how many batteries existed on 2025-01-20, so the size of the in-window increase cannot be measured — only that the fielding was completed and reported within it. Congress added nothing of its own: CRS records that its examination of both the FY2025 and the FY2026 NDAA "did not find any similar or related Force Design-related provisions", the FY2026 authorization's only HIMARS lines are Army (HIMARS modifications, $54,005,000), and neither the reconciliation act nor the FY2026 defense appropriation names a Marine Corps rocket artillery battery.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Requires-Congress ask, and the movement did not come from Congress: no bill, no authorization provision, no appropriation names a Marine Corps rocket artillery battery. It came from the service, which fields launchers with money Congress had already given it.

  • Not started → partial on 2026-09-03. The single not started event of 2025-11-24 was replaced rather than added to, because a later finding replaces the stale event instead of following it: the earlier search could only read CRS, which describes the rocket-artillery increase as a plan, and marines.mil turns out to answer a normal browser request. The Commandant’s October 2025 Force Design Update (5.5 MB, built from an InDesign file dated 2025-10-21, created 2025-10-21) was downloaded and all 667 lines extracted as text. The ten-battery statement is the Corps’ own, and it is the only completion claim on this page’s asks anywhere in the document.
  • Dating: the cover reads “September 2025”, every page footer reads “October 2025”, and the document carries no day; 2025-10-21 is the PDF’s creation date and matches both the footer month and the filename.
  • The done question, left open deliberately: the Quote asks for an increase and names no target, so a reader could take the Commandant’s completion statement as delivery. It is held at partial because the pre-window baseline could not be established from an allowlisted source and because CRS, reading the same program a month later, still calls the capacity increase future.
  • The item is deliberately not marked Already true, unlike neighboring page-116 items: CRS reports the rocket artillery increase as a plan, not as executed force structure, so the ask cannot be said to have been satisfied before the window.
  • One search covered the page 116 Marine Corps Force Design asks, #217, #218, #219, #220, #221, #222, #223, #224, #225, #226 and #227.
Action
expand
Object
USMC HIMARS rocket artillery batteries
ID
223