With the Army still digesting the interceptor drawdown from Epic Fury and the 12-Day War, service leadership has moved to attack the slower half of the problem: how long it takes new weapons to go from prototype to program of record in the first place. The Army announced this month that it is opening five military test ranges, four domestic and one in Morocco, to private industry, including firms with no existing government contract or partnership. Dugway Proving Ground (Utah), West Cibola Range (Arizona), Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center (Mississippi), Camp Grayling (Michigan), and the Africa Multidomain Training and Experimentation Center (Morocco) will now accept range-access requests through a single online portal, testrange.army.mil, rather than requiring companies to first secure a formal partnership or navigate a program of record. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll framed the change bluntly: a company with a viable system should not need "a team of lawyers and a program of record just to prove their equipment works."
The ranges are not uniform in what they offer, and that specialization is itself informative about where the Army's acquisition anxiety is concentrated. Camp Grayling will host a recurring "electromagnetic unreliability test event" beginning in September, explicitly modeled on the degraded-signal, contested-EW (Electronic Warfare) conditions observed in Ukraine, while West Cibola is currently limited to drone and counter-drone (C-UAS) assessments and Dugway offers long-range fires testing. This is not a generic modernization gesture; it is a targeted attempt to compress the test-and-evaluation timeline specifically for the categories the Army has publicly identified as its most urgent gaps — drones, C-UAS systems, long-range fires, and, notably, "cheap interceptors."
That last category is where this story connects directly to the stockpile numbers Lt. Gen. John Rafferty laid out at the SMD Symposium. CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) tracking already shows Patriot interceptor inventories down from roughly 2,300 to somewhere between 759 and 827 following Epic Fury, and while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has disputed characterizations of the shortfall as "critically" depleted, the Pentagon's own posture — pressing industry to accelerate production of PAC-3 (Patriot Advanced Capability-3) and lower-cost alternatives like Lockheed's PAC-3 ACE (Adapted Capability Effector) — tells a consistent story regardless of how the numbers are framed publicly. Opening test ranges to non-traditional vendors is the upstream fix to the same downstream problem: if the interceptor pipeline cannot refill fast enough through legacy primes alone, the fastest lever available is widening who is allowed to compete for that pipeline in the first place, and cutting the years-long test-and-evaluation bottleneck that has historically kept smaller firms out.
This also slots into a broader pattern under the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI), which has spent the past year redirecting funding away from legacy platforms toward SUAS (Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems), C-UAS, and long-range fires, alongside a parallel push, led by Joint Interagency Task Force 401, to build an online marketplace for counter-drone procurement and extend it to allied nations under agreements signed at Eurosatory 2026. Seen together, the test-range opening is not an isolated announcement but the test-and-evaluation half of an acquisition pipeline the Army has been rebuilding end-to-end: faster range access on one end, a streamlined marketplace and allied interoperability push on the other, all aimed at collapsing a procurement cycle that has historically been measured in years rather than months.
Whether this actually solves the shortfall Rafferty described at SMD is a separate question from whether it addresses the right bottleneck. Faster range access does nothing to expand the physical production capacity for PAC-3 or THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptors, which remain gated by manufacturing throughput at Lockheed and other primes rather than by testing delays. What it does do is shorten the runway for the "cheap interceptor" and counter-drone alternatives the Army is counting on to absorb a larger share of future engagements, meaning the real test of this initiative will not be how many companies request range time, but how many of the systems that emerge from it are fielded in time to matter for the next contingency rather than the last one.
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